The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Communication systems on the more populated southern shore of the St. Lawrence were better, though nowhere near what they would have had to be for aircraft to be able to respond rapidly enough to catch a U-boat after a sighting. Observers made their reports through commercial telephone and telegraph companies, which routed them to a reporting centre. The reporting centres relayed the reports by wireless telegraphy to EAC in Halifax. EAC then dispatched whatever planes it could. In September 1942, this reliance on well-meaning amateurs and a Rube Goldberg communications system would fail catastrophically. Nevertheless, ADC served an important role as a morale booster and as a means of relaying unmistakable information, such as the crash of a friendly aircraft, to officials quickly.

  The waters Vogelsang sailed into should have been stoutly defended. The Defence of Shipping—Gulf of St. Lawrence Memorandum for 1941 called for the deployment of at least twenty-nine ships organized into “hunting and striking A/S [anti-submarine] forces” to be placed at strategic points along the river. Six armed yachts, four or five corvettes and four Fairmile motor launches were to be based at Gaspé, with another ten ships slated for Sydney, Nova Scotia.

  These plans were undone by shipbuilding delays and by the exigencies of war. Twenty-six RCN escort ships (nineteen corvettes and seven destroy ers recently acquired from the United States) were assigned to the Newfoundland Escort Force, charged with protecting convoys leaving Halifax and Sydney. Operation Paukenschlag, the 1942 assault on US coastal shipping that began after the United States Navy transferred the bulk of its Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific, also undercut the RCN’s plans.

  Then, as now, although in gross terms self-sufficient in oil, Canada chose to sell oil pumped from Alberta’s fields south to the US market rather than pump it across the continent to the industrial centres of Quebec and Ontario, the shortfall in the east being made up by imports from Venezuela, Aruba and Texas. Off the US coast between January 15 and May 10, 112 tankers, representing almost 1 million tons, were turned into infernos while Admiral Edward King kept his (denuded but still not insubstantial) Atlantic Fleet in port and refused to institute convoys, despite pleas from the British. By the end of April, as oil supplies in Halifax fell to just over a two-week supply (45,000 tons), Vice-Admiral Nelles responded to King’s intransigence with a most un-Canadian outburst—“To hell with that, we’ll get our own”—and with an order to establish convoys between the West Indies and the oil pipeline termini at Portland, Maine and Halifax. The four (later six) corvettes came from both the Gulf Escort Force and the North Atlantic run. On the Newfie-Derry run during the first half of 1942, Canada had 196 ships, fully 48 per cent of the escort fleet (the RN supplied 50 per cent and the Americans 2 per cent).4

  Thus, instead of twenty-nine ships divided between two bases, the 1942 Memorandum on Defence of Shipping—Gulf of St. Lawrence refers to at most ten anti-submarine ships. The most hopeful sentence was “One and, if possible, two destroyers to be based on Sydney, N.S., and all available A/S Vessels sent to Sydney or Gaspé.” The most pessimistic: “An armed motor-boat patrol will be commenced between Île Aux Coudres and the mouth of the Saguenay River.” In the months that followed the sinking of Nicoya and Leto, Canada’s defensive hopes were pinned on convoying through the St. Lawrence.

  Although a gingerly affair made up of just one ship, SS Connector, and one escort, HMCS Drummondville (a Bangor minesweeper under the command of Lieutenant J. P. Fraser, RCNR), the first regular St. Lawrence convoy, SQ-1 (May 17, 1942), was a success.5 According to James Essex, Commander “Daddy” Woodward attributed success to Connector‘s speed, which, at 10 knots, was a good 3 to 5 knots faster than could be made by most other merchant ships in the river.

  By the end of May, Naval Service Headquarters had managed to scrape together five more Bangor minesweepers, three armed yachts and nine Fairmile launches. Six weeks later, after seeing four of its charges sunk, Drummondville became the first Canadian ship ever to engage the enemy in Canada’s inland waters.

  The chase that ended with the sinking of SS Anastassios Pateras, Hainaut and Dinaric wasn’t long. At 11:05 p.m., while the lights of the U-boat beneath him were still turned low (internal U-boat lighting followed Berlin time, which was 0505), Vogelsang spotted a fourteen-ship convoy, blacked out by order of the convoy commodore but made visible by the phosphorescence of the sea. None of the convoy’s lookouts saw U-132’s conning tower, one of the few to be painted with a swastika, the symbol of the Nazi party and state.

