TRANSCRIPT

My name is Bob Hughes, and I was born and brought up in Port Arthur. I'm 87 (years old) and in 1937 I joined the Lake Superior Regiment, which was non-permanent, active militia at that time, for three years. Those three years brought it up to around September 10th when war was declared by Canada. And, at that particular time, "C" Company of the Regiment was called out to go on guard duty here at the Armoury, the only place in town that was being guarded by the militia. In July 1940, I got my discharge from the Regiment here and joined the navy because we understood at the time that it was going to be some time before the regiment mobilized, which is the reason I changed over and got into the navy. I had chosen torpedo-work but I ended up getting gunnery. So I went into a gunnery course down there. When we finished that, we were ready for draft and they came around one day and asked us if we'd like to go on merchant ships. Not being too familiar with merchant ships, I said "yes" at the time. I shipped up to Victoria when they were building and launching the new "Park Boats" for the government of Canada. They were all brand-new and all 10,000-tonners, farley large cargo boats to start carrying cargo overseas and so on. They were farley well armed. My last one, as a matter of fact, had a 4" gun on the stern with a rocker-projector above it, 4 Oerlikons on the upper-deck and two on the fore-deck on either side of the cargo holds here, and two sets of twin .50 caliber machine guns below the bridge on the main deck. So they were armed, well we used to think they were well armed and armed better than the corvettes and mine-sweepers that they were having at that time.

This made me think something else too, that at the beginning of the war, submarines would quite often come to the surface. To save their stock of torpedoes, they would come to the surface and, if the ship they were attacking was farley small and couldn't defend herself, they would sink her with gun-fire from the submarine. Later on, when the new 10,000ton park boats started coming out with all this extra armament, you very seldom saw a submarine come to the surface and try to attack another ship, especially these.