Read The Battle of the St. Lawrence Online
Authors: Nathan M. Greenfield
The Battle of the St. Lawrence (3 page)
The forty-four men in a Type VIIC U-boat, the workhorse of Dönitz’s fleet, lived in a steel-encased cigar-shaped bubble not more than a few metres in diameter. On paper their underwater trench measured 150 square metres. In reality, it was much smaller, for within that space were crammed their diesel engines (which took up 33 metres), electric motors, two battery rooms, tanks for drinking water, thousands of metres of piping, and their ship’s stores. In addition, when the U-boats left port, four extra torpedoes were stored in the mess decks; the men would sleep on hammocks strung above them or on the hard deck plating. (Another ten torpedoes, which could only be accessed while on the surface, were stored between the outer hull and the pressure hull.) Almost every other spare place, including one of the two toilets, was stuffed with food and other provisions. The air was not only damp, it was fetid; U-boat men could go six weeks without bathing. Diesel and other oil smells and the foul odour of mouldy food filled the boat’s air.
Unlike Canadian sailors and airmen, who had to learn their trade at sea in the real time of battling U-boats scant miles off Canada’s home shores, Dönitz’s men were superbly trained.
5
At twenty-eight,
Korvettenkapitan
Paul Hartwig, the ace of the Battle of the St. Lawrence who sank nine ships, was decades younger than the men who captained
Charlottetown
or
Arrowhead.
Unlike them, however, he had had seven years of naval training, including service on the battleship
Deutschland.
Engineering cadets had over two years of training. “Even late in the war,” recalls Werner Hirschmann, chief engineering officer on U-190, which sank HMCS
Esquimalt
in April 1945 before
surrendering to the RCN on May 12, 1945, “every one of us on board was an expert in his own division.” The training regimen was a vital part of the creation of the mythos of the
U-Bootwaffe
as the elite German military force.
The map Dönitz had prepared for the January 1939 war games identified the North American supply route to England as
Kanada-Transporte.
The title, which harkened back to the First World War (for more than three years the convoys that sustained England left from Halifax, Sydney and Gaspé) was also prescient. For not only did the convoys that sustained England for two years after 1939 leave again from Halifax and Sydney, but Canadian ships provided as much as 48 per cent of the escorts.
About 200 miles south of Burgeo, Newfoundland,
Kanada-Transporte
divides. One spur cuts southeast, running just off the coast of Nova Scotia toward Boston. The northern spur heads northwest, through the Cabot Strait, almost touching Cape Ray, the most western point of Newfoundland. The line continues through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, running between Anticosti Island and the Gaspé Peninsula.
Kanada-Transporte,
which correctly predicted the main shipping lane used by the St. Lawrence convoys, ends just shy of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.
In 1939, a line on a war game map. Five years later, that same line described at least part of the course taken by each of the fifteen U-boats that invaded the St. Lawrence. It ran over the watery graves of hundreds of men, women and children and the shattered hulls of SS
Oakton, Inger Elizabeth, Mount Taygetus, Mount Pindus, Waterton, Nicoya
and
Caribou
and HMCS
Shawinigan,
eight of the twenty-nine ships destroyed in the only successful invasion of North America between 1812 and September 11, 2001.
6
WAR IN PEACEFUL SEAS
MAY 11, 12 AND 13, 1942
Is there no silent watch to keep?
An age is dying, and the bell
Rings midnight on a vast deep.
—ALFRED NOYES
A
t 11:52 p.m. on May 11
,
1942, Captain Edward H. Brice knew that his ship,
SS Nicoya,
was doomed.
He’d thought it a year earlier, in the early hours of May 20, 1941. Then, two thousand miles to the east, in the middle of the air gap (the area beyond the reach of protective aircraft where Hitler’s U-boats carved ships from the convoys that sustained England),
Westgruppe,
a ten-boat wolfpack, pounced on the twenty-nine ships of convoy HX-126. Two days later, HX-126’s commodore counted twenty-two ships.
