by Mark Zuehlke
“Don’t worry, my boy,” the captain said with a tired smile. “Whenever you see a black flag, don’t worry about it. When you get torpedoed, you won’t see any black flag. It’ll be a complete surprise to everybody. Anyway, it’s a nice quiet 4th of July.”4
Precisely at this moment a huge explosion shook the converted passenger liner City of Venice, a short distance from St. Essylt. Dead in the water, the ship coasted to a halt. St. Essylt and the rest of the merchantmen kept steaming forward, rigidly adhering to Allied convoy protocol whereby the valuable cargo ships kept going while the naval escorts would provide what assistance they could. In this case, the naval rescue tug HMST Restive raced to the stricken ship and took it under tow while three corvettes began offloading personnel. Algiers was ninety miles to the west and the cutter made for the port. But when its crew proved unable to seal the holed hull, City of Venice was declared a loss and released.5 Including its crew, the ship had 482 men aboard. Its master, 10 crew, and 10 Canadian soldiers were lost.6
From St. Essylt, Ware had watched City of Venice fade from sight and was just “waiting to get torpedoed.” With each passing minute his conviction that the U-boat had them in its sights kept growing. All the soldiers had been called up on deck in readiness to abandon ship, if necessary. “It was a very nervous half hour because you were convinced you were going to get torpedoed and you wondered what would happen,” he later said. “It was a relief when we got hit, but when we got hit, you sure knew you had been hit by something. There was a great sheet of flame from the forward end of the boat.” In seconds, the forward holds, where the ammunition was stored, were ablaze. Ware expected the entire ship to simply go up in one massive blast of exploding artillery rounds. Instead, each shell exploded singly, sounding like fireworks from hell.
The crew put lifeboats over the side, and many of the soldiers pitched in to cast away inflatable rafts and life rings. Soon only a few crew and Ware remained aboard. Much of the ship was on fire and it was heeling badly, as Ware looked about to ensure that all the soldiers were off. He would have liked to have retrieved some clothes from his cabin, but one glance revealed that fires had spread throughout the ship’s interior. He and Master Diggins shook hands and wished each other luck before clambering down ropes and dropping into the Mediterranean. Ware had “visions of the North Atlantic and being frozen to death ... but the sea was like a nice warm bath.” Losing sight of Diggins, Ware swam to a nearby raft and clung to the ropes running around its sides. He had no life jacket, had lost his shoes, and wore only his shorts. As with the City of Venice, the convoy “sailed majestically ahead. That’s one of my saddest moments ... floundering around in the water, watching the convoy sail on into the sunset.” St. Essylt continued to burn, bathing the survivors in an eerie light as it settled slowly beneath the surface. Ware thought of all the secret operational documents aboard and how they should be burning safely, so there was no likelihood of their being captured by the enemy. They drifted through the night and then at dawn a corvette steamed up and began hauling men out of the water.7 Despite the initial explosion and ensuing fires, only one crewman and one soldier from St. Essylt failed to be rescued.8
This was not the end of the slow convoy’s ordeal. On the following afternoon, at 1545 hours, the merchantman Devis was struck by a torpedo “just aft of amidships. The explosion was immediately below the ... Mess Decks, and blew the body of one man up on the bridge, and two more on the boat deck, as well as the rear end of a truck... Fire broke out immediately and within 3 to 4 minutes the fore part of the ship was cut off from the aft part. Explosions of ammunition were continuous. The men, with two exceptions, behaved extremely well. They took their boat stations in an orderly manner, and did not throw over the rafts or jump overboard until the order to abandon ship was given. In the meantime, they collected wounded and burned men, and took them overboard with them when they went.” So wrote Major Douglas Harkness, the Canadian artillery officer in command of the soldiers aboard.9
The thirty-six-year-old officer had been in his cabin when the torpedo struck. He had attempted to organize rescue parties to go after men trapped below, but the fires were too hot. There were not enough lifeboats and rafts for everyone, so Harkness and many others were left to drift in the sea. The naval vessels raced about around them, dropping depth charges. With each explosion he felt his “insides being squeezed out.” Some men who had been alive earlier disappeared, and Harkness was left with the lingering belief that these explosions “killed quite a few of our people that were in the water.” Eventually a corvette picked up the survivors.10 Fifty-two Canadian soldiersb perished while all the crew survived.11
The survivors were carried by the corvettes to Algiers and unloaded on the docks. Barefoot, wearing only salt-grimed shorts, Ware walked up to a British officer and reported that he and his men were all off St. Essylt. The officer told Ware that he understood the Canadian troops were part of an operation, but he had no information on what it was about. Ware pointed at the soldiers. “These guys are all briefed. You better clap them somewhere where they can’t be got at.” The British officer did precisely that, ordering them all loaded into trucks and taken immediately to a prisoner-of-war camp. Ware was ill pleased at being locked up, but understood the rationale. “We were certainly in a safe place behind barbed wire. But we had to be, for D-Day was on July 10, and this was the 5th of July when we were incarcerated.” The British offered up a clothing issue that consisted of two pairs of shorts and underwear, two shirts, a couple of pairs of socks, and a pair of boots.
