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Authors: Nathan M. Greenfield

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BOOK: The Battle of the St. Lawrence
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Hayday’s report made special mention of Wireless Operator MacHenry, who “was the last man to leave the ship and remained on board until the last getting his signals out.”

Lieutenant Fraser and his eighty-three officers and men had seen two of the ships they were shepherding torpedoed. They’d fought the urge to turn, fire star shells and drop depth charges. Fraser’s bridge knew that some men were dead, others in the water.

They wanted “kills.” Men had been killed under their watch. But, as much as they wanted the order, as much as Fraser wanted to give the order to attack or to try to save men in the sea, in the deep dark of the all-encompassing St. Lawrence all aboard knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t.

They wanted kills. But their mission, the convoy escort’s mission, was “to ensure safe the timely arrival of cargo ships.” So when QS-15 scattered,
Drummondville
followed the largest group of ships to offer what protection it could.

Drummondville
was a 581-ton minesweeper built by Canadian Vickers in Montreal. Like most of the sixty Bangor-class ships built during the war,
Drummondville
saw little service as a minesweeper, that threat being largely
eliminated when Germany’s surface fleet was swept from the Atlantic.
7
Instead, beginning in 1940,
Drummondville
served as a convoy escort out of Halifax to Mid-Ocean Meeting Point, almost 1,500 miles east of Halifax, beyond which the escorts based in Londonderry shepherded thousands of ships to safety in Britain.

The first counterattack in the Battle of the St. Lawrence began by chance. Apparently concerned that
Dinaric
might successfully make the coast (where it could be salvaged), Vogelsang ordered his helmsman to turn U-132 around
Dinaric’s
stern so he could fire at it again.

This time, however, it was his turn to be taken by surprise. “I turned to a new approach course when there is a muzzle flash on the port bow on bearing 160 degrees. A star shell lights the area astern of the boat,” he recorded in his war diary.

Fraser didn’t need the report from his lookouts to tell him that “dead ahead” was the U-boat that had torpedoed
Dinaric.
His bridge didn’t need the order Full Speed Ahead—all knew that standard operating procedure called for ramming: in March 1941, U-boat ace Joachim Schepke’s
U-1OO
had been rammed by HMS
Walker
and
Vanoc.

Now it was a battle of engineering—Fraser’s engines running at full speed versus Vogelsang’s tanks, propellers and dive planes.

For one captain’s men there was the routine: the almost instantaneous slide down the two ladders into the control room. The closing of the hatch. The shouted order
“Futen.”
The turning of dozens of dials, valves and controls. The flood of water into the forward tanks first, perhaps the order for men not on station to run to the bow to increase the angle of descent. The turning of hydroplanes. The quick and sure switch from diesel engines to electric motors.

For the other, there was the ringing of the ship’s telegraph. Here too, the turning of valves and the rush of steam, not water. Flank speed and a helmsman’s eye. Those who saw what they all wanted to see had time only to brace themselves. Others had already been ordered to the depth-charge racks.

Seconds ticked by.

At 16 knots, 1,000 yards can be covered in just over 120 seconds. A crash dive takes only 30.

Thirty-five seconds after spotting U-132,
Drummondville’s
bow replaced it on the surface plane of a little corner of grid square BA 3911.

Then, as the star shell faded, came the order: “Fire depth charges!”

Ten 410-pound canisters (more than 300 pounds of which was TNT) rolled off
Drummondville’s
stern, and soon huge geysers shot out of the water.

In the months that followed this first skirmish, the asdic operators aboard dozens of escort ships would have their asdics all but blinded by the bathyscaphe effect: the mixing of cold and warm water and of salt and fresh water in the river and gulf creates layers that distort asdic signals, leading to false echoes and even entirely hiding U-boats.
8
Now, at a few minutes before 2 a.m., it was the German U-boat captain who cursed the water layers, for they prevented him from diving deeper than twenty metres without using special pressure and other settings—settings that his chief engineer feared would not work because of the damage they’d suffered before entering the St. Lawrence.

What Vogelsang recorded in his war diary as “three well-placed depth charges” hammered on U-132’s already damaged hull. The hull would have been crushed instantly had any one of them exploded within twenty metres of it. Inside the U-boat, lights flickered, circuit breakers snapped, pipes vibrated.

