The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Within minutes of Brice’s ordering Abandon Ship, forty-one of the passengers and crew were safely aboard the one remaining portside boat and the aft starboard boat. Moments later, Brice and thirty-five men still aboard the fast-sinking ship watched in horror as the forward starboard boat they were preparing to board “was lowered too quickly and became waterlogged immediately [after] she hit water,” Brice reported.

  Even if there had been room in the two just-launched boats, neither would have returned to pick up Brice and the other men. Once shipped, lifeboats follow their own imperative: move as quickly as possible away from the stricken ship. This seemingly heartless manoeuvre is necessary to ensure that the lifeboat and the survivors in it are not pulled down by the suction caused by the sinking ship. As soon as his boat was free of its lines, Inch started his boat’s Austin outboard engine and moved away from the wrecked Nicoya. Moments later, the men in the other boat used their oars to do the same. Twelve hours later, Inch’s boat would be the first to reach shore and thus bring Canada the word that war had come to our inland shores.

  Perhaps because Nicoya was settling on an even keel, Thurmann thought it had not been mortally wounded. Had she been torpedoed in the open sea, he would likely have surfaced and used his deck gun to hole her hull again and ensure that she sank while saving one of his few torpedoes for another ship. Eight miles from Canada’s shore, such a gambit was too risky. Still, he could not take the risk that Nicoya might be beached ashore, where it could be salvaged. As historian Peter Padfield has shown, Dönitz’s guerre de course demanded not that ships be badly damaged but that they be sunk: “The enemy’s shipping constitutes one single, great entity. It is therefore immaterial where a ship is sunk. Once it has been destroyed, it has to be replaced by a new ship. In the long run the result of the war will depend on the result of the race between shipping and new constructions.” This time, Thurmann’s war diary doesn’t record the co-ordinates or running time, saying only, “0611 Coup de grâce from Tube II, hit amidships.”

  In the moments before Thurmann’s second torpedo hit, Captain Brice led the remaining men in launching the ship’s Carley floats. Built out of balsa wood and shaped like a large square doughnut with netting in the middle, Carley floats were standard equipment on both merchant ships and warships. Nicoya carried four, each attached to a skid secured to the ship’s rigging. On some ships, Carley floats launched themselves, their own buoyancy being enough to detach them from their skids. On others, such as Nicoya, Carley floats were launched by pulling a pin.

  Just as Brice had ordered his men to dive into the water and make for the just-launched floats, Thurmann’s second torpedo slammed into the stricken ship, setting off what one resident told the Canadian Press was a “terrific explosion that rocked the houses [several miles away from Nicoya] as though there was an earthquake.” Scant seconds before Thurmann’s coup de grâce hit their dying ship, thirty men reached one of Nicoya’s rafts. The disaster continued. Nicoya “plung[ed] to her grave,” pulling the raft and the men on it under the St. Lawrence waters.

  “The raft had been thrown over and we jumped in and swam to it,” Burby told British United Press. “About thirty of us scrambled on. But no one had cut the rope attaching the raft to the ship, and as she plunged we were dragged right under the water.”

  As desperate men hacked at the rope with whatever they could find, the other end was securely attached to a now deadweight of some 10,000 tons. The raft was pulled under and then the rope parted. The raft sprang back to the surface with six fewer men than it had supported just moments earlier—the first men to die from enemy fire in Canada since the Riel Rebellion in 1885.

  William John George, a sixteen-year-old ordinary seaman, was dead. So too were James Stanley Newcomb, a thirty-five-year-old third engineer, likely the man who ordered the Nicoya’s engines stopped. H.V. Woodthrope, a twenty-year-old carpenter; and two other thirty-five-year-olds, Frank L. Smith and Douglas Phillips, too had drowned. Henry Mills, an anti-aircraft gunner, would also never be seen again. Brice didn’t know the names yet—that would have to wait another two days—but within minutes, one count and then another had been taken, and he knew that six of his crew had vanished.

