The Battle of the St. Lawrence
Page 9
It would be several months before Canadian authorities would learn of a spy being landed by U-boat.9 And King knew that there had been no damage at all to the wireless station or any other military or civilian installation on the Gaspé. Still, pressure in the House and from Godbout led him to reverse the government’s position and hold a secret session to discuss the situation in the St. Lawrence.
At 3 p.m. on July 18, 1942, the Canadian parliament met in its first secret session since the Great War.
The notes prepared for Minister Macdonald make clear that unlike the public debates that preceded the calling of the secret session, the secret session itself was an orderly affair in which the government shared both operational and other details with the elected members. The notes covered seven areas, the longest of which pertained to the dim-out. The minister sought to impress on the members the difference between a full blackout of both navigational lights and broadcast beacons, which the government judged to be too risky, and the dim-out, which “prevent[ed] the dangerous silhouetting of ships against bright lights.” Extinguishing navigation lights would not, he argued, “materially increase the navigational problems of the submarines.”
The second issue on which Macdonald briefed the House concerned whether supplies had been hidden in the St. Lawrence. As he had done in May, he told the House that it was all but impossible for this to be the case since such supplies would have had to have been brought by surface ship “and it would be almost impossible for them to escape detection.” He gave MPs information regarding the operating period of U-boats (“6 to 8 weeks without refuelling or reprovisioning”) and their range (“12,000 to 19,000 miles”) that was not shared in open session.
Macdonald also provided a rather detailed disposition of ships in the St. Lawrence and explained how that disposition affected Canada’s other naval requirements, including the all-important oil stores:
Twelve Fairmiles have been brought into the St. Lawrence area to provide additional protection for convoys in the River and Gulf. It has also been necessary to send a number of Corvettes into the Gulf; these were found by taking off escorts from ocean tanker convoys bringing oil to Canada. This has involved a decrease in the shipments which can be imported in a given time and is causing Naval Staff and the Oil Controller some concern. It may be necessary in the near future to take these ships out of the Gulf again in order to assist in bringing oil supplies to Canada.
At the time of the incident forty-nine vessels were escorting twenty different convoys. Twenty-six vessels were at sea on patrol. These figures do not include local patrol vessels.
The government was considerably less forthcoming about EAC. The minister was prepared to say only that “Air Protection is considered adequate. It consists of long range flying boats, landbased bombers and land-based fighter bombers at Rimouski and Mont Joli.”
Surprisingly, the notes say nothing about the army’s decision to act on Brigadier-General Vanier’s letter of July 10. On the seventeenth, Major-General William Elkins responded to Vanier’s request for a “motorized column” by ordering the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, then based in Debert, Nova Scotia, to dispatch a motor platoon to Mont Joli. Tasked with operating between Bic Island and Cap-Chat, the platoon arrived in Mont Joli on July 18.
Hours after the secret session of the House ended, Prime Minister King recounted the session in his diary:
Attended from 3–6: 19 secret session of H of C. Took up statements by Roy and others about conditions in the gulf of St. Lawrence off Gaspe, and the St. Lawrence generally,—out of the sinking of three convoy ships some days ago. All kinds of rumours have been afloat.
A.M. [Angus Macdonald], with aid of map, showed how our Navy was employed. I thought he refuted completely all the rumours. [Air Force Minister] Power was able to tell of the exploits of the A.F. and the probable sinking of a submarine in the St. Lawrence; [and] the death of young Chevrier.
No doubt while writing these last words, Canada’s prime minister thought that, as he believed he could with his own mother, Chevrier’s family would be able to communicate with their departed loved one.
JULY 20, 1942
Three thousand five hundred miles east in Kleck, Belorussia, German forces murder one thousand Jews.
Five thousand miles east in Russia, German forces continue their drive toward Stalingrad.
Four thousand miles east, deportations begin from Kowalek Panskie, Poland, to the Chelmno death camp, where the first gassing occurred in 1941.
Four thousand five hundred miles east in Poland, Treblinka is readied for its July 22 opening.
