The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Edward E. Ritzer

  Frank N. Roy

  Alfred T. Savoy

  Walter B. Sealey

  Gerald J. Smith

  William R. Smith

  Stanley L. Smithson

  Anthony Smrke

  Arthur D. Snyder

  George L. S. Stefiuk

  Dirk C. Swart

  Roger C. Thomas

  Hugh L. Todd

  Frank R. Trenholm

  Eldon G. Vincent

  Spencer Wallington

  Wilfred Watson

  Conway J. Watt

  Clayton L. White

  Arthur J. Whitehead

  Milton E. Whymark

  Harold G. Woods

  Requiescat in pace

  APPENDIX A

  TWO SPIES AND A

  WEATHER STATION

  On May 14, 1942, two days after Karl Thurmann’s U-553 sank SS Leto, U-213, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Amelung von Varendorff, became the first of three U-boats to land on Canada’s shores. Two, Varendorff’s and Kapitänleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Wissmann’s U-518, landed spies; the other, U-537, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Peter Schrewe, landed a weather station in Labrador. Neither of the two spies, Leutnant (M. A.) “Langbein” and Werner Janowski, operated in Canada as intended by their German handlers. And though set up without incident, the weather station, called Kurt, failed to supply BdU with weather information because a German radio station jammed the wavelength on which the weather station’s radio broadcast.

  “LANGBEIN”

  After living in Canada between 1928 and 1932, working in both Alberta and Manitoba, the man known as Langbein returned to Germany prior to the outbreak of the war. After being mobilized, he was chosen for espionage training; his first mission was to Romania. Then, recognizing his ability to blend into Canadian society, Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence branch, sent him back to Canada on an intelligence-gathering mission.

  Landed from U-213 at 3 a.m. on May 14, 1942, near the village of St. Martin, New Brunswick, Langbein immediately buried his transmitter and some other equipment and assumed the identity prepared by German intelligence. His national registration card was prepared in the name of Alfred Haskins and gave his address as 183 Younge [sic] Street, Toronto. He was also supplied with some $7,000 in large US bills and either $12 or $13 in Canadian bills; surprisingly, none of St. Martin’s shopkeepers noticed that the bills this stranger used were out-of-date dollars.

  Given his prior knowledge of Canada, his ability to speak English and what one historian records as his “likeable character,” Langbein should have been a valuable spy. What his handlers did not know, however, was that Langbein had become disenchanted with Nazi Germany and saw his mission to Canada as a chance to escape.

  Langbein hitchhiked to Montreal, where he was able to cash his larger US bills in some of the city’s less reputable establishments. Later, he was caught in a raid on a whorehouse. His identity was preserved, however, because, like the other patrons caught in flagrante delicto in such establishments, he was booked under an assumed name and then allowed to pay the fine.

  A month after landing in Canada, Langbein settled in Ottawa, staying at the Grand Hotel, which stood at the corner of Sussex and George streets. The hotel’s bar was, according to the Ottawa Citizen in a 1952 article on Langbein, “a favourite spot for the members of the armed forces and civil servants employed in the [now demolished] Daly Building across the street.” Langbein did not, however, make use of this happy coincidence, preferring to live off his ever-diminishing bankroll. In 1943, probably to conserve funds, he moved from the Grand Hotel to a boarding house.

  On November i, 1944, Langbein walked into the Naval Intelligence Directorate on Sparks Street and informed an incredulous official that he was a German spy. The RCMP did not believe his story until, with Sergeant Cecil Bayfield watching, he dug up the transmitter and other equipment he had buried over two years earlier. The RCMP quickly established that “Haskins” had not engaged in espionage. He was interned until the end of the war, after which he was repatriated to Germany.

  JANOWSKI

  Werner Alfred Waldemar von Janowski had also lived in Canada prior to the war. He married an Ontario woman in 1932. Over the next six years, before he deserted his wife and went back to Germany, he toured the province to take pictures and paint waterfront scenes. He may have joined the French Foreign Legion and may have served with the German army at Dieppe. What is known for certain is that on November 9, 1942, U-518 landed him on the beach a few miles from New Carlisle, Quebec.