As each day passed and the invasion drew closer, Ware kept insisting on meeting with the British officer. He was desperate to be released and get passage on a ship bound to join the invasion convoys off the coast of Sicily. Ware was supposed to be LOB, which meant on a freighter sitting off the coast for the invasion, not stuck in a concentration camp in Algiers. “Nothing we can do, old boy,” was the routine reply.
WHILE THE LOSS of lives aboard the three torpedoed slow convoy ships was relatively small, the amount and nature of equipment and stores sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean was serious. A total of 562 vehicles were lost, leaving 1st Canadian Infantry Division facing a major transportation shortage. Also lost were fourteen 25-pounders, eight 17-pounders, and ten 6-pounder anti-tank guns that would significantly reduce the division’s artillery support.12 “In addition to the above,” the divisional historical officer, Captain Gus Sesia, noted in his diary, “we lost great quantities of engineers’ stores and much valuable signals equipment.”13 The biggest immediate blow was the loss of all divisional headquarters vehicles and equipment, including many precious wireless sets—precisely the nightmare scenario forecast and rejected by Kitching as infeasible when Simonds had drawn these ships by lot a few days earlier.
Equally serious was the loss in equipment and lives suffered by the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps personnel attached to the division. Due to a loading error, instead of No. 9 Field Ambulance’s vehicles being distributed among several ships, fifteen out of eighteen were on Devis.14 Accompanying the vehicles was a medical officer and nineteen other ranks and medical orderlies.15 Four of the other ranks were among the fifty-two Canadian troops killed and another four suffered injuries.16 The other field ambulance, field dressing station, and field surgery units assigned to the division were largely unaffected. No. 5 Field Ambulance’s vehicles had been distributed correctly, so only two of them and a ton of medical supplies went down with St. Essylt. City of Venice had just one medical officer, Captain K.E. Perfect, aboard and he escaped uninjured. But Perfect was overseeing safe passage of nine tons of stretchers and blankets, which all went to the bottom.17
Aboard Hilary in the Fast Assault Convoy, divisional staff through the evening of July 4 and all of July 5 scrambled to clarify what had happened to the three ships. Initial Royal Navy signals were disjointed, some indicating all ships lost, others that one vessel or another was under tow and might yet be saved. At one point on July
5, a Royal Air Force signal reported that a plane had spotted Devis still afloat. Excited officers quickly consulted a map, Sesia reported, and were disgusted to see the coordinates placed the ship “somewhere in the Sahara Desert!”18
A full accounting of the losses would not be completed for days. Even on July 7, reports were still coming in that City of Venice remained under tow and bound for Algiers. Finally, at 1900 hours on that day, its sinking was confirmed. The report also stated that most of the surviving Canadian troops had been loaded on a Landing Craft, Infantry in Algiers and were en route for Malta. From there, they would eventually rejoin the division.19
Compounding the loss of so many vehicles was the fact that the division had left Britain with a smaller than mandated number due to lack of shipping capacity. Once the seriousness of the situation was appreciated, Lieutenant Colonel D.G.J. Farquharson, the division’s assistant director of ordnance services, and his staff “tried to make [the losses] good...by emergency measures, improvising and obtaining what could be obtained buckshee from the Middle East.” They soon had commitments for some vehicles, but these would not be available until after the initial landings. The fact that every vehicle to be found locally was a Dodge posed “a considerable ordnance problem, because what spare parts we had were based on Ford and Chevrolet makes.” Improvisation would be the order of the day.20
