The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  SEPTEMBER 11, 1942

  Three thousand miles east in Hamburg, workers at Deutsche Werft AG lay the keel for U-533.

  Three thousand miles east in Bremen, U-196 is commissioned.

  Two hundred miles off Nova Scotia, the Canadian freighter SS Cornwallis is sunk by U-1230.

  Eight thousand five hundred miles southwest in New Guinea, Allied soldiers halt the Japanese advance at Owen Stanley Range.

  Four thousand five hundred miles east in Poland, 5,000 Jews are deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the death camp at Treblinka.

  When war came to their generation, James L. MacAuley’s two eldest sons knew they’d have to fight. From their father, who had been so badly wounded in France that he could not take over the family farm after the Great War, they learned the horrors of the trenches. Ray’s older brother, Horace, enlisted in the RCAF, serving most of the war as a radar technician in England.

  For generations the MacAuleys had lived near Sussex, New Brunswick, a part of the world where neatly kept graveyards tell only part of a family’s story. As often as not, the memorial for a young man gone is a name carved in a granite wall facing the sea.

  As September 11 dawned, MacAuley had been in the Navy nine months, six of those at sea, and already he had his able seaman’s papers and was training to be a helmsman.

  Scheduled to take the helm at 8:00 a.m., he entered the bridge a few minutes early and was told by the officer of the watch that because Char-lottetown’s consort, Clayoquot, was low on fuel, they wouldn’t be zigzagging on their way back to Gaspé. After taking the helm, it took a moment for MacAuley to get the feel of the ship; the river, alternately lit by bright sunlight and shrouded in misty fog, was a little choppy as they passed six miles off Cap-Chat, the radar’s oscilloscope confirming the dead-reckoning sight ing taken by the officer of the watch. His legs splayed, his hands on the large polished wooden wheel, MacAuley looked ahead, listening for orders, slowly moving the helm an inch or two in response to the gentle roll of the ship as it steamed at 11 knots; moments later, like so many thousands of other men who fought their war by going down to the sea in ships, he was running for his life.

  Ten minutes before MacAuley’s duty began at eight bells, U-517’s commander, Paul Hartwig, who had been cruising at periscope depth since first light, “sighted [a] steamer in BA 3911” off his port beam. Neither Char-lottetown‘s starboard lookouts nor her radar operator noticed the periscope between their ship and the shore off to the ship’s starboard side; the devilish waters of the river also hid Hartwig from the ship’s asdic. Three minutes later, U-517 “closed up action stations.” Then, the order “Los!” and two torpedoes sped toward the “steamer.”

  As soon as he heard the clang of the torpedo doors closing, Hartwig began counting down the seconds, nervously waiting for the impact. At the same moment, Leitender Ingenieur (Chief Engineer) Helmut Martin moved to counter the effect on U-517 (a perceptible rise toward the surface) of the sudden loss of 4,800 kilograms of weight. Barely had the echo of the clang ended before he ordered the opening of the compensation ballast tanks closest to tubes I, II and VI. Four thousand eight hundred kilograms may not seem like much when measured against the U-517’s 1,500 tons, but even the smallest loss, gain or change of weight distribution within a U-boat affected its trim and buoyancy. The cook made daily reports on both the weight of stocks used and from where in the boat stores were used. Even the weight of the garbage expelled through the torpedo tubes had to be precisely recorded. Martin ensured U-517’s buoyancy by simultaneously blowing the main compensation of 4,800 kilograms and taking on an equal amount of water in the ballast and trim tanks closest to where each torpedo had been stored.

  A scant fourteen seconds after Hartwig started his stopwatch—as Heagy made his way to the bridge to begin his radar watch, as Fortin began to settle into his watch on the gun platform, as Coder Russ Duff slept in his bunk, as Lieutenant W. A. Johnston slept in the sick bay, as P. Miller in the engine room noted that the ship’s propeller was turning at 118 revolutions per minute, as Telegraphist Gerald Martin settled into the ship’s wireless shack, as Leading Telegraphist Edmond Robinson made his way to the mess, as Able Seaman John Kinch asked for his plate of sausages—the steel plates McCorquodale’s men had riveted into place on Charlottetown’s starboard quarter were torn asunder, first by one torpedo and then by another.

