the war began in September 1939, Great Britain and its allies found themselves woefully deficient in the kinds of escort vessels required to shepherd convoys of desperately needed war matériel safely across the Atlantic Ocean. Although the March 1941 Lend-Lease exchange of military bases for ships with the United States added fifty aging destroyers to the forces available, there was still an immediate need for craft capable of tracking and sinking the German submarines that were so efficiently torpedoing Allied shipping. More destroyers would have been the ideal solution, but they took so long to build that as a matter of necessity the more quickly buildable corvette became the escort vessel of choice.
In December 1942, the HMCS Battleford was part of an escort protecting a convoy of Allied ships. Garner was there when the convoy was badly mauled, losing fourteen vessels.
The corvette’s particular advantage was that it had a narrower turning radius than U-boats, which meant it could maintain contact with them and continue its attacks for a longer period of time. On the other hand, if a submarine tired of being depth-charged and decided to fight it out on the surface, the corvette’s minimal gunnery complement gave the U-boats the advantage, which meant that some corvettes resorted to the ancient naval tactic of ramming as an effective if often suicidal way of sinking their opponent. Such desperate measures reflected the Royal Canadian Navy’s expansion during the first two years of the war from eighteen hundred to thirty-six thousand men, many with only minimal training, which as a consequence led to initially poor performances in such complex tasks as submarine hunting.
As Storm Below vividly depicts, life on a corvette was a cramped and all too intimate existence that might be radically upset by any change in routine. Thus the captain’s decision to keep a deceased sailor’s body onboard rather than bury it at sea, perhaps defensible on a larger ship where it could be kept out of sight and out of mind, proves to be a serious mistake: when the body comes loose from its moorings during the Riverford’s violent combat manoeuvres, and literally shows the face of death to the crew, the result is a pervasive “mass psychological tension” (156) that almost provokes a mutiny. The “storm below” the surface created by the ship’s antisubmarine depth charges has been relocated within the Riverford itself, and it is Garner’s deft depiction of this transformation that makes the novel such a powerful portrait of what happens to men under the conditions of combat.
Hugh Garner would go on to become one of the most prominent Canadian writers of his time. Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, which included such much-anthologized favourites as “The Yellow Sweater,” “The Conversion of Willie Heaps,” and “One, Two, Three Little Indians,” won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1963, and when Cabbagetown was finally published unabridged in 1968, it was recognized as a major work of social realism. Although the ravages of alcoholism and poor health would significantly diminish the quality of his subsequent literary output, and thus lead to a substantial downgrading of his work by literary critics and historians after his death in 1979, for much of his career he was a powerful and evocative writer who spoke directly to many of his fellow Canadians. In my biography The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner, I concluded that his best writing “will be read and appreciated as long as there is an audience for honest and impassioned literature,” and rereading and reflecting upon Storm Below allows me to reaffirm that judgment.
By the time this photograph was taken in 1968, Garner had won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and was at the height of his powers as a writer.
Selected Reading
Fetherling, Doug. Hugh Garner. Toronto: Forum House, 1972. Garner, Hugh. One Damn Thing After Another. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973.
Moss, John. “A Conversation with Hugh Garner.” Journal of Canadian Fiction, I, No. 2 (Spring 1972), 50–55.
Stuewe, Paul. Hugh Garner and His Works. Toronto: ECW Press, 1984.
____. The Storms Below:The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1988.
BY HUGH GARNER
The Canadian corvette, HMCS Riverford, which serves as the setting of this book, is fictitious only to the extent that it is a composite of many. The members of the crew are also fictitious, but, I hope, recognizable as human beings behind the hyperbole and distortion which is the privilege of the fiction writer.
It takes all kinds to make a world, and it also takes all kinds to make a war — or fight one after some of the others make it.
This is not the story of a ship, but the story of a few Canadian sailors who formed the ship’s company of the Riverford, during six days at the tag end of an escort run in March 1943. There is nothing much about them to inspire poetry, or a patriotic shiver of pride in the reader; that is not the object of this book. They are not even “typical” sailors, if such exist. All I can say to justify them is that they are drawn in the image of hundreds who made up the Royal Canadian Navy. They do not need an apology — they were out there, and we won.
The dawn of March 9, 1943, rose above the spinning earth. For the many it was without significance, except to herald the coming day, but to the few it was epochal, and filled with meaning. It was the first dawn for those who were born the night before, and the last for those who had to die.
They were to die in many ways on that fateful, yet un-different day: In the gas chambers of Osweicim, on the spittle-caking roads of North Africa, in a birth bed in the Queen Mary Maternity Hospital in Sheffield, before a Ustachi firing squad outside Sarajevo, of prostatic cancer in a hotel for indigent men near the corner of the Bowery and Houston streets in New York City, at the wheel of a 1940 Buick at a level crossing near Buenos Aires, in the tail turret of a Halifax bomber over the German Ruhr, of pulmonary embolism in a sheepherder’s hut in Queensland, Australia….
The Canadian Flower class corvette HMCS Riverford was proceeding west-southwest at ten knots, part of the escort force of a merchant convoy, eleven days out of Londonderry, Northern Ireland. She was adhering to an admiralty-specified zigzag on the port, forward anti-submarine sweep, abreast of the leading file of fifty-six assorted merchantmen returning to North America in ballast. They had rendezvoused in the Clyde from such scattered points as Tilbury, Murmansk, Birkenhead, Loch Ewe, South Shields, Bristol, Oran, Queenstown, Lisbon, and Hull for the break across the North Atlantic. They ran the gamut of sea transportation from a twenty-two-thousand-ton Norwegian whaling factory through Liberty Ships, an Australian refrigerator ship, a Canadian lower laker, to a decrepit Greek coaster which trailed the others like a dirty-faced young brother on a hike. Also escorting them were a Canadian four-stacker destroyer, four more Canadian corvettes, and an English trawler on its way to the West Indies to take up minesweeping duties outside the port of Kingston, Jamaica.
The pre-dawn air was chill with the wind which swept off the blue-glass ice shelf of Greenland a few hundred miles to the northwest, and the cold black sea was raised into sullen, turgid ridges, its fringe of white petit point blown away with each gust of wind.
Ordinary Seaman Clark, nineteen years old, Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, stepped quickly through the
