The Battle of the St. Lawrence (30 page)

As
Caribou
‘s deck slid even farther into the sea, Lundrigan saw another boat, lifeboat No. 4, being piloted by Jack Dominie, one of Taverner’s seamen. Though the lifeboat was crowded with people, Dominie brought it close enough to the wrecked hull so that Lundrigan and a few others could jump into it as it bobbed up and down, and toward and away from the sinking ship. Those who missed drowned. Within moments, however, Dominie, Lundrigan and others aboard the lifeboat realized that
Caribou
was about to go under and that, to save themselves, they had to pull away. By the time they were seventy yards away, the 2,222-ton ship, built in 1925 and refitted just two months earlier, had plunged to the bottom of the Cabot Strait, the twentieth ship sunk in the St. Lawrence.

Four minutes had elapsed.

In the moments before
Caribou
‘s final plunge, as water rushed over the main deck, Swinamer and Shiers, carrying her son, ran for the bridge, almost a fatal decision. As they climbed the steps to the only part of the ship still above water, an explosion showered them with debris. Another moment later the rushing sea wrenched Leonard from his mother’s arms and catapulted the two women into the sea.

Nursing sisters Brooke and Wilkie never made it to their lifeboat station. The precious seconds it took them to force their way out of their cabin (the blast bent the hatchway) could be measured only in feet. When they got on deck, it was already awash. Seconds later, a wave took them and they were struggling to survive in the sea.

For four minutes, the screams of men, women and children, the screech of steel being rent out of shape, the breaking of bulkheads and the awful lowing of drowning cattle filled the night, only to be followed by the sound of a whirlpool that formed as the ship plunged, fire and smoke pouring out of its shredded side. Then, before the whirlpool closed, the last of
Caribou’s
boilers exploded and a pillar of fire rose out of the water, illuminating for a moment the dead, the dying and those barely hanging on to life.

Just seconds after
Caribou
‘s last light, the men and women in Dominie’s boat realized that it was filling with water. Dominie realized that the seacock was out. “I tried the best I could to get the plug in, but I couldn’t get it in …. She was loaded with people, the force of the water would blow it back every time …. Before I’d get a chance to drive it down with my foot, it would be back out,” he recalled in an interview.

They tried bailing. It failed.

“She filled full of water and rolled, and the people all went into the water, the poor women and children, all of them. It was dark …. I don’t know how many times she rolled over. When she was finished there were just a few of us left in her …. And when we were picked up there were only the four of us,” including Lundrigan.

Metcalf remembered that terrible moment as the boat turned. After its first turn, a woman clung to him. “I tried to speak to her but she couldn’t answer.” The woman was ripped away from him a moment later as the boat again turned over in the unforgiving sea.

Cuthbert’s orders were clear. At 3:39 a.m., his mission was to “ensure the safe and timely arrival of the convoy.” A minute later it had changed. He ordered a course for the stricken ship. Then, as if on cue, before
Grandmère
was even close enough to throw lifebelts to
Caribou’s
survivors, one of Cuthbert’s lookouts spotted a “U-boat on the surface ahead and to the starboard,” 300 yards away. Immediately, his helmsman turned a course to ram it.

Gräf’s war diary tells the story succinctly:

As Cuthbert ran over Gräf’s swirl, he fired six depth charges “by eye.” Gräf reported hearing only one explode, well above his pressure hull. For the next thirty minutes, Gräf and his crew heard the telltale ping of
Grandmère’s
asdic, but since no more depth charges hammered against his hull, he could guess that he “was not detected by the destroyer’s asdic.”

His message at 2000 hrs. to BdU makes one mistake. He signalled Dönitz that “my decoy device,”
Nebelbold,
which, like the
Pillenwerfer,
was designed to blind asdic by releasing tens of millions of bubbles into the water, “does not appear to have had any effect.” In fact,
Grandmère
never picked up an asdic contact.