  The first torpedo hit well behind the engine room. The blast literally lifted the 1,050-ton ship by the stern. The coxswain and two other men who were in the tiller flats died before the shattered hull dropped down, 30° to port from its true course. Seconds after the white-hot gas bubble that lifted the ship decayed, the second torpedo detonated and another gas bubble was born. The blast destroyed the engine room, killing Engine Room Artificer (ERA) Donald Todd, the chief engineer and one other man, and ensured Charlottetown‘s quick fate: it destroyed the ship’s aft watertight bulkhead.

  “No one on the bridge saw a thing. The first we knew of it,” recalls MacAuley, “was when a tremendous shudder ran through the ship. We all felt it—felt it move with our bodies. But I could also feel the destruction of the stern through the helm. One moment we were steaming, the helm answering, and the next moment we shook and a tremendous roar washed over us from behind and the helm went dead and all power [was] lost, including the telegraph to the engine room. It’s hard to separate the two hits. For a split second, we could tell that the ship had been shoved off her course and was pulling toward the stern as tons of water poured in. And then another blast, this one from our right, and then everything began sliding toward the starboard and we saw the steam shooting up from the hole in the side of the ship.”

  The second torpedo struck immediately beneath Fortin’s watch station on the starboard gun platform. The first shockwave blew him off his feet. The second sent him flying off the gun platform. Before he fell onto the hard steel deck—a fall that broke his arm—his boots flew off his feet.

  Seconds after the explosions, Captain Bonner, who was in his quarters off the ladder to the bridge, came running onto the bridge. Immediately he instructed Moors to lead the Abandon Ship operation.

  A mile to MacAuley’s port, farther out on the river, Clayoquot’s crew watched in horror. Within seconds of hearing the first explosion, the captain, Lieutenant H. E. Lade, ran to his bridge, arriving in time to see debris still falling. As the men on Charlottetown ran for their lives, Lade rang Action Stations and ordered a hard turn to starboard. Then he rang for full speed and began a zigzag course designed to take him beyond Charlottetown’s port quarter—to where he suspected the submarine was.

  Aboard the dying ship, Heagy struggled through the steam and debris to his evacuation station at the starboard boat. By the time he got there, an officer had taken charge and was handing out lifebelts and loading men into the boat, which had been swung out on the davits.

  Bewildered by being thrown across the deck, Fortin soon realized that his ship had been torpedoed, that it had taken a dangerous list and that he’d left his lifebelt in the mess deck. He started to run for his Abandon Ship station, the portside lifeboat. As he ran past the funnel, he remembered an old locker filled with an older type of life preserver than the one he’d left in the mess deck. He took one and continued toward the portside boat.

  “I found the group I was assigned to desperately trying to push the lifeboat outward so that they could lower it into the water,” he recalled years later. “As I rushed forward to help them, I realized that my forearm was fractured.”

  Precious seconds ticked by. Tons of heavy fuel oil spread out from the stricken ship, covering the water. Thousands of tons of water flooded in, dragging Charlottetown down by the stern. Two minutes, and the boat deck, normally twenty feet above the water, was awash.

  Realizing he’d never get the second boat launched as the oily water surged over their feet, Bonner ordered the launching of the Carley floats and told his men, “The hell with it, everybody in the water.” Fortin and the
other men at his station, Bonner excepted, then jumped into the oil-and wreckage-strewn water. As he tried to swim away from the boat, which he knew was about to plunge to the bottom of the St. Lawrence, Fortin first had to struggle out of the duffle coat that was weighing him down.

  “We needed to get the Carley float closer,” recalls MacAuley, “so Lieutenant Moors asked for a volunteer to swim for it. I was a pretty good swimmer, and with my lifebelt on, I dove into the oil-covered water—it was sickening—and swam to the Carley float so I could get out the paddles and stabilize it for the other men. Everyone too moved quickly. The ship was going down and we didn’t want to get caught in the whirlpool we knew would follow.

