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PREFACE

BY HUGH GARNER

The Canadian corvette, HMCS Riverford, which serves as the setting of this book, is fictitious only to the extent that it is a composite of many. The members of the crew are also fictitious, but, I hope, recognizable as human beings behind the hyperbole and distortion which is the privilege of the fiction writer.

It takes all kinds to make a world, and it also takes all kinds to make a war — or fight one after some of the others make it.

This is not the story of a ship, but the story of a few Canadian sailors who formed the ship’s company of the Riverford, during six days at the tag end of an escort run in March 1943. There is nothing much about them to inspire poetry, or a patriotic shiver of pride in the reader; that is not the object of this book. They are not even “typical” sailors, if such exist. All I can say to justify them is that they are drawn in the image of hundreds who made up the Royal Canadian Navy. They do not need an apology — they were out there, and we won.