The Battle of the St. Lawrence (42 page)

¹
Heagy’s Canadian-made radar lagged behind the British centimetric radar largely because, in May 1940, at the request of the British Admiralty, the Canadian government sent more than twenty of the nation’s best physics graduates to man RN sets on RN ships. According to Derek Howse’s history,
Radar at Sea,
“It was only the timely arrival of these Canadians that saved the [British] Navy from facing a truly disastrous position in regard to radar personnel.” Prior to 1943—during the years when Canadian labs were failing to produce effective Canadian-designed asdic and radar sets, and when Canadian shipyards were unable to keep up with the modernization programs that were in effect, because they lacked the engineers who could install asdic and radar—“a very high proportion of the larger British warships were kept working at sea by Canadian radar officers.” This was recognized in a letter sent by the Admiralty to the National Research Council in Ottawa.
      Although Canadian asdic would continue to lag behind the RN’s and the USN’s until near the end of the war, by early 1943 Canadian scientists were at the forefront of the development of small centimetric radar units suitable for motor patrol boats and aircraft. After successful testing of Type 286 centimetric radar in April 1943, the Admiralty ordered 1,500 units. Type 286 radar remained in use for many years after the end of the war.

²
According to Marc Milner, Americans serving on the North Atlantic run thought that corvettes shipped so much water, their crews deserved submarine pay.

³
In London, the trade mission’s reports must have made for depressing but familiar reading. For, as Correlli Barnett has shown in
The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation,
British yards and manufacturing firms lacked exactly the same kind of design teams the trade mission noted that Canada lacked. The UK had to turn to US sources for “fire-control gear for the main and anti-aircraft armaments of warships and anti-submarine sonar equipment.” British industry was unable to provide armaments manufacturers and naval yards with the precision machine tools they needed. Nor was the UK able to supply the microvalves and other highly technical components of radar and sonar without US help.
      By 1944, however, Canada had become a major supplier of such equipment. To make good a 20-million-unit shortfall in thermionic valves needed for radar, Paymaster-General Lord Cherwell recommended that an “urgent enquiry should also be made into the possibility of obtaining greatly increased imports from North America,
particularly Canada,
in 1944” (emphasis added).

⁴
To save both time and money, corvettes were built to commercial, not Admiralty, standards. Accordingly, while they had many watertight bulkheads, there were only five complete transverse bulkheads that ran from the keel to the upper decking. The farthest aft divided the engine room from the aft boiler room, more than 100 feet from the after peak (propeller). By contrast, frigates, the next-largest Canadian ship, had a watertight bulkhead only 60 feet from the after peak. This difference explains the different fates of the frigate HMCS
Magog
and the corvette HMCS
Shawinigan
in October and November 1944. An acoustic torpedo destroyed 60 feet of
Magog’s
stern, but her aft bulkhead held and the ship stayed afloat. A similar explosion destroyed
Shawinigan
because, whether the aft bulkhead held or not, the flooding of some 100 feet of her 300 feet doomed it.

⁵
Although I had read about this entry in Hadley’s
U-boats against Canada,
I had forgotten about it. When I came upon these last words in the logbook preserved in the National
Archives, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. It is, perhaps, the most chilling fragment I have seen from the Battle of the St. Lawrence.

⁶
Post-war research in BdU records indicates that there were no U-boats near ON-84. Accordingly, the Board of Inquiry’s praise of Bonner’s asdic operators is probably not warranted. However, given the primitive state of the asdic aboard
Charlottetown
(a school of fish could return the signature of a U-boat), the fact that the operator picked up anything at 3,000 yards is most creditable. Whether or not a U-boat was shadowing ON-84,
Charlottetown
‘s reaction demonstrates that in the short time available to him, Bonner had turned his green crew into an efficient and effective fighting force.

⁷
On February 6, 1943, depth charges, also apparently set to safety, blew up as HMCS
Louisburg
sank after being torpedoed by Italian aircraft off Oran, Algeria. A similar tragedy befell HMCS
Weyburn
sixteen days later after she hit a mine off the Straits of Gibraltar.

