The Battle of the St. Lawrence (27 page)

As early as 1941, “Ultra” intelligence had allowed the Admiralty to route some convoys away from wolfpack concentrations. During the Battle of El Alamein, fought in early 1942, General Bernard Montgomery read Erwin Rommel’s orders sometimes before the field marshal himself. In 1943, the speed of code breaking was similar; the Allies knew the Italian order of battle prior to the invasion of Italy. In mid-1942, however, after Dönitz became concerned about the security of the
Kriegsmarine’s
ciphers, a fifth wheel was added to the Enigma machine (the code was produced by the turning of the machine’s wheels), temporarily closing the window Ultra had opened.

The huff-duff unit was established by Commander J. M. D. E. “Jock” de Marbois, Deputy Director Signals Division (Y).
⁴
Largely staffed by women who joined the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, huff-duff may not have told what the transmission said, but simple geometry told Naval Intelligence what it needed to know. By triangulating among different listening posts that picked up the message, Canadian authorities knew that another U-boat had entered the St. Lawrence and that, at twelve minutes
to midnight on the fifth, it was in the area of 49° 30° N, 65° 30° W, what the navigational officer aboard U-69 thought of as grid square BA 3669, a few miles off Cap-de-la-Madeleine on the north shore of the Gaspé—a day or so ahead of convoy NL-9.

Thirty-six hours later, it was the turn of German radio technology to play a pivotal role.

Although two years older than Hartwig’s U-517 and Thurmann’s U-553, Gräf’s U-69 was equipped with an up-to-date FuMB 1 Metox 600A radar detector. Developed after the Germans recovered an ASV Mk1 radar from a Wellington bomber shot down in 1941, Metox picked up 1.5-metre radar waves, the size generated by
Arrowheads
and
Hepatica’s
ASW radar. Metox registered radar waves at a distance of 30 miles, the distance and bearings being estimatable by the pitch and loudness of the tone. A month before entering the St. Lawrence, Gräf used Metox to great effect as he sneaked through the US defences off the Maryland coast on his mission to plant twelve mines in Chesapeake Bay.

The Metox alarm that sounded at 9:38 p.m. on October 8 did more than drive U-69 beneath the rain squalls sweeping across the St. Lawrence. Its character—“moderate length, grows louder, does not fluctuate”—told Gräf that his prey was near. Five minutes later and thirty metres below the surface, the six propellers of NL-9 were picked up by hydrophone microphones on the forward deck casing in front of the conning tower. Twenty-five minutes later, at 10:20 p.m., the sound waves rolling over U-69 were strong enough to give Gräf the numbers he needed: he surfaced, set a course of 250° and called for half speed in the hope that the convoy’s own noise would mask his 426-kilogram propeller revolving at 165 revolutions per minute.

Then, at 10:40, helped by the “slight northern lights” and the “strong phosphorescence” caused by the “mirror-calm” waters, Gräf spotted “several silhouettes bearing 220[°].”

Unaware of what was happening out beyond the shores of Métis Beach, David Gendron sat writing a love letter at the family’s rolltop writing desk in the large living room, the far windows of which looked out on the St. Lawrence. His family slept on.

At seven minutes to midnight, on both
Arrowhead
and
Hepatica,
the first watch (2000–2400 hrs.) was coming to an end.

“Watch keeping was both routine and extremely intense,” recalls Frank Curry, who began his life in the navy as an able seaman on the corvette HMCS
Kamsack.
“At the beginning of each watch, a lookout was briefed by the lookout he was replacing and by the officer of the watch as to anything to watch out for: Is the second ship in column 3 making too much smoke? Is a ship beginning to drop out of the convoy?

“For the next four hours, a lookout’s world was reduced to the elements—sun, darkness, rain, wind, fog (and, on the North Atlantic run in the winter, ice)—and 90° from the bow to the beam or the beam to the stern.”

“Sweep after endless sweep,” Curry recalls. “Each was a slow scan, and always you were looking out into the middle distance where the convoy’s ships were or where an enemy periscope might appear. The time passed interminably slowly.”

“Even towards the end of the watch,” he remembers, “the tension did not let up. You always knew that your watch keeping might be coming to an end but that at any time all hell could break loose. At the end you expected your replacement—and if he was late, you had a few choice words for him. Then you could head to the mess deck and get a cup of coffee, or, if yours was an 8-to-4 duty watch, you had four hours of seaman’s duties to do.”

