The Battle of the St. Lawrence (28 page)

Known only to Rasch, his coder and U-106’s wireless operator, these last words betray a growing frustration. U-boat commanders, even Knight’s
Cross winners (Rasch was awarded his on December 29, 1941), are not unlike elite athletes in that they are only as good as their last success. Some U-boat commanders, such as Peter Cremer, nicknamed “Ali” because of his habit of magically pulling out of a bad situation, were considered preternaturali lucky. Still others, such as Jost Metzler, U-69’s original commander, were considered as having a fine touch. When Rasch broke off his attack on the tenth, it had been almost four months since his crew had been able to paint another sinking ship on their conning tower.

Between 10:30 and 10:57 a.m. on October 11, Rasch proved his crew’s faith in him by closing from 3 miles away from the convoy to less than 300 metres from
Waterton.
Despite the fact that the seas that hid his periscope made his own view “very indistinct,” Rasch no doubt enjoyed the moment when his attack crew realized he was splitting a very fine hair indeed—by aiming each torpedo slightly differently, “one forward, one aft below the funnel.”

Then, with an audacity every bit as great as Hartwig’s run into Fortuna Bay, Rasch pushed in to as close as 220 metres from his target. His Knight’s Cross luck perhaps deserves the credit for two almost instantaneous decisions. Had he not fired when he did, his eels would have never exploded, for their run would have been 15 metres shy of the distance the propellers on their noses needed to revolve to arm their pistols. Had he not immediately after ordering
“Los!”
ordered a hard turn to starboard, U-106 would have “end[ed] up beneath” the “steamer [that] immediately settle[d] by the stern.”

Once clear of the plunging
Waterton,
Rasch “went deep because of the flying boat” that was already circling back toward the stricken ship.

In the days to come, Captain William Lutjens and
Waterton
‘s entire crew counted themselves lucky. Particularly grateful was F. Burton, who was blown overboard and saved by J. Paul, the ship’s radio officer; in his report Lutjens wrote that Paul dived “from the starboard lifeboat and succeeded in dragging him [Burton] safely to the lifeboat.” But in the minutes that followed the second torpedo explosion, not one of them would have taken a bet on their survival.

Rasch’s first torpedo, which struck just forward of the stokehold bulkhead on the port side in No. 4 hold, doomed the ship. Lutjens reported,
however, that it caused remarkably little apparent damage; nor did it produce a flash or throw up a column of water. The second torpedo, which struck the port side at No. 3 hold, forward of where the first torpedo hit, was louder than the first and threw up a “tremendous column of water.” More important for the men who were now depending on their ability to run across a deck that had taken a 30° list to port, the second blast brought down the wireless aerial, blew off the hatch over No. 3 hold, scattered beams across the pitching deck and blew tons of newsprint into the water. The state of the deck can be judged from the fact that the Canso, which dived toward
Waterton
immediately after the first explosion, was “envelope[d] in a large cloud of smoke and debris, when it arrived 150 feet over the ship seconds after the second torpedo exploded.”

For a few moments, Lutjens held out some hope that his ship might right itself. Then, after learning that the stokehold bulkhead was bulging and with the list increasing, he ordered his men to the boats. The last off his own ship, Lutjens was almost pulled under by the suction created by the sinking, but he managed to break free from the vortex and cling to some wreckage until he was picked up by the men in the portside lifeboat. The rest of his crew was picked up ten minutes later.

While the men aboard
Waterton
struggled to launch their boats and rafts and to save those in the water, Nicholson’s asdic officer aboard HMCS
Vison
reported a firm contact. Within a few moments, the 422-ton yacht was over the U-boat, dropping one depth charge.

The setting was close. Rasch reported a “loud clear explosion at depth 30 m,” which he incorrectly attributed to “aircraft bombs.” Then, moments later, his crew, who a few minutes earlier had heard the “sinking of the steamer,” were now shaken by another series of depth charges dropped by
Vison.
The first set especially must have been rather too close for comfort, for Rasch reported that they were “very well placed.” As if to underline the tension in his boat, he reported that he was under attack by “2 destroyers,” when just minutes before he’d not even mentioned the presence of the single small escort ship. Discretion being the better part of valour, Rasch stayed deep for the next eight hours as he headed out of the southwest.

