Carrying Canadian Troops: The Story of RMS <em>Olympic</em> as a First World War Troopship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the long adventurous life of Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Olympic, the older sister of the ill-fated RMS Titanic, the time she spent as a troopship ferrying Canadian troops during the First World War is a notable but frequently overlooked part of her career. Olympic was cheered enthusiastically by Canadian troops who sailed aboard her, respected as the “Old Reliable,” praised for services rendered to other ships, and honoured for her own success in attacking an enemy submarine. Carrying more Canadian soldiers than any other troopship, Olympic was an important part of Canada’s war effort.\nAble to accommodate close to 6000 troops at a time, Olympic made ten round trips from Liverpool to Halifax between March and December 1916. On the return voyages she carried wounded soldiers and civilians back to Canada. For the next two years Olympic continued to ferry Canadian and American troops across the Atlantic, and in 1919, brought the victorious soldiers home. Although she was once a household name in Canada, Olympic’s wartime service has since slipped into obscurity.\nMost information on Olympic as a troopship is derived from the memoirs of the Olympic’s wartime Captain, Sir Bertram Hayes. Using Hayes’s account as a framework, this article helps to further illuminate Olympic’s wartime history with new material such as diaries, and other sources housed at the National Archives of Canada and at the hitherto largely untapped Archives of the Canadian War Museum. These sources provide interesting details of the experiences of sailing on the vessel and of life on board, including the difficulties of embarkation and disembarkation, the danger from submarines, and the general supply and handling of this large ship in frequently hazardous circumstances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.080 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".