The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  “We rotated our 286 radar by turning a crank that was connected by a series of rods to the antenna (called a Yagi), which was shaped like two of those old TV aerials that used to be on top of houses. As we rotated the Yagi, we watched for jagged lines. Unfortunately, as we rotated it, we picked up as many back echoes as true readings. Figuring out what the oscilloscope was telling you took a lot of guesswork.”

  SQ-35 was a milk run, just like the other ten patrols telegraphist Fred Rush recalled in a 1993 interview: “Looking back, it was quite a time. We were a bunch of green kids. I was an old man of twenty-three or twenty-four. It was a holiday with pay, with no thought of war. We ate good—navy style—and slept good. One day up the river to pick up our small convoy, three or four days back to Sydney and then back to Gaspé for a layover. A real holiday with pay.”

  Amidst the endless cleaning and painting, there was time for baseball and swimming, “a very gentle time.”

  SQ-35 would be Charlottetown’s last patrol.

  Across the St. Lawrence and even in Ottawa, action swirled.

  A HF/DF report on September 8 placed one U-boat north of Anticosti Island, squarely in the middle of the Jacques Cartier Passage, one of the convoy routes. The next morning, Heagy’s opposite number on Char-lottetown’s sister ship, HMCS Summerside, called out Contact Co-ordinates. Captain F. O. Gerity chased the U-boat for six miles and fired star shells, but his lookouts saw nothing. On the ninth, after Flight Officer R. S. Keetley returned to his base at Chatham, the following signal was sent to Naval Service Headquarters, on the second floor of a building on Sparks Street in Ottawa:

  At first [the pilot] did not think it was a submarine [twenty miles south of the eastern end of Anticosti] but mistook it for [a] sail boat due to its excellent camouflage. The conning tower was painted white and the hull sea green, [giving it] the same appearance as water. It was extremely difficult to distinguish the U-boat from a small sail boat. Recognizing it to be a U-boat the pilot brought [the] aircraft [into a] dive from 4000 feet to 800 feet and noting that the enemy machine gun was mounted and directed at [the] aircraft the pilot open[ed] fire.

  The U-boat, identified as Eberhard Hoffmann’s U-165 by historian Roger Sarty, escaped Keetley’s depth charges by seconds. Several hours later, two corvettes and a minesweeper ordered by Commander German to search the same waters off Anticosti dropped four depth charges after having gained asdic contacts. Hartwig spent most of the same day under, spotting either escorts or patrol aircraft at 6:30 a.m., 3:35 p.m., 5:15 p.m. and 7:46 p.m.

  While Hartwig was lying low, King’s war cabinet was meeting in Ottawa to consider Churchill’s request of a “loan” of escort vessels for Operation Torch, the amphibious assault on North Africa planned for November 1942. Macdonald reported that Canada could supply up to seventeen vessels but that doing so would mean denuding the Gulf Escort Force of twelve corvettes and would thus require the closing of the St. Lawrence to all but essential coastal and ferry traffic, which would be escorted by the few ships left at Gaspé. Later in the day, after Rear-Admiral Nelles sent a signal closing the river and the gulf to transoceanic shipping, Naval Control of Shipping in Halifax ordered the immediate diversion of all inbound shipping to Halifax, Saint John or Sydney; new convoy schedules were drawn up to allow ships at Montreal or Quebec City to sail as soon as was practicable.

  Although the possibility of closing the St. Lawrence had been discussed as early as 1939, doing so created an immediate communications problem for King’s government. Official naval documents state the obvious: closing the St. Lawrence “undoubtedly represents a severe moral and physical defeat to Canada’s war effort.” Hard truths from a military pen, however, did not square with rules laid down by the censor’s office after the sinking of Nicoya. Accordingly, there was no public statement announcing the closure of the St. Lawrence.

  JUNE 7, 1941

  Three thousand five hundred miles east in Kiel, Germany, workers at Howadstwerke lay the keel for U-375.

  Five thousand miles east in Egypt, German bombers bomb Alexandria, killing 230.

  Five thousand miles east, British and Free French troops prepare to invade Lebanon and Syria.

