“Once we got them up on the ship, we gave them a tot of rum. We cleaned those who were burned the best we could. And then we sprinkled a powder on them; it was tannic acid, which we later found out was no longer the approved treatment for burns.
“I remember one man. He was about fifty and badly burned. He asked me, ‘Do you know my son?’ What does he do, I asked, as I cleaned him and poured powder on his burns. He told me he was Johnnie Johnson, the RAF ace. I didn’t think it was true, but he took out of his pocket a laminated article about him.”5
Just over an hour after Hoffmann destroyed Aeas, Arrowhead steamed back to the front of the convoy while Raccoon returned to its screening position astern its port side. Their zigzagging courses meant Raccoon was often out of sight of the other two escorts, but their constant speed and predictable bearing meant that at regular intervals they closed to relatively near quarters—close enough for Raccoon to appear as a back trace on Arrowhead’s primitive radar screen. Just before 2:12 a.m., Hoffmann, who on September 3 had missed Raccoon twice, fired at her again.
With the escort back to full strength, Captain Brown called an end to Action Stations on Oakton, and Read and the first cook, Douglas Wilkinson, headed for their cabin to catch what sleep they could before the next watch had to be fed. Just before reaching the cabin, Read recalls, “something lit up the night sky behind us. We heard something too, but it wasn’t like a depth charge.”
Once again Smith heard it—this time, however, not through his headphones but through the steel plating of Arrowhead’s hull. “Down in the forward mess, we didn’t just hear it. We must have been awfully close because we felt it so clearly that we ran up thinking we’d been hit.” Above deck, Gaétan Chaput, who manned Arrowhead’s 4-inch gun, heard two explosions and “saw the water go up … from the port quarter.”
Scant seconds later, Skinner, who had gone to his cabin leaving his first officer in charge, returned to the bridge to find Anti-Submarine Officer Crockette in a heated argument with the ship’s asdic and radar operators. The two operators argued that Raccoon had been hit. The asdic rating, Frederick Dive, later told the board of inquiry that investigated the loss of Raccoon that he had “been carrying out my given sweep when I heard the report on my phone. This report did not sound like the report of a depth charge. It wasn’t sharp. After the first report, I slid the phones off my ears after which I heard the second one and possibly a third.” Even more ominous were the words of Skinner’s radar operator, Theodore Burton, who told the board of inquiry, “I saw the Raccoon for less than one minute after the explosion, then she seemed to fade away, and was not picked up again.”
Crockette, however, was adamant, later telling the board of inquiry, “As nothing was heard on the radio/telegraph and no visual signalling [of being under attack] was seen, it was assumed that the Raccoon was carrying out a depth charge attack, and we maintained our station on the convoy in accordance with the Standing Operating Instructions issued previous to sailing. Visibility was very poor, about a half mile, and because of this, and her earlier actions, it did not appear strange not seeing the Raccoon during the rest of the dark hours.”
Officially, Skinner sided with Crockette, though his actions indicate his doubts. For he once again ordered Action Stations and then a course change that took him down past the convoy to Raccoon‘s last known position.
Once again, star shells. Flashes of day in the night, revealing nothing.
Once again, a pattern of depth charges. Once again, asdic searches, showing nothing.
The mission of the convoy escort took precedence. Skinner broke off the search and steamed back to the merchant ships, which had headed north into the middle of the river.
Through the night, the question hung on Skinner’s bridge: was Raccoon still out there somewhere? Perhaps with a total power failure, unable to communicate?
SEPTEMBER 7, 1942
Three thousand five hundred miles east, workers at Bremer-Vulkan in Bergen lay the keel for U-288; in Hamburg, workers at Blohm & Voss lay the keels for U-983 and U-984.6
Five thousand miles east in southern Russia, the German Sixth Army begins an advance, planned to take Hitler’s troops the last four miles through Stalingrad to the Volga River.
Five thousand miles east in Egypt, the British Army, under General Montgomery, stabilizes its defensive line at Alam el Halfa.
Ten thousand miles southwest in Java, the government of the Dutch East Indies flees as the Japanese advance.