*  *  *

The sinking of
Waterton
had the look and feel of another defeat, made all the more bitter by the fact that BS-31 had air cover. Indeed, the analysis written by Air Vice-Marshal N. R. Anderson comes close to questioning whether EAC would ever be able to counter the U-boat threat: “In spite of every effort not a sign of the U-boat could be located, not even the wake of the torpedo was visible. The high seas prevailing made it extremely difficult, if not impossible to see the periscope …. The high seas would also make it very difficult for the wake of the torpedo to be seen. The ASV [radar] was in constant operation, but failed to register a contact.”

On October 14, defeatist words also came from two sources that did not yet know about the loss of
Waterton:
Gaspé’s MP Sasseville Roy and the ultranationalist Quebec City newspaper
L’Action Catholique.
Roy told the
Ottawa Evening Journal
that he had sent the prime minister a letter demanding that he recall Parliament to debate the situation in the St. Lawrence, which, he said, was “even worse than when the House of Commons had held a secret session to discuss it last summer.” Anyone familiar with parliamentary sparring could read between the lines when Roy stated, “My constituents want to be assured that the defences along the St. Lawrence are adequate and whether the air force’s defences against the U-boat menace are directed along the most effective lines.”

More potentially damaging to the King government—because it caught the attention of Quebec’s Liberal premier, Adélard Godbout, who a few weeks earlier had criticized the decision to close the St. Lawrence to transoceanic shipping because of its effect on Montreal’s economy—was a series of articles entitled,
“Ce qui se passe en Gaspésie”
[“What’s Going on in the Gaspé”] that began running in
L’Action Catholique
on October 14. Written by Edouard Laurent, who had ties to former nationalist premier Maurice Duplessis, the articles are especially critical of both the navy and EAC. On July 19, the mayor of Les Méchins, Laurent wrote, reported to the EAC base at Mont Joli that a U-boat was offshore. According to Mayor Louis Keable, fully eight hours passed before a plane arrived over Les Méchins. Laurent charged that the delay was caused by
“Le RED-TAPE”:
RCMP agents had to travel the twenty-eight miles from Mont Joli to Les Méchins to confirm the sighting, and then permission had to be obtained from National Defence in Ottawa. Other charges included the claim that a
corvette had been detached from regular escort duty to protect a fishing expedition of VIPs and that the government was not following its own blackout/dim-out regulations. It mattered little that Laurent’s charges were easily disproved. What did matter was that he asserted that the Gaspé was gripped by
“l’atmosphère de malaise et d’angoisse.”

From the King government’s point of view, Laurent’s series was bad enough. It was made worse by the fact that within twenty-four hours of the first article appearing in
L’Action Catholique,
U-106 torpedoed the Newfoundland-Nova Scotia ferry SS
Caribou
in the Cabot Strait. Minister Macdonald announced the loss of
Caribou
on October 17, the day after the series ended and three days before the
Toronto Telegram
published one translated article under the title, “Charge Convoy Ships Sunk While Ottawa Guarded Sportsmen.” That same day, a package containing Laurent’s articles landed on King’s desk along with a covering letter from Godbout, who said that they were “the most complete and objective articles I have yet seen on the subject.”

Recognizing the political damage and the damage to national morale, King’s government responded both publicly and through private channels. A measure of the government’s concern, especially for the Liberal Party’s traditional Quebec base (King held sixty-four of the province’s sixty-five seats in Parliament as against fifty-seven of Ontario’s eighty-two seats), was the decision to have Louis St. Laurent use a trip to Hamilton Steel on November 2 to rebut the
L’Action Catholique
charge that forty ships had been sunk in the St. Lawrence.

Beneath the leaden November skies, King’s minister of justice and Quebec lieutenant addressed two different audiences. St. Laurent’s presence in Hamilton, Ontario, spoke directly to the Steelworkers whose productive efforts were vital to the war effort. But the fact that St. Laurent, before becoming member for Quebec East, was a leader of the Quebec Bar meant that he was also making the announcement directly to Quebeckers. After assuring the public that the number of sinkings had been “exaggerated three-fold,” St. Laurent said, “We are completing our effective forces and developing our navy to a point where we will be able to stop submarines from coming to hurt us as they did this year.”

