Robert MacLean

I don’t know why I picked up the sea, maybe it looked like the prairies. I went overseas in early 1944. And I was seconded to the Royal Navy for the war. And I joined HMS Devonshire, which was an old four stacker cruiser along with 10 other Canadians. And we spent most of the war onboard Devonshire. I worked mainly in the ops [operations] room in action stations. I really didn’t find any significant difference between operating in the Royal Navy as opposed to operating in the Canadian navy, which I did later. As I said, most of the time, we looked out at vast oceans and listened for submarines and watched for aircraft and tried to entice the Germans to have a go at us because we used to deploy ourselves away from the convoys and try to make as if we were a convoy. We had a couple of interesting things. We escorted the Queen Mary across the Atlantic, a part of the way, with [Winston] Churchill onboard, going to Newfoundland. And it was quite a remarkable thing because the ships, the military ships were unable to go as fast as the liner so we lined ourselves up across the ocean and escorted her from the time she appeared in sight behind us until we lost her ahead. And then there was another ship that picked her up and took her the next stage. That was one of the things we did. My brother was older by five years and he joined in 1939 and took his training as a forward observation officer for the artillery. He was knocked off his motorcycle by an explosion in Germany and he came back to England to get some attention, some medical attention and we met in London, my brother and I in 1944, as I was coming over on leave I think from my ship. I would think the main interest I had was, in actual fact, on VE Day [Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945], we went into Oslo [Norway], which was a highlight of my life. They had been oppressed very strongly I think for four or five years and the population was ecstatic coming into Oslo. And I recall that they had two parades, one day half the population got out and marched in front of the other half and then the other half got out the second day and marched in front of the first half. One of the things that I noted was they had been occupied for four or five years, the use of the English language was forbidden and yet, all of the four, five and six year olds that we had onboard for parties all had a smattering of English, if not very fluent. I don’t know how they managed to do it. Anyway, in fact, Oslo was one of the places where I was most in hazard because as I was coming back from one of the evenings, the Quislings [Norwegians who were sympathetic to or collaborated with the Nazi government], who were still holed up in a castle in Oslo, were running through the streets with cars and shooting indiscriminately at people, as if they were still fighting. And I recall that we had to go flat in order to miss getting shot up by the quislings after the war in Oslo.