Read The Battle of the St. Lawrence Online
Authors: Nathan M. Greenfield
The Battle of the St. Lawrence (22 page)
Whether because of the bathyscaphe effect, the turbulence caused by
Clayoquot’s
own propellers or Hartwig’s decision to lie still a hundred metres below, Lade’s asdic lost the contact shortly after
Clayoquot
‘s propellers drove the ship away from the wreckage-strewn waters.
Shortly before 11 a.m., Lade called off the search when, through the fog, his lookouts spotted
Charlottetown’s
rafts again.
“We were in pretty rough shape by then,” recalls MacAuley. “The water was cold, so we kept switching men from the wooden sides of the raft to
the basket in the middle and to the sides. We tried to keep the worst-injured as stable as we could. But we were all shivering. The oil covering our faces stopped us from seeing it, but I’m sure that all of our lips had turned blue.”
“The water was covered in thick oil and wreckage,” recalls Murphy. “The men were on Carley floats and some were in the whaler, most covered in thick oil. To get them, we had to throw a Jacobs ladder over the side. Some were able to climb up themselves and some had to be helped by men who climbed down the ladder to help the most injured aboard. It was a horrible scene—we’d been together with those men many times.
“I knew one of her stokers, a guy called John Grant, from Halifax like me. He’d been injured from the explosions. He was covered with oil and badly injured internally from the depth charges. The sick-berth attendant treated him and gave him morphine to ease his suffering. I found out later that he’d died. It was hard to hear about because he was a stoker like me,” recalls Murphy.
Not far away, though hidden by the fog that had gathered, Lieutenant Moors’s lifeboat made a gruesome discovery amidst the wreckage that bubbled to the surface after the ship went down: their captain’s body, floating upright in his life jacket, his face horribly distorted from the detonations beneath him. Years later, James Lamb, who commanded
Charlottetown’s
sister ship HMCS
Trail,
recounted the awesome moments that then played out amidst stunned and dying men:
With a gentleness surprising in a big man, George [Moors] lifted the slight body into the boat, where it was laid out with awkward reverence along the bottom board by youngsters awed at the nearness of their dead captain. They set out again then, rowing as best they could for the distant shore, but it quickly became apparent that something would have to be done if the oarsmen were to find room to row in the overcrowded boat. Accordingly, George lifted Bonner’s body back over the side, and others helped him tie the dead man’s life jacket to the rudder of the boat by a piece of rope. Now that room had been made, the oars could be worked properly, and course was resumed for the shore with the captain’s body towing astern at the end of its line.
The corpse, floating upright, proved a difficult tow; the men strained
at the oars to move the boat, ever so slowly, determined to save themselves and the body of their captain.
Bonner, in death as in life, proved mindful of the traditional captain’s dictum that put the welfare of one’s men first. After an hour of ever more difficult towing, the rudder was pulled right off the boat, and with its attached body, floated off astern. Willard Bonner, his last service done, disappeared in the mists forever.
Shortly afterward, Lade found Moors’s boat and, after running down one last echo and firing a pattern of five depth charges (the blast of which damaged Lade’s own asdic and gyrocompass),
Clayoquot
set a course for Gaspé, carrying fifty-eight survivors of the second of His Majesty’s Canadian Ships to be sunk in four days.
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Commander Lade served with distinction until Christmas Eve 1944, when he died after
Clayoquot
was torpedoed just outside Halifax harbour.
By the time
Clayoquot
reached Gaspé at 2:40 p.m. on September 12, men like MacAuley and Heagy, though still stained black with oil, were able to walk the gangplank back to land unaided. The ship’s leading telegraphist, Edmond Robinson, collapsed on the jetty and died several days later from his injuries. Others, such as Fortin and Thomas Macdonald, ERA, were carried off and taken first to Commander German’s house on the base. There German’s wife, Dorothy, cared for them on the floor of the living room. Later, James Essex recalls, Commander German ordered that the men whom he knew to be dying from their internal injuries be taken to Hôtel-Dieu hospital in the town of Gaspé. One, Able Seaman Donald Bowser, was carried off dead.
