Warships of the Bay of Quinte (review)

This handsome volume details the histories of the seven Canadian warships named for Lake Ontario’s Bay of Quinte and towns in that area. All but one were anti-submarine vessels built in Canadian shipyards during the Second World War for service in the Battle of the Atlantic. The seventh, hmcs Quinte ii, was a minesweeper completed in 1954 to protect Canadian ports during the Cold War and decommissioned in 1964 as a result of cuts in defence spending.

The expansion of the navy from 6 to over 250 seagoing warships, and from 3,500 to 100,000 personnel, in 1939–45 was a remarkable achievement. It was vital to Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, the long, bloody struggle that assured Britain’s survival, delivered important materiel to the Soviet Union, and supplied the forces that liberated western Europe in 1943–5. The vessels were named for towns and other localities across the country to encourage support by the country’s population – never particularly sea-minded – for the extraordinary effort. Thus the book’s celebration of the region’s link to the navy fulfills the intentions of the original ships’ names policy, one that was revived in the classes of warships built in the 1980s–1990s.

The chapter-length accounts of each of the six Second World War ships provide a cross-section of the Canadian effort in the Atlantic battle because these vessels represent most of the main shipbuilding programs. hmcs Napanee was a corvette patrol vessel and the original hmcs Quinte a Bangor minesweeper from the first building program, begun in the winter of 1939–40. hmcs Trentonian and Belleville were improved corvettes of the 1942–3 and 1943–4 programs, and hmcs Hallowell one of the big frigates of the 1943–4 program. Their service included some of the dramatic events of the war. Napanee participated in the disastrous mid-ocean battle for the westbound slow convoy ons 154 in December 1942, and Trentonian carried out escort work in British and European waters in 1944–5 for ships that supplied the Normandy invasion and the liberation of northwest Europe. Trentonian was lost to a U-boat’s torpedo off the British coast in February 1945, the result of relentless German efforts to maintain the submarine offensive right to the end of the war. One element of irony is that the frigate Hallowell, sold to the Israeli navy, participated in the 1956 offensive against Egypt that was the occasion of Canada’s first major peacekeeping effort.

The ship histories are thorough and well footnoted. The author has made good use of the substantial literature on Canada and the Atlantic war that has developed since the 1980s, and closely consulted the full files on each ship available at Library and Archives Canada, and the Directorate of History and Heritage at National Defence Headquarters. He has also searched local sources, with some notable finds of press clippings and personal correspondence. The book is well illustrated with both official and personal photographs.