Leslie MacLauchlan

We had a responsibility to get involved. It was a dire time in the next four years probably until 1943 until we got the first bit of good news anywhere in Canada, when we sent a force in the army and they were in Italy. And amongst that group would have been one of my cousins who was a doctor in PEI [Prince Edward Island]. Just a short time after graduating from Queens [University] in 1939. So he was becoming some sort of a specialist in military in the medical world and he was sent off as a doctor to Italy with the army. It had a sad ending; he was killed by a sniper. As I was on the [HMCS] Fort Francis, on convoy duty in the North Atlantic running from Halifax to Newfoundland, then down to New York and the Eastern seaboard of the United States with probably 85 ships in the convoy. The North Atlantic was a very unpleasant place for anybody. But that was us the whole while I suppose. When you took the ships and the convoy into consideration, and we were all subject to the same bad weather it seemed, and we were escorted in the convoy from New York up to Halifax and we ducked off there into Halifax and the other convoy escort would have come out of Halifax to relieve us and take us up off Newfoundland to the North Atlantic. Then another convoy system of escorts would come out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and escort them over to the east coast of Britain and then Northern Ireland where they would berth [docked for loading] themselves. And then come back with yet another convoy which we would pick up off St. John’s, Newfoundland and escort down to New York. The German submarines were a damn potent force at nailing particularly ships of the convoy and if they had an opportunity, they would go for the senior officer of the escort and try to torpedo them. But torpedoes were the big enemy. I can remember the night before we went in New York in mid-March of 1945, we had a real dinger of battle in the Atlantic with a German submarine. We of course never laid eyes on but our systems on the ship would tell us where they were and we would pursue them around at great speed for us sort of thing. But it was a dinger of a battle, I remember that one. Just by chance, I was home on leave and my two brothers from the navy wer also home in PEI on the 8th of May, so we were quite excited about the whole thing ending and then getting on with our private lives.