Commanding Canadians

COMMANDING CANADIANS: The Second World War Diaries of A.F.C. Layard.

Edited by MICHAEL WHITBY

University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2005

xv + 383 pages, notes, index. Price C$85

ISBN 0-7748-1193-5

Commander Frank Layard was a career naval officer and for three decades he kept a diary. The almost daily entries were one of the ways he found of letting of steam and voicing his personal uncertainty and doubt. The diaries have a real freshness and immediacy with an honesty and frankness untouched by later editing or censorship. This book covers the two years when he commanded a Canadian escort group from late1943 to the end of the war in Europe. Although his voice sounds clearly throughout, it is much enhanced by a series of essays by the editor which link the phases of his career. These are models of their type and without exception enhance the understanding of the context.

Having famously charged the boom at Algiers in November 1942 as Captain of Broke, Layard went to Canada to command an ageing group of Canadian Town class destroyers. They proved mechanically unreliable and were soon paid off. He was then given a group of Canadian frigates which he took to the UK. They acted as a support group in the Channel, Biscay and the Arctic until the end of the war in Europe. His full life continued after the war until he passed away on 25^th November 1999, three days short of his hundredth birthday.

The diary is a gem. Its strength lies in the depiction of the sheer hard work combined with the stress of life as an escort group commander. It is full of the minutiae of command and the daily grind “…the work never stopped. Defaulters, warrants, reports, S206s for officers and so it goes on”. Life at sea was hard. In 1943 he was 44 years old and in his forty-fourth year he spent 211 days at sea - almost two days out of three. The pressure of command was intense and unremitting. The diary is full of garbled signals, incomprehensible and conflicting orders, doubtful navigation and the ever present threat of enemy action. There are interminable searches for spurious bottom contacts never knowing whether it was a wreck or a U-boat. There is a real sense of the way in which the man on the spot had to make decisions and was on duty and on call for long spells. But this had its price. Drink provided one release valve. The diary is littered with references to hard drinking - “We had rather a lot of drinks”, “I must have drunk too much last night”, “Lord what fools we are to drink”, “One ought never to dine out the night before going to sea” and on getting famously drunk after a run ashore, “To think that I should do this, especially after my talk to the sailors. It is so degrading”. For all levels it is clear that there was a huge reliance on alcohol to relieve the stress and dull the pain.

To help cope he exercised mind and body. He sought and found many sources of stimulation. He had a real appetite for news and knowledge, complaining “We never get any news at sea”. He worked hard at training and liked technology. “What one would do with neither [radar and QH] in this thick weather and with spring tides I can’t think”. And he was a voracious if indiscriminate reader. He read H.V. Morton, James Hilton, Jeffrey Farnol, Hornblower, Plutarch’s Lives, Oliver Twist. He even ensured that his Mariner’s Mirror was sent to Canada. And always he walked for exercise, whether on shore or simply round the deck.

He inhabits and describes a lost world. Long haul transatlantic flights were still a novelty. “We flew most of the time at 14,000 feet wearing our oxygen masks. A very good sandwich lunch and hot coffee was provided”; American architecture was remarked on “Grand Central quite took our breath away”; The English obsession with property prices was already in vogue, “She has come down to sell her house, for which she is asking £5,000!!!”, while the morals of his brother officers were noted with a sense of disapproval but not judgement “…as I could see a Wren officer’s hat on his sofa I came to certain conclusions”. But perhaps above all it records the debilitating pain of separation from his much loved family. While serving in Home Waters he could see them regularly, “My home and my family are like an oasis of comfort and happiness”, but the partings were still harrowing, “Oh these partings, they just tear one’s heart out” and correspondence or the lack of it a regular feature of the diary. Here too we learn of the booked but often missed telephone calls from Liverpool to Hampshire, and the lack of contact with home could be overwhelming, “I’m tired and depressed and need my wife”.

The ostensible subject of the book although really only addressed as part of the larger picture, is his relationship with the Canadians he commanded and this was a mixture of fondness and exasperation. He did not admire some of his RN peers almost principled dislike of the RCN, “The attitude … is intensely hostile to the R.C.N. I think it is deplorable and I shall do my best to alter it.” And yet he found his Canadians bemusing, “One does get tired of them and they are not brought up in the same way as us”, found their table manners strange, “A very nice chap but strange table manners”, their independence infuriating, “The outfits some of the men had the nerve to appear in passed belief”, and their relaxed approach strange, “I noticed all sorts of odds and ends stored in the magazine, entirely contrary to King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions”. He was impatient of their skills, “You can never trust a Canadian ship to do anything without being told three times” and he never really came to terms with the waywardness of the Canadian Naval Reserve captains in his group, “Christ there are times when I never want to see another Canadian”. But he was equally passionate in protecting them. He was ashamed of the way they were treated, “We’d never seen senior RN officer on board” and fought hard over issues such as leave. And yet there was a certain relish in commanding such a group. There is a note of perverse pride in such remarks as “To the very last we were true to form. Never out of trouble”. But the strain told, “I am glad to be finished with it as I’m stale, but I’m glad I started and finished it myself.”

But perhaps above all the diary allowed him to set down his fears and uncertainties, “Once more the pain and grief of responsibility at sea arrives”. He was a popular and respected leader, but the diary rarely reflects this. On failing to kill a U-boat he notes: “I feel I’ve let the ship and the group down and feel suicidal with shame”. He constantly frets about command at night “I have an absolute complex about meeting other ships at night”. He is quite clear that “Disloyalty is the unforgivable sin in an officer”. With one exception which caused him to offer his resignation, disloyalty is confined to his diary: “Sometimes I think No 1 is mad” or “Sometimes I wonder whether they aren’t all mad up in the tunnel at HQ”. While in Canada he was frustrated at the way he was managed. His harbour-bound group of tired Towns was not well deployed. “I’m not proud, but really it seems a waste of money to pay me as a Commander and always put [me] under the orders of a 2 ½”. His lack of confidence is a constant refrain: “How remarkably lacking in ideas and initiative I am” he notes, comparing himself to another officer, or after a hard spell at sea ““I was feeling in the depths and wondering whether the other CO’s had any confidence in me at all” or “My popularity, such as it is, has been achieved largely because I haven’t faced up to the job of checking the irregularities and bad habits”. When faced with the possibility of action against a superior force he was “feeling extremely anxious and responsible and rather frightened”. Yet when his ship was hit by a glider bomb his training kicked in and the ship was saved so that when she reached port he was cheered from the bridge by the crew.

These diaries are useful in covering a little noticed period of the war in Home Waters in 1944-45 and also in covering the strained relationships between the RN and RCN. But they are much much more. They describe better than anything else the strain, the loneliness, the uncertainty and self-doubt of the ordinary man in exceptional circumstances, always rising to the challenge but always unsure of himself. One can only hope that the diaries covering the rest of his career make it into print. This is a quite remarkable book, by turns fascinating, moving and amusing. It deserves the widest possible audience.