The Battle of the St. Lawrence (11 page)

On the tenth, while authorities suspected that U-132 was still in the river because there had been no transmissions to BdU, the defence of the Gaspé spilled over into Parliament and into the perennially dangerous waters of Quebec-Ottawa relations. About the time Vogelsang saw, 800 metres away, “four motored land-based aircraft clos[ing] from bearing 220 degrees,” the member of parliament for Gaspé, Sasseville Roy, rose on a point of privilege and told the House that “three more ships forming part of a fourteen ship convoy were torpedoed last Sunday night opposite Cap-Chat in the St. Lawrence river,” and asked, “Is the minister disposed to make a statement to the House or to arrange a secret sitting to inform the people’s representatives as to the seriousness of the situation?”

Incensed at Roy’s breach of parliamentary privilege to override the censorship rules announced in May, the prime minister himself responded none too subtly. He began by reminding the House that “the minister [for naval services] made it quite clear [in May] that there would be a proper time for the government to make an announcement of any event of this kind,” and then added, “Premature announcements were only serving the ends of the enemy and would not help the ends of Canada’s defence.”

The Speaker of the House refused to recognize Roy’s supplementary question.

Over the next three days, during which time Vogelsang continued to prowl the Strait of Belle Isle and adjacent waters of the gulf, evaded at least five planes by emergency dives and tried to press at least one attack, the political storm worsened. The Saturday edition of
L’Action Catholique
(the second most important paper in French Quebec, which, according to historian Eric Amyot, had decidedly Pétainist leanings) carried an editorial not only repeating the information Roy had revealed in the House, but also stating that the same facts were known by “half the people in Quebec City before Roy spoke in the House on the 10th.” Without repeating what Roy had told the House, even the
Montreal Gazette
asked, since what had occurred on
the St. Lawrence was an “open secret in the whole countryside and beyond,” why did the government of Canada believe its silence amounted to a “withhold[ing] of information from the enemy”?

When the House met on Monday the thirteenth, Roy attempted to repeat the line of questioning he had begun the previous week but was prevented by the Speaker, who recognized Defence Minister James L. Ralston; Macdonald was out of the House at the time. Ralston picked up where King had left off the previous Friday by repeating that Roy’s question of the tenth was “a gift to Hitler’s men because it meant that the U-boat if it is still in the St. Lawrence does not have to surface to send a message and thus reveal itself.”

With Roy effectively silenced, other members of the opposition felt it was time to attack the government for its handling of the St. Lawrence situation. Obviously still smarting from the dressing-down Minister Macdonald had given him in May when he said that the U-boats that attacked
Nicoya
and
Leto
had come from St. Pierre and Miquelon, Richard Hanson, House leader of the opposition Progressive Party, rose and said, “Reports were widespread in the Province of Quebec and that he [Macdonald] himself had received letters to the effect that U-boats were freely operating both at Matane and at Cap Chat and that everyone knew it.” Hanson continued by telling the House that “precise statements would have a reassuring effect. What is the position with respect to convoys in the St. Lawrence? Are there any? Should we not know the position in a general way? What is the [navy’s] position with respect to protection?” Ralston refused all comment, which led the House leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation to echo Roy’s call for a secret session: “This is a means that not only the British Parliament has resorted to but also our sister dominions.”

Later, Naval Services Minister Macdonald returned to the House and, in a long speech, explained the government’s position with regard to both censorship and protection of the shipping for which Canada held responsibility. “Information,” he began by admitting, “as to the sinking of these ships was in the possession of many people early last week…. Many people knew of it; it was known along the waterfronts of the country, it was known to the press by Monday or Tuesday. The press refused to publish it … until an official announcement was made. It was in the possession of the Leader
of the Opposition, because he had heard the story on the train and spoke to me about it.”

Macdonald continued, taking aim at the complaints made by the Quebec press: “But there is a tremendous difference between Canadians knowing about it. The entire people of this country might know of a sinking …, but so long as it was not made public in our papers or broadcast over our radio, the chances of it getting to Germany are small…. Once it is broadcast it … speedily finds its way to Germany and is used there for propaganda purposes.” The rules established by the chief censor “are made [therefore] for the sole purpose of keeping from the enemy information which may be of great value to him in directing the movements of ships.”

Macdonald then turned to upbraiding Roy for misusing his privilege as a member of parliament:

Macdonald, who had been absent from the House the previous Friday, now spoke to what the government believed was Roy’s abuse of privilege. A measure of Macdonald’s anger is the fact that his words skirt the parliamentary rule that statements in the House are to be addressed to the Speaker and not to individual members. “I will say this to the Honourable Member for Gaspé; had I been in the house on Friday I think I should have felt constrained to rise and ask this House to expunge from the record the statement which he made. Thereby it would not have become a public statement.”

