The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  In June 1943, six months after Vichy was occupied by Hitler’s army and the last pretence that Pétain’s government represented la gloire de la France vanished—and while Courchènes continued to worry about the moral effect of the airmen training at Mont Joli—Montreal papers, including Le Devoir, ran articles praising the Fusiliers, the home army under Brigadier-General Edmond Blais and Gaspesians’ preparedness. “Tout Gaspésien est devenu un soldat,” declared La Presse on June 17, 1943, in an article in which Roger Champeaux recounted the vulnerabilities of the Gaspé and then asserted that the army emplacements and ADC training he had seen on a tour of the Gaspé provided the necessary protection. “Les Gaspésiens son aux aguets” (“Gaspesians are on the lookout”), wrote Le Devoir’s Lucien Desbiens five days later while praising the training of ADC volunteers and Blais’s soldiers, each of whom, Desbiens wrote, “is a specialist.” A year later, journalists returned to the Gaspé and in their articles reported Blais’s words. “The Gaspé has been, since the beginning of the conflict, the first zone of war in Canada. The Gaspé is the front line: its population has shown its bravery. This population, we have seen as nowhere else in the country, has been ready and able to combat the enemy.”

  MARCH 17, 1943

  One thousand two hundred miles east of the coast of Newfoundland, six U-boats sink nine ships in convoy HX-229; the loss of thirteen of thirty-nine ships over the course of the three-day battle almost convinces the Admiralty to abandon convoying.

  Three thousand miles east in London, the Royal Air Force establishes a secret bomber squadron whose mission is to destroy the dams in the Ruhr River.

  Four thousand five hundred miles east in Piaski, Poland, more than 1,200 Jews are killed in retribution for the killing of a much-feared SS trooper.

  Four thousand miles southeast in Tunisia, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army prepares for an offensive against German positions on the Mareth Line.

  Hansard records the clash between Sasseville Roy and Naval Services Minister Macdonald as being part of the 1943 budget debate, which had begun a few days earlier. But every member of the House, every visitor in the gallery and the press knew that neither Roy nor Macdonald was speaking about either the budget in general or the Naval Estimates, which totalled $3.6 billion. Rather, on March 15, 1943, with less than two months to go before the opening of the 1943 coastal shipping season, Roy had done nothing less than indicate his lack of confidence in the minister and, therefore, in the King government’s handling of security on the St. Lawrence.

  Shock at the loss of Caribou, the coming of the winter freeze-up of the St. Lawrence and Macdonald’s statement on November 24, 1942, that there had been “20 sinkings in the whole river and gulf area” had, for a time, muted the kind of criticisms made by L’Action Catholique‘s Laurent. On March 4, 1943, however, in a speech to the Quebec legislature, Onésime Gagnon, the Union Nationale member for the riding of Matane, returned to the rumour Justice Minister Louis St. Laurent had sought to squelch the previous November. According to Gagnon, whose provincial riding covered roughly the same territory as Roy’s federal riding of Gaspé, “the federal Minister of Naval Affairs has not told the people of Quebec the truth—not 20 but upward of 30 ships were sunk in the Gulf of St. Lawrence last summer.” Included in this number, he told the Quebec legislature, were “two United States destroyers that were torpedoed either in the St. Lawrence River or in the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” a claim that was accepted by Le Devoir and Le Droit, and by other members of the Quebec legislature, even though the US had made no reference to the loss of a USN ship in the St. Lawrence.

  Premier Godbout’s response suggests that Macdonald’s decision to share information with him in 1942 had quieted his fears. Godbout began by noting how Gagnon’s attitude toward defence matters had changed since 1940. At that time, the premier reminded the Quebec legislature, Gagnon had complained that “the federal government buys cannons in place of giving bread to the people.”

  In Ottawa, Macdonald responded quickly. On March 7, the minister for naval services used a standing commitment to tour RCN ships in Halifax to challenge Gagnon: “If he gives me the date and the locality of each of the 30 sinkings, I will investigate each case.” Judging well his crowd, the minister continued: “If Mr. Gagnon does not trust the Naval Service, we will appoint a committee to investigate.” Macdonald’s pledge that “this committee might include a representative appointed by the Quebec member and the navy,” and an independent party agreeable to both the minister and Gagnon, reveals as much about the perennial problem of Quebec-federal relations as does any other political statement during the war.

