The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Three more blasts, these some 300 metres away, and Fraser’s men thought they’d got their kill.

  Vogelsang’s war diary says nothing about breaking surface during the depth-charging, but both Drummondville‘s log and the report submitted by Fraser (and corroborated by Drummondville‘s officers and other members of the crew) to the Admiralty’s Office of Assessment state that after the first sets of depth charges, the U-boat surfaced astern, apparently badly damaged. Fraser could not see its conning tower and assumed that the boat was “lying on its side.” At 2:19 a.m., two minutes after having “sighted [the] submarine on the surface,” Fraser “carried out a deliberate attack” by attempting to ram it again, “the U-boat sinking before she [Drummondville] got there.”

  As he had earlier, Fraser ordered depth charges to be dropped over the swirl created by the vanishing U-boat. Fraser and his officers and men all stated that after the last depth charge, the “water gradually became covered with high smelling oil.”

  On October 8, the U-boat Assessment Committee ruled against awarding a kill to Lieutenant Fraser and Drummondville, citing among other things the “extreme unlikel[ihood] that a U-boat turned over on its side and conning tower down would come to the surface.” In 1985, Michael Hadley suggested that perhaps “U-132 had broken surface during one of her destabilized buoyant lifts.” What’s beyond doubt, however, is that in the two hours beginning at 12:21 a.m. on July 7, U-132 received a severe mauling.

  For some reason, perhaps because of the excitement of the battle, Drummondville didn’t send a signal that she was attacking. Naval Command knew nothing about either the sinkings or the battle that raged for two hours twenty kilometres north of Sainte-Anne-des-Monts until 2:30 a.m., long after Vogelsang’s quiet electric engines had pushed him out of danger.

  On the night of July 6, 1942, the base at Gaspé was a more established operation than it had been in May. Now commanded by P. B. German, Fort Ramsay’s personnel had expanded to more than two hundred men and officers. This growth caused a housing problem that was partially solved by a Mrs. Kruse, who agreed that some fifteen men, including James Essex, could be billeted in the hotel she ran out of her home. Four decades later, Essex could still recall the tunes of Cole Porter and George Gershwin that “pour[ed] forth” from Mrs. Kruse’s parlour.

  “The night shift, which usually ran from eight to eight,” recalls Ian Tate, “was generally pretty quiet save for the odd administrative message from Quebec City or Halifax.

  “At 3:30 a.m., there would have been five men or women on duty. The telegraphist on duty would have known immediately that the message he was getting was extremely important because it would have been sent with priority ‘Immediate.’ Seconds later he would have rushed the typed message down the hall to Operations. The Operations duty officer would have then immediately contacted Commander German in his home on the base. Commander German in turn likely would have immediately contacted Eastern Air Command.”

  For some reason, however, Gaspé didn’t hear the signal Drummondville sent at 2:30 a.m. Word came about a half hour later, by telephone, informing Gaspé that two Cansos based at Sydney had been ordered into the early morning light. But orders or no, Sydney’s Cansos and those at Gaspé would stay grounded by fog for more than ten hours.

  Two hundred miles to the east, around the coast of the Gaspé Peninsula at Mont Joli, the weather was better, though EAC’s luck was worse.

  Alerted at 2:30 a.m. by a phone call from the small naval station at Rimouski, ten miles away, Squadron Leader Jacques A. Chevrier ordered Mont Joli’s technicians to ready Squadron 130’s Curtis Kittyhawks for flight. An hour later, led by Sub-Lieutenant Chevrier, four single-seat fighter planes, each carrying 227 kilograms of bombs and armed with six 12.77-mm machine guns, the bullets of which could rip through a conning tower, were flying over the St. Lawrence at almost 250 miles an hour. Thirty minutes later, through the dim early morning light, Chevrier’s squadron spotted an oil slick.

