The Interwar Years

A then-young RCN officer, Frank Llewellyn Houghton, recorded these memories decades after the event, but they remained fresh to him. The carnage that had been the First World War had come to an end, but for the institution that was the Royal Canadian Navy peace meant an evaluation of its place in Canadian government policy—and its priority in the federal budget. The main naval threats, especially Germany, had been disposed of, and although Great Britain and the United States were clear rivals at sea (in regards to trade) the possibility of full-scale conflict between those two countries was simply too slim to serve as a basis for naval planning. Furthermore, the deaths of 60,000 Canadians on the battlefields of Europe had touched untold numbers of families, who were understandably skeptical of what had been purchased for the price, and hesitated to make any further sacrifice, whether on land or at sea. As historians Michael Hadley and Roger Sarty have observed, “Canada lacked the national will to develop a navy and had no myths of glory and empire with which to nourish the idea. The parliamentary debates on the Naval Service estimates of May 1919 subjected the Canadian Navy’s performance in the Great War to harsh scrutiny and often unjustified scorn.” As we have seen in the previous chapter, the RCN had performed its duty, but had not captured the public imagination and had even taken some of the blame for the Halifax explosion: “Offering an unsensational past, the navy seemed to provide no justification whatever for future development. Naval prestige was not a Canadian issue.”¹ If the Canadian Expeditionary Force that indisputably had covered itself in glory could be disbanded, it is understandable that members of the RCN looked to the future with some apprehension.

Not so much, however, as to preclude planning. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Jellicoe, visiting various colonies of the empire in the immediate post-war period, recommended that, for protecting Canada’s trade and ports, it needed three light cruisers, a flotilla leader, a dozen torpedo craft, and eight submarines with a parent ship. He also made recommendations for a fleet unit that could become part of the Royal Navy in time of emergency, but the Imperial Conference of 1921 resolved “That while recognizing the necessity of co-operation among the various forces of the Empire to provide such Naval Defence as may prove to be essential for security and while holding that equality with the Naval strength of any other power is a minimum standard for that purpose, this Conference is of opinion that the method and expense of such co-operation are matters for the final determination of the several Parliaments concerned….” Dominion autonomy won out over naval centralization, and the best the Royal Navy could get at the time were “a number of useful consultations” with several dominions and India, “at which were discussed such matters as local co-operation of each Dominion in regard to the provision of oil tanks, local Naval Defence, etc.”²

“Local Naval Defence” may have had a Laurier-like ring to it, and the peace was less than a year-and-a-half old when a Conservative Canadian government acquired a Laurier-like navy: on 24 March 1920, it accepted the British offer of a light cruiser and two destroyers, which would be commissioned respectively as HMC Ships Aurora, Patriot, and Patrician. The result, somewhat ironically, was that the RCN would be more capable in time of peace than it had been during the Great War, as none of the vessels it had operated during that conflict could be characterized as “warships.” These newly-acquired vessels would operate out of Halifax and Esquimalt, as would trawlers, the latter later reclassed as minesweepers. For the immediate post-war era all these vessels would remain close to home for training and operations, with fisheries patrols a large part of the latter. The Naval Service had taken over responsibility for some of this work from the Department of Marine and Fisheries in the early days of its existence, and would play an important role in protecting natural resources at sea for the remainder of the century and beyond. It did so at its own expense, since it was an opportunity for training, so that in 1921-22, it spent $325,000 on such duties, while Marine and Fisheries expended $350,000. Given the nature of the laws that governed resource exploitation, enforcement could be extremely intricate. The Captain’s monthly report for Thiepval on 5 March 1920, noted for example,

while cruising off Cape Scott, a fishing boat was sighted picking up her dories, she was stopped and the Capt ordered on board as she proved to be the La Paloma of Seattle, Capt informed that he was suspected to be inside the 3 mile limit, took the boat in tow, and proceeded to the inside buoy, and by careful Sextant angles fixed her at three and one half miles from the West Haycock Isl. The ship was then released, and told to get farther off shore, as this was the same man Capt Hurley, who in 1914, in the U.S. boat Malola, was warned off Rose Spit, by the Malaspina.³

As for the three largest warships of the RCN, they were commissioned on 1 November 1920. Equipment having been installed and tested, they sailed from the British Isles on December 1, though by 1800, as reported by Aurora’s captain, H.G.H. Adams, “all Ships were hove to with a Southerly gale blowing….The sea-going behaviour of all Ships was a matter of congratulations, but a good deal of discomfort was experienced by small leaks in upper deck, etc. which were easily put right by the Ships Staff.”

