The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

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.”

  History would, ultimately, prove both the committee and Admiral Nelles right. But history would have to wait for May 1943.

  The danse macabre played out across the unforgiving Atlantic and into Canada’s heartland was more than one or one hundred and one engagements. It pitted steel mills and shipyards in Hitler’s Germany and occupied Europe against the Allies’s. Even the army of slave labourers Albert Speer and Dönitz deployed to build U-boat after U-boat into the hundreds never made up for the fact that Hitler unleashed the war in 1939, when the U-Bootwaffe totalled seventy-five boats, only one-third of which were operational, and not the three hundred Dönitz had told his Führer he needed to fulfill Führer Directive Number 9: the annihilation of the English economy.

  To defeat England, Dönitz calculated, his guerre de course (war against trade) would have to sink 700,000 tons of shipping every month. His marksmen never quite reached that figure, though in 1942 they came close, averaging just over 500,000 tons a month. After the war Winston Churchill wrote, “the only thing that really frightened me was the U-boat peril.”

  To transport the bread, cheese, powdered milk and meat that kept England and millions of Allied troops fed and the machines, guns and munitions needed to defeat Hitler, tens of thousands of North American men and women filed into shipyards, where they built more than 10,000 ships. The United States built 8,800 naval vessels, more than half of which served in the Pacific theatre. In mile-long production lines, Americans built 2,700 ten-thousand-ton Liberty ships, the majority of which braved the North Atlantic. Canadians built 121 corvettes, 60 Bangor minesweepers, 64 Algerine minesweepers, 16 Isle-class large anti-submarine trawlers, 70 frigates and 80 Fairmile motor launches. In addition, our yards built 402 merchantmen, 338 of them 10,000-tonners. Ninety of these were sold to the US, and 101 were given to the UK as part of Canada’s economic aid to England, proportionately even greater than the more famous American Lend-Lease program. A special wartime Crown corporation sailed more than 170 vessels.1

  For almost three years before the Battle of the Atlantic spilled over into waters that glide past Rimouski, Cap Sainte-Anne and Baie Comeau, it was also being fought in the manning halls of Quebec City and Halifax and at Montreal’s Place Viger Hotel. Ships such as the Greek steamer SS Anastassios Pateras and the Belgian merchantman SS Hainaut, both of which were sunk on July 6, 1942, were manned by crews whose homelands had long been occupied by Hitler. Propaganda broadcasts naming ships and sometimes even crews made it clear that back in Bruges or Kosovokis or Bergen, families and friends could be endangered. Agents provocateurs tried to disrupt the finely tuned convoy system by whispering, “Britain is willing to fight—to the last Norwegian, Dutchman, Belgian, Greek, Pole, Dane or Free Frenchman.” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s victory in Libya in early 1941 sapped merchant seamen’s morale, for the fall of Tripoli netted the Desert Fox huge quantities of munitions and equipment that merchant seamen had braved the wolfpacks to bring across the ocean.

  Canadian authorities fought back with legislation and organization. An Order in Council, PC 4751, passed days after the convoy system was set up on September 7, 1939, gave authorities the power to jail foreign merchant seamen who refused to sail on ships on which they had signed the ship’s articles. The July 1941 conviction of three Greek deserters made it considerably less attractive for any of the thousands of Greek sailors who moved through Montreal to try to disappear into the city’s large Greek immigrant community.

  But it was the efforts of the Naval Boarding Service (NBS), established in June 1940, that ensured that thousands of men would sail. Led by Commander Frederick B. Watt, the NBS quickly moved beyond its original mandate to ensure that ships’ crews were not a security threat (that is, that there were no agents provocateurs aboard) and that both the ship and its crew were sound enough to depart.

  Watt’s NBS won the confidence of tens of thousands of sailors by preventing unsafe ships from departing harbour and by adding to the NBS a social welfare role. Watt’s officials took it upon themselves to provide sailors with books and magazines to read. Over the course of some 20,000 boardings in Halifax, the NBS distributed 78,000 ditty bags,
4 million cigarettes, 11,0OO fur vests and 35,000 bundles of woollens, many knitted by society ladies. Watt oversaw the creation of professional manning pools and the institution of training programs; Montreal’s NBS ran the empire’s largest centre for DEMS gunnery training. Most important, Watt wrote in In All Respects Ready, the NBS killed rumours by giving the sailors “the facts—even the hard ones” about what was occurring on the North Atlantic run.

