Shortly afterward, Lade found Moors’s boat and, after running down one last echo and firing a pattern of five depth charges (the blast of which damaged Lade’s own asdic and gyrocompass), Clayoquot set a course for Gaspé, carrying fifty-eight survivors of the second of His Majesty’s Canadian Ships to be sunk in four days.9 Commander Lade served with distinction until Christmas Eve 1944, when he died after Clayoquot was torpedoed just outside Halifax harbour.
By the time Clayoquot reached Gaspé at 2:40 p.m. on September 12, men like MacAuley and Heagy, though still stained black with oil, were able to walk the gangplank back to land unaided. The ship’s leading telegraphist, Edmond Robinson, collapsed on the jetty and died several days later from his injuries. Others, such as Fortin and Thomas Macdonald, ERA, were carried off and taken first to Commander German’s house on the base. There German’s wife, Dorothy, cared for them on the floor of the living room. Later, James Essex recalls, Commander German ordered that the men whom he knew to be dying from their internal injuries be taken to Hôtel-Dieu hospital in the town of Gaspé. One, Able Seaman Donald Bowser, was carried off dead.
Bowser’s funeral, the first for a Canadian serviceman killed in Canada since the Riel Rebellion in 1885, was the one to be held in Gaspé, the home port of four Canadian warships sunk during the Battle of the St. Lawrence.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church, where the fifty-four survivors of Hartwig’s torpedoes and more than a hundred of their fellow sailors and soldiers from the bases that dotted the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula gathered on a beautiful mid-September day to pay their final respects, shares none of the ornateness of its more famous sister in London, the capital of Bowser’s native England. Almost Calvinist in its simplicity, St. Paul’s is located on the western arm of a spit of land that juts out from the town of Gaspé. At fifty feet, its spire had been used by three generations of fishermen as a sighting point.
When MacAuley and his shipmates entered the church, the sun was streaming in through the twenty-foot-high windows. At the end of the knave, before the pulpit, under the cupola beneath the spire, was their shipmate’s casket, draped with the White Ensign. At each corner of the flag-draped casket was a sailor dressed in regulation blues—a sharp contrast with the dungarees and civilian jackets that had quickly been gathered up to clothe Charlottetown’s survivors. Each of the sailors in the honour guard stood three feet away from the casket’s corners, their heads bowed, their polished rifles barrel to the ground, their white-gloved hands clasped over their rifles’ butts.
The words spoken over Bowser’s coffin—used for centuries by the Church of England to celebrate death and eternal life in “the living Church of Christ Jesus”—were as familiar to the sailors who heard them as they are foreign to most of us today:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die….
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand in the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.
No doubt, for many of the eighteen-, nineteen-and twenty-year-old men, the words of the Book of Common Prayer had often been little more than rote sayings. Now, however, through these words and the prayer for the burial of the dead at sea—
Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.
—young men mourned their captain and their shipmates who never got off the hull built at the very headwaters of the St. Lawrence, those whose bodies were blasted as they thrashed in her waters, and the thirty-eight men from Raccoon. None of these men would ever rest in a proper grave.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHAT CYRIL PERKIN SAW
SEPTEMBER 15 AND l6, 1942
SS Saturnus, Inger Elizabeth and Joannis
Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight
The lean black cruisers search the sea.
Night-long their level shafts of light
Revolve, and find no enemy.
Only they know each leaping wave
May hide the lightning, and their grave.
—ALFRED NOYES
The decision to close the St. Lawrence to transoceanic shipping had far-reaching logistical and economic implications for Canada’s war effort. Most important, it meant severing Montreal, Canada’s largest port, from the convoy system that had been carefully built up since the outbreak of war in 1939. The convoy system was much more than the thousands of ships that assembled by the score in Halifax’s Bedford Basin before braving Dönitz’s wolfpacks on the stormy North Atlantic. It began in the nickel mines of Sudbury, on the wheat fields of the Prairies and at the ends of aircraft and tank assembly lines in Ontario and Quebec. It included tens of thousands of rail cars choreographed to be unloaded and sent back across the country. Between the railroad cars and the ships, hundreds of shipping clerks and thousands of stevedores took the lead in this complicated dance. The clerks were responsible for making sure that the cargo was stowed so that cargo for the first port of call could be unloaded without unloading the entire ship. The stevedores did the loading; they were the men who packed tons of TNT into dark holds. They were the men who knew how to load a ship with ten thousand tons of iron ore so that during a storm the ore wouldn’t shift and break the ship’s back. Any disruption in this complicated system could cause logistical chaos.
