The Battle of the St. Lawrence (23 page)

SEPTEMBER 15, 1942

Three hundred and nine feet long with a beam of 30 feet and a displacement of 1,090 tons, HMS
Salisbury
was the largest warship in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on September 15, 1942. Its crew, including its commander, Lieutenant M. H. R. Crichton, RNR, were originally slated for HMS
Cameron
but had been transferred to
Salisbury
after Goring’s Stuka dive-bombers destroyed
Cameron
in dry dock on December 15, 1940.

“We’d heard about the sinkings in the St. Lawrence,” says Signalman
Cyril Perkin, then a twenty-one-year-old Cornishman whose two older brothers were also in the Royal Navy, “but after what we’d seen on the North Atlantic, the St. Lawrence, especially in the beautiful late autumn, sounded like a vacation. At the beginning of 1942 we twice escorted the USS
Wasp
as she delivered Hurricanes to Malta. We got lucky because we weren’t attacked. But they were very tense trips—constant danger from U-boats and aircraft—and we knew from the destruction of the
Cameron
what dive-bombers could do to a ship.”

Before those missions, Perkin’s ship spent almost two years on the North Atlantic run. “We were based on the River Clyde in Scotland and would range far out into the Atlantic to pick up convoys. When we weren’t firing depth charges, we were picking up ravaged convoys. You could always tell when there’d been a terrible battle because the hulls of the ships would still be black with oil and the escort ships would be filled with survivors and signal us that they were low on fuel.”

“Our time in the St. Lawrence really did begin with a milk run,” he recalls. “Before being sent on our first escort patrol, we were given liberty in Prince Edward Island. I remember us going into a store to buy some milk and then the lot of us sitting on the sidewalk drinking it straight from the bottle. By that point, we hadn’t seen or tasted any milk for more than three years.”

The immediate reason for assigning
Salisbury
to the Gulf Escort Force was Prime Minister King’s decision to agree to Churchill’s request for corvettes to take part in Operation Torch. As well, Admiral Murray hoped that, led by a warship equipped with up-to-date anti-submarine electronics and attack systems, the Gulf Escort Force might be able to reproduce the success other forces were beginning to have in the North Atlantic.
²

On June 16, ONS-102’s escorts, led by HMCS
Restigouche,
fought off an attack by five U-boats. Dönitz attributed the escort’s success to both aggressive Allied patrolling and the inexperience of several of the U-boat captains. In St. John’s, Murray attributed the success of the largely Canadian escort force to the fact that the larger escorts were equipped with shipborne HF/DF, which allowed them to plot the U-boats as they were radioing their positions to Lorient prior to the attack. In late August, though they could not prevent every U-boat attack, the escorts of ONS-122, led by HMS
Viscount,
used their 271 radar—which allowed the escorts to spot the U-boats
while they were still beyond the convoy’s escort screen—to break up thirteen attacks on the convoy.
³
No doubt Murray hoped that perhaps one or two 271-equipped escorts could turn the tide in the St. Lawrence.

Though
Salisbury
was decades older than
Arrowhead,
the lead escort of SQ-36 until
Salisbury
joined the convoy on the fifteenth, the British ship’s asdic and radar were a generation ahead of its Canadian consort’s. “Jock” Smith and his fellow asdic operators aboard
Arrowhead
had to manually rotate the ship’s asdic transducer in what amounted to five-degree increments. To ensure complete coverage, they had to turn the wheel connected to the transducer in the dome behind the bow ten degrees forward toward the bow or stern, then five degrees backward to the original position, then ten degrees forward (or backward).
Salisbury
‘s asdic rotated automatically. But the bathyscaphe effect twenty miles off the eastern tip of the Gaspé Peninsula nullified this advantage. Because
Salisbury
‘s 271 radar broadcast in 10-centimetre waves, it was able to pick up much smaller objects than was
Arrowhead’s
286 radar, which used wavelengths of 1.4 metres: the smaller a radar’s wavelengths, the smaller the object it can pick up. Hartwig’s tactics after spotting SQ-36 at noon local time vitiated
Salisbury’s
radar’s advantage.

