The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  “By the time we arrived at the beach, the number of survivors had grown by more than a score. We arrived just in time to see another of the Nicoya’s boats land, towed by a motor fishing boat that was filled with survivors we later learned had been on the raft when the boat came out to get them.”

  Although Minister of Naval Services Angus Macdonald would soon be assuring the nation that the navy had put in place “long-prepared plans for the protection of Canada’s territorial waters” and that the 1942 memorandum entitled “Defence of Shipping—Gulf of St. Lawrence” called for the immediate dispatch of “adequate hunting and striking forces,” Canada’s immediate military action was negligible.

  Searching did not begin until dawn on the thirteenth. Even then, the existing plans could not be fully put into effect because the slipways, fuel dumps, seaplane tendering and even barracks necessary to base a detachment of Cansos (a flying boat) at HMCS Fort Ramsay were not yet complete.

  HMCS Medicine Hat, a Bangor minesweeper tasked with being the lead ship to patrol the waters around Gaspé once a submarine alert was sounded, was in Sydney, Nova Scotia, over 250 miles away. It did not arrive in the area where Nicoya and Leto were torpedoed until the afternoon of the thirteenth. Medicine Hat “searched the area of the sinkings, Fame to Fox Points, with no results,” reported the U-boat tracking report for May 1942.

  The RCN’s immediate local response was the launching of HMCS Venning, an 18-metre converted fishing trawler that first had to be taken off its winter chocks. Ordered into the water by twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant Paul Bélanger, Venning had to manoeuvre around ice floes before getting out of Gaspé’s harbour.

  James Essex’s memory of Engineer Clark trying to “squeeze every last ounce of energy from the wheezing engines” may sound like something out of a Boy’s Own Magazine story. The hard reality was, however, that though Gaspé had been designated a strike force, it was totally unprepared for antisubmarine warfare. Not only did Venning lack sonar and radar, it carried no depth charges and no machine gun. “If they did see a sub,” recalled Essex in his memoir, Victory in the St. Lawrence, “they did not even have a radio” to report it to Fort Ramsay.

  MAY 13, 1942

  Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin, in a section of his diary in which he praises the Protocol of the Elders of Zion (a late-nineteenth-century Russian creation that “outlines” how Jewish interests will take over the world), Joseph Göbbels writes, “There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.”

  One thousand five hundred miles to the east, in the middle of the air gap, in the second day of a two-day battle, ONS-92, a slow convoy bound from the UK to North America and protected by six escorts, including the corvettes HMCS Algoma, Arvida, Bittersweet and Shediac, loses two more ships.

  Two thousand miles south, Ulrich Gräf’s U-69 sinks the US freighter SS Norlandic.

  With the exceptions of the readers of the Ottawa Evening Journal, the Vancouver Province and the inside pages of Quebec’s Le Soleil newspapers of May 11, most Canadians learned of the St. Lawrence sinkings from the headlines on May 12—just about the time Gaétan Lavoie was watching the survivors of Leto come ashore in Pointe-au-Père. The news stories went considerably further than simply reporting that sinkings had occurred off “a St. Lawrence Port” (a phrase that quickly took its place beside the ubiquitous “East Coast Port”) and repeating the statement issued by Naval Services Minister Macdonald:

  The minister for naval services announces that the first enemy attack upon shipping in the St. Lawrence river took place on May 11when a freighter was sunk. Forty-one survivors have been landed from the vessel.

  The situation regarding shipping in the river is being closely watched and long-prepared plans for its special protection under these circumstances are in operation.

  Any possible further sinkings in this area will not be made public in order that information of value to the enemy may be withheld from him. It is felt, however, that the Canadian public should be informed of the presence of enemy U-boats in Canadian territorial waters and they are assured that every step is being taken to grapple with the situation.

  While subsequent days would see confusion as survivor stories became jumbled and with the publication and then retraction of the baleful rumour that “a woman and her baby [had been left] ominously alone in an oarless lifeboat,” the articles that appeared on the thirteenth and on the days that followed were substantially accurate.

