The Battle of the St. Lawrence (2 page)

H
is Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy and Nazi Germany’s
U-Bootwaffe—
the two navies that from May 1942 through November 1944 were locked in a bitter conflict stretched over the almost quarter million square kilometres of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and as far inland as Rimouski, Quebec—were almost mirror images of each other.

Shortly after the 1922 election, which returned the Liberals under Mackenzie King to power, Parliament slashed the Naval Estimates from $2.5 million to $1.5 million, causing what Commodore James Polmer called “a scar that never healed.” The loss of two-fifths of its budget forced the RCN to dispose of HMCS
Aurora,
a 3,500-ton cruiser, and two H-class submarines, and to cut hundreds from its active lists.

During the budget debate, Defence Minister George Graham argued that the cut in the Naval Estimates put Canada in line with both the spirit and the commitments undertaken by the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan at the 1921 Washington Disarmament Conference: “Every country in the world today is endeavouring to reduce its armament…. The great nations of the world agreed not only to take a holiday in naval construction, but to scrap many of their fighting ships.” The conference fixed the ratio of capital ships between the three powers at 5:5:3.
¹

Like both J. S. Woodsworth, leader of the Independent Labour Party (a forerunner of the CCF, which later became the NDP), and T. A. Crerar, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party—who asked the minister, “Who has Canada to fear?”—Graham was influenced by what military historian
Correlli Barnett has called “moralizing internationalism.” As did his counterparts in London, Graham put his faith in international covenants and the League of Nation’s “machinery of talk instead of the traditional accouter-ments of national power—armies, navies or air forces.” Graham’s desire to replace the permanent naval force with volunteers, who, he told the House, would provide “better service on our own behalf [and] a better service for the Empire at large,” was in accord with what he was hearing from London. At the same time that Graham was reducing the RCN, British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald decided to delay completion of the Royal Navy base at Singapore as a “demonstration of sincerity” to the Japanese. Graham claimed that the volunteer force would be better for the Canadian economy because it would “not take a single man out of industrial employment.” Graham’s boss, Prime Minister King—who in 1918 wrote, in
Industry and Humanity,
that industrial production is key to economic development—no doubt agreed that it was unwise to take men out of industrial employment and place them in the military, which produced, apparently, nothing. By the end of 1922, His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy had been reduced to a complement of 483 officers and ratings, and Canada’s newly opened naval college had been closed.

Six years later, after King shuffled Graham out of and shuffled Colonel J. L. Ralston, a Nova Scotian, into the Ministry of National Defence, the Naval Estimates grew to $2.7 million, and a year later to $3.6 million. The bulk of the increased funds went to purchasing two older destroyers from England and to ordering two new destroyers, HMCS
Saguenay
and
Skeena,
the first warships built specifically for the RCN. To crew these ships, the navy’s list grew to 896 officers and men.

In 1934, the year Hitler openly began to rearm and one year after Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, the Conservative government of R. B. Bennett responded to the crisis of the Depression by slashing government spending. Bennett’s Naval Estimates proposed cutting the $2.4 million budget by $2 million. Chief of Staff Major-General Andrew McNaughton proposed paying off the Royal Canadian Navy and protecting Canada’s coasts with aircraft alone. A ferocious bureaucratic battle, led by the navy’s chief of staff, Commodore Walter Hose, kept the cuts to only $200,000. Years later Rear-Admiral Leonard Murray summed up the attitude toward
the Canadian navy during these years: “They would be pleased if someone made up his mind to take the whole navy out into the middle of the ocean and sink it without a trace.”

As international tensions built through the mid-1930s, the King government began increasing the Naval Estimates. In 1936 the Estimates more than doubled, to $4.4 million, as the navy bought two additional destroyers from England. Two years later, the Estimates jumped again to $6.6 million as the RCN purchased another two, giving the navy six relatively modern destroyers, three on each coast. Together, these ships could have made a credible defence of Halifax. In late May 1939, however, King’s cabinet abruptly cut four anti-submarine vessels and two motor torpedo boats from the building program.

