NATHAN M. GREENFIELD
THE BATTLE OF
THE ST. LAWRENCE
THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN CANADA
This book is dedicated to my children, Pascale, whose excitement when I turned up something or someone new almost equalled my own, and Nicolas, who asked all the right questions when we toured the naval base in Halifax, and to Micheline, who walked with me as I travelled through the undiscovered country of the past.
No Allied seaman could ever stomach the arrogant posturing of the U-boat men that we watched in movie newsreels: the brass bands, the vainglorious songs, the strutting admirals, the buxom maidens draping garlands of flowers about the necks of their returning warriors. Only a Nazi could transform the sinking of helpless merchant ships and the drowning of unarmed sailors into Wagnerian heroics. Certainly we had no such illusions, and when one U-boat survivor attempted an arrogant, arm-in-the-air Nazi salute upon being hauled aboard a Canadian corvette, he was unceremoniously bundled back over the side to rethink the situation.
—JAMES LAMB
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
MAPS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE WAR IN PEACEFUL SEAS
CHAPTER TWO FOUR SINKINGS IN JULY
CHAPTER THREE THE ORDEAL OF QS-33
CHAPTER FOUR THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HMCS CHARLOTTETOWN
CHAPTER FIVE WHAT CYRIL PERKIN SAW
CHAPTER SIX OCTOBER WAS THE CRUELLEST MONTH
CHAPTER SEVEN 1943s OPERATION KIEBITZ
CHAPTER EIGHT 1944
EPILOGUES: 1945
IN MEMORIAM
APPENDIX A TWO SPIES AND A WEATHER STATION
APPENDIX B ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE KRIEGSMARINE
APPENDIX C SHIPS TORPEDOED IN THE ST. LAWRENCE RIVER AND THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE, 1942 AND 1944
APPENDIX D U-BOAT PATROLS IN THE ST. LAWRENCE
SOURCES
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
The subtitle of this book—“The Second World War in Canada”—will, no doubt, surprise many.
Wasn’t the Second World War “over there”? In the skies over England? At Dieppe? Across North Africa, Italy, Normandy, Belgium and Holland and in Germany? Weren’t its greatest battles on the Russian steppes and across the Pacific? Canadians fell at Juno Beach, in Ortona, along the canals of Holland, in Hong Kong, and thousands died on the North Atlantic.1Over there? Yes—surely not “in Canada.”
But between 1942 and 1944, more than 28 ships were torpedoed, 24 of these sunk, and more than 270 Canadians and scores of others did die—in Canada. They died in the Battle of the St. Lawrence, the only Second World War campaign fought inside North America.2
Many died within sight of land or of the lights that shone from the small towns and villages strung out along the rugged coast of the north shore of the St. Lawrence and Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. One hundred and forty-five were officers and ratings aboard HMCS Raccoon, Charlottetown, Magog and Shawinigan, four of the dozens of Royal Canadian Navy warships that, after the torpedoing of SS Nicoya and Leto on the night of May 11, 1942, were tasked with escorting convoys in Canada’s largest river and the gulf. One hundred and thirty-seven men, women and children—including forty-nine civilians (of whom eleven were under ten years old), forty-nine Canadian and British servicemen, eight American servicemen and thirty-one crew members, most of whom were from Port aux Basques—died when a torpedo fired from U-69 mortally wounded the Newfoundland-Nova Scotia ferry SS Caribou at 2 a.m. on October 14, 1942. Another hundred men—Finns, Belgians, Dutchmen, Greeks, Englishmen and American GIs and sailors—died, victims too of the torpedoes fired by the fifteen German U-boats that between 1942 and 1944 invaded Canada’s home waters; one ship, SS Carolus, was torpedoed 10 kilometres downriver from Rimouski, Quebec, fully 600 kilometres from the Atlantic and some 250 kilometres from Quebec City.
Like all battles, myths have accreted to the Battle of the St. Lawrence. One holds that the government staged the sinkings to help sell Victory Bonds. Another, which surfaces from time to time on uboat.net, is that U-boats landed to buy groceries. Still another tells of German officers stopping for a beer and to listen to music at an hôtel. By far, however, the most persistent myth is that wartime censorship prevented word of the battle from reaching beyond the Gaspé.