Words like “unfamiliarity” were used frequently in reports on the ships’ personnel. For example, Aurora’s complement of 323 included 47 ordinary seamen and boys recruited in Canada who had no previous experience. “This number is practically as high as there is room for in the Ship,” which was sailing with less than the optimum complement of artisans, being short two ordnance artificers, one electrical artificer, one plumber, one joiner, and one light director layer (for Patriot). Furthermore, Adams felt that “it is necessary for efficiency of the Destroyers that 1 Ordnance Artificer, 1 Electrical Artificer and 1 Shipwright be carried in addition as the work on the Destroyers is more than the Staff of Aurora can cope with.” Such work, in this part of the cruise, included range finding exercises on all working days, though “The Gun Circuits, etc., have still a good deal of work to be carried out before firing can safely take place, and … I do not anticipate being ready for any serious firing program before two months. Meanwhile training is taking place daily.”⁴

As everyone involved expected, improvement came with practice. Aurora and other vessels conducted convoy and harbour defence exercises before a year was out, and played a role in the international arena in 1921.The stage was Costa Rica, during a cruise by Aurora, Patriot, and Patrician in the spring and summer. A hint of things to come came in a message of June 6, when the Admiralty advised that Puerta Culebra, a possible port of call for the Canadian warships, “is unsuitable for visit of His Majesty’s Canadian Ships as usual salutes and other International courtesies cannot be accorded at that port. British Minister at Costa Rica suggests Punta Arenas as port of call which is in direct railway communication with Capital.” The ships arrived on July 6, and after the usual courtesies (including an exchange of salutes), reported Aurora’s captain,

The British Minister arrived down [sic] in a special train during the afternoon with a deputation from the British Residents of San Jose and was my guest on board during his stay at the Port….An invitation was extended to 12 officers of the Squadron to visit San Jose the following day and remain up there for 2 nights, which I accepted especially as the Minister thought that this visit would strengthen his hands in negotiations with the Costa Rica government over claims of the Royal Bank of Canada and the re-granting of oil concessions to a British Company which had been taken away.⁵

Negotiations ended successfully. The highlight of the operation being a night at the opera, it was more of a trade mission than gunboat diplomacy, but a sure sign that Canada’s small navy could play a role in the empire’s affairs.

The 1921 election of William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Liberals, however, forced the Canadian Navy to re-evaluate establishments and capabilities. From $1.2 million in 1919, the navy’s budget had risen to almost two million in the two fiscal years that followed, but the new government called for a limited, $1.5 million navy budget. The director of the naval staff, now Commodore Walter Hose, who had replaced Kingsmill in 1920, quickly concluded that such would be insufficient to keep a capable navy, no matter how small, at sea. The service would therefore rely on reserves to maintain its existence, and the plan he submitted on 19 April 1922 (and was swiftly approved on the 24th) decreed that Aurora would be laid up and Canada’s naval college closed, although the two destroyers could remain in commission.

It was at that time that Lieutenant Frank Houghton returned from eight years of service with the Royal Navy, joining Patriot as second-in-command. The captain was Lieutenant Howard Emerson Reid, “one year older and six months senior to me.” It was not a happy moment, as “I was returning to the RCN at a time when it was at its lowest ebb. I shall always remember the farewell party given to my predecessor, Lieutenant Cuthbert Robert Holland Taylor…. I can still hear in my mind the last words he managed to articulate before he quietly and appropriately passed out: ‘I’ve seen a Navy die, boys! I’ve seen a Navy die!’”⁶ Such words may seem melodramatic, but the RCN was not just an institution, but a society and a community as well. Still, as a member of that society, Walter Hose seemed far less angry and far more optimistic, at least after some time had passed. In August he wrote one of his colleagues, who had retired before the cuts, that,

As you may imagine, we have had to go through an anxious time as regards the Canadian Navy, but although I very much deplore the arbitrary cut of $1,000,000 in our appropriation, still I have by no means lost hope as regards the future, and I hope within the next couple of years to have an efficient reserve of at least 1,500 men organized and trained by the nucleus of the permanent force, and I still believe that from that we shall expand into a seagoing Service again.⁷