  Of all the charts and figures that tell the tale of the Battle of the Atlantic, the NBS’s is perhaps the easiest to read. Compared with the more than 27,500 ships carrying more than 166 million tons of cargo in some 2,750 North Atlantic and coastal convoys that sailed between 1939 and 1945, only a relative handful were unable to put to sea because of crew problems or sabotage.2

  JULY 6, 1942

  Three thousand miles east, workers at Flensburger Schiffbau in Flensburger lay the keel for U-367.

  Three thousand miles east in Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s family goes into hiding.

  Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin, Hitler gives orders to enlarge the Nuremberg stadium where the annual Nazi Party meetings are held “to accommodate a minimum of two million in the future.”

  At 6:23 p.m. on June 27, the radio operator aboard U-132 decoded the following message:

  To Vogelsang.

  Proceed into ordered area QU BB 14 and QU 36 [the mouth of the St. Lawrence] in the period when moon is waning. Approach area unobserved. Remain submerged by day. According to report by Thurmann QU BB 14 and QU 36 in the major quadrant to the west is favourable attack area. Intercept shipping in the narrowest portion of the pipe [strait]. Traffic pulses occur particularly on Saturdays. Sundays are also a possibility. Surface forces are weak. It is probable that only aircraft will be encountered. Establish whether outbound traffic also proceeds via 22 [Strait of Belle Isle]. If the area proves unfavourable after careful and tenacious observation, you are granted permission to manoeuvre according to your own initiative.

  Three thousand miles away in Lorient on France’s Bay of Biscay, Admiral Dönitz must have smiled to himself when he composed this order. Just over a week earlier, Kapitänleutnant Ernst Vogelsang had declined Dönitz’s order to return to La Pallice, U-132’s base on the Bay of Biscay, where the officers drank absinthe at the inaptly named Café de la Paix and ratings quaffed beer at the equally incongruously named Susie and Buffalo Bill bar. After learning of the damage U-132 had suffered during a mid-ocean encounter with HMS Stork and Gardena, whose shells damaged the submarine’s periscope and whose depth charges cracked open diving tanks, resulting in telltale slicks, Dönitz ordered Vogelsang home for repairs. Vogelsang’s reply, that despite the increased danger that resulted from the damage he and his men would “carry out the convoy task to the end,” was not insubordination. Rather, for Dönitz it was proof of the mettle of the men who joined the so-called Frei Korps Dönitz, a name that harkened back to the ultranationalist troops who destabilized the Weimar Republic and who formed the backbone of Hitler’s first storm troopers, the SA.

  Despite Naval Service Minister Angus Macdonald’s assurance that “long-prepared plans for the defence of the St. Lawrence” had been put into effect, the waters into which Vogelsang sailed, unobserved, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1942, differed little from those Thurmann had entered in early May. No doubt because of Thurmann’s May 21 report “Cap Gaspé and other lights farther out extinguished,” Vogelsang expected Canada’s coasts to be blacked out and its radio beacons silent. Hence the surprise that comes through in his war diary entry for July 2: “Navigational radio beacons are operating as in peacetime according to the list of nautical radio stations.”

  As was the case on the US east coast, where lights from New York, Atlantic City, Savannah and Miami silhouetted ships, making them easy targets for U-boats, Canadian authorities resisted imposing a blackout. Unlike the Americans, however, who resisted largely because of pressure brought by tourist interests in Miami and Atlantic City, Canadian authorities resisted because without navigational lighting and radio beacons, shipping in the St. Lawrence would have been endangered. As Prime Minister King reminded the House of Commons on March 25, 1942, “These are some of the foggiest shores in the world, winds change direction rapidly, and the seas make themselves felt.”

  Resistance to imposing a blackout or dim-out (which is what Canadian authorities opted for, although it was still popularly referred to as a “blackout”) did not, however, mean that Canadian authorities did not ready the Gaspé and the rest of eastern Canada for one should it become necessary. On November 12, 1939, just two months after the war began, instructions were sent to lighthouse keepers instructing them when to extinguish their lights. A year later, a more comprehensive system was developed that used the CBC’s and Radio-Canada’s broadcasts to signal lighthouse keepers when to turn off their lights. Rémi Ferguson, who kept the lighthouse at Cap-des-Rosiers, not far from Gaspé, told a historian the radio messages that were broadcast at 2:30 and 10:30 a.m. and at 2:30 and 10:30 p.m.: “‘A notice to lighthouse keepers: execute instructions A for Alphonse,’ and they repeated that three times. That meant to keep the lighthouse operating. B for ‘bonbon’ meant that there was the threat of a submarine offshore. That’s when we turned off the lighthouse and stopped the foghorn until further notice.” By the end of 1939, both the British territory of Newfoundland and the Free French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were incorporated into Canada’s dim-out regimen.

