The Battle of the St. Lawrence (17 page)

A perfect day at sea. Small whitecaps and even the streaks of those playful porpoise so beloved by sailors.

Then, horror.

Instead of a jumping porpoise, Smith and the rating saw white streaks in the water shoot past their stern.

In an instant, a picture-postcard afternoon had turned to war.

“Torpedoes passing astern!”
Smith yelled. This last word was barely heard as sea breeze and the low throb of the ship’s engines were replaced by the ringing of Action Stations.

Seconds later, Captain Brown saw that his commodore had hoisted the black flag, which signalled Enemy in the Vicinity, and three others. “Captain Brown turned to the code book to see what the other flags meant,” recalls Marchand, who was at the helm. “He didn’t have time to finish before we could see a column of water rising from the
Mount Taygetus.
Brown ordered a hard turn to port.”

Wilkinson ran aft, yelling for Read in their cabin. “Get the hell out here, something’s going on!”

Hartwig watched through his periscope.

The torpedoes, driven by 100 hp motors powered by lead-acid batteries and guided by gyroscopes made by Siemens, sped onward through the calm, sunlit sea.

Smith ran to the bridge. Before entering it, he turned and took a quick glance to starboard in the direction of the three small ships.

Read, too, ran—first to the hook on the wall to get his life jacket, then through the cabin door.

“Just as my eyes focused on the ships,” Smith recalls, “there were three large clouds of smoke, one arising from each of the three ships.” He looked at his watch as soon as he realized they’d been hit. By the time he looked up, scant seconds later, they were starting to disappear below the sea.

Aboard
Oakton,
time unrolled.

“Before I could get out on deck,” Read recalls, “I heard the first one get it. Seconds later, as I got out on deck, I felt the
Oakton
… it was like it missed a beat. A deep rumbling thud, coming from beneath us. I ran, but the deck wasn’t where my feet expected it to be. The explosion of the torpedo didn’t destroy the deck. No, it drove the ship down—the entire length of the ship down—into the water. The water that poured over the deck pushed me head over heels into the garbage cans. She struggled to lift herself, as she did when a wave broke over her bow in a storm. She did, but it wasn’t the same; she was heavier, being pulled. You could feel her going down.”

As Read got up and ran to his action station, Smith glanced at his watch again and realized with horror that what he’d just witnessed had taken less than thirty seconds. “One minute there were three small merchant ships pushing their way along the Gaspé coastline, and suddenly there were none.”

Hartwig almost missed his chance to observe all three hits. Just before he ordered
“Los”
[fire], he thought he’d been sighted. Immediately after the torpedo tube cap clanged shut, U-517 dived. But the escort veered away a mere 200 metres from his periscope. Hartwig commended Watch Officer Lieutenant Rolf Pingel’s operation of the ship’s hydrophones, which allowed his bridge crew to hear the hits. His entry laments the fact that he had been able to fire only three torpedoes because Tube V was “unserviceable.”

The nineteen men aboard
Oakton
were now running for their lives, doing for real what they had done so many times in practice. Read cut a corner when, instead of climbing up the ladder to his action station, he climbed up on the rail and hoisted himself up to the deck by his arms. Before Read axed the rope that held the starboard lifeboat in, he saw the ship’s first officer pull the pins that had been holding fast the Carley floats.

“Thirty seconds later, the lifeboat was in the water and I had shimmied down the monkey rope,” recalls Read. “The ship was settling quickly. Before we got hit, the drop would have been something like twenty feet from the lifeboat station to the water. Now it was more like fifteen and dropping fast.

“Before I shimmied down, I could hear the water rushing into the ship. There hadn’t been a big blast, but some of the hatchways had been blown off and coal dust had been blown into the air. I could see water shooting out of No. 2 hold.”

Marchand recalls, “There was no panic, but everyone moved quickly. Captain Brown was the last man down into the boat.”

In just over a minute,
Oakton
had been hit and her men had abandoned her. Now they were sliding into lifeboats that their shipmates were struggling to keep steady, for though dying,
Oakton
still had enough forward motion to swamp the lifeboats.

Before another minute was out, the lifeboats were filled. Then men were
rowing as fast as they could away from their ship and from the vortex they knew would form with its sinking.

