Doug Meredith

My name is Douglas Meredith. I joined the Navy in 1942. I was a rating and an officer during World War II and subsequently served in Korea. A group of us were called up on the same day somewhere in June of 1942. I was surprised to find we got paid actually. A dollar and a quarter a day and all we could eat and keep down. The first ship was a Corvette. The equipment and fittings in the ship were very basic and... and frankly, they were primitive. Not enough rubber boots to go around on... on watch. So we had to take the boots off the guy you were relieving, after you emptied the water out of them. Not enough places to sling hammocks. There were no beds in this ship. Not for the troops anyway. I wound up sleeping up... up in the upper deck by the funnel where it was relatively warm. The food was indifferent. Of course, I was indifferent to it anyway so it didn't matter. We were poorly equipped really to do the job that we had to do. But then that was common to a lot of guys that got into this kind of a situation. But it was a very tough year for storms. Forty-two, forty-three was a... just one bloody gale after the other. Convoys would get blown apart. The ships would slow down. In some cases, we made as much as ten miles a day just going against the wind. During the winter, the wind would... would blow the water into spray, the spray would freeze on the ships and we'd wind up being ice coated. We were defending convoys against submarine attack. The escort groups that I was in usually had up to five escort ships. But sometimes only three. We had a very primitive radar which at best would tell us if there was a merchantman ready to run us down. It didn't take much for the Germans to get through the... the escort screen. And they would come up inside the screen and attack the merchantmen with torpedoes as a rule, sinking them. Or else they would see a convoy coming and they would submerge and wait for the convoy to go over them. And they would rise up inside the convoy lanes and attack the merchantmen. And we couldn't attack the submarines very well when they were running in the lanes because we would damage our merchant ship. So the trick was to find them, keep them down until the convoy had passed. You're at action stations or you're in a war zone as soon as you left Halifax or any port. The ships were torpedoed within sight of Halifax. Twenty-two ships were torpedoed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So the war was very close to the Canadian shoreline. Matter of fact, the Germans put a couple of clowns ashore at, I think, Rivière du Loup, to act as spies. But they... they surfaced with old Canadian money. (laughter) Tried to buy a beer in German and it didn't work. (laughter) They were rounded up pretty quick