Vogelsang’s war diary doesn’t tell who suggested flooding the front torpedo tubes to take U-132 lower, but it doesn’t matter. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Vogelsang issued the order, but in all likelihood he spoke only to his chief engineer, who then ordered the flooding. And then came another “fall,” to forty metres.

Three more blasts, these some 300 metres away, and Fraser’s men thought they’d got their kill.

Vogelsang’s war diary says nothing about breaking surface during the depth-charging, but both
Drummondville
‘s log and the report submitted by Fraser (and corroborated by
Drummondville
‘s officers and other members of the crew) to the Admiralty’s Office of Assessment state that after the first sets of depth charges, the U-boat surfaced astern, apparently badly damaged. Fraser could not see its conning tower and assumed that the boat was “lying on its side.” At 2:19 a.m., two minutes after having “sighted [the] submarine on the surface,” Fraser “carried out a deliberate attack” by attempting to ram it again, “the U-boat sinking before she
[Drummondville]
got there.”

As he had earlier, Fraser ordered depth charges to be dropped over the swirl created by the vanishing U-boat. Fraser and his officers and men all stated that after the last depth charge, the “water gradually became covered with high smelling oil.”

On October 8, the U-boat Assessment Committee ruled against awarding a kill to Lieutenant Fraser and
Drummondville,
citing among other things the “extreme unlikel[ihood] that a U-boat turned over on its side and conning tower down would come to the surface.” In 1985, Michael Hadley suggested that perhaps “U-132 had broken surface during one of her destabilized buoyant lifts.” What’s beyond doubt, however, is that in the two hours beginning at 12:21 a.m. on July 7, U-132 received a severe mauling.

For some reason, perhaps because of the excitement of the battle,
Drummondville
didn’t send a signal that she was attacking. Naval Command knew nothing about either the sinkings or the battle that raged for two hours twenty kilometres north of Sainte-Anne-des-Monts until 2:30 a.m., long after Vogelsang’s quiet electric engines had pushed him out of danger.

On the night of July 6, 1942, the base at Gaspé was a more established operation than it had been in May. Now commanded by P. B. German, Fort Ramsay’s personnel had expanded to more than two hundred men and officers. This growth caused a housing problem that was partially solved by a Mrs. Kruse, who agreed that some fifteen men, including James Essex, could be billeted in the hotel she ran out of her home. Four decades later, Essex could still recall the tunes of Cole Porter and George Gershwin that “pour[ed] forth” from Mrs. Kruse’s parlour.

“The night shift, which usually ran from eight to eight,” recalls Ian Tate, “was generally pretty quiet save for the odd administrative message from Quebec City or Halifax.

“At 3:30 a.m., there would have been five men or women on duty. The telegraphist on duty would have known immediately that the message he was getting was extremely important because it would have been sent with priority ‘Immediate.’ Seconds later he would have rushed the typed message down the hall to Operations. The Operations duty officer would have then immediately contacted Commander German in his home on the base.
Commander German in turn likely would have immediately contacted Eastern Air Command.”

For some reason, however, Gaspé didn’t hear the signal
Drummondville
sent at 2:30 a.m. Word came about a half hour later, by telephone, informing Gaspé that two Cansos based at Sydney had been ordered into the early morning light. But orders or no, Sydney’s Cansos and those at Gaspé would stay grounded by fog for more than ten hours.

Two hundred miles to the east, around the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula at Mont Joli, the weather was better, though EAC’s luck was worse.

Alerted at 2:30 a.m. by a phone call from the small naval station at Rimouski, ten miles away, Squadron Leader Jacques A. Chevrier ordered Mont Joli’s technicians to ready Squadron 130’s Curtis Kittyhawks for flight. An hour later, led by Sub-Lieutenant Chevrier, four single-seat fighter planes, each carrying 227 kilograms of bombs and armed with six 12.77-mm machine guns, the bullets of which could rip through a conning tower, were flying over the St. Lawrence at almost 250 miles an hour. Thirty minutes later, through the dim early morning light, Chevrier’s squadron spotted an oil slick.

Chevrier ordered his squadron back to Mont Joli. He himself never made it. While flying over the river near Cap-Chat, his plane burst into flames. Witnesses reported seeing a long smoke trail before the plane, travelling at high speed, hit the water. One of the few French Canadian pilots in the RCAF, Chevrier was the first Canadian serviceman to die in the Battle of the St. Lawrence. The sorrow over his death at Mont Joli turned to bitterness two weeks later when, in a debate in the House, Charles G. Power, minister responsible for the RCAF, rose to squelch the rumour that the reason it took an hour for Mont Joli to get its planes in the air was that the pilots “were all drunk and out with women at the time of the sinkings.”

