The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  MAY 11, 1941

  Three thousand five hundred miles2 east, workers at Flender-Werke in Lübeck lay the keel for U-313; at Bremer Vulcan in Bremen, U-266 is launched.

  Six hundred and fifty miles west in Ottawa, the Canadian government announces that—following victory of the “yes” side in the April 27 plebiscite, in which Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s Liberal government asked to be released from the “no conscription” pledge it had made in the previous election—conscription will begin. The government pledges that conscripts will not be sent overseas.

  Five thousand miles east, German aircraft flying from the occupied island of Crete sink three British destroyers: HMS Lively, Kipling and Jackal.

  Nine thousand miles away in the South Pacific, the destroyer USS Henley arrives at the last known position of the US Navy tanker USS Neosho, which had been badly damaged during the Battle of the Coral Sea. Two days later, Henley will pick up more than 100 men from Neosho’s lifeboats.

  Four thousand miles east in Poland, deportations of more than 10,000 Jews from the ghetto in łódź, Poland, to the Chelmno Concentration Camp continue.

  Eight hundred miles south in New York, American Zionists demand that the Jews be given sovereignty over Palestine; the British refuse.

  Eight hundred miles south in New York, SS Queen Mary leaves New York harbour bound for England with 10,000 American troops aboard.

  At 11:52 p.m., two ships—U-553 and SS Nicoya—sailing in what German navigational maps designated grid square BB 1485 (some eight miles off the coast of the northern part of the Gaspé, just about where the peninsula begins to curve southward), were 400 metres, and almost a world, apart.

  The distinctive colour scheme—silver-grey hull, red-topped buff ventilators and buff yellow funnels crowned by black top hats—that had for two decades marked the Nicoya as an Elders & Fyffes ship had long since given way to the dull grey of war. The crates on the deck were filled not with the exotic fruits of the Caribbean but with aircraft destined to fight Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe.

  Still, as Brice and his first mate, Frederick Inch, looked ahead over the St. Lawrence and toward the rugged coastline of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula on their right, they could just about push the war from their minds. Here, eight miles from Canada’s shore, in the waters that flowed from Lake Superior, over the cataract at Niagara, past Montreal and down hundreds of miles through the world’s widest river, Nicoya felt safe.

  True, there had been warnings. In July 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King told the House of Commons that “within a few months submarines may well be found operating in the gulf, and even in the St. Lawrence river.” On September 8, 1939, the day Canada declared war on Nazi Germany, King drew the House’s attention to the reality that the “safety of Canada depends on the adequate safeguarding of our coastal regions and the great avenues of approach to the heart of this country. Foremost among these is the St. Lawrence river and gulf.” No doubt, while resting at the Manning Pool on Montreal’s Viger Street, some of Nicoya‘s crew would have run across month-old newspapers that carried stories quoting Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, chief of naval staff, and Rear-Admiral G. C. Jones, commander-in-chief of the Atlantic, warning that the start of the 1942 shipping season might very well bring U-boats into Canada’s waters. Brice might even have known of the opera buffa of October 14, 1939, when His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy consulted a “submarine diviner” before sending two harbour vessels, including the aptly named Druid, armed with a borrowed army cannon surrounded by sandbags, to investigate a reported U-boat sighting off Île d’Orléans. But everything Brice and Inch saw on the river and the fact that they were sailing independently (at least until they joined a convoy at Sydney) told them they were sailing in peaceful seas.

  There were precautions aplenty, but these too bespoke safety. The Fusiliers du St-Laurent, wearing World War I-era uniforms, could be seen guarding the railroad bridge at Quebec while others manned the 7.5-inch guns that pointed down toward the river from Fort de la Mattinière in Lauzon, opposite the heights of Quebec City. Unseen were the two 18-lb. mobile guns secreted on Île d’Orléans, the island just east of Quebec City at the centre of which was the degaussing station. There, during the 1942 shipping season, outbound ships stopped to have their hull’s magnetic charge neutralized. Likely neither Brice nor his crew knew that the waters off Bic Island, ten miles west of Rimouski, Quebec, had seen Canada’s first successful action at sea: the seizure of the 3,921-ton Italian merchantman Capo Noli by the minesweeper HMCS Bras d’Or.3

