The Battle of the St. Lawrence (16 page)

On September 1, following Dönitz’s sailing orders, which listed the small North Shore bay as “an anchorage for steamers,” Hartwig entered Fortuna Bay at night. Throwing caution to the wind, he pushed as close as fifty yards from the pier. “We could see the buildings and the lights quite clearly. There was nobody around to see us and, unfortunately, there were no freighters. So we turned around and left,” Hartwig told Moon.

The U-boat captain escaped by the skin of his teeth.

Out of the dark of night, suddenly, Hartwig’s lookout saw some 500 yards away the telltale sign of a warship, the corvette HMCS
Weyburn:
the glowing water piling in front of the bow as it cut through the water, a moving phosphorescence coming straight at them. The warship saw him too, Hartwig quickly realized. For when he tried to escape on the surface at full speed, his diesels driving U-517 at 21 knots, the warship not only followed but began gaining on him. To avoid being either rammed or shot from behind, Hartwig crash-dived.

But Hartwig was not out of danger. Either his soundings or his charts were wrong. Instead of the safety of deep water, he hit bottom at 120 feet.

“It was,” Hartwig told Moon, “a very bad situation. We were scraping on the bottom making a lot of noise. All we could do was keep absolutely quiet and listen to the vessel approach us and pass overhead,” hoping that neither the ship’s asdic nor its hydrophones gave it a fix.

They didn’t. And after several anxious minutes, Hartwig escaped.

Two days later, while sinking
Donald Stewart,
a 1,781-ton laker with concrete in her hold and tons of aviation fuel in 55-gallon drums lashed to her deck, Hartwig again played chicken with the RCN. Hartwig’s war log for September 3 reads,

“I figured,” Hartwig told Moon, “that the lookouts would be watching only the dark side of the convoy where they would expect a submarine to attack from. I thought I would take them by surprise. So I decided, against all the rules, to attack.”

Hartwig’s decision to hold his bearing even after the “guard ship,” HMCS
Weyburn
(which had seen the wash produced by his conning tower), veered toward him, surprised Captain Tom Golby—and sealed
Donald Stewart’s
fate. Had Hartwig been spooked by the star shell now illuminating his hull and had dived or even ordered a hard turn in the hopes of
repeating the
pas de deux
of the day before, his war diary would have recorded that the angle of attack was “hopeless.” Instead, he waited until
Weyburn,
closing from 1,000 yards at better than 15 knots, was just seconds away before issuing the twin orders to fire and crash-dive.

One torpedo ran harmlessly into the night. The other hit
Donald Stewart
forward of her stern, blowing a hole in the hull, which was weighed down by tons of cement, and igniting the gasoline. Within moments, Romeo Gaudet, Harry Kaminsky and Harvey Sutherland were dead. The blast lit the Strait of Belle Isle and was seen by Donald Murphy, a leading stoker aboard HMCS
Clayoquot,
more than twenty miles away. The men on
Stewart
‘s bridge and in the aft house above the engine room survived the fireball that raced up and down the foundering, burning 250-foot ship. Ironically, the best description of what the men who survived these explosions and fire went through comes from Hartwig himself: “We were so close [before diving] that I could feel the heat of the burning ship on my face and there was so much noise from the explosions and the fire that the helmsman could not hear my orders,” he told Moon.

Hartwig’s crash-dive saved him from being shot at by
Weyburn’s
guns. But this time, the gulf’s waters did not hide him from asdic. Captain Golby knew where he was. Then, just as Golby passed over the swirl left by the crash-dive,
Weyburn’s
depth-charge launchers jammed. What would ordinarily have been a brace of four or six depth charges—two set at 50 feet, two at 100 feet and two at 200 feet—or even eight, with the final two dropped with the safety still on but with the knowledge that as they touched bottom they too would explode, was cut to two. Those two must have been close, for Hartwig’s lights shorted. Four or even two more might have caught him.

As
Weyburn
attacked U-517, the men on HMCS
Trail,
which was escorting another small convoy through the strait, witnessed still another tragedy. They saw a crewman realize he was trapped by the burning sea on the burning ship. “White faced and horrified,” James Lamb later recalled, he “calmly turn[ed] to face the flames before the inferno consumed him.”

