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_{Source: www.warmuseum.ca}Immortalized in both print and film because of its actions during the Second World War, the destroyer HMCS St. Croix is among the most famous ships in Canadian Naval History. But also among its most tragic.

_{HMCS St. Croix
Source: www.warmuseum.ca}HMCS St. Croix was launched in 1919 as the USS McCook, part of a large class of “Four Stackers” built for the Great War. McCook was one of fifty destroyers acquired by the British in 1940 as part of the British-US destroyers-for-bases deal. Six of these elderly ships were transferred to Canada. In keeping with RCN practice of naming destroyers after rivers, all six of these ships were named after rivers shared with the USA. So McCook became St Croix, named for the 185 km river that serves as the international boundary between New Brunswick and the State of Maine.

_{HMCS St. Croix in Halifax Harbour, December 1940
Source: www.warmuseum.ca}The ex-American Four Stackers were low, long and narrow. They were not well suited to the broad North Atlantic. For many who sailed them, they were “sea-going purgatories” spoken of with mixed emotions. However, given the state of the Canadian navy – and the war at sea -- at the time, they were a welcome addition to the fleet.

St Croix was a “long range” Four Stacker and reasonably reliable, so she had a very busy and distinguished service defending convoys in the mid-ocean. In 1942 St Croix sank the U-Boat U90 during the battle for convoy ON 113. Then in March 1943, in conjunction with HMCS Shediac, she sank U87 off Portugal.

St Croix was such a good U-boat hunter that in 1943 she was assigned to the RCN’s second U-Boat hunting group, EG 9. In late September 1943, St. Croix and EG 9 were sent to help two convoys west of Ireland. The U-Boats attacking these convoys were equipped with new “acoustic homing torpedoes,” designed to home-in to the sounds of fast propellors – like those of a destroyer. As she searched for a reported U-Boat sighting behind the convoy, St. Croix was disabled by a torpedo exploding under her keel. The Senior Officer’s ship of EG 9, HMS Itchen, was about to come alongside to remove the crew when a second torpedo shattered the stricken old destroyer. When a third torpedo exploded in Itchen’s wake, the British ship withdrew to get help.

As St Croix sank she earned the dubious distinction of being the first ship in history sunk by a homing torpedo.

No one knows how many of St Croix’s crew of 147 escaped the sinking. Forced into the sea, in lifeboats and on “Carley Floats” – wooden rafts framed around 45-gallon oil drums – the survivors spent thirteen cold and grueling hours watching flares light the sky and hearing depth charges go off all around them.

_{Stoker William Fisher, RCNVR, the sole survivor of the loss of St Croix.
Source: www.warmuseum.ca}Itchen returned early the next day. In the meantime she had recovered just two men from the little corvette HMS Polyanthus, the second ship lost to the new German weapon. By then only 76 ratings and five officers remained. After recovering these survivors Itchen went back into the battle. On evening of September 2, Itchen herself was destroyed by a towering explosion: most likely an acoustic homing torpedo that exploded under her magazine. Itchen disappeared in about forty seconds – so fast that no one in the convoy really knew what had happened. It had been a mere “forty-nine hours between the torpedoing of the two ships.” Of the entire crew of Itchen, the 81 survivors of St. Croix, and the two men rescued from Polyanthus, only three men survived: two from Itchen and Stoker William Fisher, RCNVR, from St Croix. They may not have lived were it not for the bravery of the Polish ship Waleha, which stopped to rescue them.

_{The last known photograph of the St. Croix ship's company taken in St. John's Newfoundland on May 30, 1943 (NAC PA 192997).
Source: www.warmuseum.ca}The tragedy of the St. Croix made frontpage news in Canada. The crew had been drawn from across Canada, and their loss was felt deeply. For the lone survivor, William Fisher, losing so many “old hands and old friends” was hard to take. But he carved out a life for himself after the war, working in the oil industry until his retirement in 1982 in Alberta. For those who never returned, for “they that go down to the sea in ships, doing Canadian business in the great waters,” we will remember them.