Nine thousand miles southwest in the Solomon Islands, six hundred US marines attack the Japanese base at Taivu. The raid succeeds in damaging the base and disrupting the Japanese preparation for an attack on the main US position at Guadalcanal.
As dawn broke over Gaspé, the tension became palpable.
Already one ship had been sunk, and now Raccoon had missed her appointed time to report in.
Commander German waited, wondering if the second U-boat that NSHQ had signalled to him as having been HF/DF’d in the St. Lawrence was closing in on QS-33. He ordered the signals officer to send a coded message to Raccoon telling it to report in.
Other attempts were made to raise Raccoon. Men looked at their watches and at the clock on the wall. They smoked Sweet Caporal cigarettes. Each time Commander German asked, the rating listening intently through his headphones gave the same response: “No signal from Raccoon.”
Worried too, Skinner altered his course, moving toward the quarter where Raccoon should have been.
Nothing.
Perhaps Raccoon‘s radio rigging had been damaged. Perhaps she could not receive messages from as far as Gaspé. Commander German’s men sent the signal “I Method,” which required Quebec City to repeat the message back, thus ensuring that, wherever Raccoon was, if its wireless was working she would be able to pick up the signal. Signalmen monitored all frequencies.
Still nothing.
The speculation in Gaspé ran the gamut. Had Raccoon been blown up by a U-boat? Perhaps her wireless transmitter had been hit by a U-boat trying to fight it out on the surface? Or had she been boarded by the Germans? If so, what of their fellow officers and ratings? What of her secret code books?
Finally, Commander German ordered that the signalmen send the message “Report forthwith” in plain Morse code.
Poor weather on the morning of September 7 prevented a planned air search. In an ironic foreshadowing of its own fate over two years later, the corvette HMCS Shawinigan carried out a sea search. On the tenth, because of the lack of radio contact and the absence of reports of survivors coming ashore (indeed, the only onshore report corresponded with the explosion heard aboard Arrowhead), Commander German was forced to conclude and to report to the naval authorities in Ottawa that Raccoon “was presumed lost with all hands.”
The Board of Inquiry that sat in Gaspé on September 18, 1942, agreed with the asdic and radar officers’ belief that the evidence pointed toward the finding that “the explosions heard … were direct hits by one or more torpedoes.” Knowing the limitations under which Commander Skinner laboured as a convoy escort, the board of inquiry concluded its short report with the sentence, “We do not consider any negligence can be attributed to Commander Skinner.”
Raccoon’s loss did not become public until September 13, when Le Soleil published an article entitled “Cinq navires ont été coulés” (“Five ships have been sunk”), six days before concrete evidence of the sinking was found. The following day, September 14, the RCN issued a two-page press release announcing that Raccoon had been “lost through enemy action while guarding a convoy of merchant ships.” In order to hide the whereabouts of the action, the release spoke of “an increase in the tempos of enemy activity on Canada’s side of the Atlantic.” As well, the release purposely misled by trying to separate Raccoon‘s loss from the other sinkings: “He [Angus Macdonald, minister of national defence for naval services] regretted to have to report that four merchant ships had been lost by enemy action, with ten of their officers
and crew. The remainder of their personnel were rescued.”
The stories that built upon the release were even more fictive. Both the headline splashed across the Ottawa Daily Journal and the first sentence of the article “Canadian Naval Vessel Lost in Battling Subs”—“Fighting one or more enemy submarines in defence of a convoy of merchant ships, the Canadian patrol vessel Raccoon is presumed lost with all hands on board”—suggested a specific action at sea far beyond what actually occurred.7
In keeping with the guidelines established after the first St. Lawrence sinkings, no press release announced the September 21 discovery of small pieces of wreckage and clothing on the western end of Anticosti Island. The navy was equally quiet about the gruesome discovery some weeks later, also on Anticosti Island, of the badly decomposed body of Russell McConnell, a star hockey player at McGill University and a well-liked graduate of Royal Roads, who helped found the servicemen’s theatre in Gaspé.
When dawn broke over Oakton on September 7, it was alone, sailing toward the tip of the Gaspé.
