The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  They’d all been part of small convoys—three ships, five ships, nine ships, as against the sixty-five that routinely sailed from Halifax and soon would from New York.

  SEPTEMBER 6, 1942

  Four thousand miles east in Russia, elements of the 17th German Army capture the Black Sea port of Novorossisk.

  Four thousand miles east in Russia, heavy house-to-house fighting continues in the centre of Stalingrad.

  Five thousand miles east in Egypt, German troops under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel retake Alam el Halfa.

  Four thousand miles east in Warsaw, Poland, more than one thousand Polish Jews are killed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; deportations of 48,000 Jews to Treblinka death camp begin.

  Two thousand five hundred miles south, off the coast of Colombia, U-164 sinks the Canadian ship SS John A. Holloway.

  Just before 6 p.m., the convoy QS-33, led by the corvette Arrowhead, passed into what German navigational charts designated as grid square BB 3836.

  Three years earlier, Arrowhead‘s asdic operator Geoffrey “Jock” Smith’s biggest worry was getting the Upper Canada College student newspaper out on time. Then came the invasion of Poland and, on the same day, the torpedoing of the passenger ship SS Athenia, the flagship of the Anchor Donaldson Steamship Line, managed by Smith’s uncle. Now the tall, thin Smith was cramped in a three-sided asdic hut perched on the starboard side of Captain Alfred “Iff” Skinner’s bridge, listening for the telltale “ping” that would signal one of Grossadmiral Dönitz’s U-boats. 1

  The southern border of grid square BB 3836 corresponded to the coastline just yards away from the winding road that ran through the sleepy village of Cap-Chat and then on through the rest of the rugged coast of the Gaspé. Several hundred yards from the southwest corner of the square, at 49° 05’ 20” N, 66° 44’ 27” W, 133 feet above the river, stands a lighthouse, the beam of which shone out into the inky darkness.

  At 11 p.m., the light caught Smith’s attention, causing him to look up from his asdic set and over his right shoulder. Not a thousand yards away, he saw the silhouette of a small Greek freighter, SS Aeas, laden with 1,824 tons of lumber and 1,490 tons of steel, and thought, “What a target that would make.”

  Smith wasn’t alone in this thought.

  Several hundred yards to Arrowhead‘s port, farther out on the river, hidden by the darkness of the night, low in the water, rode U-165, commanded by Korvettenkapitän Eberhard Hoffmann.

  On his first patrol, Hoffmann, at thirty-five, was older than most U-boat commanders; his career stretched back to the tumultuous days of the Weimar Republic, when the U-Bootwaffe was a shadow force. In 1932, Hoffmann was sent to Torpedo Boat Flotilla school, which doubled as a U-boat training school. Four years later, after Germany had regained the right to openly build U-boats, Hoffmann was appointed Kompanieführer and then Kapitänleutnant.

  From 1936 until 1942, Hoffmann taught at the school, likely training the other U-boat commanders who attacked Canada as well as those who in 1942 savaged the shipping off the US coast. Until February 1942, Hoffmann’s war was confined to training runs in the Baltic. Thus the obvious relish in his war diary as he entered Canadian waters on August 25: “According to Thurmann and Vogelsang, an especially good operational area as the adjoining grid squares to the west and southeast. Average air cover, relatively inexperienced defences.” Hoffmann would have occasion to alter this first judgment but not the second.

  Ten days earlier (August 27), Hoffmann, who had been lurking near the Strait of Belle Isle, had attacked SS Arlyn and USS Laramie. Both ships had violated their convoy sailing orders and steamed ahead of the United States Coast Guard cutter Mohawk, which had been escorting convoy SG-6 since it had left New York bound through Canadian waters for Greenland.

  Later, researchers awarded the sinking of Arlyn, laden with 400 tons of explosives, gasoline, trucks, army supplies and food, to Kapitänleutnant Paul Hartwig (U-517) because he fired the coup de grâce at the still-floating derelict six hours later. Still, the “3 heavy explosions” Hoffmann saw at 11:30 p.m.—his report to BdU doesn’t distinguish between the two ships—destroyed and killed on the blacked-out ships, which had failed to take the elementary precaution of zigzagging.

