When the fall of France in June 1940 brought the U-boats to the Atlantic littoral, the RCN became increasingly involved with the North Atlantic but NSHQ never entirely relinquished its ambition to man larger warships.ДЄs the first of the Tribals would not commission until late 1942, this ambition could not be realized in the short term. Until these ships were completed, NSHQ arranged for the conversion of three large passenger ships-Prince David, Prince Henry, and Prince Robert-as auxiliary cruisers, and while the seven destroyers of the pre-war fleet were employed on convoy duty in the Atlantic the вЂњPrinceвЂќ ships mainly operated on the Pacific coast. In the winter of 1939-40 an arrangement was made with the Admiralty in London for Canada to produce escort vessels for the Royal Navy in return for British construction of four Tribal-class vessels in the United Kingdom. When war broke out in September 1939, NSHQ viewed the most dangerous threat as being large surface raiders, not submarines, and to counter this threat it wished to obtain powerful fleet destroyers of the Tribal class. The RCNвЂ™s participation in surface warfare in these theatres was primarily driven by the ambition of Naval Service Headquarters in Ottawa to build up a вЂњbalanced fleetвЂќ or вЂњblue water navyвЂќ that would be the foundation of a post-war service so strong that never again would it face possible dissolution as it had in the 1920s.

What is often over-looked, however, is that the RCN also manned a variety of warships, from light cruisers to landing craft, which carried out many different tasks in European and Pacific waters. The Royal Canadian NavyвЂ™s greatest contribution in the Second World War was the role it played in the Battle of the Atlantic, the grim and unrelenting struggle against the German U-boats, which is the subject of the next chapter.

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