  There was air cover, apparently improved from 1941 when Nicoya took McRae to England. When the war began in 1939, Eastern Air Command (EAC) had one lone squadron at an improvised base on the Sydney River (near Sydney, Nova Scotia, on the far end of the Gulf of St. Lawrence) to provide coverage of the almost ¼-million-square-kilometre area of the river and gulf in addition to the seaward approaches to Halifax. As historian Alec Douglas has shown in The Creation of a National Airforce, a year later (in 1940), this first squadron, now based at a permanent facility at Kelly Beach, Nova Scotia, was joined by a small squadron of Supermarine Stranraers, biplane seaplanes flying from Dartmouth, across the bay from Halifax. In 1941, more planes were available, from Kelly Beach, Sydney, Botwood and Gander and from American air bases in Newfoundland. By 1942, EAC had almost one hundred planes available, though most were assigned to North Atlantic convoy protection. Unarmed training squadrons based in Mont Joli, ten miles west of Rimouski, and at Charlottetown and Summerside, Prince Edward Island, did double duty as an anti-submarine deterrent force as they flew training patrols over the river and gulf.

  Out toward the end of the Gaspé itself was the newly built naval base HMCS Fort Ramsay, equipped with a seaplane slip. And just outside the town of Gaspé, a chain of army forts: Prevel, Haldimand and Peninsula, positioned to guard Gaspé Bay. Plans called for Fort Ramsay to have a small force of two armed yachts and two minesweepers, designated as a “hunter group,” that would spring into action once the location of a submarine was clear.4

  *  *  *

  Everywhere Brice and Inch looked there were the signs of safety.

  Navigational lights and radio beacons were “operating as in peacetime,” wrote Kapitänleutnant Karl Thurmann, commander of U-553, in his war diary (KTB) on May 8, 1942, three days before he fired the first salvo in the Battle of the St. Lawrence. Nicoya’s own lights shone.

  Tomorrow, after passing Cape Gaspé, the crew would once again take up war positions. Watches would be posted. The guns that had been welded to the Nicoya‘s deck would be manned.

  But for one more night, the crew that would soon once again face Dönitz’s wolves could sleep easy. Nicoya was sailing through peaceful seas, last roiled by war almost two hundred years earlier. In the Battle of the Restigouche in Baie des Chaleurs on July 8, 1760, a British squadron led by HMS Fame defeated the French fleet, led by Admiral François Chenard de La Giraudais’s 500-ton frigate Machault, which had been sent to reconquer Quebec. La Giraudais’s loss ended the Seven Years War and ended forever France’s claim to Canada.

  *  *  *

  The four men crammed onto the top of U-553’s conning tower knew differently. Now they were the hunters. The sounds of the hunt were the low throb of the 3,200-hp diesel engines that powered their Type VIIC Unterseeboot, the glide of water passing their 67.1-metre outer hull and the words of their captain—an Iron Cross First Class-winner—as he read off the co-ordinates and other target information from his attack binoculars to his Oberbootsmann. Generally referred to as Nummer Eins (“Number One”), Thurmann’s first officer repeated the numbers as he fed them into the torpedo attack calculator, which computed the settings and then transmitted them by two wires directly into the guidance system of the “eel” in Tube I.

  Two days earlier, after having entered the St. Lawrence to repair a hydroplane damaged in what Thurmann called a “chance” bombing (on May 7) some twenty miles southwest of Cape Breton’s Scaterie
Island, the sound of war was the alarm bell signalling an emergency dive after a lookout spotted a plane at 5:16 p.m. Thurmann’s war diary entry—“Emergency dive because of 4-engine land-based aircraft on bearing 300, elevation 700 m., range = 5000 m. Aircraft flying parallel course. 5 bombs landed when at depth 20 m., at moderate range, normal damage”—hardly captures the horror of being caught on the surface by a bomber, or the organized chaos of an emergency dive.

  The first glint of the setting sun reflecting off the silver skin of the US Army Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress set in motion a well-choreographed ballet of men, valves, steel and water that took the U-boat from the surface, where its conning tower was some 4.5 metres above water, to relative safety, more than 20 metres under. Immediately following the alarm, the four men on the conning tower scrambled down the hatch, more jumping than climbing down the steel ladders. The last down, the senior watch officer, closed the hatch. As soon as he had, and while still turning the wheel that locked it in place, he yelled “Fluten!”—“Flood the tanks!”