  *  *  *

  The torpedo that hit Arlyn’s port side demolished its engine room, killing twelve men instantly. Although the blast brought down the radio antenna, Arlyn’s master, Eyolf Wennesland, told naval authorities that distress signals were sent. Arlyn immediately began to settle by her stern but then, instead of sinking, levelled off, her decks awash.

  Behind large clouds of steam and smoke, the ship’s company broke in two. Before Wennesland gave the order, some men rushed to the ship’s davits, lowered the lifeboats, jumped in and pushed off, rowing the ten miles to shore. Others, including the fourteen navy gunners who were on station at the ship’s one 4-inch and four 20-mm guns when the torpedo hit, waited at their guns for twenty-five long minutes but had “no opportunity to offer a counter offensive,” as E. D. Henderson, a US Navy ensign, put it in the confidential report on the sinking of Arlyn. On Wennesland’s order, they finally abandoned ship and swam to rafts and lifeboats that had moved away from the ship in expectation of its sinking. The next morning, SS Harjurand picked up Wennesland and the crew that had stayed with him, later landing them at Sydney.

  Seconds after Arlyn was hit, Laramie, a US Fleet oiler that in 1940 had been in Montevideo harbour when the German pocket battleship Graf Spee scuttled itself, sounded General Quarters—“All hands man your battle stations.”

  Within seconds, her captain had ordered Right Full Rudder. Six decks below in her engine room, Carmello “Chuck” Roberto heard the ship’s telegraph ring Full Speed, as he felt the 14,500-ton ship begin to respond to the turning of its huge rudder.2 One hundred feet from the ship’s bow, Arthur Alvater, the ship’s pharmacist mate, who was already on watch at the ship’s forward gun, watched the flames leap from Arlyn.

  “I was on the bridge next to the helmsman,” recalls Dick Powell, Laramie’s supply officer, who had overseen the stowing of not only the tons of meat in the ship’s newly installed 4,000-cubic-foot refrigerated holds, but also the tons of mines and high-test aviation gasoline, some of it in steel barrels lashed to the deck. “First we saw the Arlyn get hit. There was just enough time for General Quarters. Then we got hit. There was no flash, thank God, or the aviation gasoline that spilled out of the storage tanks holding 500,000 gallons would have gone up. But there was a tremendous thud and tremendous force; we were turned 180° from our true course.”

  The torpedo struck Laramie ten feet below the waterline, between frames 7 and 8 on the port side, some hundred feet from the bow. The explosion, which blasted a 42 × 26 foot hole in the ship’s side, pushed halfway into the 58-foot-wide ship, collapsing five decks upward and killing four men who were asleep in their quarters.3

  The bulk of Laramie’s crew, however, were lucky. The blast breached the ship’s No. 2 gasoline tank, sending thousands of gallons of aviation gasoline upward like a geyser, drenching the boat deck (at one point the gunners were standing ankle deep in gasoline) and flooding the forward hold. “Had a fire started, its results would have been disastrous,” noted Rear-Admiral Wilson Brown in the final damage-control report. He credits the fact that “the flame and heat subsided almost instantaneously” and that there were “no secondary fires” to the fact that the torpedo hit the refrigerated hold: “Certainly, considerable energy was absorbed in their demolition, and a mass of cork and frozen provisions must have provided some insulation against the initial blast of heat and hot fragments, holding them back until the water rushed in to quench the flame.” Had the torpedo hit five feet or so lower, the damage-control report would not have said, “No general flexural vibration of the ship was noted”—the engineer’s rather dry way of saying that the keel wasn’t bent or broken by the blast.

  Oscar L. Lusby, James Curtis Voorhees and Jamie D. Wells were asleep in the forward cre
w’s quarters when the torpedo hit. Awakened by the explosion, Wells ran onto the deck. Once there, he realized that his mess mates had not also come up. He ran back into the ship. When he got to their quarters, the water, already knee deep and “covered by a heavy coating of aviation gasoline,” was rising quickly. While helping Lusby down from his bunk and “through the tangle of debris to the escape ladder,” Wells saw Voorhees, pinned by debris. After getting Lusby to the ladder, Wells turned to help Voorhees. With the water within two feet of the overhead, he pulled the collapsed bunk away from Voorhees and then took “Voorhees’ arms around his neck [and] pulled himself [and his severely shocked crewmate] through the water to the escape ladder,” wrote W. S. Keller, Laramie‘s executive officer, in his report that recommended Wells receive a commendation.

