Ordered in October 1941 and laid down on August 26, 1943, by Canadian Vickers Ltd. in Montreal, Eastview was part of a massive wartime building program designed to counter the U-boat threat that was strangling Britain's supply lines. River-class frigates represented a significant improvement over the corvettes that had borne the brunt of early convoy escort duty. The term 'frigate' itself was revived at the suggestion of Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles of the Royal Canadian Navy, reaching back to the age of sail for a designation that suited these mid-sized warships. Launched on November 17, 1943, Eastview offered her crews markedly better accommodation than the cramped corvettes, and her twin engines nearly doubled the corvette's range to 7,200 nautical miles at 12 knots - though she gained only three extra knots of speed.

Eastview entered service as a convoy escort in the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign of the Second World War. For nearly six years, Allied merchantmen and their naval escorts fought a grinding war of attrition against German submarines across thousands of miles of open ocean. The frigates' role was both tactical and psychological: their presence forced U-boats to submerge, slowing them down and making coordinated wolf pack attacks more difficult. Each successful convoy crossing meant fuel, food, and ammunition reaching Britain. Each loss meant ships, cargo, and lives swallowed by the Atlantic. Eastview served through the final years of this campaign, part of the Canadian contribution that saw the Royal Canadian Navy grow from a handful of vessels in 1939 to the third-largest navy in the Allied fleet by war's end.

When the decision came to scuttle Eastview as part of the Royston breakwater, the ship was stripped of anything salvageable. But her bell was saved - pulled from the vessel before she was sunk and presented to the city of Eastview in recognition of the support its residents had given the ship and crew during the war years. Mayor Gordon Lavergne then donated the bell to the Eastview Legion, where it remains today. In naval tradition, a ship's bell carries the vessel's identity: it marks time, calls the watch, and tolls at ceremonies. That Eastview's bell found its way to a veterans' hall rather than a scrapyard suggests that someone understood its value was more than metal.

The Royston breakwater is one of the stranger maritime monuments on the Pacific coast. Beginning in the late 1940s, decommissioned vessels were towed to this shallow bay on Vancouver Island's east coast and deliberately grounded to form a barrier protecting the harbour's log booming operations. HMCS Eastview joined other warships in this final deployment, their steel hulls forming an artificial reef that softened the waves rolling in from the Strait of Georgia. Over the decades, the sea has done its work. Rust has opened the hulls, kelp has colonized the steel, and the ships have settled into the mud. At high tide, only the upperworks of some vessels remain visible. At low tide, the full scale of the breakwater emerges - a line of ships that once sailed the world's oceans, now holding their ground against nothing more dramatic than the tide.