He was right. He was also a level-headed leader who preferred logical argument to emotional outbursts while explaining how the RCN served the nation’s interests. In an October 1922 report to Cabinet, he asked policy makers to consider that:

our geographical position, particularly on our Pacific Coast, makes the advent of assistance from the remainder of the Empire a matter for considerable time. This applies even more forcibly to our maritime enterprises, the immense capital embarked in our fisheries, our merchant ships, our sea commerce and their allied industries on shore, than to our territory…

The need to defend trade rather than land was a recurring theme in Hose’s analysis. He noted, for example, that economic relations with countries other than the United States were worth $695 million:

This sum is just the actual value of the goods and takes no account of the distress occasioned all over the Dominion — to the farmer and the lumberman, the artisan and the fisherman, resulting from the dislocation of such an immense volume of trade in all commodities.⁸

All such endeavours together added up to $796.5 million. Similarly, the Canadian Navy had to take militia requirements into account, since the transportation of troops overseas, as had occurred during the First World War, required naval escort.

Indeed, naval budgets expanded year by year throughout Mackenzie King’s tenure of office, rising to a high of almost $3.6 million in 1930-31, allowing the operation of bases at Esquimalt and Halifax, of two destroyers (Patriot and Patrician), and of four minesweepers (Festubert, Ypres, Armentières, and Thiepval). Two reserve systems were developed, the first being the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (RCNR), made up of officers and sailors of the merchant marine who could train a few weeks a year for potential service with the RCN; by the autumn of 1923 there were registrars in such potential recruiting areas as Charlottetown, Quebec City, Saint John, Halifax, Montreal, Lunenburg, Prince Rupert, Victoria, and Vancouver. The second system, the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR), for its part, had by 1926-27 reached a strength of 24 officers and 577 ratings, if one only counted those who attended training. Its members required no previous naval or merchant marine experience, and its half-companies and companies scattered in cities across Canada served not only to prepare officers and sailors, but as a means to advertise the RCN in communities hundreds and even thousands of kilometres from the sea. The ultimate experience for a member of the RCNVR was to attend an RCN cruise. In September 1924, for example, about 50 of them embarked in ships of the North America and West Indies Squadron as they executed a wide variety of evolutions in Canadian and Newfoundland waters.

Perhaps the most interesting operation of the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1920s, how- ever, was carried out in the Pacific Ocean. In the spring of 1924 the minesweeper Thiepval left Esquimalt to complete two main tasks. The first was to support a British “Round the World Aeroplane Flight” by establishing caches of fuel at various locations between the Aleutians and Japan. The second was to gather information, following an observation by the RCN’s intelligence officer that the forthcoming cruise would be the opportunity of a lifetime for collecting intelligence. Returning from its travels on August 21, the ship provided a 30-page report (quite detailed for that period) on several ports in the Aleutian and Pribiloff Islands of Alaska, the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Komandorski Islands of Soviet Russia, and the Japanese Kurile Islands. It noted that in the Aleutian and Pribiloff Islands, “General health conditions are good,” that “Oil seepages have been discovered near Ugashik and Becherof Lakes, in the Alaskan Peninsula,” and that “There is a church” in Oestkamchatka in the Kamchatka Peninsula, a sign that atheism had not completely taken hold in that part of the Soviet Union. A different part of the report provided information on wireless stations, including a photograph, the name of each, the name of the nearest town, latitude and longitude, its height above sea level, the type of station, and the number of masts and their type, for a total of 21 pieces of data.⁹

The Royal Canadian Navy, therefore, although totally incapable of fighting a war, was nonetheless able to carry out useful operations in peacetime, and not only of the fisheries patrol and lifesaving variety. By the end of the 1920s, the RCN had established itself as an instrument of Canadian government policy, whose role in wartime would be to defend the focal points of Canadian trade. To that end, Commodore Hose advised, “it is more important to have numbers than individual unit size and offensive power,” for though a cruiser “is more than powerful enough to deal with an armed merchant raider,” it could only handle one such threat at a time, whereas “two or three destroyers would render the position decidedly dangerous, especially in the case of a night attack, for a light cruiser. Each would be a match for most armed raiders. For search purposes they would cover a large radius of effective action and concentration on any point could be achieved with rapidity.” Also, “For submarine hunting they are practically essential.”¹⁰ The RCN would therefore be a destroyer-centred navy.

