The Battle of the St. Lawrence (41 page)

¹
Between 1939 and 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy lost twenty-four warships and more than two thousand officers and ratings; Canada’s merchant navy lost seventy ships and almost two thousand crew members.

²
See Appendix C for a list of ships torpedoed. Because the torpedoing of SS
Essex Lance, Pan York, Meadcliffe Hall
and
Fort Thompson
resulted in neither deaths nor destruction of these ships, I have relegated reference to them to endnotes.

³
The first recorded use of the phrase
“la bataille du Saint-Laurent”
was by
L’Action Catholique
on May 18, 1942. The first English use of “The Battle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence” was in the May 1943 edition of the
Royal Canadian Monthly Review.

⁴
In his 1985
U-Boats against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters,
which more than any other work has given shape to the battle, Michael Hadley agrees with Schull’s assessment. Unlike the historians to whom Sarty refers, however, Hadley makes extensive use of newspapers and of Hansard, thus demonstrating that the Battle of the St. Lawrence was not hidden from the Canadian public, even if on many occasions the articles were liberally sprinkled with fare that would go down well on the home front.

⁵
Gerald F. Linderman,
Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War,
The Free Press, 1987.

⁶
An earlier version of this preface appeared in the summer 2003 issue of
Gaspésie
(vol. 40, no. i), which was published to coincide with the May 2003 opening of an exhibit on the Battle of the St. Lawrence at the Musée de la Gaspésie.

¹
The US and UK were each granted the five capital ships in recognition of the US’s two coasts and the UK’s worldwide imperial responsibilities.

²
During the First World War, this first generation of U-boats sank 5,700 Allied ships totalling over 11 million tons of shipping. During the Second World War, 830 U-boats sank 2,759 Allied and neutral ships, totalling 13 million tons of shipping.

³
Nothing better illustrates the British Admiralty’s “staggering lack of imagination,” to borrow historian Peter Padfield’s words, than its view of Germany’s opening bargaining position:
      In this case Germany would have some 50 to 60 submarines, a situation which must give rise to some misgivings, but it is quite apparent from the attitude of the German representatives that it is quite a question of
“Gleichberechugung”
[equal rights] which is really exercising their mind and not the desire to acquire a large submarine fleet.
In the present mood of Germany it seems probable that the surest way to persuade them to be moderate in their actual performance is to grant them every consideration in theory. In fact they are more likely to build up to submarine parity if we object to their theoretical right to do so, than if we agree that they have a moral justification.

⁴
Fo‘c’sle: short for “forecastle,” the forward part of a ship behind the bow in front of the “castle,” the old Spanish term for “bridge.”

⁵
Also, unlike their Canadian opponents, Dönitz’s men had been thoroughly militarized by both school and the Hitler Youth. Within two years of Hitler’s rise to power, the British cabinet received a report on Nazi education: “The German schoolboy of today is being methodically educated, mentally, and physically, to defend his country …. But, I fear,” added Foreign Secretary Sir Eric Phipps, “that, if this or a later German Government ever requires it of him, he will be found equally well fitted and ready to march or die on foreign soil.” The contrast with Canadian schooling is considered in chapter 6.

⁶
In addition to the Battle of the St. Lawrence, there were two other direct attacks on the North American mainland during the Second World War, both carried out by Japan. On the evening of June 20, 1942, I-26, a Japanese submarine, shelled the lighthouse at Estevan Point on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Twenty-five to thirty shells were fired; there were no injuries. Between November 1944 and April 1945, some 300 (of 9,300) bomb-carrying balloons launched from Japan reached North America. Bombs fell in Oregon, Washington, California, Alaska, British Columbia, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. The bombs failed in their intended purpose—to start forest fires and thus divert resources from the war effort and to sow panic—however, there were casualties in Oregon, where a minister’s wife and five children were killed by a balloon bomb. Both the United States and Canada maintained a complete news blackout about the Japanese balloon offensive.

