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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger.

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Warship Wednesday 16 September 2026: The Submarine Altered Across My Bows and I Rammed Her

Above we see the mighty Flower (Trillium) class corvette HMCS Moose Jaw (K 164) steaming with a bone in her teeth off Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June 1942. The 205-foot brawler, along with her sister HMCS Chambly, sank the German Type IXC U-501 via ramming and depth charges off Greenland some 85 years ago this week.

The U-boat was the first of 30 German subs busted by the RCN during WWII.

The Flowers

A handy little sub-buster that could be cranked out in record time but was still very capable of escorting slow-moving merchantmen from the Americas to Europe during the Battle of the Atlantic, the Admiralty would order more than 300 Gladiolus/Flower-class corvettes from 1939 onward.

Essentially a stretched version of the Smith’s Dock’s 582 GRT, 160-foot steam-powered whaler design built in 1936 for the Southern Whaling & Sealing Co. Ltd (SWSC), they were single-screw vessels powered by a pair of cylindrical Scotch marine boilers feeding a single VTE engine that could, when turning at maximum RPMs, generate a theoretical 2,750 h.p., enough to push the little tub 16 ish knots while an economical load of 230 tons of fuel oil would get them 3,500nm at 12 knots, enough to make it across the Atlantic on the 2,700-mile Halifax to Liverpool route with some fuel left for maneuvering.

Using the simpler boiler pattern and including enough space for a crew of 80 officers and men (later to swell to as much as 110), the dimensions shifted from a 160-foot whaler to a 205-foot corvette. With a correspondingly wide 33-foot beam, they had a stubby 1:6 length-beam ratio.

Armament was slight: a single 4″/45 BL Mk IX forward, a 40mm/39 2pdr QF Mk VIII pom-pom on a “bandstand” platform aft, a couple of depth charge throwers and two depth charge racks over the stern, with provision for up to 40 ash cans. They also had a perfectly adequate Type 123 or Type 128 sonar and (eventually) a Type 271 or Type 286 radar.

Of course, there were extensive modifications to this and tweaks across the massive production line, but you get the idea. Late-war fits included as many as 70 depth charges, a Hedgehog ASW device, and a half-dozen 20mm Oerlikons.

Built to merchant (Lloyds) standards rather than to those of the Admiralty, they could be churned out rapidly at about any small coastwise commercial shipyard, and several dozen shipyards participated in the program in the UK and Canada.

Some 13 Canadian yards alone (Burrard, Canadian Vickers, Collingwood, Davie & Sons, Davie SB, Kingston SB, Marine Industries, Midland SY, Morton Eng. & D.D. Co, Port Arthur SB, Victoria Machinery, and Yarrows Esquimalt) made a whopping 122 Flowers during the conflict.

The average construction time was 6-8 months, a process often sped up by the fact that the armament and sensors would be installed post-delivery at a nearby naval yard, sometimes in stages, a problem that meant some Flowers had to deploy for months before they received all their gear.

No less than 111 Flowers were assigned to the RCN at one point or another, of which seven were canceled while still under construction, 80 were built from the start for the Canadians, and 24 RN corvettes (many of which were built in Canadian yards) were transferred on loan.

This all brings us to…

Meet Moose Jaw

Our subject is the only Canadian warship named for the town of Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, which has the nickname of “Canada’s Most Notorious City” due to its Prohibition-era rum-running history.

The future HMCS Moose Jaw (K 164) was one of 28 corvettes (19 Flowers/modified Flowers and nine Castles) ordered from the Great Lakes firm of Collingwood Shipyards Ltd, in Collingwood, Ontario.

Laid down 12 August 1940 as Yard No. 94, she was constructed directly alongside her sisters HMCS Galt (K 163) and Battleford (K 165).

Moose Jaw side-launched into Lake Ontario on 9 April 1941, the first anniversary of the invasion of Norway and Denmark. She was christened by Miss Jane Cory, daughter of Lt.Col. Robert Young Cory, V.D., 48th Highlanders of Canada.

She was commissioned on 19 June 1941 at Montreal.