Aboard SS
Carolus
and
New York News,
which sailed ahead of
Arrowhead,
other men kept watch, as a third of their crews slept in their bunks.

Eight hundred metres away in U-69, no one slept. The control-room crew was on a knife’s edge as the Metox indicated that the U-boat was well within a radar field. Gräf read out the numbers—“Speed 9, bows right 90, range = 2,000”—that aimed the torpedoes in tubes I and IV at “3 overlapping freighters.” At
11:57
p.m., Gräf’s
Oberleutnant
Johannes Hagemann pushed two buttons.

Immediately after firing from tubes I and IV, while being blanketed by full-strength radar waves, Gräf ordered his helmsman to turn U-69 180° to starboard so he could fire again. Within seconds the huge piston behind the torpedo in Tube V was released and tons of air vented into the U-boat as the piston sped down the tube, pushing the torpedo out at 30 knots.

As soon as the “clank” signalling the closing of the torpedo tube was heard, Gräf “opened out [proceeded] at slow speed”—some 9 knots—on course 50.

Three miles away, the huge light above David Gendron revolved four times per minute.

At three minutes to midnight, after one of
Arrowhead
‘s lookouts spotted one of Gräf’s torpedoes passing ten feet behind the ship’s stern, Action Stations rang out. Skinner’s helmsman swung his helm hard to starboard as
Arrowhead
once again started down the track of a Nazi torpedo.

Within seconds, an explosion ripped through the night. Less than a minute later, as Gendron, his family and other residents of Métis Beach were rushing to their windows, a second, much louder blast shook the Quebec night. Another eleven men died in the St. Lawrence.

Beneath the “tall dark explosive plume” and by the light of the “substantial flames” that Gräf reported back to Dönitz, the men on
Carolus
were running—as hundred of others had since the beginning of the Battle of the St. Lawrence.

Carolus
‘s chief officer, who had just come off duty and must have been walking on the boat deck, told the Canadian Press, “The shock of the impact knocked me out on my feet for two or three seconds. When I came to, I tried to release the aft boats, but the ship was listing too sharply. I tried to get to a boat but couldn’t make it.” His ship was sinking quickly. He jumped into the water and swam for it.

Naval Gunner Henry Harley from London, England, and a few other men with him in the saloon boy’s cabin fought their way through the ever-mounting rushing water that poured through the ship’s passageways. By the time they got to the boat deck,
Carolus
was listing 20° to port. “When we got out on the deck I shouted to the second officer, Anderson, ‘What’s happened?’ ‘We ‘re hit! Make off the boats!’ he ordered,” Harley told the Canadian Press.

But the boats Harley and his mates ran to were smashed. All around the ship, men were jumping into the water. They could feel the steel—thousands of tons of it, shaped by shipwrights in Sunderland in 1919—bending. Amid the cacophony of burst steam lines, the roar of flames and the rush of water, they could hear the scream of the steel being wrenched by hundreds of tons
of force, wrecking the finely calibrated distribution that had been outlined by pencils on clean drawing desks during the Great War.

Just moments after Harley, Anderson and the ship’s third officer, Barrett, jumped into the water, the ship broke in two. The part they’d just jumped off sank immediately.

Each man now fought not just to stay afloat but to rise to the surface of the water itself, for, recalled Harley, they “were pulled under by the suction as the ship went down.”

Miraculously, each managed to fight his way to the surface. “When we came up, I got hold of two empty gas drums and hung on until we got hold of a raft,” Harley told the Canadian Press.

Alex Dawson, a DEMS gunner from Montreal, was below deck when the torpedo hit his ship like a “heavy sledgehammer.” Just as he was about to step out on deck, the ship’s back broke. Immediately, the vertical hatchway Dawson was climbing through became horizontal. Though disoriented, he realized that “she was going over.” Beneath him, as the stern, unable to displace its own weight in water, pushed into the river, the air trapped like a bubble inside pushed outward, bursting the hatches. The drums stored on the ship’s deck, stowed to withstand the six-foot waves that St. Lawrence storms can dish out without being turned over 90°, broke loose from their moorings. Drums stored in the hold tumbled out of the blasted wreck. “One must have struck me, for I was unconscious when I popped out of the water,” Dawson told James Essex. He had been saved, no doubt, by the lifebelt he had not even had time to put on properly before
Carolus
‘s twenty-three-year-old keel disintegrated, killing two men instantly.

