Canada Ping!
Canada Ping!
Royal Canadian Navy?
This is a joke right?
Captain of my uncle's ship, HMCS Restigouche.
He was posted as a first lieutenant at Base Esquimalt, on the Canadian destroyer HMCS Restigouche (aka Rusty Guts). In September 1939, Restigouche was ordered to Halifax and at the start of the war assigned to convoy duty to escort merchant ships to England. At that time the RCN had only six destroyers and 3,500 men.
Piers was always close to the action. He was present when the Royal Canadian Navy fired it's first shots in World War II. In June 1940,during the evacuation of France, German General Erwin Rommel was bearing down on the British Army's 51st Highland Division at St. Valérie on the Channel coast near Dieppe. Restigouche was ordered to take off wounded soldiers, and Piers went ashore in a whaler to find out what could be done to evacuate the stranded Scottish soldiers. The General of the Highlanders,General V.M. Fortune, told him the troops would not leave because they had no orders to do so. As Piers was returning to Restigouche, the Germans fired on him. Capt. Harry Dewolfe returned fire to protect his young officer. "Here were these Scottish troops without arms, without food. Harry Dewolfe, in the meantime, was firing at the German army on the cliffs," Piers recalled years later in an interview with CBC Radio.
In June of 1941, the RCN promoted the 28 year old Piers to Lieutenant-Commander and gave him the helm of HMCS Restigouche. In August, he escorted the British Battleship HMS Prince of Wales,with Winston Churchill aboard, to Argentia Newfoundland, for WSC's secret Atlantic Charter meetings with Franklin D. Roosevelt.
