Career
HMCS Micmac was launched on 18 September 1943, named in honour of the Mi'kmaq people of Nova Scotia, continuing the tradition of naming Canadian Tribal Class destroyers after Canadian First Nations. After many difficulties, especially the delayed arrival of the propulsion system from Inglis in Toronto, Micmac was commissioned on 18 September 1945, captained by Lieutenant Commander R.L. Hennessy, DSC, RCN. Although the war she was intended for had ended the previous May, Micmac was nonetheless the very first destroyer ever constructed in Canada. At an estimated cost of $8,500,000.00 CAD, roughly four times what it cost the RN to build a Tribal, she was also the single most expensive piece of military or naval equipment produced in Canada up to that time.
Commissioned into a rapidly shrinking navy and built for a form of naval war that could never again occur, Micmac was already obsolescent. In fact, the remaining four RN Tribal class destroyers that had managed to survive World War II were themselves paid off to disposal at the war's end and all were scrapped by 1949. Nonetheless, while the rest of Canada demobilized and dozens of other HMC Ships paid off into reserve or to disposal, Micmac's crew completed her workups and the ship entered into the routine existence of a peacetime navy with an horizon empty of any potential enemy.
Read more about this topic: HMCS Micmac (R10)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
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“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
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