The Battle of the St. Lawrence (4 page)

There were precautions aplenty, but these too bespoke safety. The Fusiliers du St-Laurent, wearing World War I-era uniforms, could be seen guarding the railroad bridge at Quebec while others manned the 7.5-inch
guns that pointed down toward the river from Fort de la Mattinière in Lauzon, opposite the heights of Quebec City. Unseen were the two 18-lb. mobile guns secreted on Île d’Orléans, the island just east of Quebec City at the centre of which was the degaussing station. There, during the 1942 shipping season, outbound ships stopped to have their hull’s magnetic charge neutralized. Likely neither Brice nor his crew knew that the waters off Bic Island, ten miles west of Rimouski, Quebec, had seen Canada’s first successful action at sea: the seizure of the 3,921-ton Italian merchantman
Capo Noli
by the minesweeper HMCS
Bras d’Or.
³

There was air cover, apparently improved from 1941 when
Nicoya
took McRae to England. When the war began in 1939, Eastern Air Command (EAC) had one lone squadron at an improvised base on the Sydney River (near Sydney, Nova Scotia, on the far end of the Gulf of St. Lawrence) to provide coverage of the almost ¼-million-square-kilometre area of the river and gulf in addition to the seaward approaches to Halifax. As historian Alec Douglas has shown in
The Creation of a National Airforce,
a year later (in 1940), this first squadron, now based at a permanent facility at Kelly Beach, Nova Scotia, was joined by a small squadron of Supermarine Stranraers, biplane seaplanes flying from Dartmouth, across the bay from Halifax. In 1941, more planes were available, from Kelly Beach, Sydney, Botwood and Gander and from American air bases in Newfoundland. By 1942, EAC had almost one hundred planes available, though most were assigned to North Atlantic convoy protection. Unarmed training squadrons based in Mont Joli, ten miles west of Rimouski, and at Charlottetown and Summerside, Prince Edward Island, did double duty as an anti-submarine deterrent force as they flew training patrols over the river and gulf.

Out toward the end of the Gaspé itself was the newly built naval base HMCS Fort Ramsay, equipped with a seaplane slip. And just outside the town of Gaspé, a chain of army forts: Prevel, Haldimand and Peninsula, positioned to guard Gaspé Bay. Plans called for Fort Ramsay to have a small force of two armed yachts and two minesweepers, designated as a “hunter group,” that would spring into action once the location of a submarine was clear.
⁴

*  *  *

Everywhere Brice and Inch looked there were the signs of safety.

Navigational lights and radio beacons were “operating as in peacetime,” wrote
Kapitänleutnant
Karl Thurmann, commander of U-553, in his war diary (KTB) on May 8, 1942, three days before he fired the first salvo in the Battle of the St. Lawrence.
Nicoya’s
own lights shone.

Tomorrow, after passing Cape Gaspé, the crew would once again take up war positions. Watches would be posted. The guns that had been welded to the
Nicoya
‘s deck would be manned.

But for one more night, the crew that would soon once again face Dönitz’s wolves could sleep easy.
Nicoya
was sailing through peaceful seas, last roiled by war almost two hundred years earlier. In the Battle of the Restigouche in Baie des Chaleurs on July 8, 1760, a British squadron led by HMS
Fame
defeated the French fleet, led by Admiral François Chenard de La Giraudais’s 500-ton frigate
Machault,
which had been sent to reconquer Quebec. La Giraudais’s loss ended the Seven Years War and ended forever France’s claim to Canada.

*  *  *

The four men crammed onto the top of U-553’s conning tower knew differently. Now they were the hunters. The sounds of the hunt were the low throb of the 3,200-hp diesel engines that powered their Type VIIC
Unterseeboot,
the glide of water passing their 67.1-metre outer hull and the words of their captain—an Iron Cross First Class-winner—as he read off the co-ordinates and other target information from his attack binoculars to his
Oberbootsmann.
Generally referred to as
Nummer Eins
(“Number One”), Thurmann’s first officer repeated the numbers as he fed them into the torpedo attack calculator, which computed the settings and then transmitted them by two wires directly into the guidance system of the “eel” in Tube I.