  As U-553 cruised away on a northwesterly course that would take it farther into the river, Nicoya’s crew struggled to survive. Knowing that the raft would slow down whichever boat took it in tow, Brice ordered Inch to proceed independently to shore. Inch’s orders were as simple as they were obvious: “send out assistance” and report Nicoya’s loss to Captain Armit, commander of Fort Ramsay, the newly opened RCN base at Gaspé. Through the rest of the night and well into the next day, Inch, the wind whipping his thick mane of hair, needed every ounce of his extensive knowledge of the sea to pilot his little boat, upon which forty-one souls depended, through the strong currents of the St. Lawrence.

  The bitterly cold night was dangerous to the men in the remaining boat, but they were relatively dry. Brice knew that he and the men who swam to the raft were in mortal danger.7

  Just moments after seeing his ship destroyed and learning of the death of six of his crew, Brice had to make the most difficult of command decisions. Leaving men, including himself, on the raft, where they would be partially submerged or constantly soaked by the choppy sea, was a death sentence. Ordering that a rotation be established with the men in the chief engineer’s boat (which had taken the raft in tow) could be a death sentence to some already in the boat. Brice’s report betrays no hint of the strain he faced, saying only, “It was bitterly cold during the night, so we pulled on the oars in order to keep warm, transferring the men from the raft to the lifeboat frequently during the night.”

  MAY 12, 1942

  Three thousand five hundred miles east in Hamburg, workers at Deutsche Werft AG lay down the keel for U-540; in Danzig, F. Schichau lays down U-742’s keel. U-629, U-630 and U-710 are launched.

  Five thousand miles east in the centre of the Donets Basin in southern Russia, 854 tanks under the command of Soviet marshal Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko attack the German lines behind the city of Kharkov. Seven days later, the German general Paul L. E. von Kleist will report the destruction of more than 600 Soviet tanks and the capture of 241,000 men.

  Two thousand miles east, in the middle of the air gap, two U-boats carve five ships from ONS-92, escorted by the corvettes HMCS Algoma, Arvida, Bittersweet and Shediac.

  Three thousand miles south, off the coast of French Guiana, on his first patrol as commander of U-69, Ulrich Gräf sinks the Norwegian merchant ship SS Lise. On October 9, Gräf will see the lights of Rimouski when he sinks the SS Carolus. Five days later, he will kill 137 men, women and children when he torpedoes the

  Newfoundland-Nova Scotia ferry SS Caribou.

  Sixteen miles southwest of the waters in which Brice and his men were struggling to survive, the St. Lawrence rolls on to the Gaspé Peninsula, the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River. Four miles from the centre of the town of Gaspé, a mixed crew of sailors and two local civilian women, all specially trained in wireless, codes and ciphers, were on duty with their sub-lieutenant in the Signals Office on the second floor of a clapboard building in Fort Ramsay. Through the long hours of their watch, which began a scant five minutes after Thurmann fired his first torpedo, the wireless receivers brought not a word of the sinking of Nicoya. Nor did the telegraphists hear of Thurmann’s second victim, SS Leto, a Dutch freighter torpedoed seventeen miles north of Cap-de-la-Madeleine at 2:38 a.m. on May 12, two hours later.

  “I wasn’t on duty that night, or even the next watch, when word of those sinkings reached the base,” recalls Ian Tate, then a twenty-one-year-old sub-lieutenant just arrived from Halifax. “That watch, the one that came on duty at midnight on the eleventh, was the last of its kind, the last before the war moved into the St. Lawrence.

  “We all knew why we were there, even though, to be frank, the whole thing had a certain unreality to it. We knew, and, looking back on it, surely our C/O,
Commander Armit, knew that there was a real threat, but it was still so hard to believe. True, for two years we’d been hearing of sinkings: ‘the mighty Hood,’ HMS Repulse, Pearl Harbor, HMCS Spikenard (one of our corvettes sunk in the mid-Atlantic earlier that year in February). And, of course, we knew of the slaughter of the ‘Second Happy Time’ off the American coast and up to the approaches to Halifax.

  “But the news was always ‘over there.’

  “Here we were, in a naval base commissioned just twelve days previously, that wasn’t even finished. The wardroom wasn’t up and running yet, and neither were the barracks. The half dozen officers weren’t even able to sleep on the base, staying instead at Baker’s Hotel in the town of Gaspé.