The claim appears to have a good pedigree, stretching back to the hours after SS Nicoya’s sinking on the night of May 11, 1942. The news release that confirmed the sinking declared that “any possible further sinkings in this area will not be made public in order that information valuable to the enemy may be withheld from him.” At first, the policy seemed to have teeth, at least in the House of Commons, where on May 13 the Speaker ruled against Gaspé MP Sasseville Roy’s attempt to pry more information from Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s government. The cutline on Jack McNaught’s October 15, 1949, Maclean’s magazine article, “The Battle of the St. Lawrence,” is “A story that’s never been told.” Twenty-three years later, Peter Moon’s “The Second World War Battle We Lost at Home,” published in Canadian Magazine, was subtitled “The War Story Our Leaders Kept Quiet.” James Essex subtitled his 1984 memoir, Victory in the St. Lawrence, “Canada’s Unknown War.” The claim was repeated in 1995 in Brian and Terence McKenna’s NFB film U-boats in the St. Lawrence.
The famed “fog of war” conceals much, but in this case it hardly hid much about the Battle of the St. Lawrence from Canada’s kitchen tables and radios.3 The newspapers of May 13, 1942, jumbled Nicoya and Leto’s stories, but they clearly told Canadians that ships had been sunk in the St. Lawrence. Three days later, the Ottawa Evening Citizen reported that the sinkings had caused the war risk premium for ships using the St. Lawrence to double from 1.5 to 3 per cent.
On July IO, Roy asked in the House if the “minister is disposed to make a statement” about the torpedoing of “three more ships … last Sunday night.” According to L’Action Catholique, “half the people in Quebec City” knew of the sinkings before Roy asked the question. The sinkings of USS Laramie and SS Chatham, Arlyn and Donald Stewart in late August and early September 1942 did not make the newspapers. The sinkings of HMCS Raccoon and SS Aeas on September 6 and SS Oakton, Mount Taygetus and Mount Pindus on September 7 did. A week later, headlines told of the loss of HMCS Charlottetown. Canadians read that “the torpedo tore into the engine room, trapping the men on watch before they could reach the upper deck. Clouds of black smoke rolled along the decks. Before they could launch the lifeboats the vessel went down by the stern, just as the survivors jumped clear and into the frigid water.” They read of their sailors being killed within sight of land when their own depth charges exploded.
On September 13, the Ottawa Evening Journal told of the “daring midday attack” that had sunk SS Frederika Lensen the previous July. Two days later, the Journal‘s headline read “U-BOAT SINKS SHIP BELOW RIMOUSKI.” L’Action Catholique asked, “Ce qui se passe en Gaspésie?” (“What is going on in Gaspé?”). The stories that followed the sinking of Caribou on October 14 spared readers little: “Bodies were found floating a short distance from where the ship was attacked,” and a “number of caskets are being forwarded by train to Port aux Basques.”
In early November 1942, Naval Minister Angus Macdonald spoke out against the rumour that U-boat crews were coming ashore to buy supplies; he gave the number of ships sunk in the “whole river and gulf area” as twenty. The Halifax Herald overstated things by saying, “R.C.A.F. ‘Gets’ Another U-boat,” but, nevertheless, gav
e Canadians more than a few details about the air war being conducted against the Nazi invaders.
In March 1943, newspapers reported Quebec legislators Onésime Gagnon’s and Roy’s charges that the problems in the navy’s command structure had prevented it from reacting to save a convoy that was attacked the previous September 15 and that as many as forty ships had been sunk in 1942. On March 17, 1943, papers reported Macdonald’s speech, which not only defended the navy but also included the names of every ship sunk in 1942. After a tour of the Gaspé’s naval and army bases, La Presse’s Roger Champeaux declared, “Tout Gaspésien est devenu un soldat.”
