Shift of the Flag

The man who brought the Royal Canadian Navy up from rachitic infancy to lusty manhood headed this week across the Atlantic. Wiry Vice Admiral Percy Walker Nelles (rhymes with Hellas), C.B., had left his post of Chief of the Naval Staff at Ottawa after ten years. He had shifted the flag of the Senior Canadian Naval officer to London, to direct his ships and men in the invasion of Europe.

The Soldier's Son. The force that Vice Admiral Nelles will direct from London is vastly different from the R.C.N. as it was when Cadet Nelles signed up in 1908, the second of seven original officer candidates. Percy Nelles, son of Brigadier Charles Nelles, who served in the Northwest Rebellion, South African War and led the Royal Canadian Dragoons in World War I, was truly one of the first aboard.

The soldier's son saw service on a British cruiser, served on an escort vessel in North Atlantic convoy early in World War I, stayed on while the Canadian Navy went back to a peacetime starvation basis.

Nelles brought to Canada the Dominion's first two really modern (British-built) destroyers in 1932, next year became the first Canadian to wear a captain's stripes in his own country's service. In 1934 he was Commodore and Chief of the Naval Staff. Peace-minded parliaments gave him barely enough to buy paint for his ships, but he managed to keep his navy afloat, even made it grow a bit.

They Saw the Sea. When World War II came, Percy Nelles had some 300 officers, 1,400 ratings and 15 ships. No Navy of modern times has equaled the rate of expansion that the Royal Canadian Navy then achieved. Today it has more than 80,000 officers, ratings and Wrens, 250 combat ships, 400 other craft. Its few hundred professional officers are only a tiny kernel. But the amateurs, from city and farm, have done a job that pleases even professional Admiral Nelles.

They went into the Battle of the Atlantic with almost nothing. But soon the Royal Canadian Navy, backed up by the Dominion's high-speed shipbuilding program, was handling 40% of the convoy work on the North Atlantic. Last fall, when the tide turned in the Battle of the Atlantic, the R.C.N. and the Royal Navy sent 33 U-boats to the bottom.

Now for the Big Ones. As Percy Nelles set off for London, Ottawa announced that the Royal Canadian Navy would soon have more than destroyers and escort vessels. Canadian crews were going to man two cruisers and two escort aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy.

All this was in preparation for the day when Britain (in return for more than a billion dollars in Lend-Lease) will send two cruisers and possibly two escort carriers to the Dominion's navy. Another of Percy Nelles' hopes had been fulfilled.

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