  Unlike Langbein, Janowski buried only his naval uniform. He carried his two large suitcases (one containing a transmitter) into town. The suitcases, according to historian Michael Hadley, were “obviously of German manufacture.” As it had done with Langbein, German intelligence supplied Janowski with a great deal of cash: $4,994 Canadian and $1,000 in US twenty-dollar gold pieces. His national registration card was issued in the name of William Branton of 323 Danforth Avenue, Toronto. As well, he carried a 1940 Quebec driver’s licence. One of the two paperbacks he carried, likely to use as code books, was a 1939 edition of Mary Travers’s Mary Poppins, published in Leipzig; imprinted on its cover were the words, “Not to be introduced into the British Empire or the USA.”

  Janowski attracted attention almost immediately upon presenting himself at a hotel in New Carlisle owned by Earle Annett and asking for a room in which he could bathe and shave before lunch. Annett’s suspicions were aroused first by the strange man’s “submarine smell” (the smell of musty clothes and diesel oil) and by the fact that the patron told him that he had just arrived in town by bus; the first bus would not arrive in town until noon.

  While Janowski ate lunch in the hotel’s dining room, Annett searched his room. He didn’t find Mary Poppins. However, he did find several matches that he knew were manufactured in Belgium, with which, of course, Canada had had no trade for over three years. The bills Janowski used to pay for his room and meal, Annett recognized immediately, had been withdrawn from use several years before the war. Annett knew that Janowski planned to take the afternoon train to Montreal, so he sent his son to warn the Quebec Provincial Police.

  The QPP acted quickly. Constable Alphonse Duchesneau, posing as a radio salesman from Toronto, took the train seat next to Janowski. After some conversation, during which Duchesneau noted to himself Janowski’s German accent, he informed Janowski that he was a police officer and demanded that Janowski produce his identification. All but one of Janowski’s papers were in order. His national registration card was printed in English on one side and French on the other, as they were in Quebec; Ontario cards were printed in English only.

  Duchesneau demanded that Janowski open his luggage so he could search it. At that point Janowski declared, “I am a German naval officer. I landed from a submarine last night, and after landing, decided that I would desert. I therefore changed into civilian clothing and buried my naval uniform on the shore near the spot where I had landed. I insist on being allowed to recover my uniform and being given the treatment laid down for prisoners of war by the Geneva Convention.”

  Janowski led police to where he’d buried his uniform. Several days later, he demanded of RCMP Inspector C. W. Harvison, commissioner of the RCMP, who had come to interview him in a local jail, that he be “permitted to don his uniform and that he be treated as an officer and a gentleman.” In 1967 Harvison recalled—with, no doubt, much understatement—that “my reply may not have been in the best military tradition, but as least it startled and served to deflate the prisoner,” who had entered the room clicking his heels like a Nazi on parade. “Nuts,” said Harvison. “I believe you are spy. Sit down and keep quiet until I speak to you.”

  Harvison then set out to “turn him around”—that is, to turn him into a double agent who would feed disinformation to German intelligence. The commissioner pointed out to Janowski that his handlers back in Berlin had not shown any great regard for his safety, t
he old-style bills and mistaken identity card being his evidence. “Those goddamn Gestapo,” Janowski exclaimed after one of Harvison’s men told him that some of the $20 bills had been poorly counterfeited. “The money was secured from them, and they have framed me. They wanted me caught and executed.” Janowski then asked, “If I am executed, you think it will be by hanging?”—a question that told Harvison of Janowski’s inner debate. Seizing the moment, the commissioner replied, “Most probably,” after which his prisoner again fell silent for a moment before “sobbing and banging the desk while he repeated over and over again, “I will not be hanged, I will not be hanged.”

  Harvison waited and then told Janowski that he, Harvison, would be leaving the next morning and he would have to have Janowski’s answer by then. Later that day, Harvison had Janowski brought back into the interrogation room, where the erstwhile German naval officer agreed to be a double agent.

  Janowski’s RCMP handlers kept watch on him for the remainder of the war. From December 1942 through November 1943, Janowski fed his handlers in Hamburg disinformation produced by special intelligence committees concerning the armed services units in and around Montreal and even Quebec City, the types of ships in port and anything he could learn about submarine nets. No record exists of Janowski’s fate after the war; however, it is assumed that he was repatriated.

