The Battle of the St. Lawrence (31 page)

Rimouski and the surrounding fields changed too, though not without debate. In 1939, Mont Joli was but a plateau twenty feet above the river, adjacent to the village of Sainte-Flavie, a mere point on the map ten miles east of Rimouski. On June 20, 1940, Senator Jules A. Brillant, who had
extensive land holdings in Rimouski and on the Gaspé coast, called for the establishment of an air training school at Mont Joli. Built over the objections of Rimouski’s archbishop, Monseigneur Georges Courchènes, by 1942 the base had almost six hundred pilot and bombardier trainees—the largest of the thirty British Commonwealth Air Training Plan air bases in Canada.

Monseigneur Courchènes’s opposition to the base was of a piece with his opposition to Brillant’s role in the Fusiliers du St-Laurent. According to Major François Dornier, historian of the Fusiliers, Courchènes saw Brillant as a rival moral authority who threatened the church’s control of the Rimouski diocese. The benediction Courchènes delivered at Mont Joli’s (long-delayed) official inauguration on August 15, 1942, refers obliquely to Sub-Lieutenant Jacques Chevrier’s death the previous month but not to any of the naval officers, ratings or merchant sailors who had died in the Battle of the St. Lawrence in the preceding three months. Courchènes took time, however, to remind the airmen of their duty to uphold the “moral climate” of Rimouski. A year later, his attitude hadn’t changed. After an episcopal visit to the parish of Mont Joli on September 12 and 13, 1943, Courchènes recorded that his “concern has grown because of the presence of strangers in the parish who are part of the neighbouring aviation base.”
¹

The archbishop’s prestige was immense, but it did not carry the day with the civilian authorities or, interestingly enough, with his own flock. A survey of the articles in Rimouski’s
L’Echo du Bas Saint-Laurent
reveals public support for both the Fusiliers and the airbase—and for the money that building it would pump into the local economy. Perhaps even more telling is this February 1942 letter from Rimouski resident J. B. Côté to Claude Melançon, director of the federal Press, Information and Propaganda Service, occasioned by the visit of one of Vichy France’s representatives to Courchènes’s home in Rimouski:

Côté’s anti-Vichy sentiment was not shared by Quebec’s clerical and secular opinion leaders centred in Montreal; they continued to support Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government through the end of 1942.
Le Devoir
routinely published transcripts of Radio Vichy’s broadcasts, which were praised in Quebec for pointing out “the oppression exercised on French Canadians by Jews and the British.”

The distance between
Le Devoir
and other Quebec nationalists’ views and that of
L’Echo du Bas St-Laurent
could not have been greater. In 1940 the Rimouski paper editorialized against
“Les dupes de l’Allemagne,”
the French who thought that peace could be negotiated with the Nazis.
L’Echo
identified them with
“certaines tête chaudes
[hot-heads]
canadien-français”
who, like the Irish, “grasp with frenzy at a chimeric neutrality.” On August 9, 1940,
L’Echo
declared outright, “We thank God that England’s morale remains intact. Speaking honestly, England is at this moment alone capable of saving the world—and that includes Canada—from the darkness of barbarism and slavery.”
³

During August 1942, however—the same week in which Admiral Jones and Percy Nelles, chief of the Naval Staff, reiterated Prime Minister King’s warning of a possible U-boat assault on the St. Lawrence—
L’Action Catholique
editorialized in support of the return of Pierre Laval to the Vichy cabinet. Laval, who had lived in Paris under the protection of the German army after Pétain sacked him in 1940, was one of the most Nazified of Vichy’s politicians, notorious for seeing off French volunteers who served with German units that attacked Russia and, after his return to power, for agreeing to sending skilled French workers to Germany and giving the Gestapo permission to hunt down Jews in unoccupied France.
⁴
On April 16, in the run-up to the conscription plebiscite and one month before the sinking of SS
Nicoya, L’Union,
a small ultranationalist and anti-Semitic publication, called for a Vichy-like regime in Quebec. In September 1942—fully five months after men began dying off Quebec’s shores—the Bishop of
Montreal, Monseigneur Joseph Charbonneau, speaking at the dedication of a new building of Collège Stanislas (to which the Vichy government had contributed funds), praised Pétain, claiming, “Despite the ordeals he has gone through, Marshal Pétain is a Good Samaritan and his blessed country always thinks of us. He dreams of France’s traditional role. Here, like there, he says, ‘I will maintain.’”