Other flights launched from Sydney and Mont Joli over the next few days would be no more successful. Two would bomb what their aircrews thought were submarines.

In 1975, then air marshal C. R. Dunlap and Murray Lister, the air vice-marshal, recalled in a letter to historian W. A. B. Douglas the second of these flights, which took place on July 8, 1942:

Neither Wing Commander Lister nor Dunlap was stationed at Mont Joli. They were there because two days earlier Dunlap had ferried a Nomad bomber to the Bombing School at Mont Joli, and Lister had volunteered “to pick him up.” Just before Dunlap and Lister were due to take off for their return to their base in Mountainview, Ontario, Mont Joli received a telephone message “that a submarine had been spotted on the surface a few miles up river from Sept Iles, and that members of the crew were seen diving and swimming underwater near the ship’s hull,” apparently investigating damage to the hull. Dunlap recalled: Naturally one’s first thought was “Let’s get something into the air and carry out an attack.” … After all Sept Iles was only 135 miles away on the other side [the north shore] of the St. Lawrence. The first act was to relay the information to Eastern Air Command … but alas their nearest base was so far removed from Sept Isles that it would take hours for one of their aircraft to arrive.

Dunlap and Lister convinced George Godson, one of the base’s armaments officers, and Flight Lieutenant Taché to install several 250-lb. bombs and a bombsight; this last was abandoned because it would have taken several hours to install. After gathering maps and weather information, Dunlap and Lister plotted their course in the Operations section, and then boarded their Bolingbroke for an unauthorized mission. “We made no move to communicate with our Headquarters in Toronto, i.e., No.
1
Training Command [or Air Services in Ottawa], for there seemed no point in doing so,” recalled Dunlap.

With Lister at the controls, the Bolingbroke took off at around
1
p.m.; they were over the search area about a half hour later.

Squinched in the bomber’s “glass house” in the nose of the aircraft, Dunlap felt “somewhat naked”; there had been no time to install the machine guns that he would have used to defend the plane as it approached the U-boat.

Tension built as they neared Sept-Îles. Neither man had ever seen combat. Training with live ammunition? Yes. But in training, the man with the gun isn’t trying to hit you. Flight training with windsocks and tracers? Yes. But not German-engineered bullets fired by marksmen who know it’s either you or them.

Dunlap recalled the “thrilling prospect of perhaps being able to do something about destroying the enemy craft responsible for the recent disastrous sinkings.”

Their plan was textbook: skim along at treetop level, low enough so that they could see the U-boat before it saw them, and then, “by a quick change of course …, complete [a] shallow dive attack before it could submerge, or indeed before the submarine, if still on the surface could get a full blast of gunfire off in our direction.” But “would it still be on the surface, or would it be at periscope depth, or would it be completely beyond view?”

They reached the Sept-Îles lighthouse.

Nothing.

“We knew the elapsed time since the sightings and that underwater a sub wouldn’t make more than five or six knots, so we had a rough search area which we covered in a series of parallel sweeps [trying] to see the periscope,” recalled Lister.

Square after square, flying right angles. Making ever-larger squares.

Each time nothing.

“We then searched all the bays and shore line of the river in that area, finally returning rather deflated to base.”

While Lister and Dunlap searched the waters off Sept-Îles, U-132 was over one hundred miles away, between Anticosti Island and Gaspé, fixing the periscope and pump damage sustained in the first depth-charging of the Battle of the St. Lawrence.

Three days later, on July 10, Brigadier-General Georges Vanier, district officer commanding Military District No. 5, which encompassed the Gaspé, wrote to National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa that rumours of additional sinkings and of the possibility of landings by Germans to either kill Canadians or kidnap them as hostages were sweeping the Gaspé: “Although I am not responsible for its [the Gaspé’s] protection and security”—respon-sibility lay with the General Officer Commanding in Chief Atlantic Command in Halifax—“I feel bound in conscience to recommend that a motorized column, not necessarily large in numbers, should be established at once in some centralized place of the Gaspé Peninsula from which it
could radiate to the long stretches of the coast which are completely open and without railway communication. This motorized column could send out patrols, particularly at night.”

BOOK: The Battle of the St. Lawrence
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