  Chevrier ordered his squadron back to Mont Joli. He himself never made it. While flying over the river near Cap-Chat, his plane burst into flames. Witnesses reported seeing a long smoke trail before the plane, travelling at high speed, hit the water. One of the few French Canadian pilots in the RCAF, Chevrier was the first Canadian serviceman to die in the Battle of the St. Lawrence. The sorrow over his death at Mont Joli turned to bitterness two weeks later when, in a debate in the House, Charles G. Power, minister responsible for the RCAF, rose to squelch the rumour that the reason it took an hour for Mont Joli to get its planes in the air was that the pilots “were all drunk and out with women at the time of the sinkings.”

  Other flights launched from Sydney and Mont Joli over the next few days would be no more successful. Two would bomb what their aircrews thought were submarines.

  In 1975, then air marshal C. R. Dunlap and Murray Lister, the air vice-marshal, recalled in a letter to historian W. A. B. Douglas the second of these flights, which took place on July 8, 1942:

  Neither Wing Commander Lister nor Dunlap was stationed at Mont Joli. They were there because two days earlier Dunlap had ferried a Nomad bomber to the Bombing School at Mont Joli, and Lister had volunteered “to pick him up.” Just before Dunlap and Lister were due to take off for their return to their base in Mountainview, Ontario, Mont Joli received a telephone message “that a submarine had been spotted on the surface a few miles up river from Sept Iles, and that members of the crew were seen diving and swimming underwater near the ship’s hull,” apparently investigating damage to the hull. Dunlap recalled: Naturally one’s first thought was “Let’s get something into the air and carry out an attack.” … After all Sept Iles was only 135 miles away on the other side [the north shore] of the St. Lawrence. The first act was to relay the information to Eastern Air Command … but alas their nearest base was so far removed from Sept Isles that it would take hours for one of their aircraft to arrive.

  Dunlap and Lister convinced George Godson, one of the base’s armaments officers, and Flight Lieutenant Taché to install several 250-lb. bombs and a bombsight; this last was abandoned because it would have taken several hours to install. After gathering maps and weather information, Dunlap and Lister plotted their course in the Operations section, and then boarded their Bolingbroke for an unauthorized mission. “We made no move to communicate with our Headquarters in Toronto, i.e., No. 1 Training Command [or Air Services in Ottawa], for there seemed no point in doing so,” recalled Dunlap.

  With Lister at the controls, the Bolingbroke took off at around 1 p.m.; they were over the search area about a half hour later.

  Squinched in the bomber’s “glass house” in the nose of the aircraft, Dunlap felt “somewhat naked”; there had been no time to install the machine guns that he would have used to defend the plane as it approached the U-boat.

  Tension built as they neared Sept-Îles. Neither man had ever seen combat. Training with live ammunition? Yes. But in training, the man with the gun isn’t trying to hit you. Flight training with windsocks and tracers? Yes. But not German-engineered bullets fired by marksmen who know it’s either you or them.

  Dunlap recalled the “thrilling prospect of perhaps being able to do something about destroying the enemy craft responsible for the recent disastrous sinkings.”

  Their plan was textbook: skim along at treetop level, low enough so that they could see the U-boat before it saw them, and then, “by a quick change of course …, complete [a] shallow dive attack before it could submerge, or indeed before the submarine, if still on the surface could get a full blast of gunfire off in our direction.” But “would it still be on the surface, or would it be at periscope depth, or would it be completely beyond view?”

  They reached the Sept-Îles lighthouse.

  Nothing.

  “We knew the elapsed time since the sightings and that underwater a sub wouldn’t make more than five or six knots, so we had a rough search area which we covered in a series of parallel sweeps [trying] to see th
e periscope,” recalled Lister.

  Square after square, flying right angles. Making ever-larger squares.

  Each time nothing.

  “We then searched all the bays and shore line of the river in that area, finally returning rather deflated to base.”

  While Lister and Dunlap searched the waters off Sept-Îles, U-132 was over one hundred miles away, between Anticosti Island and Gaspé, fixing the periscope and pump damage sustained in the first depth-charging of the Battle of the St. Lawrence.