“We heard the explosion in the mess,” recalls Roy Woodruff, who in 1942 was a nineteen-year-old able seaman aboard the Q-074, one of the two Fairmile launches that (along with HMCS Chedabucto, a Bangor minesweeper, and HMCS Weyburn) was escorting the five merchant ships that made up QS-19. After the disaster of QS-15, the detachments of the Gulf Escort Force had been increased, albeit at the cost of less frequent sailings.
“Zero-Seven-Four was my ship,” he says with a voice that even sixty years later emphasizes “my.” “I was on her from the day she was commissioned [April 21, 1942] in Midland, Ontario, took her out into Georgian Bay and then down through the locks to Toronto where her gun—the gun that was my action station—was installed, then down to Kingston, where they put in her electrical system, and on to Montreal, where her radar and asdic were installed. I was in her three years, three months, through three captains, through terrible storms that tossed the little ship around like a cork. She was a short ship and would pitch and toss as she rode up and down waves.”
And Woodruff was with Q-074 at the end when, her engines cold, she was towed from Quebec City to Sorel, Quebec. There, on June 29, 1945, she was turned over to the War Assets Corporation for disposal.
“We only heard the sound once on Zero-Seven-Four, but I knew that dull thud from my days on the North Atlantic run before I was drafted off the corvette HMCS Prescott,” recalls Woodruff.
The explosion Woodruff heard that sent him running up from the Fairmile’s mess deck was caused by Kapitänleutnant Ernst Vogelsang’s twelfth torpedo, fired in his most daring attack in Canadian waters to date.
Peering through his periscope shortly after 1 p.m., Vogelsang “sighted smoke plumes bearing 260,” almost perpendicular to his port bow. Soon he was able to distinguish the “steamers” from the escort ships, one (probably Woodruff’s) “at inclination 0,700 m distant,” well within visual sighting range, especially during sea state O.
To avoid detection, Vogelsang dove to twenty metres.
Would the sound of propellers stay constant?
It did, signalling U-132’s crew that the “anti-submarine vessel pass[ed] ahead” of his bow. As the swish, swish of the screws faded off to his starboard, Vogelsang ordered his hydroplane operators to turn their wheels, and moments later his electric motors pushed his boat to periscope depth (13.5 metres).
U-132 was now “inside the convoy,” a position described by U-boat captain Herbert Werner in his memoir Iron Coffins: “Our distance from the shadowy monsters ranged from 400 to 700 metres. It was a stunning situation, sailing undetected amid an Armada of enemy ships, selecting at leisure the ones which had to die.”
Vogelsang settled on the thirty-year-old, 4,283-ton SS Frederika Lensen, then travelling in ballast 800 metres away.
At 1:39 p.m. on July 20, while cruising off Cap-Chat, Vogelsang fired again. Less than a minute later, Frederika Lensen was opened to the sea and four men were dead.
The explosion, that followed when the crosshairs of the torpedo’s warhead touched as it sped into Lensen‘s starboard side, killed four men, Englishman Robert James Spence and three lascars: Abudul Rajack, Ali Edris and Ali Mossadden. The 18 × 20 foot hole blasted beneath the bilge keel wrecked the engine room. The force was enough not only to burst the boiler but to rip it from its anchor bolts.
Vogelsang correctly guessed that the “muffled explosion” he heard was the
boiler. He never knew, however, that the explosion blasted it fifteen feet upward. The salvage crew that later boarded Lensen found that the “boiler [had] landed on top of the engine.”
Action Stations rang across the convoy as Lensen began to spew steam and smoke from its side and tons of water poured in.
“As steam burst from the stricken ship, our Bangor-class escort,” wrote Harold Freeman in an article entitled “Daring Mid-Day Sub Attack Hits Freighter in St. Lawrence,” which the Censor Office allowed to be published on October 13, “leaped ahead from her position half a mile astern of the freighter, a little Fairmile came cutting in on the starboard side and a corvette turned on a dime from her position ahead of the convoy to help.”
Breaking convoy rules, the captains of SS John Pillsbury and Meaford, two Canadian lakers, and one of Canada’s new 10,000-ton ships, rang for Full Speed and set their own courses out of the convoy’s lines.
“When I heard the detonation,” Woodruff remembers, “I ran from the mess deck to the companionway, and as I climbed up the Action Stations alarm sounded. When I exited on deck, I was facing aft and a glance (Lensen was on our port side) showed me the large, gaping hole.”