Years later, Cuthbert responded to criticism that he had erred in not searching for the U-boat in the waters directly beneath the survivors (where, in fact, it had hidden): “Oh my God, I felt the full complement of things you feel at a time like that. Things you have to live with. You are torn. Demoralized. Terribly alone …. I should have gone on looking for the submarine, but I couldn’t. Not with women and children out there somewhere. I couldn’t do it any more than I could have dropped depth charges among them. Judge me how you will,” Cuthbert told Douglas How, author of
The Night of the Caribou.

As Cuthbert searched for
Caribou’s
killer, the angel of death took the form of hypothermia and stalked the waters that glided over 47° 19° N, 59° 29° W. It found the wreckage of the lifeboat Fielding and eleven others clung to. “When we were picked up, there were only five of us left. Four of the women slid off the upturned shell and disappeared, as did several of the men, weakened with the cold water. We did everything we could to help them but it was futile,” Fielding recalled.

Neither hymns nor prayers could keep the avenging angel from finding the capsized lifeboat to which nursing sisters Wilkie and Brooke clung. “The waves kept washing us off, one by one,” recalled Brooke. “And eventually Agnes said she was getting cramped. She let go but I managed to catch hold of her with one hand. I held her as best I could until daybreak. Finally, a wave took her. When I called to her, she didn’t answer. She must have been unconscious. The men tried to rescue her, but she floated away,” Brooke told the
Halifax Herald.
⁸

Death claimed a woman here, a man there, a child. One shocked, cold
and tired man was ripped from death’s clutches—the other men on his raft slapped him back to reason after he stood up and tried to throw himself off the raft and into a cold death. But though Gladys Shiers wouldn’t know it for hours, pity must have moved the angel of death, for it passed over Leonard Shiers and another infant, both of whom were kept afloat by air trapped in their rubber pants.

At 5:20 a.m., Cuthbert broke off his search and began the delicate task of picking up the survivors, now spread out over several miles. Only the few who were in lifeboats could easily be brought aside his ship. The rest—ninety-six exhausted, cold men, women and children—were floating on bits of wood, on capsized boats or by the grace of their lifebelts, their arms and legs all but numb and thus unable to grasp the scramble nets thrown from
Grandmère
‘s side. Every advance into the human archipelago risked even more death. Even at its slowest speed, the movement of
Grandmère
through the water produced enough suction to bash rafts to pieces against her bow. Her engines may have moved safety toward the survivors, but they also threatened to pull them under. By 7:30 a.m., a Canso flying boat from North Sydney dropped smoke floats, telling Cuthbert that here, six miles away, were still more souls to save.

Half a continent away in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mackenzie King was waking out of what, no doubt, he later believed to be one of his prophetic dreams. As he recorded in his diary late on October 14, “Before waking this morning, I had a vision of standing, it seemed near a bookshelf in a library or church vestry where there were one or two books out. Suddenly, a bomb burst immediately outside.” King’s dream, however, differed greatly from the nightmare that had unfolded off Canada’s eastern waters. For in his vision, there was “no panic” and no death.

By 9:30 a.m., after picking up 104 survivors, Cuthbert ordered a course for Sydney; two people died before they reached the quay from which they had departed sixteen hours earlier.

As
Grandmère
steamed to Sydney and U-69 prepared to leave the St. Lawrence, a small armada of skiffs, dories, fishing boats and, ultimately, two corvettes sent from Sydney converged on German grid square BB 5198 to pick up the dead.

As
Grandmère
steamed for Sydney, Norman Crane, an officer in the Newfoundland Rangers stationed in Tompkins, was already heading for Port aux Basques to help with the recovery duties. The town he reached on that clear October day was in shock.

“In 1942,” he recalls, “Port aux Basques was not like small towns on the mainland. It was more like a nineteenth-century town. Yes, it was the terminus of the railway and the port, but the three towns around the harbour had maybe two thousand people. There was no electricity or running water. To take a bath you bought water for a quarter from a guy who sold it out of a wheelbarrow. There was one truck, one taxi, and if they encountered a horse-drawn cart, there was a traffic jam. They were a rough-cut bunch like most communities that relied on the sea were. But they were also very religious and respectful.