Two days earlier, after having entered the St. Lawrence to repair a hydroplane damaged in what Thurmann called a “chance” bombing (on May 7) some twenty miles southwest of Cape Breton’s Scaterie Island, the sound of war was the alarm bell signalling an emergency dive after a lookout spotted a plane at 5:16 p.m. Thurmann’s war diary entry—“Emergency dive because of 4-engine land-based aircraft on bearing 300, elevation 700 m., range = 5000 m. Aircraft flying parallel course. 5 bombs landed when
at depth 20 m., at moderate range, normal damage”—hardly captures the horror of being caught on the surface by a bomber, or the organized chaos of an emergency dive.

The first glint of the setting sun reflecting off the silver skin of the US Army Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress set in motion a well-choreographed ballet of men, valves, steel and water that took the U-boat from the surface, where its conning tower was some 4.5 metres above water, to relative safety, more than 20 metres under. Immediately following the alarm, the four men on the conning tower scrambled down the hatch, more jumping than climbing down the steel ladders. The last down, the senior watch officer, closed the hatch. As soon as he had, and while still turning the wheel that locked it in place, he yelled
“Fluten!”
—“Flood the tanks!”

The first valves that were turned after the chief engineer ordered, “Vent ballast tanks 2, 3, 4 and 5,” opened the air vents at the top of the boat’s forward ballast tanks, which allowed water rushing into the bottom of the tanks to push out the air that kept the U-boat afloat. Simultaneously, the ship’s hydroplane operators turned the wheels in front of them to pitch the heavy diving planes downward. In the engine room, artificers were at once shutting down U-553’s diesel engines and engaging her silent electric motors in a tightly co-ordinated sequence designed to ensure that the boat’s propellers did not miss a beat. Every bite the propeller blades took into the water drove the boat farther toward safety. Only after the boat had achieved a descent angle of between 20° and 25° did the chief engineer call for the aft ballast tank to be filled; this sequence ensured that the boat’s stern did not pop out of the water.

Had the dive been occasioned by the sighting of a ship, Thurmann’s engineering officer would probably have ordered it halted when they reached 13.5 metres (their depth being indicated by a mercury column similar to a barometer), which was periscope depth. Because they were diving to escape a plane, however, the engineering officer waited several more seconds, till they reached 20 metres, before ordering the dive plane operators to bring the hydroplanes back to their neutral position—and before ordering the complex pumping of water between the ship’s fore and aft, starboard and port trim tanks that would keep the 1,070-ton ship on an even keel. As lit
tle as 36.3 litres (8 gallons) in the wrong tank could upset the boat’s trim and buoyancy.

A little over three hours later, Thurmann radioed U-boat headquarters in Lorient telling
Führer der Unterseeboote
Karl Dönitz that his “forward hydroplane motor [was] again unserviceable,” that even though he’d obviously been spotted, “navigational lights ashore are still operating,” and that he had gone “into the river!” Ten hours later, he’d travelled 94.5 nautical miles farther into Canadian waters. Seventeen hours after that, he stood 400 metres off
Nicoya’s
port side, ten miles from Fame Point, ten miles west of the tip of the Gaspésie.

At nine minutes to midnight on May 12, 1942, the equation that described
Nicoya’s
ability to float was as old as Archimedes’ famous naked run through Syracuse.
⁵
Nicoya
floated because though the ship, its stores and cargo, and its men weighed some 10,670 tons (of which 4,400 tons was the ship’s own weight), her 400 × 51 foot hull displaced its own weight in water. It did this because the tons of steel, glass, planes, frozen meat and men, all heavier than water, were part of an equation that also included the thousands of cubic metres of air trapped within the hull. In effect, the hull was a gigantic bubble. Even though the hull pushed down into the water as much as 26.9 feet, as long as it remained intact the hydrostatic force of the water pushed upward on it, creating what naval architects call “buoyancy.”

That equation changed a minute later when, at the end of a 400-metre run, the torpedo fired from U-553’s Tube I detonated. The torpedo hit
Nicoya
with the force of 57.6 metric tons about 100 feet from the stern, just behind the engine room on the port side.

Within milliseconds of the torpedo’s pistol’s igniting 268 kilograms of
Schiesswolle 36
—a high-explosive mixture of TNT, hexanitrodiphenylamine and aluminum flakes—a white-hot (3,000° C) gas bubble with a pressure of some 50,000 atmospheres (750,000 pounds per square inch) formed. If such a shock bubble forms close to a ship’s keel, it is strong enough to lift even the largest ship. The bubble then acts like a pivot around which the keel bends and, finally, breaks. Set at three metres, however, Thurmann’s
torpedo hit too far above
Nicoya’s
keel to lift her and break her back. Instead, it blasted through
Nicoya’s
.46-inch steel plating, tearing, Brice reported, a “huge hole” in the ship’s port side.