Bowser’s funeral, the first for a Canadian serviceman killed in Canada since the Riel Rebellion in 1885, was the one to be held in Gaspé, the home port of four Canadian warships sunk during the Battle of the St. Lawrence.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church, where the fifty-four survivors of Hartwig’s torpedoes and more than a hundred of their fellow sailors and soldiers from the bases that dotted the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula gathered on a beautiful mid-September day to pay their final respects, shares none of the ornateness
of its more famous sister in London, the capital of Bowser’s native England. Almost Calvinist in its simplicity, St. Paul’s is located on the western arm of a spit of land that juts out from the town of Gaspé. At fifty feet, its spire had been used by three generations of fishermen as a sighting point.
When MacAuley and his shipmates entered the church, the sun was streaming in through the twenty-foot-high windows. At the end of the knave, before the pulpit, under the cupola beneath the spire, was their shipmate’s casket, draped with the White Ensign. At each corner of the flag-draped casket was a sailor dressed in regulation blues—a sharp contrast with the dungarees and civilian jackets that had quickly been gathered up to clothe
Charlottetown’s
survivors. Each of the sailors in the honour guard stood three feet away from the casket’s corners, their heads bowed, their polished rifles barrel to the ground, their white-gloved hands clasped over their rifles’ butts.
The words spoken over Bowser’s coffin—used for centuries by the Church of England to celebrate death and eternal life in “the living Church of Christ Jesus”—were as familiar to the sailors who heard them as they are foreign to most of us today:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die….
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand in the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.
No doubt, for many of the eighteen-, nineteen-and twenty-year-old men, the words of the Book of Common Prayer had often been little more than rote sayings. Now, however, through these words and the prayer for the burial of the dead at sea—
Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be
changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.
—young men mourned their captain and their shipmates who never got off the hull built at the very headwaters of the St. Lawrence, those whose bodies were blasted as they thrashed in her waters, and the thirty-eight men from
Raccoon.
None of these men would ever rest in a proper grave.
WHAT CYRIL PERKIN SAW
SEPTEMBER 15 AND l6, 1942
SS
Saturnus, Inger Elizabeth
and
Joannis
Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight
The lean black cruisers search the sea.
Night-long their level shafts of light
Revolve, and find no enemy.
Only they know each leaping wave
May hide the lightning, and their grave.
—ALFRED NOYES
T
he decision to close the St. Lawrence to transoceanic shipping had far-reaching logistical and economic implications for Canada’s war effort. Most important, it meant severing Montreal, Canada’s largest port, from the convoy system that had been carefully built up since the outbreak of war in 1939. The convoy system was much more than the thousands of ships that assembled by the score in Halifax’s Bedford Basin before braving Dönitz’s wolfpacks on the stormy North Atlantic. It began in the nickel mines of Sudbury, on the wheat fields of the Prairies and at the ends of aircraft and tank assembly lines in Ontario and Quebec. It included tens of thousands of rail cars choreographed to be unloaded and sent back across the country. Between the railroad cars and the ships, hundreds of shipping clerks and thousands of stevedores took the lead in this complicated dance. The clerks were responsible for making sure that the cargo was stowed so that cargo for the first port of call could be unloaded without unloading the entire ship. The stevedores did the loading; they were the men who packed tons of TNT into dark holds. They were the men who knew how to load a ship with ten thousand tons of iron ore so that during a storm the ore
wouldn’t shift and break the ship’s back. Any disruption in this complicated system could cause logistical chaos.
Even though the U-boat offensive in the St. Lawrence had meant adding another thousand miles of convoying to Canada’s responsibilities, Naval Control of Shipping considered the Port of Montreal an important logistical asset. The city’s ready supply of skilled labour ensured that merchant ships could be repaired faster than in Halifax’s congested yards and dry docks. Montreal may have been ice-bound for several months a year, but the time lost to Father Winter was less than the time lost because of Maritime labour patterns in Halifax, Sydney and Saint John. (Many stevedores returned to their farms and fishing boats for seven months of the year.) Accordingly, in 1940 and 1941, Montreal recorded an average turnaround time of less than four days as compared with up to two weeks in Halifax. Added to this efficiency was the fact that guns and mines, wood and iron ore and aircraft, trucks and tanks loaded in Montreal did not have to be hauled six hundred miles by rail to the Maritime ports.
