3 Nothing better illustrates the British Admiralty’s “staggering lack of imagination,” to borrow historian Peter Padfield’s words, than its view of Germany’s opening bargaining position:
In this case Germany would have some 50 to 60 submarines, a situation which must give rise to some misgivings, but it is quite apparent from the attitude of the German representatives that it is quite a question of “Gleichberechugung” [equal rights] which is really exercising their mind and not the desire to acquire a large submarine fleet. In the present mood of Germany it seems probable that the surest way to persuade them to be moderate in their actual performance is to grant them every consideration in theory. In fact they are more likely to build up to submarine parity if we object to their theoretical right to do so, than if we agree that they have a moral justification.
4 Fo‘c’sle: short for “forecastle,” the forward part of a ship behind the bow in front of the “castle,” the old Spanish term for “bridge.”
5 Also, unlike their Canadian opponents, Dönitz’s men had been thoroughly militarized by both school and the Hitler Youth. Within two years of Hitler’s rise to power, the British cabinet received a report on Nazi education: “The German schoolboy of today is being methodically educated, mentally, and physically, to defend his country …. But, I fear,” added Foreign Secretary Sir Eric Phipps, “that, if this or a later German Government ever requires it of him, he will be found equally well fitted and ready to march or die on foreign soil.” The contrast with Canadian schooling is considered in chapter 6.
6 In addition to the Battle of the St. Lawrence, there were two other direct attacks on the North American mainland during the Second World War, both carried out by Japan. On the evening of June 20, 1942, I-26, a Japanese submarine, shelled the lighthouse at Estevan Point on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Twenty-five to thirty shells were fired; there were no injuries. Between November 1944 and April 1945, some 300 (of 9,300) bomb-carrying balloons launched from Japan reached North America. Bombs fell in Oregon, Washington, California, Alaska, British Columbia, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. The bombs failed in their intended purpose—to start forest fires and thus divert resources from the war effort and to sow panic—however, there were casualties in Oregon, where a minister’s wife and five children were killed by a balloon bomb. Both the United States and Canada maintained a complete news blackout about the Japanese balloon offensive.
CHAPTER ONE
1 Quoted and translated by David J. Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig in their The Destruction of the Bismarck (Stoddart, 2001), 88f.
2 All distances included in lists of historical events have been calculated from Gaspé, Quebec, and are rounded off to the nearest 100 miles.
3 The Finnish ship SS Carolus, sunk near Rimouski, Quebec, by U-69 on October 9, 1942, was also a prize of war seized by Canada after Finland allied itself with Hitler’s Germany in 1939.
4 Gaspé’s brush with fame came in 1940 during the height of the Blitz, when it was designated, under the so-called “spare bedroom” policy, as the port to which the British fleet would steam if England fell to the Nazis.
5 Vessel’s weight in air = volume of hull immersed in water X water density.
6 This is exactly what happened to the 5,229-ton SS Muneric, its holds laden with heavy iron ore and hence more than half empty, after being torpedoed by U-432 on September 10, 1941. Two of Muneric’s convoy companions, SS Joannis and Mount Taygetus, were torpedoed in the St. Lawrence four months after Nicoya.
7 A 1948 study found that sailors immersed in 60°F (16°C) water could be expected to survive less than five hours; sailors in water of 40° to 41°F (4°C) had “minutes only.” The average temperature of the waters where the Nicoya sank is 40°F (4°C); the average daytime air temperature is 44.5°F (7°C).
8 Nationwide, 80 per cent of voters voted to free the government from its “no conscription” pledge; in Quebec, 80 per cent voted to hold the government to its pledge.
9 Quoted and translated by Michael L. Hadley in his U-Boats Against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters (McGill-Queens Press, 1985), 276.
10 Over the course of ten patrols, Thurmann sank thirteen ships, for a total of 64,612 tons; he damaged another two ships totalling 15,273 tons. Thurmann’s U-553 was lost with all forty-seven hands in late January 1943; his last radio message was “Sehrohr unklar” (“Periscope not clear”).
