The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  The process of lifting the ship from these blocks and sliding her into Lake Ontario began with the installation of a series of ropes that anchored her on her starboard side. Then launching ways were placed under her keel. Each long, well-worn timber sloped from under her keel into the waters of Lake Ontario. The installation of the butter boards came next. Slightly wider than the gap between the launching ways and the keel, these heavily greased boards were driven by sledgehammers into the gap between the ways and the keel, lifting the hull from the building blocks.

  The launch itself was a civic affair. People gathered. Military bands from Fort Henry played. Dignitaries gave speeches praising the men of the Kingston Shipyards and appealing for people to purchase more war bonds. Then, at the appointed time, the trigger was thrown and the ropes anchoring the hull were cut.

  “For a moment,” recalls MacLaughlin, who in 1944 rode a later corvette down from the ways, “nothing happened. And then she started to slide sideways towards the open lake, gathering speed as she moved. At the end of the ways, she tipped into the water, portside bilge first, with a gigantic splash that resembled a tidal wave moving away from the ship.”

  Over the next eighty-five days before “No. 20” sailed from Kingston to Quebec City for commissioning and final outfitting, McCorquodale’s men worked on it day and night. Thousands of feet of wire and piping were snaked through her. Fuel tanks, which held enough oil to travel 4,000 miles at 12 knots, were constructed; to save weight, and thus fuel, the outer wall of the fuel tanks was the ¾-inch plating of the hull. Messes, storerooms, wardrooms and ammunition lockers were formed by welding bulkheads in place. The frames for the watertight doors, one in each transverse bulkhead, were riveted in place. Above her deck, a bridge arose that would hold the asdic hut, radar and steering. Two racks from which depth charges could be rolled were welded to her stern. On each side, 100 feet from the stern, depth-charge throwers were riveted and welded into place. Ahead of the bridge, a raised round steel plate was readied to receive a 4-inch gun. Work went on continuously all over the ship except for several hours on the day her power plant was installed: two huge Scotch boilers and a three-stage reciprocating steam engine, which had taken 10,000 man-hours to build.

  “The day the boilers were hoisted from the railroad siding that ran close to the berth where the hull was brought after the launching, all other work on her had to stop. We never had an accident,” recalls MacLaughlin, “but moving it was dangerous work. If one of the cables of the Shear Legs snapped, it would have cut a man in two.

  “We didn’t lift the boilers and engines with a crane like the ones you see today building skyscrapers. Instead, we had something called a ‘Shear Legs.’ The Shear Legs consisted of two heavy steel posts that pivoted on the ground and were joined at the top by steel beams. Their only movement was from the vertical to overhanging the water (and thus over the corvette’s hull, into which the Shear Legs could lower engines and boilers). The movement was controlled by a steel cable going to steam-driven winches well back on the dock. The railroad siding came under the Shear Legs,” recalls MacLaughlin.

  “And, of course, we didn’t have walkie-talkies to communicate with the drive house. Instead, the foreman directing used hand signals. After making sure that everyone was clear, he’d twirl his fingers and the hoisting would begin; he used the baseball safe signal for ‘stop.’ If he wanted a bit more height, he’d tweet his thumb and forefinger together.”

  “Once the boiler or engine was hoisted, the winch man paid out the steel tackle, and the top of the Shear Legs would begin to pitch out over the hull of the ship. The hoist tackle would be paid out and the engine or boiler would start to sink into the hull. After it disappeared from view, men down in the hold manhandled it until it was over the fittings that had been drilled in huge blocks of steel. Then the word came up from below to lower it again. Their aim had to be perfect—there was maybe an eighth of an inch leeway,” recalls MacLaughlin.

  DECEMBER 13, 1941

  Three thousand five hundred miles east in Hamburg, workers at Blohm & Voss lay the keels for U-607 and U-608; U-600 is commissioned.

  Three thousand five hundred miles east in Hamburg, workers at Howadstwerke lay the keel for U-661.

  Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin in the German Reichstag, Adolf Hitler declares war against the United States of America.

  One thousand miles south in Washington, DC, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt asks Congress for a declaration of war against Germany.

  Eight thousand miles west, the Japanese attack Wake Island.

