The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  With twenty years at sea, Bonner may have had almost a decade’s more experience than did Hartwig, but prior to the outbreak of the war Bonner’s military training consisted only of a course every year or two. The men of the RCNVR trained one or two nights a week at local drill halls and two weeks a year at Halifax or Esquimalt. Upon being activated, these men received another two months of training. Of course, both naval lore and training experts agree that while it may take two years to build a ship, it takes five years to train a sailor.

  By 1942, the navy’s need for men to crew its more than two hundred ships meant that training could be measured in weeks. Between 1939 and the end of 1942, the navy grew from 131 officers and 1,634 ratings (backed up by another 181 reserve officers and 1,649 reserve ratings) to more than 1,514 officers—the vast majority of whom were “wavy navy” (RCNVR) men—and some 45,000 ratings.2 By 1945 the total number of men serving in the navy was over 95,000. Gavin Clark became executive officer on Fairmile 085 straight from a four-month training program at Royal Roads in Victoria, British Columbia; less than a year later, at twenty years, five months and seventeen days old, he took command of the Fairmile. Like thousands of others, Léon-Paul Fortin had never been aboard a ship before Charlottetown’s commissioning; most of the crew were so green that they were seasick in the first storm.

  Depending on the experience of a U-boat’s captain, the time allotted for working up a crew varied. In 1942, six months was the norm—six months that included torpedo-firing drills, diving drills, emergency-escape drills. Six months that included navigation and more English study. Six months that included wolfpack tactics. Charlottetown worked up for eighty-five days—less than three months—most of which included more chipping paint than gunnery practice. Its regimen did not include training with a Dutch submarine that had been seconded to Halifax.

  The U-boat captain—the lone wolf, wearing a worn leather jacket, looking through a periscope, finding his prey—and his “band of brothers” fearfully trusting that the pressure hull of their 160-foot trench will hold are powerful and romantic images that, especially as the decades have passed, have come to obscure the essential difference between the men who sailed under the swastika and those who sailed under the White Ensign.

  Even on such useful Web sites as uboat.net, debates rage about whether Dönitz was a Nazi. Both he and his deputy were card-carrying members of the Nazi party, as was U-boat ace Eric Topp (U-552). Participants on uboat.net endlessly point out that the tens of thousands of officers and ratings who made up the U-Bootwaffe were not Nazis and that, in fact, the service itself was officially apolitical. If so, the reason is because it could afford to be—the men who crewed Hitler’s U-boats had had years of National Socialist indoctrination.

  By 1942, nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old midshipmen had all been part of Nazi-run organizations for almost a decade. They had seen their primary schools “cleansed” of Jewish teachers. Their school readers likened Jews to animals and disease: “The Poisonous Serpent” ended with the words, “If we do not kill the Jewish poisonous serpent, it will kill us!” Deutschland: Sechster Teil, a middle-school geography textbook, inveighed against the Versailles Diktat and called for the return of Germany’s African colonies. Even math textbooks were Nazified. Algebraic word problems asked how much a bomber weighs when empty if “on takeoff [it] carries twelve dozen bombs, each weighing ten kilos. The aircraft takes off for Warsaw, international centre of Jews. It bombs the town.”

  Outside of school, the Hitler Youth taught obedience to Hitler. German rearmament would secure them their living space and their place in the sun. Hartwig’s twenty-one-year-old Leutnant zur See (second lieutenant) was, according to the Report of the Interrogation of Survivors from U 517, “a typical Hitler Youth movement product, entirely lacking in manners and making a very poor impression.” The twenty-five-year-old Hartwig himself was “filled with ideals of false heroism and unyielding devotion to his Führer.” Kapitänleutnant Rolf Schauenburg, who took U-536 into the Baie des Chaleurs in 1943, was described in a similar report as a “fanatical and idealistic Nazi.”

  Older officers, such as Helmut Martin, Hartwig’s engineering officer, born in 1913, might have been out of school by 1933 when Hitler took power, but they were no less influenced by the currents that Hitler melded into National Socialism. Even during the Weimar Republic, Germany’s schools denounced Versailles as a Diktat and pressed for its removal. Naval histories—not to mention wardroom chatter—blamed Germany’s loss in the First World War on politicians who temporized before authorizing “unrestricted submarine warfare” until it was too late; a mere seventeen U-boats almost brought England to its knees.