In mid-1944, thousands of Canadians received copies of Canada’s War at Sea, a government-sanctioned book they had subscribed for a year earlier. Entitled “The Battle of the Gulf,” chapter 4 tells a remarkably complete story of what was happening both on the St. Lawrence and in Parliament in 1942 and 1943. The torpedoing of HMCS Magog in October 1944 was not reported until April 18, 1945, less than a month before the end of the war. On December 7, 1944, under the headline “Canadian Corvette Sunk with All Crew—Five Drown, 85 Missing on Shawinigan,” the Ottawa Evening Journal told of the corvette that had been torpedoed on the night of November 24.
Why then the myth that the Battle of the St. Lawrence is Canada’s “unknown war”?
Professor Roger Sarty, whose pioneering work on the history of Eastern Air Command (EAC) is a model of both scholarship and clear writing, suggested one reason at a conference held in Rimouski, Quebec, in May 2002 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the battle. The generation of historians that immediately followed the war viewed the battle as a defeat—a view from which Sarty politely, but firmly, dissents—and thus sought to downplay it. In his Far Distant Ships: An Official Account of Canadian Naval Operations in World War II, Joseph Schull devotes a mere 14 (of 432) pages to the only naval campaign in Canadian waters; he characterized the battle as a “defeat,” tout court.4
The second reason has less to do with wounded service pride than with the context in which history, especially military history, exists in Canada. No province or school board has ever included the Battle of the St. Lawrence in its curriculum. Accordingly, there is no mental envelope for the information contained in the cavalcade of commemorative articles or television shows that appear on solemn anniversaries or on such occasions as the launching of HMCS Charlottetown III.
The Battle of the St. Lawrence wasn’t hidden from Canadians during the war. Rather, for three generations the nation’s curriculum writers have been engaged in an ongoing act of forgetting. Forgetting that in the darkest days of the Second World War, hundreds of men, women and children were killed by Nazis who plied our inland waters. Forgetting that thousands of Canadians volunteered to defend our shores.
This book, then, is an act of historical recovery. Though this is not an academic history, I have tried to write as objectively as possible. However, while it is necessary to remain objective regarding tactical and strategic matters (such as the RN’s failure to equip its ships with up-to-date radar), it is entirely inappropriate to say, as Martin Middlebrook does in his famous (and otherwise excellent) book Convoy, that “after more than thirty years, courage and patriotism can surely be admired whichever side a man fought on.”
It is important and necessary to tell of U-boatmen’s experience, of the sheer horror of being depth-charged. But to admire their “courage” is to imply that there is something in their actions that was morally courageous, for, as Gerald Linderman shows in his Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War, the word courage properly used means something much more moral than naked bravery.5 “Only a Nazi,” wrote James Lamb, who served aboard the corvette HMCS Trail during the 1942 portion of the battle, “could transform the sinking of helpless merchant ships and the drowning of unarmed sailors into Wagnerian heroics.” Still less is it proper to “admire” U-boat captains Eberhard Hoffmann’s, Ernst Vogelsang’s or Paul Hartwig’s “patriotism.” They were not, as one of my correspondents who served aboard a U-boat tried to convince me, simply men who lived at a particular time in a particular set of circumstances and who did the job they were trained for without rancour or hate. Each and every one of the men who served aboard the U-boats that invaded Canada was a volunteer; each and every one had taken an oath of fidelity to Germany’s Führer, Adolf Hitler. Each and every one served the Nazi state, Vogelsang with the swastika emblazoned on his conning tower. To forget this, to forget that their “Iron Coffins” fired torpedoes—Nazi steel shaped to kill—is to forget that had Germany won the war or at least fought the Allies to a draw, Hitler would have remained supreme in Europe and millions more would have been turned to dust in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Birkenau.
To admire their “patriotism” is to dishonour that of Ted Read, Ian Tate, Geoffrey “Jock” Smith, Rear-Admiral Desmond “Debbie” Piers, Rear-Admiral R. J. Pickford, Max Korkum, John Chance, Herb Montgomery, Léon-Paul Fortin, Arthur Alvater, Bill “Mac” McRae, Lorraine Guilbault, Gaétan Lavoie, Roy Woodruff, Laurent Marchand, Gavin Clark, Frank Curry, Marilyn Whyte, Grace Bonner, Donald Murphy, Francis MacLaughlin, Ray MacAuley, Allan Heagy, Cyril Perkin, Ruth Fullerton, Donald Crowther, Fred Linnington, Richard (Dick) Powell, Leilo Pepper and Norman Crane, whose stories now stand for the thousands who lived—and the hundreds who didn’t—through the Battle of the St. Lawrence.6
INTRODUCTION
His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy and Nazi Germany’s U-Bootwaffe—the two navies that from May 1942 through November 1944 were locked in a bitter conflict stretched over the almost quarter million square kilometres of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and as far inland as Rimouski, Quebec—were almost mirror images of each other.