“The attack began just after midnight on May 20th,” recalls Bill “Mac” McRae, who, along with three other recently trained RCAF pilots, was on his way to Fighter Command in England. Lashed to
Nicoya’s
hatches was an equally important cargo: two crated Hawker Hurricanes built in Fort William, Ontario. “Bill Wallace and I were in our bunks in what before the war was a first-class cabin below the main deck. Suddenly, the steady throb of the engines ceased. We heard a dull thud and felt the ship heel sharply to the left. Immediately, a steward came running to our cabin and told us to get dressed and get up to the boat deck with our lifebelts on.”
It took the twenty-one-year-old McRae and Wallace less than three minutes to get dressed and run up to the deck. When they got there, SS
Norman Monarch,
torpedoed some 180 seconds earlier, was already gone. Later, Brice told McRae he’d ordered the Hard to Starboard that McRae felt in
order to avoid the other ship, which had been stopped dead in the water before plunging to the bottom.
Through the long night,
Nicoya
‘s crew kept watch and its gunner stood at the ready
(Nicoya
was a defensively equipped merchant ship, or DEMS). McRae, Wallace, Jack Milmine and Wally McLeod—listed on the ship’s manifest as “passengers”—alternated between standing nervously on deck and trying to catch a few moments’ sleep on the wardroom’s steel deck.
Late the next morning, the attacks began again.
“In quick succession, three more ships were hit, and sank before our eyes,” victims, McRae learned years later, of U-556. “One, a tanker off to our starboard, burned fiercely. We could see the inky black smoke that billowed off her for hours.”
* * *
Kapitänleutnant
Herbert Wohlfarth, nicknamed “Sir Parsifal,” one of Admiral Karl Dönitz’s most enthusiastic volunteers, saw the horrific scene differently: “Both torpedoes hit…. The tanker was struck amidships and immediately bursts into bright flames…. The oil from the two tankers has spread over the water. The entire sea is on fire. In its middle, looming gigantically, the burning tanker. It is dreadfully beautiful.”
1
“Just after we saw the third ship go down,” recalls McRae, “off our port quarter, not fifty yards away, a submarine broke surface. The gunner tried to depress the 3-inch gun, but before he even tried to get off a shot, Captain Brice, who was up on the bridge, yelled down, ‘Don’t shoot!’ through a megaphone. Later I heard a rumour that our convoy had a British submarine escorting us.”
Moments after the submarine disappeared, a loud thud reverberated through the ship.
Thinking that his ship had been torpedoed, and hoping to prevent it from blowing up when the cold water of the North Atlantic washed over its hot boilers and pipes, Brice rang Full Stop and ordered the mate to blow the whistle and let off the steam that
Nicoya’s
boilers had produced from Canadian coal. The ship was dead in the water. Brice ordered that the lifeboats be swung out on their davits and that the seacocks be put in place.
Standing by his assigned lifeboat, McRae watched the wreckage of war around him. “Off to our port, we could see the burning tanker and the gaps left by the ships that had already been sunk. Among the broken bits of wood, oil and other wreckage were the fuselages of two Lockheed Hudsons that must have been cut loose by men desperate for anything that could serve as a raft.”
Brice did not, however, order Abandon Ship. Instead, he told his chief engineer to go below and report on the damage. The chief engineer came back a few minutes later and reported that there had been none. Brice ordered the engine room to raise steam. “We’d all felt the thud—we’d definitely hit something or been hit,” recalls McRae. “Later, Captain Brice said that maybe it was a dud torpedo or that we’d run over the submarine that we’d seen.”
The first two letters of convoy HX-126 designated it a fast convoy that left from Halifax; slower convoys (the SC series) were capable of making up to 7 knots and left from Sydney, Nova Scotia. According to Admiralty regulations, HX-126 should have been able to make 14 knots, but in reality, some of its ships could make only 7 knots, which became the whole convoy’s speed.
Built for the “banana run” from Jamaica and the islands to Liverpool and the Mersey, Brice’s
Nicoya
could do better than 14 knots. Still, it took over an hour to get enough steam to get underway again. “All the time,” McRae recalls, “we stood at our lifeboat stations and stared out at the wreckage and the still-burning tanker, expecting at any moment that we too would be torpedoed.”