  The cold wind whipping off the St. Lawrence carried away the last words of the centuries-old invocation, “May God bless this ship and all who sail in her,” spoken by Commander L. J. M. Gauvreau, the naval officer in charge at Quebec. Led by their captain, Lieutenant John Willard Bonner, RCN, the officers and ratings who would serve on the newly commissioned HMCS Charlottetown marched onto the cold and darkened ship. It was a solemn moment, recalls Ray MacAuley, then an eighteen-year-old able seaman. He had joined the navy two weeks before work began on Char-lottetown‘s keel. “We knew that these same words had been spoken before thousands of American and British sailors, men just like us, men killed at Pearl Harbor and just two days earlier when Japanese dive-bombers sank HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse.”

  As the last member of the crew stepped off the gangplank, Bonner’s ship came alive, throbbing as his engineers engaged her triple-steam reciprocating engine, powering the dynamos. Then lights—up in the bridge, above the hatchways, down the passageways. Moments later, the coxswain stationed at the mast ran up the commissioning pennant and the White Ensign. Two days later, fearing that Charlottetown, its equally new sister ship HMCS Fredericton and the Bangor minesweeper HMCS Vegreville would be locked in by the ice accumulating in the basin beneath the heights of Quebec, Commander Gauvreau ordered Bonner to lead the other two ships to Halifax.

  The forty-six-year-old Bonner was a most unlikely warrior. He was a former RCMP captain who had spent not a little time pursuing “Uncle Iff” Skinner—Skinner, before becoming captain of HMCS Arrowhead, was a rum-runner from Newfoundland. And, like Lieutenant Commander Norman Smith of HMCS Raccoon, Bonner spent years commanding United Fruit ships. Ready to retire the year the war broke out, he entered the navy instead, taking command of Charlottetown’s sister ship, HMCS Rimouski. Bonner was also a devoted family man. His daughter, Marilyn Whyte, recalls the story of a physical exam during which Bonner was asked to remove his false teeth; Bonner replied to the stunned medical corpsman that the perfect teeth in his mouth were his own.

  Bonner was a leader of the Presbyterian church in Halifax, where on occasion he preached. Though none of his sermons survive, they must have been somewhat unusual, for in addition to having an interest in Biblical prophecy—hardly in the mainstream of Presbyterian thought—Bonner was a Mason. As well, recalls his sister-in-law Grace Bonner, he was learned in the Scottish heritage of Cape Breton and was able to read and write Gaelic. A tantalizing inkling of the quality of Bonner’s mind and temperament lies at the bottom of the last page of Charlottetown’s second logbook, which was taken off the ship sometime before its last escort patrol. After twenty-four lines of standard naval information—“15:15—Fog clearing slightly”; “21:00—98 revs”—in a cursive hand is the following:

  —a sentence that bespeaks a man very much at home in the genteel traditions of the eighteenth-century novel.5

  The chain of command exists on small ships like corvettes as much as it does on great battleships. Bonner’s orders were rarely issued directly to the ratings. Rather, if they concerned general operations of the ship, they were given to Lieutenant George Moors—who, like every other first lieutenant, was called No. 1—or to whichever other officer was the officer of the watch. Moors would then relay the order to the coxswain, who would then detail the ratings. If the order concerned either the engine room or the boilers, the captain spoke directly to the engineer, who then de
tailed ratings to carry out the order.

  “But it wasn’t the chain of command,” recalls MacAuley, “that made Charlottetown a good ship. We had faith in Moors; he was a fair man. Mind you, we ratings knew we weren’t in it for fun. We joined the navy to do a job, and we were serious about it. Still, there were times when Moors had to discipline, had to show he was a fair man.

  “Charlottetown was a good ship because Bonner was a good captain. He set the tone. The rules were there and he expected us to follow them. He had pride in his ship and, though we hated all the chipping and painting he ordered when we were in port, we could tell from the fact that it was important to him that he had pride in it and us. While we were working-up in Halifax, Bonner took every opportunity to give us gunnery practice. The first few times it was kind of fun; after that we hated it. Gunnery practice in Halifax in January is a pretty cold experience, but he didn’t just order it, he took an interest in it and complimented us when we improved.