“I was the second cook on the Oakton, so I had the early morning mess,” recalls Ted Read. “It was dark when I came out of the galley. When I left, I was surprised. Not only was the sea as smooth as a plate, but we were alone. It was like the days before the Nicoya got hit, before they had to start the convoys.” Read didn’t know it then, but after the second explosion Captain Brown had ordered his helmsman, Laurent Marchand, to “get the hell out of here; go south, we’ll take our chances with the shoals.”
“The Oakton wasn’t a fast ship,” recalls Read, “and we were carrying a full load of coal from Sandusky, Ohio, to Corner Brook, Newfoundland, so we were heavy and low. Like this normally we’d make 5 knots. But the engineer—he’d been with the ship and Captain Brown for years—must have known how to get more from her old engines. We were making tracks, going maybe 9 knots—anything, I guess, to get as far from where the shooting was and as close to Sydney as we could.” Before the afternoon was out, Read, Brown, Wilkinson and a few dozen other men would escape Paul Hartwig’s torpedoes with their lives; another seven wouldn’t.
Perhaps only war could have brought Read’s and Paul Hartwig’s lives so close. Nine years younger than the U-boat captain, whom historian Michael Hadley aptly refers to as the enfant terrible of the Battle of the St. Lawrence, Read was born in Montreal of Newfoundland parents. His father, C. H. Read, had served with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment under Sergeant-Major “Alf” Brown, who years later did his old friend a favour when he took the young, tall, thin, sandy-haired Edward aboard his ship as a deckhand.
“I’d had other jobs since finishing high school when I was sixteen. Odd jobs at first, then, as the war got Montreal humming, I got a job as a riveter at Fairchild Aviation down in Longueuil. I didn’t like working inside much, though. I remembered what it was like when my father lost his good job at Eatons; he’d been a manager. During the Depression we spent years without regular money coming in. Later, my father told me sometimes we survived on my paper route. So I jumped from it to a better-paying job that was outside and came with room and board too.
“I’d always wanted to go to sea. I’d grown up next to the Lachine Canal, seeing all those boats and those men going all over. And here was my chance.
“My father wouldn’t sign the forms allowing me into the navy at seventeen. And I wanted to do something for the war effort. He told me this was something I could do.”
Before Oakton sailed from Montreal, Read had talked his friend Nelson Puddester, also from a Newfoundland family, into signing on with him. When seasickness quickly put an end to Puddester’s career as second cook, Captain Brown told Read, “‘It’s easy to find a deckhand, but you can’t find a second cook everywhere.’ So I started doing dishes for nineteen men and peeling potatoes. Sufferin’ Jesus,” added Read when he recalled this story.
A flat-bottomed scow, designed to fit into the small locks of the Welland and Lachine canals, Oakton didn’t rise up and then slam down on waves during storms. “She didn’t have the V-shaped keel that could do that. Instead, she corkscrewed up and down, first toward port, then toward starboard, riding over the waves, but you never thought she was going to turn.” Captain Brown, Read recalls, was the gruff old type, but his bark was worse than his bite. “Sometimes when we were passing through the Lachine Canal he’d tell me to grab a cab to see my mother and father.”
* * *
About the time Read’s ship was making its final passage through the Welland Canal, U-517 was passing through the Strait of Belle Isle.
Like so many other U-boat captains, Hartwig was from Germany’s interior. Born in Saxony in 1919, Hartwig grew up in a Germany that extolled the U-Bootwaffe (the U-boat Arm) of the First World War. The U-Bootwaffe, not the battleships and cruisers of the blue-water navy, almost brought England to her knees. Even more important, the U-Bootwaffe remained clear of the twin stains of the Kiel Mutiny, when the kaiser’s imperial flag was struck and the Red flag flew in its place, and of the blue-water fleet’s ignominious end, its self-scuttling at Scapa Flow.