Hartwig followed the same procedure he’d used with such devastating efficiency a week earlier when he sank three of QS-33’s ships in thirty seconds. Rather than attacking at once, he stayed submerged and ran ahead of the convoy, positioning himself so that it would run over him. Just before 2:30 p.m., the convoy commodore signalled a 3° change of course to 330° NW, which, Hartwig recorded in his war diary, put him “outside the [main body of the] convoy on its starboard [right] side.” To Hartwig’s port, 400 metres away, ran
Salisbury,
its radar operating and its lookouts, including Cyril Perkin on the bridge, scanning the water.

Had Hartwig attacked at night, as he had on July 3 when he destroyed SS
Donald Stewart
up in the Strait of Belle Isle, chances are U-517 would have been partially surfaced. Had he been partially surfaced, not only would Perkin have been likely to see him, but
Salisbury
‘s radar would surely have caught him, even though a full sweep took almost two minutes. Had this attack
occurred a year later, SQ-36’s other escort ships would have been equipped with centimetric radar and at least one would likely have picked him up.
⁴

But at 1:30 p.m. on September 15, 1942, Hartwig’s periscope was hidden from
Salisbury
‘s lookouts by the shadows and wash of the convoy’s own ships.
Salisbury
‘s radar was unable to distinguish an object as small as a periscope—especially one only a couple of hundred metres off her starboard bow—from among all the other readings and echoes generated by twenty-one merchant ships and seven escorts. What Hartwig called his “sixth sense, like a tiger in a jungle,” served him well; he came to periscope depth “just as the OAS air patrol had flown out ahead of the convoy.”
⁵
It returned forty minutes after he “fire[d] off a salvo of four torpedoes at 2 overlapping steamers in the second formation” on what Perkin remembers as a beautiful late summer day.

At 1:38 p.m., as
Salisbury
steamed one mile to the convoy’s starboard, Perkin, who had been on watch for almost two and a half hours, had just completed another sweep toward the bow. “It was exhausting work, looking through the binoculars, sweeping forward methodically, pausing ever so slowly over a swell to see if behind it was a periscope or the churning water of a torpedo. As soon as the fo‘c’sle came into my view,” he recalls, “I slowed, allowing my sweep to pass just over the bow, where it intersected with the lookout’s on the other side of the bridge. Then I started my sweep back.”

A second or two before Perkin began to turn once again toward his starboard side, two torpedoes sped away from Hartwig’s U-boat 120 metres away.

One might have broken surface and crashed into cliffs south of Cap-des-Rosiers. The other blasted a hole in the Norwegian freighter SS
Inger Elizabeth,
the lead ship of the sixth column.

“It happened in an instant,” recalls Perkin. “I was sweeping toward the stern, and the merchant ship had just come into focus. It was only in my field of vision for just a moment. But in that moment, that exact moment, it was torpedoed. I saw the flash and a geyser, but what was even more amazing was that I saw the ship literally jump up.”

Within seconds,
Salisbury’s
officer of the watch, Lieutenant Wilson, rang Action Stations and Captain Crichton was on the bridge. Two miles ahead
of the convoy, aboard
Arrowhead,
Captain Skinner rang for Full Speed and turned back toward the convoy.

Before Skinner received instructions—remain in front of the convoy and continue carrying out an anti-submarine sweep—the lookouts aboard SS
Saturnus,
a 2,741-ton Dutch steamship, were yelling to their bridge. The port-side lookout had seen a periscope, something for the DEMS gunners to aim at. The starboard lookout spotted torpedoes 400 yards away—and closing.

Captain Jacob William Korthagan ordered a hard turn to port and rang for Full Speed. It wasn’t enough. At 1:30 p.m., torpedoes “hit the stern about propeller depth,” Korthagan reported. P. Kool, a gunner manning the aft 4-inch gun, vanished as hundreds of almost half-inch steel plates, riveted to I-beams and ribs weighing as much as ten tons, disintegrated.

Kool was the third man to die in less time than it took Perkin to complete his lookout sweep. The first two had died as
Inger Elizabeth’s
engine room was turned into a fireball three minutes earlier. A fourth aboard
Inger Elizabeth
drowned during the otherwise orderly evacuation of the ship.