  Two days later, on March 9, as Macdonald and Gagnon traded telegrams about the mandate of the proposed committee, Hormidas Langlais, the Union Nationale member of the Provincial Parliament for Îles-de-la-Madeleine, brought forward a motion demanding that the government of Quebec table “a copy of all correspondence” exchanged between it and the federal government pertaining to the St. Lawrence since 1937. After repeating Gagnon’s claim that thirty, not twenty, ships had been sunk the previous year, Langlais protested the closing of the St. Lawrence to transoceanic shipping. “The weight of this decision,” he thundered, “falls more heavily” on Quebec’s population; the benefits “flow to Saint John and Halifax, where it has been necessary to expand in order to handle the increased traffic.” Langlais then directly accused Macdonald, who represented a Halifax riding, of favouring ports in English provinces.

  Langlais was answered by Godbout’s attorney general, Léon Casgrain, who began by reminding his Quebec parliamentary colleagues that the questions are “posed to Mr. Angus Macdonald, naval minister. However, this man is in Ottawa.” His next comment, “No one in this Legislative Assembly, none of us possesses the necessary lights, knows the facts or is qualified to discuss in detail questions of naval strategy,” might, especially after some thirty years of constitutional wrangling with Quebec, sound strange to our ears, but was nevertheless true. Casgrain ended by saying that the government that stood before the opposition in the Quebec legislative assembly “will do its duty to work to administer our province and leave to the federal government their care of our defence.”

  In Ottawa the next day, March 10, Gordon Graydon, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, asked Macdonald about the debates that had occurred in Quebec. Macdonald responded by explaining to the House his offer to Gagnon. The minister used his reply to Graydon’s supplementary question, which again cited Gagnon’s numbers, to begin to cut the ground out from under the Quebec legislator: “Mr. Gagnon says that he has a list of the names of the ships and the dates on which they were sunk. I asked Mr. Gagnon to produce this list for my investigation. I have asked him by telegram and he replied that surely my own department has the information. My department cannot have this information on ghost ships that have been sunk—flying Dutchmen or something of that sort.”

  After assuring the House that there were no bases in the St. Lawrence at which U-boats could refuel, Macdonald said, “I believe I am safe in saying that every possible precaution will be taken by the Canadian armed services—the navy, the army and the air force—to deal with every situation that can be expected to develop.”

  Maddeningly vague though the minister’s words were, they were far from parliamentary bluster. During the winter, ADC had been reorganized and thousands more volunteers had been trained, bringing the total to 3,968 by the beginning of 1943, and rising to 9,943 by December 1943. EAC had been strengthened by the addition of 47 RCAF planes (for a total of 98) and more than 100 trainers (for a total of 386)—the largest group based at Mont Joli. RCN ships had been equipped with the more powerful Mark VIII depth charges. Further, the RCN had established “killer groups” designed to operate independently of the escort groups that provided “close protection of convoys.” And, perhaps most important, at the National Research Council labs on Sussex Drive in Ottawa, work was proceeding apace on a microwave early warning radar,
to be deployed early in the shipping season; this system used 10.7-centimetre waves capable of locating surfaced U-boats at greater distances than the equipment then being used.

  King’s naval minister then set about trying to drive a wedge between Gagnon and his constituents (and by implication, also between Roy and his constituents). “To cope adequately with a problem of this kind, however, involves co-operation of citizens in the area,” Macdonald began, “and the co-operation of members of this House and of provincial legislatures. To disclose information which might be helpful to the enemy by asking questions in public or by making statements in public is not doing a service to this country or for the welfare of the parts of the country which are directly affected by this discussion or for the protection of the lives of those who must fight every threat that is made.”

