OTTAWA — Nearly seven decades ago during the Second World War, Elsa Lessard was a pretty, bright-eyed 22-year-old serving in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, listening for German submarines out in the Atlantic Ocean.
One of 200 WRENS working as radio intercept operators at a hush-hush base in Coverdale, N.B., just outside Moncton, her job was to monitor the frequency of the radio broadcasts made by the submarines when they surfaced to make radio contact with their headquarters. Those coded messages, along with the submarines’ bearings, were forwarded to naval headquarters in Ottawa and from there to the Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park in England.
“That’s how we tracked U-boats during the war. We were spies because we were intercepting the Germans’ messages,” Lessard said Thursday. One of those intercepted messages included the message the German naval commander, Admiral Karl Donitz, sent to his fleet announcing Adolf Hitler’s death in 1945. “We were proud of our role in the war.”
On Thursday, Lessard, a bright-eyed 89-year-old, commemorated her years of service — and those of every other man or woman who has served in the Royal Canadian Navy, past and present — as the guest of honour at the official naming of Canada’s newest national military monument on Richmond Landing in the Ottawa River, below the Portage Bridge.
Under leaden skies, before a crowd of more than 300 — white-hatted sailors in dress uniforms were in the majority — and with Prime Minister Stephen Harper looking on, Lessard cheerfully shattered a nylon-wrapped bottle of champaign on the marble-faced “bow” of The Royal Canadian Navy Monument. Only moments earlier, Naval Chaplain Padre John Wilcox had blessed the monument with water gathered from the three oceans that touch Canada’s coasts.
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” Lessard said later in expressing her pleasure that the monument honoured those like herself who had served in the navy.
The sentiment was widely shared. The monument “speaks” to “the meaning of naval service,” the prime minister said.
“We need memorials such as this,” Harper said, “as tangible remembrances that may cause a younger generation to demand of an older one, ‘What is this place? What do these things mean? What did these people do?’
“This monument demands that the navy’s full story be told and understood, as it serves as a reminder to all Canadians that the navy is always there, over the horizon, today as in the past, at the first sign of trouble, saying, ‘Ready Aye Ready,’” he said, referring to the motto inscribed on the monument.
The prime minister made a point of noting that the last Canadian to win the Victoria Cross was a Canadian naval pilot, Robert Hampton Gray, of Trail, B.C. While serving in the British Navy, Gray was killed only days before the end of the Second World War while attacking a Japanese destroyer.
As well, Harper said, Thursday’s ceremony marked the second anniversary of a Navy Petty Officer Craig Blake, a 37-year-old mine expert who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010.
Speaking on behalf of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Paul Madisson expressed his appreciation for the “depth of thought” reflected in the monument, but also said that, for him, what it most conveyed was “the strength and flare of our warships at sea.”
Jointly sponsored by the National Capital Commission and the Royal Canadian Navy to mark the navy’s centennial, the monument was designed by a British Columbia-based team of Alan McWilliams, Joost Bakker and Bruce Haden. The trio won a national design competition for the $2-million project in 2009.
National Capital Commission chairman Russell Mills referred to the NCC’s “successful partnership” with the navy and said such monuments were the means by which Canadians could “honour our past and present and share our collective memory.”
Mills also noted the significance of the monument’s location, pointing out that, after the War of 1812, demobilized British soldiers and their families landed at Richmond Landing and marched inland to establish some of the earliest settlements in the Ottawa area.
McWilliams, speaking on behalf of his team, said it had been a privilege to undertake the project. He expressed the hope that it reflected the many facets of the navy and, in particular, “created a form and space charged with meaning.”
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