¹
Quoted and translated by David J. Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig in their
The Destruction of the Bismarck
(Stoddart, 2001), 88f.

²
All distances included in lists of historical events have been calculated from Gaspé, Quebec, and are rounded off to the nearest 100 miles.

³
The Finnish ship SS
Carolus,
sunk near Rimouski, Quebec, by U-69 on October 9, 1942, was also a prize of war seized by Canada after Finland allied itself with Hitler’s Germany in 1939.

⁴
Gaspé’s brush with fame came in 1940 during the height of the Blitz, when it was designated, under the so-called “spare bedroom” policy, as the port to which the British fleet would steam if England fell to the Nazis.

⁵
Vessel’s weight in air = volume of hull immersed in water X water density.

⁶
This is exactly what happened to the 5,229-ton SS
Muneric,
its holds laden with heavy iron ore and hence more than half empty, after being torpedoed by U-432 on September 10, 1941. Two of
Muneric’s
convoy companions, SS
Joannis
and
Mount Taygetus,
were torpedoed in the St. Lawrence four months after
Nicoya.

⁷
A 1948 study found that sailors immersed in 60°F (16°C) water could be expected to survive less than five hours; sailors in water of 40° to 41°F (4°C) had “minutes only.” The average temperature of the waters where the
Nicoya
sank is 40°F (4°C); the average daytime air temperature is 44.5°F (7°C).

⁸
Nationwide, 80 per cent of voters voted to free the government from its “no conscription” pledge; in Quebec, 80 per cent voted to hold the government to its pledge.

⁹
Quoted and translated by Michael L. Hadley in his
U-Boats Against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters
(McGill-Queens Press, 1985), 276.

¹⁰
Over the course of ten patrols, Thurmann sank thirteen ships, for a total of 64,612 tons; he damaged another two ships totalling 15,273 tons. Thurmann’s U-553 was lost with all forty-seven hands in late January 1943; his last radio message was
“Sehrohr unklar”
(“Periscope not clear”).

¹
This tremendous industrial achievement is even more stunning when set in the context of North America’s total wartime production and the difference between the two nations’ populations. With 130 million people, the United States produced the above-mentioned ships and 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, 2,000,000 army trucks and some 87,000 landing craft; the United States Navy ended the war with more than 90 aircraft carriers. With a population of a little over 8 million, Canada produced the above-mentioned ships and 5,096 aircraft, 5,066 artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns, and more than 7,400 tanks and heavy trucks.

²
One expert estimated that 166 million tons of cargo would fill eleven lines of railway boxcars stretching from Vancouver to Halifax.

³
Such public relations gimmicks were hardly needed. On March 6, 1942, just five days before the sinking of SS
Nicoya, L’Echo du Bas St-Laurent
crowed, “The Lower St. Lawrence and the Gaspésie buy more than $1,200,000.00” in Victory Bonds. The tiny village of Témiscouata subscribed for $59,950. For a full discussion of Canada’s oil convoys, see Robert C. Fischer’s “‘We’ll Get Our Own’: Canada and the Oil Shipping Crisis of 1942” (
Red Duster,
1993), and p. 407f of
No Higher Purpose
by W.A.B. Douglas et al.

⁴
The effort was one of Canada’s great successes: 77 tankers in 14 convoys were escorted safely though the same U-boat-infested waters off the American coast in which more than 150 unescorted tankers under US control went to the bottom.

⁵
An improvised special convoy, QSS-1, sailed safely under escort on May 9, two days before the attack on
Nicoya
and
Leto.

⁶
Had U-132 been perpendicular to the convoy Vogelsang would have said, “angle on bow = 0°”; had it been parallel, he would have said “angle on bow 90°.”

⁷
In May 1943, a U-boat slipped through Halifax’s outer defences and laid fifty-three mines. Port Defence Officer Geoffrey Smith, of whom we will hear much more later, suspected that a U-boat had crossed the asdic loop, and warned the harbour patrol boats; he recalls hearing the explosions of the mines being detonated by the Bangor minesweepers.

