The Battle of the St. Lawrence (14 page)

Truro
too reacted, setting a course that cut across the convoy. A dangerous manoeuvre at the best of times,
Truro’s
run almost turned tragic when her steering broke down as she steamed into the heart of the small convoy. Only quick work on the part of a stoker, sent to the auxiliary steering cabin in the stern, avoided a collision between the escort, on her first mission, and one of its charges.

Once out of danger,
Truro
continued its course toward the assumed path of the torpedo and carried out its own star-shell and asdic search. Finding nothing,
Truro
returned to the convoy, which had slowed almost to a halt, to find that two ships had scattered and that her asdic had malfunctioned; for the rest of the voyage
Truro
would be able to use only her hydrophones.

As
Arrowhead
closed on the U-boat’s suspected position, the blare of the steam signals sounding Action Stations across the convoy was drowned out. A second, louder explosion rent the night. Caused by the cold river water washing over her boilers, this explosion ripped out
Aeas
‘s bottom; four minutes later, she was gone.

The action aboard
Arrowhead
and
Truro
was matched by the merchantmen.

“For us, the scream of the steam whistle was nothing new,” recalls Read. “Captain Brown had us practise often. As soon as we heard it, each of us knew what to do. My job was to go around the galley aft, climb up a ladder on the side up the ship and take the axe that was there and be ready to cut the rope that was holding the lifeboat in; when cut, it would swing out on the davits. One of the men standing next to the davits would then secure the seacock—the drainage hole kept open when the boat was secured on deck—then they would see her down to the water before they shimmied down the ropes to the boat. Once in, they’d ship the oars and hold the lifeboat close so the rest of us could get in. The
Oakton’s
first officer’s job was to pull the pins that held the Carley floats in place, before heading aft himself.”

At 15 knots, it took
Arrowhead
less than two minutes to be over the torpedo’s tracks, perhaps a thousand yards. Smith and the bridge listened for the slightest ping. And if they heard it, they would hope it wasn’t an echo caused by either a long-forgotten wreck or the devilish waters of the river and gulf, where the mixing of fresh and salt water created gradients that could render asdic all but useless.

Nothing.

Without an asdic contact, Skinner had to drop his depth charges by feel. No doubt he hoped that today he’d be as lucky as he’d been a quarter century earlier when he escaped from a German POW camp. “The captain, who had been a member of the Newfoundland Regiment,” recalls Smith, “had been working on a prison farm near Kiel. One day he was able to grab a pitchfork, and he stuck it through a guard’s chest. He then escaped and managed to get back to the UK.”

Skinner ordered one pattern over the point where he suspected the U-boat had been when it had fired the torpedo. Then another, a little farther away. His tactics, learned while on the North Atlantic run (on which
Arrowhead
once spent twenty-one straight days at Battle Stations), were sound. But U-165, rigged for silent running, had already moved on, continuing to stalk the convoy from a distance.

Breaking off the search after dropping four sets of depth charges,
Arrowhead
returned to
Aeas.
Screened by the armed yacht
Raccoon, Arrowhead
began the emotional and dangerous task of taking oil-soaked men aboard. The men in the water were endangered both by the debris and choking and by
Arrowhead
‘s hull, which could push men under to their deaths. Though screened by the waters of the river that played havoc with asdic, had Hoffmann chosen to fire,
Arrowhead
was a sitting duck.

Even sixty years later, Jock Smith’s voice is tinged with horror and sorrow when he recalls the plight of the men covered in oil, many burned by steam from bursting pipes, others with limbs broken by flying debris, floating in wreckage-strewn waters. “It was the first time I’d been involved in something like that,” he recalls. “It was the first time for most of us. All I felt was that I had to try to do the best I could for everyone. We dropped the rope
net, and those men who were strong enough to climb up did; others we had to help by us climbing down the ropes and pulling them out of the debris-covered water. So many of them were so badly burned.

“Once we got them up on the ship, we gave them a tot of rum. We cleaned those who were burned the best we could. And then we sprinkled a powder on them; it was tannic acid, which we later found out was no longer the approved treatment for burns.

“I remember one man. He was about fifty and badly burned. He asked me, ‘Do you know my son?’ What does he do, I asked, as I cleaned him and poured powder on his burns. He told me he was Johnnie Johnson, the RAF ace. I didn’t think it was true, but he took out of his pocket a laminated article about him.”
⁵

Just over an hour after Hoffmann destroyed
Aeas, Arrowhead
steamed back to the front of the convoy while
Raccoon
returned to its screening position astern its port side. Their zigzagging courses meant
Raccoon
was often out of sight of the other two escorts, but their constant speed and predictable bearing meant that at regular intervals they closed to relatively near quarters—close enough for
Raccoon
to appear as a back trace on
Arrowhead’s
primitive radar screen. Just before 2:12 a.m., Hoffmann, who on September 3 had missed
Raccoon
twice, fired at her again.

With the escort back to full strength, Captain Brown called an end to Action Stations on
Oakton,
and Read and the first cook, Douglas Wilkinson, headed for their cabin to catch what sleep they could before the next watch had to be fed. Just before reaching the cabin, Read recalls, “something lit up the night sky behind us. We heard something too, but it wasn’t like a depth charge.”

Once again Smith heard it—this time, however, not through his headphones but through the steel plating of
Arrowhead’s
hull. “Down in the forward mess, we didn’t just hear it. We must have been awfully close because we felt it so clearly that we ran up thinking we’d been hit.” Above deck, Gaétan Chaput, who manned
Arrowhead’s
4-inch gun, heard two explosions and “saw the water go up … from the port quarter.”

