Marine Falcon

The ship

The C4 was the largest standard cargo hull of the American wartime programme, and the C4-S-A3 variant was completed as a troop transport. Ships of this design were built to carry several thousand soldiers, and a contemporary account of the refugee sailings notes that although the C4s could hold 3,485 troops they usually took fewer than 700 displaced persons, the space going to family accommodation, hospitals and stores for a long passage.61

After trooping and repatriation work in Asia and Europe in 1945 and 1946, Marine Falcon appears in United Nations archive listings as an UNRRA repatriation ship in the China theatre, and in 1948 on the northern European emigrant service. The government fleet record shows her laid up and reactivated repeatedly in the following years, entering the reserve fleet on 14 October 1948, leaving it on 9 December 1948 and re-entering on 15 April 1949. She was sold out of government hands to Waterman Steam Ship Company in November 1964 and finally struck off in August 1965.14

A handbook of the troopships published in April 1947 records her first voyage. She left San Francisco in late September 1945 and reached Yokohama in early October, called at Osaka, Wakayama and Nagoya in Japan and at Inchon in Korea, and returned to Portland, Oregon, in early November.8

The 1948 voyages

The museum at Pier 21 records three arrivals, all with the same long list of ports: Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Bremen, Antwerp, Le Havre, Southampton, Plymouth and Cobh, then Halifax and New York. She reached Halifax on 28 March 1948 with 431 passengers, on 24 May 1948 with 600 and on 23 June 1948 with 600. The operator on all three records is United States Lines.2

That itinerary is worth reading closely. A ship that called at Hamburg, Bremerhaven and Bremen was loading from the British and American zones of Germany, where the great majority of Ukrainian displaced persons were held; the Channel and Irish calls added ordinary emigrants and returning passengers; and the double destination of Halifax and New York meant that Canadian and American admissions could be carried on the same hull.2

No inspection report on conditions aboard was found. The general pattern on the American transports out of Bremerhaven in 1948 is documented: families were not quartered together, men berthed aft and women forward, meals were taken standing at high tables, and passengers provided their own cleaning, galley and engine-room work details. Nothing in the sources read shows that the Marine Falcon differed from this.6

A Ukrainian family aboard

The best-documented Ukrainian passage on the ship is a family testimony held by the museum at Pier 21. The family's history before the voyage runs through both dictatorships: Soviet exile and forced labour between 1929 and 1935, then German forced labour in Austria from 1942 to 1945. Liberated in May 1945, they crossed the Alps on foot to reach an American military post and spent three years at Camp Lexenfeld near Salzburg.3

In June 1948 they sailed from Bremerhaven on the Marine Falcon. The entry records that Pier 21 in Halifax welcomed them on 23 June 1948, the date of the third recorded arrival. Their account describes a quick passage through customs and then a Canadian Pacific train across the country to Taber in southern Alberta, where a sponsoring sugar-beet farmer met them at the station and took them to a converted grain bin that became their first home. The father worked out a two-year agricultural sponsorship agreement, and the family built their own house between 1951 and 1953.32

That contract was the ordinary condition of entry. Canada admitted nearly 200,000 displaced persons between 1947 and 1952, many of them under bulk labour schemes that assigned them to farms, mines and mills for a fixed term. About 34,000 Ukrainians came in between 1947 and 1954, chiefly out of the camps in Austria and Germany. Neither figure is specific to this ship, and no Ukrainian count survives for any Marine Falcon sailing.7

A contributor to a merchant-marine message board recalled a Ukrainian scouting presence on the June 1948 crossing: a Plast sea camp named Atliantyk, at one of whose meetings, on 19 June 1948, the boy and girl scouts assembled and sang songs. The recollection was posted long afterwards and has not been checked against any record.9

Reception at Halifax

Arrivals landed at Pier 21, the immigration shed on the Halifax waterfront, where medical and civil examination took place under one roof and voluntary agencies met the trains. A customs officer of the period remembered that arrivals brought almost nothing of value, their belongings in sacks and a few battered cardboard suitcases. More than a fifth of all postwar arrivals through the pier were displaced persons or political refugees, and for most of them the shed was a few hours in a journey that continued for several days by rail.7