When Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee spoke Friday in Halifax at the keel-laying ceremony for Canada’s first River-class destroyer, his words could have been interpreted as describing one of the vessels HMCS Fraser is named after.
“We have always been a destroyer navy, a navy that has small ships capable of doing big things anywhere that Canada needs them to go,” he said.
And in 1940, just before the first HMCS Fraser became the first Royal Canadian Navy vessel to sink during the Second World War, it aided in evacuating British and Allied troops from France as the country was swiftly overrun by German forces.
“It’s a fascinating bit of history,” said Jeff Noakes, the Second World War historian with the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
Noakes said the Royal Canadian Navy had very few ships during the 1920s after big cutbacks, so there was a major need for rearmament in the 1930s.
“The 1930s is also the era of the Great Depression,” he said. “There’s not a lot of money for anything or anyone.”
Piece by piece, Canada acquired both new and used vessels.
In 1936, the Royal Navy’s HMS Crescent was sold to Canada and became HMCS Fraser.
Originally stationed on the West Coast, HMCS Fraser relocated to Halifax after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
Noakes said it carried out convoy escorts and coastal patrols, but after Germany attacked Western Europe in May 1940, Canada sent its modern destroyers to the U.K. — including HMCS Fraser — to help augment defences there.
With France on the verge of surrendering to the Germans in June, evacuations of British and other Allied forces took place all along the French coast — and not just at Dunkirk.
On June 21, HMCS Fraser found itself in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, close to the Spanish border, alongside another Canadian destroyer, HMCS Restigouche, and other British ships.
“For the next couple of days, Restigouche and Fraser are part of the force that’s there off Saint-Jean-de-Luz as people are being evacuated and they’re there providing protection against possible attacks by German submarines or other German forces while their ships, boats are being used to transport all these evacuees from the port to ships that are waiting offshore,” said Noakes.
On June 25, the ships had to flee, said Noakes. The Fraser, Restigouche and a British ship, HMS Calcutta, headed north along the French coast.
He said that some accounts say the ships were heading to assist a French merchant ship so it wouldn’t have to go into a port in occupied France, where it would have been captured.
Just after sundown, the Fraser, Restigouche and Calcutta were rearranging how they were sailing in company with each other.
“It’s a complex situation,” said Noakes. “People have been literally doing this for days on end without respite or rest because you want to get as many people out as you possibly can.”
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As part of the manoeuvring, the Calcutta struck the forward part of the Fraser, causing the front part of the Fraser to break off and sink in the Gironde River estuary.
Noakes said 47 people from the Fraser died, many of them Canadian, while some people were rescued from the part of the ship that briefly stayed afloat or were rescued from the water.
He said part of the bridge of HMCS Fraser wound up on the bow of HMS Calcutta, so five people were literally able to step off from that piece onto the Calcutta.
“The first Canadian warship loss of the Second World War is due to accident rather than due to enemy action,” said Noakes.
Many of the Fraser crew who survived were transferred to a ship, HMCS Margaree, that essentially acted as a replacement for the Fraser.
In October 1940, the Margaree was lost due to another collision at sea.
Frank Crossley’s father, Sid Crossley, served on HMCS Fraser, but not HMCS Margaree. He suspects his father had post-traumatic stress disorder, in part, because of his time on the Fraser.
“That’s another aspect of his consciousness, you know, all his mates that were survivors of the Fraser and got perished on the Margaree, unfortunately,” said Crossley.
He said his father worked on sonar during his 25-year military career and was likely on the Fraser’s bridge when the collision with the Calcutta occurred.
He said his father was like Jekyll and Hyde, and suffered from alcohol abuse.
“[It] might have helped if him and I could have talked about what he experienced,” said Crossley.
A second HMCS Fraser served Canada for about four decades until 1997, when it arrived in Bridgewater, N.S., to stand as a floating museum. The vessel was ultimately reacquired by the military and eventually scrapped.
At Friday’s ceremony in Halifax, a symbolic coin was welded onto the Fraser’s keel. The tradition aims to bring good luck to the ship and its crew.
Freelance naval historian Roger Litwiller said it’s common for navies to repeat ship names.
“It gives the sailors that serve in the ship, it gives them a legacy to build from, it gives them something to be proud of and it just brings forward the history of not just the ship, but the Royal Canadian Navy as a whole, from the past to the future,” he said.
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