Rats leaving the sinking ship?
Owners and operators of big American companies are selling their stock. A piece in the Wall Street Journal says the super rich, such as Elon Musk of Tesla, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are big sellers, getting rid of more than $200-million each.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and members of the Walton family of War Mart also selling. A finance professor told the Journal that the super rich have a history of selling at the top and buying back in at the bottom.
Cathie Wood, the investment guru who runs ARK Investment is off her game. The Financial Times says ARK Disruptive Innovation ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) returned gains of 40 per cent over the past five years.
But it is down 17 per cent this year and 34 per cent since its peak in February. If it wasn't for her huge gain in Tesla shares, ARKK (its stock symbol) would be even lower.
Transitory no more: inflation is back big time
American inflation is at 6.8%, higher than its been since 1982 when the formidable Paul Volcker of the US Federal Reserve wrestled it to the ground.
Volcker succeeded, but at a huge cost, pushing interest rates to 20% to kill inflation.
Current central bankers have had their heads in the sand. Now they will have to act. The Bank of Montreal says consumer rates — think mortgages— will go up early in 2022 and will then go up eleven times in a row. Pain is on the horizon.
European Natural Gas prices
The numbers aren’t that clear, all you really need to know is that the price of natural gas is through the roof. The Netherlands is on the left and the price is much cheaper than Germany on the right. The Dutch have their own natural gas supply.
Germany and the rest of Europe depend on Russia. It could be a cold winter, in particular if there is a war in Ukraine. Canada has natural gas coming out its ears but can only export to the United States as federal and provincial governments have blocked any routes to world markets.
Who needs profit?
One would think that the object of starting a business is to make money. Not at the BDC, a Canadian government agency that says its job is to lend money to new businesses. Its ad says, in part, that BDC is “…all for breaking down barriers and building businesses that are more sustainable and inclusive… and delivering value beyond profit.”
Sounds more like a Liberal Party campaign ad. The copywriters must have got their orders from the top.
Speaking of top down
Canada’s minister of Environment and Climate Change is thinking about forcing car dealers to sell a certain percentage of electric cars. Stéphane Guilbeault says he wants that done within the next year.
“We’re at three, maybe four per cent, (electrical car sales of total) we have to get the 50.” You wonder how telling car dealers to sell more electric vehicle will work? Car companies maybe. Subsidies to car buyers maybe. That’s how Norway got to 50% plus. Including free parking. Someone doesn’t understand how markets work.
Bombers in Britain
I stumbled across the map below and it reminded me England was like an aircraft carrier in the Second World War. My father was in Bomber Command; he was a bomb aimer, the guy who pushed the button. The British, Canadian, Australian, South African, Jamaican and other crews flew from Royal Air Force Fields and they flew at night. The had a one in two chance of making it through the war. My father was 23 when he went over, old for bomber crews. He and many others became heavy drinkers.
The US Eighth Air Force flew in the daytime. “In 1943, bomber crews were tasked with a 25-mission tour of duty. Most crews never made it past their fifth,” said an online history site. Their bases, for B-17s and B24s, were all over England. When I was shooting a television item in the British Midlands in the early 1990s I remember being snubbed by an older man in a hardware store. The cameraman said: “They’re still angry about what you did to their daughters during the war.”
The Americans were helped by the development of the P-51 Mustang, an American fighter with a British Spitfire engine that could fly all the way to Berlin and back.
Many years after the war I took my car to a German mechanic, Horst Kroll. We became good friends. Horst was a young boy in 1945 and was hiding with his mother in a house 50 kilometres outside of Dresden when it was bombed. He told me the earth shook for hours as bombs fell on the city. When he went outside at night he remembered the burning city lit up the sky like the sun.
Essay of the Week
This is the third instalment from my book on Harry Steele, The Commander . It deals with his time in the Royal Canadian Navy. I have edited it for length. I hope you find it an interesting read.
Chapter 3
In The Navy
“People would be well advised to go on receive sometimes rather than transmit.” A favourite Harry Steele aphorism from his days in the Royal Canadian Navy.
