The Battle of the St. Lawrence (36 page)

Montgomery ran toward what was left of the stern. Men blackened with oil were crawling out of the wreckage. Some were covered with red, which Montgomery at first assumed to be blood. “It took me a moment to realize it, but the torpedo had blasted apart the ship’s stores and almost everyone and everything was covered in tomato sauce.”

Under the wreckage that covered the 12-lb. cannon on the boat deck, Montgomery saw legs sticking out. Together with some other men, he used two-by-fours to pry the wreckage up. As the wreckage lifted, “suddenly an arm popped out. And in the open hand, we saw a penny,” recalls Montgomery. “We knew immediately that it was Ted E. Davis, who had a habit of flipping a penny and asking us to call it.

“Had I not been in the captain’s cabin when the torpedo hit, the toll would have been much worse; I and a good part of the crew would have been on that quarterdeck.”

*  *  *

At 16 knots,
Toronto
quickly bore down on the path cut by the torpedo through the water.

Kneip’s hydrophones heard every turn of
Toronto’s
screw. They also heard what sounded to them like the squeal of a circular saw—the sound made by the anti-Gnat “CAT gear” streaming behind
Toronto.
⁷
Soon they heard the explosions of depth charges and the firing of
Toronto
‘s gun at what one lookout thought was a periscope.

Toronto
‘s attack was undone by the devilish waters of the gulf. Neither
Toronto
nor
Magog,
whose asdic continued to work, ever heard the ping that would signal Kneip’s boat.

Stettler
too sprang into action, recalls Fred Linnington, then a twenty-two-year-old able seaman. “I was portside lookout on the bridge. Suddenly, I saw that instead of steaming along normally,
Magog
just slowed down and then began to list towards the stern. Lieutenant Commander D. G. King, our captain, immediately rang Action Stations. Our asdic operator got an echo, and soon we were running it down and dropping depth charges. After dropping a few, we kept searching but could not find another echo.”

Just moments after the gruesome discovery of Davis’s remains, Montgomery saw an even more ghastly sight. “There, just floating where the stern of the ship used to be, in amongst the wreckage, was a life jacket with just a torso in it. No head. No legs. Just a torso. We took note of the number on the jacket and realized it was Able Seaman Kelly, who’d been on lookout, who’d been killed there.” The official report records that the remains of Kelly’s body were lost while
Magog
was being towed to safety.

Shortly before 11:00 a.m.,
Toronto
broke off its search and steamed back to Quick’s ship. Before taking it in tow, Captain H. K. Hill sent his medical officer, Surgeon Lieutenant Léon Beicque, to
Magog,
which did not have a medical officer of its own. Beicque cared for the three injured sailors as
Magog
was towed to Godbout Bay by
Toronto
‘s sister ship HMCS
Shawinigan.
“Just before dark,” Montgomery remembers, “a twin-engined Catalina seaplane” appeared.

The transfer of men from
Magog
to the cutter and then to the Catalina was both difficult and dangerous. Decades later, Vancouver journalist Gordon Hunter recalled for Michael Hadley “the harrowing experience of lying strapped immobile in a Neil-Robertson stretcher and being lowered
over the
Magog
‘s ravaged side to the small boat surging and pitching below. One slip of the crew … would most certainly [have sent] him plummeting helplessly into the depths.” Writing a day later, Surgeon Lieutenant Commander J. R. Smith, HMCS Fort Ramsay’s medical officer, who was aboard the Catalina flying boat, still wondered that
Magog
‘s men had been able to transfer the injured to the Catalina. Manoeuvring
Magog
‘s cutter over to the aircraft, he wrote, seemed “physically impossible without jeopardizing both the craft and crew members.”

In addition to the choppy seas, the cutter’s crew also had to contend with the stream of the propellers, which were not turning (had they been stopped, it would have been impossible to line up the Catalina and the cutter). To keep the boat alongside the plane, the men in the boat had to reach out and grab hold of the plane. Smith made special mention of the farthest forward member of the boat’s crew, who “crouched on the bow of the boat [and] was greatly endangered by the starboard propeller, wing and spars of the plane” as time after time he “tried to grasp the edge of the plane’s starboard gun ‘blister.’”

