Ted Barris

Regulations clearly stipulated against it. An exposed light in the middle of the darkness, especially on the open sea when the country was at war made the vessel emitting the light extremely vulnerable. German U-boats could spot it in a second, and attack in the next. And the risk was made extremely clear to merchant navy man Jim Hunt during one North Atlantic crossing when his tanker convoy was under an escort by U.S. navy ships.

“Someone had left a porthole open with a light on at dusk on board our tanker,” Hunt said, remembering his time in the Second World War as a teenaged sailor at sea aboard a Norwegian merchant navy ship. “So, an American destroyer came alongside our ship and signaled for us to turn the light out … or they would sink us.”

When I told this story last Saturday morning during our tribute to the local veteran (at the start of our Uxbridge Oilies Remembrance Day hockey tournament), Jim Hunt, now 86, eventually explained to the audience at the arena what had happened.

“It turned out that I was the guilty person,” he said. “I had left the light on and the porthole open.”

In 1939, when the war broke out, Jim Hunt was eager to get into the fighting. But barely a teenager at that time, he wasn’t accepted by the Royal Canadian Navy. So instead, he went to sea aboard a Norwegian merchant navy ship. It was a 17,000-tonne fuel tanker, carrying high-octane airplane gasoline. In other words, they were a ticking time bomb. All it would take was an enemy torpedo and their ship would go up like fireworks. In fact, Jim remembered a time when his ship the Jotunfjell nearly did.

“Once, while unloading the fuel in Taranta, Italy, the sirens aboard the shop began to sound,” he said. “We couldn’t disconnect the unloading hoses. So we were sitting ducks. Then, at the last possible moment, three Royal Air Force fighter planes appeared (and drove off) the German bombers.”

History statistics illustrate the magnitude and peril of serving in the world’s merchant navies during the Second World War. During the battle between Allied navy convoys (trying to get munitions and supplies from North America to England) and the German U-boat wolf packs trying to sink them, Canada’s merchant navy consisted of 37 ships with about 1,400 merchant sailors. By the end of the war, that number had grown to 180 ships and 12,000 mariners.

But merchant navy losses were among the worst per capita. Canada lost 67 merchant ships during the war, and of the 7,705 seaman (credited by the Department of Transport with sailing in dangerous waters) 1,146 were killed and 198 taken prisoner. Put simply, the odds of surviving merchant navy sailing were not good; one in five died at sea between 1939 and 1945.

Our featured vet at last weekend’s tournament, Jim Hunt, offered me one more story in which he and his crewmates nearly bought it. His tanker vessel had been lying in drydock, in Baltimore harbour, getting some repairs done. But when it came time for the convoy to leave the east coast of North America, his ship was a day late joining the convoy eastbound across the Atlantic. So they attempted to catch up.

“The captain pushed the ship to its top speed so that we could catch up to our convoy. And we did,” Hunt said. “But about 24 hours later, there was this loud bang because the ship’s engines had broken down. Dead silence.”

Jim said they watched the entire convoy and navy escort sail away to the east. And there they were sitting on 17,000 tonnes of high-octane gas again with no power. He said they bobbed around for three days until a tugboat came out from the mainland and towed them back to port. Maybe, as Jim learned later, it was a blessing for his ship and crew. Later in the crossing, that convoy had been decimated by a pack of German U-boats.

“Theirs was an occupation noted in peacetime for hardiness and monotony, yearned for only because of the sense of freedom it gave,” wrote author Joseph Schull, author of The Far Distant Ships. “Now was added the prospect of death by freezing water or flaming oil in a life unrelieved by uniforms, recognition, or the shore-side amenities for naval crews. And freedom was gone … The ships had to be sailed and these men had to sail them.”

By the way, Jim Hunt told us on Saturday during our tribute to him, because he’d left that porthole light on in his quarters that time, he lost a day’s pay. It might have broken his bank account, but as a sailor determined to do his part for the war effort, it didn’t break his spirit.