J. Emmett Mulvaney (Primary Source)

In around 2010, The Memory Project interviewed John Emmett Mulvaney, a naval veteran of the Second World War. The following recording (and transcript) is an excerpt from this interview. Born on 17 June 1920, Mulvaney was raised in Kenora, Ontario. He served six years in the Canadian navy but spent most of the war on merchant ships. The DEMS (Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships) was a Second World War program through which naval personnel served in the merchant navy. In this testimony, Mulvaney describes rescuing his friend; he also mentions naval operations in the north Atlantic and North Sea, alluding to the Arctic convoys that supplied Russia during the war. (See also Battle of the Atlantic). After the war, Mulvaney became a professor of Economics, Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Winnipeg, where he worked for 35 years. He died on 11 May 2015 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, at the age of 94.

Please be advised that Memory Project primary sources may deal with personal testimony that reflect the speaker’s recollections and interpretations of events. Individual testimony does not necessarily reflect the views of the Memory Project and Historica Canada.

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I remember I asked our Commodore if I could go over to another ship after we saw it had been damaged. I said I saw a friend of mine over on that ship, but everybody else through binoculars appeared to be dead...

Transcript

My name is Emmett Mulvaney. I was in the Navy, but most of it was on merchant ships. I spent the first year and a half or so as a radio operator because I had been a radio operator in Ottawa for a long time.

I remember I asked our Commodore, a Rear Admiral, I said that a steamship over there has a friend of mine onboard and everybody else [through] binoculars appears to be dead, but my friend Tug is still [moving]. I’d like to take off my heavy gear and go, board that ship and get Tug off there and [onto a rescue ship]. Every convoy had two rescue ships at the stern. They were vessels that had been in the Dover to Calais on peacetime business. Then the Commodore said, “By all means” and I took off my heavy stuff and pulled Tug off that ship and a rescue ship came along in about five minutes. It had a special kind of scoop to scoop live people up out of the water.

Our most important runs seem to be [bringing ships] to Loch Ewe, which is on the very north side of Scotland. [Loch Ewe was the main base for Arctic convoys in the Second World War.] We were no sooner out of the way than these ships would be in line, one after the other, to the Orkney Islands… that’s the home of the Home Fleet. There would be real aircraft carriers and battleships and such and they had … to escort them up to Murmansk. But that coast was treacherous because the Germans controlled Norway, which was the visible part or the approachable part of Scandinavia, let’s say.