  On March 15, after asking the House’s leave to allow him to postpone his remarks on the budget, Roy repeated Langlais’s and Gagnon’s claim that thirty, not twenty, ships had been sunk in 1942 and made several new serious charges. The first touched on the RCN and the postal service. At the height of the battle the previous July, Roy said, a corvette had been detached to accompany Jean Brillant on a sport-fishing trip. The escort had been justified, Roy said, by a “request of the Postmaster General (Mr. Mulock) because it [Jean Brillant] was carrying mail to the north shore. However, the boat never dropped off mail on her way on but proceeded to the fishing trip for quite a few days.”

  Roy’s second charge criticized the lack of co-operation between the RCN and the RCAF. He reported that in late July 1942, after witnessing a midafter-noon “battle between two corvettes and a submarine,” Laurent Giroux of Griffon Cove “rushed to a telephone and called the Gaspé operator, telling her to pass the word to the Gaspé military base, where we were supposed to have some bombers.” Why, he asked, as the battle went on for more than an hour, did “no help ever come from Gaspé, though the distance to Griffon Cove as a bird would fly is only about six and a half miles?” To this example, Roy added the attacks of September 11, 1942, on HMCS Charlottetown, of September 16 on SS Joannis and of September 15 on SS Saturnus and Inger Elizabeth, including the story of lighthouse keeper Ferguson’s efforts to alert EAC. He also reiterated Gagnon’s claim that the RCAF could not do its job because it had to get approval from Ottawa before it could fly.

  Roy’s third charge concerned both the war economy as a whole and the economic health of Montreal and Quebec in particular. Though he did not produce any figures, closing the St. Lawrence to transoceanic shipping had, he claimed, done “much harm … to the harbours of Montreal and Quebec,” an almost exact quotation of Gagnon’s and Langlais’s claim that closing the St. Lawrence prejudiced Quebec City and Montreal in favour of Atlantic Canadian ports. Roy then argued that the closing of the St. Lawrence had so overloaded the single-track railroad that connected Halifax with Montreal that the government was wasting millions of dollars of war material: “If some honourable members travelled between Montreal and Quebec, I am sure they must have seen tanks and other war materials [left] there to rot, through lack of means to send them to the places where they are so badly needed.” Roy continued by citing an editorial from the Chronicle Telegraph, Quebec City’s English newspaper: “The St. Lawrence is a strategic factor of first-rate importance in the battle of supplies…. It ought to be kept open and in use and there is no reason why it cannot be kept open and in use with reasonable safety—as much safety as can be claimed for any other Atlantic route.”

  On March 17, Macdonald moved quickly to end the debate about the number of ships that had been sunk in 1942. In contravention of his own censorship regulations and, he claimed, in a break from the practice followed by the US and the UK, he named eighteen merchant ships and two warships that had been sunk and indicated where they were sunk. Macdonald turned next to Roy’s charge that a corvette had been sent to escort Jean Brillant on a fishing trip. Knowing that Roy would dismiss anything he said, the minister began with the extraordinary step of asking the House’s leave to lay before it affidavits sworn out by Jean BrManfs captain, the manager of the Lower St. Lawrence Navigation Company and Senator Jules-André Brillant, member of the legislative council of the province of Quebec (then the upper house of the Quebec provincial parliament), all of whom said that Jean Brillant “had had no escort.” Not content with spiking Roy’s story, Macdonald also took the occasion to directly attack Roy’s credibility: “The point on which I criticize the Honourable Member for Gaspé in the Jean Brillant [affair] is this. He knows Mr. Brillant (the Legislative Councillor concerned), he knows some of the other gentleman who were on that trip, and he could have asked them, ‘Were you accompanied by a corvette when going on the fishing trip?’ He never took that trouble; he assumed the worst.”

