Storm Below. Hugh Garner
to Catalonia, he came to see as undermined by the Moscow-controlled Spanish communists, who weakened the Republican coalition by squabbling with its anarchist and Trotskyite factions. Disillusioned by the failure of left-wing groups to unite against their fascist enemy, he returned to Canada and the part-time, poorly paid jobs that were all he could find. When the Second World War began in September 1939, he enlisted first in the Royal Canadian Artillery, where for a variety of reasons, including the suspicion that he was a communist sympathizer, he felt himself discriminated against. Requesting and receiving his discharge, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy in June 1940, and spent the next five years in the world chronicled by Storm Below.
In 1937, Garner served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion during the Spanish Civil War, fighting on the Republican side against Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Although Storm Below is set during six days in 1943 and is intensely focused on the relationships among the crew of a small Canadian ship escorting a convoy across the Atlantic Ocean, its characters and their actions reflect several different aspects of Hugh Garner’s life experience. Many of the humorous incidents that lighten the novel’s overall mood of imminent danger are taken directly from his autobiographical writings: First Class Stoker O’Brien’s naked serenade to his shipmates while aloft on a mast (115–16), First Class Signalman “Cowboy” Henderson’s “uncontrollable urge to ride a milkman’s horse through the Halifax dockyard” (86), as well as his reminiscences of hoboing during the Depression (122–23), would all be presented as actual happenings in One Damn Thing After Another. More generally, Storm Below’s frank descriptions of the fears and anxieties that trouble many of its characters have many analogues in Garner’s remembrances of his Spanish Civil War and Second World War experiences. A characteristic example is his account in a 1960 Star Weekly article of one of the first times he came under fire in Spain when any thoughts of incipient heroism were swept aside by a deeper urge:
I dreamed up visions of girls I had known at home, and wished I had impregnated one of them before I left. I felt the urge to leave something behind, so that all of me would not come to an end in that wheatsheaf- strewn field under the boiling sun that afternoon. I felt that I had not rounded out my life, and I wanted so much to do so.
As a consequence, Storm Below’s realistic treatment of life on a Canadian corvette is not simply a matter of describing the physical environment comprised by the Riverford and its crew, but also delves deeply into the psychological pressures that affect the men onboard. Nor is this limited to combat experiences, of which there are surprisingly few in the book; Garner served on the corvette Battleford during three days of continuous submarine attacks on Convoy ONS-154 in December 1942 when fourteen of its forty-six ships were sunk, and he could easily have used this as the basis for a more action-packed narrative. Instead, as he noted in One Damn Thing After Another,
The book, though based on an amalgam of many convoy escort groups I served in, with the ever-present stress of sudden death as part of everyone’s life, was a sociological study of a small warship’s crew rather than a study of the Battle of the Atlantic and its relationship to the crew of a small Canadian corvette.
Thus in choosing to focus on the interpersonal and group relationships that form and are transformed in the close quarters of a small warship, Garner produced an ambitious and largely successful portrait of men during wartime.
Garner served on a number of corvettes in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War. Here he is on the HMCS Arvida in 1941.
There are two linguistic aspects of Storm Below that deserve some comment. As a lifelong celebrant of the delights of slang, Garner peppers his text with words that are specific to the informal speech of seamen. Most are either immediately explained or can be figured out from the context in which they occur, but a few require assistance from reference works such as Wilfrid Granville’s Sea Slang of the Twentieth Century and Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. For example, slackers (98) derives from the sequence Halifax–Halifacks–Slacks– Slackers, which explains how it can be the location of a torpedo school. A bag shanty, first introduced as something that smells bad (38), later becomes a place where one is able to have sex (67), which gets us closer to its more common meaning of a brothel. The Jimmy (144), or first lieutenant, those social climbers who are scissor-bills (159) — naggers and gossipers — and a scratch house (150), lodgings where the resident vermin give one the itch to vacate, are other examples of Garner’s penchant for the colourful and effective use of slang.
The novel also presents an amusing example of one of the ways Garner went about naming his characters. He would often select a relatively common name from the Toronto telephone directory and then change one or two of its letters, afterward ensuring that there was no one listed under this spelling. In the case of one of the main characters in Storm Below, Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Frigsby, Garner took the name “Grigsby” and replaced its initial g with an f; however, an editor more familiar with the idiom of working-class Canadians would have recognized that frig was a common euphemism for fuck, the latter, of course, being completely unacceptable in print in 1948. Given Hugh Garner’s anti-establishment attitudes, one can well imagine that he enjoyed this opportunity to imply what he really thought of authority.
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HMCS — “His Majesty’s Canadian Ship” in nomenclature that reflects the country’s status as a loyal member of the British Commonwealth — Riverford is, as Garner tells us, a “composite” of the several corvettes he served on during the Second World War. Although readers will gather that a corvette is a naval vessel somewhat smaller and less well armed than a destroyer, it might help to more fully describe a craft whose development reflects the specific conditions of anti-submarine warfare during the Second World War.
When the war began in September 1939, Great Britain and its allies found themselves woefully deficient in the kinds of escort vessels required to shepherd convoys of desperately needed war matériel safely across the Atlantic Ocean. Although the March 1941 Lend-Lease exchange of military bases for ships with the United States added fifty aging destroyers to the forces available, there was still an immediate need for craft capable of tracking and sinking the German submarines that were so efficiently torpedoing Allied shipping. More destroyers would have been the ideal solution, but they took so long to build that as a matter of necessity the more quickly buildable corvette became the escort vessel of choice.
In December 1942, the HMCS Battleford was part of an escort protecting a convoy of Allied ships. Garner was there when the convoy was badly mauled, losing fourteen vessels.
The corvette’s particular advantage was that it had a narrower turning radius than U-boats, which meant it could maintain contact with them and continue its attacks for a longer period of time. On the other hand, if a submarine tired of being depth-charged and decided to fight it out on the surface, the corvette’s minimal gunnery complement gave the U-boats the advantage, which meant that some corvettes resorted to the ancient naval tactic of ramming as an effective if often suicidal way of sinking their opponent. Such desperate measures reflected the Royal Canadian Navy’s expansion during the first two years of the war from eighteen hundred to thirty-six thousand men, many with only minimal training, which as a consequence led to initially poor performances in such complex tasks as submarine hunting.
As Storm Below vividly depicts, life on a corvette was a cramped and all too intimate existence that might be radically upset by any change in routine. Thus the captain’s decision to keep a deceased sailor’s body onboard rather than bury it at sea, perhaps defensible on a larger ship where it could be kept out of sight and out of mind, proves to