⁸
Quoted from
The Battle of the St. Lawrence,
produced by Brian and Terence McKenna (NFB, 1995).

⁹
Two days later, on September 13, in the middle of the North Atlantic, U-91 sank the destroyer HMCS
Ottawa,
killing 113 officers and ratings, as well as 6 men of the Royal Navy and 22 merchant seamen. The six days that followed the loss of
Raccoon
on September 7 were the worst in the history of the Royal Canadian Navy: 16q officers and ratings died.

¹
St. Lawrence shipping could not be completely suspended for both national and international reasons. Many communities along the north shore of the river and up into Labrador relied on coastal shipping for their supplies and for the movement of their chief products (iron ore, timber, coal and bauxite), which were themselves vital for Canada’s war industries. Additionally, the British Ministry of War Transport argued that shipping efficiency required that ships loading timber destined to shore up British coal mines be loaded at traditional timber ports on the St. Lawrence.

²
In mid-1942, Canadian escorts in the Mid-Ocean Escort Force registered four U-boat kills, more than the RN, the force’s better-equipped and better-trained senior partner.

³
Only three of nine U-boats managed to penetrate the escort screen. And while U-boats did sink four ships on the night of August 24, they did so at great cost: two U-boats were heavily damaged. As Marc Milner notes in his recent
Battle of the Atlantic,
Western Approaches Command found this to be an acceptable rate of exchange.

⁴
One of the reasons that the RCN underperformed the RN in terms of kills was that through 1942, Canada’s escort ships were equipped with 123 asdic and 286 radar and were thus a generation behind the RN’s ships, equipped with 127 asdic and 271 centimetric radar.
      The decision to so equip Canadian ships was at least partially a result of the desire of the federal government to use the impetus of the war to develop Canada’s own war industries. The failure of this policy can be judged not only from the repeated delays in equipping Canadian escorts with equipment as it became available in the UK, but also from the fate of HMCS
Magog
on October 14, 1944. When
Magog
was torpedoed, it was steaming with its Canadian-designed and-manufactured RX/C centimetric radar operating; it failed to pick up U-1223’s periscope. In his
North Atlantic Run: The Royal Canadian Navy and the Battle for the Convoys,
historian Marc Milner writes that “in service it [RX/C] proved a disaster.”

⁵
In
U-boats against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters,
historian Michael L.
Hadley summarizes Hartwig’s description of the hours before the attack: “Mounting tension, fear of aircraft attack, the gnawing questions of whether one should continue with the tactic or pull out; all this pressured an already overburdened nervous system …. One controls one’s energies cool, and runs the ever-present calculated risk.”

⁶
Both groups safely reached shore at Cap-des-Rosiers.

⁷
The 4,570-ton freighter SS
Pan York
was also torpedoed but did not sink and suffered no casualties.

⁸
That same night, more than thirty men responded to the threat of three U-boats in the gulf by taking advantage of the full moon on a clear night and manning six Avro Ansons in what, for the time, was an extraordinary operation: an entire escort patrol at night.

⁹
To man the ships that were to be commissioned by the spring of 1941, in 1940 the RCN had to train fully 7,000 men and 300 officers—none of whom were even in the RCN yet.

¹⁰
The “any ship is better than none” philosophy adopted by the Admiralty in 1940 crippled Canada’s ability to produced a trained cadre. At the Admiralty’s request, 840 of the RCN’s best-trained men were assigned to six of the four-stacker destroyers the United States had transferred to the RN. An additional 540 officers and ratings remained in Britain, manning the ten corvettes they were supposed to transfer to British crews.

¹
The “militia myth,” which in his recent
Canada’s Army
Jack Granatstein has traced back to Bishop Strachan and Egerton Ryerson—the belief that citizen soldiers can rise like a Spartan band to protect the nation and its interests—is at the core of Canadian military thinking.

²
RCNVR officers were easily discernible by the gold bands on their uniforms. Instead of the solid band of the RCN, theirs was a wavy band; hence the nickname “wavy navy.”