  “I must have been on the float for a minute. I had time to ship the paddles and a few other men had gotten onto the float’s ring. There were also a few men in the webbing in the water in the middle of the float. And then there were six huge explosions in the water.”

  The explosions were not from Hartwig’s eels. Rather, they were the last moments of six bubbles, each pushing out at 50,000 atmospheres, caused by Charlottetown’s own depth charges. The exact reason why they exploded is unknown. Since Charlottetown was not at Action Stations, the depth charges on the depth-charge rack should have been set to safety; those in the locker would not have had their hydrostatic fuses in place. Lieutenant Moors was in the water when the depth charges went off, and the force crushed a Ronson lighter in his jacket pocket (Ronson replaced the lighter). Moors told the board of inquiry that he thought the torpedo that destroyed Charlottetown’s stern may have fractured the pistols (fuses), causing them to detonate even though they were set to safety.7

  “I went right up and down,” Frank Dillon, who was swimming toward a Carley float, told a reporter. “How high? It could have been 5 feet or 500 feet. I doubt that it was 500. It could have been 25 or 30 feet, dear knows. When I came down, I naturally went under and then came up. I swam up, I remember that. I did not lose consciousness for some reason. I did feel the pain. And I swallowed a lot of oil.”

  “Our float was a few hundred yards away,” recalls Heagy. “It was a hideous sight. The ship was going down, the sea was covered with oil, men were swimming for the Carley floats, and then all of a sudden the sea erupted beneath the men when the depth charges went off. We felt the tremendous vibration and saw the men in the water. After the roar of the explosions died down, we could hear the men yelling.

  “The water started to boil. I was on the float, not in the water, so I felt the ripples and heard the explosions, but I wasn’t injured. Some of the men must have been blown out of the water. Others were bleeding from the mouth. Those that I was able to get into the float were hurt inside. Of course we were all covered in oil and we were choking from the fumes and the oil that got into our mouths.”

  Dillon was one of the first to get to Heagy’s float after the depth charges exploded. Dillon “helped me get men onto the float and made a point of trying to keep up our morale by telling everyone that ‘there’s better days ahead,’” says Heagy.

  Fortin was in the roiling water. One of the lucky ones, the blast broke one of his legs but didn’t injure him internally. Somehow he continued to swim.

  Hartwig heard the blasts and watched the agony unfolding in the waters off the small village of Cap-Chat. “It’s a poor ship indeed. A lot of their sailors were killed by their own depth charges. Nobody could help them,” he told his crew.8

  In the last moments before Charlottetown plunged to the bottom, still another tragic scene was played out. Able Seaman Charles “Judy” Garland, who, according to Moors’s report, “showed especial gallantry in standing by and passing out life jackets from the locker, giving them all away when he himself could not swim,” found himself trapped on the wreck. Having refused to leave the ship without Screech, the ship’s mascot (which, ironically enough, was safely on a Carley float), Garland clawed his way toward the bow as the ship heeled up before its final plunge. He vanished from sight when, just before the plunge, another explosion—probably caused by cold river water washing over the boilers—opened the rest of the shattered hull.

  “Once she heeled up,” MacAuley recalls, “she just blew apart and vanished beneath the waves. The final explosion killed Captain Bonner, blowing his body far enough away from the vortex that it was not pulled to the bottom of the St. Lawrence.”

  “As long as there is life, there is hope,” recalled Fortin. He yelled for help. But none came. “It seemed I was alone in the whole Gulf of St. Lawrence. This solitude was frightening.”

  His arms and legs began to go numb, and so did his mind, as he struggled in the 40°F (4°C) water, where survival time is counted in minutes.

  Just as those minutes ticked away to an end, Moors’s overloaded boat found him. “Take me aboard. If you don’t take me aboard, I’ll let myself go.” His mates took him aboard.

  Hartwig’s laconic entry in his war diary—“1300–1600 [hrs.] continual depth-charge explosions or ammunition exploding on board the steamer”—gives little indication of the action that swirled 120 metres above him.