  Shortly after 7 a.m., Foreman Duncan McCorquodale and some two hundred other men walked out of the warehouse-like building that housed the Kingston Shipyards offices and the machine shops that fashioned steel into any of ten thousand parts of a ship. They stopped some hundred yards away, in the middle of a 300-by 60-foot slip that just a few days earlier had been filled by Hull 19, shortly to be called HMCS Prescott—the third corvette built by Kingston Shipyards. Soon the gentle rustling of the breeze coming off the narrowest part of Lake Ontario, which lapped the US shore a few miles south and which less than two miles east formed the headwaters of the St. Lawrence itself, was drowned out by the ear-splitting sound of pneumatic hammers driving rivets into I-beams and plates. The beams formed the keel and the plates formed the hull that Hartwig’s torpedoes would destroy on September 11, 1942, 361 days after Naval Service Headquarters in Ottawa received a one-sentence signal from the naval officer in charge in Quebec City: “H.M.C.S. ‘CHARLOTTETOWN’ COMMISSIONED THIS DAY.”

  “The men,” recalls Francis MacLaughlin, who in 1943 worked at the yard while other corvettes were being built, “took their cue from General Manager T. G. Bishop.” Tommy Bishop was from the old school, as were McCorquodale and even Donald Page (who at twenty-five was almost forty years younger than the other two), who headed the Design Office. “They were no-nonsense men, very much aware, and made us very much aware, how important our role was.”

  The controlled mayhem of the shipyard was their battlefield. Beyond the smoke and glow of braziers that turn cold plugs of steel into red-hot rivets was an endless ballet in which one strong, sweaty man tossed one, then another, red-hot rivet up twenty, thirty, forty feet to another man standing on a staging plank, who caught it in a cup and plucked it out with tongs. Before it could cool and lose its red heat, he held it straight, and a third man drove it through a narrow hole in three-quarters of an inch of steel. Sixteen rivets, and one more plate was held in place—one small contribution to the defeat of the U-boats that prowled the North Atlantic.

  For weeks, even as astute an observer of the Kingston yard as young MacLaughlin would not have been able to tell Hull 20 from the previous two corvettes built on the same slip. HMCS Napanee and Prescott belonged to the Flower class, so named, it was said, because a wag in the Admiralty looked forward to the propaganda value of the headline “HMS Pansy Sinks U-Boat.” Hull 20 belonged to the revised Flower class. Originally slated to be inshore patrol vessels, the first corvettes were built with short fo‘c’sles and noticeably unflared bows. Once forced onto the North Atlantic run, they were admired by the British Admiralty for their ability to weather the heaviest Atlantic gales “without material damage.” They were, however, notoriously uncomfortable ships.

  At 205 feet 1 inch long, corvettes of the first building program were too short to straddle the North Atlantic’s waves; at 905 tons, they were too light to cut through the rollers. Instead, they climbed over them, bobbing like corks. Their short draught, 13 feet 5 inches, made them roll violently in the heavy seas of the North Atlantic. Men who sailed in them proudly said “they’d roll on grass in heavy dew.” This short draught also accounted for their extraordinary manoeuvrability. Charlottetown and its sister ships could turn a complete circle in a hundred seconds, much faster than either a surfaced or a submerged U-boat.

  “They corkscrewed all over the place,” recalls Max Korkum, who late after the war commanded HMCS Sackville, the “last corvette,” now berthed in Halifax. “But what really wore the men down about the first corvettes was that they were a wet ship. Because of their short fo‘c’sle (the short raised deck at the bow of the ship), water poured over the deck, running down in torrents onto the boat deck (behind the fo‘c’sle but in front of the superstructure). From there, water ran onto the main deck, and could run into the ship itse
lf via ventilators and hatchways. Inside the ship, water shorted out electrical equipment and made for hellish living conditions.”2

  Frank Curry, who joined the RCN in 1940 when he was twenty years old and who served on an original Flower-class corvette, HMCS Kamsack, remembers that sea water was constantly backing up into the mess deck. “When they [were] not floating in dirty salt water on the deck, loaves of bread were soggy and almost always mouldy because of the mess’s dampness.”

