Importance of the Merchant Navy
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- Medium: Video
- Owner: Veterans Affairs Canada
- Duration: 3:26
- Copyright / Permission to Reproduce
More Clips
1. Relationships With the Crew
2. Becoming an Officer of the Watch
3. Importance of the Merchant Navy
Details
Importance of the Merchant Navy
The Merchant Navy played an important role during the Second World War. Mr. Guindon gives his opinion of the extent and importance of the Canadian Merchant Navy.
André Guindon
Mr. Guindon was born in Ville-Marie, in Témiscamingue county, Quebec. He entered military service by going to the offices of HMCS Montcalm in Quebec City in 1942. After three years of university military training at the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps (COTC), he attended Kings College naval academy in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He enlisted in the Navy on a corvette assigned to protect Merchant Navy ships from enemy submarine attacks. He provides interesting insights about the importance of the Merchant Navy.
Transcription
The importance of the Merchant Navy
A convoy can have between 30 and 260 ships. You have to remember, during the war, they shipped 181,643,000 pounds of cargo and equipment. That’s the equivalent of 11 merchandise convoys from Halifax to Vancouver. Think about it–a train going from Halifax to Vancouver 11 times. Without the convoys, we couldn’t have fought the war, because once they took France, all of Eastern Europe from Spain to the north was controlled by the Nazis. Great Britain didn’t have oil. It was defended by its navy, the English navy, which was the biggest navy in the world. No oil, no navy. No navy and Mr. Hitler would have crossed the Channel immediately. That’s why Winston Churchill, who was the top man, said that the Battle of the Atlantic was the most important battle of the war. If the Allies had lost the Battle of the Atlantic, it would have been over. Canada didn’t have a navy at the start, but we’d built up an entire fleet by the end of the war.
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