If anything, the private channels are even more telling of the govern
ment’s unease. Defence Minister Charles Power signed a memorandum authorizing the release of classified information about the St. Lawrence sinkings—dates, names of ships and places—to Premier Godbout and to a Liberal Party organizer in Rimouski, who was then supposed to pass this information to both Laurent and the editors of
L’action catholique.
Given
L’action catholique’s
ties with pro-Vichy forces in Quebec and the Vichy government’s puppet status, it is interesting to speculate whether the information Ottawa released to it following Laurent’s articles contributed either to a November 4 article published in the Nazi party newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
that trumpeted the U-boat attacks “from Capetown to Canada” or to a December 18 article (five weeks after the German army occupied Vichy) that accused Churchill of “flimflam” in denying that there had been “numerous sinkings in the Gulf of St. Lawrence” and that taunted Ottawa over the fact that its attempts to keep the sinkings secret had failed.
⁵

Ironically, the perception of defeat, heightened by the sinking of
Caribou,
took hold just as EAC and the RCN had learned their trade. Not one of the four successful or twelve unsuccessful attacks in the St. Lawrence that followed Gräf’s October 9 sinking of
Carolus
was carried out by a surfaced U-boat. As Gräf’s and Rasch’s war reports make clear, by mid-October 1942 there were few places in the St. Lawrence not blanketed by radar waves. The “screamingly loud detections” of Rasch’s Metox and the resulting crash-dives so unnerved Rasch that he radioed to Dönitz that “we need a device that indicates distance as well as bearing.”

In twenty days of patrolling after torpedoing
Waterton,
airplanes or Metox warnings forced Rasch under eleven times. On October 22, in his report of a failed attack, he told Lorient that air surveillance was not only “co-operating with surface search forces but also operating everywhere without surface forces.” This is a tribute to EAC’s coverage of the St. Lawrence: in response to the
Caribou
tragedy, twenty-four-hour coverage was being maintained only over the Cabot Strait.

Rasch’s messages to Lorient on October 30 clearly indicate that EAC’s patrols were not only disrupting his mission but also causing him to begin to question his own judgment. At 0400 he spotted a ten-to fifteen-ship convoy.
Two hours later he wrote, “Gave up pursuit as the continuous air cover that has been observed in this area means that a pursuit in daylight in this calm weather will be impossible.” Forty-five minutes after that, after having dived and lost the convoy, he wrote in his war diary, “This decision was incorrect. I should have attempted to pursue after all.” Later on the thirtieth, he reported to Lorient another price exacted by EAC’s efforts: “Will have to depart [for home] in 8 days because potash cartridges will be expended.” (Potash cartridges removed carbon dioxide from the air when it accumulated as a result of the inability to surface and fill the boat’s air tanks.) The cost of having spent forty-two of ninety-seven days submerged, he confided to his war diary, was high: “Too much running under submerged ruins the fighting spirit.”

Rasch’s experience was shared by Gräf and by Hans-Joachim Schwandtke’s U-43. In the five days between the sinkings of
Carolus
and
Caribou,
which Gräf came upon by accident while making his way out of the gulf, the Metox picked up radar signals at least nine times, while EAC and RCN patrols forced him to dive four times. On the sixteenth, he was “driven underwater by night aircraft” flying without the Leigh light system, which was still under development in England. Upon leaving the gulf, Gräf radioed Lorient that the patrols were “exactly like those in the [Bay of] Biscay,” the approaches to Lorient and St. Nazaire above which the RAF had total air supremacy; this tactical advantage forced the U-boats to travel underwater, where they were much slower.

Kapitänleutnant
Schwandtke entered Canadian waters early in the morning of October 19. He left on November 4, after a patrol that took him as far inland as Matane, bemoaning both the lack of river traffic and the “good co-operation between sea and air” that was “utterly disarming.”

It would be an overstatement to say that the weeks that followed the sinking of
Waterton
presaged the defeat of the U-boats in May 1943, when hunter-killer groups, formed around such ships as the fleet aircraft carrier USS
Bogue,
destroyed forty-one U-boats and damaged thirty-seven others. Yet it is possible to see in those weeks the outlines of what has come to be called Black May.