Early Years
DeWolf was born in Bedford, Nova Scotia. His father owned and operated DeWolf & Sons, a shipbrokerage business.
DeWolf entered the Royal Canadian Navy in 1918 at age 15 when he attended the Royal Naval College of Canada at Esquimalt, British Columbia. The original RNCC had been destroyed in the Halifax Explosion the previous winter.
DeWolf graduated from RNCC in 1921 and was sent on an exchange with the Royal Navy to serve on board the battleship HMS Resolution (09). He was promoted to Sub-Lieutenant in 1924 and took a 6-month course in gunnery, torpedoes and navigation at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Returning to Canada in the summer of 1925, he was posted to one of the RCN's two destroyers, HMCS Patriot.
In early 1930, Lieutenant (Navy) DeWolf received his first command, the Battle class trawler HMCS Festubert at Halifax. In May 1931 he married Gwendolen Gilbert of Somerset, Bermuda who he had met while serving aboard HMCS Patriot which had spent a winter training there several years earlier. In 1932, DeWolf was posted to the destroyer HMCS Vancouver (F6A) and then in 1933 to the destroyer HMCS Skeena (D59).
In July 1935 he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and posted to National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ) in Ottawa. He was made Assistant Director of Intelligence and Plans and was part of the RCN's negotiation team for acquiring four used destroyers from the RN.
In 1937, DeWolf studied at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich and then served on an exchange with a RN cruiser squadron in the Mediterranean Sea during the Spanish Civil War.
Read more about this topic: Harry De Wolf
Famous quotes related to early years:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)