Svend Hansen is going to pour himself a glass of rum on Friday.
He might even make it a double.
Not that the occasional tipple is extraordinary for the 96-year-old Port Moody resident. But this glass will definitely be celebratory.
It was May 8, 1945, when Hansen decoded a special message from Morse code to plain English that had been sent to his ship, the Penetang, which was escorting a convoy of merchant vessels in the North Atlantic, somewhere east of Newfoundland.
“Splice the main brace,” the message read.
It meant, “double the rum ration.”
The day before, Hansen had translated another message, “Tuesday, eighth of May is VE Day.”
The war in Europe was over.
Hansen, who’d accompanied some 30 convoys safely through the waters of the North Atlantic during his time in the Royal Canadian Navy, said the news of the war’s end didn’t come as a total surprise.
“The war was going the way we thought it was,” he told The Tri-City News. “We realized it was coming.”
So it was the rum reward that really boosted the sailors’ spirits, Hansen said.
“The rum ration message was the best one.”
The service of more than one million Canadian veterans of the Second World War, including 45,000 who died, is being recognized by an official proclamation, declared by B.C. Lieutenant Governor Janet Austin on the 75th anniversary of VE Day.
Hansen said, all things considered, his tour — first aboard a small, anti-submarine corvette from early 1943 to late the following year, and then on the frigate Penetang — wasn’t that eventful. Sailing the “triangle run,” from Halifax to New York or Boston to St. John’s, where his ship’s escort duties would be handed off to others for the perilous crossing to Great Britain, he never saw conflict, although enemy subs were lurking. In fact, three days after VE Day, his crew captured a German U-boat that had surfaced just off St. John’s to surrender.
Still, Hansen said, the official end of the war brought immense relief.
“It was a pretty relaxed atmosphere,” he recalled as the ship headed to harbour, where the sailors would blow off some steam in the local bars.
His duties over, Hansen took leave to head home to Calgary, where he was eager to get on with his life, attend university, get a job, settle down.
But the urge to serve his country remained strong, so Hansen volunteered to fight in the Pacific. Before he was able to ship out, though, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan and that conflict concluded as well.
Hansen, who found his way to British Columbia in 1965 and has been living in a condo in Newport Village for the past 17 years, said he considers himself “fortunate” to have survived the war unscathed. But his memories of that time are no less valuable as a reminder of its toll.
With no remembrance ceremony possible because of the COVID-19 pandemic, not even a trip to the Royal Canadian Legion to share stories, Hansen is posting copies of the historical messages he decoded in the lobby of his building so his neighbours can get an appreciation of Friday’s significance.
