The Battle of the St. Lawrence (24 page)

More revealing of both the emotions of the moment (which included the Admiralty’s growing unease at the state of the RCN’s training) and the “fog of war”—and, as Geoffrey Smith suggests, the Admiralty’s attempt to pass off one of its own failures to the RCN—is the “Analysis of Attacks by U-Boat on Convoy SQ-36 on 15th and 16th Sept. 1942.” The part of the Remarks section that deals with the attack on the fifteenth minces few words: “The absence of any escort organization is clearly shown in this attack. ‘Salisbury’ left Sydney after the remaining escorts had sailed and was therefore not able to hold an escort conference. On joining the convoy at 2045/13 [and becoming the chief escort ship] ‘Salisbury’ was informed by ‘Arrowhead’ that, in his opinion, previous sinkings in the River were caused by mines and not torpedoes. However there would still appear to be no apparent reason to account for the absence of escort organization, especially as there was ample time in which to signal instructions.”

“Captain Skinner could not have told
Salisbury
that ‘in his opinion, previous sinkings in the River were caused by mines and not torpedoes,’” says Smith. “Even when we were told by the captain of the
Aeas
[on September 6] that he thought he’d struck a mine, Skinner ordered HMCS
Raccoon
to
screen us as we picked up the
Aeas’s
survivors; you only screen if you think torpedoes are a possibility. A day later, when the SS
Oakton
and two other ships were sunk, Skinner knew that they were torpedoed because I reported to him that I had seen the torpedoes pass twelve yards behind our stern. He knew damn well on the fifteenth that those sinkings and
Charlottetown’s
were caused by torpedoes. It’s hard not to think that the report isn’t slanted towards her [Salisbury].”

Whether the report was purposely slanted is an open question. What isn’t in doubt, however, is that it was written before HMCS
Vegreville
and
Chedabucto
and one Fairmile had filed their action reports, none of which provide support for the report’s assertion that Skinner believed that the previous sinkings were caused by mines.

Smith’s view of the report is mirrored by Perkin’s, who believes that one claim—“After realizing that a ship had been torpedoed, ‘Salisbury’ failed to order ‘Artichoke’ or pass any instructions to the escort, and did not herself take any action until 12 minutes after the torpedoing, and 5 minutes after having sighted a periscope in the centre of the convoy. The periscope was under observation by ‘Salisbury’ for 7 minutes”—amounts to a calumny of his captain. “As soon as we saw the ship explode,” says Perkin, “we were at Action Stations. It was only a matter of a few moments before the captain ordered a hard turn to take us around toward the position the U-boat had to have been in when it fired.”
Arrowhead’s
logbook and, ironically, the report’s own summation of
Arrowhead
‘s actions disprove the report’s claim that
Salisbury
“failed to pass any instructions to the escort.”

Six months later, on March 15, 1943, Sasseville Roy, the MP for Gaspé, rose in the House and said that Canadian authorities had had a pretty good idea of where Hartwig was
before
he attacked on September 15, 1942. At “exactly eleven o’clock in the morning” on September 15, U-517 had been seen by the Cap-des-Rosiers lighthouse keeper, Joseph Ferguson, a member of the Air Detection Corps (ADC). Ferguson immediately telephoned Captain Côté, who was in charge of the ADC, and another ADC watcher, Walter Lequesne, in Fox River, some twenty five kilometres away. Roy’s captivating story continued: “A few minutes later from the lighthouse a convoy could
be seen coming up from the southeast, toward that very spot,” the one Ferguson had indicated on a map. “It was evident something was going to happen to the convoy when it reached there.”

It was so evident that Lesquesne’s two daughters and Albert Morris’s daughters “climbed up inside the church steeple to watch what was going to happen down there.” But, according to Roy, nothing was done. “No aeroplane showed around there to help the corvettes.” Why, he asked, had there not been wireless messages from Gaspé, Halifax or Quebec ordering the convoy to change course? “They had plenty of time to do it. The civilian population knew what was about to happen. They were watching the events. It was the navy and airforce which did not seem to be aware of those facts.”

