John Schumacher first came to Bermuda as a fresh faced boy with the Canadian RoyalNavy during the Second World War.

Seventy years later, as a nonagenarian, he is still visiting the Island with his wife Mary and The Royal Gazette talked with the Schumachers at the Salt Kettle Guest House in Paget.

Mr.Schumacher joined the Navy at the age of 19. He was on the first convoy crossing the Atlantic after war broke out in September 1939.

"The war was only a week old when I went to England," he said. "It was a wonderful experience in England at that time.

"The war was just breaking out and everything was just beginning to develop. Seeing all those big ships that we had only seen in news reels was quite exciting."

In England, he joined a destroyer and went back with it to Canada to run convoys.

Because his destroyer had no heat, it was sent to the West Indies where the Royal Navy had 46 German ships blockaded.

When one of the German ships sailed, his ship, the HMCS Assiniboine "tore off" to join the British cruiser the HMS Dunedin which captured the German merchant ship Hanover on March 8, 1940.

"When the Dunedin stopped the German ship, we went alongside to help put out the fires," said Mr. Schumacher. "We damaged our side quite a bit.

"We took her in tow and took her into Jamaica. We had so much damage done we had to come to the dry dock in Bermuda. That was early March. We spent two weeks getting repairs done.

"The dry dock in Bermuda was smaller than the dry docks of today. The dry docks of today are often built for 800 foot ships. The one in Bermuda was built for maybe a 400 to 500 foot ship. It was built for a cruiser."

He described Bermuda in the 1940s as "a lovely place".

He returned to Bermuda later as a gunner on the armed merchant cruiser HMCS Prince Henry.

"We came down to Bermuda around Christmas time," he said. "That was when the Americans had first arrived here.

"That was when they were having the problems. They were bulldozing part of the island to make the airport.

"There was a lot of fuss about it. When there wasn't much going on so we use to wander around Hamilton.

"It reminded me of a quiet seaport town t was very much different than today. It was not painted up like it is today. It wasn't seedy, but it was like a retired seaport town that had passed its glory days and hadn't yet found new glory days."

Mr. Schumacher spent several years in hunter groups searching out German U-boats which were decimating British and American ships early in the war.

At one point during the war, a glider bomb struck his frigate.

"These frigates were very tough," said Mr. Schumacher. "We had a 50 foot hole. It broke the keel and the back was wobbling up and down. We towed her into port. We weren't that far from Plymouth,

He said the scariest moment for him was when he was on a gasoline tanker as a gunner in March 1941.

"We broke down and were drifting across the Atlantic," said Mr.Schumacher. "A ship called the Chilean Reefer passed us. We knew the Scharnhorst was in our vicinity."

The Scharnhorst was the crown jewel in the German fleet.It was said to be one of the most beautiful battleships on the ocean. On this trip, it was travelling with its sister ship, the Gneisenau.

"About an hour and a half later we could hear the Chilean Reefer being fired on by the Scharnhorst.

We could see her burning in the distance."

The Chilean Reefer was a tiny ship, but bravely returned fire on the Gneisenau.

The firing back of such a small ship confused the captain of the Gneisenau The captain thought that perhaps the Chilean Reefer was actually a disguised armed cruiser, or carried torpedoes.

The Gneisenau moved off a little and began firing its 11-inch guns.

But the ocean was so large and the Chilean Reefer so small on it, that it took more than 70 rounds to sink it, more than the total expended on any other single target during the cruise.

The tanker that Mr.Schumacher was on, narrowly escaped being fired on by the Scharnhorst, but it was busy with other ships, and it wasn't powerful enough to take on the British battleships in the area.

"We thought we were next," said Mr. Schumacher. "But nothing happened."

The Scharnhorst was sunk in December 1943 in the Battle of North Cape.

In those days, if a ship in a convoy was sunk survivors would often be left behind in the water, while the other ships got out of the way of danger.

But Mr.Schumacher said no ship he was on, ever left survivors behind.

"There was one ship that disappeared for a couple of days," said Mr >Schumacher. "It turned out it had gone back to pick up survivors, against orders.

"How they managed to carry 186 survivors aboard one corvette I don't know. We weren't supposed to but most of our ships would pick up the survivors."

But he said once rescued from the icy waters of the Atlantic, people often died on the deck.

"At that time we really didn't understand hypothermia," said MrSchumacher. "The rescuers would try to warm up the survivors right away, and that could be fatal when it came to hypothermia.

"The RoyalNavy lost 35,000 people in the Navy due to hypothermia."

During the war, Mr. Schumacher also spent time on corvettes, such as the HMCS Moosejaw and the HMCS Amherst. Corvettes were small, manoeuvrable, lightly armed warships.

"Accommodations on the corvettes were pretty tiny," said Mr. Schumacher. "They were built to hold 45 people, and we had 108. It was pretty crowded."

It was a 17 to 21 day crossing from Newfoundland, Canada, to Derry,Northern Ireland. "The big problem was food," he said. "On the corvettes, we would run out of food very quickly. Bread would go mouldy in about three or four days.

"We had big pilot biscuits in cans. We had corned beef.The cooks would always make up a pot of soup no matter what the weather was.<\p>We ate alright. We were never hungry."

He said the corvettes were very safe ships.

"We were at sea in the corvettes with waves up to 70 feet high and they rode through it quite comfortably," he said.

He spent a total of 64 months at sea, during the Second World War.

After the war, in 1951, he returned to Bermuda with the Canadian RoyalNavy headed for the Korean War.

He retired from the Canadian RoyalNavy in 1966. He obtained a certificate to work as master on other ships.

" I spent a lot of time up in the Arctic on icebreakers," he said. "We were up there in the winter time it was very cold and dark.

"You had to watch out for icebergs.There are a lot of things in the Arctic that people don't really understand.

"You couldn't run in a straight line, for example. You are constantly moving about to find easy ice."

After working for long periods in the icy Arctic, sunny Bermuda, naturally sounded like a good place for a vacation.

He and his wife Mary have made over 40 trips to Bermuda, over the years.

Only Mr.Schumacher's granddaughter Alexandra has followed him into the Navy.