Moose Jaw’s first skipper was LT Frederick Ernest Grubb, RCN, a regular who shipped out on the monitor HMS Erebus as a cadet in 1927, followed by tours on the battleships HMS Revenge and Warspite. His first RCN ship was the destroyer HMCS Vancouver in 1934 as a sub-lou, before serving as a full lou on HMCS Skeena and St Laurent, the latter of which had badly damaged the German submarine U-52 on a three-hour pursuit and depth charging while defending the Halifax-to-UK Convoy HX 60 in August 1940– almost the first Canadian sub kill of the war.

Her namesake city passed the hat and sent a box of radios to be installed for the morale of the crew, as noted by the May 1941 Moose Jaw Times Herald: “The radios, one each for the forward and after crews and the officers, have been shipped to Halifax with the compliments and good wishes of the city of Moose Jaw.”

Part of the RCN’s 72 1939-40 Programme Flowers, Moose Jaw had the earlier fit of armament for the class: a single shielded 4″/45 BL Mk IX forward, two twin Vickers .50 cals, two twin .303-caliber Vickers machine guns, two depth charge throwers, and two depth charge racks with total capacity of 40 “ash cans.”

The only image I can find of her during the war that shows her foremast has the RCN’s REL-made, manually rotated 1.5m SW1C (Surface Warning, 1st Canadian) radar array installed, which was likely added at Saint John, NB, in June 1942.

War!

Arriving at Halifax in late June 1941, Moose Jaw spent six weeks working up in the waters off Nova Scotia, then tagged along with Flower-class sisters HMCS Prescott and Kenogami on Convoy HX 146 for three days out of Halifax to transfer to the Newfoundland Escort Force at St. John’s.

Once there, under CDR “Chummy” Prentice’s local control as Senior Officer, Canadian Corvettes, Moose Jaw and sisters had a hill to climb in training and meeting Chummy’s exercise program.

As noted by No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War:

Although Moose Jaw was one of the very few corvettes commanded by a regular force officer, Lieutenant F.E. Grubb, RCN, most of his inexperienced crew, missing several key specialist personnel, “was seasick for the first four days at sea, some of them being quite incapable of carrying out their duties.”

Then came an emergency call to go to the rescue of the struggling Convoy SC 42, which had left Sydney, Nova Scotia on 30 August with 64 slow (7-knot convoy speed) merchant ships bound for Liverpool under the protection of four escorts. The lumbering flotilla was discovered by the 14 U-boats of Wolfpack Gruppe Markgraf off Southeast Greenland on 9 September, with U-81 sinking the straggling Empire Springbuck (5,591 GRT) that morning. While depth-charge-carrying PBY Catalina flying boats from Iceland kept the wolves away during the day, night proved a horror story. By the end of the 10th, the Markgraf wolves claimed another eight steamers.

The slaughter led C-in-C Western Approaches to sortie reinforcements from Iceland (36 hours away) and even strip escorts from the safely steaming HX 147 and ON 13 Convoys to sail to SC 42’s aid.

From off St. John, Chummy was ordered to rush his proven HMCS Chambly (K 116) and his new Moose Jaw, which were at sea on exercises, at best possible speed to the battle. Arriving just 24 hours after they left Newfoundland, the two Flowers saw the signal rockets shooting up from the struggling merchant vessels under attack around 2100 on the 10th in the Denmark Strait south of Angmagsalik, Greenland.

Soon, Chambly had an ASDIC contact 700 yards off and was turning to drop charges, which had an immediate effect.

As detailed in the RN interrogation report of U-501’s crew:

“U 501” was at a depth of 40 meters (131 ft), and the explosion of the depth charges caused considerable damage inside the U-Boat, a number of instruments being smashed and the after hydroplane being put out of action; both the ordinary and the emergency lighting systems ceased to function.

Prisoners claim to have heard two more crashes in the control room, followed by a smell of gas given off by the action of water on potassium cartridges. The valves of the U-Boat were said to have been damaged, and the depth gauge was put out of action.

