Thus, when war broke out in September 1939, the RCN found itself with a complement of 129 officers and 1,456 men, and with 13 ships—a woeful mismatch for the mission fate handed it. The primary mission of the Canadian navy had none of the glamour that fired the imaginations of generations of boys. Save for a few officers serving on RN ships during the hunt for Bismarck, there would be no latter-day Trafalgar, Copenhagen or Jutland for Canadians. Canada’s war at sea—and its war at home—was the defence of the merchant ships that carried the men, machines, food and fuel needed to defeat Hitler.
Only a crash industrial program, scarcely imaginable just a few short years earlier during the Depression, gave Canada the hundreds of ships needed for convoy escort work. By the end of 1940, Canada’s shipyards had turned out 11 corvettes and had converted 12 yachts into armed yachts. A year later, another 57 corvettes, 26 Bangor-class minesweepers and 13 Fairmile motor launches went into service. By the end of 1942, the Naval Estimates totalled $19,367,632 and the navy’s rolls counted 179 warships; by the end of the war, Canada’s fleet numbered 378 ships, the world’s fourth largest, and the Dominion government was spending $427,098,883 on His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy.
In 1944, journalist Leslie Roberts apostrophized the RCN as “a Navy of bank clerks, dirt farmers, fishermen, bond salesmen, mechanics and machinists, telegraphers and pre-war amateur radio enthusiasts.” It had to be.
To crew the first group of ships that Canada put to sea, the navy called upon the 66 officers and 196 men enrolled in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (RCNR) and the 115 officers and 1,435 volunteers in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR). The men of the RCNR—men such as Captain John Willard Bonner, who died in the St. Lawrence when his corvette, HMCS Charlottetown, was torpedoed in September 1942, and Captain Alfred Skinner, whose corvette, HMCS Arrowhead, fought three actions in the St. Lawrence during 1942—had decades of experience at sea. As captains of merchant ships, Skinner’s and Bonner’s naval training consisted of a couple of weeks every year or so. The men of the RCNVR had even less training; they were, according to Roberts, “pre-war Sunday Sailors, members of yacht clubs and only partially trained.” From 1939 through 1942, Canada’s navy was manned by a maritime equivalent of the militia myth—a myth that holds, as Jack Granatstein has recently shown, that hastily drilled volunteers filled with pluck and a self-evidently just cause will produce great victories.
The navy didn’t lack men to crew the ships that poured off Canada’s slipways; it lacked time to train them. An old navy adage holds that “while it takes two years to build a ship, it takes five years to train a sailor.” On March I, 1943, the RCN counted 603 officers and 4,002 ratings. The RCNR’s totals were 924 officers and 5,000 ratings. The bulk of the navy’s volunteers, however, came through the RCNVR, which then carried 4,437 officers and 40,713 ratings; later in 1943 the RCNVR totalled almost 70,000 men.
After the fall of France in 1940 gave U-boats relatively unfettered access to the North Atlantic, the RCN rushed thousands of RCNVR men through two-week-long training courses. Léon-Paul Fortin, who survived the torpedoing of Charlottetown off Sainte-Anne-des-Monts on September 11, 1942, had never been to sea before December 13, 1942, the day Charlottetown was commissioned. The rest of the crew was so green that they were seasick within hours of leaving the jetty in Quebec City. Weapons specialists such as Radar Operator Allan Heagy, also of Charlottetown, had scarcely more sea training.
Out on the North Atlantic, RCN ships—equipped at first with 123 asdic (sonar) and 286 radar, both of which were a technological generation behind the RN’s 127 asdic and 271 radar, which could pick up a periscope—were almost overmatched by the “grey wolves” that prowled the sea. In May 1941, the RN complained that the Canadians “showed a complete lack of understanding of what was expected of divisions within individual ships (the Asdic operators, depth charge crew, gunners, and so on) and of ships operating as a group.” Just six months later, after the bulk of the US Atlantic Fleet was sent to the Pacific following Pearl Harbor, the RCN supplied 48 per cent of the escort ships on the “Newfie–Derry” run; the RN supplied 50 per cent and the USN 2 per cent.
Before 1942 was out, the strain of expansion and the slow upgrading of radar and asdic (years after RN corvette captains were furnished with gyrocompasses, which continued to function during depth-charge attacks, Canadian corvette captains relied on inaccurate magnetic compasses mounted on the binnacle) came close to breaking the Canadian navy. Sixty of the eighty ships lost in convoying were lost while under RCN escort, eighteen of them in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River.
