Yukon & I

Before I proceed to the ship, I must say some words about the picture. As the keen-eyed will have noted, the hull number (262) represented HMCS Saskatchewan, not Yukon (263). For reasons made clear below, I wanted a special image for this ship. The picture is actually a copy of a lithograph by the artist Robert Banks, and I have used it here with the permission of Ron Battiston, who runs an outstanding Naval website. (See Acknowledgements .) I have taken a further liberty by electronically superimposing, in place of the single Canadian Maple Leaf flag on the painting's stern, not one, but two images of the White Ensign.

This configuration is known as flying a Battle Ensign. Given the life and death of Yukon, I think the image fitting.

As I've remarked elsewhere, it is no more possible to say that you love a particular ship the best, than it is for a child, or a book, or a house, but there are intangibles which make one special. In Yukon's case, I could start with her captain, Dick Carle, who died tragically young. Stripped to a single essential, all sailors want from their captain -- or any Officer of the Watch -- is the ability, in the event of a Man Overboard! cry, to manoeuvre the ship to pick them up, quickly, no matter what. If a captain can provide calmness under pressure, courtesy, humour, and granting his officers maximum responsibility to manoeuvre for themselves, you have a winner. Dick Carle had all of the above, and a charming wife.

His Executive Officer (Second in Command) Bill Chaster was a goateed ex-submariner, and as mad as a hatter. Reciting Shakespeare aloud after midnight in downtown San Diego, he almost got half the wardroom arrested. He and Carle made an odd, but effective couple to run a warship.

The greatest intangible, because of the emotions it still invokes, is the stark fact that Yukon was the last ship I served in, although I didn't know it then. Perhaps being asked by Dick Carle to say a few words when (on Ottawa's orders) we hauled down the White Ensign for the last time was a precursor. I know that thirty-seven years later, when I read an account of the final days of this ship, I was outraged. She was sold to be made into a kids' video game: blowing her up was to be its ignominious finale. During the night before that humiliation, she mysteriously sank herself.

In an article which the Toronto Globe & Mail did not see fit to print, I have written a fuller account of Yukon's life and death: if you would like to read it, please click on Down to the Sea in Party Ships .

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