  “The captain was always ‘the Captain.’ He had the experience. Before the war he was a captain in the merchant marine, while most of us were only in our late teens or early twenties. But—and this is important to understanding how a ship actually works—Bonner took the time to know his crew. He had good people on the bridge. I was just an able seaman, but I had put in to train at the helm. Moors chose me. The first time I was up there I remember being very nervous. Neither Bonner nor Moors said anything, but they showed their confidence in a scared young kid by giving him the helm.

  “Captains have to be stern, but we saw a sense of humour. After a local paper wrote that we were Unlucky 13—because there are thirteen letters in Charlottetown and we were commissioned on the thirteenth—Bonner told the crew that ‘it would be the U-boats who were unlucky because of number thirteen.’”

  After several short patrols immediately outside Halifax during the first days of March 1942, MacAuley’s war began in earnest on March 13, when Bonner ordered the rudder hard to starboard and called for Slow Speed Astern. Immediately, even before the engine-room artificers began turning the large handles on the valves that would let more steam flow from the boilers to the engines, the engineer on duty grabbed the telegraph’s handle and moved it forward until the arrow pointed to “Slow Speed,” which instantaneously rang and registered “Slow Speed” on the bridge. Then a rating opened the steam valve, which let more steam into the engine. The increased steam pressure caused the eccentric crank, which ends with the propeller, to begin to turn. After some thirty seconds—maybe twenty revolutions of the propeller—Charlottetown was two or three feet off the jetty and Bonner called Full Stop and Let Go All Lines. Then, with his ship free from land, he called Slow Ahead, the start of eleven uneventful days escorting HMS Severn, a British submarine, to Delaware, picking up two others at New London, Connecticut, and bringing them back to Halifax.

  At 6:40 a.m. on April 24, 1942, while escorting ON-84 on the North Atlantic three days out from Halifax, Bonner’s asdic operator thought he heard a ping. Seconds after that, four men, including MacAuley and Able Seaman Léon-Paul Fortin, the Charlottetown’s sole French Canadian, were running for the 4-inch gun twenty feet from the ship’s bow. MacAuley, the gun’s layer rating, quickly climbed into the gunner’s seat on the gun’s port side; at the same time, the gun’s trainer climbed into the seat on the starboard side. Together they aimed the gun, MacAuley’s dials controlling its elevation and the other’s its horizontal position. Fortin stood at the ready, awaiting the captain of the mount’s order to put a shell and charge into the breech.

  As they waited nervously for orders from the bridge, they added their eyes to those of the lookouts scanning the water in front of the ship.

  One hundred and twenty-five feet behind MacAuley, Charlottetown’s torpedo ratings manned the depth-charge racks. Since depth charges weighed over 300 pounds and had to be manhandled onto the racks from storage lockers some thirty feet away, there were always ten unarmed depth charges on each rack, one each on the port and starboard throwers. As soon as Action Stations was called, the torpedo ratings undid the strap that held the depth charges in place. Then they waited—first for the order that would tell them at what depth to set the fuses, then for the order to fire them.

  Even on the calmest days, the swells of the North Atlantic off Sable Island are more than enough to hide a trimmed-down U-boat; a periscope is nearly undetectable.

  Then, at 7:05 a.m., the 14-kilocycle beam produced by the transducer housed in a dome in Charlottetown’s hull bounced back. Bonner ordered his helmsman to change course. Moments later, he ordered the torpedo ratings to fire.

  Developed during World War I, the depth charge was an inexact weapon. The problems lay not so much with the hydrostatic fuse or charge as with the way it was fired and with the spread that could be achieved. Like a torpedo, an exploding depth charge produced a gas bubble that pushed outward with a force of 50,000 atmospheres—more than enough to rip through the U-boat’s outer hull and then crush its protective pressure hull. When they failed to do so it was largely because they exploded too far from the U-boats they were aimed at.

  In 1942, Canadian corvettes fired depth charges off their sides and from racks on their stern. Thus, unlike the most advanced RN corvettes, which were equipped with a “hedgehog,” a mortar-like device that fired mortarlike pistols in front of the ship, RCN corvettes lost precious seconds as they manoeuvred over the U-boat by running over the wake left by the diving submarine. Once under, U-boats took vigorous evasive action by moving in any direction and by diving as deep as 700 feet, well below the 500-foot maximum depth setting of the depth charges available to the escorts in the St. Lawrence.