The torpedoing of
Magog
put an end to almost seven months of relative quiet for EAC’s airmen. Between the beginning of the shipping season in April 1944 and that October, EAC’s pilots had logged thousands of hours. With the exception of a relative handful of sweeps after the HF/DFing of U-802 in August (it was the appearance of U-802 that prompted Admiral Murray to reinstate the St. Lawrence convoys), they’d found nothing. Thousands of hours of uneventful flights led the diarist of one squadron based in Summerside, PEI, to write on July 1, 1944, “the crews returned with that monotonous rhyme on their lips, ‘Nothing seen but miles and miles of waves and whales.’” A little over two weeks later he wrote, “Inclement weather overtook us and were I gifted with the philosophical wit of Plato, the rapier-like sarcasm of Voltaire or the analytical power of Tolstoy, I could not the more aptly pen a summary of the day than in the following words: ‘Nothing further to report.’”

On the morning of October 14, a Canso flying boat escorting ONS-33, flying a search pattern fourteen miles ahead of
Magog,
immediately turned
back and started to search for the U-boat. Shortly after it flew over the stricken ship, it dropped sonobuoys. For some eighteen minutes the buoys picked up what the Canso’s anti-submarine officer reported to be the sound of the U-boat’s propeller. However, according to historian Roger Sarty, “the sound was obliterated as the other frigates in the escort raced to counter attack.” The Canso continued looking for the submarine for three hours before it was relieved by four other Cansos. Bad weather forced EAC to order all but one plane back to base at around 8 p.m.

As soon as the weather cleared on the fifteenth, EAC sprang into action again. Cansos from Gaspé and Sydney flew the “salmon” search pattern. This pattern called for the Cansos to patrol in three concentric squares around the suspected location of the submarine. One square was eight miles away from the contact point, one twenty-four and the third forty. The middle patrol group flew in a clockwise direction at one altitude; the other two flew counterclockwise at different altitudes. The patrol was flown for twenty-four hours, using the Leigh light during the night. After the cancellation of “salmon” on the afternoon of the sixteenth, other flights were made over the river and western gulf until the eighteenth.
⁸

At 7:35 a.m. on October 17, the tug
Lord Strathcona
slipped its lines after having towed the shattered
Magog
to the jetty in the basin on the north side of Quebec’s Lower Town. Later on the morning of the seventeenth, Francis MacLaughlin, who in 1941 had watched the men of Kingston Shipyards build HMCS
Charlottetown
and who was now an eighteen-year-old naval rating in training at HMCS Montcalm (a naval base in Quebec City), was part of a hastily trained honour guard that paraded through the streets of Quebec City’s Upper Town. After the parade, MacLaughlin and some of his fellow ratings walked down from the heights of Quebec to the jetty.

“We had never seen anything like it before. We knew she’d been torpedoed and thought she’d have a hole in her. But what we saw was just as if a big hand had crumpled the aft part of the ship upward. The torpedo had folded her stern up onto the deck. The aft-peak bulkhead held, so she was still floating,” recalls MacLaughlin, who after the war became a naval architect.

NOVEMBER 24, 1944

Few Canadian ships had seen more types of action than K136, a corvette built in Lauzon, Quebec, in 1941. Commonly known as HMCS
Shawinigan,
K136 was on the North Atlantic run in the early months of 1942, during the worst days of the “Second Happy Time,” when German U-boats savaged shipping off the North American coast. In the last days of January, thirty-five miles or so southeast of St. John’s,
Shawinigan
came across empty lifeboats from either SS
Williman Hanson
or SS
Belize,
both of which were sunk by U-754 on January 22. On September 7, 1942,
Shawinigan
was sent from Gaspé to search for HMCS
Raccoon.
It was part of the escort of NL-9, and it counterattacked after Ulrich Gräf sank SS
Carolus
within sight of Rimouski on October 9, 1942. Six months after its first refit, during which its fo‘c’sle was extended and its bridge enlarged,
Shawinigan
was with HMCS
Rimouski
in the Baie des Chaleurs. A year later, on September 3, 1944, it picked up the fourteen survivors of SS
Livingston,
sunk by Kurt Peterson (U-541) after he left the St. Lawrence. On October 14,
Shawinigan
was sent to aid
Magog
and helped tow the stricken ship to Godbout Bay.

At 10:30 p.m. on November 24, 1944,
Shawinigan
was patrolling some thirty miles off Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, squarely within the sights of U-1228, which had entered Canadian waters eleven days earlier.

