The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  A second or two before Perkin began to turn once again toward his starboard side, two torpedoes sped away from Hartwig’s U-boat 120 metres away.

  One might have broken surface and crashed into cliffs south of Cap-des-Rosiers. The other blasted a hole in the Norwegian freighter SS Inger Elizabeth, the lead ship of the sixth column.

  “It happened in an instant,” recalls Perkin. “I was sweeping toward the stern, and the merchant ship had just come into focus. It was only in my field of vision for just a moment. But in that moment, that exact moment, it was torpedoed. I saw the flash and a geyser, but what was even more amazing was that I saw the ship literally jump up.”

  Within seconds, Salisbury’s officer of the watch, Lieutenant Wilson, rang Action Stations and Captain Crichton was on the bridge. Two miles ahead of the convoy, aboard Arrowhead, Captain Skinner rang for Full Speed and turned back toward the convoy.

  Before Skinner received instructions—remain in front of the convoy and continue carrying out an anti-submarine sweep—the lookouts aboard SS Saturnus, a 2,741-ton Dutch steamship, were yelling to their bridge. The port-side lookout had seen a periscope, something for the DEMS gunners to aim at. The starboard lookout spotted torpedoes 400 yards away—and closing.

  Captain Jacob William Korthagan ordered a hard turn to port and rang for Full Speed. It wasn’t enough. At 1:30 p.m., torpedoes “hit the stern about propeller depth,” Korthagan reported. P. Kool, a gunner manning the aft 4-inch gun, vanished as hundreds of almost half-inch steel plates, riveted to I-beams and ribs weighing as much as ten tons, disintegrated.

  Kool was the third man to die in less time than it took Perkin to complete his lookout sweep. The first two had died as Inger Elizabeth’s engine room was turned into a fireball three minutes earlier. A fourth aboard Inger Elizabeth drowned during the otherwise orderly evacuation of the ship.

  While survivors of both ships were running for their lifeboats,6 for the first time in the Battle of the St. Lawrence DEMS gunners went into action. Lookouts aboard another Dutch ship, SS Llangollen, and aboard the two British ships SS Cragpool and Janetta spotted Hartwig’s periscope. Immediately, the three ships’ gun layers and trainers began aiming their 3-and 4-inch guns. Had they been on land and firing at a stationary target, wind and barometric pressure would have been the only major factors to take into account. A strong wind could push a large shell as much as fifteen yards off target; changes in barometric pressure could result in over-or undershooting a target by hundreds of yards. But naval gunners also had the relative courses and speed of their own ships and their targets to take into account.

  Had their lookouts spotted a conning tower or trimmed-down submarine 1,000 to 4,000 yards away, the gun layers would have used their handheld Cotton rangefinders to determine the range of the gun. To aim at a periscope a couple of hundred yards away, they depressed their guns’ barrels and judged by eye. As gun layers turned the cranks that depressed their guns so that they would be shooting as low as possible, gun trainers looked through small mounted telescopes and turned cranks that moved the gun from left to right. And while the gun layers and trainers were doing their jobs, the breech worker took off the safety and assured that the contact fire switch was set to “on.” Then, after warning everyone to step back, the gun layer pulled the trigger. Nanoseconds later, 3-and 4-inch shells were hurtling toward the periscope.

  None of the three DEMS crews expected their first shell to hit the periscope. Indeed, the periscope was not their real target—what they wanted to hit was the top of the conning tower beneath the water. Normally the first shell overshot. Then, as the gun layer rating made a few quick mental calculations and the gun trainer adjusted the gun for deflection, the breech worker opened the breech, expelling the spent casing. Barely was it out before he was ramming another shell, handed to him by the loading number (a merchant seaman who trained with the DEMS crews), into the breech.

  “The whole procedure, from spotting to shooting, took a few seconds,” says Max Reid, who served as a gun layer in Canadian and Norwegian merchant ships. “We were supposed to fire a spotting round and wait for the splash, make corrections and continuing firing, trying first to bracket the target. In reality, when faced with an enemy for the first time, you got as many rounds as possible into the air and made corrections after the first rounds landed. A good crew could get off twenty-five rounds a minute.”