  “Our clothes too,” Curry says, “were always wet—and so were our hammocks, because we had to crawl into them in our wet clothes. During the winter runs on the North Atlantic, the watch going on duty had to put on the ice-covered and chilled duffle coat of the watch coming off duty.

  “The battering of the ship in the North Atlantic—and remember, these ships rolled in even the slightest seas—took its toll on our bodies. Our hips were constantly being wrenched by the ship’s roll and the fact that we had to hold on to the stanchions while we walked and she rolled. The battering also took its toll on our dishes. I remember leaving port time and again with a full set of dishes for the crew and that by the end of the patrol we were eating out of empty jam tins because every one of our dishes had been smashed.”

  The addition of 3 feet 3 inches to the corvettes’ length (to 208 feet 4 inches) and 2 feet 2 inches to their draught (to 15 feet 7 inches) in the revised program begun in late 1940 did not materially alter either their manoeuvrability or their sea-keeping ability. The first change to appear was an increased flare to the bow (which drove water away from the ship’s deck). Even more important was the extension of the fo‘c’sle, which made the ships drier, quite literally because there was more ship between the deck and the sea.

  “The extension of the fo‘c’sle did one other thing,” says Korkum. “It changed the rolling of the ship. They still rolled a lot, but the ones with the extended fo‘c’sle didn’t pitch and yaw with the same speed or ferocity.”

  Ensuring that over the 373,000 man-hours it took to build Hull 19, shipwrights, boilermakers, platers, riveters, coppersmiths, steam-and pipefitters, and chippers and caulkers had the pieces they needed took, wrote Lesley Roberts in 1944, 55,000 phone calls. Part IV—Machinery (Steam—Reciprocating) Including Electrical Generators of the Specifications for an Admiralty Single-Screw Corvette of the 1941 Programme ran to more than fifteen pages. Whatever supply bottlenecks Bishop faced while overseeing the building of Hull 20—and the National Archives contains more than a dozen pages of correspondence pertaining to the Kingston Shipbuilding Company’s requisitioning of a ship’s telegraph from Marine Industries in Montreal and to Marine Industries’ demands for payment of $1,850 for the “telegraph and fittings”—they would be far easier to overcome than those he had faced just eighteen months earlier when Kingston began building HMCS Napanee.

  When on September 13, 1939, Canada received from the Admiralty the plans for what was originally called “patrol vessel, whaler type” (a variant of Southern Pride, a whaler designed by William Reed of Smith’s Dock Co., Ltd., in Yorkshire), the country hadn’t built a significant ship in almost twenty years. The dockyards that undertook to build what Churchill dubbed “the cheap, but Nasties” (Charlottetown cost $532,000) had barely survived the long dark years of the Depression by doing repair work.

  Though slightly revived by the small rearmament program begun in 1936 when the King government more than doubled the Naval Estimates to $4.8 million (funds that ensured that when war broke out in 1939, Canada possessed six modern destroyers, enough to mount a credible defence against surface attacks on the east coast), the Canada that undertook to build and launch twenty-eight corvettes before the end of 1940 hardly possessed either the industrial plant or the experienced personnel required for such a project. Of the Great Lakes yards that built dozens of corvettes and minesweepers, the “History of the British Admiralty Technical Mission in Canada” (1946) wrote, “Without having dealt with them, no one brought up to Admiralty practice could begin to appreciate the primitive nature of all these yards…. In one there was no drawing office at all.” Of Canada’s machine-tool industry, the sine qua non of a shipbuilding industry, the “History” wrote that it was “relatively small, and that tooling of plants largely depends on U.S. and U.K. sources: this applies particularly to the specialized tools required for fire [gunnery] control”—sources that were hard-pressed to meet their own demands.

  Valves—or, to be more precise, the lack of valves—caused the “most serious bottleneck in production, owing to the small number of firms manufacturing them and the very large requirements of very varied sizes and designs.” This bottleneck was broken by the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, which “set up an organization for producing them in the workshops of their numerous subsidiary companies.” Fan motors, cabling, electrical fittings and a hundred other components were difficult to get or were not being manufactured to the specifications required for a warship. The size and diversity of the electrical industry, the “History” concluded, corresponded to Canada’s small population:

  Practically all the manufacturing firms are off-shoots of American concerns…. One effect of this is that most of the firms, particularly the smaller ones, are not as fully staffed on the engineering side as they would be if they had to depend on their own resources….