  The first valves that were turned after the chief engineer ordered, “Vent ballast tanks 2, 3, 4 and 5,” opened the air vents at the top of the boat’s forward ballast tanks, which allowed water rushing into the bottom of the tanks to push out the air that kept the U-boat afloat. Simultaneously, the ship’s hydroplane operators turned the wheels in front of them to pitch the heavy diving planes downward. In the engine room, artificers were at once shutting down U-553’s diesel engines and engaging her silent electric motors in a tightly co-ordinated sequence designed to ensure that the boat’s propellers did not miss a beat. Every bite the propeller blades took into the water drove the boat farther toward safety. Only after the boat had achieved a descent angle of between 20° and 25° did the chief engineer call for the aft ballast tank to be filled; this sequence ensured that the boat’s stern did not pop out of the water.

  Had the dive been occasioned by the sighting of a ship, Thurmann’s engineering officer would probably have ordered it halted when they reached 13.5 metres (their depth being indicated by a mercury column similar to a barometer), which was periscope depth. Because they were diving to escape a plane, however, the engineering officer waited several more seconds, till they reached 20 metres, before ordering the dive plane operators to bring the hydroplanes back to their neutral position—and before ordering the complex pumping of water between the ship’s fore and aft, starboard and port trim tanks that would keep the 1,070-ton ship on an even keel. As lit tle as 36.3 litres (8 gallons) in the wrong tank could upset the boat’s trim and buoyancy.

  A little over three hours later, Thurmann radioed U-boat headquarters in Lorient telling Führer der Unterseeboote Karl Dönitz that his “forward hydroplane motor [was] again unserviceable,” that even though he’d obviously been spotted, “navigational lights ashore are still operating,” and that he had gone “into the river!” Ten hours later, he’d travelled 94.5 nautical miles farther into Canadian waters. Seventeen hours after that, he stood 400 metres off Nicoya’s port side, ten miles from Fame Point, ten miles west of the tip of the Gaspésie.

  At nine minutes to midnight on May 12, 1942, the equation that described Nicoya’s ability to float was as old as Archimedes’ famous naked run through Syracuse.5 Nicoya floated because though the ship, its stores and cargo, and its men weighed some 10,670 tons (of which 4,400 tons was the ship’s own weight), her 400 × 51 foot hull displaced its own weight in water. It did this because the tons of steel, glass, planes, frozen meat and men, all heavier than water, were part of an equation that also included the thousands of cubic metres of air trapped within the hull. In effect, the hull was a gigantic bubble. Even though the hull pushed down into the water as much as 26.9 feet, as long as it remained intact the hydrostatic force of the water pushed upward on it, creating what naval architects call “buoyancy.”

  That equation changed a minute later when, at the end of a 400-metre run, the torpedo fired from U-553’s Tube I detonated. The torpedo hit Nicoya with the force of 57.6 metric tons about 100 feet from the stern, just behind the engine room on the port side.

  Within milliseconds of the torpedo’s pistol’s igniting 268 kilograms of Schiesswolle 36—a high-explosive mixture of TNT, hexanitrodiphenylamine and aluminum flakes—a white-hot (3,000° C) gas bubble with a pressure of some 50,000 atmospheres (750,000 pounds per square inch) formed. If such a shock bubble forms close to a ship’s keel, it is strong enough to lift even the largest ship. The bubble then acts like a pivot around which the keel bends and, finally, breaks. Set at three metres, however, Thurmann’s torpedo hit too far above Nicoya’s keel to lift her and break her back. Instead, it blasted through Nicoya’s .46-inch steel plating, tearing, Brice reported, a “huge hole” in the ship’s port side.