When Hartwig was in his teens in Hitler’s Germany, books like Alarm! Tauchen! U-Boot in Kampf und Sturm (Alarm! Dive! U-boat in Combat and Storm), which extolled the chivalry of the U-boat forces and called for scrapping the limits placed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, were popular. According to Hadley’s Count Not the Dead: The Popular Image of the German Submarine, a year before Hartwig joined the U-Bootwaffe, one of the most popular pulp paperbacks was Torpedo Achtung! Los! (Torpedo Away!), which raised a paean to the new era: “The seed is sown! We, the war generation, see it rise with our own eyes; it’s a magnificent feeling to be here and to be able to help it happen. Heil to our Führer”—lessons that seem to have taken, for according to the Report on Interrogation of Survivors from U-517 (Hartwig’s boat was bombed to the surface on its second patrol on November 21, 1942), Hartwig was a “cold and calculating young Nazi, filled with ideals of false heroism and unyielding devotion to his Führer.”
Hartwig was two years older than Read when he decided to go to sea. He did not, however, join the German merchant marine. Instead, in 1935 he joined the Kriegsmarine. He volunteered for the U-Bootwaffe on September 9, 1939, the day Hitler’s troops invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. After the standard several months of submarine training, Hartwig served as first lieutenant on Günter Kuhnke’s U-125; Kuhnke was a highly regarded commander who won the Knight’s Cross in September 1940. Hartwig was then sent for two months of commanding officer training and to the command of the then-unfinished U-517.
Hartwig’s next few months would have differed little from those described by Herbert Werner in his memoir Iron Coffins. At that point in the war, cap tains (and chief engineers) were assigned to their boats when they were still abuilding so that they would know every gauge, rivet and bilge pump—the guts of their ships. Launched in early January 1942 and commissioned on March 21, Hartwig’s U-517, a 740-ton Type IXC U-boat, passed its silent running test at Rönne on May 12 and her measured mile, crash-diving and speed tests three days later off Danzig. On May 20, Hartwig led his crew through torpedo-firing tests at Gdynia, and then gunnery trials at Pillau during the first week of June. During these weeks, Hartwig’s crew came to view him as “an efficient, if not very popular, captain,” in the words of the Allied officers who interrogated U-517’s crew.
Returning to Hamburg for final adjustments, Hartwig spent some time, before leaving Kiel on August 8, studying the charts of Canadian waters. More than a few of those charts would have been German. German naval ships explored both the British Columbia and the Atlantic coasts in 1904–5 and scouted anchorages as far as Montreal. In 1937, German agents, operating behind a dummy Dutch forestry company, surveyed Anticosti Island and its anchorages.
At times, Hartwig’s war diary, his actions and the banter reported to historian Michael Hadley belie the portrait of a hard-drinking, jealous martinet contained in the interrogation
report. The report notes that Hartwig was apparently so jealous of his first first officer, Oberleutnant zur See Gustav-Adolf von Dresky, that he arranged to have Dresky transferred from U-517 before its first patrol. According to the interrogation report, “when von Dresky went ashore for the last time, the ship’s company gave him three cheers, which infuriated Hartwig.”
Indeed, even in translation, parts of his war diary betray a poetic mind. Upon entering the Strait of Belle Isle at 4:39 a.m. on August 27, he wrote, “Bright moonlit night, vis 30 nm winds freshening slightly. Steered toward land on Westerly course. Encountered fishing vessel showing navigation lights moving between Hare Bay and Anthony. She proceeds toward Anthony.”
This impression is strengthened by two stories. The first, told to journalist Warren Moon in the 1970s, is of his taking his “boat close to the shore in fog so that his men could hear the music coming from a bar.” The second, told to Hadley, is of an early Sunday morning when, from their conning tower, Hartwig and his men saw a tiny village and, in that village, “a shack with lights on and smoke curling invitingly from its chimney.” Hartwig and the officer of the watch, engineer and lookouts then took time from looking for ships to torpedo to reminisce about home, about “freshly baked crusty rolls”—so far from the mould-covered food eaten within U-517. Hartwig told Hadley of their “half-earnest, half-whimsical banter about launching a dinghy for a trip ashore.”
Whatever Hartwig’s attitude toward poetry, his war diary also makes clear that by the time he shaped a course through the Canadian waters, his was a finely honed military mind that could spot and capitalize on his opponents’ errors.8
The Battle of the St. Lawrence Page 11