Thus, when war broke out in September 1939, the RCN found itself with a complement of 129 officers and 1,456 men, and with 13 ships—a woeful mismatch for the mission fate handed it. The primary mission of the Canadian navy had none of the glamour that fired the imaginations of generations of boys. Save for a few officers serving on RN ships during the hunt for
Bismarck,
there would be no latter-day Trafalgar, Copenhagen or Jutland for Canadians. Canada’s war at sea—and its war at home—was the defence of the merchant ships that carried the men, machines, food and fuel needed to defeat Hitler.

Only a crash industrial program, scarcely imaginable just a few short years earlier during the Depression, gave Canada the hundreds of ships needed for convoy escort work. By the end of 1940, Canada’s shipyards had turned out 11 corvettes and had converted 12 yachts into armed yachts. A year later, another 57 corvettes, 26 Bangor-class minesweepers and 13 Fairmile motor launches went into service. By the end of 1942, the Naval Estimates totalled $19,367,632 and the navy’s rolls counted 179 warships; by the end of the war, Canada’s fleet numbered 378 ships, the world’s fourth largest, and the Dominion government was spending $427,098,883 on His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy.

In 1944, journalist Leslie Roberts apostrophized the RCN as “a Navy of bank clerks, dirt farmers, fishermen, bond salesmen, mechanics and machinists, telegraphers and pre-war amateur radio enthusiasts.” It had to be.

To crew the first group of ships that Canada put to sea, the navy called
upon the 66 officers and 196 men enrolled in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (RCNR) and the 115 officers and 1,435 volunteers in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR). The men of the RCNR—men such as Captain John Willard Bonner, who died in the St. Lawrence when his corvette, HMCS
Charlottetown,
was torpedoed in September 1942, and Captain Alfred Skinner, whose corvette, HMCS
Arrowhead,
fought three actions in the St. Lawrence during 1942—had decades of experience at sea. As captains of merchant ships, Skinner’s and Bonner’s naval training consisted of a couple of weeks every year or so. The men of the RCNVR had even less training; they were, according to Roberts, “pre-war Sunday Sailors, members of yacht clubs and only partially trained.” From 1939 through 1942, Canada’s navy was manned by a maritime equivalent of the militia myth—a myth that holds, as Jack Granatstein has recently shown, that hastily drilled volunteers filled with pluck and a self-evidently just cause will produce great victories.

The navy didn’t lack men to crew the ships that poured off Canada’s slipways; it lacked time to train them. An old navy adage holds that “while it takes two years to build a ship, it takes five years to train a sailor.” On March
I
, 1943, the RCN counted 603 officers and 4,002 ratings. The RCNR’s totals were 924 officers and 5,000 ratings. The bulk of the navy’s volunteers, however, came through the RCNVR, which then carried 4,437 officers and 40,713 ratings; later in 1943 the RCNVR totalled almost 70,000 men.

After the fall of France in 1940 gave U-boats relatively unfettered access to the North Atlantic, the RCN rushed thousands of RCNVR men through two-week-long training courses. Léon-Paul Fortin, who survived the torpedoing of
Charlottetown
off Sainte-Anne-des-Monts on September 11, 1942, had never been to sea before December 13, 1942, the day
Charlottetown
was commissioned. The rest of the crew was so green that they were seasick within hours of leaving the jetty in Quebec City. Weapons specialists such as Radar Operator Allan Heagy, also of
Charlottetown,
had scarcely more sea training.

Out on the North Atlantic, RCN ships—equipped at first with 123 asdic (sonar) and 286 radar, both of which were a technological generation behind the RN’s 127 asdic and 271 radar, which could pick up a periscope—were almost overmatched by the “grey wolves” that prowled the sea. In May 1941, the RN complained that the Canadians “showed a complete lack of
understanding of what was expected of divisions within individual ships (the Asdic operators, depth charge crew, gunners, and so on) and of ships operating as a group.” Just six months later, after the bulk of the US Atlantic Fleet was sent to the Pacific following Pearl Harbor, the RCN supplied 48 per cent of the escort ships on the “Newfie–Derry” run; the RN supplied 50 per cent and the USN 2 per cent.

Before 1942 was out, the strain of expansion and the slow upgrading of radar and asdic (years after RN corvette captains were furnished with gyrocompasses, which continued to function during depth-charge attacks, Canadian corvette captains relied on inaccurate magnetic compasses mounted on the binnacle) came close to breaking the Canadian navy. Sixty of the eighty ships lost in convoying were lost while under RCN escort, eighteen of them in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River.