Responding to the fact that between February and March 1917, 148 U-boats destroyed i.9 million tons of shipping, which nearly forced England out of the Great War, Article 191 of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, declared, “The construction and acquisition of any kind of submarine, even for trade purposes, is forbidden to Germany.”2 Within two years, a secret U-department had been organized within the permitted Torpedo and Mines Inspectorate based in Kiel. Together with inspectorate officials, engineers from the firm Blohm & Voss were soon in Kobe, Japan, helping Germany’s former enemy (and future ally) build its first submarine fleet. That same year, Krupp sent engineers to Argentina to supervise the construction of ten submarines.
In 1922, the year Canada slashed two-fifths from the RCN’s estimates, the three German shipyards led by German steel-producing giant Krupp formed a dummy company in Rotterdam, Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheeps-bouw (IvS), staffed by former U-boat captains and engineers. IvS built submarines for four countries—submarines that served in effect as prototypes of the U-boats Germany would use against the Allies. Turkey’s 1923 order was filled in 1927; the boat’s sea trials were carried out by a former U-boat commander and chief engineer who made a report to a secret division of the German Naval High Command.
In 1926, a year during which the Naval Service of Canada failed to spend $60,000 of its $1.4-million budget, IvS received orders from Spain, Finland and the Soviet Union, this last sale preceded by three secret missions to Moscow. A large part of an 800-million-gold-mark loan granted to the Weimar Republic by the International Control Commission in 1926 was dispersed to Krupp and other industrial firms involved in secret rearmament, including the electronics giant Siemens.
In 1930, two years before Hitler’s rise to power and seven years before the formal abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, Rear-Admiral Walter Gladisch was already signing himself Führer der Uboote (FdU). From July to September 1930, some of his officers, disguised as civilian tourists, carried out the sea trials for one of the 500-ton submarines that IvS had built for Finland. In 1935, the British Admiralty, convinced, as the Defence of Trade Committee put it a year later, that “the problem of dealing with the submarine is more than simplified by the invention of ASDIC [sonar],” raised no objection to the London Naval Treaty, which removed the prohibition on building submarines that Versailles had placed on Germany. The main thrust of the London Naval Treaty was to try to limit Germany’s surface ship fleet and thereby prevent the start of the type of naval arms race that preceded World War I.3
The U-Bootwaffe quickly took shape after February I, 1936, the day Hitler ordered the construction of the first boats. In March, the 1st Flotilla was organized in Kiel. (After the fall of France it moved to Brest.) Several months later, Hitler appointed Karl Dönitz, a former U-boat captain and World War I Iron Cross winner, to the position of FdU. Despite Hitler’s and Grossadmiral Erich Raeder’s commitment to large capital ships such as the battleship Bismarck (only 10 per cent of Germany’s steel production was dedicated to the building of U-boats), Dönitz argued that the U-Bootwaffe was the Kriegsmarine’s most potent arm in the coming guerre de course, the war against England’s trade. In October 1936, the 2nd Flotilla, based first in Wilhelmshaven and later in Lorient, was organized. Within a year, Dönitz, who had told Hitler, “give me three hundred submarines and I’ll win the war for you,” was organ
izing group exercises that presaged the wolf-packs that savaged the ships on the North Atlantic run.
The conditions endured by Dönitz’s men were not all that different from those cursed by the thousands of Canadians who served in corvettes. Like the “patrol vessel, whaler type” (as the ships were called before Churchill dubbed them “corvettes”), U-boats were cramped, wet ships. Designed for a crew of forty-five, corvettes routinely carried eighty or more, the number growing through the war as they were fitted with more specialized antisubmarine gear. Because of the corvette’s low fo’c’sle, water poured into the ship’s hatchways and down ventilators until it came to rest in the crew’s mess.4 Uniforms were almost always damp, and men slept in damp hammocks abutting each other, strung up above the water sloshing on the deck beneath them, upon which floated bits of food, personal belongings and the detritus of daily life.
