Romkey - St. Johns and the Battle of the Atlantic

In the early summer of 1972 I was captain of HMCS Skeena. Having nearly completed our operational tour of duty with the Standing Naval Force Atlantic in the Caribbean and eastern Atlantic, we were looking forward to a liberty port en route to home port Halifax, NS. The ships company of 220 was polled regarding which of the 25 or so ports in the Atlantic Seaboard Europe or North America they would prefer for a six day stopover. The near-unanimous choice was St. Johns, Newfoundland! This speaks volumes about the close relationship that has existed between the navy and this great city for centuries from the early days of the fishing admirals that ruled the colony from St. Johns Harbour, to the present.

The familiar thick fog that day in 1972 caused our harbour approach to the Narrows to be somewhat dramatic, as the first and sudden visible existence of land loomed out of the dense blanket in the form of the foreboding steep cliffs of Signal Hill on one side and Fort Amherst on the other. As we entered the harbour, recollections of my early boyhood in St. Johns during World War II went through my mind. I was 18 months old when the war began and I lived near Water Street until I moved to Bonavista in 1944. I remembered the sailors in uniform walking along Water Street, the dreaded Shore Patrols, the nuisance blackouts, the omnipresent ration cards, and the scarcity of key related ingredients. The shock and sadness of the news of the sinking by a U-boat of the ferry Caribou in the Cabot Strait and the burning of the Knights of Columbus hut remained a clear memory to me, as did the stern and repeated voice accompanying the daily Gerald S. Doyle news over radio station VONF that N is for nuts and A is for apples not knowing what code it represented if any! But above all I vividly remember the navy ships and the hustle and bustle along the many finger piers that lined this strategically important harbour during the Battle of the Atlantic.

In later years my regular visits to and eventual life membership in the Crows Nest Club seemed an enjoyable and appropriate part of my job as a rear admiral and deputy commander of the Canadian Navy. One of the highlights of my life, later in politics, was representing the Canadian government in my capacity as Regional Minister for Newfoundland and Labrador in the commissioning of the new frigate HMCS St. Johns on Discovery Day in 1996.

The story of St. Johns, the navy, and the last World War can be told by many people in many ways, though perhaps none better than by a St. Johns native, a naval officer and a politician, who lived it and remembers it in these dimensions. He has literally covered the waterfront of the many poignant aspects of the city, the time, and the people in such a way that one feels part of the story whether or not they were there. Senator Bill Rompkey, in this valuable historical work, displays his well-known passion as a Newfoundlander and Labradorian and his love for the navy.