CHAPTER TWO
1 This tremendous industrial achievement is even more stunning when set in the context of North America’s total wartime production and the difference between the two nations’ populations. With 130 million people, the United States produced the above-mentioned ships and 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, 2,000,000 army trucks and some 87,000 landing craft; the United States Navy ended the war with more than 90 aircraft carriers. With a population of a little over 8 million, Canada produced the above-mentioned ships and 5,096 aircraft, 5,066 artillery pieces and anti-aircraft guns, and more than 7,400 tanks and heavy trucks.
2 One expert estimated that 166 million tons of cargo would fill eleven lines of railway boxcars stretching from Vancouver to Halifax.
3 Such public relations gimmicks were hardly needed. On March 6, 1942, just five days before the sinking of SS Nicoya, L’Echo du Bas St-Laurent crowed, “The Lower St. Lawrence and the Gaspésie buy more than $1,200,000.00” in Victory Bonds. The tiny village of Témiscouata subscribed for $59,950. For a full discussion of Canada’s oil convoys, see Robert C. Fischer’s “‘We’ll Get Our Own’: Canada and the Oil Shipping Crisis of 1942” (Red Duster, 1993), and p. 407f of No Higher Purpose by W.A.B. Douglas et al.
4 The effort was one of Canada’s great successes: 77 tankers in 14 convoys were escorted safely though the same U-boat-infested waters off the American coast in which more than 150 unescorted tankers under US control went to the bottom.
5 An improvised special convoy, QSS-1, sailed safely under escort on May 9, two days before the attack on Nicoya and Leto.
6 Had U-132 been perpendicular to the convoy Vogelsang would have said, “angle on bow = 0°”; had it been parallel, he would have said “angle on bow 90°.”
7 In May 1943, a U-boat slipped through Halifax’s outer defences and laid fifty-three mines. Port Defence Officer Geoffrey Smith, of whom we will hear much more later, suspected that a U-boat had crossed the asdic loop, and warned the harbour patrol boats; he recalls hearing the explosions of the mines being detonated by the Bangor minesweepers.
8 A measure of the power of the bathyscaphe effect is the fact that after the torpedoing of SS British Freedom on January 14, 1945, off Halifax, Allied ships were unable to get an asdic contact on the ship’s stern—even though its bow was out of the water. US studies showed that in the Canadian zone of the Northwest Atlantic, asdic sweeps could not penetrate deeper than 200 feet, and in the St. Lawrence the effect would have been stronger because of the mixing not just of cold and warmer water but also of salt and fresh water.
9 Godbout was, in fact, correct: U-213 had landed a spy, code-named “Langbein,” on May 14. However, since “Langbein” immediately disappeared, neither Godbout nor any other Canadian authority knew about his presence until 1944. (See Appendix A.)
10 Lensen’s officer was mistaken about the number of lascars lost; the correct number is three.
11 Lensen never left Grande-Vallée Bay. She broke up in early 1943, though pieces of it were still visible until late 1967, when they settled far enough into the bottom to be covered by the waters of the St. Lawrence. On June 19, 2003, Robert Spence’s daughter, Maureen Hall, in a ceremony arranged by André Kirouac, Director of the Naval Museum of Quebec, dropped a wreath over the site where Lensen lies.
CHAPTER THREE
1 Skinner’s nickname, “Iff “—pronounced with the broad “eh” of a Newfoundland accent, “Ehh-lf”—came from his penchant for saying, “Eh-ff the Germans attack.”
2 Roberto was used to Canadian wat
ers. In 1940, he was part of the crew that took USS Crown Shelf and Wicks, two of the four-stacker World War I-era destroyers that were part of the “destroyers for bases” deal, up to Halifax, where they were turned over to the RN. He was one of the first men drafted onto Laramie. “When we got to her, she’d been laid up for years. She was a real rustbucket. The engines and most of the equipment from the fire room had been taken topside and disassembled. We worked like buzzards putting her back together. We had to strip other ships in the yard to get pumps for her engines and fuel tanks,” he recalls.
