The Battle of the St. Lawrence (7 page)

Sent to news editors on May 21, Memorandum No. 1 recognized the impossibility of imposing a complete news blackout when the battle front extended hundreds of miles into the country. The director of censorship’s goal was, rather, to convince the nation’s news editors to censor their own news and thus, as Macdonald told the House several months later, to establish two types of information: local rumour and official news, only the latter to be broadcast and hence accessible to the enemy.

The notes explained what type of information was useful to the enemy. In addition to such obvious points as the exact location of an attack (which
revealed the strength of Canada’s defences) or the type of ship (which revealed information about supplies of food or oil), the notes explained that such seemingly innocuous information as the nationality of the ship or the names of survivors was useful to the Germans: “If any crew members are nationals of German occupied territories, their [the crew’s] morale can be attacked through persecution of relatives, or friends.” The notes are equally clear on what German naval authorities could glean from such statements as “there were other ships within hunting distance” (that river traffic was unescorted), or even from statements about the weather.

Since high-frequency directional finding (HF/DF, or “huff-duff”), a system of listening posts in Greenland, the United Kingdom, eastern Canada and the United States that allowed the navy to locate a U-boat by triangulating on its radio broadcasts, was top secret, it’s hard to know what crusty news editors would have made of the statement: “It is in our interest to encourage U-boats to use their radio. It is detrimental to our interest to spare them this necessity.” No doubt, news editors winced at the navy’s purple prose:

But, on the whole, they took the navy’s admonition to heart while not flinching from reporting the horror of the war.

*  *  *

At 3 p.m. on May 13, as
Medicine Hat
and EAC’s planes searched for
Nicoya
and
Leto’s
killer, two centuries-old rituals were about to begin: one in Ottawa, the other in the corner of a cemetery in Pointe-au-Père.

One hundred and fifty feet to the west of the hushed Hall of Honour, which to this day holds the leather-bound folio-sized Book of Remembrance that lists the names of Canada’s dead from the Great War, is the entrance to the House of Commons. On May 13, as he did every day when the House was in session, at precisely 3:00 p.m., the black-robed Speaker rose, looked toward his left to the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and asked if there were any questions for the government sitting three swords’ lengths away. A moment later, Thomas L. Church, the Progressive Conservative member for Toronto-Broadview, rose, answered “Yes” and, after looking across the green carpet at the cabinet, turned toward the Speaker and told the House of Commons that his question was for the minister of naval services.

Sixty years later, and even taking into account that over the year and a half Canada had been at war parliamentarians had learned that operational matters would not be discussed in open session, the exchange that followed has a certain unreality about it. Instead of asking whether the attacks inside Canada would affect the government’s plans to send, if necessary, conscripts to Europe, or even whether the “long-prepared plans” Macdonald had referred to in his statement of the twelfth now required revision, Church asked, “Is the Government aware that for nearly the past two years German U-boats have been sheltering in the deep creeks, inlets and harbours of these islands, St. Pierre and Miquelon, where they flash signals at night from shores to sink Atlantic shipping?”

Macdonald’s reply—“Does my honourable friend state that to be the case?”—violated the parliamentary tradition that forbids that a minister who is being asked a question reply with a question. Momentarily interrupted by Conservative house leader Richard Hanson’s heckle, “He is asking you,” Macdonald continued. “There has to be something more in this House than mere innuendo and suggestion.”

Church’s supplemental question—“Where was your navy when all this was going on in the St. Lawrence?”—ratcheted up the tenor of the debate to the level that it would remain over the next several months as more ships
were sunk. Macdonald’s reply evaded the supplementary question and sought instead to forewarn the House that the sinkings of
Nicoya
and
Leto
were not isolated instances because, as King had told the caucus a day earlier, technological changes had altered the time and distance of war:

By the end of Question Period, Thurmann had cruised to grid square BA 3673, about fifteen miles off the small village of Tourelle, Quebec, some fifty miles upriver from where he sank
Leto
and some seventy-five miles from where
Medicine Hat
was looking for him. Thurmann left the St. Lawrence on May 22 without sinking another ship.
¹⁰

Two of
Leto
‘s dead were buried, the first in unhallowed ground.

Wearing oversized pants, old woollen sweaters and dark peacoats worn from long use, the men who stood in the far corner of the cemetery adjacent to the white clapboard church looked at the plain wooden casket the priest had refused to allow into his church. Their hands and faces still stained from the ooze created when coal dust and oil mixed with salt water, they stood; some choked back tears, some didn’t. Through their minds ran images—of the explosion, the water, the grasping hands that pulled them onto floating bits of decks. Some still heard sounds far more striking than the gentle rustle of the breeze that came in off the waters of the St. Lawrence—the cracking of the ship, the screams of men trapped in the furnace that had been the engine room.

They looked at the church and wondered what it was like inside. They heard again their captain, now just a survivor of a torpedoing like them, tell them the priest would not allow a non-Catholic—a parishioner of the Dutch Reformed Church, a Protestant schismatic who looked not to Rome but to his own reading of the Bible to find the risen Christ—to cross the threshold of the church. They stood now not even on hallowed ground, for that too was denied to Wilhelm Koning.

In the far corner of the yard, far from the cross and distant from where other men, women and children slept, they stood and looked into the open casket, at Koning’s body. They must have commented on Arsène Michaud’s undertaker’s art, for the body was no longer “blackened as if burned.” Soon the words ended. The body was lowered, not as deep as the men who lay at rest in the shattered
Leto,
but deep enough to rest forever in the Gaspé.