Despite the fact that the Bas St-Laurent was the part of Quebec that best received both Radio Vichy and the Nazi-controlled Radio Paris, Gaspesians were less interested in remaining faithful to
notre mère-patrie, la France
than were the intellectuals safely ensconced in Montreal. In 1940, despite Courchènes’s public disapproval of the Fusiliers du St-Laurent and despite Radio Vichy imprecations to
les canadiens français
to refuse military service, 500 men volunteered for the Fusiliers. Two years later, No. 1 Battalion of the Fusiliers alone counted 773 men and 34 officers. A year later, the 2nd Battalion had more than 1,000 men and officers; by autumn the battalion’s rolls had grown to 1,251 officers and men. Nor was the Gaspé’s support for the Canadian military limited to enlistees; during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays of 1941 and 1942, more than two hundred francophone families welcomed Australian, British, New Zealand, Canadian and American air trainees into their homes.

As the losses mounted in the St. Lawrence during 1942, more men enlisted in the Fusiliers. Between September and November 1942, 1,500 men enlisted, enough to create four new subdivisions.
⁵
In 1943, the 3rd Battalion alone had 49 officers and 1,877 men, 50 per cent of whom had had field battery training. Rimouski’s 2nd Battalion counted 972 men. Along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, 737 men and 35 officers stood guard, in addition to 187 civilian ADC personnel. Across the Gaspé Peninsula, more than 1,000 ADC members watched the waters nervously.

In June 1943, six months after Vichy was occupied by Hitler’s army and the last pretence that Pétain’s government represented
la gloire de la France
vanished—and while Courchènes continued to worry about the moral effect of the airmen training at Mont Joli—Montreal papers, including
Le Devoir,
ran articles praising the Fusiliers, the home army under Brigadier-General Edmond Blais and Gaspesians’ preparedness.
“Tout Gaspésien est devenu un soldat,”
declared
La Presse
on June 17, 1943,
in an article in which Roger Champeaux recounted the vulnerabilities of the Gaspé and then asserted that the army emplacements and ADC training he had seen on a tour of the Gaspé provided the necessary protection.
“Les Gaspésiens son aux aguets”
(“Gaspesians are on the lookout”), wrote
Le Devoir’s
Lucien Desbiens five days later while praising the training of ADC volunteers and Blais’s soldiers, each of whom, Desbiens wrote, “is a specialist.” A year later, journalists returned to the Gaspé and in their articles reported Blais’s words. “The Gaspé has been, since the beginning of the conflict, the first zone of war in Canada. The Gaspé is the front line: its population has shown its bravery. This population, we have seen as nowhere else in the country, has been ready and able to combat the enemy.”

MARCH 17, 1943

Hansard records the clash between Sasseville Roy and Naval Services Minister Macdonald as being part of the 1943 budget debate, which had begun a few days earlier. But every member of the House, every visitor in the gallery and the press knew that neither Roy nor Macdonald was speaking about either the budget in general or the Naval Estimates, which totalled
$3.6 billion. Rather, on March 15, 1943, with less than two months to go before the opening of the 1943 coastal shipping season, Roy had done nothing less than indicate his lack of confidence in the minister and, therefore, in the King government’s handling of security on the St. Lawrence.