Even though the U-boat offensive in the St. Lawrence had meant adding another thousand miles of convoying to Canada’s responsibilities, Naval Control of Shipping considered the Port of Montreal an important logistical asset. The city’s ready supply of skilled labour ensured that merchant ships could be repaired faster than in Halifax’s congested yards and dry docks. Montreal may have been ice-bound for several months a year, but the time lost to Father Winter was less than the time lost because of Maritime labour patterns in Halifax, Sydney and Saint John. (Many stevedores returned to their farms and fishing boats for seven months of the year.) Accordingly, in 1940 and 1941, Montreal recorded an average turnaround time of less than four days as compared with up to two weeks in Halifax. Added to this efficiency was the fact that guns and mines, wood and iron ore and aircraft, trucks and tanks loaded in Montreal did not have to be hauled six hundred miles by rail to the Maritime ports.
Though ships assembled by the score in Halifax’s Bedford Basin, most merchant ships were not loaded at this most famous eastern Canadian port, home to both the Western Local Escort Force and the Mid-Ocean Escort Force. The forces consisted of 115 Canadian and 23 British warships. The docks were so full that in 1941, when Charlottetown arrived in Halifax, it tied up on the water side of the Free French corvette Alysse. Halifax’s repair yards were so busy that when the Canadian navy decided to upgrade the corvette fleet’s asdic and radar, it took six months to do the work.
Second call on Halifax’s dockside facilities went to the “troopers.” The largest piers, 21 and 22, were all but reserved for Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, each of which sailed time and again with more than 15,000 troops aboard. Third call went to small refrigerated ships, whose cargoes of meat were hauled by rail to dockside, and to small tankers that could be turned around fast enough to be assigned to the next convoy heading out.
In 1940, the first full year of the war, Montreal, Quebec City and other St. Lawrence River ports loaded 596 ships; a year later the number had jumped to 704. In 1942 the number dropped to 278. In 1943 it fell by another 100 to 178, a number that includes scores of naval ships built along the St. Lawrence.1
Canada’s mariti
me ports were not, however, capable of absorbing “even half the customary trade of Montreal”; they became, according to naval historian Gordon N. Tucker, “congested and inefficient.” Trade was diverted from the traditional east-west corridor, established by Sir John A. Mac-donald’s National Policy and the CPR, to a north-south axis. By 1943, Canadian arms, food and other supplies were being shipped from New York, New Orleans, Savannah and even Galveston, Texas.
The economic dislocation caused by the drop in shipping can be measured by the decline in tonnage of foreign-going cargo being loaded at St. Lawrence River ports. In 1941 Montreal’s stevedores loaded 4,078,070 tons of foreign-going cargo; in 1942 the tonnage had dropped to 1,600,935 tons before falling further to 1,089,447 tons in 1943. Quebec City dropped from about 320,000 in 1941 to 142,308 in 1942. The economic fallout of this new north-south axis created a political headache for King’s wartime government.
Quebec’s premier, Adélard Godbout, complained that Quebec was being shortchanged by the federal government. On March 4, 1943, Onésime Gagnon, member of the Quebec legislative assembly for Matane, charged that Montreal and Quebec City had been harmed by the closure of the St. Lawrence in 1942 and would “suffer enormous prejudice” if the river remained closed in 1943. Five days later, his Union Nationale colleague from the riding of Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Hormidas Langlais, protested against the continued closure of the St. Lawrence: “This decision caused considerable misery among the population, it would further harm the value of the ports [of Montreal and Quebec City] and benefit those of St. John and Halifax,” which he went on to point out were in Minister Macdonald’s part of the country (Macdonald represented a Halifax riding). A few days later, in Parliament in Ottawa, Sasseville Roy claimed that shifting the shipping of war material to rail traffic cost the Canadian taxpayer an extra $i million a year. Even after the river was reopened in 1945 and traffic in Montreal and Quebec City rebounded (to 4,904,744 and 544,280 tons, respectively), the issue did not go away. Maurice Duplessis, who had defeated Godbout a year earlier, reiterated Gagnon’s and Langlais’s 1943 charges. On March 7, 1945, Duplessis petitioned the federal government to declare the Port of Quebec City a “free port.”