  “KURT”

  Named for its builder, Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer, the weather station called Kurt was the only German “base” established in North America during World War II. Similar automated weather stations, all manufactured by Siemens, were established in arctic or subarctic regions, including at Spitzbergen, in Greenland, and in the Barents Sea north of Norway.

  The automated base consisted of twelve 1 x 1.5 metre cylinders, most weighing some 220 pounds, which had to be manhandled out of U-537’s hold onto rubber dinghies, floated to shore and then carried 140 yards inland and up a 170-foot-high hill. Nine of the cylinders contained nickel-cadmium and dry-cell high-voltage batteries. One contained a sophisticated mechanism that recorded the temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and barometric pressure, and then encoded this information in Morse code. The two other parts were the radio aerial and a tripod upon which were mounted temperature, pressure and wind sensors. Kurt broadcast at 3940 kHz with enough power to be picked up at stations in northern Europe. To throw off the suspicions of any hunter or fisherman who happened to find Kurt, each cylinder was stamped with the name of the official-sounding (but non-existent) Canadian Weather Service; the Germans also left Canadian cigarette butts and, for good measure, a few empty emergency-ration cans.

  Twenty-eight hours after surfacing at 60° 5° N 64° 24° W in Martin Bay on the northeastern coast of Labrador on October 22, 1943, U-537’s captain gave the order to weigh anchor. Kurt, or WFL-26 (Wetterfukgerat-Land #26) as it officially was known, broadcast its first weathergram three minutes later. For several days, every three hours Schrewe’s radiomen picked up Kurt’s broadcasts on schedule. Then they began noticing that the broadcasts were being jammed. One can only imagine their surprise when they discovered that the station jamming Kurt was in fact German.

  Unlike “Langbein” and Janowski, who were known to Canadian authorities during the war and who disappeared after the war, Kurt remained unknown until the 1970s, when Franz Selinger, a retired Siemens engineer, wrote a history of the German Weather Service. Kurt’s remains, which are on display in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, were discovered in 1981 by a team led by historian W. A. B. Douglas.

  APPENDIX B

  ANTI-SEMITISM AND

  THE KRIEGSMARINE

  The debate over the extent to which the Kriegsmarine or the Wehrmacht, as opposed to the Einsatzgruppen, shared Hitler’s eliminationist antiSemitism (to borrow Daniel Goldhagen’s perfect phrase) continues. Even if we grant that Timothy Mulligan (author of Neither Sharks nor Wolves: The Men of Nazi Germany’s U-boat Arm, 1939–1945) has a point when he argues that because the U-Bootwaffe’s bases were far from the death camps of Eastern Europe, it is going too far to say, as he does, that Dönitz’s men were “isolated from the regime’s true nature.”

  First, it is unclear that physical distance itself explains ignorance. Second, Mulligan himself cites U-boatmen who had heard of mass killings of Jews in Latvia. In his Dönitz: The Last Führer, historian Peter Padfield quotes Diesel Matt (U-333), who tells of having been presented with a wooden box containing watches after his 1943 return to base: “The watches were all second-hand, all in working order; a few were watches for the blind. Then we knew exactly. That was too macabre. Nobody should say that he knew nothing. We knew at that time where they came from.”

  The more stolid members of the Wehrmacht may have been shocked and even revolted by the wanton killings by the SS in Poland and the east and by the factories of death of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Birkenau. But, as many histories have made clear, the German army and General Staff stood by and did precisely nothing.

  Perhaps more revealing than the statistics of deportations and killings is this 1942 report, quoted by Jonathan Steinberg in All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–43 (a comparative study of Italian and German attitudes toward the Holocaust), from a German army counterintelligence officer in Libya who was complaining of the Italian army’s scandalous attitude toward the Jews under its control: “It becomes clearer every day that the local Jews sit ‘in an iron barrel’ [that is, are protected], as the Italians appropriately put it …. A closer look reveals that the Italian administrative apparatus itself is ‘the iron barrel,’ which surrounds the Jews protectively and allows them to go on pursuing their dirty business. One frequently hears from Italian officials the astonishing opinion that the Jews of Libya are ‘decent chaps.’… The police make no distinction between Jews and Italians.” Steinberg goes on to comment: “The German intelligence officer, [was] not an SS fanatic but an army counter-intelligence specialist …. [He] simply cannot imagine how Italians could call Jews, any Jews, ‘decent chaps.’ He is amazed that the Italian police do not distinguish between Italian and Jew …. German anti-semitism was not the special preserve of a few fanatics in black uniforms but a pervasive, widespread and fundamental attitude found throughout the entire Wehrmacht. In many years of intensive research in German army archives, I have found fewer than five examples of German officers expressing anything other than the opinions quoted above.”

