The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Just moments after Harley, Anderson and the ship’s third officer, Barrett, jumped into the water, the ship broke in two. The part they’d just jumped off sank immediately.

  Each man now fought not just to stay afloat but to rise to the surface of the water itself, for, recalled Harley, they “were pulled under by the suction as the ship went down.”

  Miraculously, each managed to fight his way to the surface. “When we came up, I got hold of two empty gas drums and hung on until we got hold of a raft,” Harley told the Canadian Press.

  Alex Dawson, a DEMS gunner from Montreal, was below deck when the torpedo hit his ship like a “heavy sledgehammer.” Just as he was about to step out on deck, the ship’s back broke. Immediately, the vertical hatchway Dawson was climbing through became horizontal. Though disoriented, he realized that “she was going over.” Beneath him, as the stern, unable to displace its own weight in water, pushed into the river, the air trapped like a bubble inside pushed outward, bursting the hatches. The drums stored on the ship’s deck, stowed to withstand the six-foot waves that St. Lawrence storms can dish out without being turned over 90°, broke loose from their moorings. Drums stored in the hold tumbled out of the blasted wreck. “One must have struck me, for I was unconscious when I popped out of the water,” Dawson told James Essex. He had been saved, no doubt, by the lifebelt he had not even had time to put on properly before Carolus‘s twenty-three-year-old keel disintegrated, killing two men instantly.

  For a moment, both Octave Gendron and his father thought that the U-boat was firing its guns at the lighthouse, situated on a spit of land that pushes a quarter mile into the river. What they were hearing and seeing, however, was the boom and the arc of the star shells fired by Arrowhead and Hepatica.

  The star shells, which turned night into bright, harsh day, were a gamble. If lookouts were to have any chance of spotting the U-boat and especially its periscope, they needed light. But that same light illuminated Arrowhead, Hepatica and the remaining merchant ships. If the U-boat was either far enough under or far enough into the shadows, both Skinner and Lade knew they were setting the stage for still another salvo and more dead men on the St. Lawrence. Skinner’s men saw nothing. After a forty-five-minute search, Skinner ordered Arrowhead back to where Carolus had been. Once again Smith and his crewmates began the grim task of helping oil-soaked, shocked men aboard Arrowhead. Of the twenty-eight men who got off Carolus, nine drowned in the river.

  Lade’s men also saw nothing. At 1:53 a.m., however, after dismissing one asdic contact as doubtful, Lade heard the words “CONTACT, range 1,700 yards, inclination no doppler, target steady”—everything the textbook said was a U-boat lying still. He ordered a ten-depth-charge pattern, six to be rolled off the stern and two each to be fired from the port and starboard throwers, set varyingly for 100 and 225 feet. At 300 yards, the contact was lost, but he dropped the depth charges anyway before altering course to help with the recovery of Carolus’s survivors.

  Hidden by the deep dark of the river, Gräf saw the star shells, heard the depth charges and wondered why, since his Metox indicated that he was being blanketed by radar waves, the counterattack was so uncoordinated. His conclusion, that “the personnel operating the enemy radars were having an excellent sleep,” may have played well in Lorient, but was unwarranted. The actual reason that neither corvette could “see” him was because their 286 radar sets were unable to pick up a trimmed-down U-boat.

  OCTOBER 11, 1942

  Nine thousand miles southwest in the Battle of Cape Esperance (Guadalcanal), the Americans lose two destroyers and a cruiser; the Japanese lose a cruiser and one destroyer and manage to land artillery and tanks.

  Five thousand four hundred miles east in Russia, the battle for Stalingrad rages.

  Three thousand miles east, a Liberator bomber flying out of Coastal Command in the UK sinks U-597.

  Three thousand miles east in England, hundreds of assault ships and others—including seventeen Canadian corvettes—are readied for the launch of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa.

  At 10:30 a.m. on October 11, 1942, SS Waterton, her holds filled with tons of wood sulphate and with huge rolls of newsprint lashed to her deck, rode low in the waters off St. Paul’s Island in the Cabot Strait. Several hundred yards away, across the three-to four-foot swells caused by a 15-knot wind from the south, steamed the tanker SS Omaha, an American ship flying a Panamanian flag of convenience. Another few hundred yards to the starboard, their escort was the armed yacht HMCS Vison, commanded by Lieutenant W. E. Nicholson, RCNR. Despite the drizzle and the low cloud cover of between 900 and 1,000 feet, convoy BS-31 also enjoyed the protection of a Canso flying boat, which flew an inner submarine patrol a half mile ahead of the ships.

  Three miles to Waterton’s port—much too far away for its lookouts or the Canso’s to spot it—fourteen inches above the surface, U-106’s periscope cut through the water.