⁸
A measure of the power of the bathyscaphe effect is the fact that after the torpedoing of SS
British Freedom
on January 14, 1945, off Halifax, Allied ships were unable to get an asdic contact on the ship’s stern—even though its bow was out of the water. US studies showed that in the Canadian zone of the Northwest Atlantic, asdic sweeps could not penetrate deeper than 200 feet, and in the St. Lawrence the effect would have been stronger because of the mixing not just of cold and warmer water but also of salt and fresh water.

⁹
Godbout was, in fact, correct: U-213 had landed a spy, code-named “Langbein,” on May 14. However, since “Langbein” immediately disappeared, neither Godbout nor any other Canadian authority knew about his presence until 1944. (See Appendix A.)

¹⁰
Lensen’s
officer was mistaken about the number of lascars lost; the correct number is three.

¹¹
Lensen
never left Grande-Vallée Bay. She broke up in early 1943, though pieces of it were still visible until late 1967, when they settled far enough into the bottom to be covered by the waters of the St. Lawrence. On June 19, 2003, Robert Spence’s daughter, Maureen Hall, in a ceremony arranged by André Kirouac, Director of the Naval Museum of Quebec, dropped a wreath over the site where
Lensen
lies.

¹
Skinner’s nickname, “Iff “—pronounced with the broad “eh” of a Newfoundland accent, “Ehh-lf”—came from his penchant for saying, “Eh-ff the Germans attack.”

²
Roberto was used to Canadian waters. In 1940, he was part of the crew that took USS
Crown Shelf
and
Wicks,
two of the four-stacker World War I-era destroyers that were part of the “destroyers for bases” deal, up to Halifax, where they were turned over to the RN. He was one of the first men drafted onto
Laramie.
“When we got to her, she’d been laid up for years. She was a real rustbucket. The engines and most of the equipment from the fire room had been taken topside and disassembled. We worked like buzzards putting her back together. We had to strip other ships in the yard to get pumps for her engines and fuel tanks,” he recalls.

³
Three other crewmen were missing in action and presumed dead.

⁴
Boone and Mills, who had been asleep in the crew’s forward quarters, abandoned ship after being “knocked down and washed half the length of the main deck by a wave of water and aviation gasoline which swept down the port side immediately after the explosion,” wrote Executive Officer Keller, who recommended that they not be punished. After floating on rafts for five days, they were picked up on August 28 and returned to
Laramie.

⁵
Several weeks before I interviewed Jock Smith in late January 2002, he saw another article about Johnnie Johnson, one that announced his retirement as vice-marshal of the Royal Air Force.

⁶
U-984 would sink four ships and damage one before being sunk by HMCS
Ottawa, Kootenay
and
Chaudiere
in 1944.

⁷
The press release left out the most colourful part of
Raccoon’s
history.
Raccoon
was one of twelve yachts brought to Canada as part of what’s been called the “Great Yacht Plot.” Devised by Rear-Admiral Leonard Murray to get around the US Neutrality Act, which was still in force in 1940, the Great Yacht Plot saw Canadian naval authorities requisitioning yachts from wealthy Canadians who then, on the advice of the navy, purchased replacement yachts in the United States. Upon receipt of the replacement yacht, the navy immediately returned the first yacht and requisitioned the new yacht, which was then converted into an anti-submarine escort ship.

⁸
Hartwig’s fine military mind was recognized after he was repatriated to West Germany from Canada, where he spent four years in a POW camp after his U-boat was sunk in November 1942. In the early 1950s, he joined the
Bundesmarine,
West Germany’s navy, rising to become admiral of the fleet before retiring in the early 1970s.

⁹
Degaussing neutralized a ship hull’s magnetic charge—thus defeating the pistols of magnetic torpedoes.

¹⁰
Quoted and translated by Hadley in his
U-Boats Against Canada,
119.

¹¹
On October 9, 2003, the Greek ambassador placed a tombstone on Triantafyllarous’s grave.