The crew was gripped with fear, as recent talk had been all about the killing capacity of the notorious “pocket battleship” the Graf Spee, but it turned out to be a false alarm: the intruder was the King George V, and a friend. Ralph spoke with respect of the fate of the “armoured merchant cruiser” HMS Jervis Bay, in reality a converted passenger ship, accompanying another convoy from Halifax, but equipped with puny obsolescent guns, whose captain sacrificed his ship, his crew and himself, when he deliberately and courageously drew the fire of the battleship Admiral Scheer by sailing towards her, enabling many other ships in the convoy to escape. The moving story is available in many versions on the internet. Chuck Lyons’ The Heroic Death of the HMS Jervis Bay is particularly memorable. Ralph had real reservations about convoys sent to Murmansk to aid the Russians, and some more about decisions made by senior officials in the Royal Navy, a frequent criticism made by fighting men of decision-making by those remote ‘pooh-bahs’ themselves isolated far from the conflict, like school superintendents removed far from the classroom.
After Ralph’s second convoy reached safety, he went to stay with his five aunts in Manchester, where he met a girl he was attracted to called Alice, but managed to “escape committing” himself to her before his return to Canada, after five years abroad, at the same time as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, “a day that will live in infamy” as Roosevelt called it, thereby bringing the United States into the war. Back home, Ralph followed a suggestion made by his friend George Weir that they both apply to work for Imperial Oil, as they paid better than the merchant marine. Ralph did, and was accepted as first mate on an oil tanker in 1942. This posting appears to have been on an early voyage of the Cypress Hills Park, from Victoria, B.C., through the Panama Canal, loading up with its cargo of oil either in Cartagena, Colombia, or Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, on convoys of three or four other tankers, and escorted by two Canadian corvettes, for delivery either to Texas or New York. These ‘Park’ tankers were 10,000 ton deep-sea ships, all built in Canada, variations on the British-designed but American-made ‘Liberty’ ships, all of which could be mass-produced quickly, essential in wartime, but Park ships were better built, according to Ralph, as they were riveted together rather than merely welded, as Liberty ships were. They were each named after a Canadian National Park: Algonquin Park, Jasper Park, and Gatineau Park among them. A total of 170 Park ships were built during the war, which partly explains how Canada’s merchant marine was among the biggest in the world by 1945. Americans then affected to believe the tankers in the Caribbean were in no danger of enemy subs or surface raiders, yet the U.S. admiral who made this claim was, said Ralph, a notorious anglophobe who was proved wrong in time, as tankers were hit and sunk, including several, apparently, off the coast of Cape May on the Atlantic seaboard. Ralph was with Imperial Oil (now Esso in Canada and Exxon in the U.S.) for 11 years, during which he saw service on several ‘Park’ ships ferrying Venezuelan oil across the Caribbean, always in a convoy.
