Canada: NOVA SCOTIA: Homecoming

As the destroyer H.M.C.S. Micmac, 2,300 tons, bounded home to Halifax, spirits were high. The morning’s “wups”* had been successful. Sailors lazed on upper decks, chatted about a forthcoming Atlantic cruise. Ahead, inside Sambro lightship, lay dense patches of fog, but that was nothing to worry about. The Micmac’s radar was the most modern afloat. She sounded her klaxon, stepped briskly into a fog bank at 20 knots.

Suddenly, looming out of the fog, her captain saw above him the huge bow of a freighter. His thin-skinned warship plunged headlong into the 10,000-ton Yarmouth County, outbound at a cautious eight knots. Fifty feet of the Micmac’s port bow was peeled back like the lid of a sardine can. Jagged steel ripped through the arms and legs of seamen dozing on their mess deck. Crashing steel girders pinned others to the deck.

The Yarmouth County shook herself, peered through the enveloping gloom to see what had hit her, felt gingerly for her wound. She found it. One of the Micmac’s capstans was stuck like a burr in her side.

Under her own power, the wounded Micmac managed to limp into port. Naval experts were undecided whether she would ever sail again. The Navy last week held a court of inquiry into the worst peacetime disaster in R.C.N. history: six men killed, five “missing,” 16 hospitalized.

* Working-up trials, after a two-months’ refitting.