Captain Norm's Second World War -- and Nova Scotia's

We Nova Scotians are accustomed to conceiving the Second World War as something that happened someplace far away, in Europe and Asia and the Mideast, but with our participation in the war and our protrusion into the Atlantic, the war’s edges sometimes extended to our shores.

The evening of May 30 in 1942 was such a time. The SS Liverpool Packet -- formerly the Sonia -- was passing Seal Island off Nova Scotia en route from New York to a Newfoundland air base, laden with massive power generators, vehicles, tires, etc. The Packet’s captain was Nova Scotia’s own "Captain Norm", hero of the First World War.

Captain Norman Emmons Smith -- born in 1880 at Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia and at sea by the age of 12 -- had captained munitions ships in the First World War, managing an impossible 42 Atlantic crossings. Variously nicknamed "Captain Norm", "Dynamite", and "Iceberg", he was as near invincible as any mariner in Nova Scotia’s maritime history.

Captain Norm’s ship Ruby on its return from a delivery to France caught the eye of a German U-boat. Spotting torpedoes swimming for his broadside, Captain Norm swung Ruby around end-to, shrinking the target, and the torpedoes passed narrowly without detonating. The German submarine then surfaced and "shot away" Ruby’s smokestack and mast, but Ruby outran the sub and made it back to port above-water.

On December 4 of 1917 Captain Norm had departed Halifax Harbour for Europe carrying a cargo of TNT; it was all of two days later that another munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, collided and caught fire in the harbour, and the resultant Halifax Explosion killed 2,000 and constituted the greatest manmade explosion before the Hiroshima bomb.

On the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Captain Norm had enlisted as a captain in the Merchant Marine once more, aged 59. He was given command of the Belle Isle, establishing and supplying weather and radio stations on Greenland whose advance forecasting for Allied operations in Europe was life-and-death: Allied counter-intelligence saw to it that Germany couldn't know the where of the D-Day landings, and as to the when, Germany was confounded by a forecast from Greenland of a break in a storm, for the 6th of June. Captain Norm crossed the Atlantic in the second war as he had in the first, and not infrequently without convoy protection, as when his ship was slower than the slowest allowed in convoy.

Captain Norm was in the middle of a solo supply run that evening of May 30 in '42. His 3,000 ton Liverpool Packet was making its top speed: 8 knots. At 8:45, the Packet was a dozen miles off Seal Island and only 30 miles from Captain Norm’s native Woods Harbour when an undetected German U-boat slammed a torpedo into its broadside. The torpedo tore through the entire engineroom, killing the two firemen instantly and blasting such a hole as to render the Packet unsalvageable. Inside of five minutes, the Packet would be altogether underwater. The lifeboat was launched and some of the men scrambled aboard, while others jumped and swam clear of the sinking ship and its deadly drag.

After the Packet’s survivors had been collected in the lifeboat, the German sub surfaced. Its crew emerged and trained their guns on the Packet men, half-dressed but no less dangerous. The German captain demanded to know Captain Norm’s destination and cargo. Captain Norm was uncommonly bold and brave even by the standards of a courageous age, but with neither weapons nor ship and responsible for 17 now-helpless crewmen whom the Germans might kill as easily as not, he gave up the information, which blessedly was not critical military intelligence. The U-boat then disappeared and the lifeboat rowed for land.

Before they had got far, the Packet’s survivors heard calls for help from what turned out to be the first mate. He had been thrown by a secondary explosion some 25 yards, and made a life-preserver of the lid of a wood crate. That 19th survivor was crammed into the lifeboat and it restarted for shore.

The Liverpool Packet hadn't been the first ship to be torpedoed just off Nova Scotia in the Second World War, and it wouldn't be the last. Not three weeks earlier, the Kitty’s Brook had been torpedoed about 40 miles off Lockeport. Two ships in three days were torpedoed off Neils Harbour that October: the Waterton, about 40 miles off, and the Caribou, about 50. The Caribou attack was particularly heinous, that ship being a passenger ferry and its losses numbering 137. A couple years later in 1944 the Watuka was torpedoed 35 miles off Little Harbour, and the Nipawan Park was torpedoed about 30 miles off that same point as late as January of '45, just months before war’s end.

As for Captain Norm, he carried on at sea for two years after the war, which he outlived by 24 years. From the Arctic to the Mediterranean, in two world wars, the only torpedo to sink Captain Norm came 30 miles from his Nova Scotia hometown.