The navy was made for Harry, and in many ways it made him. The boy from Musgrave Harbour embraced the discipline of the navy while he was at Memorial University. Once he graduated, Harry started a life at sea almost right away.
Harry was assigned first to HMCS Cabot, the naval headquarters in St. John's. According to the Naval List, the first ship he was assigned to was HMCS Ontario, a Light Cruiser, the largest warship (apart from aircraft carriers) in the Royal Canadian Navy, and the most powerful ship in the RCN at the time. In 1951 it took Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Phillip from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Newfoundland during the Royal Visit.
When Harry joined the Ontario as a junior officer, she went on a training cruise from Esquimalt in British Columbia across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand.
By the middle of 1954, he was serving on HMCS Magnificent, an aircraft carrier known affectionately to her crew as the Maggie. Harry was on the Magnificent for a little more than a year, but missed the ship's biggest deployment, bringing Canadian peacekeeping troops to police the Suez crisis, the initiative that won the Nobel Peace Prize for the future prime minister, Lester Pearson.
That was a one-off assignment for the Royal Canadian Navy. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Navy's main task was patrolling the North Atlantic keeping an eye on Soviet vessels, from spy ships disguised as trawlers to submarines. That was the world Harry was about to enter. When he left the Magnificent, he was posted to a specialized Royal Navy training school in the naval port of Portsmouth England.
The school was called HMS Mercury. Training establishments, similar to onshore naval depots in Canada, carried the names of ships, and HMS Mercury specialized in communications. Harry was there for the better part of a year, and Catherine went with him. She recalls that she enjoyed her time in England.
"We went to England not long after we were married. I loved it," recalls Catherine Steele. She gave up teaching in St John's to go with Harry. They didn't have children at the time. Their son Peter would be born in September of 1956, by which time they were back in Canada.
What Harry learned in England would shape the rest of his naval career. Captain (Ret'd) Edward `Ted' Kelly was a senior officer in the RCN and describes how junior officers moved on to a speciality once they gained a bit of seniority.
"In those days after you served at sea for a while the next step was to specialize in some facet of the operations and the areas of specialization in those days were: communications, navigation and direction or gunnery or torpedo anti-submarine fields. Harry was interested in communications. So he went to England and did what was called a long course, which meant that at the end he was a specialist in communications," says Ted.
When Harry returned to duty at sea, it was aboard HMCS Nootka, the most modern of the Tribal Class destroyers, such as the Haida and the Huron, which had distinguished themselves in the Second World War. The Nootka, built in Halifax, entered service just after the war. Harry joined as the communications officer in charge of all radio traffic, trained in what he calls "reading other people's mail," that is monitoring the signals sent from others ships, in particular, Soviet vessels and other ships of the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance headed by the Soviet Union.
All Tribal Class destroyers were named after native groups, and the Nootka took the name of an indigenous group on the coast of British Columbia. During Harry's time on the Nootka, the ship would have been at the center of an Escort Group patrolling with the Atlantic Fleet of the Royal Canadian Navy.
Serving on a Tribal was a rite of passage in the RCN. The ships were well armed and fast: The Nootka's maximum speed was 36.5 knots, the equivalent of 67.6 kilometres an hour. It was one of the first two Canadian naval ships to circumnavigate the world, though not on Harry's watch.
Harry's next ship was HMCS Sault Ste. Marie, a minesweeper that had seen service in the Second World War. While he was serving on the Sault Ste. Marie, Harry was promoted to Lieutenant; though the same name as an army rank, a naval Lieutenant outranked an Army person with the same rank.
In 1959 Harry was posted to Naval Headquarters in Halifax, HMCS Stadcona. No one, especially Harry, will tell you what he was doing there, but one can only assume he was involved in the listening post aspect of the naval base of the Atlantic Fleet. The following year he moved to another naval base in Nova Scotia, HMCS Cornwallis, the center for training new recruits and as a naval communication specialist Harry's specialized skills and training would have been put to good use.
The Naval List has Harry back at sea aboard HMCS Fort Erie in 1961. This is a posting we know a lot about, because of the recollections of a fellow officer, Bill Shead, who is retired and now lives in Selkirk, Manitoba.
