The Battle of the St. Lawrence (12 page)

“Zero-Seven-Four was
my
ship,” he says with a voice that even sixty years later emphasizes “my.” “I was on her from the day she was commissioned [April 21, 1942] in Midland, Ontario, took her out into Georgian Bay and then down through the locks to Toronto where her gun—the gun that was my action station—was installed, then down to Kingston, where they put in her electrical system, and on to Montreal, where her radar and asdic were installed. I was in her three years, three months, through three captains, through terrible storms that tossed the little ship around like a cork. She was a short ship and would pitch and toss as she rode up and down waves.”

And Woodruff was with Q-074 at the end when, her engines cold, she was towed from Quebec City to Sorel, Quebec. There, on June 29, 1945, she was turned over to the War Assets Corporation for disposal.

“We only heard the sound once on Zero-Seven-Four, but I knew that dull
thud from my days on the North Atlantic run before I was drafted off the corvette HMCS
Prescott,”
recalls Woodruff.

The explosion Woodruff heard that sent him running up from the Fairmile’s mess deck was caused by
Kapitänleutnant
Ernst Vogelsang’s twelfth torpedo, fired in his most daring attack in Canadian waters to date.

Peering through his periscope shortly after 1 p.m., Vogelsang “sighted smoke plumes bearing 260,” almost perpendicular to his port bow. Soon he was able to distinguish the “steamers” from the escort ships, one (probably Woodruff’s) “at inclination 0,700 m distant,” well within visual sighting range, especially during sea state O.

To avoid detection, Vogelsang dove to twenty metres.

Would the sound of propellers stay constant?

It did, signalling U-132’s crew that the “anti-submarine vessel pass[ed] ahead” of his bow. As the swish, swish of the screws faded off to his starboard, Vogelsang ordered his hydroplane operators to turn their wheels, and moments later his electric motors pushed his boat to periscope depth (13.5 metres).

U-132 was now “inside the convoy,” a position described by U-boat captain Herbert Werner in his memoir
Iron Coffins:
“Our distance from the shadowy monsters ranged from 400 to 700 metres. It was a stunning situation, sailing undetected amid an Armada of enemy ships, selecting at leisure the ones which had to die.”

Vogelsang settled on the thirty-year-old, 4,283-ton SS
Frederika Lensen,
then travelling in ballast 800 metres away.

At 1:39 p.m. on July 20, while cruising off Cap-Chat, Vogelsang fired again. Less than a minute later,
Frederika Lensen
was opened to the sea and four men were dead.

The explosion, that followed when the crosshairs of the torpedo’s warhead touched as it sped into
Lensen
‘s starboard side, killed four men, Englishman Robert James Spence and three lascars: Abudul Rajack, Ali Edris and Ali Mossadden. The 18 × 20 foot hole blasted beneath the bilge keel wrecked the engine room. The force was enough not only to burst the boiler but to rip it from its anchor bolts.

Vogelsang correctly guessed that the “muffled explosion” he heard was the boiler. He never knew, however, that the explosion blasted it fifteen feet
upward. The salvage crew that later boarded
Lensen
found that the “boiler [had] landed on top of the engine.”

Action Stations rang across the convoy as
Lensen
began to spew steam and smoke from its side and tons of water poured in.

“As steam burst from the stricken ship, our Bangor-class escort,” wrote Harold Freeman in an article entitled “Daring Mid-Day Sub Attack Hits Freighter in St. Lawrence,” which the Censor Office allowed to be published on October 13, “leaped ahead from her position half a mile astern of the freighter, a little Fairmile came cutting in on the starboard side and a corvette turned on a dime from her position ahead of the convoy to help.”

Breaking convoy rules, the captains of SS
John Pillsbury
and
Meaford,
two Canadian lakers, and one of Canada’s new 10,000-ton ships, rang for Full Speed and set their own courses out of the convoy’s lines.

“When I heard the detonation,” Woodruff remembers, “I ran from the mess deck to the companionway, and as I climbed up the Action Stations alarm sounded. When I exited on deck, I was facing aft and a glance
(Lensen
was on our port side) showed me the large, gaping hole.”

Woodruff then immediately turned left and ran up the starboard side of the ship toward the gun at the bow. “As I passed the bridge, I saw the bridge lookout, Georges Desrochers from Montreal, pointing down to a line of bubbles—the wake of the torpedo—coming to the surface just ahead of the wheelhouse.”

By the time Woodruff had covered the last few feet to his action station, his captain, Thomas Denny, RCNVR, who before the war was a British Columbia businessman and yachtsman and later became Commander in Charge of Fairmiles, East Coast, ordered a hard turn to the starboard.

“Our asdic man had gotten an echo, and the captain was running it down. We ran it down and dropped a set of depth charges off both sides of the ship and the stern. Then we turned around and dropped another set and then another.

“I was in the bow, so each time we came around I could see what the explosions had brought up. I remember seeing a circle of diesel fuel and large black oily lumps.”

Sixty metres below, U-132 rode out the storm, Vogelsang recording only that he’d been forced under and had been depth-charged. As he waited on the bottom, Vogelsang could hear the propellers of warships
suddenly turn away as they went to rescue
Lensen
‘s crew.

“After we had exhausted our depth charges,” Woodruff recalls, “we circled round and went to the lifeboats. We took one in tow—I’d been in gunnery training with the DEMS gunner who threw me the line—and brought the boat to HMCS
Weyburn.
After throwing the line to them, I noticed another guy I knew, Lieutenant Pat Milson, and waved to him.”

Then, while Vogelsang watched through his periscope, Denny ordered his helmsmen to steer a course for the listing—but not sinking—ship. Vogelsang’s war diary records its list as being 20° to the starboard.

