Finding the Enemy While They’re Looking For Us
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Media Information
- Medium: Video
- Owner: Veterans Affairs Canada
- Duration: 6:29
- Copyright / Permission to Reproduce
More Clips
1. Relationships With the Crew
2. Becoming an Officer of the Watch
3. Importance of the Merchant Navy
4. Finding the Enemy While They’re Looking For Us
Details
Finding the Enemy While They’re Looking For Us
Mr. Guindon describes the most dangerous situation at sea: encountering an enemy submarine, and explains how the ASDIC, the device used to detect submarines, works.
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
Finding the enemy while they’re looking for us
Obviously, the worst thing that can happen on a ship is to meet up with the enemy. But that’s not something you’re trying to avoid, it’s something you’re trying to make happen, because the Canadian Navy’s job was to escort the convoys, and protect them from the German submarines. Those submarines chased us, and we chased them. But when you run after a submarine, and you know that it’s there, that it has torpedoes–in 1944 they had those famous homing torpedoes that were automatically attracted by the ship’s propellers–when you’re hunting for the submarine, you’re so focused on what you’re doing that you forget. You go to action stations . . . when the action signal sounds, it’s like whiplash. You run to your post, and you focus on your job.
My combat position
I was on the bridge in the navigation cabin. I helped the navigator plot the echo course. The echo from the submarine. We found them by echo, using the asdic device. When the echo was reflected back, it meant something was there. So the anti-sub unit sent out pulses and when they hit something they were reflected back and we plotted them on the map to identify the submarine’s course and its depth. It was gripping.
The asdic equipment was used to detect submarines
The asdic, it’s a charge, a pulse. Waves are sent into the water at a specific angle and recorded, and if the pulse strikes an object, whether it’s a whale or something else, a submarine, the echo is reflected back and is automatically recorded. So the asdic device sends out echo 3-6-0 true North or 0-4-5 East, and when it comes back, asdic identifies the type of echo. It doesn’t say exactly where the object is, but the ping, the sound, it shows pretty much were it is. If it’s flat, if the echo comes back but less powerful than when it was sent, then it hasn’t hit metal. If it just deviated, it didn’t hit anything. But if the echo sounding 0-4-5, if a submarine is there, the asdic device will say: submarine; distance: so much; range: . . . and then . . .
The crew’s reaction when a submarine is detected
Everyone goes to their stations and the submarine hunt begins. The senior officer escort. If the submarine is on the right, he sends an escort to chase it. That can last 20 minutes or 20 hours. But that’s the most exciting part.
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