  APPENDIX C

  SHIPS TORPEDOED IN

  THE ST. LAWRENCE RIVER AND

  THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE,

  1942 AND 1944

  Ships Torpedoed in the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence

  ∗ Denotes ships torpedoed but not sunk.

  a Both E. H. Read and L. Marchand dispute the figure of three men lost given by the Department of Veterans Affairs publication The Battle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

  APPENDIX D

  U-BOAT PATROLS IN

  THE ST. LAWRENCE

  a Since SS Frederika Lensen could not be salvaged, naval records record it as being sunk.

  SOURCES

  The two most important historians of the Battle of the St. Lawrence are Michael L. Hadley and Roger Sarty. The former’s U-boats against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985) was the first scholarly work to give shape to the battle. Sarty’s contribution to the recently published No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1939–1943, edited by W. A. B. Douglas (Vanwell, 2002), “The Battle of the St. Lawrence, February 1942-December 1941,” is required reading, especially for those interested in how the battle fits into the overall story of the Royal Canadian Navy in World War II. Equally important are Sarty’s articles “Ultra, Air Power, and the Second Battle of the St. Lawrence, 1944,” in To Die Gallantly: The Battle of the Atlantic, edited by T. J. Runyan and J. M. Copes (Westview, 1994), and “The Limits of Ultra: The Schnorkel U-boat Offensive against North America, Nove
mber 1944-January 1945,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 12, no. 2 (April 1997), 44–68. Less accessible but of great use to me are Sarty’s unpublished “Eastern Air Command Anti-Submarine Operations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1942” and “Eastern Air Command Anti-Submarine Operations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1942,” both of which were prepared for the National Defence Directorate of History; I thank Roger for making copies of this work available to me. More accessible is W. A. B. Douglas’s Creation of a National Air Force: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force (University of Toronto Press, 1986), particularly the chapter “The Battle of the St. Lawrence.” More popular presentations of the battle can be found in Sarty’s Canada and the Battle of the Atlantic (Art Global, 1998) and Sarty and Brian Tennyson’s Guardian of the Gulf: Sydney, Cape Breton, and the Atlantic Wars (University of Toronto Press, 2000). The most accessible history of the Battle of the St. Lawrence is the excellent Web site maintained by the Musée Naval du Québec (Quebec Naval Museum), http://www.mnq-nmq.org.

  Brian and Terence McKenna’s documentary War at Sea: U-boats in the St. Lawrence (NFB, 1995) must be treated very carefully, for while they correctly depict the RCN’s equipment problems, they leave the impression that both the RCN’s staff and their political masters happily sent men to their deaths.

  In her U-boat Adventures: Firsthand Accounts from World War II (Naval Institute Press, 1999), Melanie Wiggins devotes a chapter to Operation Kiebitz, as does C. W. Harvison in his memoir of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, The Horsemen (McClelland and Stewart, 1967); Harvison’s book also contains a chapter on Werner Janowski. Daniel Hoffman’s Camp 30, “Ehrenwort”: A German Prisoner-of-War Camp in Bowmanville, 1941–1945 (Bowmanville Museum, 1988) contains a great deal of information about the operations of the Lorient Espionage Group. Stephen B. Lett’s “A Book and Its Cover,” RCMP Quarterly, vol. 39, no 2 (April 1974), tells how the RCMP disassembled and then reassembled the book that contained the maps being send to the Lorient Espionage Group. Operation Kiebitz, by Jean-Guy Dugas (Ed. Franc-Jeu, 1992) is a French-language history of the breakout and recapture of Wolfgang Heyda. Jak P. Mallmann Showell’s U-boats at War: Landings on Hostile Shores (Ian Allan, 2000) contains important information about and excellent pictures of all three U-boat landings on Canadian shores.