The destroyers Champlain and Vancouver, named for famous explorers of the Canadian East and West, had replaced Patriot and Patrician. While the minesweepers focused on fisheries patrols and lifesaving operations, the destroyers spent more time training in the use of their guns and torpedoes as well as showing the flag in various cities, towns and villages on Canada’s coasts and up its wider and deeper rivers; cruises to southern climes were still part of their routine. The two destroyers had been acquired as temporary stop-gaps, the King government signing contracts for the construction of Saguenay and Skeena in 1929, and as brand new vessels they would incorporate some of the latest developments in ship design. The vessels were commissioned in 1931, and followed the same operational schedule of training, showing the flag, and southern cruises that had occupied their predecessors.

A cruise of January 1932 proved to be an exception. Economic hardship in El Salvador led to revolt, for which the local communist party took credit, although the violence had far more to do with material wants than with ideology. The British Consul, concerned that insurgents would attack such British interests as the railways, requested naval assistance, and as it turned out His Majesty’s Canadian Ships Skeena and Vancouver were on a cruise in the region. Skeena’s orders, received by radiotelegraph as the ships made their way to the port of Acajutla, were clear and concise, in keeping with such matters in the RN and RCN:

On arrival get in touch with British Consul or other British authority and ascertain what can be done. Failing that enquire from constituted San Salvador authority and ascertain if assistance required to protect British lives and property. At same time  get in touch with United States authorities and work in co-operation with them ascertain if any Canadian residents no overt act should be taken unless actual and immediate imperative necessity to save lives of British subjects.¹¹

The ship accommodated five British women who were concerned for their safety, while the captain, Victor Gabriel Brodeur, and his executive officer, the ubiquitous Frank Houghton, went ashore to conduct a reconnaissance.

What they found was a peasant population in full revolt but avoiding damage to churches, railways, and those farms that paid higher than the normal wage. The Salvadorean military restored order, executing some 20,000 people in doing so, and the insurrection was crushed by the end of the month. An important lesson for the RCN was confirmation of the need to install a modern wireless telegraphy station in Ottawa, as messages from Skeena were being passed through Bermuda to Halifax, which had been out of communication with Ottawa all day on January 25 and in poor communication on the 26th and 27th, mainly due to atmospheric interference. There was a facility at the Ottawa suburb of Rockliffe, but:

The small power of the transmitting apparatus at Rockliffe was a great drawback…. A number of messages were received direct but could not be acknowledged till some hours later, giving rise to a certain amount of congestion and unnecessary W/T traffic, since the same messages were re-transmitted by an intermediate station….
In particular it would have assisted Bermuda greatly if Ottawa had been able to acknowledge messages as soon as received…. Communication would also have been much facilitated if Ottawa had been able to transmit direct to Skeena during the whole period Skeena was audible at Ottawa.¹²

Rockliffe should, according to the director of naval intelligence, Commander W.B. Hynes, RN, be Canada’s first priority in re-equipping W/T stations. The lesson was clear—the RCN of 1932 was not a coastal force.

As Walter Hose and the naval staff contemplated such modernization and expansion, they were unaware that the next year the institution they served would suffer a near-death experience. The country was going through one of the worst economic downturns in its history, and as historian Desmond Morton has noted, “In Ottawa, politicians and officials ransacked budgets for economies. Defence was an obvious place to look. Warned of wide- spread Communist organizing among the unemployed, the cabinet decided not to cut deeply into the militia or the permanent force [army].The other services were more vulnerable.”¹³ As Chief of the General Staff General Andrew McNaughton explained at the time, “The situation with which we are now faced involves a very large reduction in the funds to be made available for Defence and to distribute these reductions over all the Forces would result in weakness everywhere.” Therefore, it would be best to “narrow our purpose” to “the forces necessary for the maintenance and support of the Civil Power,” and to “the creation of a minimum deterrent to seaborne attack.” A small navy would not serve such a purpose, at least not in General McNaughton’s thinking:

On the other hand Air Forces even in small numbers are a definite deterrent in narrow waters and on the high seas in the vicinity of the shore; they can be developed with considerable rapidity provided a nucleus of skilled personnel in a suitable training organization is in existence; pilots engaged in civil aviation can be quickly adapted to defence purposes; civil aircraft are not without value in defence, and any aircraft manufacturing facilities are equally available to meet military as well as  civil requirements.¹⁴

Placed in an extremely difficult position, McNaughton rightly or wrongly opted to support the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), if necessary at the cost of the RCN.