For a moment, both Octave Gendron and his father thought that the U-boat was firing its guns at the lighthouse, situated on a spit of land that pushes a quarter mile into the river. What they were hearing and seeing, however, was the boom and the arc of the star shells fired by
Arrowhead
and
Hepatica.

The star shells, which turned night into bright, harsh day, were a gamble. If lookouts were to have any chance of spotting the U-boat and especially its periscope, they needed light. But that same light illuminated
Arrowhead, Hepatica
and the remaining merchant ships. If the U-boat was either far enough under or far enough into the shadows, both Skinner and Lade knew they were setting the stage for still another salvo and more dead
men on the St. Lawrence. Skinner’s men saw nothing. After a forty-five-minute search, Skinner ordered
Arrowhead
back to where
Carolus
had been. Once again Smith and his crewmates began the grim task of helping oil-soaked, shocked men aboard
Arrowhead.
Of the twenty-eight men who got off
Carolus,
nine drowned in the river.

Lade’s men also saw nothing. At 1:53 a.m., however, after dismissing one asdic contact as doubtful, Lade heard the words “CONTACT, range 1,700 yards, inclination no doppler, target steady”—everything the textbook said was a U-boat lying still. He ordered a ten-depth-charge pattern, six to be rolled off the stern and two each to be fired from the port and starboard throwers, set varyingly for 100 and 225 feet. At 300 yards, the contact was lost, but he dropped the depth charges anyway before altering course to help with the recovery of
Carolus’s
survivors.

Hidden by the deep dark of the river, Gräf saw the star shells, heard the depth charges and wondered why, since his Metox indicated that he was being blanketed by radar waves, the counterattack was so uncoordinated. His conclusion, that “the personnel operating the enemy radars were having an excellent sleep,” may have played well in Lorient, but was unwarranted. The actual reason that neither corvette could “see” him was because their 286 radar sets were unable to pick up a trimmed-down U-boat.

OCTOBER 11, 1942

At 10:30 a.m. on October
11
, 1942, SS
Waterton,
her holds filled with tons of wood sulphate and with huge rolls of newsprint lashed to her deck, rode low in the waters off St. Paul’s Island in the Cabot Strait. Several hundred yards away, across the three-to four-foot swells caused by a 15-knot wind from the south, steamed the tanker SS
Omaha,
an American ship flying a Panamanian flag of convenience. Another few hundred yards to the starboard, their escort was the armed yacht HMCS
Vison,
commanded by Lieutenant W. E. Nicholson, RCNR. Despite the drizzle and the low cloud cover of between 900 and 1,000 feet, convoy BS-31 also enjoyed the protection of a Canso flying boat, which flew an inner submarine patrol a half mile ahead of the ships.

Three miles to
Waterton’s
port—much too far away for its lookouts or the Canso’s to spot it—fourteen inches above the surface, U-106’s periscope cut through the water.

Commanded by Hermann Rasch, U-106 had entered Canadian waters on October 10, 1942. Rasch’s mission was to sink merchant ships and thereby disrupt enemy supply lines and force the Allies to devote precious men and ships to convoy defence. Thanks to the constant sounding of his Metox, U-106 would become something more akin to a real-time German version of USS
Nerka,
the submarine in
Run Silent, Run Deep
that endlessly practised emergency diving. “Operations in such coastal waters,” referring to Canada’s radar blanketed inland sea, had “become a continued up and down affair,” he informed Lorient.

Rasch’s war diary entry for 12:46 p.m. on October 10 indicates how effective EAC had become. After sighting a convoy at 12:24 p.m. and getting himself into a firing position ahead of it, “Emergency dive because of an aircraft which is escorting the convoy. When the steamers—4 of medium size and 1 escort—come into the sight in the periscope, they are at bows right, inclination 30, on course 090–100. Turned to attack course and closed at maximum speed. Despite this, I am unable to close to firing range, the convoy has turned away somewhat farther and when at inclination 90 the range is roughly 6–7000 m. Once again my attempt was unsuccessful.”