  Few aspects of the Battle of the St. Lawrence were as much discussed during the Battle or are as well remembered today as the dim-out. “Some people,” recalls Lorraine Guilbault, who in 1942 was twelve years old, “said that the dim-out regulations were just part of the government’s publicity campaign to support the sale of war bonds.”3 For most Gaspesians, however, the dim-out was serious.

  The Fusiliers du St-Laurent enforced l’obscuration. Hundreds of men in uniform checking to see if houses and other buildings were properly blacked out and manned checkpoints at which cars that had more than a ¾-inch slit of their headlights unpainted were stopped and their headlights were painted. In response to fears about dangers to highway traffic, in 1943 the regimen was changed to painting out the “upper half of the headlights down to half-an-inch below [the] centre” of the headlights. Dozens of stories reported the preening of mayors such as Gaspé’s Davis, who on February 27, 1942, declared that l’obscurcissement exercise held on the Sunday before February 27 was “a complete success…. Private homes, community and religious buildings, the harbour, everything was in total darkness for nine hours.” The dim-out was one of the few aspects of the war that was openly discussed at school, recalls Guilbault. “When it came to the defence of the river, the thing we talked about most at school was the blackout. We were taught how to put up curtains to darken our houses and how to do the blackout at school.”

  On the whole, the dim-out regulations were well observed. When they were not and when that fact became widely publicized, the dim-out became a bone of contention between English and French Canada. In June 1943, Brigadier-General Edmond Blais, the army officer commanding the Quebec military district, told the Canadian Press that “while the dim-out is fairly generally observed, in most of the fishing villages along the rugged coast many car headlights remain untreated.” The Halifax Chronicle Herald wasted little time before editorializing, “It is true that last year dimout regulations were not fully observed but no attempt appears to have been made to enforce them.” On June 9, the Montreal Daily Star applauded the government for a planned “campaign to enforce ‘dimout’ regulations,” non-compliance with which it immediately went on to equate with “careless talk”—which everyone knew, from the ubiquitous posters warning against repeating shipping information, “costs lives”—and with “the circulation of sensation and inaccurate rumours.” In other words, the Daily Star all but branded those who failed to paint out their headlights or who let light shine through their curtains as fifth columnists.
/>
  Nor were the air defences what Vogelsang might have imagined from Thurmann’s having reported that in the days after the sinking of Nicoya and Leto defences were “very alert.” Memoranda that declared where his planes were to be stationed aside, Air Vice-Marshal A. A. L. Cuffe, commander of EAC, was shuffling his planes around the gulf as bases at Gaspé and Mont Joli became available and, even more important, poor communication systems undercut Cuffe’s men’s effectiveness. Poor communications between EAC and the US Air Force in Newfoundland prevented Canadians from finding out about the May 10 sighting and bombing of U-553 by a B-17 flying out of Gander until late on the eleventh, far too late to launch their own planes for a follow-up attack.

  But it was the sheer size of the river and gulf, some quarter million square kilometres, that posed the greatest challenge to communications. While the introduction of convoys with known routes reduced the operative area significantly, port-to-port coverage was beyond the ability of the RCAF and its American partner, the US Army Air Force. Late in the 1942 shipping season, the pressure of more than a dozen sinkings would lead EAC to undertake night escort flights. Such flights were good morale boosters, but without such innovations as the Leigh light or fully workable airborne radar, neither of which would be available before the end of 1942, night flights were less than effective in finding the U-boats before the U-boats found the ships. To find U-boats before they found the convoys, Canadian air defence authorities relied heavily on the civilian Aircraft Detection Corps (ADC).

  Established in 1940, by the time Thurmann entered the St. Lawrence in 1942 the ADC numbered 1,320 volunteer observers in Quebec and across the Maritimes and Newfoundland. But the ADC proved problematic. The chief problem was not that the “thousands of additional eyes and ears” filed thousands of reports of which only a handful proved to be true; most of the reports were checked out by either RCMP officials or the Fusiliers du St-Laurent. Rather, the problem lay in the delay between the time of a confirmed sighting and the time EAC was informed of it. On the north shore of the St. Lawrence, there was one unsecured telegraph line (which, when broken, was repaired “by whatever passerby notices the need”) strung precariously along hundreds of miles.