Shortly after
Nicoya
had caught up with the other survivors of
West-gruppe’s
attack, what to the Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ontario, born and bred McRae looked like an armada passed HX-126. An Aldis lamp signal told them that “the mighty
Hood,”
the pride of the British navy, had been sunk, and that these thirteen ships, including the battleship
King George V
and the aircraft carrier
Victorious,
were in hot pursuit of its slayer, the great battleship
Bismarck.
Years later, McRae learned that had
Bismarck,
with its consort,
Prinz Eugen,
broken out into the Atlantic,
Nicoya
and the other ships in HX-126 would have soon been within its sights. He also learned that U-556 had sped away from its attack on HX-126 to protect the wounded
Bismarck
and
found itself in perfect position to torpedo HMS
Ark Royal
and
Renown,
two of the warships that helped sink the battleship, but it could not. For Wohlfarth had expended his last torpedoes sinking three ships within hailing distance of
Nicoya.
MAY 11, 1941
Three thousand five hundred miles
2
east, workers at Flender-Werke in Lübeck lay the keel for U-313; at Bremer Vulcan in Bremen, U-266 is launched.Six hundred and fifty miles west in Ottawa, the Canadian government announces that—following victory of the “yes” side in the April 27 plebiscite, in which Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s Liberal government asked to be released from the “no conscription” pledge it had made in the previous election—conscription will begin. The government pledges that conscripts will not be sent overseas.
Five thousand miles east, German aircraft flying from the occupied island of Crete sink three British destroyers: HMS
Lively, Kipling
and
Jackal.Nine thousand miles away in the South Pacific, the destroyer USS
Henley
arrives at the last known position of the US Navy tanker USS
Neosho,
which had been badly damaged during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Two days later,
Henley
will pick up more than 100 men from
Neosho’s
lifeboats.Four thousand miles east in Poland, deportations of more than 10,000 Jews from the ghetto in łódź, Poland, to the Chelmno Concentration Camp continue.
Eight hundred miles south in New York, American Zionists demand that the Jews be given sovereignty over Palestine; the British refuse.
Eight hundred miles south in New York, SS
Queen Mary
leaves New York harbour bound for England with 10,000 American troops aboard.
At 11:52 p.m., two ships—U-553 and SS
Nicoya
—sailing in what German navigational maps designated grid square BB 1485 (some eight miles off the coast of the northern part of the Gaspé, just about where the peninsula begins to curve southward), were 400 metres, and almost a world, apart.
The distinctive colour scheme—silver-grey hull, red-topped buff ventilators and buff yellow funnels crowned by black top hats—that had for two decades marked the
Nicoya
as an Elders & Fyffes ship had long since given way to the dull grey of war. The crates on the deck were filled not with the exotic fruits of the Caribbean but with aircraft destined to fight Hermann Göring’s
Luftwaffe.
Still, as Brice and his first mate, Frederick Inch, looked ahead over the St. Lawrence and toward the rugged coastline of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula on their right, they could just about push the war from their minds. Here, eight miles from Canada’s shore, in the waters that flowed from Lake Superior, over the cataract at Niagara, past Montreal and down hundreds of miles through the world’s widest river,
Nicoya
felt safe.
True, there had been warnings. In July 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King told the House of Commons that “within a few months submarines may well be found operating in the gulf, and even in the St. Lawrence river.” On September 8, 1939, the day Canada declared war on Nazi Germany, King drew the House’s attention to the reality that the “safety of Canada depends on the adequate safeguarding of our coastal regions and the great avenues of approach to the heart of this country. Foremost among these is the St. Lawrence river and gulf.” No doubt, while resting at the Manning Pool on Montreal’s Viger Street, some of
Nicoya
‘s crew would have run across month-old newspapers that carried stories quoting Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, chief of naval staff, and Rear-Admiral G. C. Jones, commander-in-chief of the Atlantic, warning that the start of the 1942 shipping season might very well bring U-boats into Canada’s waters. Brice might even have known of the opera buffa of October 14, 1939, when His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy consulted a “submarine diviner” before sending two harbour vessels, including the aptly named
Druid,
armed with a borrowed army cannon surrounded by sandbags, to investigate a reported U-boat sighting off Île d’Orléans. But everything Brice and Inch saw on the river and the fact that they were sailing independently (at least until they joined a convoy at Sydney) told them they were sailing in peaceful seas.