All the time these assessments and response plans were being made, the Canadian convoys had continued steaming towards Sicily. After July 5, German submarine alarms became daily fare, particularly for the fast convoy. To make it more difficult for the U-boats, the ships maintained a fast pace and zigzagged to avoid being easily tracked. To ensure arrival off Sicily on schedule, each convoy’s course had been meticulously charted to bring it to a specific waypoint at a precise hour. On July 6, the fast convoy was scheduled to pass Algiers at 2130 hours. Realizing the convoy would overshoot this waypoint by about four hours at its current speed, Rear Admiral Sir Philip Vian ordered the convoy “to kill time [by] zig-zagging to starboard and port.” The Royal Navy headquarters at Algiers, meanwhile, was also tracking the convoy’s pace and signalled for Vian to cut his speed dramatically and not pass Algiers until 0030 hours the morning of July 7. To avoid having the ships sitting virtually still for almost four hours, Vian ordered the convoy turned sharply about at 1325 hours with the intention of steaming for ninety minutes back the way they had come before returning to their assigned course.21
Captain Sesia had just stepped out on Hilary’s deck for some air and noticed “we were veering completely about. At the same time, two of the escorting destroyers on our starboard side high-tailed it ahead of us and dropped depth charges. The Black Pennant was run up on all ships and hooters hooted. All the ships in the convoy seemed to be turning in mad circles, and I never saw such frantic signalling by lights and flags both from the Hilary and the other vessels. Then came ‘action stations.’ There was no panic—all personnel proceeded to their stations adjusting their lifebelts and blowing them up. Undoubtedly, quite a number of us were thinking of the Devis and the other two vessels which had been torpedoed ... but ... we did not show it except that perhaps our expressions were a little grimmer than usual.”22
After forty-five minutes, “stand down” was signalled. Sesia subsequently learned that the destroyer screen had spotted a U-boat travelling on the surface off to one side of the convoy as it came about. Two Royal Navy destroyers, Whimbrel and Cygnet, charged the U-boat but ended coming at it from opposite angles so that neither could open fire with guns for fear of hitting the other. Whimbrel attempted to ram the sub, but it managed to dive clear. The destroyers then alternated depth-charge runs. After Cygnet’s fourth attack, bubbles were spotted coming to the surface. Whimbrel immediately dropped charges on the bubbles and both destroyers reported hearing what sounded like a ballast tank blowing. More bubbles, now mixed with oil, rose on either side of Cygnet as she crossed the same marker. Each destroyer dropped another pattern of charges, but no further indication of the U-boat was seen. Both ships rejoined the convoy a few minutes after 1500 hours and the U-boat was claimed sunk (though no German records report a U-boat lost in the Mediterranean during this time period). In the action, Whimbrel dropped sixty-eight charges and Cygnet, fifty-nine.23
Because of the U-boat incident, the following day the fast convoy’s destroyer escort was increased to a dozen ships. The Delhi, an anti-aircraft cruiser, which was also equipped with five 5-inch guns, joined the convoy because it was now deemed to be within range of German bombers stationed at airfields in Italy and Sicily. The Mediterranean was increasingly crowded with Allied ships. At 1200 hours, an American convoy consisting of two cruisers, six destroyers, and twenty merchantmen was spotted off to one flank. Three hours later, the fast-moving Canadian convoy passed another American convoy plodding eastward at a slower pace. In Hilary’s “naval operations room, convoys are plotted on the map (with one pin denoting not a ship, but each convoy) and from Gibraltar to Bizerta there are so many pins that one can hardly see the map. This is going to be some party!” the division’s war diarist wrote. “While the sea thronged with Allied ships, the sky overhead was equally cluttered with Allied bombers and fighters. The former were bound for targets in southern Europe while the latter prowled above the convoys in order to intercept any Axis aircraft that might threaten the precious ships. On July 8, forty-one Mitchell bombers ‘passed over our convoy on their way to bomb Sicily. According to the news broadcasts, Sicily is getting a non-stop pasting. We are now proceeding along the eastern coast of the Bone Peninsula. Tunisian villages with their mosques and minarets are plainly visible. So far no enemy aircraft have appeared, though the sea is filled with shipping as far as the eye can see. Mussolini’s Lake, indeed!’”24