Responding to the fact that between February and March 1917, 148 U-boats destroyed i.9 million tons of shipping, which nearly forced England out of the Great War, Article 191 of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, declared, “The construction and acquisition of any kind of submarine, even for trade purposes, is forbidden to Germany.”
²
Within two years, a secret U-department had been organized within the permitted Torpedo and Mines Inspectorate based in Kiel. Together with inspectorate officials, engineers from the firm Blohm & Voss were soon in Kobe, Japan, helping Germany’s former enemy (and future ally) build its first submarine fleet. That same year, Krupp sent engineers to Argentina to supervise the construction of ten submarines.

In 1922, the year Canada slashed two-fifths from the RCN’s estimates, the three German shipyards led by German steel-producing giant Krupp formed a dummy company in Rotterdam, Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheeps-bouw (IvS), staffed by former U-boat captains and engineers. IvS built submarines for four countries—submarines that served in effect as prototypes of the U-boats Germany would use against the Allies. Turkey’s 1923 order was filled in 1927; the boat’s sea trials were carried out by a former U-boat commander and chief engineer who made a report to a secret division of the German Naval High Command.

In 1926, a year during which the Naval Service of Canada failed to spend $60,000 of its $1.4-million budget, IvS received orders from Spain, Finland and the Soviet Union, this last sale preceded by three secret missions to Moscow. A large part of an 800-million-gold-mark loan granted to the Weimar Republic by the International Control Commission in 1926 was dispersed to Krupp and other industrial firms involved in secret rearmament, including the electronics giant Siemens.

In 1930, two years before Hitler’s rise to power and seven years before the formal abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, Rear-Admiral Walter Gladisch was already signing himself
Führer der Uboote
(FdU). From July to September 1930, some of his officers, disguised as civilian tourists, carried out the sea trials for one of the 500-ton submarines that IvS had built for Finland. In 1935, the British Admiralty, convinced, as the Defence of Trade Committee put it a year later, that “the problem of dealing with the submarine is more than simplified by the invention of ASDIC [sonar],” raised no objection to the London Naval Treaty, which removed the prohibition on building submarines that Versailles had placed on Germany. The main thrust of the London Naval Treaty was to try to limit Germany’s surface ship fleet and thereby prevent the start of the type of naval arms race that preceded World War I.
³

The
U-Bootwaffe
quickly took shape after February
I
, 1936, the day Hitler ordered the construction of the first boats. In March, the 1st Flotilla was organized in Kiel. (After the fall of France it moved to Brest.) Several months later, Hitler appointed Karl Dönitz, a former U-boat captain and World War I Iron Cross winner, to the position of FdU. Despite Hitler’s and
Grossadmiral
Erich Raeder’s commitment to large capital ships such as the battleship
Bismarck
(only 10 per cent of Germany’s steel production was dedicated to the building of U-boats), Dönitz argued that the
U-Bootwaffe
was the
Kriegsmarine’s
most potent arm in the coming
guerre de course,
the war against England’s trade. In October 1936, the 2nd Flotilla, based first in Wilhelmshaven and later in Lorient, was organized. Within a year, Dönitz, who had told Hitler, “give me three hundred submarines and I’ll win the war for you,” was organizing group exercises that presaged the wolf-packs that savaged the ships on the North Atlantic run.

The conditions endured by Dönitz’s men were not all that different from
those cursed by the thousands of Canadians who served in corvettes. Like the “patrol vessel, whaler type” (as the ships were called before Churchill dubbed them “corvettes”), U-boats were cramped, wet ships. Designed for a crew of forty-five, corvettes routinely carried eighty or more, the number growing through the war as they were fitted with more specialized antisubmarine gear. Because of the corvette’s low fo’c’sle, water poured into the ship’s hatchways and down ventilators until it came to rest in the crew’s mess.
⁴
Uniforms were almost always damp, and men slept in damp hammocks abutting each other, strung up above the water sloshing on the deck beneath them, upon which floated bits of food, personal belongings and the detritus of daily life.