“Commanding Officer Denny asked for volunteers—a seaman and a stoker—to board her with her officer in order to secure a tow line,” recalls Woodruff. “I volunteered along with Gabriel Canuel, a strong guy who was an enthusiastic amateur wrestler from Rimouski. We climbed up the ladder that just a few minutes earlier
Lensen
‘s men had used to leave her. We asked the officer if there were any casualties, and he told me, ‘Four lascars went out the bottom.’ I’ll never forget the expression on his face when he said it. One minute they were there and the next, he said again, ‘They were blown out of the bottom of the ship.’
¹⁰

“Then, while the officer went to get a hawser [a thick towing rope] and two axes, Gabe and I were to stand ready to cut the rope if the
Lensen
began going down, so it would not take Zero-Seven-Four with it.

“While he was getting the rope, I went to get some paint. We were always looking for paint, and when I asked him if he had any, he said, ‘Take what you want, she’s going down.’ We also took life jackets. Theirs were better than the navy’s. But we didn’t take anything personal,” recalls Woodruff.

When the
Lensen
‘s officer returned with the hawser, Canuel and Woodruff secured it to the stricken ship’s stern and then threw the other end over the side, where it was picked up by Denny’s ship.

“Zero-Seven-Four then headed straight for the beach,” says Woodruff, “pulling the
Lensen
stern first. Her list didn’t increase, but Gabe and I stood ready with the axes. The creaks and groans we heard were awful, like pain from deep within the ship.”

Q-074’s draught was only a few feet;
Lensen’s
was 26.1 feet.
Lensen
beached long before Q-074 would hit the beach. Once he’d beached the bigger ship, Denny ordered a course for Sydney.

Vogelsang too turned away, noting in his war diary that “the steamer sinks steadily by the stern, only roughly 1 m of freeboard remains.”
¹¹

“We arrived in Sydney the next day,” recalls Woodruff, “and there heard for the first time about Lord Haw Haw, who mentioned the torpedoing of the
Lensen.
”

On July 22, the day on which six thousand miles away mass deportations from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp began, U-132’s swastika-adorned conning tower broke the surface. Vogelsang signalled Lorient asking permission to begin his homeward passage. Permission was granted. Six days later, off Sable Island, Vogelsang sank SS
Pacific Pioneer
before suffering another ferocious depth-charge attack.

Three days later, only two days from the pens at La Pallice where U-132 would be refitted, Vogelsang’s radio officer handed him the following message from the Flag Officer Submarines in Lorient:

Woodruff’s war continued, and the sinking of
Frederika Lensen
became a memory. Early in 1943, he was promoted to coxswain. In 1944, the last of Q-074’s original crew, he heard that a logbook had been seized from a sub captured in the Mediterranean and that the log recorded that a submarine had attacked and torpedoed
Frederika Lensen
and was in turn attacked by 074 and had been destroyed.

“It was a strange feeling,” Woodruff recalls. “You hated to think that you had put some out down there without them seeing the sky again, but I felt good that we had put them out of action, maybe even preventing another attack like the one on the
Lensen.”

T
he breaking of radio silence was enough.

It meant another attack.

The details would follow—the ships, positions, counterattacks, pleas for help. HMCS
Arrowhead’s
signature, which came across at 11:35 p.m. on September 6, 1942, told the four men in the signals room on the second floor of the grey clapboard building all that mattered. Out on the broad stretches of the St. Lawrence, ships were under attack—as SS
Donald Stewart
had been three days earlier, as SS
Arlyn
and
Chatham
and USS
Laramie
had been three days before that. All four had been up in the Strait of Belle Isle. Now the signal came from 150 miles up the river, within sight of the lighthouse at Cap-Chat.

Had the signal come six hours earlier or even four hours later, help could have been sent quickly. The small squadron based at Mont Joli may have been partly staffed with trainees whose planes were not equipped to drop bombs, but the U-boats didn’t know that. Air cover of any type might keep them at bay. Heavier planes were farther away, at Sydney, Gander, Chatham. Whichever aerodrome the pilots of the Hudsons or Digbys called home, Eastern Air Command’s pilots had a score to settle. Not forty-eight hours earlier, U-517, which sank
Donald Stewart,
had used up one life when
it crash-dived to escape bombs dropped by J. H. Sanderson’s Digby. But for now, and for hours to come, air cover was out of the question.

“We waited for the signal,” recalls then sub-lieutenant Ian Tate. “We recorded the messages, and we sent them next door to the operations centre, where they were plotted on the map that covered the far wall. Commander German asked for news. We relayed what we knew—nothing—to Ottawa and Eastern Air Command in Halifax, and we waited.”

The waiting was the toughest part. Perhaps they’d hear of a “kill.” Perhaps they’d sit with rapt attention as they decoded a message like this one, received a few days earlier from HMCS
Raccoon:

The little armed yacht was out there now, part of an escort force led by the corvette HMCS
Arrowhead,
the Bangor minesweeper HMCS
Truro
and two Fairmile launches.

Hopes for a kill vanished as September 6 gave way to the seventh, and those hopes were replaced with worries about
Raccoon
itself. Why had it not reported in? Nor would daylight end the ordeal. By late morning, Commander German sent the minesweeper HMCS
Vegreville
to reinforce QS-33’s defences. Before dark, not fifty miles from the map that showed movement of every ship between Quebec City and the east coast of Newfoundland and as far south as New York, SS
Mount Pindus, Mount Taygetus
and
Oakton
were sent to the bottom.

They’d all been part of small convoys—three ships, five ships, nine ships, as against the sixty-five that routinely sailed from Halifax and soon would from New York.

SEPTEMBER 6, 1942