Scant seconds later, Skinner, who had gone to his cabin leaving his first officer in charge, returned to the bridge to find Anti-Submarine Officer Crockette in a heated argument with the ship’s asdic and radar operators.
The two operators argued that
Raccoon
had been hit. The asdic rating, Frederick Dive, later told the board of inquiry that investigated the loss of
Raccoon
that he had “been carrying out my given sweep when I heard the report on my phone. This report did not sound like the report of a depth charge. It wasn’t sharp. After the first report, I slid the phones off my ears after which I heard the second one and possibly a third.” Even more ominous were the words of Skinner’s radar operator, Theodore Burton, who told the board of inquiry, “I saw the
Raccoon
for less than one minute after the explosion, then she seemed to fade away, and was not picked up again.”

Crockette, however, was adamant, later telling the board of inquiry, “As nothing was heard on the radio/telegraph and no visual signalling [of being under attack] was seen, it was assumed that the
Raccoon
was carrying out a depth charge attack, and we maintained our station on the convoy in accordance with the Standing Operating Instructions issued previous to sailing. Visibility was very poor, about a half mile, and because of this, and her earlier actions, it did not appear strange not seeing the
Raccoon
during the rest of the dark hours.”

Officially, Skinner sided with Crockette, though his actions indicate his doubts. For he once again ordered Action Stations and then a course change that took him down past the convoy to
Raccoon
‘s last known position.

Once again, star shells. Flashes of day in the night, revealing nothing.

Once again, a pattern of depth charges. Once again, asdic searches, showing nothing.

The mission of the convoy escort took precedence. Skinner broke off the search and steamed back to the merchant ships, which had headed north into the middle of the river.

Through the night, the question hung on Skinner’s bridge: was
Raccoon
still out there somewhere? Perhaps with a total power failure, unable to communicate?

SEPTEMBER 7, 1942

As dawn broke over Gaspé, the tension became palpable.

Already one ship had been sunk, and now
Raccoon
had missed her appointed time to report in.

Commander German waited, wondering if the second U-boat that NSHQ had signalled to him as having been HF/DF’d in the St. Lawrence was closing in on QS-33. He ordered the signals officer to send a coded message to
Raccoon
telling it to report in.

Other attempts were made to raise
Raccoon.
Men looked at their watches and at the clock on the wall. They smoked Sweet Caporal cigarettes. Each time Commander German asked, the rating listening intently through his headphones gave the same response: “No signal from
Raccoon.”

Worried too, Skinner altered his course, moving toward the quarter where
Raccoon
should have been.

Nothing.

Perhaps
Raccoon
‘s radio rigging had been damaged. Perhaps she could not receive messages from as far as Gaspé. Commander German’s men sent the signal “I Method,” which required Quebec City to repeat the message back, thus ensuring that, wherever
Raccoon
was, if its wireless was working she would be able to pick up the signal. Signalmen monitored all frequencies.

Still nothing.

The speculation in Gaspé ran the gamut. Had
Raccoon
been blown up by a U-boat? Perhaps her wireless transmitter had been hit by a U-boat trying to fight it out on the surface? Or had she been boarded by the Germans? If so, what of their fellow officers and ratings? What of her secret code books?

Finally, Commander German ordered that the signalmen send the message “Report forthwith” in plain Morse code.

Poor weather on the morning of September 7 prevented a planned air search. In an ironic foreshadowing of its own fate over two years later, the corvette HMCS
Shawinigan
carried out a sea search. On the tenth, because of the lack of radio contact and the absence of reports of survivors coming ashore (indeed, the only onshore report corresponded with the explosion heard aboard
Arrowhead),
Commander German was forced to conclude and to report to the naval authorities in Ottawa that
Raccoon
“was presumed lost with all hands.”

The Board of Inquiry that sat in Gaspé on September 18, 1942, agreed with the asdic and radar officers’ belief that the evidence pointed toward the finding that “the explosions heard … were direct hits by one or more torpedoes.” Knowing the limitations under which Commander Skinner laboured as a convoy escort, the board of inquiry concluded its short report with the sentence, “We do not consider any negligence can be attributed to Commander Skinner.”

Raccoon’s
loss did not become public until September 13, when
Le Soleil
published an article entitled
“Cinq navires ont été coulés”
(“Five ships have been sunk”), six days before concrete evidence of the sinking was found. The following day, September 14, the RCN issued a two-page press release announcing that
Raccoon
had been “lost through enemy action while guarding a convoy of merchant ships.” In order to hide the whereabouts of the action, the release spoke of “an increase in the tempos of enemy activity on Canada’s side of the Atlantic.” As well, the release purposely misled by trying to separate
Raccoon
‘s loss from the other sinkings: “He [Angus Macdonald, minister of national defence for naval services] regretted to have to report
that four merchant ships had been lost by enemy action, with ten of their officers and crew. The remainder of their personnel were rescued.”

The stories that built upon the release were even more fictive. Both the headline splashed across the
Ottawa Daily Journal
and the first sentence of the article “Canadian Naval Vessel Lost in Battling Subs”—“Fighting one or more enemy submarines in defence of a convoy of merchant ships, the Canadian patrol vessel
Raccoon
is presumed lost with all hands on board”—suggested a specific action at sea far beyond what actually occurred.
⁷

In keeping with the guidelines established after the first St. Lawrence sinkings, no press release announced the September 21 discovery of small pieces of wreckage and clothing on the western end of Anticosti Island. The navy was equally quiet about the gruesome discovery some weeks later, also on Anticosti Island, of the badly decomposed body of Russell McConnell, a star hockey player at McGill University and a well-liked graduate of Royal Roads, who helped found the servicemen’s theatre in Gaspé.