  Commanded by Hermann Rasch, U-106 had entered Canadian waters on October 10, 1942. Rasch’s mission was to sink merchant ships and thereby disrupt enemy supply lines and force the Allies to devote precious men and ships to convoy defence. Thanks to the constant sounding of his Metox, U-106 would become something more akin to a real-time German version of USS Nerka, the submarine in Run Silent, Run Deep that endlessly practised emergency diving. “Operations in such coastal waters,” referring to Canada’s radar blanketed inland sea, had “become a continued up and down affair,” he informed Lorient.

  Rasch’s war diary entry for 12:46 p.m. on October 10 indicates how effective EAC had become. After sighting a convoy at 12:24 p.m. and getting himself into a firing position ahead of it, “Emergency dive because of an aircraft which is escorting the convoy. When the steamers—4 of medium size and 1 escort—come into the sight in the periscope, they are at bows right, inclination 30, on course 090–100. Turned to attack course and closed at maximum speed. Despite this, I am unable to close to firing range, the convoy has turned away somewhat farther and when at inclination 90 the range is roughly 6–7000 m. Once again my attempt was unsuccessful.”

  Known only to Rasch, his coder and U-106’s wireless operator, these last words betray a growing frustration. U-boat commanders, even Knight’s Cross winners (Rasch was awarded his on December 29, 1941), are not unlike elite athletes in that they are only as good as their last success. Some U-boat commanders, such as Peter Cremer, nicknamed “Ali” because of his habit of magically pulling out of a bad situation, were considered preternaturali lucky. Still others, such as Jost Metzler, U-69’s original commander, were considered as having a fine touch. When Rasch broke off his attack on the tenth, it had been almost four months since his crew had been able to paint another sinking ship on their conning tower.

  Between 10:30 and 10:57 a.m. on October 11, Rasch proved his crew’s faith in him by closing from 3 miles away from the convoy to less than 300 metres from Waterton. Despite the fact that the seas that hid his periscope made his own view “very indistinct,” Rasch no doubt enjoyed the moment when his attack crew realized he was splitting a very fine hair indeed—by aiming each torpedo slightly differently, “one forward, one aft below the funnel.”

  Then, with an audacity every bit as great as Hartwig’s run into Fortuna Bay, Rasch pushed in to as close as 220 metres from his target. His Knight’s Cross luck perhaps deserves the credit for two almost instantaneous decisions. Had he not fired when he did, his eels would have never exploded, for their run would have been 15 metres shy of the distance the propellers on their noses needed to revolve to arm their pistols. Had he not immediately after ordering “Los!” ordered a hard turn to starboard, U-106 would have “end[ed] up beneath” the “steamer [that] immediately settle[d] by the stern.”

  Once clear of the plunging Waterton, Rasch “went deep because of the flying boat” that was already circling back toward the stricken ship.

  In the days to come, Captain William Lutjens and Waterton‘s entire crew counted themselves lucky. Particula
rly grateful was F. Burton, who was blown overboard and saved by J. Paul, the ship’s radio officer; in his report Lutjens wrote that Paul dived “from the starboard lifeboat and succeeded in dragging him [Burton] safely to the lifeboat.” But in the minutes that followed the second torpedo explosion, not one of them would have taken a bet on their survival.

  Rasch’s first torpedo, which struck just forward of the stokehold bulkhead on the port side in No. 4 hold, doomed the ship. Lutjens reported, however, that it caused remarkably little apparent damage; nor did it produce a flash or throw up a column of water. The second torpedo, which struck the port side at No. 3 hold, forward of where the first torpedo hit, was louder than the first and threw up a “tremendous column of water.” More important for the men who were now depending on their ability to run across a deck that had taken a 30° list to port, the second blast brought down the wireless aerial, blew off the hatch over No. 3 hold, scattered beams across the pitching deck and blew tons of newsprint into the water. The state of the deck can be judged from the fact that the Canso, which dived toward Waterton immediately after the first explosion, was “envelope[d] in a large cloud of smoke and debris, when it arrived 150 feet over the ship seconds after the second torpedo exploded.”

  For a few moments, Lutjens held out some hope that his ship might right itself. Then, after learning that the stokehold bulkhead was bulging and with the list increasing, he ordered his men to the boats. The last off his own ship, Lutjens was almost pulled under by the suction created by the sinking, but he managed to break free from the vortex and cling to some wreckage until he was picked up by the men in the portside lifeboat. The rest of his crew was picked up ten minutes later.

  While the men aboard Waterton struggled to launch their boats and rafts and to save those in the water, Nicholson’s asdic officer aboard HMCS Vison reported a firm contact. Within a few moments, the 422-ton yacht was over the U-boat, dropping one depth charge.

  The setting was close. Rasch reported a “loud clear explosion at depth 30 m,” which he incorrectly attributed to “aircraft bombs.” Then, moments later, his crew, who a few minutes earlier had heard the “sinking of the steamer,” were now shaken by another series of depth charges dropped by Vison. The first set especially must have been rather too close for comfort, for Rasch reported that they were “very well placed.” As if to underline the tension in his boat, he reported that he was under attack by “2 destroyers,” when just minutes before he’d not even mentioned the presence of the single small escort ship. Discretion being the better part of valour, Rasch stayed deep for the next eight hours as he headed out of the southwest.