  Over the next fourteen minutes, as the night deepened in Gaspé, as dawn broke over Europe on the day that Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam, Vogelsang closed from some five miles away on the port side of the convoy. His target could not have been more inviting. Even the fine optical glass of his Zeiss binoculars could not help him distinguish one ship from another as they huddled together travelling in a straight line through the night 1,500 metres away.

  Vogelsang watched the “overlapping steamers.” He read off the attack information: “Target speed = 5 knots, angle on bow = 75. Computed lead angle = green 9.5. Range = 1500.”6 The numbers transferred through the lines to the torpedo’s guidance system, which directed the fins behind the torpedo’s propeller to turn so that by the time they’d travelled the 1,500 metres, they were almost on a dead 90° track.

  As Anastassios Pateras, Hainaut, Dinaric and nine other merchant ships “steam[ed] along in quiet water and fog,” their lookouts scanned the night.

  Eight hundred metres away, Vogelsang’s men heard the familiar order: “Offnen Sie alle Bugklappen.”

  “Bow caps open,” came the reply a moment later. But Vogelsang and the other men on the conning tower already knew they’d been opened, for they’d felt the boat dip ever so slightly as water rushed into the forward tubes.

  “Bereit! Eins!” (“Ready! Torpedo Tube One!”)

  “Bereit! Zwei!” (“Ready! Two!”)

  “Bereit! Drei!” (“Ready! Three!”)

  “Bereit! Vier!” (“Ready! Four!”)

  “Los! Eins!” (“Fire! Torpedo Tube One!”)

  “Los!Zwei!” (“Fire! Torpedo Tube Two!”)

  “Los! Drei!” (“Fire! Torpedo Tube Three!”)

  “Los! Vier!” (“Fire! Torpedo Tube Four!”)

  U-132 shuddered as four huge pistons, one behind each torpedo, shot forward, pushed by a blast of compressed air (which was vented back into the boat, preventing a telltale burst of bubbles). Each piston drove forward with the force of 24 atmospheres, pushing the torpedo in its tube out into the water at close to 30 knots. Just before exiting the tube, a tripping mechanism started the torpedo’s electric motor. When the piston reached the end of its track, it triggered a mechanism that slammed the torpedo tube cap closed.

  Seconds ticked by, counted off by Vogelsang’s stopwatch.

  At 11:20 p.m., the men on Dinaric’s bridge “heard a terrific explosion and saw a flash indicating that a ship not far off from ours had been hit,” Dinaric’s captain, Marijan Zadrijevac, told the Canadian Press. Before Zadrijevac, who before the war had been a professor at the Nautical School of Yugoslavia, could order his helmsman to change course, “a new detonation on a second ship close to ours exploded” as a “burst of flames shot into the air.”

  The first torpedo hit SS Anastassios Pateras, a 3,382-ton Greek freighter. The wound in its starboard side was mortal.

  Hit between the cross bunker (a passageway that allowed the ship’s firemen to shuttle coal back and forth between the starboard and portside coal bunkers) and the stoke hold, the ship took an immediate 10° list. Her captain quickly ordered it abandoned. Two firemen, John Howard of England and Silvino Eugenio of Brazil, and a trimmer, Ham Karamm, a Free Frenchman, were incinerated by the flash that burned through the St. Lawrence fog.

  Four hours later, the Greek ship’s crew reached the shores of Cap-Chat. Romuald Roy, who directed the local Red Cross office, told the Canadian Press “the first men out threw themselves down on their knees an
d scooped up handfuls of sand, which they kissed passionately while uttering incomprehensible cries of Greek delight.”

  The blast that destroyed Pateras‘s buoyancy wakened an unnamed sailor on a ship also unnamed by the Canadian Press. “There was a terrible report—I thought it was us,” he recalled. Then, strangely, the silence of the calm river night rushed back in. “Not a sound came from her” as she began to sink.