3 Three other crewmen were missing in action and presumed dead.
4 Boone and Mills, who had been asleep in the crew’s forward quarters, abandoned ship after being “knocked down and washed half the length of the main deck by a wave of water and aviation gasoline which swept down the port side immediately after the explosion,” wrote Executive Officer Keller, who recommended that they not be punished. After floating on rafts for five days, they were picked up on August 28 and returned to Laramie.
5 Several weeks before I interviewed Jock Smith in late January 2002, he saw another article about Johnnie Johnson, one that announced his retirement as vice-marshal of the Royal Air Force.
6 U-984 would sink four ships and damage one before being sunk by HMCS Ottawa, Kootenay and Chaudiere in 1944.
7 The press release left out the most colourful part of Raccoon’s history. Raccoon was one of twelve yachts brought to Canada as part of what’s been called the “Great Yacht Plot.” Devised by Rear-Admiral Leonard Murray to get around the US Neutrality Act, which was still in force in 1940, the Great Yacht Plot saw Canadian naval authorities requisitioning yachts from wealthy Canadians who then, on the advice of the navy, purchased replacement yachts in the United States. Upon receipt of the replacement yacht, the navy immediately returned the first yacht and requisitioned the new yacht, which was then converted into an anti-submarine escort ship.
8 Hartwig’s fine military mind was recognized after he was repatriated to West Germany from Canada, where he spent four years in a POW camp after his U-boat was sunk in November 1942. In the early 1950s, he joined the Bundesmarine, West Germany’s navy, rising to become admiral of the fleet before retiring in the early 1970s.
9 Degaussing neutralized a ship hull’s magnetic charge—thus defeating the pistols of magnetic torpedoes.
10 Quoted and translated by Hadley in his U-Boats Against Canada, 119.
11 On October 9, 2003, the Greek ambassador placed a tombstone on Triantafyllarous’s grave.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 Heagy’s Canadian-made radar lagged behind the British centimetric radar largely because, in May 1940, at the request of the British Admiralty, the Canadian government sent more than twenty of the nation’s best physics graduates to man RN sets on RN ships. According to Derek Howse’s history, Radar at Sea, “It was only the timely arrival of these Canadians that saved the [British] Navy from facing a truly disastrous position in regard to radar personnel.” Prior to 1943—during the years when Canadian labs were failing to produce effective Canadian-designed asdic and radar sets, and when Canadian shipyards were unable to keep up with the modernization programs that were in effect, because they lacked the engineers who could install asdic and radar—“a very high proportion of the larger British warships were kept working at sea by Canadian radar officers.” This was recognized in a letter sent by the Admiralty to the National Research Council in Ottawa.
Although Canadian asdic would continue to lag behind the RN’s and the USN’s until near the end of the war, by early 1943 Canadian scientists were at the forefront of the development of small centimetric radar units suitable for motor patrol boats and aircraft. After successful testing of Type 286 centimetric radar in April 1943, the Admiralty ordered 1,500 units. Type 286 radar remained in use for many years after the end of the war.
2 According to Marc Milner, Americans serving on the North Atlantic run thought that corvettes shipped so much water, their crews deserved submarine pay.
3 In London, the trade mission’s reports must have made for depressing but familiar reading. For, as Correlli Barnett has shown in The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation, British yards and manufacturing firms lacked exactly the same kind of design teams the trade mission noted that Canada lacked. The UK had to turn to US sources for “fire-control gear for the main and anti-aircraft armaments of warships and anti-submarine sonar equipment.” British industry was unable to provide armaments manufacturers and naval yards with the precision machine tools they needed. Nor was the UK able to supply the microvalves and other highly technical components of radar and sonar without US help.
By 1944, however, Canada had become a major supplier of such equipment. To make good a 20-million-unit shortfall in thermionic valves needed for radar, Paymaster-General Lord Cherwell recommended that an “urgent enquiry should also be made into the possibility of obtaining greatly increased imports from North America, particularly Canada, in 1944” (emphasis added).