While Chambly turned to make another depth-charge attack, the damaged U-boat, U-501 (KrvKpt. Hugo Forster), surfaced near Moose Jaw. The banged-up submarine attempted a hasty withdrawal, and Moose Jaw opened fire, but an overexcited sailor in the 4-inch gun’s crew jammed its mechanism.

Then came something really special.

As described by Grubb in his report from Moose Jaw:

The next few minutes was spent in chase … At one time four of the submarine’s crew made a determined move to the after gun. As our own gun was still jammed, no action could be taken except to increase speed and try to ram before they could fire. This I did, although the chance was small; fortunately, someone on the conning tower ordered them back. The .5-inch machine guns were bearing at the time, but when the trigger was pressed, they failed to fire. A subsequent check showed no defects, so I assume that in the excitement the crew failed to cock them.

I managed to go alongside the submarine, starboard side to, and called on her to surrender. To my surprise, I saw a man make a magnificent leap from the submarine’s deck into our waist [the mid-part of the corvette], and the remainder of her crew move to do likewise. Not being prepared to repel boarders at that moment, I sheered off. The submarine altered across my bows and I rammed her [a glancing blow that, fortunately, did not seriously damage the corvette] …

After the impact she moved across my bows at reduced speed. The gun being cleared by that time, I opened fire again. The crew jumped into the sea as soon as the first round went, and I ordered fire to be stopped. I subsequently learned that the shell had passed low enough over the conning tower to knock down the men who were standing thereon.

The man who I had seen jump on board turned out to be the submarine’s commanding officer. He was badly shaken, and when he was brought to me on the bridge appeared to be worried at the amount of light we were showing in order to pick up survivors.

While Chambly put a nine-man boarding team aboard U-501 under Lt. Ted Simmons looking for code books, it was reported by the boarding party that a large hole was seen, about four feet in diameter, where the U-Boat’s casing joined the hull on the port quarter. It appeared that the U-Boat’s port after hydroplane had been shorn off.

The boat sank before they could get very far, losing a man in the process, Stoker William Irvin Brown, RCNVR, while Simmons, sucked out of the conning tower, almost perished.

In all, U-501 lost 10 men.

On both the skipper’s and the boat’s first patrol, U-501’s commander had only one vessel to their credit, a 2,000-ton Norwegian steamer which required six torpedoes and 40 shells from the boat’s deck gun, before being sent to the bottom by Moose Jaw and Chambly 35 days after leaving Trondheim. A regular who had joined the Reichsmarine in 1923 and served aboard surface ships– he was on the cruiser Blücher when she was sunk in a cold Norwegian fjord in 1941– Förster was nonetheless a very green 37-year-old submarine commander.

From the RN crew interrogation:

He was transferred fairly recently to U-Boats and took a shortened U-Boat course. He refused to go into any details of his recent career, but it was established that the first and last cruise of “U 501” was also his first and last cruise as Captain of a U-Boat, although he may have been on a war cruise in another U-Boat under instruction as a prospective Captain. His lack of experience, his cowardice, and other defects were bitterly criticized by his officers and men, some of whom went so far as to threaten to take vengeance into their own hands should Förster not be adequately punished by Court Martial after the war. According to his crew, Förster not only surrendered without a fight, but subsequently thought solely of his own skin, and not of the fate of his ship, nor of the lives of his men, eleven of whom were drowned.  He was the first to desert his U-Boat and the only man to jump from her to the British corvette [Moose Jaw] without even getting wet, let alone having to swim for some time before being rescued. Later, when visiting his men, he offered his hand to his Chief Quartermaster, a man of fourteen years’ service in the German Navy, who refused to shake hands with him.

The captain of “U 501” explained his precipitate leap from his U-Boat by stating that he felt impelled to get aboard “Moosejaw” at once in order to insist on the British rescuing his men; otherwise, he added, the German crew might have been left to drown.  His explanation, while failing to convince the British, succeeded in infuriating his own men into a state of high blood pressure.