Woodruff then immediately turned left and ran up the starboard side of the ship toward the gun at the bow. “As I passed the bridge, I saw the bridge lookout, Georges Desrochers from Montreal, pointing down to a line of bubbles—the wake of the torpedo—coming to the surface just ahead of the wheelhouse.”
By the time Woodruff had covered the last few feet to his action station, his captain, Thomas Denny, RCNVR, who before the war was a British Columbia businessman and yachtsman and later became Commander in Charge of Fairmiles, East Coast, ordered a hard turn to the starboard.
“Our asdic man had gotten an echo, and the captain was running it down. We ran it down and dropped a set of depth charges off both sides of the ship and the stern. Then we turned around and dropped another set and then another.
“I was in the bow, so each time we came around I could see what the explosions had brought up. I remember seeing a circle of diesel fuel and large black oily lumps.”
Sixty metres below, U-132 rode out the storm, Vogelsang recording only that he’d been forced under and had been depth-charged. As he waited on the bottom, Vogelsang could hear the propellers of warships suddenly turn away as they went to rescue Lensen‘s crew.
“After we had exhausted our depth charges,” Woodruff recalls, “we circled round and went to the lifeboats. We took one in tow—I’d been in gunnery training with the DEMS gunner who threw me the line—and brought the boat to HMCS Weyburn. After throwing the line to them, I noticed another guy I knew, Lieutenant Pat Milson, and waved to him.”
Then, while Vogelsang watched through his periscope, Denny ordered his helmsmen to steer a course for the listing—but not sinking—ship. Vogelsang’s war diary records its list as being 20° to the starboard.
“Commanding Officer Denny asked for volunteers—a seaman and a stoker—to board her with her officer in order to secure a tow line,” recalls Woodruff. “I volunteered along with Gabriel Canuel, a strong guy who was an enthusiastic amateur wrestler from Rimouski. We climbed up the ladder that just a few minutes earlier Lensen‘s men had used to leave her. We asked the officer if there were any casualties, and he told me, ‘Four lascars went out the bottom.’ I’ll never forget the expression on his face when he said it. One minute they were there and the next, he said again, ‘They were blown out of the bottom of the ship.’10
“Then, while the officer went to get a hawser [a thick towing rope] and two axes, Gabe and I were to stand ready to cut the rope if the Lensen began going down, so it would not take Zero-Seven-Four with it.
“While he was getting the rope, I went to get some paint. We were always looking for paint, and when I asked him if he had any, he said, ‘Take what you want, she’s going down.’ We also took life jackets. Theirs were better than the navy’s. But we didn’t take anything personal,” recalls Woodruff.
When the Lensen‘s officer returned with the hawser, Canuel and Woodruff secured it to the stricken ship’s stern and then threw the other end over the side, where it was picked up by Denny’s ship.
“Zero-Seven-Four then headed straight for the beach,” says Woodruff, “pulling the Lensen stern first. Her list didn’t increase, but Gabe and I stood ready with the axes. The creaks and groans we heard were awful, like pain from deep within the ship.”
Q-074’s draught was only a few feet; Lensen’s was 26.1 feet. Lensen beached long before Q-074 would hit the beach. Once he’d beached the bigger ship, Denny ordered a course for Sydney.
Vogelsang too turned away, noting in his war diary that “the steamer sinks steadily by the stern, only roughly 1 m of freeboard remains.”11
“We arrived in Sydney the next day,” recalls Woodruff, “and there heard for the first time about Lord Haw Haw, who mentioned the torpedoing of the Lensen.”
On July 22, the day on which six thousand miles away mass deportations from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp began, U-132’s swastika-adorned conning tower broke the surface. Vogelsang signalled Lorient asking permission to begin his homeward passage. Permission was granted. Six days later, off Sable Island, Vogelsang sank SS Pacific Pioneer before suffering another ferocious depth-charge attack.
Three days later, only two days from the pens at La Pallice where U-132 would be refitted, Vogelsang’s radio officer handed him the following message from the Flag Officer Submarines in Lorient:
Well carried out operations.
The decision by the commanding officer to continue his patrol after being damaged by depth charges [while still in European waters] and his tenacity in the operating area in the St. Lawrence River paid off well and resulted in a nice success.
