HMCS MORDEN

The “Flower” Class corvette, HMCS MORDEN, was laid down in the yards of the Port Arthur Shipbuilding Co. of Port Arthur, Ontario, on 25 October 1940, and launched on 5 May 1941.  She left Port Arthur on 23 August and was commissioned at Montreal on 6 September 1941.  Morden, Manitoba, gave its name to the ship.  It is a town seventy-five miles southwest of Winnipeg and near the United States border.  It was called after a man who settled there in 1874.

The corvette proceeded to Halifax and arrived there on 16 September.  In the following month, she went on to Sydney, N.S.  While based there she patrolled the Belle Isle Strait area and accompanied convoys into Hamilton Inlet, Labrador.  In November she transferred to the Newfoundland Escort Force to escort merchant ships along the hazardous convoy routes across the Atlantic.

One of the determinedly attacked convoys she escorted in 1942 was SC-97.  The assaults on the convoy climaxed on 31 August with the torpedoings and sinkings of the Norwegian MV Bronxville and the Panama-registered SS Capira.  The escorts fought back vigorously.  MORDEN sighted and fired on a U-boat at a range of 400-500 yards.  It got away and the Commanding Officer said afterwards that he regretted not having tried to ram it.

The corvette picked up the survivors from Capira.  Thus began a career of snatching the shipwrecked from the ocean, for which the newspapers later called her “champion survivor-carrier” of her class in the United Nations Navies.  In October 1943 it was estimated that over the past year she had saved 357 lives.

The ship strengthened her claim to the distinction in a striking fashion on 22 October, when she took aboard at least 192 survivors from the 8,807-ton British ship, SS Winnipeg II.  Many of them were passengers, including women and children.  Bringing to port, still four and a half days away, such a number in rude and cramped messdecks where her 71-man ship’s company had barely room to swing a cat was to strain every resource of a corvette.

In March 1943 MORDEN accompanied a convoy bound to Gibraltar from the United Kingdom.  During an air attack the SS City of Christchurch was badly damaged.  At first, she was able to steam at six knots and the corvette was detailed to stand by her.  But gradually she sank lower in the water until MORDEN had no choice but once again to embark survivors, this time 102 of them.

Before the ship sank, MORDEN’s Executive Officer and a volunteer crew boarded her and cut loose two valuable RN harbour defence motor launches.  One was damaged beyond salvage, but they were able to launch the other and navigate her in foul weather to Gibraltar, reaching the Rock just before the fuel gave out.

On 12 May 1943 MORDEN picked up forty survivors from the straggling Norwegian MV Brand.  The enemy sank two other stragglers from the convoy.  He paid for his successes with one U-boat accounted for by the escort and a Sunderland aircraft.

In order to strengthen the forces in the Eastern Atlantic, the Navy in August 1943 placed MORDEN under the operational control of the Royal Navy’s Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches, who assigned her to the newly-formed Support Group, EG-9, Senior Officer in HM Frigate Itchen.  In the following month, the Group reinforced the escort of the combined convoys of ONS-18 and ON-202, which were steaming westward from the United Kingdom.  From 19 September the convoys were heavily attacked.  The assailants used new tactics.  They decoyed the escorts away with surfaced U-boats and torpedoed them, using the acoustic torpedo or GNAT for the first time.

HMC Destroyer ST. CROIX, HM Corvette Polyanthus and Itchen all fell victims to these tactics leaving only three survivors.  HM Frigate Lagan was damaged as well and six merchant ships were lost.  The successful battle cost the enemy U-229, which was sunk by HM Destroyer Keppel.  One of the merchant ship casualties was the US Steamship Steel Voyager.  MORDEN took aboard thirty-one of her survivors, while the Free French corvette Renoncule recovered the rest.

EG-9 had to be disbanded and MORDEN was allocated to Escort Group C-2.  In October she sailed with Convoy SC-143.  Reinforcements for it arrived on the 7^th in the forms of ships of the 10^th Support Group.  One of its members was the Polish destroyer Orkan.  In the early morning of the 8^th, this ship was torpedoed, and she sank with heavy loss of life.  It was estimated that fifteen U-boats were in contact with the convoy.  Shore-based aircraft and planes from the SS Rapana, merchant aircraft carrier, sank three of them.  More importantly, the escorts kept the pack at a distance.  One merchant ship was sunk on the 9^th, but the attack was made at long range.

MORDEN and C-2 continued to cross with the transatlantic convoys during 1944, but the year was a relatively quieter one for them.  In Sydney, N.S., in December, the corvette began a refit which, along with a month of “working-up” exercises in Bermuda, kept her out of action until April 1945.  Transferred from the Mid-Ocean Escort Force to the Halifax Force and then to Group W-9 in the Western Local Escort, she passed another month steaming with convoys from Halifax to Boston and New York.  With the ending in May of the War in Europe, she was no longer required by the Navy and she was paid off on 29 June 1945 and sold in October to the International Iron and Metals Co. of Hamilton, Ontario, for scrap.

Directorate of History

National Defence Headquarters

Ottawa, 29 November 1973