  When difficulties over the development of small motors for fans were under discussion, the Chief Engineer of the Canadian Westinghouse Company stated that he did not have the staff of engineers qualified to design a direct current machine, and therefore had to use a standard design from the Westinghouse Company.3

  In 1940, every one of the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel that thousands of men and women turned into corvettes and minesweepers had to be imported from the then-neutral United States. Until the Parker Fountain Pen Co. began capitalizing on its experience with small tubing to build hundreds of thousands of electrical fuses, few could be found. The same was true for ignition switches until the Renfrew Electric and Refrigeration Company stepped in. Cansfield Electric designed and built marine electrical equipment. Boilers and triple-expansion steam engines capable of producing 2,750 BHP and 185 rpm, enough to drive a corvette at 16 knots but rarely ordered during the 1930s, were manufactured by Dominion Engineers.

  In 1940 stocks of building materials were so low at the Kingston yard, recalled Page in a 1990 interview, that he had to send a crew to scour the farms outside Kingston to find the planking needed to build staging for the riveters and welders working on Hulls 17 and 18. Naval guns were in such short supply that the first of the fourteen corvettes to sail for England crossed the Atlantic with grey-painted wooden dowels sticking out of their gun turrets. By the time they reached the English Western Approaches, the “guns” were drooping, a sight that prompted an admiral to exclaim, “My God! Since when are we clubbing the enemy to death?”

  McCorquodale’s men began where shipbuilders since the Phoenicians have begun—with the keel. In the 1860s, when Kingston Shipyards built 1,223-ton sailing ships, the phrase “her keel was laid” was literally true. Cut from huge trees, keels were rough-hewn timbers hundreds of feet long laid in the middle of a slipway.

  The materials McCorquodale’s men worked with were considerably less romantic. Scores of angle bars, similar to T-brackets, were riveted to steel plates, which were then riveted to still more, L-shaped angle bars called channels to form the 208 foot 4 inch keel.

  To a layperson, riveting resembles nothing so much as nailing, with all the attendant possibilities of pieces working loose. However, according to Francis MacLaughlin, “riveting not only joins plates and bars but also squeezes them together. They are squeezed so tight as to form a watertight bond. There are two reasons that rivets are red hot when driven into the hole. The first is so it is malleable. The second is because as it cools and shrinks, the bulbous head and flattened end are pulled closer together, therefore pulling the two pieces of steel (plates and/or bars) closely together.”

  T
he riveting never stopped. Once the keel was in place, the frames that form the skeleton of the ship were erected and fastened—with rivets—to the keel. Next, the bulkheads (solid transverse walls) were placed wherever watertight divisions were needed.4 And they too were riveted into place. Then the prefabricated pieces of decking were put in place and riveted. All the time this was going on, McCorquodale’s men were riveting hundreds of steel plates onto the outer lip of the frames to form the ship’s hull.

  The pounding of pneumatic hammers flattening out the stems of thousands of rivets wasn’t the worst noise. “Riveting was noisy,” recalls MacLaughlin, “but even worse was the chipping. Red-hot rivets were pushed into the hole and then a backer would put a heavy backing hammer against the head while the riveter would use the pneumatic hammer to flatten and spread out the end.

  “Chipping was necessary when overlapping plates made a watertight seal impossible. Chipping was done with a high-speed pneumatic-driven chisel, similar to a riveting gun. Instead of the staccato sound of a riveting gun, chipping guns caused a high-pitched screech. The metallic screech of metal on metal was awful. Only the man with the chipping gun had any ear protection. The rest of us simply had to put up with it.”

  In the days leading up to the scheduled launch date of September 10, McCorquodale’s men put down their pneumatic hammers, electric arc welding guns, asbestos blowers and cutting torches, and reverted to the same techniques used to launch Drake’s Golden Hind three centuries earlier. For eighty-five days, Hull 20 had been sitting on 12 × 12 × 4 inch building blocks, one line running directly under the keel and four others running six and nine feet out toward each side.