Woodruff’s war continued, and the sinking of Frederika Lensen became a memory. Early in 1943, he was promoted to coxswain. In 1944, the last of Q-074’s original crew, he heard that a logbook had been seized from a sub captured in the Mediterranean and that the log recorded that a submarine had attacked and torpedoed Frederika Lensen and was in turn attacked by 074 and had been destroyed.
“It was a strange feeling,” Woodruff recalls. “You hated to think that you had put some out down there without them seeing the sky again, but I felt good that we had put them out of action, maybe even preventing another attack like the one on the Lensen.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE ORDEAL OF QS-33
AUGUST 27–28, SEPTEMBER 3 AND SEPTEMBER 6–7, 1942
USS Laramie, SS Chatham, Arlyn, Donald Stewart and Aeas, HMCS Raccoon, Mount Pindus, Mount Taygetus and Oakton
Till over the deep the tempests sweep of fire and bursting shell,
And the very air is a mad Despair in the throes of a living hell.
—JOHN ROONEY
The breaking of radio silence was enough.
It meant another attack.
The details would follow—the ships, positions, counterattacks, pleas for help. HMCS Arrowhead’s signature, which came across at 11:35 p.m. on September 6, 1942, told the four men in the signals room on the second floor of the grey clapboard building all that mattered. Out on the broad stretches of the St. Lawrence, ships were under attack—as SS Donald Stewart had been three days earlier, as SS Arlyn and Chatham and USS Laramie had been three days before that. All four had been up in the Strait of Belle Isle. Now the signal came from 150 miles up the river, within sight of the lighthouse at Cap-Chat.
Had the signal come six hours earlier or even four hours later, help could have been sent quickly. The small squadron based at Mont Joli may have been partly staffed with trainees whose planes were not equipped to drop bombs, but the U-boats didn’t know that. Air cover of any type might keep them at bay. Heavier planes were farther away, at Sydney, Gander, Chatham. Whichever aerodrome the pilots of the Hudsons or Digbys called home, Eastern Air Command’s pilots had a score to settle. Not forty-eight hours earlier, U-517, which sank Donald Stewart, h
ad used up one life when it crash-dived to escape bombs dropped by J. H. Sanderson’s Digby. But for now, and for hours to come, air cover was out of the question.
“We waited for the signal,” recalls then sub-lieutenant Ian Tate. “We recorded the messages, and we sent them next door to the operations centre, where they were plotted on the map that covered the far wall. Commander German asked for news. We relayed what we knew—nothing—to Ottawa and Eastern Air Command in Halifax, and we waited.”
The waiting was the toughest part. Perhaps they’d hear of a “kill.” Perhaps they’d sit with rapt attention as they decoded a message like this one, received a few days earlier from HMCS Raccoon:
FIRST TORPEDO PASSED 25 FEET AHEAD OF ME. SECOND TORPEDO PASSED UNDERNEATH ME FORWARD OF BRIDGE. BOTH WITHIN 3 SECONDS AT 0240 3RD AND TRACKS CLEARLY VISIBLE DUE TO PHOSPHORESCENCE MY POSITION 1500 YARDS ABREAST OF LEADING SHIP PORT COLUMN COURSE DEGREES 240. COURSE OF BOTH TORPEDOES 285° FIRE FROM MY PORT QUARTER. RAN UP TRACK 6000 YARDS DROPPING DEPTH CHARGES BUT NO CONTACT. AFTERWARDS I STEERED CLOSING COURSE ZIGZAGGING AND RESUMED STATION
The little armed yacht was out there now, part of an escort force led by the corvette HMCS Arrowhead, the Bangor minesweeper HMCS Truro and two Fairmile launches.
Hopes for a kill vanished as September 6 gave way to the seventh, and those hopes were replaced with worries about Raccoon itself. Why had it not reported in? Nor would daylight end the ordeal. By late morning, Commander German sent the minesweeper HMCS Vegreville to reinforce QS-33’s defences. Before dark, not fifty miles from the map that showed movement of every ship between Quebec City and the east coast of Newfoundland and as far south as New York, SS Mount Pindus, Mount Taygetus and Oakton were sent to the bottom.