  “I was one of the four pretty green officers in charge of a mixed watch system, varying from eight to twelve hours. I’d had all of one month’s training. Two months earlier, I’d been at University of Toronto studying arts so that I could go to law school.”

  At 2:30 a.m., at the end of a 1,200-metre run, the torpedo fired from U-553’s Tube III struck the SS Leto‘s starboard side some 60 metres from her bow, 3 metres below the waterline. For a moment a “big stream of water and coal” towered over the Dutch ship. Before it collapsed, forty-three men were running for their lives through a ruined ship.

  The Leto’s first chief engineer, C. Spaan, ran to the engine room but never made it. Finding his way blocked by steam and feeling that the engines had stopped, Spaan knew that the engine room had been blown apart. Through the torn bulkheads he could hear “two screams and that was it,” as the six men of the third watch who weren’t incinerated by the 3,000° C bubble or obliterated by the 50,000 atmospheres of pressure were scalded to death by the ship’s own steam. The explosion trapped a seventeen-year-old trimmer in the coal hold at the bottom of the ship.

  As Spaan ran toward the engine room, his captain, Egbert Henrik Van Der Veen, paused only long enough to don his life jacket before running to the bridge. Once there, he sent his second navigation officer to the quarterdeck to supervise preparations for launching Leto‘s boats. Then, together with J. Breet, his first navigation officer, Van Der Veen scanned the night for the submarine, ready to issue orders to twenty-year-old George Brown and twenty-one-year-old Leonard Clepson, two British DEMS gunners who had been able to make it to their guns.

  Asleep in their bunks deep in the ship when the torpedo hit, London-born twenty-five-year-old Bill Middladitch and James Hullican, twenty-four, of Welsey, never got to their guns. “We couldn’t realize what had happened at first,” Hullican told the Ottawa Evening Citizen‘s reporter a day later. “But when we leaped out of [our] bunks and stepped in knee deep water we knew we must have been hit.”

  By the time they got to the deck, Leto had started to list and Van Der Veen had ordered Abandon Ship. Before leaving the bridge, he threw the secret code books into the water he’d soon be swimming in.

  Unlike Nicoya, which settled on an even keel, Leto quickly took on a list to starboard as thousands of tons of water poured into her ruptured hull. Just moments after reaching the boat deck to help launch the lifeboats, maybe two minutes after the ship had been hit, Van Der Veen heard “water entering the between-decks” (an area several decks above the waterline) when he ran past the starboard bunker window.

  Leto carried five lifeboats, more than enough for her forty-three men and two passengers (including O. Nuzink and M. A. A. Overzier, both from Rotterdam, who were returning to England after having been torpedoed seven weeks earlier in the North Atlantic)—had they all been launched.

  One boat on the starboard side had been destroyed by the explosion. Because of the list, the main port boats lay heavily against Leto‘s side. Johannes Boerklaar told the Montreal Gazette that in the few anxious moments before the ship began to heel over, “some of the men tried to swing [the boats] out in twos and threes, but it was useless.”

  While the men near Boerklaar tried to swing the boats out, Van Der Veen ran back up to the bridge, where still another lifeboat was lashed to the stricken Leto. He freed it, but his efforts were in vain. It slid down its stays too quickly and foundered when it hit the water.

  By now, the first boat to be launched (a jolly boat designed for twelve men but carrying twenty-two, including gunners Hullican and Middladitch) had got safely away from the fast-sinking Leto. The portside boat that Van Der Veen ran for was in the water too. As he got to it, the Leto’s 4,712 tons began to heel over.

  In the moments before Leto capsized, members of the crew heard the first navigation officer shouting that he had a passenger with him who couldn’t swim. He asked the donkeyman, an oiler and a fuel man if they could take care of the passenger while he and the first navigation officer, who also didn’t have a lifebelt, swam for it as the ship plunged.

  The suction of the sinking ship drew several men into a maelstrom of twisted wreckage and water made oily by coal dust.

  Seconds ticked by.

  Then air bubbles, some filled with coal dust, burst to the surface. Next, wooden hatchways that had broken apart and been pulled into the vortex bounded up from the depths.