Moose Jaw and Chambly, having completed the rescue of U-501’s survivors, joined the convoy at 2315, with the former soon stopping to pick up survivors from the lost British steamer Berury. Moose Jaw and sister HMCS Kenogami (K 125) rescued Berury’s master, 36 crew members and four gunners, only losing one to the sea. Berury’s captain informed Grubb that he had been unable to remove the confidential books from the bridge of his ship and, with seas too high to board the vessel, Moose Jaw riddled the hull with 66 shells from her 4-inch gun (33 HE, 33 SAP) to help speed the sinking along.

The two Flowers would spend the next week riding shotgun towards the British Isles. SC 42 made it to Liverpool on 20 September, after losing 16 ships totaling 68,259 GRT.

Besides U-501, U-207 was sent to the bottom with all hands by the destroyers HMS Leamington and Veteran of the 2nd Escort Group out of Iceland, while HMCS Skeena and Kenogami had severely damaged U-85.

Moose Jaw had 29 prisoners (three commissioned officers, two midshipmen, and 24 ratings) along with 35 merchant seamen from torpedoed ships on board when she made port.

In the aftermath of the SC 42 convoy fight, the Admiralty’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Division classed the defense of SC 42 as “valiant” and praised the destruction of U-501 by Chambly and Moose Jaw. Chummy Prentice and Ted Simmons earned a DSO and DSC, respectively, while our LT Grubb was Mentioned in Dispatches.

With her ASDIC and bow busted because of ramming U-501, she was put in for 10 days of patchwork at Greenock for repairs.

The corvette operated on ASW patrols between St. John’s and Iceland for the rest of 1941 and into 1942, operating with sisters HMCS Chicoutimi, Sherbrooke, Berne, Brandon, Rosthern, and Morden. During this time, she clocked in briefly on other eastbound SC convoys, including SC 58 and SC 64, as well as westbound Liverpool-to-Halifax Convoys ON 29, ON 36, ON 48, and ON 60.

On 9 February 1942, while escorting convoy ON-60, the Free French Flower-class sister FS Alysse (K 100) was torpedoed by the German submarine U-654 and eventually sank. The Moose Jaw and HMCS Hepatica took 34 men as survivors, including the wounded skipper, LdV Jacques Pépin Lehalleur, while 36 men were lost to the sea.

Moose Jaw then ran aground on the south entrance to St. John’s harbor on 19 February while en route to join convoy HX.176, and required repairs to fix busted seams at Saint John, New Brunswick until 25 June. This resulted in the reassignment of her skipper at the time, T/Lt. Henry Drummond Campsie, RCNR, who had taken over from Grubb the previous December.

Her third skipper, arriving on Valentine’s Day 1942, was T/Lt. Lewis Dennis Quick, RCNR, who would remain in command into early 1944.

Dispatched to join the Western Local Escort Force, Moose Jaw was once again on North Atlantic Convoy duty, clocking in on westbound ON 109, ON 116, ON 123, ON 129, and ON 133, as well as eastbound SC 93, SC 97, SC 100, SC 103, and SC 107.

On 3 November 1942, while escorting Convoy SC 107, sisters Moose Jaw and Algoma (K 127) engaged the marauding U-704 and U-89 of Wolfpack Gruppe Veilchen with star shells and depth charges, forcing both sharks to break contact. Still, SC 107 was a rough convoy fight, losing 15 of 42 merchant ships to Donitz’s raiders, some 82,817 tons of shipping, while the Germans only lost two subs, both to RCAF patrol bombers.

Then came the Torch landings in North Africa, with Moose Jaw joining sisters Algoma and Regina, actively escorting convoys to and from England to Gibraltar and Tunisia between November 1942 and March 1943. These included Med-bound KMS 5G, KMS 6G, KMS 8G, and UGS 5 as well as Liverpool-bound MKS 4 and MKS 9. Regina bagged the Italian coastal submarine Avorio north-west of Philippeville, Algeria during this period.

After this, Moose Jaw was sent back home to join Quebec Force/Gaspe Force for escort duties in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

During a December 1943 to March 1944 refit at Liverpool, NS, she was modernized, and her forecastle was extended along with a sheet of over 30 modifications and additions, including increased accommodations, watertight lockers for the fighting equipment, and additional voice pipes and electric buzzers for communication within the ship.