“The loss of the
Caribou
affected Port aux Basques more than you can imagine today. Ben Taverner wasn’t just a well-liked captain of the
Caribou,
he was a respected man, known to have devoted his life to his boat and thus to their link to the outside world. His sons weren’t just fun-loving fellows—although they were—they were Ben Taverner’s sons, and that counted for a lot.

“Her second engineer, Tom Moist, was a friend of mine. He was old enough to be my grandfather and he had actually retired. His replacement’s son was getting married, so he asked Tom to take the trip for him, so he could go to the wedding. Tom made the trip to help out a friend and never came back.

“When I got there, bodies had already started coming in.”

Crane—who as a Newfoundland Ranger was responsible for everything from law and order through tourism, wildlife and nature preservation to school inspection—commandeered a shed and set up a temporary mortuary. “It was a long shed, lit with bare bulbs every twenty feet. The bodies came in one by one. By the end, we had twelve bodies laid out on bales of hay under the bare bulbs.”

The macabre scene in the temporary morgue Crane helped set up was matched, he recalls, on the streets of the town. “The feeling was one of complete gloom. Eerie is probably the best way to describe it. The whole town felt like a mortuary—which in a real way it was.”

Three hundred miles away in Sydney, word spread too. Leilo Pepper, the twenty-two-year-old wife of Howard Pepper, commander of Fairmile Q-062, found out about it at 2:15 a.m., when her husband returned to their small apartment for a brief rest before taking his crew to sea at first light. “At first it was hard to believe what Howard had told me,” she recalls. “I knew that he’d just spoken to Captain Taverner a few days earlier and made plans to go fishing the next time the captain was ashore in Sydney. And now, here, in the middle of the night, Howard was telling me that the old ship we were so used to seeing was sunk.”

Late in the afternoon, while walking her nine-month-old son on the esplanade that overlooked Sydney Harbour, Pepper saw
Grandmère
come in laden with its human cargo.

“They landed a couple of hundred yards away across the street,” she recalls. “Some were able to walk. Many had to be helped. Others were carried on stretchers. The other women walking their children and I stood in a hushed group as the wind whispered over us.

“We’d all heard by then that the loss of life was heavy. And we knew enough to know that that meant that women like us and children like ours had died in the cold Atlantic waters.”

Two days later, on October 17, naval minister Macdonald rose and told the House of Commons, “The sinking of the SS
Caribou
brings the war to Canada with tragic emphasis. We deplore the loss of officers and men of our fighting forces …. Yet those for whom our hearts bleed most are the … women and children …. if there were any Canadians who did not realize that we were up against a ruthless and remorseless enemy, there can be no such Canadians now. If anything were needed to prove the hideousness of Nazi warfare, surely this is it. Canada can never forget the SS
Caribou.”

T
he war that began washing up on the shores of the little villages of Cloridorme and L’Anse-à-Valleau on May 15, 1942, altered the lives of the men, women and children who lived in the scores of towns, villages and hamlets strung out along the north shore of the Gaspé Peninsula, at the end of which Jacques Cartier planted his cross in 1534. In 1939 Gaspesia, the name given to the region by the locals, counted just under 2,000 residents, 65 per cent of whom were English. By 1943 the population had increased to over 2,300, with another 650, mostly English-speaking soldiers, airmen and sailors stationed in the five military bases built around the town. Gaspesians, used to fishing and hunting where they wished, now found large tracts of land and the shoreline cut off by the fences of forts Prevel, Peninsula and Haldimand. Workers who had never built anything larger than a train barn or a small railroad bridge were hired to build structures they had perhaps imagined only as children playing with toy soldiers: an anti-submarine net to protect Gaspé’s inner harbour and huge concrete emplacements that housed two 75-mm guns, two 4.7-inch guns and, after July 1941, two huge 10-inch guns.