Dear Reader:
Three of my maternal uncles served in the Royal Canadian Navy on convoy escort duty during World War Two. They never spoke about their wartime experiences, and when the last of them passed away, I regretted that I never pressed them to talk about it.
Then several years ago I came across an article in which one of my uncles, Bob McDonald, was quoted. The article described how he dove into the bone-chilling North Atlantic waters and rescued both his commanding officer and a German submariner.
Anyone who is familiar with my work knows that I’m primarily a comedy writer, and there’s nothing very funny about the Battle of the Atlantic. But discovering this one small but intriguing bit of family history made me want to find out more, and inspired me to propose this book for the I Am Canada series.
To my mind, the Battle of the Atlantic doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other great conflicts of World War Two. Maybe it was difficult to film and photograph it compared to the air and ground wars. We just don’t have a visual record of it to the extent that we do with the air and ground battles, and so it’s further from our minds.
But the Battle of the Atlantic was an epic struggle. To beat the Nazis, millions of tonnes of food, fuel and military equipment had to be imported into Great Britain by ship. The Nazis were determined to cut that lifeline using their submarine fleet to sink Allied freighters, choke off the military supplies to our forces and starve Britain into surrender. And they nearly succeeded. The situation was so grave that afterwards, Winston Churchill wrote, “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” It is no exaggeration to say that had the Battle of the Atlantic been lost, you and I would be living in a very different and much less pleasant world.
This conflict happened more than 70 years ago, and most of the participants are now deceased. I knew it would have been possible to craft an exciting novel inspired by the accounts they left behind. But I realized that writing this book gave me an incredible opportunity to seek out and interview the last remaining survivors to hear their stories first hand. So that’s what I did. And I’m glad, because the stories that the veterans shared with me were astonishing, revealing grit and determination under harrowing conditions, beyond anything I had ever read in historical records. Although Bill O’Connell is a fictional character, the vast majority of the events in Sink and Destroy actually happened to the people that I interviewed. I feel incredibly fortunate to have recorded these previously untold stories before they disappear forever.
I hope this book gives readers a sense of just how high the stakes were, how deadly this conflict was, and how amazing those young Canadian sailors were. Like Bill, many of them were only teenagers, yet they went head-to-head against the toughest, most skilled and battle-hardened forces that Hitler could throw at them . . . and won.