No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1939-1943, Volume 2, Part 1 (review)

Canada's Navy has had to wait a long time for an official operational history of its service in its only major war. Sixty years later, a majority of those who served in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War have passed on. Other survivors may lack the strength to lift so massive a volume of their wartime exploits.

Purists insist that RCN veterans have benefited from Professor Gilbert Norman Tucker's two-volume The Naval Service of Canada published in 1952 - as accurate and boring an administrative record as any bureaucrat could wish for. So dull was Tucker's work that his minister of national defence, Brooke Claxton, cancelled his third volume on RCN operations and tried to wind up all official histories. Instead, naval veterans and their families were probably satisfied in 1950 by Joseph Schull's Far Distant Ships, a chatty account of the RCN at war, based on interviews collected by Tucker's staff. Certainly Schull's matelots performed as heroically as any posterity could have wished.

Unfortunately, there was a large, potentially embarrassing hole in this version of RCN history of which most Canadians and even many RCN veterans were unaware. In the spring of 1943, the Battle of the Atlantic entered its darkest moment. Ultra was stymied when the Germans added a wheel to their coding machines, wolf packs shared British codes, and sinkings soared. At this moment, the exasperated British opened their training facilities and virtually ordered Canada's corvette navy out of battle to get the training and equipment it needed to do its job.

The British might have included this episode in their official history but, instead, discretion prevailed. Canadian reviewers noted the lack of grateful references to the RCN and blamed the British for being snotty. In 1977, Alec Douglas, senior author of this volume, and Ben Greenhous published Out of the Shadows, a popular history of Canada in the Second World War. Suddenly some embarrassing truths began to emerge. Canada's corvette navy, with its yacht-club officers and prairie-bred sailors, had been valiant and long-suffering and too untrained and badly equipped to find or kill U-boats except almost by accident.

In 1985, a young academic historian, Marc Milner, published North Atlantic Run, full of the operational failings hinted at by Douglas and Greenhous and severely questioning the competence of both the uniformed and civilian leadership of Canada's wartime navy. Three years later, David Zimmermann published The Great Naval Battle of Ottawa, criticizing the failure of admirals and politicians to provide ships at sea with the scientific and technological resources to do their job.

As official historians, Douglas and Greenhous might have saved their revelations for No Higher Purpose, since it covers much the same history as Milner's first volume. Still, there are advantages in being late. In the 1950s, Professor Tucker could not have anticipated the American or British histories, nor could he have known what we now know about the German submarines and their management by B-Dienst. Admirals who might have tried to shape Tucker's work, like the generals who tried to influence Colonel Charles Stacey's army volumes, are now barely ghosts. The failings and inadequacies depicted by Milner and Zimmerman are neither hidden nor polished, but they are set in a fairer context.

Except for specialists, the main contribution of this phenomenally detailed account is to enlarge understanding of Canada's complicated role in the North Atlantic alliance against the Nazis. Starting as a tiny colonial clone of the Royal Navy, the RCN grew to be a junior ally of both the British and the Americans. Excluded from major decisions, unwisely eager to shoulder heavier burdens than were compatible with its lack of up-to-date equipment and trained...