  As historian Michael Hadley has shown, popular culture hardly depicted the navy as being free of anti-Semitism. U-boots-Maschinist Fritz Kasten (Fritz Kasten: U-boat Engineer), published in 1933—the year Hitler consolidated power—underlined the “breakthrough of the racial ideal” embodied by National Socialism and tellingly ended with a scene of German sailors marching in columns with Nazi “brown shirts who were ready to sacrifice their lives for this hour.” A year after the war began, U-boat ace Joachim Schepke wrote in Submarines of Today: Narrated by a U-boat Commander that while the youngest member of a U-boat crew might be called Moses, no one should think that he was a Jew, for no “seaman would … share their space with such an aberration of nature.”3

  The men who saluted the White Ensign grew up singing “God Save the King” and believing that the swath of pink that girdled the map on the wall was as immutable as the white cliffs of Dover. Their history was of expansion across an all-but-empty continent, of stopping the Americans at Lundy’s Lane in Niagara and at Crysler’s Farm and, more recently, of defeating the kaiser’s army at Vimy Ridge. But though Canadians had shed blood in South Africa, their imperialism was more imaginative than real. Fed by the writings of Rudyard Kipling and the now-forgotten George A. Henty, Canadian boys grew up wanting to be like Clive in India—while at the same time learning that the real end of empire was self-government, something even discussed for India.

  Canadian school readers contained stories about dogs stealing food from unsuspecting country folk. Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” is typical of the fare in the 1927 edition of The Atlantic Readers. The 1935 edition of A Reader in Canadian Civics surveyed the municipal, provincial and federal governments, explained how taxes are collected and pointed out the “curious fact that the Dominion cabinet has no base in law, and is not even mentioned in any statute, but is what is called a ‘convention’ of the constitution.” Published the same year Hitler pulled Germany out of the League of Nations, the reader ended with a chapter explaining Canada’s relationship to the League. History textbooks in the thirties gave as much space to the conscription crisis as they did to Passchendaele, the Somme and, of course, Vimy Ridge.

  For men such as Geoffrey Smith, Ian Tate and John Chance (Chance, as commander of Fairmile 058, would search for survivors of HMCS Shawinigan in November 1944), the words “for King and Country” were redolent of more than just George VI and the land north of the 49th parallel. At Upper Canada College, Smith learned of the Long Parliament and the English Civil War, and of Drake and Nelson, who were honoured for both their martial brilliance and the part they played in the story of protecting English liberties. Tate, who came from a long line of naval men, learned the same at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, and Chance studied the same Whig interpretation of history at Lisgar Collegiate in Ottawa. “When King George VI spoke on the radio at Christmas,” he remembers, “the three Chance boys stood up in the living room.”

  For others—perhaps for most of the lower decks—political theory and even Nelson and Drake meant less than did the rough-hewn democracy of local elections and family allegiance to the Grits or the Tories. Theirs was the same democracy that made it difficult for Canadian servicemen to salute when the officer was the fellow who lived in the same town and used to deliver the mail, the same d
emocracy that shocked the British officer corps when Canadian troops booed Prime Minister Mackenzie King when he visited them in England.

  Frank Curry, who ended the war as a leading seaman of HMCS Caraquet, remembers growing up in Winnipeg. “My father and older brother didn’t believe war would come, but I knew from listening to Hitler’s rantings and ravings through the 1930S that war was coming. When I joined the navy in 1940, I left a good clerking job in Ottawa, one that I’d just gotten after taking a nationwide test; it paid $90 a month, which was fantastic money after the long, dark years of the Depression.

  “I joined a day after another guy from the office joined. I remember he told me he was going to join, and then I realized that I had a duty to my country. And the men who joined with me, we all felt that Canada had taken on this war and that we had to stand up with Britain and against Hitler and all he represented. There was no rah-rah enthusiasm, but we knew what we were fighting against and why.”

  OCTOBER 9, 1942

  Nine thousand miles southwest in the Solomon Islands, American marines wipe out a Japanese battalion west of the Matanikau River.

  Eight thousand five hundred miles southeast in Madagascar, British troops occupying the capital, Tananarive, move south to link with the troops that had landed there at the end of September.

