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A life at sea in service to the nation is not what most people think of when they’re contemplating an occupation, possibly for the rest of their life.
The times may have been different during World War II when Howie Poole and Fred Linnington signed up with Canada’s naval forces, but they became part of a seafaring tradition that continues to this day.
Navy’s centennial
As the Canadian Navy spends this year marking its 100th anniversary, Poole and Linnington — both navy veterans who are members of the Royal Canadian Legion’s Branch 185 in Two Mountains — sat down with the North Shore News to share some of their memories.
Poole, a past president of the branch, joined the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR) as a young man during the world war. He became an Able Seaman and gunner aboard vessels doing convoy duty, helping transport dozens of troop ships across the North Atlantic to the war front.
North Atlantic was rough
While the North Atlantic has a well-deserved reputation as one of the world’s fiercest bodies of water, Poole calls himself “one of the lucky ones,” in that he completed his three years service without incident and actually came into range of the enemy only a few times. “It wasn’t always rough,” he says of the North Atlantic. “There were good times and bad times, depending on the weather. Some of the seas were rough and some weren’t.”
Poole’s says his main reason for signing up with the navy was straightforward. “It was because I didn’t have to wear a tie,” he says with a laugh. And he has no illusions when it comes to explaining how he ended up as a seafarer. “I wasn’t born to go to sea, but I ended up there.” During Poole’s time of service, it was a tradition in the Canadian navy, as it was for centuries in the British naval forces, to provide each sailor with a small ration of rum at least once a day. But there’s no doubt about one thing. “I’d go back,” says Poole. “I’d do it all again.”
A naval tradition
Fred Linnington, a past president of the White Ensign Club in St. Eustache for World War II naval service veterans, was in the Canadian Merchant Navy, which automatically made him a member of the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (RCNR). He served from 1940 until five years after the war. Linnington came from a family which had a longstanding naval tradition. He got his seafaring start as a teenager during the late 1930s, working as a hand on boats that would ply Canada’s inland waterways.
While Poole got through the war relatively unscathed, Linnington suffered a permanent ear injury while serving in the North Atlantic. Standing too close to an ordnance being fired from his ship’s deck at some overhead targets, the explosion damaged his hearing and the flash gave him a burn across the side of his face. “If I’m teaching and in a group and people start talking, my comprehension of what’s going on is not the greatest because the ear is perforated,” he says, adding that the Canadian Forces never compensated him.
Saw HMCS Magog torpedoed
While serving in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on Oct. 14, 1944, Linnington witnessed the torpedoing by a German U-boat of the HMCS Magog, a Royal Canadian Navy frigate built by Canadian Vickers, and the subsequent loss of at least two Canadian sailors’ lives. According to Linnington, he and a bunch of other sailors had been out the night before in the bars of Gaspé just off the gulf. As the previous day had been Friday the 13th, more than a few people were nervous.
According to Linnnington, the Magog was in a formation where normally his vessel should have been when the Magog was hit. “That’s when the Magog got torpedoed,” he says. “It was an acoustic torpedo, and it hit the quarter-deck, and the deck just rolled up. Normally I would have been in that position.” Two buddies he had been out with the night before died in the attack. While the Magog didn’t sink, she was towed to Quebec City where she was declared a total loss and eventually scrapped.
