The Battle of the St. Lawrence (43 page)

⁶
On March 25, Roy sought to correct the impression Macdonald left—that Roy had said he, Roy, had witnessed the “battle” when, in fact, Hansard records Roy saying that Laurent Giroux claimed to have witnessed it; I’ve not found any newspaper that picked up Roy’s correction.

⁷
POW Camp 30 in Bowmanville, Ontario, 65 kilometres east of Toronto, was one of twenty-six POW camps across Canada. Camps were in such unlikely places as Kingston, Ontario; Sherbrooke and St. Helen’s Island (Montreal), Quebec; and in the resort at Kananaskis, Alberta. After being transferred to Canada in late 1942, Paul Hartwig spent the rest of the war in this last camp.

⁸
According to Michael Hadley, the Ireland code “was a system in which letters of the alphabet represented dots and dashes of the Morse code; it permitted the terse communication of lean data in seemingly innocent correspondence …. The first letter of every word in
any piece of correspondence indicated either a dot or a dash …. A censor would scarcely twig to the fact that a U-boat commander’s lament
“Meine Kameraden und auch ich waren langen in Sorge, denn
…” (“My comrades as well as I were worried for a long time, for …”) actually named the weapon that sank them. Transposed into symbols, the first letter of each word spelled “mine.” In this case, nine words of seemingly innocuous plain language provided but a single word of coded communication. Clearly one could not write a lengthy military report by this procedure. But it allowed an inventive writer (or an identifiable group of writers) considerable flexibility and scope.”

⁹
On April 30, 1943, Admiral Murray was named commander of the Canadian North West Atlantic, making him the only Canadian to ever command a theatre of battle.

¹⁰
Quoted and translated by Hadley in his
U-Boats Against Canada,
p. 176; Hadley, p. 183 is also my source for
“Kiebitz verpiffen”:
“Operation Magpie blown” on p. 215.

¹¹
Unless otherwise indicated, the following quotes from Rolf Schauenburg and Wolfgang Von Bartenwerffer come from Melanie Wiggins’s
U-Boat Adventurers: Firsthand Accounts from World War II
(Naval Institute Press, 1999), 126–131.

¹²
I thank Rodney Martin, author of
Silent Runner: Wolfgang Heyda, U-boat Commander,
for this information.

¹³
See chapter 8 for a fuller discussion of the Gnat, an acoustic torpedo.

¹
Despite Dönitz’s remonstrances, Hitler ordered the
Grossadmiral
to keep twenty U-boats in Norwegian waters to defend against an invasion that never came.

²
Quoted and annotated by Martin Middlebrook in
Convoy
(Penguin, 1978), p. 73. At 0314 Berlin time on May 7, 1944, Dönitz signalled U-548’s commander, Heinrich Zimmermann: “Daughter born 4 May. Mother and daughter well. Congratulations. Admiral Commanding U-boats.” One hour and twenty minutes later, Zimmermann torpedoed the frigate HMCS
Valleyfield,
killing 125 officers and ratings. Among her 44 survivors was the same Lieutenant Ian Tate who in 1942 had been signals officer at HMCS Fort Ramsay.

³
In July 1943, researchers at I. G. Farben informed Reich armaments minister Albert Speer that they would soon be able to supply a material that absorbed 100 per cent of radar waves. Anti-sonar panels were tested in 1941 and again in 1944 but were found wanting, first because they tended to break off, and second because they created noise that Allied hydrophones could pick up.
      After eighteen months of development, on November 6, 1943, Speer ordered 287 Elektro boats. The first was launched on April 17, 1944, and commissioned June 12, six days after D-Day. Both the Russian advance from the east and Anglo-American bombing disrupted Speer’s plan for the launching of sixty Elektro boats per month in 1944.

⁴
Quoted and translated by Roger Sarty in his “Ultra, Air Power, and the Second Battle of the St. Lawrence, 1944” (in
To Die Gallantly: The Battle of the Atlantic,
ed. Timothy J. Runyan and Jan M. Copes, Westview Press, 1994), 189f.

⁵
Quoted and translated by Hadley in his
U-Boats Against Canada,
228.

⁶
“Weighing off” involved docking pay and cutting off shore leave.

⁷
The Canadian anti-acoustic torpedo (CAT) gear was an ingenious low-tech solution to the problem raised by the acoustic torpedo. According to Marc Milner, it consisted of “one
five-foot pipe (soon reduced to thirty inches) bolted to a bracket with another loosely fitted above so the two rattled, and the whole thing attached to a wire yoke. The pipes lasted for over fourteen hours and could be towed at nearly 18 knots.”

⁸
On November 2, Kneip torpedoed the 10,000-ton Canadian steamer SS
Fort Thompson
six miles off Matane. The blast, which was originally attributed to either a mine or a boiler explosion, blew a large hole in the Vancouver-built ship’s starboard bow but did not kill or injure any of its crew. Thinking that the ship was sinking, however, seventeen crew members abandoned ship. Their appearance on the shores of Quebec renewed alarm about
“l’action de l’ennemi,”
as
L’action catholique
put it on November 3. The remaining forty-five officers and crew remained on board, and
Fort Thompson
made port under its own steam.

⁹
It is unclear whether Murray ordered a search for the U-boat, though given the time that had elapsed since the last sighting of
Shawinigan
and in the absence of huff-duff reports, his searchers would have little idea where to look. In fact, by the time Murray was alerted, U-1228 had transited the Cabot Strait and was some fifty miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, over two hundred miles away from where it sank
Shawinigan.

¹⁰
Kapitän zur See
Hermann Lessing’s U-1231 entered the St. Lawrence in late November 1944. This last invader left on or about December 8 after twice firing dud torpedoes.

¹¹
I’d like to thank Professor Mike Whitby of the Department of Defence History Directorate for drawing my attention to these two reports.

¹
December 1944, which saw thirty-one U-boats launched, was, in fact, the peak of U-boat production.

²
Exactly why Macdonald chose to announce HMCS
Annan’s
role in the sinking of U-1006 on April 3, 1945, almost six months after the U-boat was destroyed, or why he overstated the facts—
Annan
shared battle honours with HMCS
Loch Achanalt
and other ships in Escort Group 6—is unclear.

³
Quoted and translated by Peter Padfield in
Donitz: The Last Fuhrer
(Cassell & Co., 1988), 419.

¹
It is unclear whether Triantafyllarous was aboard SS
Mount Pindus
or
Mount Taygetus.
His assignment to
Mount Taygetus
is undertaken with knowledge that it might be in error.