"Harry and I were shipmates on HMCS Fort Erie. I joined the ship in June of 1960 and left maybe one and a half or two years later. This was the squadron leadership for the 7th squadron, and Harry was the squadron's communications officer," says Bill.
That meant that all communications operations of the other ships reported to Harry. The job was to monitor traffic at sea. This was the apex of tension in the Cold War. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev tested the resolve of the newly elected American president, John F. Kennedy by sending missiles to Cuba. The Berlin Wall was built that year. The American backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed.
NATO ships patrolling the North Atlantic, including those of the Royal Canadian Navy, were on full alert. Lieutenant Harry Steele was busy decoding messages and monitoring Russian language radio traffic.
"We had a section of communications called radiomen supplementary, and these were radiomen who basically listened for Russian traffic or enemy traffic on special frequencies in a special section of the ship," says Bill Shead.
"These radiomen, in some cases, had special training in the Russian language. They were basically off by themselves, unlike all the other communicators who would be responsible for standing their watch in the communications centre for example. The radiomen supplementary who were doing this spook job, if you want to call it that, had one area that they went to and the communications officer was generally the only one that went in there to see what was going on," says Bill.
"Harry wasn't only responsible for the communications but for the encryptions because most of our traffic went out encrypted. We had confidential books and codes that we had to set, and if we were receiving traffic with a high-security requirement, the message would come in encoded and then it would have to be decoded which went to either one of the senior communicators on board. Harry would have to go up and use the Canadian version of the Enigma machine."
"We saw an awful lot of Russian traffic, particularly fishermen and when there's fishermen you'll also find that there's usually a Russian spook ship, a spy ship as they were called. They were pretty overt because they had to be fairly large with big antenna arrays and sometimes dishes, so you knew it was more than a trawler," says Bill.
To this day, both Bill and Harry are pretty close-lipped about any incidents. They signed the Official Secrets Act, and they still take it seriously.
Harry saw a lot of the world in the navy. On one tour he visited West Africa, in particular Ghana and Nigeria, members of the British Commonwealth. Harry oldest son Peter remembers his father telling him how he was affected by the poverty, with people coming to find food in the garbage cans of the ships.
There was more to life on Canadian ships than reading radio traffic. There was the routine, and that's when men got to know each other.
"Harry often sat watches, and I was his second officer of the watch while I was under training. Each watch was four hours. When the ship was underway, you were responsible for the navigation of the ship, and you would instigate anything like a man overboard rescue. Generally, when you are on watch, you would keep the position fixed if you were in pilotage waters or in areas where you could actually take a fix. Sometimes in those days, the only way you could take a fix was by maintain a dead reckoning of the ship's track from one fix to another," says Bill.
"In the morning you would get up, and you would fix the ship's position with the star fixes or things like that, and then you'd predict its track depending on the course and speed of the ship and then around noon you'd take another sight, this time probably sun and you'd fix the ship's position again. Nowadays it's all GPS, and people don't know anything about fixing a ship's position."
They would take the `fix' or location using a sextant, an instrument first used by the Royal Navy in the early 18th century.
HMCS Fort Erie was an older and slower vessel from the Second World War. It was a River Class Frigate, ordered during the war as an improvement on the Corvettes, which were the backbone of the wartime Royal Canadian Navy. Fort Erie's top speed was around twenty knots. Like the Corvette, it was an anti-submarine vessel, but the Fort Erie was faster than a Corvette, better armed and equipped with more accurate ways of aiming depth charges at submarines.
"Harry was the squadron communications officer. In those days the squadron commander was also the commanding officer of the lead ship. In this case the squadron commander was (Commander Latham) `Yogi' Jensen and all of his staff officers were also ship's officers and from time to time he would send one of them to another frigate in the squadron to carry out an inspection or do whatever was required of his duty as a squadron commander," recalls Bill Shead.
"Harry was responsible for all the communications in the ship and in the squadron. In those days we didn't have computers, and we relied a lot on radio frequency traffic, high frequency when we were far out at sea, UHF when we were in close company and VHF for a little bit longer range.”