Several days later, a body washed ashore near Grande-Vallée. To preserve it, local fisherman put it in an ice house and then transported it to Fort Ramsay in Gaspé, where Captain Van Der Veen identified it as don-keyman Frederick van Hoogdalem. Several days later, Captain Van Der Veen and several of his crew returned to Grande-Vallée where, since no one knew whether Hoogdalem was Catholic or not, the local priest agreed to bury him in hallowed ground.

Since 1943, every May 12 an emissary of the Dutch embassy has come to these little villages and placed flowers on the graves.

O
n August
1O
, 1940, as hundreds of
Luftwaffe
pilots struck England and hundreds more readied themselves for
Adlertag,
the 1,500-sortie-a-day attack against England’s airfields, radar stations and aircraft factories, engineers at Bremen’s Vulkar-Vegesacker Werft laid the keel for the yard’s seventh Type VIIC U-boat. Over the next ten months, as
Adlertag
rose to its crescendo with the bombing of London and the obliteration of Coventry, as the Third Reich suffered its first defeat when Hermann Göring’s planes were driven from England’s skies, as Bomber Command made its first tentative raid on Bremen and as the
Wehrmacht
moved troops east for Operation Barbarossa, shipwrights spent 254,000 hours fashioning 268 metric tons of steel, 4 tons of wood and 4 tons of paint into U-132, a weapons platform that sank or damaged ten ships for a total of 45,629 tons of shipping, almost half of it in the St. Lawrence.

Der Tag.
The Day.

Sailors in the
Kriegsmarine
lived for
der Tag,
the day when their capital ships of 26,000, 31,000 and 42,000 tons would once again sally forth and battle “perfidious Albion” for control of the seas. The British, including Canadians who served with the Royal Navy, dreamed of another Drake, another Nelson—for another Battle of Jutland, the First World War battle during which the RN drove the kaiser’s much-vaunted Grand Fleet from the
seas. For the men of the
Kriegsmarine, der Tag
would erase this stain and wipe out the ignominy of the surrender and self-scuttling at Scapa Flow in 1919.

Der Tag
never came.

The Second World War in the Atlantic saw epic engagements—in 1939, between the merchant cruiser HMS
Rawalpindi
and the battlecruiser
Scharnhorst,
and a year later between the merchant cruiser
Jervis Bay,
and the German pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer.
On May 24, 1941,
Bismarck
sank “the mighty
Hood.”
Three days later, an armada sank
Bismarck.
The spectre of 16-inch guns hurling two-ton shells 20,000 yards at the merchant ships carrying food, fuel and the weapons of war to Britain continued to haunt the Admiralty even after
Bismarck.
The 40,000-ton battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
were in the Channel port of Brest, France, as was
Bismarck’s
consort, the 20,000-ton
Prinz Eugen.
Trondheim on the Norwegian Sea sheltered
Bismarck’s
sister ship, the not-yet-finished
Tirpitz.
Dubbed a “fleet in being,” these four ships tied down scores of the Royal Navy’s battleships and destroyers.

But the Battle of the Atlantic was ultimately fought by smaller ships. Some, such as the corvette, the most numerous of Allied ships, weren’t even in existence when the war broke over Europe in September 1939. The six-year total of some 700 U-boats sinking 2,259 ships hides more than it reveals. After the establishment of U-boat bases in occupied France gave Dönitz’s men relatively untroubled access to the North Atlantic, losses rose from 375 ships representing 1.8 million tons of shipping in 1940 to 496 ships representing 2.4 million tons in 1941. In 1942, imports to the UK fell to one-third of the peacetime levels of 1938 (the last year of the Depression) as 5.4 million tons of shipping were sent to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Another 2.4 million tons were sunk elsewhere. In January 1943, the RN’s stock of fuel oil dropped to two months’ worth. Month after month, great convoys consisting of scores of ships covering 20 or 30 square miles put to sea from Sydney, Halifax and, later, New York. Until May 1943, when the air gap in the middle of the Atlantic was closed, month after month convoys repeated SC-42’s fate: in a ten-day battle that unrolled over 1,200 miles of ocean, twenty-one U-boats sunk eighteen merchant ships totalling over 100,000 tons of food, fuel and war material.

*  *  *

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The British Admiralty was so sanguine about the prospects of asdic, invented in the last days of the First World War, that it raised no objection to the 1935 London Naval Agreement that legitimized Germany’s violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which had forbidden Germany from building and possessing submarines. The 1936 report of the Royal Navy’s Defence of Trade Committee reported that “the problem of dealing with the submarine,” which before the introduction of convoys in 1917 had come close to forcing England out of the First World War, “is more than simplified by the invention of ASDIC. This instrument takes the place of the ‘eye’ and removes from the submarine the cloak of invisibility which was its principal source of strength in the late war…. It is considered that war experience will show that with adequate defences, the operations of submarines against merchant vessels in convoy can be made unprofitable.”

Just weeks before the outbreak of the war, Canada’s chief of naval staff, Admiral Percy Nelles, echoed the committee: “If unrestricted submarine warfare is again resorted to, the means of combating Submarines are considered to have so advanced that by employing a system of convoy and utilizing Air Forces, losses of submarines would be very heavy.”