As the Canadian and American convoys streamed past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean during the first nine days of July, Northwest African Coast Air Force was there to meet them—flying a total of 1,426 sorties. Over a forty-eight-hour period starting the morning of July 7, fighters from this command carried out a record 574 sorties. The British convoys coming west from Egypt or through the Suez Canal were greeted by fighters from Air Headquarters, Air Defences Eastern Mediterranean, who sortied 1,421 times between July 1 and July 9. The Royal Navy weighed in with 600 sorties off ships and aircraft carriers engaged in anti-submarine hunts. Those convoys closing to within sixty miles of Malta in the last days before the invasion were further protected by fighters flying off the island’s airfields.25 One Canadian Spitfire squadron—417 (City of Windsor)—was operating in the Mediterranean during this time, and it was slated to move to Sicily as soon as airfields were captured and ready for use.
Given the formidability of the Italian navy, the invasion planners had feared its warships would venture forth from their sheltered harbours. None did so. In large part this was due to implementation in mid-May of intensive bombing raids on Italy’s airfields, ports, and submarine bases. Over six successive weeks, 2,292 sorties by bombers and fighter bombers struck airfields in Sicily, Sardinia, and Southern Italy, while another 2,638 sorties were launched against other strategic targets in the region.26 Between July 3 and the July 10 invasion date, Allied air forces concentrated their efforts on disabling, in the words of the British official historian, “whatever hostile air forces were likely to oppose the landings, and to assail the enemy’s land, sea, and air communications within Sicily. The principal targets were airfield bases of the German Air Force, and the attack would, it was hoped bring his fighters to battle and cause them heavy losses. Day and night attacks upon communications would swell to maximum as D-Day approached. Beach defences were to be left alone so that surprise might not be prejudiced, but radar installations in Sicily and Sardinia were to be attacked. Just before the landings, specially-equipped aircraft would try to baffle the radar stations within whose scrutiny the areas of assault happened to be.”27
Pitching into this effort with night raids were the Wellington bombers of Royal Canadian
Air Force 331 Wing made up of three squadrons—420 (City of London), 424 (City of Hamilton), and 425 (Alouette). Most of their raids were concentrated against targets on either side of the Straits of Messina. This wing began operations from an air base in Malta on June 15 with plans to move it to Sicily as soon as possible.28 The Canadian squadrons, along with twelve American Liberator squadrons, had been loaned to Northwest African Strategic Air Force from their commands in the United Kingdom to support the invasion.
Altogether, the Allied air presence in the Mediterranean heavily outnumbered that of the Axis forces. The Allies had 3,462 aircraft, of which about 2,510 were operational, opposing 1,750 enemy planes stationed in Sardinia, Sicily, and mainland Italy. Of the Axis aircraft, 960 were German. Hoodwinked into suspecting that either Greece or Crete was more likely to be invaded than Sicily, the Germans had diverted a larger number of aircraft to that region. Furthermore, only half the Luftwaffe bombers in Italy were stationed within effective range of Sicily—the rest were positioned to defend Sardinia, Corsica, and southern France. As the immediate countdown to the invasion began in early July, just 775 Luftwaffe aircraft could range on Sicily and 289 of these planes were on the island itself, only 143 of them operational. Also in Sicily were 145 Italian aircraft, of which only 63 were serviceable. Three-quarters of all these planes were either fighters or fighter bombers.