  Macdonald next turned to Roy’s claim that the RCN and RCAF were unable to co-ordinate their activities. Later in the speech, Macdonald would admit that communications problems had manifested themselves the previous September 15 (the day of the attacks on SS Saturnus and Inger Elizabeth). Seasoned debater that he was, however, Macdonald sought to cushion the blow of that admission by first undercutting Roy’s credibility on tactical questions. Of the claim that in the “latter part of July … a battle was engaged between a submarine and two corvettes,” Macdonald said, “I have had reports from the logs of the ships and I find that I must regretfully disappoint the Honourable Member for Gaspé. I must tell him that he has not had the privilege of witnessing a battle at all, and that all he heard was gun practice between two corvettes which were going up the river.”6

  Macdonald turned next to the necessity of closing the St. Lawrence. The river had to be closed to transoceanic shipping because, though the defences had become stronger, the RCN and the RCAF could not provide the kind of protection needed for transoceanic shipping to resume. Without getting into the details of what could be detected and what couldn’t, Macdonald reminded the House of the problems inherent in detecting submerged and surfaced U-boats and of the immensity of the St. Lawrence area: “When some people speak of a river they think of a fairly small stream that can be bridged or that can be easily netted; they think of a river perhaps half a mile or a mile wide. Let them remember that the St. Lawrence river, at the point furthest inland where an attack was made least year, is thirty miles wide.” This distance, he reminded the House, “is wider than the Straits of Dover between England and France.” To drive home the point, he reached back a year to February 12, 1942, when the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau humiliated the Royal Navy as they made their famous dash up the English Channel from the French port of Brest to the North Sea and finally to Germany: “If the great British Navy with all its experience and skill and strength and devotion to duty has not succeeded in making the Straits of Dover absolutely safe from submarines—indeed only a year ago it was unable to prevent certain great enemy ships from going through the straits—if that cannot be done there, is it to be wondered at that we cannot guarantee complete immunity for ships in the river St. Lawrence.”

  Despite the immense distances involved, the RCN and the RCAF had done well, Macdonald asserted. Yes, there had been deaths and losses, “but, I can say that of the total tonnage which used the river and the gulf last year, only three out of every thousand tons was sunk.”

  On June 9, the ever-present tension between English and French Canada briefly flared again when Roy rose on a point of privilege to take issue with a Montreal Daily Star editorial entitled “Opportunity for Service,” directed squarely at Gaspesians. Roy dismissed the first part of the editorial as “stupid” for stating that “the population of that area are now being given an opportunity, which they will no doubt seize with alacrity, to share in their own defence.” Given the number of civilians already in ADC and the number of enlistees in the Fusiliers, Roy’s epithet surely was correct. He took further umbrage at the editorial’s final paragraph, which went beyond chiding Gaspesians for a certain laxity in observing the dim-out: “The gove
rnment plans a campaign to enforce “dim-out” regulations and to discourage careless talk and the circulation of sensational and inaccurate rumours many of which last year were repeated in the House of Commons itself by members of affected constituencies” (emphasis added).

  The use of the term “careless talk” was more redolent than it is today. Especially in Maritime communities, this phrase was ubiquitous. The top half of thousands of posters showed a man being overheard telling another man in a bar, “She sails at midnight…” The bottom half showed a ship going down after being torpedoed, above the words “CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES.” Thus the Daily Star, as Roy rightly noted, was doing more than underlining the importance of the dim-out. It was none-to-subtly impugning both his own and his constituents’ patriotism.

  Before ending his point of privilege, Roy tweaked the Star’s nose by saying, “I believe that every Canadian citizen would have been much more happy to learn that those reports of sinkings in the St. Lawrence were merely rumours, but unfortunately they were true.” He then, rather deftly, took credit for having forced the government to acknowledge the sinkings “in this very House of Commons” and thus for the fact “that the government has decided to follow a new policy with respect to protection of the St. Lawrence.”

  By contrast with Parliament and the debate over the dim-out, after a flurry of activity between May 14 and May 16, triggered by a huff-duff report that correctly indicated that a U-boat had left the St. Lawrence, the river and gulf were quiet. U-262 entered the river on April 25 to pick up on PEI’s south coast prisoners who planned to break out of POW Camp 70 in Ontario; it left Canadian waters on May 10, having failed in its mission and having sustained severe ice damage. Over the course of the year, scores of coastal convoys sailed safely—indeed, so safely that on September 4 the British Admiralty urged that British ships again be allowed to sail independently from Sydney to Montreal. Convoying was ended for all St. Lawrence ships nine days later, a decision that resulted in an increase in EAC flying time from 1,232 hours in August to 1,581 hours in September.