“We hadn’t gone more than fifty or sixty yards,” recalls Read. “It was maybe two or two and a half minutes since she’d been hit when, suddenly, we saw her break clean in two. We were dumbstruck.

“The two halves were just about equal. The bow rose up on one side, and the propellers rose up on the other. Everything that wasn’t bolted down on the deck slid down, the hatchways broke off and just for a second we could see the coal the stevedores had so carefully shovelled into her in Sandusky begin to spill out. When we saw that the propeller was still turning, one guy said, ‘Jeez, she’s still trying to go somewhere.’”

They watched as the funnel, still belching smoke, and the monkey deck (which was above the bridge in the forward part of the ship) came together. Then the funnel smashed through the monkey deck.

“Together, the two halves then sank in water that was boiling like a cauldron as all the air in them came to the surface, along with everything that wasn’t bolted to sinking steel. Then we heard the muffled explosions of her boilers and one last great bubble,” recalls Read. “The other two, the Greek ships, were off on our starboard side. They went down awfully fast too. We were too far to hear their boilers explode, but we saw their boats go out, and then they were gone too.”

Hartwig and his crew also heard the sounds of all three ships’ boilers exploding and of their bulkheads breaking.

The signals officers in Gaspé heard
Arrowhead
‘s signature and again knew that men were dead and dying and cargo was sinking.

Another turn and 15 knots put
Arrowhead
over the rapidly fading torpedo tracks. Then, despite the temperature gradients and the mixing of salt and fresh water, a ping, a good ping. Clear enough to give Skinner’s depth-charge men something to go for.

One pattern.

Then another, as
Truro
joined the attack.

And more, now from the Fairmiles.

Beneath the roiling sea, lights flickered, crackled and shorted out. Sparks flew around the ship as insulation around the wiring wore thin. Pipes squealed against their braces; some broke.

The ping of the asdic continued, the sound both bouncing off and penetrating Hartwig’s hull. The closeness of the next depth charge told the men in U-517 that this time the water wasn’t hiding them.

Steel squealed. Gauges gyrated and burst. Water seeped into the bilges.

Ten minutes.

Another blast, and plates bent as the U-boat, now in darkness—surrounded by darkness, the water that would be instant death—vibrated, but not as Hollywood or even the producers of the movie
Das Boot
would have it. Unless a depth charge explodes within twenty feet and blows a hole in the pressure hull, depth-charging has little effect on U-boats.

Though only 77 metres long, U-boats like Hartwig’s have a mass of 1,500 tons. This mass is immersed in an infinitely larger mass of water, which to an unbreached hull is almost solid. “Depth charges don’t move boats even an inch,” according to Werner Hirschmann, chief engineer on U-612 and U-190, “but, rather, are like a blow with a giant hammer on an immovable object.”

“It’s that pounding which breaks the glass of lights and gauges, which bends the metal of the deck plates where, either from the time they were cast or welded into place, there is a pre-existing weak spot,” says Hirschmann. “It’s the thousands of tons of pressure generated by the outward movement of the pressure bubble formed by the detonation that is transmitted by the water directly through the hull and into such things as shafts. Shafts and their housings bend because the force exerted on them is not equally distributed along their lengths, both because the explosions occur in one specific place and because by their very nature shafts and their housings have pockets—the gap between the shaft and its house—that are irregular.”

Twenty minutes, and still more.

Had the outer hull held? Was oil leaking from the bilges? If so, would the Canadians above see it as proof of a hit? Would they drop more, or would they think the boat had gone to the bottom?

More blasts. Perhaps these were the ones that damaged the ship’s water-distilling plant, cutting its output from fifty gallons of drinkable water to ten; a jury-rigged system would later produce just another ten gallons.

More sounds of propellers. Hartwig and his crew were scared, terrified or resigned; he and his men had to be as silent as possible. They’d long ago taken
off their shoes and donned the special socks that dampen all sound. Orders were whispered; damage-control reports were whispered. If caught by a hydrophone, a cough, a sneeze, a dropped tool could mean a better-aimed spread.