The forty-four men in a Type VIIC U-boat, the workhorse of Dönitz’s fleet, lived in a steel-encased cigar-shaped bubble not more than a few metres in diameter. On paper their underwater trench measured 150 square metres. In reality, it was much smaller, for within that space were crammed their diesel engines (which took up 33 metres), electric motors, two battery rooms, tanks for drinking water, thousands of metres of piping, and their ship’s stores. In addition, when the U-boats left port, four extra torpedoes were stored in the mess decks; the men would sleep on hammocks strung above them or on the hard deck plating. (Another ten torpedoes, which could only be accessed while on the surface, were stored between the outer hull and the pressure hull.) Almost every other spare place, including one of the two toilets, was stuffed with food and other provisions. The air was not only damp, it was fetid; U-boat men could go six weeks without bathing. Diesel and other oil smells and the foul odour of mouldy food filled the boat’s air.
Unlike Canadian sailors and airmen, who had to learn their trade at sea in the real time of battling U-boats scant miles off Canada’s home shores, Dönitz’s men were superbly trained. 5 At twenty-eight, Korvettenkapitan Paul Hartwig, the ace of the Battle of the St. Lawrence who sank nine ships, was decades younger than the men who captained Charlottetown or Arrowhead. Unlike them, however, he had had seven years of naval training, including service on the battleship Deutschland. Engineering cadets had over two years of training. “Even late in the war,” recalls Werner Hirschmann, chief engineering officer on U-190, which sank HMCS Esquimalt in April 1945 before surrendering to the RCN on May 12, 1945, “every one of us on board was an expert in his own division.” The training regimen was a vital part of the creation of the mythos of the U-Bootwaffe as the elite German military force.
The map Dönitz had prepared for the January 1939 war games identified the North American supply route to England as Kanada-Transporte. The title, which harkened back to the First World War (for more than three years the convoys that sustained England left from Halifax, Sydney and Gaspé) was also prescient. For not only did the convoys that sustained England for two years after 1939 leave again from Halifax and Sydney, but Canadian ships provided as much as 48 per cent of the escorts.
About 200 miles south of Burgeo, Newfoundland, Kanada-Transporte divides. One spur cuts southeast, running just off the coast of Nova Scotia toward Boston. The northern spur heads northwest, through the Cabot Strait, almost touching Cape Ray, the most western point of Newfoundland. The line continues through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, running between Anticosti Island and the Gaspé Peninsula. Kanada-Transporte, which correctly predicted the main shipping lane used by the St. Lawrence convoys, ends just shy of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.
In 1939, a line on a war game map. Five years later, that same line described at least part of the course taken by each of the fifteen U-boats that invaded the St. Lawrence. It ran over the watery graves of hundreds of men, women and children and the shattered hulls of SS Oakton, Inger Elizabeth, Mount Taygetus, Mount Pindus, Waterton, Nicoya and Caribou and HMCS Shawinigan, eight of the twenty-nine ships destroyed in the only successful invasion of North America between 1812 and September 11, 2001.6
CHAPTER ONE
WAR IN PEACEFUL SEAS
MAY 11, 12 AND 13, 1942
Is there no silent watch to keep?
An age is dying, and the bell
Rings midnight on a vast deep.
—ALFRED NOYES
At 11:52 p.m. on May 11, 1942, Captain Edward H. Brice knew that his ship, SS Nicoya, was doomed.
He’d thought it a year earlier, in the early hours of May 20, 1941. Then, two thousand miles to the east, in the middle of the air gap (the area beyond the reach of protective aircraft where Hitler’s U-boats carved ships from the convoys that sustained England), Westgruppe, a ten-boat wolfpack, pounced on the twenty-nine ships of convoy HX-126. Two days later, HX-126’s commodore counted twenty-two ships.
“The attack began just after midnight on May 20th,” recalls Bill “Mac” McRae, who, along with three other recently trained RCAF pilots, was on his way to Fighter Command in England. Lashed to Nicoya’s hatches was an equally important cargo: two crated Hawker Hurricanes built in Fort William, Ontario. “Bill Wallace and I were in our bunks in what before the war was a first-class cabin below the main deck. Suddenly, the steady throb of the engines ceased. We heard a dull thud and felt the ship heel sharply to the left. Immediately, a steward came running to our cabin and told us to get dressed and get up to the boat deck with our lifebelts on.”
It took the twenty-one-year-old McRae and Wallace less than three minutes to get dressed and run up to the deck. When they got there, SS Norman Monarch, torpedoed some 180 seconds earlier, was already gone. Later, Brice told McRae he’d ordered the Hard to Starboard that McRae felt in order to avoid the other ship, which had been stopped dead in the water before plunging to the bottom.