  Another ship, Hainaut, now with a four-foot hole blasted in its starboard side at Hold No. 2, would never go home, nor would one of its stokers.

  The force ripped upward through the starboard side of the ship, destroying the lifeboat lashed to the boat deck. The explosion caused pipes, fittings, bulletproof glass and reinforced concrete slabs that protected the map room to break loose; the slabs blocked the passageway to the map room.

  Immediately after the explosion, Captain Léon Castelein ordered his men to their lifeboat stations. They used their hands as eyes to struggle through Hainaut‘s darkened passageways and across the wreckage-strewn decks. The decision to abandon ship came a few moments later when the captain and his chief engineer, Charles De Landtsheer, found that water was pouring into the engine room.

  Vogelsang watched as the convoy “dispers[ed] in all directions.” Both Dinaric‘s helmsmen and the one on the ship that followed it spun their helms four points to starboard. Ten minutes later, while his captain, Marijan Zadrijevac, was checking the ship’s position in the chart room, Dinaric’s chief officer, Mr. Hayday, spotted “something ahead which looked like islands” and ordered an immediate hard turn to port to avoid them.

  Vogelsang’s war diary records none of these course changes, but he must have noted them, for he stayed with Hayday’s ship.

  *  *  *

  Several thousand yards away, the last two acts of Hainaut‘s drama unfolded. Worried that in the darkness of the night his men on the lifeboats and rafts would become lost, Captain Castelein ordered that once clear of their sinking ship, the lifeboats and rafts must stay close to each other on the flat waters of the river. Immediately after the boats and rafts cast off, Hainaut‘s survivors heard one of the ship’s stokers, Mokbel Mohammad, calling from a distance. After a short search, they found him, then realized that another stoker, Säid Nouman, was missing; he would never be found.

  The search for Mohammad had taken the ship’s survivors far enough from Hainaut that they could no longer see her. They were close enough, however, to hear her death throes. Out of the darkness of the night, forty men heard the sharp sounds of metal ripping, of heavy weights—perhaps the vehicles that had been lashed to the deck—splashing into the water, the scream of escaping steam and then, finally, the sound of boiling water when the air that had been within the ship broke to the surface as Hainaut plunged to the bottom. Moments after the last sound, their rafts and boats began to rock, at first gently, then more violently, as Hainaut‘s death gurgle spread out on the quiet, still waters.

  An airplane spotted Castelein and his thirty-nine men at dawn; they were picked up at 7:45 a.m.

  At 11:58 p.m. and three minutes later, Vogelsang fired two more torpedoes. Each missed its target. His aim was better at 1:45 a.m. on the seventh, when, after an 800-metre run, a torpedo hit Dinaric, just as Zadrijevac was about to order a change in course.

  Dinaric‘s chief officer, Hayday, who filed the report for his hospitalized captain, reported, “The explosion sounded to me like a dull thud. I do not think there was any flash or flame but a large column of water and debris were thrown into the air.” By the time the spectacular geyser collapsed back into the sea, the four men on the engine-room watch—James Jameson, Henry Thomas, Herbert Walton and Slavko Ziganto—had been obliterated in a cauldron of burning, twisted steel.

  The blast wrecked the bridge. The captain was blown off it and covered with debris. He was saved by one of his officers, who risked being trapped himself in order to get his captain to safety.

  Hayday too was momentarily trapped. “I could not get out of the chart room for a few minutes on account of the falling debris and escaping steam from the engine room.”

  Once Hayday managed to get out of the chart room, he met up with Zadrijevac, a lookout and the second mate. Together, the four men climbed down first to the wrecked foredeck and then to the boat deck, where the crew had already gathered. The explosion had destroyed the starboard boat. The port and bridge boats were sound and were soon launched.

  Anxious minutes ticked by as the ship continued to list, with the captain and chief engineer still on the deck.

  “I told the Captain that he had better get into the [life]boat so that we could cast off because it looked as if the ship might overturn on to the boat,” recalled Hayday.

  Hayday’s report made special mention of Wireless Operator MacHenry, who “was the last man to leave the ship and remained on board until the last getting his signals out.”

  Lieutenant Fraser and his eighty-three officers and men had seen two of the ships they were shepherding torpedoed. They’d fought the urge to turn, fire star shells and drop depth charges. Fraser’s bridge knew that some men were dead, others in the water.