But in the days that followed the September 9, 1942, decision to close the St. Lawrence, establishing secure coastal convoys was the more immediate concern to the Naval Control of Shipping office in Quebec City. Shepherding those ships that could not be loaded at other ports to Montreal or Quebec City and then leading them safely out of the gulf was the first priority. In order to provide better air coverage, albeit from training aircraft based on Prince Edward Island, convoys were routed south of the Îles de la Madeleine. To replace the seventeen corvettes that were being sent to take part in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, Admiral Murray attached two older British destroyers, HMS Salisbury and Witherington, to the Gulf Escort Force. As well, on September 15, the Commanding Officer Atlantic Coast (COAC) received the recommendation that fixed convoy routes be abandoned because they were too predictable. Evidence for this accumulated even as the COAC was receiving the recommendation. Within hours of this signal having been sent, Hartwig torpedoed the USS Laramie and SS Saturnus and Inger Elizabeth; a day later Hoffmann destroyed SS Joannis.
SEPTEMBER 15, 1942
Three thousand five hundred miles east in Bremen, workers lay the keel for U-863.
Five thousand five hundred miles east in Russia, fighting rages in the main railway station in Stalingrad.
Four thousand five hundred miles east in Ukraine, members of the Jewish community from Kalushare are deported to Belzec death camp; hundreds of Jews in Kamenka are murdered.
Three hundred and nine feet long with a beam of 30 feet and a displacement of 1,090 tons, HMS Salisbury was the largest warship in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on September 15, 1942. Its crew, including its commander, Lieutenant M. H. R. Crichton, RNR, were originally slated for HMS Cameron but had been transferred to Salisbury after Goring’s Stuka dive-bombers destroyed Cameron in dry dock on December 15, 1940.
“We’d heard about the sinkings in the St. Lawrence,” says Signalman Cyril Perkin, then a twenty-one-year-old Cornishman whose two older brothers were also in the Royal Navy, “but after what we’d seen on the North Atlantic, the St. Lawrence, especially in the beautiful late autumn, sounded like a vacation. At the beginning of 1942 we twice escorted the USS Wasp as she delivered Hurricanes to Malta. We got lucky because we weren’t attacked. But they were very tense trips—constant danger from U-boats and aircraft—and we knew from the destruction of the Cameron what dive-bombers could do to a ship.”
Before those missions, Perkin’s ship spent almost two years on the North Atlantic run. “We were based on the River Clyde in Scotland and would range far out into the Atlantic to pick up convoys. When we weren’t firing depth charges, we were picking up ravaged convoys. You could always tell when there’d been a terrible battle because the hulls of the ships would still be black with oil and the escort ships would be filled with survivors and signal us that they were low on fuel.”
“Our time in the St. Lawrence really did begin with a milk run,” he recalls. “Before being sent on our first escort patrol, we were given liberty in Prince Edward Island. I remember us going into a store to buy some milk and then the lot of us sitting on the sidewalk drinking it straight from the bottle. By that point, we hadn’t seen or tasted any milk for more than three years.”
