When replenishing the navy was easy
Saga of B.C. subs shows fleet has come full circle
The Royal Canadian Navy finds itself in troubled waters these days. The military’s second-incommand has been suspended indefinitely, and a massive effort to replenish the fleet has faced repeated setbacks.
History’s echoes are all around us. Perhaps military procurement is simply cursed in this country. Certainly, through the years it has often seemed that way.
More than a century ago, things could at least be expedited.
At the time, one premier believed his province faced the prospect of annihilation. His back to the wall, the premier of British Columbia would chart a way around the bureaucratic tangle of shipbuilding simply by cutting a cheque from the provincial treasury, in the process doubling the size of the Canadian navy. But again, nothing is ever quite so simple as that in politics and procurement.
This is the story of Richard McBride and his submarines.
At the dawn of the Great War, things were looking bleak for British Columbians.
Residents of Canada’s West Coast had been all but abandoned by the British navy a decade earlier. The coast was now defended by a few coastal guns and the Royal Canadian Navy’s lone ship in the west ... HMCS Rainbow. Slow, old, poorly armed and manned by barely trained reservists, the Rainbow was no match for any warship that might appear.
In Europe, the July Crisis of 1914 was approaching the crescendo that would spell doom for millions. The unimaginable bloodshed of the First World War was about to begin, and Canada would soon be at war.
It was in this climate that B.C. Premier Richard McBride would double the size of the Royal Canadian Navy by buying the nation’s first submarines in the name of the province. It was a purchase that would cause a major political scandal, culminating in a Royal Commission to sort out whether the ships cost too much, and whether McBride had received a personal payoff from their expedited purchase.
Back in 1914, the danger of the navy’s decrepit state was even more acute than it is today. Isolated and practically undefended, the citizens of B.C. feared they would soon be under German bombardment.
They had reason to feel threatened. In the months before July of that year, the ships of the German East Asia squadron had left their home port of Tsingtao, China, and scattered into the Pacific Ocean. On the eve of war, the German ViceAdmiral Maximilian von Spee began collecting his ships into a single group. Now the squadron was in the wind, and thought to be headed to the Americas to disrupt shipping and bombard the coast. The trouble is, no one knew exactly where.
In addition to the threat of von Spee’s fearsome warships looming in the distance, another German warship, Leipzig, was much closer. The light cruiser had last been seen off the coast of Mexico, making its way north.
In B.C., the public was getting nervous. This was the worst-case scenario some had imagined when the British withdrew their fleet a decade before. A Royal Commission report, issued in 1917, described the “alarm, in intensive form” that the cities of Victoria and Vancouver were under.
“During these days of anticipation, the banks removed their specie” — gold — “and securities to inland points; families made preparations to fly; bombardment insurances in large sums were effected; women and children had orders to leave their quarters in the Naval yard; hospital ships were prepared; … and official instructions were received by the Naval authorities to expect an immediate attack.”
In early 1914, the Royal Canadian Navy, such as it was, consisted of two warships, one on each coast. In the east, HMCS Niobe patrolled with the British navy out of Halifax. That left the RCN’s only other dedicated warship, the Rainbow, defending the West.
The Rainbow was built for Britain’s Royal Navy in 1892. A cruiser of the pre-dreadnought era, the iron ship was clad in wood and copper, initially intended for operation in tropical waters. The aging Rainbow was all the allies had on the North American west coast. The nearest British ships in the Pacific were stationed in China. And the United States was years away from joining the war, officially a neutral power.
The location of Leipzig was a mystery. In his naval history of the First World War, Robert K. Massie traces the course of the German light cruiser. “Before hostilities began, Capt. Johannes Haun sailed north from Mexico and was off the entrance to the Straits of San Juan de Fuca, the gateway to Vancouver and Seattle,” Massie writes. The German ship then returned south, “On Aug. 11, he coaled at San Francisco and then lay off the Golden Gate for five days, keeping Allied shipping in port.”
But British and Canadian authorities didn’t know how close the ship would come. The British Admiralty requested the Rainbow be sent to sea to protect shipping in the area.
If it found the German ship, Rainbow would almost certainly meet its doom. Leipzig heavily outclassed the much older Canadian cruiser. The German ship was newer, faster, better armed and more heavily armoured. To make matters worse, the crew of the Rainbow was a motley group of Canadian sailors, British reinforcements and barely trained local volunteer reservists.
Rainbow sailed with minimal fanfare in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 3, according to the book TinPots and Pirate Ships. “Many British Columbians never expected to see Rainbow again and braced themselves instead for the appearance of enemy cruisers with guns blazing off Prince Rupert, Victoria, and Vancouver,” authors Michael L. Hadley and Robert Sarty write.
Which brings us back to McBride. Into this climate of fear, bordering on panic, the premier was suddenly presented with an opportunity.
J.V. Paterson, the president of the Seattle Constructions and Drydock Company, was in Victoria in late July. And he just so happened to have two submarines, available for a willing buyer.