  Four thousand five hundred miles east in Miedzyrzec, Poland, thousands of Jews are deported to the Treblinka death camp.

  Four thousand five hundred miles east in Moscow, Joseph Stalin decides to remove political commissars from Red Army units, a move that strengthens the control of military commanders.

  At 11:48 p.m. on October 5, 1942, the day after NL-9, a convoy of four merchant ships escorted by HMCS Arrowhead and Hepatica, sailed from Collinghams Cove, Labrador, for Rigolet, Quebec, Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service) manning secret listening posts at East Baccaro, Nova Scotia, heard a “whurrp” and reached for their pencils and blue message pads. Over the next few seconds, they copied down dots, dashes and call letters, which were then sent by secure land line to Halifax. A year earlier, the code would have been sent on to Bletchley Park, England, where Alan Turing’s “bomb,” the electronic marvel that unbuttoned the German Enigma code, would have been able to decode the message. Within an hour or two, it would have told the Admiralty precisely what Kapitänleutnant Ulrich Gräf on U-69 was telling Lorient.

  As early as 1941, “Ultra” intelligence had allowed the Admiralty to route some convoys away from wolfpack concentrations. During the Battle of El Alamein, fought in early 1942, General Bernard Montgomery read Erwin Rommel’s orders sometimes before the field marshal himself. In 1943, the speed of code breaking was similar; the Allies knew the Italian order of battle prior to the invasion of Italy. In mid-1942, however, after Dönitz became concerned about the security of the Kriegsmarine’s ciphers, a fifth wheel was added to the Enigma machine (the code was produced by the turning of the machine’s wheels), temporarily closing the window Ultra had opened.

  The huff-duff unit was established by Commander J. M. D. E. “Jock” de Marbois, Deputy Director Signals Division (Y).4 Largely staffed by women who joined the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service, huff-duff may not have told what the transmission said, but simple geometry told Naval Intelligence what it needed to know. By triangulating among different listening posts that picked up the message, Canadian authorities knew that another U-boat had entered the St. Lawrence and that, at twelve minutes to midnight on the fifth, it was in the area of 49° 30° N, 65° 30° W, what the navigational officer aboard U-69 thought of as grid square BA 3669, a few miles off Cap-de-la-Madeleine on the north shore of the Gaspé—a day or so ahead of convoy NL-9.

  Thirty-six hours later, it was the turn of German radio technology to play a pivotal role.

  Although two years older than Hartwig’s U-517 and Thurmann’s U-553, Gräf’s U-69 was equipped with an up-to-date FuMB 1 Metox 600A radar detector. Developed after the Germans recovered an ASV Mk1 radar from a Wellington bomber shot down in 1941, Metox picked up 1.5-metre radar waves, the size generated by Arrowheads and Hepatica’s ASW radar. Metox registered radar waves at a distance of 30 miles, the distance and bearings being estimatable by the pitch and loudness of the tone. A month before entering the St. Lawrence, Gräf used Metox to great effect as he sneaked through the US defences off the Maryland coast on his mission to plant twelve mines in Chesapeake Bay.

  The Metox alarm that sounded at 9:38 p.m. on October 8 did more than drive U-69 beneath the rain squalls sweeping across the St. Lawrence. Its character—“moderate length, grows louder, does not fluctuate”—told Gräf that his prey was near. Five minutes later and thirty metres below the surface, the six propellers of NL-9 were picked up by hydrophone microphones on the forward deck casing in front of the conning tower. Twenty-five minutes later, at 10:20 p.m., the sound waves rolling over U-69 were strong enough to give Gräf the numbers he needed: he surfaced, set a course of 250° and called for half speed in the hope that the convoy’s own noise would mask his 426-kilogram propeller revolving at 165 revolutions per minute.

  Then, at 10:40, helped by the “slight northern lights” and the “strong phosphorescence” caused by the “mirror-calm” waters, Gräf spotted “several silhouettes bearing 220[°].”

  Unaware of what was happening out beyond the shores of Métis Beach, David Gendron sat writing a love letter at the family’s rolltop writing desk in the large living room, the far windows of which looked out on the St. Lawrence. His family slept on.