4 To save both time and money, corvettes were built to commercial, not Admiralty, standards. Accordingly, while they had many watertight bulkheads, there were only five complete transverse bulkheads that ran from the keel to the upper decking. The farthest aft divided the engine room from the aft boiler room, more than 100 feet from the after peak (propeller). By contrast, frigates, the next-largest Canadian ship, had a watertight bulkhead only 60 feet from the after peak. This difference explains the different fates of the frigate HMCS Magog and the corvette HMCS Shawinigan in October and November 1944. An acoustic torpedo destroyed 60 feet of Magog’s stern, but her aft bulkhead held and the ship stayed afloat. A similar explosion destroyed Shawinigan because, whether the aft bulkhead held or not, the flooding of some 100 feet of her 300 feet doomed it.
5 Although I had read about this entry in Hadley’s U-boats against Canada, I had forgotten about it. When I came upon these last words in the logbook preserved in the National Archives, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. It is, perhaps, the most chilling fragment I have seen from the Battle of the St. Lawrence.
6 Post-war research in BdU records indicates that there were no U-boats near ON-84. Accordingly, the Board of Inquiry’s praise of Bonner’s asdic operators is probably not warranted. However, given the primitive state of the asdic aboard Charlottetown (a school of fish could return the signature of a U-boat), the fact that the operator picked up anything at 3,000 yards is most creditable. Whether or not a U-boat was shadowing ON-84, Charlottetown‘s reaction demonstrates that in the short time available to him, Bonner had turned his green crew into an efficient and effective fighting force.
7 On February 6, 1943, depth charges, also apparently set to safety, blew up as HMCS Louisburg sank after being torpedoed by Italian aircraft off Oran, Algeria. A similar tragedy befell HMCS Weyburn sixteen days later after she hit a mine off the Straits of Gibraltar.
8 Quoted from The Battle of the St. Lawrence, produced by Brian and Terence McKenna (NFB, 1995).
9 Two days later, on September 13, in the middle of the North Atlantic, U-91 sank the destroyer HMCS Ottawa, killing 113 officers and ratings, as well as 6 men of the Royal Navy and 22 merchant seamen. The six days that followed the loss of Raccoon on September 7 were the worst in the history of the Royal Canadian Navy: 16q officers and ratings died.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 St. Lawrence shipping could not be completely suspended for both national and international reasons. Many communities along the north shore of the river and up into Labrador relied on coastal shipping for their supplies and for the movement of their chief products (iron ore, timber, coal and bauxite), which were themselves vital for Canada’s war industries. Additionally, the British Ministry of War Transport argued that shipping efficiency required that ships loading timber destined to shore up British coal mines be loaded at traditional timber ports on the St. Lawrence.
2 In mid-1942, Canadian escorts in the Mid-Ocean Escort
Force registered four U-boat kills, more than the RN, the force’s better-equipped and better-trained senior partner.
3 Only three of nine U-boats managed to penetrate the escort screen. And while U-boats did sink four ships on the night of August 24, they did so at great cost: two U-boats were heavily damaged. As Marc Milner notes in his recent Battle of the Atlantic, Western Approaches Command found this to be an acceptable rate of exchange.
4 One of the reasons that the RCN underperformed the RN in terms of kills was that through 1942, Canada’s escort ships were equipped with 123 asdic and 286 radar and were thus a generation behind the RN’s ships, equipped with 127 asdic and 271 centimetric radar.
The decision to so equip Canadian ships was at least partially a result of the desire of the federal government to use the impetus of the war to develop Canada’s own war industries. The failure of this policy can be judged not only from the repeated delays in equipping Canadian escorts with equipment as it became available in the UK, but also from the fate of HMCS Magog on October 14, 1944. When Magog was torpedoed, it was steaming with its Canadian-designed and-manufactured RX/C centimetric radar operating; it failed to pick up U-1223’s periscope. In his North Atlantic Run: The Royal Canadian Navy and the Battle for the Convoys, historian Marc Milner writes that “in service it [RX/C] proved a disaster.”
5 In U-boats against Canada: German Submarines in Canadian Waters, historian Michael L. Hadley summarizes Hartwig’s description of the hours before the attack: “Mounting tension, fear of aircraft attack, the gnawing questions of whether one should continue with the tactic or pull out; all this pressured an already overburdened nervous system …. One controls one’s energies cool, and runs the ever-present calculated risk.”
6 Both groups safely reached shore at Cap-des-Rosiers.
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