WATCH ON SEAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 April 1940, Page 3

WATCH ON SEAS

I VIGILANCE OF CANADIAN FORCES COASTLINE CLASSED AS WAR ZONE. EVERY PRECAUTION TAKEN. OTTAWA. Canada is doing, her task of protecting sliippim*. from tier Eastern const in a most efficient manner, supplying naval and ail' escorts to the convoys of merchant vessels and constantly patrolling the shipping lanes within the orbit of her activities. A spokesman for the Department of National Defence of Canada recently referred to the work of the "gallant fellows who, day and night, watch Canada's ramparts, ensuring, first, the safe movement of the Empire's trade and second, the safety of Canadians and Canadian soil." The late Lord Twcedsmuir, Canada's Governor-General who died just recently, in a public address several months before the outbreak of war. plainly told his hearers that a Canadian’s first duty is always to his Canada. “That 'ls the torch those sailors, soldiers and airmen have taken up who guard our nation's shores and shipping, for to them has fallen the greatest of' all Canadian duties, the guarding of Canada along the ramparts we watch." The defence of Canada’s shores and Iter sea-borne trade is ;i matter of great importance in the present war. Twenty-five years ago in the Great War. Canada’s waters were comparatively safe. No one could attack from the air and the onlj' danger could have* come from some bravo searaider which might have slipped up under cover of darkness, bombarded a Canadian port, and run. “In this war." says the Government commentator, "all this is changed. Canada's coastlines are war zones in ever.v sense of the term, guarded as such, ready for defence as such, ashore, afloat and in the air. No submarine can penetrate our harbour mouth. The door is shut. No cnemj' air raider can reach us without warning. The watchers are out. No raider can slip inshore. or stand out at sea to harm us. without being sure of a cordial response from the batteries ashore. This is a war zone, a zone ready for immediate blackout, a zone ready for action. In that zone are the unsung heroes of the three services, performing arduous duties which fall to them in what is one of the vital, perhaps at this time the most, vital, of all phases of Canada’s war effort.’’ In a weekly radio broadcast, the Government commentator is attempting to make the public .better acquainted with all phases of Canada's war work —not only of the more spectacular movements of her troops overseas, but of the watchfulness of her own defence forces on the coasts and particularly on the Atlantic. The task of organising the large convoys of merchant vessels carrying food, munitions. and necessities of war across the Atlantic to the Mother Country, and her Allies is mainly performed by Canadian naval officers who must gauge the speeds of various vessels awaiting for the trans-Atlantic journey and help speed up shipping as part of the economic warfare. These convoys leave their carefully protected anchorage only after Canadian minesweepers have carefully swept the danger-zone waters adjacent to the coast. Planes of the Royal Canadian Air Force conduct a neverending patrol I'm- out over the ocean in their hunt for submarines or surface raiders and Canadian destroyers escort the convoys far out at sen. past the danger “focal areas" through which all trade routes converge. While Canada has never constructed great cruisers and battleships, she lias acquired a number of modern, highly mobile destroyers, armed to the teeth, and capable of performing their primary task of protecting merchant shipping in North American waters, hundreds of miles off the coast of the Dominion. Through storms and fog, through blinding snow and freezing sleet, day and night, ships of the Royal Canadian Navy are out protecting the waters. .Aloft, the planes of the Royal Canadian Air Force are forever patrolling far out to sea, and on the coasts stand the guns of the Coastal Defence forces. The defence of Canada's coastlines, and particularly that of her coastal harbours, depends primarily on the big guns mounted on the wind-blown, blizzard-ridden headlands of the coast, supported by antiaircraft batteries and machin'e-lguns and by regiments of infantry—an integral part of the vast pattern of the Canadian war effort in which Army joins forces with Navy and Air Force. These coastal defences form an integral and essential part' of the greater war plan and are urgently necessary to tile defence of Canada's shores and to the ships which enter her harbours.