  Though now aboard a doomed ship, Brice’s crew were luckier than most torpedo victims. The blast that ripped through the hull entered a refrigerated hold. Tons of chilled meat absorbed some of the force. The dense cold cooled the rampaging stream of superheated gas, preventing the formation of the flash, an instantaneous burning that streams through passageways, ventilation shafts and whatever pathway the force of the explosion itself has bludgeoned. Had the torpedo hit a hold with vast empty spaces, the white-hot bubble would have expanded within the hold, its heat and force shredding even the thick steel bulkheads, turning them into pieces of shrapnel moving at hundreds of miles an hour. It’s likely that had the flash erupted in an empty hold, Nicoya would have vanished in mere seconds.6

  Before Brice and his crew felt their ship tremble, a secondary effect of the bubble tore through Nicoya. The detonation wave, now behaving like water flowing through the ground, followed the path of least resistance. Because the hold’s bottom plating ranged between .72 inches and 1 inch in thickness, the torrent could not break out through the ship’s bottom. Nor could it rupture the hold’s fore and aft bulkheads, which were stiffened by frames spaced every 30 inches. The path of least resistance, therefore, lay upward. The explosion surged through the steel and wooden decking that covered the hold, blowing apart a crate and the plane within it. Then the explosive wave exhausted itself—at just about the time Captain Brice’s bridge crew became aware of it—by blowing apart the aft port lifeboat.

  Reaction aboard the Nicoya was instantaneous. The engineer stopped the engines even before the ship’s telegraph rang Full Stop. Men and the one woman aboard, who before going to sleep had looked out upon the peaceful waters that lapped the shores of the Gaspé, jumped up. Some dressed before running out of their cabins or messes. Steward Russell Simpson didn’t; he ran from his cabin barefoot and in his pyjamas.

  Two of Brice’s passengers had experienced this nightmare of broken glass, twisted metal and ruptured steam lines spewing forth scalding white smoke just a month earlier. One, Roman Ferreira, had survived the sinking of SS Montevideo that March; during the First World War, he had survived being torpedoed, and two weeks in an open boat. He didn’t survive a fourth torpedoing 362 days after the Nicoya’s sinking. Either Ferreira or the other passenger (unnamed by the press) who had also survived a sinking just weeks earlier told a reporter that in addition to losing his new kit, he lost the marshmallows he was bringing home to his wife, “who had quite a liking for them.”

  Before running from the bridge, the wireless telegraphist likely given the watch, Second Wireless Officer Lewis Burby, paused for a moment to shove the secret code books that had been given to Brice in Montreal into the weighted bag. The bag was later thrown over the side.

  Mrs. Michael Silverstone, on her way to England to join her husband, an RAF officer who had returned home earlier from a posting in Montreal, ran from her cabin, carrying her eighteen-month-old son, Nathan. Once on deck, they joined Captain Brice and seventy-four other souls in a grotesque ballet. Shrouded by steam, they picked their way over broken glass and twisted metal and over or around wrecked wooden hatches. All this and more is contained in Brice’s words: “There was so much noise from escaping steam, it
was impossible to give orders or hear anything, and it was difficult to see through the steam”—the laconic expression favoured by the writers of operations reports.

  In the first minute after the explosion, hundreds of tons of water poured through the hole blasted by the torpedo. The water’s first effect might be called beneficial. It cooled the hold and doused any fires that may have burned in its bottom.

  Soon, maybe two minutes after the torpedoing, the water passed the critical mark. Fully loaded as it was, Nicoya had a reserve buoyancy of some 2,200 tons. As Hold No. 3 filled with water that quickly began to flow farther aft through the bilge and crankshaft spaces, Nicoya‘s reserve buoyancy vanished.

  Brice didn’t need to work out the equation that says that a ship will sink when it has taken on so much water that its total weight (ship + water) exceeds its hull’s ability to displace water. Every moment Nicoya pushed lower into the water told him that soon there’d be no more buoyancy to be found.

  Nor was he fooled by the fact that his ship was still on an even keel. The fact that even with a gaping wound Nicoya‘s hull was still able to distribute the added load across her length and breadth was a tribute to her designers as much as it was a twist of fate. Had the torpedo hit the forward hold, now, some two minutes after being hit, Nicoya would be going down by the bow. Again, Brice’s words—“she was obviously sinking rapidly”—hide more than they reveal, but since Brice doesn’t mention a list, it’s safe to assume that Nicoya was settling quickly into the dark waters of the St. Lawrence.