³
See Appendix B for a further discussion of anti-Semitism.

⁴
Mauritius-born de Marbois was the leading force behind the establishment of the WRCNS in 1942. De Marbois, who ran away to sea when he was twelve, could have stepped directly out of a John le Carré novel. According to John Bryden, whose
Best-Kept Secret
tells the story of Canada’s electronic intelligence during the Second World War, by the time de Marbois was seventeen,
      he had been around the world twice in sailing vessels and had survived two shipwrecks and a bloody mutiny in which the captain and all his ship’s officers died. During the First World War, he had served as a British Liaison officer aboard a Russian cruiser and had fled the Bolshevik revolution with his fiancée, a Russian countess. After the war he settled for a time in Nigeria before finally coming to Canada. He spoke French, Spanish, German and Russian fluently, and had a smattering of Arabic, Turkish and about a dozen Far Eastern languages ….
      He enthralled the boys of Upper Canada College [including GeoífTey Smith, who credits de Marbois with igniting in him the desire to join the navy] with tales of typhoons at sea, rescue by cannibals, and escape from Argentinian desperadoes. His colleagues at Naval Headquarters were skeptical. Yet the stories were true and de Marbois could tell them vividly.

⁵
For a discussion of how German newspapers spun the St. Lawrence sinkings see Hadley’s
U-Boats Against Canada,
129f.

⁶
My narrative of
Caribou’s
final voyage is reconstructed from Douglas How’s
The Night of the Caribou
(Lancelot Press, 1988), “The
Caribou
Disaster: William Lundrigan’s story as
told to
Newfoundland Woman (Newfoundland Woman,
vol. 3 no. 3–5, October-December 1964), “I survived the Wreck of S.S.
Caribou:
The Words of John (Jack) T. Dominie”
(Downhomer,
vol. 12 no. 1, June 2000, and “The
Caribou
Disaster: Thomas Fleming’s Story” by Cassie Brown
(St. John’s Woman,
October 1963).

⁷
Lines on the bow that tell to what point a ship can be loaded.

⁸
Wilkie’s body was recovered. A Newfoundland Ranger found a twenty-dollar bill safety-pinned to the inside of her jacket.

¹
Courchènes was nothing if not consistent. In the early 1950s, he successfully opposed National Defence’s plans to turn the old EAC base at Mont Joli into a Strategic Air Command base. A new base was ultimately built at Bagotville, north of Quebec City. In 1953, Courchènes complained about the moral attitude of the Fusiliers; he was especially critical of Friday-night dances.

²
For a full discussion of the relationship between Quebec’s political and religious leaders’ attitudes toward Vichy, see Eric Amyot’s
Le Québec entre Pétain et De Gaulle: Vichy, la France libre et les canadiens français 1940–1945.
This book is the source of Monseigneur J. Charbonneau’s quote below.

³
On October 25, 1940,
L’Echo du Bas St-Laurent
also indicated its distance from the antiSemitism of
Le Devoir
and Quebec’s Catholic Church. In an editorial entitled
“La réconstruction de l’étâtpalestinien,” L’Echo
called for the re-creation of a Jewish state in what was then the British mandate of Palestine. Over a year before the factories of death were built at Auschwitz and Treblinka,
L’Echo
wrote that the Germans were “attacking the Jews with savage ferocity.” The editorial closed with an attack on Vichy: “The men of Vichy, wanting to ape the Nazis, press themselves to also practise anti-Semitism. They are, no doubt, familiar with the writings of St. Paul [which, as the editorial stated earlier, speak of the Jewish people as ‘bearing witness to the Scriptures’] and no less with the pope’s decree of September 15, 1928, which condemns anti-Semitism.”

⁴
After the war Laval was found guilty of treason; he was executed on October 15, 1945.

⁵
The distance between the ultranationalist view represented by
Le Devoir
or
L’Action Catholique
and the views, of the men and women who lived in the Gaspé is, perhaps, best measured from the fact that on July 9, 1942, with political emotions still rubbed raw by the conscription debate, 176 members of the Fusiliers volunteered for combat duty overseas.