The immediate reason for assigning Salisbury to the Gulf Escort Force was Prime Minister King’s decision to agree to Churchill’s request for corvettes to take part in Operation Torch. As well, Admiral Murray hoped that, led by a warship equipped with up-to-date anti-submarine electronics and attack systems, the Gulf Escort Force might be able to reproduce the success other forces were beginning to have in the North Atlantic.2
On June 16, ONS-102’s escorts, led by HMCS Restigouche, fought off an attack by five U-boats. Dönitz attributed the escort’s success to both aggressive Allied patrolling and the inexperience of several of the U-boat captains. In St. John’s, Murray attributed the success of the largely Canadian escort force to the fact that the larger escorts were equipped with shipborne HF/DF, which allowed them to plot the U-boats as they were radioing their positions to Lorient prior to the attack. In late August, though they could not prevent every U-boat attack, the escorts of ONS-122, led by HMS Viscount, used their 271 radar—which allowed the escorts to spot the U-boats while they were still beyond the convoy’s escort screen—to break up thirteen attacks on the convoy.3 No doubt Murray hoped that perhaps one or two 271-equipped escorts could turn the tide in the St. Lawrence.
Though Salisbury was decades older than Arrowhead, the lead escort of SQ-36 until Salisbury joined the convoy on the fifteenth, the British ship’s asdic and radar were a generation ahead of its Canadian consort’s. “Jock” Smith and his fellow asdic operators aboard Arrowhead had to manually rotate the ship’s asdic transducer in what amounted to five-degree increments. To ensure complete coverage, they had to turn the wheel connected to the transducer in the dome behind the bow ten degrees forward toward the bow or stern, then five degrees backward to the original position, then ten degrees forward (or backward). Salisbury‘s asdic rotated automatically. But the bathyscaphe effect twenty miles off the eastern tip of the Gaspé Peninsula nullified this advantage. Because Salisbury‘s 271 radar broadcast in 10-centimetre waves, it was able to pick up much smaller objects than was Arrowhead’s 286 radar, which used wavelengths of 1.4 metres: the smaller a radar’s wavelengths, the smaller the object it can pick up. Hartwig’s tactics after spotting SQ-36 at noon local time vitiated Salisbury’s radar’s advantage.
Hartwig followed the same procedure he’d used with such devastating efficiency a week earlier when he sank three of QS-33’s ships in thirty seconds. Rather than attacking at once, he stayed submerged and ran ahead of the convoy, positioning himself so that it would run over him. Just before 2:30 p.m., the convoy commodore signalled a 3°
change of course to 330° NW, which, Hartwig recorded in his war diary, put him “outside the [main body of the] convoy on its starboard [right] side.” To Hartwig’s port, 400 metres away, ran Salisbury, its radar operating and its lookouts, including Cyril Perkin on the bridge, scanning the water.
Had Hartwig attacked at night, as he had on July 3 when he destroyed SS Donald Stewart up in the Strait of Belle Isle, chances are U-517 would have been partially surfaced. Had he been partially surfaced, not only would Perkin have been likely to see him, but Salisbury‘s radar would surely have caught him, even though a full sweep took almost two minutes. Had this attack occurred a year later, SQ-36’s other escort ships would have been equipped with centimetric radar and at least one would likely have picked him up.4
But at 1:30 p.m. on September 15, 1942, Hartwig’s periscope was hidden from Salisbury‘s lookouts by the shadows and wash of the convoy’s own ships. Salisbury‘s radar was unable to distinguish an object as small as a periscope—especially one only a couple of hundred metres off her starboard bow—from among all the other readings and echoes generated by twenty-one merchant ships and seven escorts. What Hartwig called his “sixth sense, like a tiger in a jungle,” served him well; he came to periscope depth “just as the OAS air patrol had flown out ahead of the convoy.”5 It returned forty minutes after he “fire[d] off a salvo of four torpedoes at 2 overlapping steamers in the second formation” on what Perkin remembers as a beautiful late summer day.
At 1:38 p.m., as Salisbury steamed one mile to the convoy’s starboard, Perkin, who had been on watch for almost two and a half hours, had just completed another sweep toward the bow. “It was exhausting work, looking through the binoculars, sweeping forward methodically, pausing ever so slowly over a swell to see if behind it was a periscope or the churning water of a torpedo. As soon as the fo‘c’sle came into my view,” he recalls, “I slowed, allowing my sweep to pass just over the bow, where it intersected with the lookout’s on the other side of the bridge. Then I started my sweep back.”
The Battle of the St. Lawrence Page 17