  On deck, discipline threatened to break down. According to Captain P. M. Moncy, following the call to General Quarters “someone, probably one of the new draft of seamen recently received on board, called ‘Abandon Ship.’” Before officers and experienced petty officers throughout the ship got control of their local situations, Carmine J. Aloia, Elmo W. Boone and Robert A. Mills abandoned the stricken, but not sinking, Fleet oiler.4

  As water poured into Laramie, her list to port increased from 15° in the moments after the explosion to 30° and threatened to worsen because of the large volume of liquid cargo in her holds. Ensign “Judy” Garland Casey, who along with other members of the ship’s Forward Damage Control Party received citations for meritorious conduct, led the efforts to right the ship. He ordered that the port main cargo pump be placed in the cargo tanks and that the oil be pumped over the side. Two hours into the operation, one of the pumps stopped; disregarding atomized diesel oil, steam and gas fumes—and without breathing apparatus—Casey climbed into the tank to restart the pump. In four hours, Casey’s party pumped 11,800 barrels of diesel oil and 171,000 gallons of aviation gasoline over the ship’s side.

  Though a Fleet oiler, Laramie was a warship, ready, even in a damaged state, to fight back. Despite the ever-present danger of fire, within minutes Captain Moncy ordered a star-shell search. The aft 3-inch anti-aircraft guns fired fifty-three rounds at a point 1,000 feet high and 5,000 yards away. Instantaneously, as shells burst in the sky, releasing magnesium flares suspended by parachutes, a large arc of night vanished. Even through the measured prose of the operations report, it is easy to feel the crew’s disappointment that the 5-inch and other guns remained silent: “To the deep regret of all hands, no enemy was sighted.”

  The crisis and the night passed. And, under its own power, Laramie made Sydney on the afternoon of August 25, burying five of its American sailors in Canada’s inland sea.

  Ten days later (September 6, 1942), as Jock Smith looked out at Aeas from his asdic hut aboard Arrowhead, Hoffmann aimed even more carefully. Between his tubes and the ship he’d chosen to attack steamed what he rather grandiloquently called a “destroyer.” Moments later, he saw not only that he’d accurately predicted where Aeas’s hull would be, but also that he’d accurately predicted that “destroyer’s” draught. Seconds before the torpedo struck Aeas amidships, killing two men instantly, Hoffmann’s “eel” passed directly under Arrowhead, sounding to Smith like a subway train.

  For seventeen-year-old Edward Read, who was just stepping out of SS Oakton’s galley, the intense quiet of a windless night on a calm sea was shattered. From his distance and angle (Oakton was ahead and to Aeas’s starboard), it was not the kind of explosion the newsreels showed. “There was no great flash, and there was no towering geyser. All we heard was an extremely loud dull thud. But we knew that a torpedo had gotten a ship over to our port,” recalls Read.

  The shockwaves that hit the shore were louder and longer, echoing off the hills, the highest of which was topped by a large cross. By the time the residents of Cap-Chat got to their windows, they could see the light from the burning ship out beyond the little harbour.

  The blast that ripped through Smith’s headphones caused him to jump out of the three-sided asdic hut; he landed at the foot of Arrowhead’s exposed bridge. Captain Skinner, a veteran of the merchant navy who’d been in command of Arrowhead since January 1941, rushed to Smith. Deafened by the blast, Smith could see but not hear his captain’s questions. As Action Stations was called, Arthur Crockette, Arrowhead‘s anti-submarine officer, took over from Smith.

  As Smith’s hearing returned, he heard Skinner through the megaphone asking Aeas‘s master what had happened. He thought he’d hit a mine.

  Still stunned, Smith immediately told Crockette that he “thought that the ship had not hit a mine but had been torpedoed, that I’d heard the torpedo run under our ship.”

  Barely had the men on the bridge had time to digest what they’d just been told—that their convoy was under torpedo attack—before Skinner ordered a hard turn to port, rang for Full Speed and set off at 15 knots to run down the torpedo’s track. Arrowhead‘s lookouts, now wearing red goggles to protect their eyes against night blindness as sixteen star shells made day out of night, scanned the waters looking for an untoward ripple, the wake of a periscope. Across the bridge from Smith’s asdic hut, “Dutch” Davey, Arrowhead‘s leading radio directional finding (RDF, or radar) rating, watched the blips of the Fairmiles—HMCS Raccoon and Truro, SS Oakton, Mount Pindus, Mount Taygetus and Benacas—fade in then out of his screen as the radar antenna rotated. He counted the blips and plotted them against the positions of the ships he had in his head. Davey knew that the chance of seeing a blip from a periscope was close to nil, and nil again if the U-boat itself was only partially surfaced but within a half mile of his antenna, for each burst of radio waves emitted by the kite-like antenna connected by coaxial cable to the magnetron left a dead zone in the immediate area around the ship. Still, one extra blip, just one extra blip, and they’d know where to start fighting.