Of all the war diaries penned by the U-boat captains who invaded Canada’s inland sea,
Oberleutnant
Friedrich-Wilhelm Marienfeld’s is, perhaps, the
most beguiling. As one reads of the recurring troubles Marienfeld had with his gyroscope, echo sounder and
Schnorchel
—the float valve caused him no end of difficulty—one is almost liable to feel a certain sympathy, if for nothing else than for the simple frustration that comes through even in translation. After Dr. Günther Spohn, who a lifetime earlier was Marienfeld’s
Nummer Eins,
told me that following the war Marienfeld earned a PhD in philosophy, it became hard not to see a certain quality of mind in such entries as this: “Porpoises putting on a running show. A great deal of squealing, crackling and humming, sometimes to be heard with unaided ear,” from November 14, 1944. Or in the entry for the morning of the twenty-fifth, “Coast shining beautifully in the moonlight, Table Mountain, Sugar Loaf, Cape Ray beacons showing up as gleams on the horizon.”

But such reveries aside, Marienfeld’s war diary makes clear (as Hartwig’s war diaries do for him) that Marienfeld’s was a finely tuned military mind. BdU criticized him for his rather longish reports and for excessive caution. His decision not to enter the river came in for special criticism: “Deductions about traffic wrong! First see whether traffic has really stopped after you have detected!” Still, BdU could also praise him for spotting the “destroyer” at 0210 Berlin time and for the “success” of the Gnat he launched twenty minutes later.

Spotting the “destroyer” was something of a fluke. Marienfeld was on the cusp of deciding to give in to his technical problems and leave the gulf when, at 0150 Berlin time (9:50 p.m. local time), his hydrophone officer reported picking up a bearing at 200° off U-1228’s port quarter. Moments later, Marienfeld confirmed the sighting, the etchings on his attack periscope’s prisms telling him that the “destroyer” in his sights was actually at 210°. Marienfeld could have fired then and counted on the Gnat’s hydrophones and internal guidance mechanism to home in on the RCN ship’s screws. But, perhaps because he had not yet had any successes, he chose to be more careful and ordered his helmsman to come around 140°.

Instantly, the 1,545-ton boat began to turn to the starboard. On paper the turn would make U-1228’s course look like a P, with the U-boat ending up on a line that corresponds to the bottom part of the loop that joins the letter’s stem. Then came the command “Open bow cap” and the reply “Bow cap open.” From his position in the attack room above the bridge came the
co-ordinates for the attack computer: “90, speed 10 knots, depth 4, steering WS, aiming point stern, estimated range, 25 hm.” At 0230 Berlin time, the final order—
“Los!”
—the shudder as the “eel” was pushed into the sea, the clanking of the bow cap slamming closed.

Thirty miles away from U-1228’s conning tower, at 10:30 p.m. on November 24, 1944, John L. Gullage, captain of SS
Burgeo,
the Newfoundland-Nova Scotia ferry that had replaced SS
Caribou,
lay in bed next to his wife. Gullage would be up early, for his ship was scheduled to rendezvous with
Shawinigan
before 8 a.m. for the return trip to Sydney. Suddenly, a “peculiar noise,” a “sort of rumble,” rolled through the deep quiet of the late fall Newfoundland night. Gullage and his wife disagreed about what they’d heard. He thought it was nothing but a car backfiring. She heard a deeper sound. The rumble, she told her husband, “made the house tremble.”

At exactly the same moment, ten miles away in Grand Bay, Randall J. White and his wife were also in bed. There, the “explosion … sounded like a case of dynamite,” a sound they knew well from the previous year, when the US Army Air Force had been blasting near their home. An ADC member, White reported that two minutes after the first explosion they heard a second, which he described as “a roar like thunder.”

Through U-1228’s hydrophones, twenty-four-year-old
Oberleutnant zur See
Friedrich-Wilhelm Marienfeld and the bridge crew of U-1228 heard things more clearly. First, just the sounds of the “destroyer’s” screw. Then the swish of the torpedo as it exited Tube VI at 30 knots. A moment later, the “torpedo and screw noises merge[d].” After four minutes, the “screw noises disappeared],” replaced by the “great roaring and crackling sounds” of a hit, loud enough to be heard by Spohn, who wasn’t on the bridge at the time. Less then two minutes later came six more explosions, which Marienfeld assumed were depth charges exploding as they sank.