Macdonald’s response—“Does the honourable member think he is helping the river St. Lawrence traffic by making such a speech as he is making to-night?”—is pure parliamentary camouflage meant to conceal what the minister knew to be the true story: a major intelligence failure had occurred.

Ferguson did see U-517 at 11 a.m., but EAC did not receive word of his sighting until 3:10 p.m., five minutes before
Arrowhead
was ordered to break off its search for the attacking U-boat. The reason was twofold. First, according to Field Officer H. M. Boucher, an ADC officer who was sent to investigate what went wrong on the fifteenth, “army headquarters at Gaspé was only dimly aware of the ADC, and had been instructing civilians on the coast to pass submarine sighting reports through army intelligence.” Second, and more important, Boucher reported to his superiors that the public telephone line controlled by Côté was not integrated into the ADC system: “Captain Côté is something of an eccentric. He could see no reasons why ADC calls should be given priority over calls from his ‘regular customers.’ He objected to the charges on these calls being made ‘collect’ to the Reporting Centre; i.e. Gaspé. He is a lighthouse keeper who is disposed for political partisanship. After considerable discussion and humouring, he finally ‘saw the light.’ His [commercial telephone] operators … had never heard of ADC before this date [September 15].” Boucher concluded that “Captain Côté intentionally withheld instructions from his operators re. ADC.” This arrangement, which relied on commercial telephone operators, was an accident waiting to happen.

As Roy spoke and as Jean-François Poulliot, a Quebec member of parliament, yelled out that “he [Roy] was showing that the minister is incompetent,”
no doubt Minister Macdonald was chomping at the bit to tell the House that three days earlier (March 12, 1943), a committee formed under the chiefs of staff of the army, air force and navy, and including the Dominion and Quebec Civil Defence organizations, the RCMP and the Quebec Provincial Police, had agreed on a major reorganization of the ADC. Among changes were the establishment of new reporting centres at Chatham, Mont Joli and Sept-Îles, each to be staffed with bilingual personnel; the establishment of field parties to train volunteer observers; the establishment of a twenty-four-hour service using commercial telephone lines; and the distribution of wireless sets where telephone service did not exist.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1942

At 7 a.m., the Canso flying boat escorting SQ-36 was several miles ahead of the convoy. Airborne escorts relied on what sailors had relied on for millennia: the well-trained eyes of their crew. Later in the war, such planes would be equipped with airborne radar that could pick up periscopes. On September 16, 1942, however, the best the Canso’s radar could have picked up would have been the shoreline and the presence of the largest ships in the twenty-seven-ship convoy. A few miles off BA 3833, some seven miles off Cap-Chat, flying over waters that a week earlier had seen Hoffmann torpedo SS
Aeas
and HMCS
Raccoon,
blips on oscilloscopes had not yet replaced the sighting of wakes, bubbles and torpedo tracks.

Behind the Canso steamed the twenty merchant ships, arranged in five columns of four, with seven escorts, led by
Salisbury,
positioned two miles ahead of the convoy’s centre column.
Vegreville, Summerside
and Q-063 covered the port side, while
Chedabucto, Arrowhead
and Q-082 covered the starboard side. The Admiralty
would later criticize
Arrowhead
for positioning the Fairmiles in the rear, noting that the assumption that the previous day’s attack was made by a U-boat that had penetrated from the rear was “unsupportable” because submerged U-boats were unable to travel fast enough to enter a convoy from the rear. However, the deployment decided by
Salisbury
provided asdic coverage of the entire convoy.

CONVOY SQ - 36 FROM 7:00—7:15 A.M. ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1942

At 7:09 a.m., the lookout aboard the British ship SS
Essex Lance
spotted a torpedo track some 4,200 feet off the ship’s starboard bow.

Once again, Action Stations was called.