Life in the merchant marine, on ships like
Donald Stewart
or its sister ship, Read’s
Oakton,
should not, of course, be romanticized. The work was hard.
Long periods of boredom were interspersed with strenuous, repetitive activities and unending chipping of paint. But, as many who have written about them have noted, merchant seamen see themselves as being the last of a breed: free men who freely sign the ship’s articles. The articles may bind them to a ship and to a captain’s command, but only for a specific period of time.

The pay was low, conditions often poor. Captains or first officers could be stupid and tyrannical, but surprisingly few merchant seamen view these types as the norm. They stand out in their memories because they are so rare. “The old man knew how to take care of his crew” is a phrase much more commonly heard when retired merchant sailors speak of their captains than the salty language for which sailors are famed. Even sixty years later, Robert Pike, who served aboard SS
Waterton,
a British freighter sunk off Cap-de-la-Madeleine on October 11, 1942, fondly recalls his captain, William Lutjens: “He was a good captain. Looked after the crew. He made sure that we had what we needed.”

Read served under two captains and speaks highly of both. His experience may be coloured, he admits, by the fact that one of the captains was his father’s old friend. Still, neither he nor Marchand recalls Brown treating Read all that differently than he did any new hand. “He did it for me, but he did it for the other young fella; when we were on lookout watch, sometimes he’d take us up on the bridge and give us a turn at the helm. Boy, did we feel big then.”

Some twelve hours after the sinking of
Donald Stewart,
Read lifted the hawser that had held
Oakton
to the stanchion on the side of Lock No. 1 of the Lachine Canal and then jumped aboard. A short time later, just before slipping under the railroad bridge that connects Montreal to Halifax in the southeast and the rail lines that run to Halifax or New York,
Oakton
passed the busy Port of Montreal. Among the ships berthed in the inner harbour near the huge concrete Red Rose flour silos and downriver toward the city’s financial district, then the economic heartbeat of Canada, were three weather-beaten, rust-stained Greek ships.

A reluctant ally that entered the war only after Mussolini invaded in 1940, in 1942 Greece was occupied by Hitler’s troops, which had been dispatched
when Mussolini’s invasion force broke. Along with hundreds of other masters, including
Aeas
‘s, the masters of SS
Mount Pindus
and
Mount Taygetus
refused orders to return home, putting themselves instead at the service of Britain and its allies. A few days later, after the
Oakton
steamed by them, these three ships weighed anchor and steamed first to Quebec City for a convoy conference, then to Île d’Orléans, where they were degaussed, and finally another 170 miles downriver to Bic Island, where convoy QS-33 firmed up.
⁹

“For us, the most important thing about Bic Island had nothing to do with the convoy or the escorts,” recalls Read. “It meant another full dollar a day, the war risk bonus.” The men on
Mount Taygetus
must have felt the same. Like Read, they knew of the U-boat risk, but for them especially, when in the St. Lawrence, the threat must have seemed small beer indeed. The storms of the North Atlantic hadn’t sunk
Mount Taygetus,
and neither had Dönitz’s wolves, though two years earlier they’d come close when
Mount Taygetus
was part of SC-42, a convoy that included SS
Joannis
and
Inger Elizabeth,
which Hoffmann and Hartwig, respectively, would sink within a fortnight.

Two hundred miles east of Bic Island, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the part of the river that the U-boats were known to be operating in totals hundreds of square kilometres. Huff-duff bearings and locations of recorded attacks may have narrowed Hartwig’s area of operations considerably, but the lag between getting a fix and the arrival of air cover was still measured in hours—time enough for Hartwig to become the proverbial needle in the haystack. Were he to have surfaced soon after the attack and then run on the surface for five hours after attacking
Donald Stewart
—and despite the obvious dangers, even during the day, Hartwig preferred to travel on the surface both because of the speed he could make and because it allowed him to air out his fetid boat and charge his batteries—Hartwig could have been anywhere along the edge of a 200-square-kilometre box. Had he spent these five hours cruising underwater, the box would have been 50 square kilometres. In addition, of course, he would have been underwater and thus invisible to planes and all but invisible to asdic.