Shortly after the 1922 election, which returned the Liberals under Mackenzie King to power, Parliament slashed the Naval Estimates from $2.5 million to $1.5 million, causing what Commodore James Polmer called “a scar that never healed.” The loss of two-fifths of its budget forced the RCN to dispose of HMCS Aurora, a 3,500-ton cruiser, and two H-class submarines, and to cut hundreds from its active lists.
During the budget debate, Defence Minister George Graham argued that the cut in the Naval Estimates put Canada in line with both the spirit and the commitments undertaken by the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan at the 1921 Washington Disarmament Conference: “Every country in the world today is endeavouring to reduce its armament…. The great nations of the world agreed not only to take a holiday in naval construction, but to scrap many of their fighting ships.” The conference fixed the ratio of capital ships between the three powers at 5:5:3.1
Like both J. S. Woodsworth, leader of the Independent Labour Party (a forerunner of the CCF, which later became the NDP), and T. A. Crerar, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party—who asked the minister, “Who has Canada to fear?”—Graham was influenced by what military historian Correlli Barnett has called “moralizing internationalism.” As did his counterparts in London, Graham put his faith in international covenants and the League of Nation’s “machinery of talk instead of the traditional accouter-ments of national power—armies, navies or air forces.” Graham’s desire to replace the permanent naval force with volunteers, who, he told the House, would provide “better service on our own behalf [and] a better service for the Empire at large,” was in accord with what he was hearing from London. At the same time that Graham was reducing the RCN, British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald decided to delay completion of the Royal Navy base at Singapore as a “demonstration of sincerity” to the Japanese. Graham claimed that the volunteer force would be better for the Canadian economy because it would “not take a single man out of industrial employment.” Graham’s boss, Prime Minister King—who in 1918 wrote, in Industry and Humanity, that industrial production is key to economic development—no doubt agreed that it was unwise to take men out of industrial employment and place them in the military, which produced, apparently, nothing. By the end of 192
2, His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy had been reduced to a complement of 483 officers and ratings, and Canada’s newly opened naval college had been closed.
Six years later, after King shuffled Graham out of and shuffled Colonel J. L. Ralston, a Nova Scotian, into the Ministry of National Defence, the Naval Estimates grew to $2.7 million, and a year later to $3.6 million. The bulk of the increased funds went to purchasing two older destroyers from England and to ordering two new destroyers, HMCS Saguenay and Skeena, the first warships built specifically for the RCN. To crew these ships, the navy’s list grew to 896 officers and men.
In 1934, the year Hitler openly began to rearm and one year after Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, the Conservative government of R. B. Bennett responded to the crisis of the Depression by slashing government spending. Bennett’s Naval Estimates proposed cutting the $2.4 million budget by $2 million. Chief of Staff Major-General Andrew McNaughton proposed paying off the Royal Canadian Navy and protecting Canada’s coasts with aircraft alone. A ferocious bureaucratic battle, led by the navy’s chief of staff, Commodore Walter Hose, kept the cuts to only $200,000. Years later Rear-Admiral Leonard Murray summed up the attitude toward the Canadian navy during these years: “They would be pleased if someone made up his mind to take the whole navy out into the middle of the ocean and sink it without a trace.”
As international tensions built through the mid-1930s, the King government began increasing the Naval Estimates. In 1936 the Estimates more than doubled, to $4.4 million, as the navy bought two additional destroyers from England. Two years later, the Estimates jumped again to $6.6 million as the RCN purchased another two, giving the navy six relatively modern destroyers, three on each coast. Together, these ships could have made a credible defence of Halifax. In late May 1939, however, King’s cabinet abruptly cut four anti-submarine vessels and two motor torpedo boats from the building program.
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