  Though none of their shots hit the periscope, their aim was good enough to force Hartwig to reverse his course and, after a run of 2,800 yards, dive.

  Five minutes later Captain Crichton had his contact: “Range 250 yards, inclination slight closing.” His orders were textbook—one pattern of five charges set to 50 metres.

  Before they could explode, Asdic Rating Smith, aboard Arrowhead, which was in position ahead of the convoy, called out: “Target 2,500 yds, no doppler, target steady.” Thinking that Smith’s asdic was pinging off a convoy vessel, his anti submarine officer, Crockette, told him to disregard.

  “Even though I’d been told disregard,” Smith recalls, “I was so certain that it was a viable contact, I kept after it as the contact moved toward the starboard side of the convoy. After explosions occurred in the centre of the convoy [the sounds of the shelling], Crockette came back into the asdic hut and told me to sweep to the starboard side of the convoy towards the stern of the convoy. Instead, I told him that I had the contact.

  “We then raced in towards the contact. About five hundred yards from it, we lost it. Instead of ‘pingwup,’ I got just a mushy sound, which I later learned was caused by the U-boat’s anti-asdic weapon, the Pillenwerfer.”

  Contact or not, Skinner continued the attack. Just seconds after the geysers formed by Salisbury‘s depth charges collapsed, Arrowhead steamed over the same spot, firing another ten-charge pattern. Sixteen minutes later, Arrowhead dropped yet another ten-charge pattern over the same area.

  The bloodless tone of Hartwig’s war diary—“Because of depth-charge attack have to go down (A*+40) [120 meters]. At A+60 [180 meters] there is a sharp metallic sound, presumably a tube caved in”—hardly captures the moment. At least one of the explosions must have been terrifyingly close, for not only did the attack put the “after torpedo angling gear out of order,” it damaged the torpedoes that were stored in the upper deck compartment between U-517’s pressure and outer hulls. A little bit closer and the Canadian-produced pressure wave would have cracked the steel bubble that protected Hartwig and his forty-nine men.

  More revealing of both the emotions of the moment (which included the Admiralty’s growing unease at the state of the RCN’s training) and the “fog of war”—and, as Geoffrey Smith suggests, the Admiralty’s attempt to pass off one of its own failures to the RCN—is the “Analysis of Attacks by U-Boat on Convoy SQ-36 on 15th and 16th Sept. 1942.” The part of the Remarks section that deals with the attack on the fifteenth minces few words: “The absence of any escort organization is clearly shown in this attack. ‘Salisbury’ left Sydney after the remaining escorts had sailed and was therefore not able to hold an escort conference. On joining the convoy at 2045/13 [and becoming the chief escort ship] ‘Salisbury’ was informed by ‘Arrowhead’ that, in his opinion, previous sinkings in the River were caused by mines and not torpedoes. However there would still appear to be no apparent reason to account for the absence of escort organization, especially as there was ample time in which to signal instructions.”

  “Captain Skinner could not have told Salisbury that ‘in his opinion, previous sinkings in the River were caused by mines and not torpedoes,’” says Smith. “Even when we were told by the captain of the Aeas [on September 6] that he thought he’d struck a mine, Skinner ordered HMCS Raccoon to screen us as we picked up the Aeas’s survivors; you only screen if you think torpedoes are a possibility. A day later, when the SS Oakton and two other ships were sunk, Skinner knew that they were torpedoed because I reported to him that I had seen the torpedoes pass twelve yards behind our stern. He knew damn
well on the fifteenth that those sinkings and Charlottetown’s were caused by torpedoes. It’s hard not to think that the report isn’t slanted towards her [Salisbury].”

  Whether the report was purposely slanted is an open question. What isn’t in doubt, however, is that it was written before HMCS Vegreville and Chedabucto and one Fairmile had filed their action reports, none of which provide support for the report’s assertion that Skinner believed that the previous sinkings were caused by mines.

