Wearing of the Green (III -- Canadian Navy)

DESCRIPTION: ""I met with Uncle Percy, and he shook me by the hand, I said, 'How is our navy, sir, and is it still on land?' 'Tis the most distressful navy, faith, that ever yet was seen'"; headquarters is full of landsmen and deadbeats but has no real sailors
AUTHOR: J. P. Lunzer (source: Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear)
EARLIEST DATE: 1942 (Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear)
KEYWORDS: navy derivative Canada
FOUND IN: Canada
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear, pp. 86-87, "The Wearin' of the Green" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #29429
NOTES [666 words]: As Hopkins-SongsFromTheFrontAndRear states, the "Uncle Percy" of the first verse is "Commodore Percy Walker Nelles, RCN, who became chief of the Naval Staff on 1 July 1934. Nelles was born in Brantford, Ontario, in 1892 and was among the first group of Canadian cadets to join CGS Canada in 1908. After a brief exposure to battleships in 1912-1914, Nelles spent most of the [First World] war on British cruisers operating in the western Atlantic. During the early 1920s he held a series of staff jobs and completed both the intelligence and staff war courses in England. He then spend the lat 1920s as senior naval officer, Esquimalt, while trying to get back to sea. Finally, in 1929 he was sent overseas again for the RN's Staff officer Technical Course" (Milner, p. 70).
In 1930, he became executive officer of HMS Dragon and had the good luck to take charge of the ship when her captain died. He was the first skipper of HMS Saguenay (for which see "The Saguenay Song") when that first Canadian destroyer was commissioned. Promoted to captain in 1932, he became assistant chief of the Naval Staff in 1933. He ran the navy until 1943, and died shortly after the war.
Lamb, who served in the RCN when Nelles was in charge and once saw Nelles lead an inspection, described him as "a nice little man who looked a bit like radio comedian Ed Wynn and who had spent the greater part of his wartime career in Ottawa" (Lamb, p. 10). "A short, plump little man with very thick glasses, he was not exactly a warrior leader calculated to fire our blood" (Lamb, p. 11).
Bercuscon, p. 144, charges, "If there was one man who, compared with his Allied peers, was least in tune with the ever more complex and technical nature of the anti-submarine war, it was Vice-Admiral Percy W. Nelles, Chief of the Naval Staff in Ottawa since 1934. Nelles was not at fault for the many shortages of vessels and trained men that had plagued the RCN since the outbreak of war, though he had been over-eager to take on more than his fledgling navy could handle.... A navy that was not prepared to give its men the very latest in equipment and training could not hope to pull its weight in the Atlantic battles. Nelles had constantly failed to ensure that the RCN kept up with its Allies in that regard." The numbers bear out this assessment: the RCN proved almost completely unable to catch and sink U-boats.
To be fair, the Mackenzie King government had consistently pursued a policy of ensuring that Canadian forces were separate and individual and not subsumed in a greater British war machine, which caused all branches of the Canadian military to be in over their heads -- e.g. the Canadian group in the British bomber force was for long the worst unit in the air army. It does seem, though, as if Nelles was the worst offender in that regard. Eventually Minister of National Defence for Naval Services MacDonald (who himself bore a big share of blame for the problem) decided the situation could not continue. "Nelles was moved out of the chief's post in January 1944 and replaced by Vice-Admiral G. C. Jones" (Bercuson, p. 144). This, unfortunately, created its own problems; "Given the bitter personal rivalry between Jones and [L. W.] Murray, who held the navy's most important operational command [in effect, Murray commanded the Atlantic forces], the RCN for the remainder of the war was something of a house divided" (Milner, p. 136). But at least the government was trying.
By then, ironically, the U-boat war had definitively shifted toward the Allies; Nelles was in charge during the entire period when the outcome was in doubt, and when a better officer might have made a huge difference.
The song's description of the Navy is mostly right; the Canadian navy had never been large, and had only a half dozen destroyers and no larger ships as 1939 rolled around. It didn't really have the bloated staff described in the song -- but with so few actual seamen, any staff at all probably seemed excessive. - RBW
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File: Hopk086

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