"Close company means line of sight. For UHF your range for radio is probably just over the horizon whereas with high frequency you have a longer radio wave and you can transmit radio internationally. So, if we were off the east coast of Africa, we would send high-frequency radio to send communications traffic back to Canada. But if we were travelling with a group of ships our normal method of communication would have been on the UHF so the range of our communication would only remain probably within an area of twenty miles."
The navy is the most formal branch of the Canadian military. There is a reason for it: to maintain discipline at sea in a crowded ship demands sticking to the rules, and tradition and proper dress are part of those rules, staying neat and civilised when the easy thing to do would be to let things go. Discipline and order. That extended to relatively formal dining habits.
"We were a pretty tight boardroom because on a frigate we were a dozen officers and we were a senior ship, so we set an example in terms of dress and deportment and what we did in the wardroom was traditional. Harry was a very good shipmate. He had a tremendous sense of humour," says Bill.
Harry was also the wardroom wine caterer. Though never a big drinker, Harry was in charge of making sure the officers were supplied with wine and liquor. The ship was a duty-free zone of its own. When it entered a foreign port, it would be Harry's job to buy duty-free liquor and wine from chandlers, the name of the people who supplied ships, both warships and merchant vessels. It wasn't only the officers he was buying for. In those days the Royal Canadian Navy still served up a `tot' of rum, two and half ounces of dark rum, to the sailors every day, a tradition carried over from the Royal Navy and only stopped in 1972.
A navy ship was also a floating Canadian embassy when it visited Lagos or Antwerp.
"Because we were responsible for hosting dignitaries in foreign ports, we in the wardroom had a fairly good supply of wines and spirits which Harry would buy, and we would use that for the hospitality that we would have to extend on official occasions. Wardroom members could buy liquor at duty-free prices," says Bill Shead.
He describes the formal dinners at sea and in port that made the long tours at sea more tolerable.
"If we had a mess dinner you'd have soup and sherry, and then you'd have the main course with white and red wine, and then you'd have port afterwards and maybe liqueurs after that. It sounds like a lot, but over the space of a few hours, it really wasn't. Nobody got blind-eyed drunk and certainly not on the Fort Erie."
HMCS Gatineau was the pride of the Canadian fleet when Harry served on her in 1963. The Gatineau was a modern Canadian destroyer, its sleek design unlike anything seen in the RCN before. While serving on the Gatineau, Harry was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. The following year he served on a sister ship, HMCS Restigouche, a vessel of identical design. The Cold War continued, and Canadian ships patrolled the North Atlantic, and the Communications Officer was busy reading Russian radio traffic and sending encrypted messages to other ships and bases on shore. It was war without the shooting.
Those two destroyers were the last ships Harry served on. In 1965 he was sent to Washington, attached to the Canadian embassy. He never spoke of this work there, but it was almost certainly naval intelligence, shared with Canada's NATO allies, in particular, the United States. The Naval List cryptically classifies Harry as a Code 09, which was communications.
"He would have been on the staff of the Embassy there," says Ted Kelly. "We had a defense liaison officer in Washington so there would have been an attaché there so Harry would have been on the Embassy staff probably with the responsibility for maintaining the relationships with the communications people in the United States Navy and also would have been involved in monitoring technological equipment developments because of the nature of that industry in the U.S. which was well in advance of our own."
Harry's next posting would be his last with the navy. He was named commander of the Canadian Forces Base in Gander, Newfoundland. In many ways, it was coming home. As the helicopter flies, Gander is only 71 kilometres from Musgrave Harbour.
"When he came to Gander, he was the commander, and they were setting up what, for lack of a better term, was a listening station which the locals affectionately called the turkey farm. The locals in Gander called soldiers turkeys at the time, I don't know if they still do," says John Steele.
"As you flew into Gander you could see the turkey farm. It was a circular enclosure, a square building within a circular enclosure having high antennas and wires and all that type of stuff."
Civilians, even those working at the airport, could only guess what all that equipment was for. Newfoundland juts out into the North Atlantic, and Gander is so close to the coast it makes the perfect listening post. The base there was originally a secret airfield set up by the Americans in conjunction with the British, who ruled Newfoundland at the time.
