MORRIS, WILBUR Reg. # V8485
As noted at left, Wilbur was the son of George and Janet Morris of Port Carmen Chapman Twp.
He was drafted to the HMCS Stadacona, training facility, and then to the HMCS Windflower.
The ship was cut in half in heavy fog by a Dutch freighter it was protecting on December 7, 1941.
Morris lost his life in the incident.
Above, the HMCS Windflower during acceptance trials in 1940. Note that her armament has not yet been fitted. RCN photo.
The picture above is titled “HMS Windflower, December 7, 1941 – although given that the ramming apparently occurred in heavy fog, the date may e in correct.
The above picture is titled ‘Ships Company aboard the HMCS Windflower, 1940. (from The Accidental Enemy: Navy, Part 41, October 22, 2010, by Marc Milne
Marc Milne wrote:
“The winter of 1941-42 is usually treated by historians as a quiet one on the North Atlantic Run, but it is doubtful anyone guarding the convoy routes saw it that way. The North Atlantic was its typical vile self, with storm-battered ships and weary men standing to their duty in the face of a constant threat from U-boats. In fact, weather proved to be a major factor in the loss of two Royal Canadian Navy escorts to marine accidents in December 1941. This brought to an end a series of losses to weather and collision dating back to May 1940, when the battleship His Majesty’s Ship Revenge sideswiped and sank the gate vessel His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Ypres in Halifax. The destroyers Fraser and Margaree are also counted in this category. The navy suffered only one loss to marine accident after 1941: a testament, perhaps, to the introduction of effective radar by 1942 and improving seamanship.
The first Canadian escort lost in the North Atlantic in the winter of 1941-42 went down off Newfoundland on Dec. 7. The incident occurred less than a day after a Newfoundland Escort Force group, led by HMCS St. Laurent, had taken over the eastbound convoy SC 58 on the Grand Banks. In addition to the destroyer, the group consisted of six corvettes, including the RCN’s Hepatica, Pictou, Windflower, Moose Jaw and Buctouche and HMS Nasturtium.
On the morning of Dec. 7, SC 58 was steaming through calm seas, but the convoy was shrouded in the thick fog that persists where the cold Labrador Current runs into the warm Gulf Stream. Towards the end of the morning watch, at 7:40 a.m., Windflower’s position was fixed by radar as roughly 4,000 yards on the starboard bow of the leading ship in the convoy’s starboard column. The information was sufficient for the corvettes’ captain (or officer of the watch) to turn to port to try to gain visual contact.
But the radar information was little more than a guesswork of position and range. Early radars for small escorts, like the Canadian designed and built type SW1C fitted to the escort fleet in 1941, operated more like contemporary sonars. Operators pointed the antenna at a suspect target and read the range off a simple “A” scan display (like a modern heart monitor). Nothing was automatic, and in the absence of a “Plan Position Indicator” display screen (a modern radar screen in which the ship is in the centre of the display and the radar sweeps continuously around revealing all contacts within range), the early sets simply told you the bearing and range to a target. The information then had to be plotted on paper or in your head. The situational awareness provided by Windflower’s radar in December 1941 was a vast improvement over anything previously available for navigation in dense fog, but the information was not precise.
The subsequent Board of Enquiry into Windflower’s loss also concluded the ship was mistaken in her assumed position relative to the convoy. She was supposed to be in position “C” of Night Escort screening diagram 7, but appears to have drifted forward into position “C” for daytime screening. All of this meant that when Windflower’s captain, Lieutenant John Price, Royal Canadian Naval Reserve, turned his ship to port to try to establish contact with the convoy at roughly 9:15 a.m. he had little clear idea of just where he was. Indeed, survivors and the board later agreed that Price (or the officer of the watch, it is unknown who gave the fateful order) ought to have eased gently to port until they found the convoy. Instead, Windflower turned perpendicular to the convoy’s track and stood-in.
Contact with SC 58 was established at 9:20 a.m. when the fourth ship in the port column, the Dutch steamer Zypenberg, loomed out of the fog barely 400 yards on Windflower’s port side. Horns sounded as both ships took evasive action. Windflower went to full speed and turned to starboard: Zypenberg sounded her horn three times and also went to starboard. She could not, of course, go to port because the rest of the convoy lay in that direction.
There was neither time nor space enough to avoid a collision. Windflower was swinging and nearly clear when Zypenberg struck at a 45 degree angle and sliced off 25 feet of the corvette’s stern.
The corvette’s after bulkhead remained intact and it looked for a while that the ship might be saved. Depth charges were set to safe, the boiler fires drawn, and excess steam vented, while efforts were made to get her boats, stowed on either side of the funnel, into the water. When the after bulkhead suddenly collapsed cold sea water struck the after boiler and it exploded. As Fraser McKee and Robert Darlington concluded in their book, The Canadian Naval Chronicle, 1939-1945, “the majority of casualties were caused by this explosion.” It hurled one of Windflower’s boats overboard along with the crew trying to launch it. The other boat was successfully lowered, but one of the falls jammed and the boat capsized. At 9:50 Windflower finally sank, leaving the sea littered with wreckage, one capsized boat and scores of men struggling to survive.
By the time Zypenberg stopped to help she had disappeared back into the fog. As she backed up to the scene of the collision, she sounded her horn so the men in the water would know where she was. Other ships needed to know, too. The next ship in the fourth column, SS Baltara, plowed past Zypenberg by the narrowest of margins—and on into the murk—as the Dutch ship put its boats in the water. It was fortunate that Zypenberg acted promptly. Although the sea was calm, the air temperature was frigid and the water temperature barely 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Windflower’s survivors would not have lasted long. Within 45 minutes, 47 men were rescued, three of whom died before they reached St. John’s, Nfld. In all, 23 men perished, including Price who was last seen leaping from the bridge.
Windflower was not the only victim of the incident. When Nasturtium heard the corvette’s boiler blow her crew assumed Windflower had been torpedoed and raced to the scene. Once there the British corvette gained a sonar contact and attacked it with depth charges. The target proved to be the sinking wreck of Windflower. One of Nasturtium’s charges detonated prematurely, and others countermined depth charges on Windflower, resulting in a rending explosion. This brought down Nasturtium’s aerials, smashed her sonar and caused oil leaks throughout the ship: she accompanied Zypenberg into St. John’s. Windflower was the only corvette lost by the RCN during the war to marine accident: a remarkable accomplishment in view of the work they did.”