By this stage of the war, Moose Jaw carried her 4-incher, a 40mm 2-pounder QF Mk VIII, four 20mm Oerlikons, a 24-rocket Hedgehog ASW spigot mortar system, and room for as many as 72 depth charges. She also sported a more advanced Type 271 radar and a Type 123 sonar.

By May 1944, Moose Jaw was sent to the British Isles as part of the buildup for the Normandy invasion, one of 62 documented RCN warships involved in D-Day.

Assigned to the escort force as one of the 70-odd corvettes under Western Forces Command out of Milford Haven and Portsmouth, Moose Jaw was soon running small convoys from Barry on the Bristol Channel across the English Channel to the Seine Bay in France, a sector still very hot with German S-boots, U-boats, human torpedoes, and aircraft.

These EBC/FBC convoys were small and lightly escorted, for instance, with EBC 43 seeing Moose Jaw depart Barry with 19 merchants on 17 July 1944 with only the old (circa 1916) destroyer HMS Walker to help shepherd the group. They were short, 200-mile/three-day runs, but they were always a pucker factor. By September, Moose Jaw had run 10 convoys across the Channel in such fashion and lived to tell the tale.

Shifting to Escort Group 41 out of Plymouth in December 1944, Moose Jaw escorted coastal BTC (Milford Haven – Southend/Thames Estuary) and TBC (Southend/Thames Estuary – Milford Haven) convoys until the end of the war, logging 15 of each. These coastwise four-day/450nm milk runs were very small indeed, typically just a few merchant vessels hugging the 10-fathom line with Moose Jaw seaward as the sole escort.

Don’t think this work was low risk, as even in this late stage of the war, “Jerry” was still about. On 28 February 1945, Moose Jaw rescued six survivors from the British merchant ship Norfolk Coast, which had been torpedoed and sunk by U-1302 south-west of Strumble Head.

By the end of the war, the little corvette had logged no less than 66 convoys of all sorts. She earned battle honors for Atlantic 1941-1943, Normandy 1944, and English Channel 1944-1945.

Not all her sisters were that fortunate. No less than seven were lost during the war, including Levis, Charlottetown, and Shawinigan to U-boats; Albernie, Weyburn, and Regina to mines; and Louisburg to air attack.

Moose Jaw was paid off from the RCN on 8 July 1945 at Sorel, Quebec, then sold for scrapping in September 1949 and broken up at Hamilton, Ontario.

Epilogue

A For Posterity’s Sake page exists to carry forward the memory of the lost corvette.

Moose Jaw’s plank owner skipper, who commanded her during the U-501 attack, went on to command the HMCS Charny (Z 26) through November 1942 and ended the war at the Toronto shore establishment HMCS York, a site that trained 14,000 RCN members during the conflict. Post-war, he shifted to the HMCS Naden shore establishment at Esquimalt, BC, and went on to pen several scholarly works, including Naval Customs and Social Practices. He retired as a captain in 1954 and passed in 1985 at Victoria, aged 74.

Captain James Douglas “Chummy” Prentice, RCN, DSO, DSC, was on the scene for the sinking of at least three more U-boats and retired in 1946 as ADC to the Governor General of Canada. He passed in Saanichton, BC, in 1979.

As for the man who jumped from his U-boat to Moose Jaw’s deck during the fight for Convoy SC-42, KvtKpn. Hugo Förster of U-501 spent the following three years in Canadian POW camps, then was repatriated in January 1945 in poor health as part of a prisoner exchange. He committed suicide just weeks after returning to war-ravaged Germany.

Of Moose Jaw’s classmates, the last of her Collingwood-built sisters, HMCS Barrie (K 138), survived until 1972, serving with the Argentine Navy as the survey ship Capitan Canepa.

The final Canadian Flower afloat, HMCS Sackville, remained in service first as a controlled minelayer, then as a survey ship with the RCN into the 1980s, and is a fixture on the Halifax waterfront, complete in WWII livery.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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