  Had there been only twelve men in the jolly boat, they would have braced themselves for the outwash waves created by the plunging ship. The twenty-two men knew the horrible truth: nothing could keep the outwash waves from pouring over the boat’s low freeboard, the first of many waves that would all but swamp the boat during the long cold night. “We were bailing the water as fast as we could, but we would just dip out one bucketful when two or three more would come surging in,” recalled twenty-one-year-old crewman Tommy Maxwell.

  Leto never got off a message; Gaspé knew nothing.

  More seconds ticked by and then, among the detritus coughed up by Leto, were two living men: Captain Van Der Veen and George Brown. Van Der Veen’s story was told only in the classified operations report: “Shortly after I got there [to the portside lifeboat], the ship capsized and sank, dragging the portside lifeboat, including the people in it, with it. When I reached the water’s surface, I noticed that my watch stopped at 2:47 a.m.” Brown’s story, however, was read by millions. “That was the only time I was afraid,” Brown told the Canadian Press. “I had no lifebelt and I was sucked down far under the water as our ship went down. I really did some praying then.”

  Later Brown was able to save his gunnery mate, Clepson. Clepson, who told interviewers of the painful irony of being able to “see the lights of shore about six miles away,” didn’t remember how he got off the dying ship. “I passed out cold,” sprawled out on a bobbing packing case. After coming to, he saw Brown on a larger case and joined him there. As the night wore on, hypothermia began to affect Clepson. “I was wearing lighter clothes than Len, but the cold water didn’t affect me as much as it did him,” recalled Brown. Toward dawn, the cold almost claimed Clepson. “Shall we go over?” he asked Brown. “And, just as he got the words out I said, ‘There’s a ship in sight.’ He never said another word until we were rescued.”

  Wilhelm Koning, who had survived another sinking just weeks earlier and was travelling back to England on the Leto, was picked up by another Dutch steamer, SS Titus, but died “because of the cold water and exhaustion.”

  Neither Titus nor SS Dutch Mass, which was travelling with Titus and which also picked up survivors, radioed to Gaspé to alert Commander Armit. Both ships proceeded upriver. At 7:30 the next morning, the survivors and Koning’s body were transferred to the pilot’s boat and then landed at Pointe-au-Père (five miles east of Rimouski, Quebec) directly outside the window of then eleven-year-old Gaétan Lavoie, the Pointe-au-Père lighthouse keeper’s son.

  “There were about twenty of them. I’d never seen anything like it before. There, at 7:30 in the morning, were twenty men covered in oil walking past my window from the wharf into the town. I didn’t know where they were going, but later learned they went to the hotel, where they were given dry clothes and food,” recalls Lavoie.

  “I asked my father, the l
ighthouse keeper, what had happened. He told me he didn’t know. I thought he knew but didn’t want to frighten us.

  “When I arrived at school, we learned something about them. We heard that they’d said they’d been sunk by a submarine. That’s what some of the kids who had parents who took them in and gave them clothes said.”

  Young Gaétan almost certainly guessed right about his father. By the time Leto‘s survivors and dead were coming ashore, Canadian authorities already knew that there had been at least one sinking in the St. Lawrence. Since 1939, Charles-August Lavoie and his fellow lighthouse keepers had listened for codes, broadcast on CBC and Radio-Canada, that told them when to dim their beacons because of enemy action.

  Action Stations was rung at Fort Ramsay shortly after noon on May 12 after a phone call brought the first report of torpedoing survivors coming ashore. The boat that landed at L’Anse-à-Valleau, fifteen kilometres from Fox River (Rivìere-au-Renard), carried the thirty-nine men as well as Mrs. Silverstone and her son, whom Brice had entrusted to First Mate Inch.

  “The true impact of what had happened, that the war had now come home to Canada’s inland shores, did not dawn on us,” recalls Tate. “I don’t remember where on the base I was when I first heard the news, but I know that within a few minutes I’d grabbed my camera and joined a rescue party of eight men, including Commander Armit and an army medical officer.

  “It took us about an hour and a quarter to get there. We took the base station wagon as far as we could, but there was still a great deal of snow on the ground and it drifted across the only road on the coastline. Some ways away, we had to abandon the station wagon and walk, carrying the supplies through the village to the beach.