Shock at the loss of
Caribou,
the coming of the winter freeze-up of the St. Lawrence and Macdonald’s statement on November 24, 1942, that there had been “20 sinkings in the whole river and gulf area” had, for a time, muted the kind of criticisms made by
L’Action Catholique
‘s Laurent. On March 4, 1943, however, in a speech to the Quebec legislature, Onésime Gagnon, the Union Nationale member for the riding of Matane, returned to the rumour Justice Minister Louis St. Laurent had sought to squelch the previous November. According to Gagnon, whose provincial riding covered roughly the same territory as Roy’s federal riding of Gaspé, “the federal Minister of Naval Affairs has not told the people of Quebec the truth—not 20 but upward of 30 ships were sunk in the Gulf of St. Lawrence last summer.” Included in this number, he told the Quebec legislature, were “two United States destroyers that were torpedoed either in the St. Lawrence River or in the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” a claim that was accepted by
Le Devoir
and
Le Droit,
and by other members of the Quebec legislature, even though the US had made no reference to the loss of a USN ship in the St. Lawrence.

Premier Godbout’s response suggests that Macdonald’s decision to share information with him in 1942 had quieted his fears. Godbout began by noting how Gagnon’s attitude toward defence matters had changed since 1940. At that time, the premier reminded the Quebec legislature, Gagnon had complained that “the federal government buys cannons in place of giving bread to the people.”

In Ottawa, Macdonald responded quickly. On March 7, the minister for naval services used a standing commitment to tour RCN ships in Halifax to challenge Gagnon: “If he gives me the date and the locality of each of the 30 sinkings, I will investigate each case.” Judging well his crowd, the minister continued: “If Mr. Gagnon does not trust the Naval Service, we will appoint a committee to investigate.” Macdonald’s pledge that “this committee might include a representative appointed by the Quebec member and the navy,” and an independent party agreeable to both the minister and
Gagnon, reveals as much about the perennial problem of Quebec-federal relations as does any other political statement during the war.

Two days later, on March 9, as Macdonald and Gagnon traded telegrams about the mandate of the proposed committee, Hormidas Langlais, the Union Nationale member of the Provincial Parliament for Îles-de-la-Madeleine, brought forward a motion demanding that the government of Quebec table “a copy of all correspondence” exchanged between it and the federal government pertaining to the St. Lawrence since 1937. After repeating Gagnon’s claim that thirty, not twenty, ships had been sunk the previous year, Langlais protested the closing of the St. Lawrence to transoceanic shipping. “The weight of this decision,” he thundered, “falls more heavily” on Quebec’s population; the benefits “flow to Saint John and Halifax, where it has been necessary to expand in order to handle the increased traffic.” Langlais then directly accused Macdonald, who represented a Halifax riding, of favouring ports in English provinces.

Langlais was answered by Godbout’s attorney general, Léon Casgrain, who began by reminding his Quebec parliamentary colleagues that the questions are “posed to Mr. Angus Macdonald, naval minister. However, this man is in Ottawa.” His next comment, “No one in this Legislative Assembly, none of us possesses the necessary lights, knows the facts or is qualified to discuss in detail questions of naval strategy,” might, especially after some thirty years of constitutional wrangling with Quebec, sound strange to our ears, but was nevertheless true. Casgrain ended by saying that the government that stood before the opposition in the Quebec legislative assembly “will do its duty to work to administer our province and leave to the federal government their care of our defence.”

In Ottawa the next day, March 10, Gordon Graydon, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, asked Macdonald about the debates that had occurred in Quebec. Macdonald responded by explaining to the House his offer to Gagnon. The minister used his reply to Graydon’s supplementary question, which again cited Gagnon’s numbers, to begin to cut the ground out from under the Quebec legislator: “Mr. Gagnon says that he has a list of the names of the ships and the dates on which they were sunk. I asked Mr. Gagnon to produce this list for my investigation. I have asked
him by telegram and he replied that surely my own department has the information. My department cannot have this information on ghost ships that have been sunk—flying Dutchmen or something of that sort.”