By Glenna Metchette
Often forgotten are those who served on and serviced the fleets of transport ships that supplied desperately needed food and armaments for the Allies.
A total of 12,000 men and women served in Canada’s Merchant Navy, and more than 25,000 merchant ship voyages were made during the Second World War.
Danger was not faced only by those in military uniform, and not all danger occurred far at sea.
Few single events have etched themselves so deeply into Canadian memory as the great Halifax explosion of 1917 when 2,000 people were killed and 9,000 injured.
Probably very few today remember how closely Vancouver came to sharing a similar fate on March 6, 1945.
On that never-to-be-forgotten day, I was having lunch with my mother and grandparents in a restaurant next to the Bank of Montreal on Granville Street, a short distance from CPR’s Pier B-C. At noon, four separate explosions rocked the city.
Thousands of windows were shattered and flying glass slashed many on the busy streets. As great chunks of ceiling plaster rained down around us, we rushed outside.
Screams of “the [Japanese] are attacking” led to panic in the streets. Suddenly, my grandfather moaned in pain and clutched his chest.
“Get him into the Bank,” yelled my mother over the din of shrieks and sirens. Slipping and sliding over shards of plate glass, we dragged him.
It was like assaulting shifting polar ice, except blood from slashed flesh splattered the glassy surface. The blasts had sucked out the bank’s enormous plate glass windows.
Grandfather survived this heart attack, but two merchant seamen and six longshoremen loading the 10,000 tonne S.S. Greenhill Park, berthed at Pier B-C, did not.
The explosions lifted Jules Lantchier on to the top of his galley stove, burning him badly.
It killed the two seamen in a cabin near the hold below. It blew out the bulkhead separating the holds and incinerated five longshoremen. A sixth longshoreman died trying to escape up a narrow passageway inside a mast-house.
Panic gripped the men. They scrambled for the gangplank, clogging it.
The next blasts were bigger than the first. They launched the ship’s bridge 30 metres into the air.
The whole ship shuddered and rose under the men, tossing some onto the dock. Many were burned and scalded. A few lucky ones jumped overboard.
Pickles pattered down on the dock. Streamers of newsprint unravelled high into the air like rolls of toilet paper. Sunglasses shot out of the hold and landed as far away as Lumbermen’s Arch. Ammunition exploded and distress flares ignited, soaring into the sky in an awesome display of grim fireworks. The force of the blasts tore through half inch steel plates as though they were tissue paper. Had the four separate explosions been compressed into one, this disaster would have killed thousands and been ranked with the Halifax explosion.
Later, some investigators cited sabotage; others blamed improper storage of a catch-all cargo bound for troops in Australia; and some others blamed longshoremen for starting the fire which led to the explosions.
Death by explosion, fire, scalding steam or drowning at sea was horrific enough. Harshest of all, floundering merchant seamen from fatally hit vessels frequently had to be left behind so the convoy still underway would not be sitting ducks. Drowning sailors had to be abandoned to the cold Atlantic, so the greater number would survive.
We are forever indebted to those who served in Canada’s Merchant Navy. They did their jobs knowing their ships were prime targets for enemy action.