Though ships assembled by the score in Halifax’s Bedford Basin, most merchant ships were not loaded at this most famous eastern Canadian port, home to both the Western Local Escort Force and the Mid-Ocean Escort Force. The forces consisted of 115 Canadian and 23 British warships. The docks were so full that in 1941, when
Charlottetown
arrived in Halifax, it tied up on the water side of the Free French corvette
Alysse.
Halifax’s repair yards were so busy that when the Canadian navy decided to upgrade the corvette fleet’s asdic and radar, it took six months to do the work.
Second call on Halifax’s dockside facilities went to the “troopers.” The largest piers, 21 and 22, were all but reserved for
Queen Mary
and
Queen Elizabeth,
each of which sailed time and again with more than 15,000 troops aboard. Third call went to small refrigerated ships, whose cargoes of meat were hauled by rail to dockside, and to small tankers that could be turned around fast enough to be assigned to the next convoy heading out.
In 1940, the first full year of the war, Montreal, Quebec City and other St. Lawrence River ports loaded 596 ships; a year later the number had jumped to 704. In 1942 the number dropped to 278. In 1943 it fell by another 100 to 178, a number that includes scores of naval ships built along the St. Lawrence.
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Canada’s maritime ports were not, however, capable of absorbing “even half the customary trade of Montreal”; they became, according to naval historian Gordon N. Tucker, “congested and inefficient.” Trade was diverted from the traditional east-west corridor, established by Sir John A. Mac-donald’s National Policy and the CPR, to a north-south axis. By 1943, Canadian arms, food and other supplies were being shipped from New York, New Orleans, Savannah and even Galveston, Texas.
The economic dislocation caused by the drop in shipping can be measured by the decline in tonnage of foreign-going cargo being loaded at St. Lawrence River ports. In 1941 Montreal’s stevedores loaded 4,078,070 tons of foreign-going cargo; in 1942 the tonnage had dropped to 1,600,935 tons before falling further to 1,089,447 tons in 1943. Quebec City dropped from about 320,000 in 1941 to 142,308 in 1942. The economic fallout of this new north-south axis created a political headache for King’s wartime government.
Quebec’s premier, Adélard Godbout, complained that Quebec was being shortchanged by the federal government. On March 4, 1943, Onésime Gagnon, member of the Quebec legislative assembly for Matane, charged that Montreal and Quebec City had been harmed by the closure of the St. Lawrence in 1942 and would “suffer enormous prejudice” if the river remained closed in 1943. Five days later, his Union Nationale colleague from the riding of Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Hormidas Langlais, protested against the continued closure of the St. Lawrence: “This decision caused considerable misery among the population, it would further harm the value of the ports [of Montreal and Quebec City] and benefit those of St. John and Halifax,” which he went on to point out were in Minister Macdonald’s part of the country (Macdonald represented a Halifax riding). A few days later, in Parliament in Ottawa, Sasseville Roy claimed that shifting the shipping of war material to rail traffic cost the Canadian taxpayer an extra $i million a year. Even after the river was reopened in 1945 and traffic in Montreal and Quebec City rebounded (to 4,904,744 and 544,280 tons, respectively), the issue did not go away. Maurice Duplessis, who had defeated Godbout a year earlier, reiterated Gagnon’s and Langlais’s 1943 charges. On March 7, 1945, Duplessis petitioned the federal government to declare the Port of Quebec City a “free port.”
But in the days that followed the September 9, 1942, decision to close the St. Lawrence, establishing secure coastal convoys was the more immediate concern to the Naval Control of Shipping office in Quebec City. Shepherding those ships that could not be loaded at other ports to Montreal or Quebec City and then leading them safely out of the gulf was the first priority. In order to provide better air coverage, albeit from training aircraft based on Prince Edward Island, convoys were routed south of the Îles de la Madeleine. To replace the seventeen corvettes that were being sent to take part in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, Admiral Murray attached two older British destroyers, HMS
Salisbury
and
Witherington,
to the Gulf Escort Force. As well, on September 15, the Commanding Officer Atlantic Coast (COAC) received the recommendation that fixed convoy routes be abandoned because they were too predictable. Evidence for this accumulated even as the COAC was receiving the recommendation. Within hours of this signal having been sent, Hartwig torpedoed the USS
Laramie
and SS
Saturnus
and
Inger Elizabeth;
a day later Hoffmann destroyed SS
Joannis.