When Lieutenant Commander Steele arrived in Gander he brought his own form of military discipline and his own likes and dislikes. One thing he did not like was smoking, even the smell of smoke.
“When dad took up his posting in Gander the commander of the base was given a car and a driver,” says Peter Steele. “His first day and he went up to the base in his finest Navy Blues all pressed and I even remember the car, a black Plymouth and as dad went out to his first day the driver was smoking. Dad sent him off to go and clean the car right away. Let me say that he expressed his displeasure and the driver understood that he was never to smoke in the car again.”
Harry was base commander in Gander from 1969 to 1974, the longest stretch in one posting in his 30-year career in the navy. Since neither Harry nor anyone who served with him will say much about what went on at the time, we can only surmise by looking back what went on in those years. The United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War and would not leave until 1973.
In August of 1968, the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing a liberalisation movement there, and exerting its hold on the so-called Eastern Bloc for the next 20 years. Tensions between the Soviets and NATO continued in the North Atlantic and in the air. Soviet planes would test how close they could come to Canadian and American airspace, while Russian surface vessels and submarines played tag with American and Canadian warships.
All of this meant radio traffic and monitoring it, and deciphering it, was the job overseen by Lieutenant Commander Harry Steele, a naval man who was commanding an airbase. But the turkey farm was more important than the airbase at the height of the Cold War.
"Gander was also a communications establishment. A lot of that was radio supplementary as they called the listening posts," says Ted Kelly.
Bill Shead has more than one theory about why Harry left the Navy, and it was more than just unification and the green uniform. One reason was that promotion was slow in the navy, and getting slower as the Trudeau government spent less on defence. Fewer ships meant fewer opportunities for command.
"Career opportunities for naval officers began to shrink in the 1960s: we got rid of the aircraft carrier, and our ships were downsizing. We were paying off the old World War II vessels, and the new ships were coming online, but they weren't coming along as fast as we were paying off the older ships. So opportunities for command and for further progression kept contracting. I would think that Harry, having ambitions and having knowledge of what was going on in the outside world, saw a tremendous opportunity that he wanted to seize on civilian street. He had studied what was going on in the finance world, and he was not a fellow who would want to miss a real opportunity to do something. One of the things about being a communicator, he saw things coming in technology that some of us in other specialties probably did not see. I know of one petty officer second class on the ship who was a communicator who got out at about the same time as Harry, and he bought into cable and did extremely well for himself."
"Let me tell you this story about Harry. I think it exemplifies his philosophy of life and why he has succeeded the way he has," says his shipmate, Bill Shead. "In our first days at sea we went to Bermuda, and that was the first time we had the opportunity of re-stocking the wardroom bar. So Harry, being the wardroom wine caterer went ashore and got all the booze and brought it back making sure the ship was well-stocked.
One day this executive officer who was president of the wardroom asked, "Harry, how come we have so many different varieties of scotch in the bar?"
You know, in a wardroom there were maybe ten or twelve officers and not all of them drank scotch but we had about seven different brands, and Harry said to the executive officer, generally known as ‘number one', he said, "Number one, I'd hate like hell to have a guest come aboard this ship and ask for a drink that we don't have." So there was his approach to his service in a nutshell.”
Ted Kelly is a retired Captain who served in the same squadron as Harry, though never on the same ship. For those not familiar with military ranks, a Captain in the Royal Canadian Navy is a much more senior rank than a Captain in the Navy. A naval captain is equal to a full Colonel in the army.
"In those days each ship had a communications department comprised of three different elements of communicators: One were the signalmen who operated visual signals like lights, semaphore, flags and all of that. The other were the radiomen who handled all the radio communications. There was a broadcast and all the transmission in those days was all by Morse. Then also they had the radio supplementary branch which were the people who monitored communications circuits around the world that was part of the Cold War."
That meant Harry and his team were listening for signals from Russian submarine signals and all communications that from sources that they knew had material or information that was directed toward the Russian Fleet operations.
