HMCS Kitchener in heavy seas |
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| Career (Canada) | Royal Canadian Navy |
|---|---|
| Namesake: | Kitchener, Ontario |
| Builder: | George T. Davie & Sons Ltd., Lauzon, Quebec, Canada |
| Laid down: | 28 February 1941 |
| Launched: | 18 November 1941 |
| Commissioned: | 28 June 1942 |
| Decommissioned: | 11 July 1945 |
| Renamed: | from HMCS Vancouver before launch. |
| Refit: | Completed 28 January 1944, Liverpool, Nova Scotia. |
| Identification: | Pennant number: K225 |
| Honours and awards: |
Atlantic 1942-43, Gulf of St. Lawrence 1942, English Channel 1944-45, Normandy 1944 |
| Fate: | Scrapped in 1949, Hamilton, Ontario |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Flower-class corvette |
| Displacement: | 925 long tons (940 t; 1,036 ST) |
| Length: | 205 ft (62.48 m)o/a |
| Beam: | 33 ft (10.06 m) |
| Draught: | 11.5 ft (3.51 m) |
| Propulsion: |
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| Speed: | 16 knots (29.6 km/h) |
| Range: | 3,500 nautical miles (6,482 km) at 12 knots (22.2 km/h) |
| Complement: | 85 |
| Sensors and processing systems: |
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| Armament: |
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HMCS Kitchener was a Royal Canadian Navy Flower-class corvette which took part in convoy escort duties during World War II. The vessel was originally named HMCS Vancouver but was renamed in November 1941 before the ship was launched.[1]
Following commissioning in Quebec City in June 1942 the ship transferred to Halifax, arriving on 16 July, and spent the next six weeks at Pictou, Nova Scotia working up.
She played the fictional HMCS Donnacona in the film Corvette K-225, released in 1943, the filming probably done during this unusually long working up period. In September she was briefly assigned to the Western Atlantic Escort Force (WLEF) before being reassigned as an escort for Operation Torch, the landings in North Africa. She sailed to Derry, arriving on 3 November and spent the next few months escorting convoys between the UK and the Mediterranean before returning to Canada in April 1943 as an escort for convoy ONS.2.
She was briefly assigned to the Western Support Force but in June was reassigned to Escort Group C-5 of the Mid-Ocean Escort Force where she made three round trips to Derry. An extensive refit in Liverpool, Nova Scotia was completed on 28 January 1944 and after two weeks working up in Bermuda the ship transferred to Milford Haven, Wales for escort duties associated with Operation Neptune.
Kitchener was the only Canadian corvette to participate in the 6 June D-Day invasion of Normandy, escorting the second wave of American infantry which landed at around 11 am on Omaha Beach, then assigned as picket ship for the heavy cruiser USS Augusta which was acting as General Omar Bradley's command ship. From August until May 1945 she was a member of Escort Group 41 based at Plymouth, England, after which she returned to Canada. The ship was decommissioned at Sorel-Tracy, Quebec in July 1945 and broken up in 1949.
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