The Battle of the St. Lawrence (25 page)

Keetley’s cruising altitude was over 800 feet, and his bombing altitude was 40 to 50 feet. He knew U-517 was in his sights, but he quickly realized, even as he pulled up on the plane’s controls and changed the fuel mixture so that his twin engines slowed down, that he could not dive fast enough to successfully bomb Hartwig. Nevertheless, as Keetley flew over the U-boat at 800 feet and then banked, which slowed the Hudson enough so that the second overpass was at the correct attack altitude, his gunners opened fire. “I could see the traces splashing all about the conning tower,” Flying
Officer P. G. Hughes told the
Halifax Herald.
“It was like the 24th of May”—Victoria Day fireworks.

Less than half a minute later, Keetley’s plane was in an even better position. “I knew we couldn’t miss that baby,” recalled Hughes. “He stood out like a white corvette with this camouflage.” As the sixty five-foot Hudson passed over the U-boat, Keetley fired his machine guns and four depth charges, spaced at sixty-foot intervals.

Hartwig escaped, though the presence of a small oil slick indicated that he had received some damage.

Over the next few days, as EAC added nine planes to its patrol force, Hartwig became the hunted. Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth, he was attacked twice more—attacks that did more than simply keep him under. His report to Lorient on September 22 indicates that, while he’d not been mortally wounded, the cumulative attacks were beginning to tell; his starboard inner exhaust flap could not be moved at all, and the port flap could be moved “only with great difficulty.”

On the twenty-fourth, Hartwig was “surprised by [an] aircraft” piloted by Maurice Jean Bélanger. Under bright moonlight, Bélanger’s bombs were dropped from a height of only forty feet and were accompanied by streams of machine-gun fire that raked the conning tower.

Hartwig’s war diary—“2 powerful explosions astern. 3 bombs dropped; 3rd bomb right next to ship’s side so that the stern gets flooded over by impact. Presumably a dud”—is as bloodless as ever. But the scene aboard U-517 must have been more chaotic. Over the next eleven hours, U-517 crash-dived four more times.

Bélanger bombed Hartwig again the same day. Accuracy when bombing a diving submarine was not easy. Shortly after 2 p.m., Bélanger got everything right, coming over Hartwig while his decks were still awash. The pattern of dropping one bomb every forty feet was designed to catch the moving object. One depth charge exploded within five to ten feet of U-517’s pressure hull but did not breach it.
⁸

Five days later (on September 29), at 2:23 p.m., Bélanger again pulled on the controls, causing his Hudson 624 to bank sharply. Seconds later,
levelling off at fifty to sixty feet, machine guns firing, he dropped another four bombs on U-517 as it crash-dived. Bélanger’s report—“The depth charges were seen to explode all around the hull slightly ahead of the conning tower. One large explosion occurred around the hull of the U-boat. The U-boat’s bow came up out of the water and all forward motion stopped. It then appeared to settle straight down”—cannot be squared with Hartwig’s, which says only, “crashed dived to evade aircraft. 3 well-placed depth charges.” But the backhanded compliment makes clear the margin by which Hartwig escaped.

On the twenty-ninth, EAC almost got its kill. Several hours after what Hartwig called a skilful bomb and machine-gun attack, he surfaced to find that a bomb had lodged in his hull forward of the 10.5-cm gun’s ammunition locker. Had U-517 descended much farther during its escape dive, the bomb that Hartwig, his chief engineer and two other crew members pried off their boat’s hull and pitched into the sea would have exploded, destroying the plating and sinking the sub.

Over and over again in the weeks that followed the sinking of
Joannis,
Hartwig closed in for the kill. Again and again, close work by the RCN and air escorts frustrated his ambitions. At 4 p.m. on September 24, for example, Hartwig had surfaced and was maintaining contact with a fifteen-ship convoy. “Unfortunately on the port side [of the convoy at] bearing 50°,” recorded Hartwig in his war diary, “there is a single steamship moving fast to catch up to the convoy. I am between the steamship and the convoy, can’t get ahead of him or go around the lone vessel.” Two hours and sixteen minutes later, another crash-dive and another depth charge. A day later, and he wrote this in his war diary:

Finally, on October 5 at 8 p.m., one day before he left the gulf, Hartwig was in position to attack a convoy when suddenly an aircraft with a searchlight overflew him. Twenty-three minutes later, he fired, using his day-attack periscope because “nothing [could] be seen through the night-target periscope as it [had] been completely shattered.” The torpedoes missed. Twenty minutes later, at 8:45 p.m., just before he tried again, “the fire-control calculator [broke] down.” The four eels sailed harmlessly into the night.

When he left the St. Lawrence, Hartwig’s damage-control report listed,

• Water-distilling plant (reduced from 50 to 10 gallons);
  

• Torpedo angling gear;
  

• Upper-deck torpedo storage compartment;
  

• Torpedoes stored in upper-deck storage compartment;
  

• Two caved-in torpedo tubes;
  

• Night target periscope;
  

• Fire-control calculator.
  

For destroying 52,000 tons of shipping, Hartwig was awarded an Iron Cross. But during his final twenty-one days in Canada’s home waters, he sank nothing.