Hartwig commanded, but when the U-boat was underwater, even when being depth-charged, it was his chief engineer who was in charge of operations. It was he who interpreted the damage control for his captain, who told him what the boat could withstand—a deeper dive? Once told to keep it at, say, 75 metres, it was he who had to determine if the boat was becoming lighter (because of leaking oil from the bilges) or heavier (because of water pouring into a ruptured bilge tank). If lighter, even by a small percentage of its total weight, it would rise, and valves had to be opened to let in just enough sea water. If heavier, water had to be blown out of the tanks by releasing compressed air into them. So that this would not become a calling card to the depth charges, the release had to be timed exactly to the rhythm of the blasts raining down from above.

Thirty minutes.

Still more hammering on the welded steel hull. Every decibel crashed into the crew’s ears. Hartwig and his bridge crew listened to the hydrophones. They could make out different propellers. Another blast. Another ping. Another blast.

U-517’s hull still held. But for how long? The real danger, Hartwig knew, was not the charge now pounding the boat, but the next one. Would it be closer?

After almost forty minutes of being pounded, Hartwig decided to use a secret device called the
Pillenwerfer.
Launched from a torpedo tube, it did not explode, killing men. Rather, it burst into millions of bubbles that turned a ping into a mushy sound that hid the U-boat from the asdic operator.

Aware that his force’s supply of depth charges was rapidly diminishing, Skinner broke off action and ordered his ship and the others to save the men in the lifeboats. Their last depth charges burst only the
Pillenwerfer’s
bubbles, as U-517’s silent electric motors pushed its hushed crew away and out of danger.

Read and his shipmates watched as the Fairmiles cut past them on their way to depth-charge the U-boat. Then, after one of the men took a count,
he heard him say, “Captain Brown, there’re eighteen of us here—the chief’s missing.”

“That silly old bugger went back for his glasses,” said an oiler, as Captain Brown realized his penny-ante poker buddy, the chief engineer, was last seen going into the
Oakton,
now just tons of wrecked steel perhaps a thousand feet below.

“‘We’d better go look in that mess,’ said Captain Brown, pointing to the flotsam and jetsam that marred the sea where
Oakton
‘s two pieces sank,” Read recalls.

“I don’t really remember us being worried that we wouldn’t find him,” says Read. “It wasn’t that kind of a moment. Someone passed around cig-arettes—we smoked a lot of them back then. We heard the explosions of the depth charges and watched the great domes of water they shot up. At one point we even thought we’d seen the submarine rise up like a cigar. We’d heard that sometimes when being depth-charged they did that.”

“The escorts kicked up quite a ruckus. The Fairmiles were flitting all over and all around us,” Read remembers. “There were depth charges going off every which way.

“We rowed into the floating mass of broken hatch covers, coal dust, splinters, still some clothes that had boiled up from inside the ship, paper, paint chips, oil that had once lubricated the engine, and insulation. It wasn’t long, less than five minutes, before one of the guys spotted a large section of wooden hatchway, and holding on to it was the chief. As soon as he saw us, he yelled, ‘For Christ’s sake, get me out of here, it’s cold!’”

The crews aboard
Mount Pindus
and
Mount Taygetus
were not as lucky. Together they lost seven men, and many with flash burns, adrift in lifeboats or Carley floats, didn’t receive proper medical attention for hours. According to
Arrowhead
‘s log, Captain Skinner ordered the Fairmiles to pick up the survivors at 4:55. The last surviving merchant ship of QS-33 was sent on to Sydney, escorted by
Truro. Arrowhead
and the Fairmiles turned to Gaspé, arriving there close to 8:30 p.m.

“When we got into port, they marched us into a barracks, where we were given clean, dry clothes and something to eat,” recalls Read, who slept that
night in a barrack requisitioned from one of the servicemen assigned to Gaspé. Other men, who lived at Mrs. Kruse’s hotel, gave up their beds so that the survivors of QS-33 could sleep between two clean sheets. The dead were buried immediately.

Two days later, when they arrived by special train in Montreal, Read and his shipmates and the men from the three Greek ships that had been sunk were taken to the Queens Hotel, across from where Bonsecours Market stands today.

“Once they got us there, we were taken into a large reception room, where we were sat down. There were both civilians and naval personnel, with lots of gold rings on their cuffs,” recalls Read, a memory he shares with Marchand.