Carman Eldridge

I'll tell you about the last trip back, the next ship I was on was the HMCS North Bay, and that was 1945, and the trip…before we took the trip, we were in Halifax [Nova Scotia] and the head commodore of the fleet came down to the jetty, and we had all the ships crews muster on this jetty, and he told them that he had news; that bigger and bigger torpedo’s were coming out on new submarines out of the north there, in Holland and places where the Germans were building them, and that everybody better keep on their toes if they got out in the North Atlantic we was going to have an awful time. Two or three days out a message came through to our headquarters on the ship, the war was over, the rest of the way over, the submarines were popping up all over the place and some of the ships were leaving the convoy to herd them back into port. And when we went up the river Foyle to Londonderry [Ireland] there were all kinds of submarines tied to the buoys all along the way, that’s how many that were out there and they were bringing them in by the dozen. When we were ready to come back, the convoy was ready to come back from before hand so they sent us all back under the same conditions with the convoy. When we got out, first night out on our way home, the order came out to turn the lights on, every ship, every ship in the convoy and the navy, turn on their lights. After six years of black outs, it was just like a city sailing across the ocean. And we said goodbyes to all the people we knew there, and then we sailed into Sydney, North Sydney where we tied the ships up at the jetties and they took everything off and they took the guns off, the depth charges and all the ammunition and everything, they stripped it right down so there was just a bare ship, and they left it and we said goodbye to all our ship mates. Then they kept the skeleton crew on and I was one of them, and then we sailed out to Sorel, Quebec and when we reached Sorel, Quebec we tied a buoy there and there was hundreds of our corvettes and mine sweepers all tied there, not a light on and black, nothing on them, dead, I wrote the story, and I said we left the ship with her sister ships, stripped of all their wartime necessities, in a graveyard of water.