The steamship left the harbor and sailed into the perilous Atlantic with the tough Canadian kid bravely aboard. World War II had started two days earlier with the Nazi Germans’ invasion of Poland.
And Great Britain had quickly declared war against Germany.
Just as quickly, Hitler’s deadly U-Boats started searching the high seas for British shipping.
So it was that Bill Gadsby, an aspiring hockey player, was deposited into the ocean at age 12.
The U-30, a German submarine on patrol in the North Atlantic, fired a torpedo into the hull of the civilian passenger liner SS Athenia out of Glasgow and Liverpool on Sept.