  Truro too reacted, setting a course that cut across the convoy. A dangerous manoeuvre at the best of times, Truro’s run almost turned tragic when her steering broke down as she steamed into the heart of the small convoy. Only quick work on the part of a stoker, sent to the auxiliary steering cabin in the stern, avoided a collision between the escort, on her first mission, and one of its charges.

  Once out of danger, Truro continued its course toward the assumed path of the torpedo and carried out its own star-shell and asdic search. Finding nothing, Truro returned to the convoy, which had slowed almost to a halt, to find that two ships had scattered and that her asdic had malfunctioned; for the rest of the voyage Truro would be able to use only her hydrophones.

  As Arrowhead closed on the U-boat’s suspected position, the blare of the steam signals sounding Action Stations across the convoy was drowned out. A second, louder explosion rent the night. Caused by the cold river water washing over her boilers, this explosion ripped out Aeas‘s bottom; four minutes later, she was gone.

  The action aboard Arrowhead and Truro was matched by the merchantmen.

  “For us, the scream of the steam whistle was nothing new,” recalls Read. “Captain Brown had us practise often. As soon as we heard it, each of us knew what to do. My job was to go around the galley aft, climb up a ladder on the side up the ship and take the axe that was there and be ready to cut the rope that was holding the lifeboat in; when cut, it would swing out on the davits. One of the men standing next to the davits would then secure the seacock—the drainage hole kept open when the boat was secured on deck—then they would see her down to the water before they shimmied down the ropes to the boat. Once in, they’d ship the oars and hold the lifeboat close so the rest of us could get in. The Oakton’s first officer’s job was to pull the pins that held the Carley floats in place, before heading aft himself.”

  At 15 knots, it took Arrowhead less than two minutes to be over the torpedo’s tracks, perhaps a thousand yards. Smith and the bridge listened for the slightest ping. And if they heard it, they would hope it wasn’t an echo caused by either a long-forgotten wreck or the devil
ish waters of the river and gulf, where the mixing of fresh and salt water created gradients that could render asdic all but useless.

  Nothing.

  Without an asdic contact, Skinner had to drop his depth charges by feel. No doubt he hoped that today he’d be as lucky as he’d been a quarter century earlier when he escaped from a German POW camp. “The captain, who had been a member of the Newfoundland Regiment,” recalls Smith, “had been working on a prison farm near Kiel. One day he was able to grab a pitchfork, and he stuck it through a guard’s chest. He then escaped and managed to get back to the UK.”

  Skinner ordered one pattern over the point where he suspected the U-boat had been when it had fired the torpedo. Then another, a little farther away. His tactics, learned while on the North Atlantic run (on which Arrowhead once spent twenty-one straight days at Battle Stations), were sound. But U-165, rigged for silent running, had already moved on, continuing to stalk the convoy from a distance.

  Breaking off the search after dropping four sets of depth charges, Arrowhead returned to Aeas. Screened by the armed yacht Raccoon, Arrowhead began the emotional and dangerous task of taking oil-soaked men aboard. The men in the water were endangered both by the debris and choking and by Arrowhead‘s hull, which could push men under to their deaths. Though screened by the waters of the river that played havoc with asdic, had Hoffmann chosen to fire, Arrowhead was a sitting duck.

  Even sixty years later, Jock Smith’s voice is tinged with horror and sorrow when he recalls the plight of the men covered in oil, many burned by steam from bursting pipes, others with limbs broken by flying debris, floating in wreckage-strewn waters. “It was the first time I’d been involved in something like that,” he recalls. “It was the first time for most of us. All I felt was that I had to try to do the best I could for everyone. We dropped the rope net, and those men who were strong enough to climb up did; others we had to help by us climbing down the ropes and pulling them out of the debris-covered water. So many of them were so badly burned.