While survivors of both ships were running for their lifeboats,
⁶
for the first time in the Battle of the St. Lawrence DEMS gunners went into action. Lookouts aboard another Dutch ship, SS
Llangollen,
and aboard the two British ships SS
Cragpool
and
Janetta
spotted Hartwig’s periscope. Immediately, the three ships’ gun layers and trainers began aiming their 3-and 4-inch guns. Had they been on land and firing at a stationary target, wind and barometric pressure would have been the only major factors to take into account. A strong wind could push a large shell as much as fifteen yards off target; changes in barometric pressure could result in over-or undershooting a target by hundreds of yards. But naval gunners also had the relative courses and speed of their own ships and their targets to take into account.

Had their lookouts spotted a conning tower or trimmed-down submarine 1,000 to 4,000 yards away, the gun layers would have used their handheld Cotton rangefinders to determine the range of the gun. To aim at a periscope a couple of hundred yards away, they depressed their guns’ barrels and judged by eye. As gun layers turned the cranks that depressed their guns so that they would be shooting as low as possible, gun trainers looked through small mounted telescopes and turned cranks that moved the gun from left to right. And while the gun layers and trainers were doing their
jobs, the breech worker took off the safety and assured that the contact fire switch was set to “on.” Then, after warning everyone to step back, the gun layer pulled the trigger. Nanoseconds later, 3-and 4-inch shells were hurtling toward the periscope.

None of the three DEMS crews expected their first shell to hit the periscope. Indeed, the periscope was not their real target—what they wanted to hit was the top of the conning tower beneath the water. Normally the first shell overshot. Then, as the gun layer rating made a few quick mental calculations and the gun trainer adjusted the gun for deflection, the breech worker opened the breech, expelling the spent casing. Barely was it out before he was ramming another shell, handed to him by the loading number (a merchant seaman who trained with the DEMS crews), into the breech.

“The whole procedure, from spotting to shooting, took a few seconds,” says Max Reid, who served as a gun layer in Canadian and Norwegian merchant ships. “We were supposed to fire a spotting round and wait for the splash, make corrections and continuing firing, trying first to bracket the target. In reality, when faced with an enemy for the first time, you got as many rounds as possible into the air and made corrections after the first rounds landed. A good crew could get off twenty-five rounds a minute.”

Though none of their shots hit the periscope, their aim was good enough to force Hartwig to reverse his course and, after a run of 2,800 yards, dive.

Five minutes later Captain Crichton had his contact: “Range 250 yards, inclination slight closing.” His orders were textbook—one pattern of five charges set to 50 metres.

Before they could explode, Asdic Rating Smith, aboard
Arrowhead,
which was in position ahead of the convoy, called out: “Target 2,500 yds, no doppler, target steady.” Thinking that Smith’s asdic was pinging off a convoy vessel, his anti submarine officer, Crockette, told him to disregard.

“Even though I’d been told disregard,” Smith recalls, “I was so certain that it was a viable contact, I kept after it as the contact moved toward the starboard side of the convoy. After explosions occurred in the centre of the convoy [the sounds of the shelling], Crockette came back into the asdic hut and told me to sweep to the starboard side of the convoy towards the stern of the convoy. Instead, I told him that I had the contact.

“We then raced in towards the contact. About five hundred yards from
it, we lost it. Instead of ‘pingwup,’ I got just a mushy sound, which I later learned was caused by the U-boat’s anti-asdic weapon, the
Pillenwerfer.”

Contact or not, Skinner continued the attack. Just seconds after the geysers formed by
Salisbury
‘s depth charges collapsed,
Arrowhead
steamed over the same spot, firing another ten-charge pattern. Sixteen minutes later,
Arrowhead
dropped yet another ten-charge pattern over the same area.

The bloodless tone of Hartwig’s war diary—“Because of depth-charge attack have to go down (A*+40) [120 meters]. At A+60 [180 meters] there is a sharp metallic sound, presumably a tube caved in”—hardly captures the moment. At least one of the explosions must have been terrifyingly close, for not only did the attack put the “after torpedo angling gear out of order,” it damaged the torpedoes that were stored in the upper deck compartment between U-517’s pressure and outer hulls. A little bit closer and the Canadian-produced pressure wave would have cracked the steel bubble that protected Hartwig and his forty-nine men.