  The geyser formed by the water pushed upward by the expanding gas bubble may have been spectacular, but from a tactical point of view it was worse than useless. The quickly moving gas caused innumerable perturbations that threw off asdic readings, making aiming the next spread even more difficult. Unseen shockwaves did more than simply ripple around the attacking ship. If the depth charge exploded shallowly enough and if the attacking ship was not moving fast enough, the shockwaves meant to destroy the U-boat could damage the ship that launched the depth charge; on September 6, 1942, Truro’s depth charges knocked out its asdic.

  Bonner secured the ship from Battle Stations moments after the last geyser died and he saw the water littered with hundreds of dead fish—fish that moments earlier had been swimming in a school that had been picked up by the asdic unit.

  Twenty hours later, at 2:48 a.m. on April 25, Action Stations rang out again after the asdic operator reported an echo bearing N 60 E, range 3,000 yards—fully 2,000 yards beyond the normal range at which a firm contact could be established. At 1,000 yards, the target was roughly 45° off Charlottetown’s port bow, at a right angle to Bonner’s ship. Bonner ordered a hard turn to port. Moments later, as His Majesty’s Canadian Ship steamed through “heavily churned” water that had been left as the U-boat dived, two depth charges set for 150 feet rolled off Charlottetown’s stern.

  Seconds ticked by as the depth charges sank at a rate of 10 feet per second.

  Every 15 feet, the air in the fuse was compressed by the equivalent of 1 atmosphere of pressure. At 105 feet, the air was compressed by a factor of 7, effectively pushing the fuse toward the critical point. At 150 feet, the equivalent of just over 10 atmospheres of pressure, the fuse ignited, setting off 396 pounds of amatol or minol, generating an explosion equivalent to a torpedo.

  By the light of the not-yet-set moon, Bonner’s crew saw the geysers burst from the sea. Before the geysers collapsed, Charlottetown was plunged into darkness.

  The ship’s log—“The Asdic then went out of order, the steering jammed and the dynamo went out”—hardly captures either the tension or the fears that gripped the sixty men as damage-control parties fanned out across the ship. Bonner’s mission was now no longer “the safe and timely arrival of the convoy,” but survival.

  Knowing that the U-boat’s captain wo
uld soon come to periscope depth to see if the search had been broken off, and that if he caught Charlottetown dead in the water he’d undoubtedly torpedo it, Bonner ordered the manning of the auxiliary steering, located in the tiller flats in the stern between the depth-charge racks. He set a course for a mile away, hoping the darkness of the night would cloak Charlottetown while repairs were carried out.

  The repairs took something less than an hour, for the ship’s log reports both an asdic sweep and the dropping of another pattern of depth charges before 4:00 a.m. At 4:06 a.m. was still another pattern, this time over what the log records as a “doubtful echo.” This second pattern was, however, incomplete: “One thrower failed to operate, due to a jammed impulse cartridge,” and “the rails jammed after the second charge had been dropped.” By 4:12 a.m., both “had been put in good order again.”

  Thirty-three minutes later, Bonner almost got another fix. “At 4:45 a voice speaking German was heard on the D/F set.” Unfortunately, “there wasn’t sufficient time to D/F the voice before it ceased.” At daylight, Bonner recorded in his log, “nothing further being sighted[,] a course was set to rejoin the convoy” that had been guarded during the night by Charlottetown’s consort, the corvette HMCS Kenagoni.

  The Board of Inquiry that sat in Halifax to investigate the engagement credited Charlottetown with having saved ON-84 from a U-boat attack. It reserved special praise for the asdic team for picking up the target at such a long range; 3,000 yards was at the far outside of the range expected from the Charlottetown’s 123 asdic.

  Rear-Admiral G. C. Jones and Captain G. R. Miles (D), in charge of anti-submarine warfare, also made two criticisms, though. First, given the short interval between the initial sighting and the dropping of the charges, they wrote, “the initial pattern was set much too deep.” They also criticized Bonner for going it alone: “No enemy sighting report either by rocket or radio was made until 2 hours after the initial attack…. Had Kenagoni been advised of the sighting and joined Charlottetown in a combined offensive, the chances of a ‘kill’ would have been much greater.”6