  At seven minutes to midnight, on both Arrowhead and Hepatica, the first watch (2000–2400 hrs.) was coming to an end.

  “Watch keeping was both routine and extremely intense,” recalls Frank Curry, who began his life in the navy as an able seaman on the corvette HMCS Kamsack. “At the beginning of each watch, a lookout was briefed by the lookout he was replacing and by the officer of the watch as to anything to watch out for: Is the second ship in column 3 making too much smoke? Is a ship beginning to drop out of the convoy?

  “For the next four hours, a lookout’s world was reduced to the elements—sun, darkness, rain, wind, fog (and, on the North Atlantic run in the winter, ice)—and 90° from the bow to the beam or the beam to the stern.”

  “Sweep after endless sweep,” Curry recalls. “Each was a slow scan, and always you were looking out into the middle distance where the convoy’s ships were or where an enemy periscope might appear. The time passed interminably slowly.”

  “Even towards the end of the watch,” he remembers, “the tension did not let up. You always knew that your watch keeping might be coming to an end but that at any time all hell could break loose. At the end you expected your replacement—and if he was late, you had a few choice words for him. Then you could head to the mess deck and get a cup of coffee, or, if yours was an 8-to-4 duty watch, you had four hours of seaman’s duties to do.”

  Aboard SS Carolus and New York News, which sailed ahead of Arrowhead, other men kept watch, as a third of their crews slept in their bunks.

  Eight hundred metres away in U-69, no one slept. The control-room crew was on a knife’s edge as the Metox indicated that the U-boat was well within a radar field. Gräf read out the numbers—“Speed 9, bows right 90, range = 2,000”—that aimed the torpedoes in tubes I and IV at “3 overlapping freighters.” At 11:57 p.m., Gräf’s Oberleutnant Johannes Hagemann pushed two buttons.

  Immediately after firing from tubes I and IV, while being blanketed by full-strength radar waves, Gräf ordered his helmsman to turn U-69 180° to starboard so he could fire again. Within seconds the huge piston behind the torpedo in Tube V was released and tons of air vented into the U-boat as the piston sped down the tube, pushing the torpedo out at 30 knots.

  As soon as the “clank” signalling the closing of the torpedo tube was heard, Gräf “opened out [proceeded] at slow speed”—some 9 knots—on course 50.

  Three miles away, the huge light above David Gendron revolved four times per min
ute.

  At three minutes to midnight, after one of Arrowhead‘s lookouts spotted one of Gräf’s torpedoes passing ten feet behind the ship’s stern, Action Stations rang out. Skinner’s helmsman swung his helm hard to starboard as Arrowhead once again started down the track of a Nazi torpedo.

  Within seconds, an explosion ripped through the night. Less than a minute later, as Gendron, his family and other residents of Métis Beach were rushing to their windows, a second, much louder blast shook the Quebec night. Another eleven men died in the St. Lawrence.

  Beneath the “tall dark explosive plume” and by the light of the “substantial flames” that Gräf reported back to Dönitz, the men on Carolus were running—as hundred of others had since the beginning of the Battle of the St. Lawrence.

  Carolus‘s chief officer, who had just come off duty and must have been walking on the boat deck, told the Canadian Press, “The shock of the impact knocked me out on my feet for two or three seconds. When I came to, I tried to release the aft boats, but the ship was listing too sharply. I tried to get to a boat but couldn’t make it.” His ship was sinking quickly. He jumped into the water and swam for it.

  Naval Gunner Henry Harley from London, England, and a few other men with him in the saloon boy’s cabin fought their way through the ever-mounting rushing water that poured through the ship’s passageways. By the time they got to the boat deck, Carolus was listing 20° to port. “When we got out on the deck I shouted to the second officer, Anderson, ‘What’s happened?’ ‘We ‘re hit! Make off the boats!’ he ordered,” Harley told the Canadian Press.

  But the boats Harley and his mates ran to were smashed. All around the ship, men were jumping into the water. They could feel the steel—thousands of tons of it, shaped by shipwrights in Sunderland in 1919—bending. Amid the cacophony of burst steam lines, the roar of flames and the rush of water, they could hear the scream of the steel being wrenched by hundreds of tons of force, wrecking the finely calibrated distribution that had been outlined by pencils on clean drawing desks during the Great War.