Eight times in the days after sinking
Donald Stewart,
Hartwig ordered Alarm after his lookouts spotted RCAF patrol planes The young pilots, products of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which trained 150,000
pilots in bases across Canada, tried everything. Cutting their engines and gliding silently. Skimming low over the water with the sun at their tails, hoping to blind Hartwig’s lookouts. Dropping out of the clouds.

J. H. Sanderson, flying a Douglas Digby out of Gander, got the closest. Eleven hours after Hartwig sank
Donald Stewart,
Sanderson put his twin-engine Digby into a power dive that took him directly over U-517. He was—just—too far away. The brace of four depth charges he dropped from 150 feet hit the water twenty seconds after Hartwig crash-dived. Twenty seconds translated into 30 metres, a scant but sufficient margin of safety. The blasts shook Hartwig up but left him undamaged.

Daybreak on the seventh gave way to the morning, and still Read’s
Oakton
was alone on the south side of the St. Lawrence. “Some time near 11 a.m., a plane came over and signalled us to rejoin the convoy. Using a lamp and my boy-scout Morse code, I told them we didn’t know where the convoy was.”

A few hours later, a Fairmile launch appeared and its captain told Brown to take
Oakton
into the middle of the river. By midafternoon, Captain Skinner had reassembled QS-33 with
Oakton
on its starboard. By 3 p.m., rain had cut “visibility to one mile or less,” forcing the convoy’s air cover back to base.

Skinner didn’t know it, but earlier in the day, before the convoy re-formed, his charges had dodged a bullet. At 7:06 a.m. on September 7, Hartwig took aim at “three fat steamers” as they entered QU BA 3693. After taking aim, however, he realized that the “inclination was hopeless.” Rather than risk a torpedo—which cost 24,000 Reich marks (about the cost of a small house in Germany) and took 3,720 man-hours to build—by firing when the angle was beyond that angle at which torpedoes would run truest, Hartwig decided to reposition himself in front of the convoy, running ahead of it until late in the afternoon.

Shortly after 4 p.m., eighteen miles off Gaspé point, QS-33 steamed directly over U-517. Again Hartwig resisted the first chance to fire when the inclination would have been 70°. He risked being caught in the asdic beams, trusting that the same temperature and salinity gradients that made holding trim difficult would hide him from what Joseph Schull calls the “searching fingers of Asdic.”

Following a flagged order from the convoy commodore aboard SS
Benacas, Oakton
‘s helmsman, Laurent Marchand, turned the wheel as the convoy cut another angle, designed to protect them but putting Hartwig between the “1st and 2nd steamers.”

Still the angle was not perfect, so, according to his war diary, Hartwig “proceeded between the 2nd and 3rd steamers at right angles to the convoy course” and then turned 180° so that he could fire from both his forward and aft tubes. From where he was, all his “eels” would have to do to sink three ships at once was to run simple and true.

As Hartwig manoeuvred between the convoy’s columns, Jock Smith’s asdic watch came to an end.

“It was a beautiful sunny day and I decided to go for a walk around the ship,” he recalls. “When I came to the stern, I met one of the torpedo ratings I knew. We reminisced about the sinkings during the night and expressed relief at the bright sunny day we were experiencing.”

“A perfect day at sea,” Smith remembers. “Bright sun, blue sky. On the
Arrowhead
‘s starboard side, three small merchant ships slowly ploughing their way along the Gaspé coast,” looking not all that different from the ships that a century and a half earlier had left New France carrying beaver pelts by the ton. Smith’s memory of running fairly close to the heavily wooded shoreline is the same as Read’s; since the second sinking the night before, “we’d been running for the shoals.”

Four hundred yards away and twenty feet below the dappled surface, while peering through one periscope, Hartwig pushed the button that fired a torpedo from his one functioning aft tube. Peering through the other periscope, Karl Brandi, his thirty-year-old first officer, pushed the two buttons that fired the torpedoes in the U-boat’s forward tubes.