  Smith’s view of the report is mirrored by Perkin’s, who believes that one claim—“After realizing that a ship had been torpedoed, ‘Salisbury’ failed to order ‘Artichoke’ or pass any instructions to the escort, and did not herself take any action until 12 minutes after the torpedoing, and 5 minutes after having sighted a periscope in the centre of the convoy. The periscope was under observation by ‘Salisbury’ for 7 minutes”—amounts to a calumny of his captain. “As soon as we saw the ship explode,” says Perkin, “we were at Action Stations. It was only a matter of a few moments before the captain ordered a hard turn to take us around toward the position the U-boat had to have been in when it fired.” Arrowhead’s logbook and, ironically, the report’s own summation of Arrowhead‘s actions disprove the report’s claim that Salisbury “failed to pass any instructions to the escort.”

  Six months later, on March 15, 1943, Sasseville Roy, the MP for Gaspé, rose in the House and said that Canadian authorities had had a pretty good idea of where Hartwig was before he attacked on September 15, 1942. At “exactly eleven o’clock in the morning” on September 15, U-517 had been seen by the Cap-des-Rosiers lighthouse keeper, Joseph Ferguson, a member of the Air Detection Corps (ADC). Ferguson immediately telephoned Captain Côté, who was in charge of the ADC, and another ADC watcher, Walter Lequesne, in Fox River, some twenty five kilometres away. Roy’s captivating story continued: “A few minutes later from the lighthouse a convoy could be seen coming up from the southeast, toward that very spot,” the one Ferguson had indicated on a map. “It was evident something was going to happen to the convoy when it reached there.”

  It was so evident that Lesquesne’s two daughters and Albert Morris’s daughters “climbed up inside the church steeple to watch what was going to happen down there.” But, according to Roy, nothing was done. “No aeroplane showed around there to help the corvettes.” Why, he asked, had there not been wireless messages from Gaspé, Halifax or Quebec ordering the convoy to change course? “They had plenty of time to do it. The civilian population knew what was about to happen. They were watching the events. It was the navy and airforce which did not seem to be aware of those facts.”

  Macdonald’s response—“Does the honourable member think he is helping the river St. Lawrence traffic by making such a speech as he is making to-night?”—is pure parliamentary camouflage meant to conceal what the minister knew to be the true story: a major intelligence failure had occurred.

  Ferguson did see U-517 at 11 a.m., but EAC did not receive word of his sighting until 3:10 p.m., five minutes before Arrowhead was ordered to break off its search for the attacking U-boat. The reason was twofold. First, according to Field Officer H. M. Boucher, an ADC officer who was sent to investigate what went wrong on the fifteenth, “army headquarters at Gaspé was only dimly aware of the ADC, and had been instructing civilians on the coast to pass submarine sighting reports through army intelligence.” Second, and more important, Boucher reported to his superiors that the public telephone line controlled by Côté was not integrated into the ADC system: “Captain Côté is something of an eccentric. He could see no reasons why ADC calls should be given priority over calls from his ‘regular customers.’ He objected to the charges on these calls being made ‘collect’ to the Reporting Centre; i.e. Gaspé. He is a lighthouse keeper who is disposed for political partisanship. After considerable discussion and humouring, he finally ‘saw the light.’ His [commercial telephone] operators … had never heard of ADC before this date [September 15].” Boucher concluded that “Captain Côté intentionally withheld instructions from his operators re. ADC.” This arrangement, which relied on commercial telephone operators, was an accident waiting to happen.

  As Roy spoke and as Jean-François Poulliot, a Quebec member of parliament, yelled out that “he [Roy] was showing that the minister is incompetent,” no doubt Minister Macdonald was chomping at the bit to tell the House that three days earlier (March 12, 1943), a committee formed under the chiefs of staff of the army, air force and navy, and including the Dominion and Quebec Civil Defence organizations, the RCMP and the Quebec Provincial Police, had agreed on a major reorganization of the ADC. Among changes were the establishment of new reporting centres at Chatham, Mont Joli and Sept-Îles, each to be staffed with bilingual personnel; the establishment of field parties to train volunteer observers; the establishment of a twenty-four-hour service using commercial telephone lines; and the distribution of wireless sets where telephone service did not exist.