Though now aboard a doomed ship, Brice’s crew were luckier than most torpedo victims. The blast that ripped through the hull entered a refrigerated hold. Tons of chilled meat absorbed some of the force. The dense cold cooled the rampaging stream of superheated gas, preventing the formation of the flash, an instantaneous burning that streams through passageways, ventilation shafts and whatever pathway the force of the explosion itself has bludgeoned. Had the torpedo hit a hold with vast empty spaces, the white-hot bubble would have expanded within the hold, its heat and force shredding even the thick steel bulkheads, turning them into pieces of shrapnel moving at hundreds of miles an hour. It’s likely that had the flash erupted in an empty hold,
Nicoya
would have vanished in mere seconds.
⁶

Before Brice and his crew felt their ship tremble, a secondary effect of the bubble tore through
Nicoya.
The detonation wave, now behaving like water flowing through the ground, followed the path of least resistance. Because the hold’s bottom plating ranged between .72 inches and 1 inch in thickness, the torrent could not break out through the ship’s bottom. Nor could it rupture the hold’s fore and aft bulkheads, which were stiffened by frames spaced every 30 inches. The path of least resistance, therefore, lay upward. The explosion surged through the steel and wooden decking that covered the hold, blowing apart a crate and the plane within it. Then the explosive wave exhausted itself—at just about the time Captain Brice’s bridge crew became aware of it—by blowing apart the aft port lifeboat.

Reaction aboard the
Nicoya
was instantaneous. The engineer stopped the engines even before the ship’s telegraph rang Full Stop. Men and the one woman aboard, who before going to sleep had looked out upon the peaceful waters that lapped the shores of the Gaspé, jumped up. Some dressed before running out of their cabins or messes. Steward Russell Simpson didn’t; he ran from his cabin barefoot and in his pyjamas.

Two of Brice’s passengers had experienced this nightmare of broken glass, twisted metal and ruptured steam lines spewing forth scalding white smoke
just a month earlier. One, Roman Ferreira, had survived the sinking of SS
Montevideo
that March; during the First World War, he had survived being torpedoed, and two weeks in an open boat. He didn’t survive a fourth torpedoing 362 days after the
Nicoya’s
sinking. Either Ferreira or the other passenger (unnamed by the press) who had also survived a sinking just weeks earlier told a reporter that in addition to losing his new kit, he lost the marshmallows he was bringing home to his wife, “who had quite a liking for them.”

Before running from the bridge, the wireless telegraphist likely given the watch, Second Wireless Officer Lewis Burby, paused for a moment to shove the secret code books that had been given to Brice in Montreal into the weighted bag. The bag was later thrown over the side.

Mrs. Michael Silverstone, on her way to England to join her husband, an RAF officer who had returned home earlier from a posting in Montreal, ran from her cabin, carrying her eighteen-month-old son, Nathan. Once on deck, they joined Captain Brice and seventy-four other souls in a grotesque ballet. Shrouded by steam, they picked their way over broken glass and twisted metal and over or around wrecked wooden hatches. All this and more is contained in Brice’s words: “There was so much noise from escaping steam, it was impossible to give orders or hear anything, and it was difficult to see through the steam”—the laconic expression favoured by the writers of operations reports.

In the first minute after the explosion, hundreds of tons of water poured through the hole blasted by the torpedo. The water’s first effect might be called beneficial. It cooled the hold and doused any fires that may have burned in its bottom.

Soon, maybe two minutes after the torpedoing, the water passed the critical mark. Fully loaded as it was,
Nicoya
had a reserve buoyancy of some 2,200 tons. As Hold No. 3 filled with water that quickly began to flow farther aft through the bilge and crankshaft spaces,
Nicoya
‘s reserve buoyancy vanished.

Brice didn’t need to work out the equation that says that a ship will sink when it has taken on so much water that its total weight (ship + water) exceeds its hull’s ability to displace water. Every moment
Nicoya
pushed lower into the water told him that soon there’d be no more buoyancy to be found.