Once again, the black flag (signifying enemy action) was run up the yardarm.

Once again, a ship’s telegraph rang for Full Speed as the ship tried to go to starboard.

Once again, men waited as the relentless laws of geometry and mathematics played themselves out.

Once again, a white-hot fireball blasted through tons of steel.

SS
Essex Lance
and her crew were luckier than most of the other ships attacked in the St. Lawrence: the evasive action worked. Instead of hitting amidship, Hoffmann’s eel hit between the propeller and the rudder. Though tons of water poured into the stern, the ship’s bulkheads held and it was soon taken into tow by
Vegreville
to Quebec City, where it was repaired.
⁷

This time Skinner didn’t wait for instructions. The convoy’s lead ship,
Salisbury,
was over two miles ahead of the main body of the convoy. Skinner was closer and rang immediately for 175 revolutions of his propeller per minute. Within seconds, the three-bladed propeller some 150 feet behind the bridge was biting into the water 515 times a minute.
Arrowhead
was steaming at 16 knots and ordered a course behind the stern of the convoy and then up its port side.

Three miles away,
Summerside,
commanded by Lieutenant F. O. Gerity, immediately altered its course to do a sweep outward. A quick check by radio telephone with
Vegreville,
the ship closest to
Essex Lance,
confirmed what Gerity’s lookouts had told him: the torpedo had come from the port side.

Two miles ahead,
Salisbury
was steaming at flank speed back toward the convoy, on a course that would take it between the third and fourth columns—where, it already knew from flagged signals, one of the merchantmen had seen a periscope.

But before Skinner could join
Summerside,
before
Salisbury
could bear down on the reported periscope, before the Canso could return, Hoffmann fired again, at what his war diary calls a 6,000-tonner: SS
Joannis,
laden with 4,800 tons of anthracite coal and travelling at 10 knots.

Again, a lookout saw tracks, this time 7 cables (4,256 feet) off the ship’s starboard beam.

Again, a ship’s telegraph rang for Full Speed.

Again, a helmsman turned the polished wheel, following the order Hard to Port.

Again, the relentless logic of geometry.

Again the blast, this time in the after peak (just behind the starboard bow).

Again, tons of water poured into a hull, this one built in 1909 by Richardson and Duck Co. in Stockton, England.

Again, the order to abandon ship, this time given by Captain George Mandraka.

Thirty-two men scrambled into lifeboats and rowed for their lives through debris-choked waters. From their lifeboats they watched, a scant ten minutes after the torpedo struck, as the stern of their ship lifted out of the gulf and tons of water flooded in through the hole blasted in her hull.

Hoffmann’s war diary doesn’t mention the five 400-lb. Mark VII depth charges fired by
Salisbury
or the two that Skinner dropped on a contact Smith picked up at 8:04 a.m.

The signal sent on September 17 by Group Captain M. Costello, senior staff officer of EAC—“convoy patrols have very little chance of sighting and attacking submarines, but are useful in forcing the enemy to submerge and preventing him from carrying out attacks”—was overly defeatist. A day earlier, Pilot Officer R. S. Keetley had attacked Hartwig’s U-517, an attack that showed that EAC had begun to learn its trade. “1503 Aircraft. Crash-Dive. 4 aerial bombs, Grid 1449,” was all of Hartwig’s sparse report on the aerial attack on the sixteenth.

Keetley’s offensive owed more to electronic intelligence than it did to “luck,” the word Keetley used to describe it. Finding even a surfaced U-boat in the great expanse of the St. Lawrence was never easy, but Keetley’s patrol path was anything but chance. After taking off from Chatham, he set his Hudson on a course that would take him close to the U-boat; huff-duff reports had allowed EAC to triangulate Hartwig’s position when he radioed Lorient at 0126 (01:46 GMT). Three and a half hours later, Keetley spotted Hartwig, fully surfaced three miles away, north of Cap-de-la-Madeleine.