Through the long night, Nicoya‘s crew kept watch and its gunner stood at the ready (Nicoya was a defensively equipped merchant ship, or DEMS). McRae, Wallace, Jack Milmine and Wally McLeod—listed on the ship’s manifest as “passengers”—alternated between standing nervously on deck and trying to catch a few moments’ sleep on the wardroom’s steel deck.
Late the next morning, the attacks began again.
“In quick succession, three more ships were hit, and sank before our eyes,” victims, McRae learned years later, of U-556. “One, a tanker off to our starboard, burned fiercely. We could see the inky black smoke that billowed off her for hours.”
* * *
Kapitänleutnant Herbert Wohlfarth, nicknamed “Sir Parsifal,” one of Admiral Karl Dönitz’s most enthusiastic volunteers, saw the horrific scene differently: “Both torpedoes hit…. The tanker was struck amidships and immediately bursts into bright flames…. The oil from the two tankers has spread over the water. The entire sea is on fire. In its middle, looming gigantically, the burning tanker. It is dreadfully beautiful.”1
“Just after we saw the third ship go down,” recalls McRae, “off our port quarter, not fifty yards away, a submarine broke surface. The gunner tried to depress the 3-inch gun, but before he even tried to get off a shot, Captain Brice, who was up on the bridge, yelled down, ‘Don’t shoot!’ through a megaphone. Later I heard a rumour that our convoy had a British submarine escorting us.”
Moments after the submarine disappeared, a loud thud reverberated through the ship.
Thinking that his ship had been torpedoed, and hoping to prevent it from blowing up when the cold water of the North Atlantic washed over its hot boilers and pipes, Brice rang Full Stop and ordered the mate to blow the whistle and let off the steam that Nicoya’s boilers had produced from Canadian coal. The ship was dead in the water. Brice ordered that the lifeboats be swung out on their davits and that the seacocks be put in place.
Standing by his assigned lifeboat, McRae watched the wreckage of war around him. “Off to our port, we could see the burning tanker and the gaps left by the ships that had already been sunk. Among the broken bits of wood, oil and other wreckage were the fuselage
s of two Lockheed Hudsons that must have been cut loose by men desperate for anything that could serve as a raft.”
Brice did not, however, order Abandon Ship. Instead, he told his chief engineer to go below and report on the damage. The chief engineer came back a few minutes later and reported that there had been none. Brice ordered the engine room to raise steam. “We’d all felt the thud—we’d definitely hit something or been hit,” recalls McRae. “Later, Captain Brice said that maybe it was a dud torpedo or that we’d run over the submarine that we’d seen.”
The first two letters of convoy HX-126 designated it a fast convoy that left from Halifax; slower convoys (the SC series) were capable of making up to 7 knots and left from Sydney, Nova Scotia. According to Admiralty regulations, HX-126 should have been able to make 14 knots, but in reality, some of its ships could make only 7 knots, which became the whole convoy’s speed.
Built for the “banana run” from Jamaica and the islands to Liverpool and the Mersey, Brice’s Nicoya could do better than 14 knots. Still, it took over an hour to get enough steam to get underway again. “All the time,” McRae recalls, “we stood at our lifeboat stations and stared out at the wreckage and the still-burning tanker, expecting at any moment that we too would be torpedoed.”
Shortly after Nicoya had caught up with the other survivors of West-gruppe’s attack, what to the Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ontario, born and bred McRae looked like an armada passed HX-126. An Aldis lamp signal told them that “the mighty Hood,” the pride of the British navy, had been sunk, and that these thirteen ships, including the battleship King George V and the aircraft carrier Victorious, were in hot pursuit of its slayer, the great battleship Bismarck.
Years later, McRae learned that had Bismarck, with its consort, Prinz Eugen, broken out into the Atlantic, Nicoya and the other ships in HX-126 would have soon been within its sights. He also learned that U-556 had sped away from its attack on HX-126 to protect the wounded Bismarck and found itself in perfect position to torpedo HMS Ark Royal and Renown, two of the warships that helped sink the battleship, but it could not. For Wohlfarth had expended his last torpedoes sinking three ships within hailing distance of Nicoya.
The Battle of the St. Lawrence Page 2