"The Canadian Navy in those days drew upon its wartime experience where it was principally an anti-submarine convoy escort. It formed the principal task of the Canadian Navy, and we got pretty good at it and, as a result, our post-war contribution to the NATO Alliance was directed toward anti-submarine which was considered to be the major threat in those days," says Captain Kelly.
"I knew Harry more by observation than by close collegial association. He was a well-known and well-respected naval officer. As you might expect he had a strong personality and he cut a figure, he had a reputation. He knew how to handle people; he was particularly good at leading people."
Harry Steele was one of the first Newfoundlanders to join the Royal Canadian Navy. Before March 31, 1949, when Newfoundland became part of Canada, the option would have been joining Britain's Royal Navy, a class-ridden service that probably would not have accepted a colonial as an officer.
The Royal Canadian Navy was more open, as is Canadian society in general compared to Britain. The navy experience prepared Harry Steele for his future success in business, success that did not surprise Captain Ted Kelly.
"I wasn't surprised at all. I'll give you a quick anecdote: in about 1964 or so, the 5th squadron paid a visit to Philadelphia in support of a trade exhibition show. Canadian External Affairs people put on these trade exhibitions to drum up interest in things. I guess we were about four or five ships then went into Philadelphia. The External Affairs people were having difficulty coping with this particular trade show and it was either the trade consul or the ambassador who mentioned something at a luncheon either on the first day or just before the show opened to the squadron commander who was a man by the name of McKnight, often known by his nickname ‘Toughie McKnight' and he came to Harry and said, ‘Harry, they tell me they're having trouble down there, would you go down there and sort them out?"
Harry went down, and he found out that a lot of the difficulties were communications difficulties in terms of queries that were coming from different organizations and people, it was just kind of a chaotic situation. Harry gathered up a bunch of communications people from the ships and took them down. This was a four or five-day exposition and pretty soon Harry was running it. The External Affairs people just weren't up to the take charge thing, and Harry just stepped in and took charge of it. At the end of it, the Ambassador was effusive in his remarks about how the Navy had saved the day for them, principally Harry.
Harry’s time in navy formed his attitudes towards business. He could solve a problem in a hurry. On a warship if there was something wrong, it had to be fixed, no excuses.
"One thing I learned was when I did most of my training in the Royal Navy was to believe fervently that anything was possible. I believed that, and I still do," says Harry.
He gave the example of one aspect of his advanced training that he was not that keen on learning to fly or at least understand the world of pilots.
"We had to take compulsory pilot training, and I had absolutely no desire ever to be a pilot, none, zero. I remember flying in an aircraft in the UK, and I told the instructor "I don't want to fly airplanes," and he told me if I didn't want to fly airplanes let's fly bottom up and he rolled the airplane over," remembers Harry.
In retrospect, the lesson was that if a Naval officer was going to command people, he better understand everything that is happening on his watch, and that includes military aircraft. "It was a valuable lesson," says Harry, and something that guided him when he was running a complex business empire later in life. He always wanted to know what the people working for him were doing.
His family members think Harry should have been promoted beyond the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. Harry might think so, but he is too modest to say that so many years later.
"I might have been, but that's the natural thinking to have. You always thought you were more deserving. But I'll tell you one thing they did do that shocked the hell out of everybody: you had to wait eight years to be promoted from Lieutenant to Lieutenant Commander. It was automatic. So they took six people to promote after six and a half years, and I was one of the ones they picked in all the Navy, so I was pleased with that. It was the best victory I ever had in my life. So I have no bitter feelings at all about the Navy," says Harry.
Harry's last posting in the navy was in Gander, where he was commander of the base. The Cold War was still on Gander was a vital listening post, in particular for submarine traffic in the North Atlantic. You can't pry a word out of Harry on the subject, other than he was "…reading other people's mail."
When asked if he ever found or listened to anything interesting he has a curt response: "No but if I did I wouldn't talk about it. A long time ago be damned, it makes no difference to me." As his sons point out, his career at the navy was not something their father spoke about at home.
"That part of our father's life he kept very much to himself. He never shared with us about the ships that he went on or about what he did with the communications or being trained by the Brits," says Peter Steele. "We were very young at the time and as we came up and we'd ask him about that it was either one-liners of, if pushed on it, it was obtuse responses that were very vacuous without much content or substance to them."