Aware that the King government, even though it held a majority of seats from Quebec, could not afford to alienate public opinion—especially having just seen a great majority of French Canadians refuse to release the government from its 1940 campaign pledge not to bring in conscription—
Macdonald briefly held out an olive branch to Roy and Roy’s supporters in the House. Recalling what he had said earlier in his speech about the leader of the opposition’s having come privately to him to discuss what he had heard on the train, Macdonald said, “My Honourable friend could have asked his question privately if he had wished…. Then he would have been given the information on his honour as a member of the House. But I do not understand how asking the question or making the statement in this House is going to add to the protection of my Honourable friend’s constituents.”

The olive branch extended, Macdonald quickly retracted it, with his strongest attack on Roy. The attack took the form of an explanation of how the defence of the St. Lawrence fitted into Canada’s strategic thinking:

The sinkings in the St. Lawrence may have excited MPs because the carnage was occurring within sight of the nation’s towns and villages, but Macdonald was telling the House—and, since his comments were published in Hansard, all Canadians—that the way to stop the sinkings was not to withdraw the Canadian navy from the North Atlantic (still less from the Caribbean oil run), but rather to continue all possible efforts to defeat Nazi Germany.

On July 15, while Vogelsang spent the day diving to avoid detection by eight different aircraft, Quebec’s Liberal premier, Adélard Godbout, a nominal ally of King’s federal Liberals, wrote the prime minister expressing his concern about public opinion in the Gaspé: “I am convinced that a perilous situation exists, one which contained [sic] additional and incalculable elements of danger to the safety and security of Canada.” The local population, Godbout asserted, “is bewildered and nervous.” And he claimed that
twice during the past week two “reliable sources” had told him “that the wireless station in Sainte-Flavie airport [Mont Joli] was recently attacked by two men who had either landed from a submarine or were saboteurs still roving about our country.”

It would be several months before Canadian authorities would learn of a spy being landed by U-boat.
⁹
And King knew that there had been no damage at all to the wireless station or any other military or civilian installation on the Gaspé. Still, pressure in the House and from Godbout led him to reverse the government’s position and hold a secret session to discuss the situation in the St. Lawrence.

At 3 p.m. on July 18, 1942, the Canadian parliament met in its first secret session since the Great War.

The notes prepared for Minister Macdonald make clear that unlike the public debates that preceded the calling of the secret session, the secret session itself was an orderly affair in which the government shared both operational and other details with the elected members. The notes covered seven areas, the longest of which pertained to the dim-out. The minister sought to impress on the members the difference between a full blackout of both navigational lights and broadcast beacons, which the government judged to be too risky, and the dim-out, which “prevent[ed] the dangerous silhouetting of ships against bright lights.” Extinguishing navigation lights would not, he argued, “materially increase the navigational problems of the submarines.”

The second issue on which Macdonald briefed the House concerned whether supplies had been hidden in the St. Lawrence. As he had done in May, he told the House that it was all but impossible for this to be the case since such supplies would have had to have been brought by surface ship “and it would be almost impossible for them to escape detection.” He gave MPs information regarding the operating period of U-boats (“6 to 8 weeks without refuelling or reprovisioning”) and their range (“12,000 to 19,000 miles”) that was not shared in open session.

Macdonald also provided a rather detailed disposition of ships in the St. Lawrence and explained how that disposition affected Canada’s other naval requirements, including the all-important oil stores:

The government was considerably less forthcoming about EAC. The minister was prepared to say only that “Air Protection is considered adequate. It consists of long range flying boats, landbased bombers and land-based fighter bombers at Rimouski and Mont Joli.”

Surprisingly, the notes say nothing about the army’s decision to act on Brigadier-General Vanier’s letter of July 10. On the seventeenth, Major-General William Elkins responded to Vanier’s request for a “motorized column” by ordering the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, then based in Debert, Nova Scotia, to dispatch a motor platoon to Mont Joli. Tasked with operating between Bic Island and Cap-Chat, the platoon arrived in Mont Joli on July 18.

Hours after the secret session of the House ended, Prime Minister King recounted the session in his diary:

No doubt while writing these last words, Canada’s prime minister thought that, as he believed he could with his own mother, Chevrier’s family would be able to communicate with their departed loved one.

JULY 20, 1942

“We heard the explosion in the mess,” recalls Roy Woodruff, who in 1942 was a nineteen-year-old able seaman aboard the Q-074, one of the two Fairmile launches that (along with HMCS
Chedabucto,
a Bangor minesweeper, and HMCS
Weyburn)
was escorting the five merchant ships that made up QS-19. After the disaster of QS-15, the detachments of the Gulf Escort Force had been increased, albeit at the cost of less frequent sailings.