On December 17, 1942, Prime Minister Churchill wrote to his Canadian counterpart, “I appreciate the grand contribution of the Royal Canadian Navy to the Battle of the Atlantic, but the expansion of the RCN has created a training problem which must take some time to solve.” Five days earlier, in
Analysis of Attacks by U-Boat on Convoy SQ 36 on 15th and 16th Sept. 1942,
the UK’s director of anti-submarine warfare called attention to “a very grave lack of efficiency on the part of the Canadian escort force.” Although he does not name Rear-Admiral Jones, the director clearly lays the blame on the manning policy Jones authored: “Much of this [the inefficiency of the RCN] is undoubtedly due to the difficulties that have prevented Canadians from forming permanent groups, that can be trained to act together as teams.” Even during the height of the Atlantic war, one-third of RN ships were routinely detached from escort duty to train with a live submarine at Tobermory, Scotland; by contrast, 90 per cent of the RCN’s ships were at sea. Murray’s plans for Canadian training with a live submarine were derailed when, after Pearl Harbor, the bulk of the US Atlantic Fleet sailed for the Pacific and the RCN took over responsibility for escorting convoys across the North Atlantic.

Called “piratical” by Rear-Admiral Murray in Halifax, Jones’s manning policy was designed to spread the talent around the rapidly expanding Canadian fleet. Jones feared that had Canada followed normal practice and kept crews together on a ship and ships together in groups that could be trained as a unit, the ships would have been largely unmanned.
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The fleet had expanded exponentially—from 13 ships and 3,600 officers and ratings
in 1939, to more than 43,000 officers and ratings and more than 200 warships in 1942. (In 1945 the numbers would be 93,000 officers and men, 373 warships, including 2 aircraft carriers, and 563 other types of ships.) The only way to crew the hundreds of new ships—and thereby provide escorts to the convoys—was, Jones believed, to take what few trained men the RCN had and put them on the ships as they came down the slipways. These men then formed the nucleus around which the untrained crew was formed. Training often occurred on station at sea.
¹⁰

However defensible from a manning point of view, Jones’s policy damaged the RCN’s convoy-escort role because it militated against the concerted training of groups of ships to work together in convoy protection. In a report that examined the effectiveness of the largely Canadian escort force of SC-52—which, on November 1, 1941, became the only convoy driven back to port—the Admiralty wrote, “RCN corvettes … have been given so little chance to become efficient that they are almost more of a liability than an asset to the escort group.” According to historian Marc Milner, Murray protested vigorously against Jones’s policy: “One of the more damnable effects of this policy,” Murray wrote in a memo to NSHQ, “was that it worked the few good people who were available to near exhaustion.” Lieutenant Brigg’s
Orillia,
for example, had recently been ravaged by Halifax manning personnel, and Murray warned that she “may be unfit for further duty at sea for some considerable time period” following the completion of its later passage. Briggs was now the only qualified watch keeper aboard
Orillia,
and the corvette had spent twenty-eight days at sea during the month of October.

Almost a year before the attack on SQ-36, Murray had called for a manning policy that assigned new crews to new ships—and then kept them together for training. In December 1941, Naval Service Headquarters in Ottawa turned down the plan. According to Milner, “The RCN was quite prepared to accept a ‘temporary’ reduction in efficiency for long-term benefits of producing a larger cadre of experienced personnel” and the ability to man the navy’s existing ships. The lives of the merchant sailors, their ships and their cargoes were the coin that paid the price of both Jones’s manning policy and the years of neglecting the RCN’s staff list prior to the war.

In his December 21 memo, the director of the Trade Division was even more blunt: “Should they [U-boats] return” to the area between New York
and 49° W (the mid-Atlantic)—the area of Canadian responsibility—“the result may well be disastrous unless some way can be found of improving the standard of training of the Western Local groups.” On the same page, though dated a few days later (December 24), he continues, “It was understood that training facilities would be made available at St. John’s and Argentia but complaints have been made that in the case of Canadian ships this training was much interfered with by the continual changing of crews.” Interestingly, given the criticisms the report makes of
Salisbury
itself, it goes on to say, “This should not affect British manned vessels, such as the SALISBURY and the remainder of the ships in the support groups”—per-haps, as Smith suggests, another example of the Admiralty’s desire to put the best gloss on things directly under its control.

The final part of the director’s analysis is also important. First, it illuminates an important difference between the RN and the RCN—indeed, between the Canadian and British armed forces in general. Before rehearsing the usual criticisms about the changing of crews and the reluctance of the Canadians to form attack groups, the director of anti-submarine warfare notes that “the individuality of the officers … makes them reluctant to accept instructions in official publications and to obey them, or to accept the lessons learnt by others.” No doubt part of what the Admiralty was getting at here was the exuberance of youth. Because of the huge expansion of the RCN, its officers were on the whole much younger than the RN’s. But another part of what the Admiralty was saying no doubt stems from the social differences between the RN and the RCN. The RN was England’s senior service, its officers products of long-established naval colleges and of a navy stretching back hundreds of years.

Lieutenant Desmond Piers, commander of the destroyed HMCS
Restigouche,
had passed through these schools. So had Lieutenant R. J. Pickford, commander of the corvette HMCS
Rimouski,
who had been trained first at HMS King Alfred and then at HMS Auspry and who held an RN watch keeper’s certificate. But few other Canadians had such qualifications.

Bonner was a merchant seaman—from the Admiralty point of view, a notoriously individualistic lot. Skinner was a rum-runner, Lade a yachtsman.

The report’s penultimate paragraph stung especially hard: “It has been estimated that 80% of all ships torpedoed in transatlantic convoys during
the last 2 months were hit while being escorted by Canadian groups.” Though correct, Milner has shown that the raw numbers conceal almost as much as they reveal. The vast majority of convoys Canadians escorted were slow convoys, and slow convoys were much easier targets both because they spent as much as 30 per cent more time at sea and because their lack of speed made them less able to respond to tactical situations.

From a Canadian point of view, the Admiralty’s remarks are incomplete. The first gap is the failure of ADC on September 15 to warn of the U-boat’s presence. The second is the failure of
Salisbury
‘s 271 radar to pick up the presence of U-517 within the convoy. Both contributed mightily to the tactical disaster of SQ-36.