"I remember he spent a lot of time in Tampa which we didn't know was a large US Military facility. He'd go down there every year we were posted in Washington for the better part of a month, and he would never tell us about what he was working on or what he did and to this day never has. So he was a guy who lived by a code: the Official Secrets Act."
Reid Nicholson served with Harry at Gander, and he feels the same way. The Cold War may be over, but the Cold Warriors are going to the grave with their secrets.
"I can't go into that, and I'm not trying to be coy, I just can't," says Reid, who started in the Navy as an ordinary seaman but was commissioned as an officer after many years of service.
When he came to Gander it was as commanding officer. He came from Washington where he was a naval attaché to the diplomatic liaison services.
You might wonder why a naval man was in charge of what everyone thought of an airbase, a giant aviation gas stop for aircraft both military and civilian travelling from the New World to the Old and back again? The reason is that from a military point of view, the aviation bit was secondary. Goose Bay was where the fighter jocks trained and the Italians flew their planes upside down over the runway.
Gander was about intelligence and the Commander was the expert.
There was a branch of the Navy called Radio Special. They had stations at sea and on land, in the Queen Charlotte Islands off Vancouver Island, across the north and one of the biggest, if not the largest, was a Gander. The home base was Ottawa. We can forget the past tense; these operations still go on, perhaps almost as much today as they did during the Cold War.
Not only did these bases listen for radio traffic they also used direction finding techniques to figure which ships were where. If NATO intelligence services wanted a piece of information, key bases such as Gander would help find that out. Electronic spy craft. Highly secret stuff.
Gander’s position is unique, stuck out in the North Atlantic.
“It was fundamentally a communications station. There was a radar base there. The base was all-encompassing, we had what they called an air weapons control which was run by the Air Force. We had a search and rescue component and we had at the base that I was serving on which, at that time was an old base and very small, it's much bigger today. It was a direction-finding station and Harry came there as the commanding officer of the whole thing. The Air Force and the Coast Guard came under him,” said Reid Nicholson a naval officer who served with Harry at Gander for five years.
Reid says he agrees totally with Harry's position on the integration of the Armed Forces and the new uniforms.
“Harry resisted putting on the green uniform. When they brought this in a lot of us had a really strong opinion. This, to us, was an absolutely incredible insult and was asinine from the very beginning and doomed to fail which is why, as history proved, they moved back to the old uniforms, as far as they can,” says Reid.
“As I recall it, I don't know if he ever did put on a green uniform and if he did it was done under duress. He was a lieutenant commander. He was never a major (the equivalent rank, though the Naval List disputes than claim). There was a group of us who I will call Navy people who maintained their naval ranks such as Chief Petty Officers. There was an Admiral who I don't remember by name who sent a message around saying he didn't care what anybody else said but he wouldn't serve under this and there were a lot of people who shared that view.”
Harry Steele represented almost everything in my mind that I believed a naval officer should represent. He didn't suffer fools lightly. I'm a great believer that rank is not a reward but a challenge and you have a responsibility to the people above you to do the job and to the people below you. Naval leadership is unlike in the army where they say ‘you go here and you go there', naval leadership is all about ‘follow me' and there's a difference in that. That was Harry Steele: "this is what I want you to do and this is how we're going to do it"… it was sort of a ‘we'. I had the greatest respect for him.”
The navy was the making of Harry Steele. It is doubtful he would have had such opportunity if he had stayed on the lower layers of society. Tough to say, but true.
"The Navy gave him a lot," says Peter Steele. "It gave him discipline and it helped him put a structure, how to put a plan together and how to make things happen. It taught him self-discipline how to be on time and it also opened him up to what could be by seeing Africa and spending time in Europe and going to these places."
Sitting in the restaurant of the Albatross in the fall of 2017, Harry agrees with that sentiment.
"The navy trained you well," says Harry. "You knew how to do things and you were never scared to do things; you always had a certain amount of independence, which is important." That self-confidence carried over to the next stage of his life as a businessman.