Word quickly reached McBride, and he set about trying to acquire the ships, which had originally been built for the Chilean government. The Chileans had rejected the submarines, finding them not up to the standard they had ordered. Now the pair were languishing at the American shipyard.
By Aug. 3, the two sides were nearing a deal. Total war was believed to be just days away — it was in fact, less than two. Things needed to be swiftly completed. Once war was declared, U.S. arms suppliers, by law, couldn’t sell to belligerents on either side.
The final price set by the Seattle shipyard was for $575,000 per sub. The Canadians were surprised — Chile had agreed to about $150,000 less per ship — and attempted to bargain the price lower. Paterson, according to the commission’s report, stood firm: “This is no time to indulge in talk of that kind and that I would not listen to it, and that if they did not care to get the boats they did not need to take them.”
Without the ability to secure proper funding from Ottawa, and running desperately short on time, McBride decided to buy the submarines himself. He had cheque for $1.15 million made out from the provincial treasury, and handed it to Lt.-Cmdr. Bertram E. Jones, a submarine veteran of the British Royal Navy.
Meanwhile, in Seattle, the two submarines slipped from their docks at 10 p.m. the night of Aug. 4 and headed for the open ocean. “For the sake of silence, battery power was used up to the harbour light, or entrance, then the diesel engines took up the work. A heavy fog helped the adventure,” the commission report states. “It might be styled an escape rather than a clearance, for clearance papers were not obtained.”
Their escape was successful, but only just. Had they left as little as two hours later, ships dispatched by the U.S. Navy would have surely caught them before they made open sea. An executive from the dockyards explained it to the commission thusly: “As it was, when the report got out, the United States government sent out boats from Puget Sound to find these boats and bring them back, but they had already been delivered.” When the submarines arrived at their meeting spot, eight kilometres south of B.C.’s Trial Islands, Jones was there waiting.
“Satisfied with the results (of his inspection), Jones handed the cheque to Paterson; obtained his receipt in writing; took over command; hoisted the British flag; and made for Victoria.” There was no formal bill of sale drawn up, and Paterson simply handed Jones a receipt. “Neither time nor circumstances permitted the delays which would have been needed for the execution of legal documents,” the later Royal Commission report states.
Soon after arriving in Victoria, the ships would be officially acquired by the RCN and renamed CC-1 and CC-2. Just like that, the Royal Canadian Navy was double its size, having acquired its very first submarines from the government of British Columbia.
Almost as soon the subs arrived, the danger evaporated. On Aug. 25, the Japanese armoured cruiser Izumo arrived off the B.C. coast, two days after Japan had entered the war on the side of the allies. Days later, a modern British light cruiser, HMS Newcastle, arrived as well, according to authors Hadley and Sarty. Vancouver and Victoria were now well defended.
Meanwhile, Leipzig would never come close to threatening British Columbians again. The ship that had loomed so large in the nightmares of coastal residents would harass shipping off the Peruvian coast with little success, before being ordered to link up with ViceAdm. von Spee’s German squadron at Easter Island, according to Massie’s account. The Germans would deal a major defeat to the British navy off the coast of South America Nov. 1, at the Battle of Coronel, before making a break around Cape Horn in an effort to escape to Germany.
But von Spee would not see a home port again. The East Asia Squadron, plus Leipzig, would be smashed and sunk off the Falkland Islands in early December, when an ill-fated raid on the islands ran into a British fleet sent to hunt down the admiral.
The Rainbow would survive the war. It and its crew would never find Leipzig and were spared. The ship would be sold for scrap in 1920.
McBride, meanwhile, would eventually be dragged to Ottawa to testify before a Royal Commission as to why he paid so much for the subs, and whether he received any personal benefit from the transaction. The Royal Commission’s report, from which portions of this story is compiled, would clear him fully in 1917. But facing waning political fortunes due to a battered economy, McBride had already resigned as premier and left to become a B.C.’s representative in the U.K. in 1915. He would die of nephritis and diabetes in London on Aug. 6, 1917, at the age of 46, according to an entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
The two subs, CC-1 and CC-2, would patrol off Victoria until 1917, when they would be transferred to the East Coast to defend against German U-boats. Their journey nearly met disaster on several occasions when heavy seas swamped the boats, damaging their batteries and overworking their diesel engines. They would have to limp their way through the Panama Canal — the first warships flying the British White Ensign to pass through the locks — before finally arriving in Halifax badly in need of a nearly complete overhaul, Hadley and Sarty write.
When the British Admiralty learned of their condition they reassigned the subs to coastal defence and training. Replaced near the end of the war with more advanced models, Canada’s first submarines would be put up for sale in 1920, and scrapped five years later, along with HMCS Niobe.
Canada, having neglected its navy for years, had been caught in a dire situation. Suddenly, confronting a real threat, and with no ally near enough to pick up the slack, a lone politician was backed into a corner, forced to pay whatever a shipbuilder demanded.
Has a bit of a familiar ring, doesn’t it?
Many British Columbians never expected to see Rainbow again.