  Three days later, on July 10, Brigadier-General Georges Vanier, district officer commanding Military District No. 5, which encompassed the Gaspé, wrote to National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa that rumours of additional sinkings and of the possibility of landings by Germans to either kill Canadians or kidnap them as hostages were sweeping the Gaspé: “Although I am not responsible for its [the Gaspé’s] protection and security”—respon-sibility lay with the General Officer Commanding in Chief Atlantic Command in Halifax—“I feel bound in conscience to recommend that a motorized column, not necessarily large in numbers, should be established at once in some centralized place of the Gaspé Peninsula from which it could radiate to the long stretches of the coast which are completely open and without railway communication. This motorized column could send out patrols, particularly at night.”

  On the tenth, while authorities suspected that U-132 was still in the river because there had been no transmissions to BdU, the defence of the Gaspé spilled over into Parliament and into the perennially dangerous waters of Quebec-Ottawa relations. About the time Vogelsang saw, 800 metres away, “four motored land-based aircraft clos[ing] from bearing 220 degrees,” the member of parliament for Gaspé, Sasseville Roy, rose on a point of privilege and told the House that “three more ships forming part of a fourteen ship convoy were torpedoed last Sunday night opposite Cap-Chat in the St. Lawrence river,” and asked, “Is the minister disposed to make a statement to the House or to arrange a secret sitting to inform the people’s representatives as to the seriousness of the situation?”

  Incensed at Roy’s breach of parliamentary privilege to override the censorship rules announced in May, the prime minister himself responded none too subtly. He began by reminding the House that “the minister [for naval services] made it quite clear [in May] that there would be a proper time for the government to make an announcement of any event of this kind,” and then added, “Premature announcements were only serving the ends of the enemy and would not help the ends of Canada’s defence.”

  The Speaker of the House refused to recognize Roy’s supplementary question.

  Over the next three days, during which time Vogelsang continued to prowl the Strait of Belle Isle and adjacent waters of the gulf, evaded at least five planes by emergency dives and tried to press at least one attack, the political storm worsened. The Saturday edition of L’Action Catholique (the second most important paper in French Quebec, which, according to historian Eric Amyot, had decidedly Pétainist leanings) carried an editorial not only repeating the information Roy had revealed in the House, but also stating that the same facts were known by “half the people in Quebec City before Roy spoke in the House on the 10th.” Without repeating what Roy had told the House, even the Montreal Gazette asked, since what had occurred on the St. Lawrence was an “open secret in the whole countryside and beyond,” why did the government of Canada believe its silence amounted to a “withhold[ing] of information from the enemy”?

  When the House met on Monday the thirteenth, Roy attempted to repeat the line of questioning he had begun the previous week but was prevented by the Speaker, who recognized Defence Minister James L. Ralston; Macdonald was out of the House at the time. Ralston picked up where King had left off the previous Friday by repeating that Roy’s question of the tenth was “a gift to Hitler’s men because it meant that the U-boat if it is still in the St. Lawrence does not have to surface to send a message and thus reveal itself.”

  With Roy effectively silenced, other members of the opposition felt it was time to attack the government for its handling of the St. Lawrence situation. Obviously still smarting from the dressing-down Minister Macdonald had given him in May when he said that the U-boats that attacked Nicoya and Leto had come from St. Pierre and Miquelon, Richard Hanson, House leader of the opposition Progressive Party, rose and said, “Reports were widespread in the Province of Quebec and that he [Macdonald] himself had received letters to the effect that U-boats were freely operating both at Matane and at Cap Chat and that everyone knew it.” Hanson continued by telling the House that “precise statements would have a reassuring effect. What is the position with respect to convoys in the St. Lawrence? Are there any? Should we not know the position in a general way? What is the [navy’s] position with respect to protection?” Ralston refused all comment, which led the House leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation to echo Roy’s call for a secret session: “This is a means that not only the British Parliament has resorted to but also our sister dominions.”