McNaughton’s threat to do away with the navy was considered seriously elsewhere in bureaucratic Ottawa. Hose, now with the title of chief of the naval staff, reminded Treasury Board that, although the Great Depression might force a reduction in government spending, it had not changed global-strategic considerations. He also threatened to resign. It is unknown which of these initiatives convinced the president of the Treasury Board to change his mind, but that did happen: the Canadian Navy’s budget was reduced (not deleted) from almost $3.6 million in 1930-31 to a little over $3 million the following year; it would be reduced further, to $2.2 million, by 1933-34, but its existence would never again be put into doubt. When Walter Hose retired on 1 of January 1934, he had reason to be satisfied.

His successor was Percy Nelles, a member of the first class of cadets who had joined in 1908 even before the RCN was created. By late 1935 he was chief of the naval staff of a permanent organization of 102 officers, 804 ratings, and four destroyers, the 1937-38 budget providing funds to acquire two more destroyers. Then, in the period from 1935 to 1939, the defence budget increased more than four-fold, while the navy’s main role gelled somewhat, evolving from a general requirement to defend against surface raiders to the more specific function outlined in the army’s Defence Scheme No. 2, of protecting Canadian neutrality in a war between the United States and a third power—most likely Japan. The navy would therefore concentrate mainly on the West Coast, even as the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in October 1935 provided a forum to determine what would be the RCN’s logistical requirements on the first day of a European war. Although the Canadian government had no intention of intervening, the naval service was unaware of that, and attempted to prepare to operate what few vessels it had. In order of priority, it needed: ammunition for four-inch and 12-pounder guns to be mounted in auxiliary vessels, totaling $20,000 dollars; two anti-submarine nets at $32,500; a general stock of ammunition at $110,000; five torpedoes (half of an outfit) at $70,000; two wireless sets at $30,000; minesweeping maintenance stores at $15,000; two fire control clocks at $30,000; and, at the bottom of the list of priorities, the other half of the torpedo outfit, at another $70,000.The grand total came to $377,500. In the event, Italy was not opposed in any real sense in its annexation of Ethiopia, so the stores and equipment were not purchased, but it had perhaps been a useful exercise in logistical planning.

More concrete was the acquisition of Fraser and St. Laurent in 1937, and in early 1938 Cabinet authorized a complement of 1,582 ratings, making a more than three-fold increase since the immediate post-war period. To the RCNR, with registrars in all of Canada’s larger ports, and the RCNVR, with divisions in every major city in the country, was added the Fisherman’s Reserve, an exclusively West Coast organization whose role would be to keep an eye on its thousands of bays, inlets, and rivers, still with the aim to maintain Canadian neutrality in keeping with Defence Scheme No. 2. Fisheries and lifesaving patrols continued to be an important part of the RCN’s routine, to which were added experiments in ice breaking and reconnaissance operations in Canada’s Far North. Ottawa and Restigouche were commissioned in 1938, and training, particularly on the West Coast, was conducted with war clouds on the horizon, especially after Japan’s invasion of China in 1937.

Then in 1938 Adolf Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, in which over a million ethnic Germans lived, be annexed to the Third Reich. A conference was organized to take place in Munich, the main players being France, Britain, and Germany, but pending its outcome it was reasonable to assume that war was imminent. As Fraser’s captain reported:

While the ships were at Cypress Bay the international situation became tense. The only news available was the unofficial press news received on the main W/T set and various broadcasts heard on private radio sets in the ship. On Tuesday evening, September 27, the Commanding Officer decided to bring ships to a state of preparedness for war, except that items which would involve large expenditure of stores and were not absolutely essential should not be taken in hand … The work was commenced at 0600, Wednesday, September 28, and continued until dark. The longest item was the preparation of eight torpedoes and fitting of warheads in Fraser. This was not completed until noon on Thursday, September 29.¹⁵

Like the Abyssinian crisis, it proved to be more of an exercise than a necessity, but it was the first time since the 1918 Armistice that Canadian vessels prepared for an all-out conflict.