  At 8:15 a.m. Lade’s hydrophone officer gave him the information he wanted: a submarine bearing 150°, range 300 yards. Seconds later, three depth charges were fired, each set for 150 feet. Too shallow to damage U-517, the explosions damaged Clayoquot‘s wireless transmitter, which delayed the sending of an attack report but did not materially alter the counterattack.

  Six minutes later, Lade’s anti-submarine officer reported another echo: bearing 340°, range 1,400 yards. Although he lost contact 100 yards from his target area, which led him to incorrectly assume that the U-boat was 50 to 100 feet below the surface, Lade pressed the attack, firing five depth charges.

  Then, after sighting Charlottetown‘s rafts and lifeboat, Lade ordered his helmsmen to steer a careful course into the heart of the floating wreckage. Before cutting his engines, Lade circled the rafts so that his asdic operator could perform the widest possible sweep. Assured that there was no contact, he ordered Full Stop, and the men on his boat deck readied to climb down the grappling nets to help the oil-covered survivors aboard.

  A moment later, Lade’s asdic operator gained another contact. Immediately, the anti-submarine officer ordered that the depth-charge throwers be readied. Realizing that, where they were, the charges would explode too close to Charlottetown’s already blasted survivors, Lade belayed that order and instead ordered Full Speed and a course designed to take him around the survivors.

  “Despite our disappointment at not being picked up,” MacAuley recalls, “we cheered Clayoquot when we realized she was going back into the fight against the German boat that sank us.”

  Whether because of the bathyscaphe effect, the turbulence caused by Clayoquot’s own propellers or Hartwig’s decision to lie still a hundred metres below, Lade’s asdic lost the contact shortly after Clayoquot‘s propellers drove the ship away from the wreckage-strewn waters.

  Shortly before 11 a.m., Lade called off the search when, through the fog, his lookouts spotted Charlottetown’s rafts again.

  “We were in pretty rough shape by then,” recalls MacAuley. “The water was cold, so we kept switching men from the wooden sides of the raft to the basket in the middle and to the sides. We tried to keep the worst-injured as stable as we could. But we were all shivering. The oil covering our faces stopped us from seeing it, but I’m sure that all of our lips had turned blue.”

  “The water was covered in thick oil and wreckage,” recalls Murphy. “The men were on Carley floats and some were in the whaler, most covered in thick oil. To get them, we had to throw a Jacobs ladder over the side. Some were able to climb up themselves and some had to be helped by men who climbed down the ladder to help the most injured aboard. It was a horrible scene—we’d been together with those men many times.

  “I knew one of her stokers, a guy called John Grant, from Halifax like me. He’d been injured from the explosions. He was covered with oil and badly injured internally fr
om the depth charges. The sick-berth attendant treated him and gave him morphine to ease his suffering. I found out later that he’d died. It was hard to hear about because he was a stoker like me,” recalls Murphy.

  Not far away, though hidden by the fog that had gathered, Lieutenant Moors’s lifeboat made a gruesome discovery amidst the wreckage that bubbled to the surface after the ship went down: their captain’s body, floating upright in his life jacket, his face horribly distorted from the detonations beneath him. Years later, James Lamb, who commanded Charlottetown’s sister ship HMCS Trail, recounted the awesome moments that then played out amidst stunned and dying men:

  With a gentleness surprising in a big man, George [Moors] lifted the slight body into the boat, where it was laid out with awkward reverence along the bottom board by youngsters awed at the nearness of their dead captain. They set out again then, rowing as best they could for the distant shore, but it quickly became apparent that something would have to be done if the oarsmen were to find room to row in the overcrowded boat. Accordingly, George lifted Bonner’s body back over the side, and others helped him tie the dead man’s life jacket to the rudder of the boat by a piece of rope. Now that room had been made, the oars could be worked properly, and course was resumed for the shore with the captain’s body towing astern at the end of its line.

  The corpse, floating upright, proved a difficult tow; the men strained at the oars to move the boat, ever so slowly, determined to save themselves and the body of their captain.

  Bonner, in death as in life, proved mindful of the traditional captain’s dictum that put the welfare of one’s men first. After an hour of ever more difficult towing, the rudder was pulled right off the boat, and with its attached body, floated off astern. Willard Bonner, his last service done, disappeared in the mists forever.