  Later, Naval Services Minister Macdonald returned to the House and, in a long speech, explained the government’s position with regard to both censorship and protection of the shipping for which Canada held responsibility. “Information,” he began by admitting, “as to the sinking of these ships was in the possession of many people early last week…. Many people knew of it; it was known along the waterfronts of the country, it was known to the press by Monday or Tuesday. The press refused to publish it … until an official announcement was made. It was in the possession of the Leader of the Opposition, because he had heard the story on the train and spoke to me about it.”

  Macdonald continued, taking aim at the complaints made by the Quebec press: “But there is a tremendous difference between Canadians knowing about it. The entire people of this country might know of a sinking …, but so long as it was not made public in our papers or broadcast over our radio, the chances of it getting to Germany are small…. Once it is broadcast it … speedily finds its way to Germany and is used there for propaganda purposes.” The rules established by the chief censor “are made [therefore] for the sole purpose of keeping from the enemy information which may be of great value to him in directing the movements of ships.”

  Macdonald then turned to upbraiding Roy for misusing his privilege as a member of parliament:

  There is very little use, there is very little purpose, in censoring the press … if any Honourable Member of this House can stand in his place and by asking a question or by making a direct statement, as the Honourable Member for Gaspé did, undo the efforts of those who are endeavouring to ensure the safety of allied ships and allied seamen…. “Guard your tongues” we are telling the people in French and English all the time. How can we expect the average citizen of this country to guard his tongue if Honourable Members of this House do not guard theirs?

  Macdonald, who had been absent from the House the previous Friday, now spoke to what the government believed was Roy’s abuse of privilege. A measure of Macdonald’s anger is the fact that his words skirt the parliamentary rule that statements in the House are to be addressed to the Speaker and not to individual members. “I will say this to the Honourable Member for Gaspé; had I been in the house on Friday I think I should have felt constrained to rise and ask this House to expunge from the record the statement which he made. Thereby it would not have become a public statement.”

  Aware that the King government, even though it held a majority of seats from Quebec, could not afford to alienate public opinion—especially having just seen a great majority of French Canadians refuse to release the government from its 1940 campaign pledge not to bring in conscription—Macdonald briefly held out an olive branch to Roy and Roy’s supporters in the House. Recalling what he had said earlier in his speech about the leader of the opposition’s having come privately to him to discuss what he had heard on the train, Macdonald said, “My Honourable friend could have asked his question privately if he had wish
ed…. Then he would have been given the information on his honour as a member of the House. But I do not understand how asking the question or making the statement in this House is going to add to the protection of my Honourable friend’s constituents.”

  The olive branch extended, Macdonald quickly retracted it, with his strongest attack on Roy. The attack took the form of an explanation of how the defence of the St. Lawrence fitted into Canada’s strategic thinking:

  If he [Roy] thinks for one moment that the whole of the Canadian navy is going to line up along his shores and defend those shores only, letting the convoy system we have and the protection we have for all the rest of Canada go to the dogs he is making a tremendous mistake. I am not ready to change the disposition of one ship of the Canadian navy for him or all the questions he may ask from now until doomsday.

  The sinkings in the St. Lawrence may have excited MPs because the carnage was occurring within sight of the nation’s towns and villages, but Macdonald was telling the House—and, since his comments were published in Hansard, all Canadians—that the way to stop the sinkings was not to withdraw the Canadian navy from the North Atlantic (still less from the Caribbean oil run), but rather to continue all possible efforts to defeat Nazi Germany.

  On July 15, while Vogelsang spent the day diving to avoid detection by eight different aircraft, Quebec’s Liberal premier, Adélard Godbout, a nominal ally of King’s federal Liberals, wrote the prime minister expressing his concern about public opinion in the Gaspé: “I am convinced that a perilous situation exists, one which contained [sic] additional and incalculable elements of danger to the safety and security of Canada.” The local population, Godbout asserted, “is bewildered and nervous.” And he claimed that twice during the past week two “reliable sources” had told him “that the wireless station in Sainte-Flavie airport [Mont Joli] was recently attacked by two men who had either landed from a submarine or were saboteurs still roving about our country.”