Episode Twenty Eight Chapter 9 EPILOGUE

In Peril on the Sea – Episode Twenty Eight Chapter 9 EPILOGUE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY: THE LEGACY OF THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC The Allied Navies Triumphant, 1945 By the last months of the war, the U-boats had been swept off the mid-ocean and convoy after convoy completed its journey without incident. While Signalman Jack Scott of HMCS Sherbrooke mans his projector in the foreground, the corvette HMCS Barrie refuels from a tanker. Barrie, commissioned in May 1941, was a veteran of the North Atlantic. She was sold to the Argentine Navy in 1947 and broken up in 1972. (Photograph by G.P. Boydell, courtesy, National Archives of Canada, PA 115354) The navy’s shame: The VE Day riot, May 1945 There had never been any love lost between Canadian sailors and the overcrowded, expensive and rather grim port of Halifax, the despised “Slackers” in the sailors’ vocabulary. Between 1939 and 1945 the city’s population had risen from 68,000 to 99,000, swollen by service personnel and their families and there were shortages of everything – accommodation, restaurants, entertainment, recreational facilities, cinemas, cabs – and many unscrupulous civilians had made themselves wealthy by extorting service personnel. Particularly galling in sailors’ eyes was that the city was officially “dry,” and there were no bars or night clubs although alcohol could be purchased at government liquor stores. The stringent drinking laws, intended to keep intoxication to the minimum, actually created a booming trade in bootlegging. Sailors on shore leave from convoy duty, finding nothing to do in Halifax and nowhere to go, too often ended up purchasing liquor at exorbitant prices from bootleggers and then drinking it in public places because they had nowhere to consume it in private. The city’s small police force was overwhelmed, and although the navy’s shore patrols assisted, the sight of drunken men in uniform weaving through the downtown area was all too common in the latter years of the war. The tension between service personnel, particularly sailors, and civilians increased as the conflict in Europe began to wind down and there were muttered threats that the navy would “take Halifax apart” on VE Day. Senior naval officers were aware of the potential for violence but their -attempts to head it off suffered from the fact that there was no single co-ordinating commander for the many shore establishments in the city. -Admiral Leonard Murray was the senior commander but his attention, particularly in the last days of the war, was directed toward operations intended to defeat Dönitz’s final offensive in Canadian waters. The commanding officer of each shore establishment therefore made his own -arrangements and no overall authority was in place to head off what was to be a tragedy. On 7 May 1945, when news of the German surrender reached the city, there were 18,000 sailors, 3,500 airmen, 3,000 soldiers and an estimated 2,000 merchant mariners in Halifax. Many went into the downtown area but finding nothing to do and the government liquor stores closed as a precau- tion, they drifted up and down the streets. Toward evening a crowd of sailors, egged on by civilians, burned a streetcar and, thus encouraged, spectators broke into two liquor stores and distributed the contents to those gathered to watch the fun. The city police were helpless in the face of the crowd’s numbers but, in any event, the participants were in a good mood, helped by the free refreshments, and what followed was a rather happy street party. At this point, the senior officers of the armed forces and municipal authorities had been given a warning and they might have taken steps to prevent what occurred the next day by confining service personnel to their quarters and beefing up military and naval police patrols. Instead, half the sailors in the port were permitted to return to the city on 8 May and many were roaming the streets during the afternoon as a large civic celebration, complete with bands and politicians, took place on the Garrison Grounds behind Citadel Hill. When it concluded, those who had attended moved into the business section and joined thousands of people wandering aimlessly up and down the streets. Eventually, some uniformed personnel, again encouraged by watching civilians, began to smash store windows and once started, this activity increased – shops were looted and some set on fire, a police car was overturned, a third liquor store and a brewery were invaded – providing free drinks for all and sundry. It was noted that, although servicemen made many of the initial break-ins, the waiting civilians did most of the looting. By early evening King Mob ruled downtown Halifax in an orgy of drink and destruction. Admiral Murray drove through