On this day: Peters leads Oran harbour raid, 1942

On Nov. 8, 1942, Capt. Frederick Peters, a Charlottetown-born Royal Navy officer, led the sloop HMS Walney through the boom at Oran harbour in Algeria, an assault that earned him the Victoria Cross, according to Veterans Affairs Canada.

The attack, code-named Operation Reservist, was part of the Allied landings in North Africa known as Operation Torch. Its aim was to seize the harbour at Oran before the French garrison could wreck it, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Peters, then an acting captain, commanded the small force from Walney. A second former U.S. coast guard cutter, HMS Hartland, accompanied her. Both ships carried American troops, the commission said.

The ships came under point-blank fire from shore batteries, the sloop La Surprise and the destroyer Epervier, according to the commission. Walney reached the jetty disabled and ablaze, and she sank. Hartland was hit by fire from the French destroyer Typhon and blew up, Wikipedia’s account of the action says, with about half her crew lost.

Peters was blinded in one eye, according to the commission. Its account says he was the only survivor of the 11 officers and men on Walney’s bridge. The Victoria Cross citation, as quoted by Veterans Affairs Canada, gives the figure as 17, so the sources differ on that detail.

Peters and a handful of men reached shore and were taken prisoner. The operation did not achieve its aim, because the French had already damaged the harbour facilities, the commission said. Peters was freed on Nov. 10, 1942, when the French garrison surrendered.

Peters was born on Sept. 17, 1889, the son of Frederick Peters, a premier of Prince Edward Island, according to Veterans Affairs Canada and the commission. He had served in the Royal Navy since the First World War and held the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Service Cross with a bar before Oran, according to Wikipedia.

The United States recognized his part in the raid with the Distinguished Service Cross, with general orders dated Nov. 23, 1942, the commission said.

He did not live to see the honours. On Nov. 13, 1942, Peters was returning to Britain aboard a Short Sunderland flying boat when it crash-landed in thick fog in Plymouth Sound, at the entrance to Devonport Dockyard. The pilot, Flt.-Lt. Wynton Thorpe of the Royal Australian Air Force, held him in the water for about 90 minutes, but he was dead when a rescue launch arrived, according to the commission. He was 53.

The Victoria Cross was gazetted in London on May 14, 1943, according to Veterans Affairs Canada and Wikipedia. The citation praised his valour in taking Walney “in an enterprise of desperate hazard” into the harbour of Oran on Nov. 8, 1942. The commission quotes an Admiralty announcement dated May 18, 1943, a few days later.

Peters has no known grave. He is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial, Panel 61, Column 3, according to Veterans Affairs Canada. A mountain near Nelson, B.C., was named Mount Peters in his honour in 1946, the commission said.

The raid has been overshadowed in Canadian memory by the larger campaigns of the Second World War, and Peters is one of the few Prince Edward Islanders to receive the Victoria Cross. His story is told in Sam McBride’s 2012 biography, “The Bravest Canadian.”

As Remembrance Day nears, readers can find free transit offers for veterans and the story of William Hall, another Canadian who won the VC. Yesterday’s feature looked at the first successful lung transplant in 1983.

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