Training was therefore conducted with an added level of seriousness, as Frank Houghton later remembered:

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the international situation, which since Munich (where part of Czechoslovakia was handed over to Germany) was becoming increasingly ominous, we proceeded on the usual Spring Cruise to the Caribbean in January 1939, during which we carried out war exercises with the cruisers of the North American and West Indies Squadron.¹⁶

Exercises were realistic and rehearsed RCN ships in the types of operation they were expected to carry out in time of war. “I shall always remember one particular exercise when the two cruisers represented enemy armed raiders whose object was to sink British merchant shipping in the western Caribbean.” The job of the Canadian flotilla was to find and sink them. It was all rather heady, as:

This involved a lot of steaming at high speeds over a vast area, an ideal setting for such an exercise at that time of year. At one period the destroyers were spread out at just visibility distance of each other, searching for the “enemy.” Towards evening, nothing having been sighted by then, Captain (D[estroyers]) recalled all destroyers to join him for a night sweep. Just at that moment, however, based on certain information I had been able to intercept on my wireless, I was almost sure I was on the track of one of the cruisers, so I decided to take a calculated risk and disobey the recall signal.

About half an hour later, “to my enormous relief,” the Canadians “sighted the topmasts of a cruiser just peeking over the horizon. We immediately turned away to avoid being sighted ourselves and I sent off an enemy report. About two the following morning all destroyers, having rejoined Captain (D), were able to carry out a surprise attack on the cruiser and ‘sink’ her with torpedoes.” Houghton was not reprimanded for ignoring orders.

Hitler’s forces invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, France and Britain declared war on the 3rd, and Canada followed suit on the 10th.The RCN began the Second World War with a much more coherent force and a much better sense of what was expected of it than it had at the beginning of the previous global conflict, mainly because its leadership was rarely distracted from essentials. There being too little funding in the early 1920s to maintain a cruiser and two destroyers, the former was sacrificed, emphasis was placed on the reserves to maintain a link with communities across the country, and the naval service carried on as best it could. Facing budgetary disaster in the early 1930s, it cogently and coherently explained its role in the defence of Canada, namely to protect the ports where so much of the country’s trade was imported or exported, and the trade routes that led to those harbours. Throughout the interwar period, it had ships to operate, namely destroyers, so that it could lay claim to being a true navy as opposed to a mere roll of names on reserve lists sometimes operating small, unwarlike trawlers and other vessels. It was not the fleet of battle cruisers and supporting vessels that some had envisaged in the early years following the First World War, but it was a realistic little force, with no little experience of operating ships at sea, and able to conduct itself well. In a country that was not very large in population to begin with, and that had spent years in the midst of a depression that threatened the very foundations of its economy and society, the institution that was the Royal Canadian Navy in 1939 was no small accomplishment.

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Author: Bill Rawling

1 Michael L. Hadley and Roger Sarty, Tin-Pots and Pirate Ships (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 301.

2 A.Temple Patterson (ed.), The Jellicoe Papers: Selections from the Private and Official Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Earl Jellicoe, Vol. 2 (London, 1968), 370–71, 374–76, and 378.

3 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 5687, HMCS Thiepval,“Captain’s Monthly Report for March 1921.”

4 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 3887, Captain Aurora to Secretary of the Naval Service, 17 December 1920.

5 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 5632, HMCS Aurora, “Letter of Proceedings,” 14 July 1921.

6 Houghton, Memoirs, 91.

7 DHH, 2001/112, C11, Hose Papers, Walter Hose to Capt H.E. Holme, 10 August 1922.

8 LAC, RG 26, J1,Vol. 77, King Papers, Walter Hose to William Lyon Mackenzie King, 26 October 1922.

9 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 11924, Director of Naval Intelligence to District Intelligence Officer Esquimalt, 27 September 1924.

10 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 4046, Chief of the Naval Staff, “The Naval Defence Policy in Canada,” 21 August 1930.

11 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 1598, Chief of the Naval Staff to Skeena, 23 January 1932.

12 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 6198, Director of Naval Intelligence to Chief of the Naval Staff, 12 February 1932.

13 Desmond Morton, Canada and War, 97.

14 LAC, MG 30, E133,Vol. 12, Chief of the General Staff to Minister of National Defence, 1 June 1933.

15 LAC, RG 24,Vol. 5684, HMC Ships Fraser and St Laurent, “Reports of Proceedings,” 1 to 30 September 1938.

16 Houghton, Memoirs, 136-37.

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