  As he had for thousands of nights, before going to bed on the twelfth, Canada’s tenth prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, sat alone writing in his diary, accompanied only by his dog. King sat in a room on the second floor of Laurier House, a three-storey brick Victorian building that his predecessor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had given the Liberal Party. Amidst pictures of his mother and father, King recorded the first mention of the Battle of the St. Lawrence in Parliament. Toward the end of a Liberal caucus meeting, in which the prime minister reminded his members of the need for both cabinet and caucus unity in dealing with the contradictory vote in the April 7 plebiscite that freed King from his 1940 campaign promise not to bring in conscription, he made a most uncharacteristic detour into technical military matters:8

  I then went on to say that I had pretty good evidence of what I had said about space and time being eliminated. Matters were moving very rapidly and distance being overcome. I drew from my pocket a brown envelope with red seals and said that they would be surprised to learn that therein was word that an enemy submarine had torpedoed a ship in the waters of the St. Lawrence west of Gaspé and that this morning the survivors were being landed on the shores of the river in the province of Quebec. I said that I hoped they would not imagine that this was an isolated happening, and that they might expect to find it followed by further raids and the probable approach of the enemy into our country both on the waters and overhead, with the probable destruction of Canadian lives, homes, etc.

  Vague as ever, King’s words did more than tell his MPs that new technologies were altering the time and space of war. His words were preparing them—and through them, ultimately, the nation—for something entirely new: battle deaths in Canada.

  *  *  *

  The stories pieced together by reporters grabbed the attention not only of the Canadian public but also of the German and Canadian governments. Even before Thurmann radioed his report to Admiral Dönitz at U-boat Command (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote, or BdU), Germany knew of the sinkings from Canadian sources, published on the twelfth. At 9:15 a.m. on May …, hours before young Gaétan saw Leto’s survivors arrive on land, Berlin radio broadcast the (somewhat fictionalized) report, which indicates, incidentally, that Radio Berlin’s wordsmiths did not fully understand the geopolitical division of North America:

  German U-boats are now operating in the St. Lawrence River, the nearest approach to land. A German U-boat sank an American 6,000-ton freighter yesterday, carrying a cargo of jute from India for Montreal. The ship had made the long voyage from India safely, only to be sunk in the St. Lawrence. This is the first time that U-boats have operated so far from the sea. The news broke like a bombshell in Canada and the United States. The United States Navy Department announced that no further report will be given of any future sinkings that may occur in this region.9

  Concerned about the extent of detail published in the aftermath of the sinkings—including the naming of survivors and such information as “we never used watches in the St. Lawrence river and we were only due to start them the morning after we were sunk”—the director of censorship of the Canadian naval staff prepared guidelines that told news editors what types of information should not be published. The legal foundation for Memorandum No. 1, prepared by Walter Scott Thompson and entitled “Sinkings in the St. Lawrence, May 11, 1942: Notes on Publication of News Stories,” was an Order in Council passed on September 1, 1939, nine days before King George VI signed Canada’s Declaration of War: “N
o person shall print, circulate or distribute a book, newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, picture or documentary of any kind containing any material, report or statement, false or otherwise, intended or likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty, or to interfere with the success of His Majesty’s forces … or which might be prejudicial to the safety of the state or the efficient prosecution of the war.”

  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:

  The morale in U-boats is a highly variable morale. Success will send it rocketing; failure will plunge it to the depths. Apparent success, without full knowledge of its extent, is irritating and tantalizing.

  It is safe to assume that a comprehensive report on this exploit will now be made for the use of U-boat commanders, and that it will give the fullest particulars [i.e., details taken from Canadian news reports] regarding the whole matter. It will tell more of this operation than could have been told by the commander of the attacking U-boat.

  This will increase the respect of U-boat commanders and crews for the German Naval Intelligence Department, and will, in every way, assist in building U-boat morale.

  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:

  I will answer my honourable friend with the fact that I do not know, and he does not know, and no respectable, reputable authority knows that there is a German U-base on this side of the Atlantic.

  I have stated several times in this House that we knew definitely that German U-boats could leave European bases, come over to this side, operate for some days off the American coasts and get back to their bases in France or Germany or along the conquered coasts without the necessity of refuelling. There are no very deep inlets in the harbours of St. Pierre-Miquelon.

  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, loc
al 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOUR SINKINGS IN JULY

  JULY 6 AND 20, 1942

  SS Anastassios Pateras, Hainaut, Dinaric and Frederika Lensen

  And found’ring like a man in fire or lime …

  Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

  —WILFRED OWEN

  On 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.