the streets in a loudspeaker car, appealing to his men to return to their bases and ships, but thousands of sailors continue to reel through the streets and the riot only wound down after a curfew was proclaimed that night and military and naval police began to make numerous arrests. On the following day, 9 May 1945, armed soldiers from a nearby military camp arrived and the city was quiet. In the end, 19 airmen, 34 sailors, 41 soldiers and 117 civilians were charged with criminal acts and 152 people convicted of public drunkenness. The Halifax Riot provoked outrage across Canada. Vice Admiral G.C. Jones, the Chief of the Naval Staff, flew to Halifax to assume command of all naval personnel in the city and the government appointed a Supreme Court justice to conduct an inquiry, which focused on the navy’s role in this miserable event. Murray, believing that a senior officer is responsible for the actions of those under his command, refused to implicate any of his subordinates and took entire responsibility upon himself. He accepted the blame and resigned his com- mission to go into voluntary exile in Britain, where he died, almost forgotten, in 1971. It was a tragic end to the career of Canada’s foremost wartime naval commander, who has been summed up as an officer deeply and deservedly respected by the seagoing navy. He was neither colourful nor brilliant, yet he was a hero, a dogged hero, though Canadians resist that word. His name should never be forgotten. The irony of his life was that his downfall came the very day his arch-enemies, the U-boats, surfaced to surrender.1 Many in the RCN believed that Murray was made a scapegoat and the true culprit was the government of Canada which, although it compensated property owners for the losses they sustained in the riot, had refused throughout the war to spend a cent more than necessary to ease the strained conditions in Halifax. The navy’s glory: The Bedford Magazine fire, July 1945 Responsibility for the Halifax Riot is still a matter of debate but there is little disagreement over who was to blame for the Bedford Magazine fire which began Rear Admiral L.W. Murray, CB, CBE (1896-1971) In May 1941, Commodore Leonard Murray took command of the Newfoundland Escort on 18 July 1945. By this time, the demobilization of the wartime fleet was in full Force and, in the spring of 1943, was appointed commander-in-chief, Canadian flood and dozens of ships were decommissioning at Halifax and unloading their Northwest Atlantic, becoming the only Canadian to command a theatre of war during the war. From 1941 to 1945, Murray was the senior Canadian officer most directly weapons, ammunition and equipment for storage. Thousands of rounds were concerned with the Battle of the Atlantic and he proved to be a very competent leader. placed in the RCN magazine at Bedford near Dartmouth across the harbour from Forced into early retirement by his supposed failure to anticipate and control the Halifax Riot, Murray went to England where he died, almost forgotten, in 1971. In the Halifax. Naval regulations wisely prohibited more than one warship at a time un- background of the portrait are four representative ships of the RCN escort fleet: HMCS loading its ammunition on a single dock – only when that load had been safely Columbia (Town Class destroyer); HMCS Restigouche (River Class destroyer); HMCS Sackville (short foc’sle corvette) and HMCS Sorel (late type corvette). (Painting by David dispensed in the magazines, could another vessel de-ammunition. These safety McIntosh, courtesy of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic) measures, however, slowed demobilization of the wartime fleet and the Liberal government (whose record on naval affairs was not its brightest feature) wanted the process of converting naval personnel into civilians (and potential voters) accelerated. The government therefore insisted that, in the name of expediency, the safety regulations be set aside and on 18 July 1945 the ammunition of three warships was sitting on the south jetty of the Bedford Magazine in blazing hot summer weather. Even worse, since there hadn’t been time to properly store previous loads in sealed structures, thousands of shells were dispersed in open dumps around the magazine area. At about 1800 that evening, a worker noticed that a pyrotechnic flare on the jetty had caught fire and went to put it out but before he could do so, there was a massive explosion that shook Halifax and Dartmouth and shattered windows in both cities and the south jetty simply disappeared. Captain Owen Robertson, RCN, the officer responsible for fire safety in the naval base, was having dinner with his wife in the Nova Scotian Hotel in Halifax when he heard a “thump” and observed dust coming out of the ventilators.

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