THE UNKNOWN NAVY - Canada's World War II Merchant Navy by Halford, Robert G

St. Catherines Vanwell 1995., first Canadian edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2, FINE/FINE CONDITION, 272 pages, illustrations, notes, bibliog., appendices, index.----------------------------------------- "BUT I DIDN'T KNOW THAT." The men who built and sailed on Canadian merchant ships during World War II, often hear such a reaction from postwar generations to the news that Canada operated the wartime world's fourth largest Merchant Navy, almost all of it built in Canadian shipyards.---------------------------------------------------Compared to the well-published achievements of the Navy, Army and Air Force, an ocean of silence surrounds the long-gone Canadian Merchant Navy.In his new book, Robert Halford examines Canada's so-called Unknown Navy. Using available source material, the personal recollections of merchant seamen and his own wartime experiences, he provides an in-depth look at the Merchant Navy from its glorious beginnings to its unceremonious dissolution. During wartime, the merchant seamen were the heroes of the 19391945 war, the fourth arm of the Services. By 1948 they had undergone a quick image change, transformed from heroes to anonymous troublemakers hindering the shipping industry. And once the fleet was gone, the wartime merchant sailors vanished from the public consciousness.Only with the mounting in the late 1980's of a campaign to gain official recognition for them as veterans did Canada's wartime Merchant Navy begin to move out from the obscurity of nearly fifty years. The Unknown Navy is a further attempt to throw light on the Merchant Navy's important contributions to the Allied cause during World War II.