  They wanted “kills.” Men had been killed under their watch. But, as much as they wanted the order, as much as Fraser wanted to give the order to attack or to try to save men in the sea, in the deep dark of the all-encompassing St. Lawrence all aboard knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t.

  They wanted kills. But their mission, the convoy escort’s mission, was “to ensure safe the timely arrival of cargo ships.” So when QS-15 scattered, Drummondville followed the largest group of ships to offer what protection it could.

  Drummondville was a 581-ton minesweeper built by Canadian Vickers in Montreal. Like most of the sixty Bangor-class ships built during the war, Drummondville saw little service as a minesweeper, that threat being largely eliminated when Germany’s surface fleet was swept from the Atlantic.7Instead, beginning in 1940, Drummondville served as a convoy escort out of Halifax to Mid-Ocean Meeting Point, almost 1,500 miles east of Halifax, beyond which the escorts based in Londonderry shepherded thousands of ships to safety in Britain.

  The first counterattack in the Battle of the St. Lawrence began by chance. Apparently concerned that Dinaric might successfully make the coast (where it could be salvaged), Vogelsang ordered his helmsman to turn U-132 around Dinaric’s stern so he could fire at it again.

  This time, however, it was his turn to be taken by surprise. “I turned to a new approach course when there is a muzzle flash on the port bow on bearing 160 degrees. A star shell lights the area astern of the boat,” he recorded in his war diary.

  Fraser didn’t need the report from his lookouts to tell him that “dead ahead” was the U-boat that had torpedoed Dinaric. His bridge didn’t need the order Full Speed Ahead—all knew that standard operating procedure called for ramming: in March 1941, U-boat ace Joachim Schepke’s U-1OO had been rammed by HMS Walker and Vanoc.

  Now it was a battle of engineering—Fraser’s engines running at full speed versus Vogelsang’s tanks, propellers and dive planes.

  For one captain’s men there was the routine: the almost instantaneous slide down the two ladders into the control room. The closing of the hatch. The shouted order “Futen.” The turning of dozens of dials, valves and controls. The flood of water into the forward tanks first, perhaps the order for men not on station to run to the bow to increase the angle of descent. The turning of hydroplanes. The quick and sure switch from diesel engines to electric motors.

  For the other, there was the ringing of the ship’s telegraph. Here too, the turning of valves and the rush of steam, not water. Flank speed and a helmsman’s eye. Those who saw what they all wanted to see had time only to brace themselves. Others had already been ordered to the depth-charge racks.

  Seconds ticked by.

  At 16 knots, 1,000 yards can be covered in just over 120 seconds. A crash dive takes only 30.

  Thirty-five seconds after spotting U-132, D
rummondville’s bow replaced it on the surface plane of a little corner of grid square BA 3911.

  Then, as the star shell faded, came the order: “Fire depth charges!”

  Ten 410-pound canisters (more than 300 pounds of which was TNT) rolled off Drummondville’s stern, and soon huge geysers shot out of the water.

  In the months that followed this first skirmish, the asdic operators aboard dozens of escort ships would have their asdics all but blinded by the bathyscaphe effect: the mixing of cold and warm water and of salt and fresh water in the river and gulf creates layers that distort asdic signals, leading to false echoes and even entirely hiding U-boats.8 Now, at a few minutes before 2 a.m., it was the German U-boat captain who cursed the water layers, for they prevented him from diving deeper than twenty metres without using special pressure and other settings—settings that his chief engineer feared would not work because of the damage they’d suffered before entering the St. Lawrence.

  What Vogelsang recorded in his war diary as “three well-placed depth charges” hammered on U-132’s already damaged hull. The hull would have been crushed instantly had any one of them exploded within twenty metres of it. Inside the U-boat, lights flickered, circuit breakers snapped, pipes vibrated.

  Vogelsang’s war diary doesn’t tell who suggested flooding the front torpedo tubes to take U-132 lower, but it doesn’t matter. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Vogelsang issued the order, but in all likelihood he spoke only to his chief engineer, who then ordered the flooding. And then came another “fall,” to forty metres.