  Three thousand miles east in Hamburg, U-647 and U-648 are launched.

  Five thousand miles east in the Aleutians, Japanese troops evacuate Attu Island.

  Four thousand five hundred miles east, 6,000 Polish Jews are killed at the Treblinka death camp.

  Nine thousand miles southwest, US Marines continue to hold their position on Guadalcanal against the Japanese.

  SEPTEMBER 16, 1942

  At 7 a.m., the Canso flying boat escorting SQ-36 was several miles ahead of the convoy. Airborne escorts relied on what sailors had relied on for millennia: the well-trained eyes of their crew. Later in the war, such planes would be equipped with airborne radar that could pick up periscopes. On September 16, 1942, however, the best the Canso’s radar could have picked up would have been the shoreline and the presence of the largest ships in the twenty-seven-ship convoy. A few miles off BA 3833, some seven miles off Cap-Chat, flying over waters that a week earlier had seen Hoffmann torpedo SS Aeas and HMCS Raccoon, blips on oscilloscopes had not yet replaced the sighting of wakes, bubbles and torpedo tracks.

  Behind the Canso steamed the twenty merchant ships, arranged in five columns of four, with seven escorts, led by Salisbury, positioned two miles ahead of the convoy’s centre column. Vegreville, Summerside and Q-063 covered the port side, while Chedabucto, Arrowhead and Q-082 covered the starboard side. The Admiralty would later criticize Arrowhead for positioning the Fairmiles in the rear, noting that the assumption that the previous day’s attack was made by a U-boat that had penetrated from the rear was “unsupportable” because submerged U-boats were unable to travel fast enough to enter a convoy from the rear. However, the deployment decided by Salisbury provided asdic coverage of the entire convoy.

  CONVOY SQ - 36 FROM 7:00—7:15 A.M. ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1942

  * * *

  At 7:09 a.m., the lookout aboard the British ship SS Essex Lance spotted a torpedo track some 4,200 feet off the ship’s starboard bow.

  Once again, Action Stations was called.

  Once again, the black flag (signifying enemy action) was run up the yardarm.

  Once again, a ship’s telegraph rang for Full Speed as the ship tried to go to starboard.

  Once again, men waited as the relentless laws of geometry and mathematics played themselves out.

  Once again, a white-hot fireball blasted through tons of steel.

  SS Essex Lance and her crew were luckier than most of the other ships attacked in the St. Lawrence: the evasive action worked. Instead of hitting amidship, Hoffmann’s eel hit between the propeller and the rudder. Though tons of water poured into the stern, the ship’s bulkheads held and it was soon taken into tow by Vegreville to Quebec City, where it was repaired.7

  This time Skinner didn’t wait for instructions. The convoy’s lead ship, Salisbury, was over two miles ahead of the main body of the convoy. Skinner was closer and rang immediately for 175 revolutions of his propeller per minute. Within seconds, the three-bladed propeller some 150 feet behind the bridge was biting into the water 515
times a minute. Arrowhead was steaming at 16 knots and ordered a course behind the stern of the convoy and then up its port side.

  Three miles away, Summerside, commanded by Lieutenant F. O. Gerity, immediately altered its course to do a sweep outward. A quick check by radio telephone with Vegreville, the ship closest to Essex Lance, confirmed what Gerity’s lookouts had told him: the torpedo had come from the port side.

  Two miles ahead, Salisbury was steaming at flank speed back toward the convoy, on a course that would take it between the third and fourth columns—where, it already knew from flagged signals, one of the merchantmen had seen a periscope.

  But before Skinner could join Summerside, before Salisbury could bear down on the reported periscope, before the Canso could return, Hoffmann fired again, at what his war diary calls a 6,000-tonner: SS Joannis, laden with 4,800 tons of anthracite coal and travelling at 10 knots.

  Again, a lookout saw tracks, this time 7 cables (4,256 feet) off the ship’s starboard beam.

  Again, a ship’s telegraph rang for Full Speed.

  Again, a helmsman turned the polished wheel, following the order Hard to Port.

  Again, the relentless logic of geometry.

  Again the blast, this time in the after peak (just behind the starboard bow).