  *  *  *

  The sinking of Waterton had the look and feel of another defeat, made all the more bitter by the fact that BS-31 had air cover. Indeed, the analysis written by Air Vice-Marshal N. R. Anderson comes close to questioning whether EAC would ever be able to counter the U-boat threat: “In spite of every effort not a sign of the U-boat could be located, not even the wake of the torpedo was visible. The high seas prevailing made it extremely difficult, if not impossible to see the periscope …. The high seas would also make it very difficult for the wake of the torpedo to be seen. The ASV [radar] was in constant operation, but failed to register a contact.”

  On October 14, defeatist words also came from two sources that did not yet know about the loss of Waterton: Gaspé’s MP Sasseville Roy and the ultranationalist Quebec City newspaper L’Action Catholique. Roy told the Ottawa Evening Journal that he had sent the prime minister a letter demanding that he recall Parliament to debate the situation in the St. Lawrence, which, he said, was “even worse than when the House of Commons had held a secret session to discuss it last summer.” Anyone familiar with parliamentary sparring could read between the lines when Roy stated, “My constituents want to be assured that the defences along the St. Lawrence are adequate and whether the air force’s defences against the U-boat menace are directed along the most effective lines.”

  More potentially damaging to the King government—because it caught the attention of Quebec’s Liberal premier, Adélard Godbout, who a few weeks earlier had criticized the decision to close the St. Lawrence to transoceanic shipping because of its effect on Montreal’s economy—was a series of articles entitled, “Ce qui se passe en Gaspésie” [“What’s Going on in the Gaspé”] that began running in L’Action Catholique on October 14. Written by Edouard Laurent, who had ties to former nationalist premier Maurice Duplessis, the articles are especially critical of both the navy and EAC. On July 19, the mayor of Les Méchins, Laurent wrote, reported to the EAC base at Mont Joli that a U-boat was offshore. According to Mayor Louis Keable, fully eight hours passed before a plane arrived over Les Méchins. Laurent charged that the delay was caused by “Le RED-TAPE”: RCMP agents had to travel the twenty-eight miles from Mont Joli to Les Méchins to confirm the sighting, and then permission had to be obtained from National Defence in Ottawa. Other charges included the claim that a corvette had been detached from regular escort duty to protect a fishing expedition of VIPs and that the government was not following its own blackout/dim-out regulations. It mattered little that Laurent’s charges were easily disproved. What did matter was that he asserted that the Gaspé was gripped by “l’atmosphère de malaise et d’angoisse.”

  From the King government’s point of view, Laurent’s series was bad enough. It was made worse by the fact that within twenty-four hours of the first article appearing in L’Action Catholique, U-106 torpedoed the Newfoundland-Nova Scotia ferry SS Caribou in the Cabot Strait. Minister Macdonald announced the loss of Caribou on October 17, the day after the series ended and three days before the Toronto Telegram published one translated article under the title, “Charge Convoy Ships Sunk While Ottawa Guarded Sportsmen.” That same day, a package containing Laurent’s articles landed on King’s desk along with a covering letter from Godbout, who said that they were “the most complete and objective articles I have yet seen on the subject.”

  Recognizing the political damage and the damage to national morale, King’s government responded both publicly and through private channels. A measure of the government’s concern, especially for the Liberal Party’s traditional Quebec base (King held sixty-four of the province’s sixty-five seats in Parliament as against fifty-seven of Ontario’s eighty-two seats), was the decision to have Louis St. Laurent use a trip to Hamilton Steel on November 2 to rebut the L’Action Catholique charge that forty ships had been sunk in the St. Lawrence.

  Beneath the leaden November skies, King’s minister of justice and Quebec lieutenant addressed two different audiences. St. Laurent’s presence in Hamilton, Ontario, spoke directly to the Steelworkers whose productive efforts were vital to the war effort. But the fact that St. Laurent, before becoming member for Quebec East, was a leader of the Quebec Bar meant that he was also making the announcement directly to Quebeckers. After assuring the public that the number of sinkings had been “exaggerated three-fold,” St. Laurent said, “We are completing our effective forces and developing our navy to a point where we will be able to stop submarines from coming to hurt us as they did this year.”

  If anything, the private channels are even more telling of the govern ment’s unease. Defence Minister Charles Power signed a memorandum authorizing the release of classified information about the St. Lawrence sinkings—dates, names of ships and places—to Premier Godbout and to a Liberal Party organizer in Rimouski, who was then supposed to pass this information to both Laurent and the editors of L’action catholique. Given L’action catholique’s ties with pro-Vichy forces in Quebec and the Vichy government’s puppet status, it is interesting to speculate whether the information Ottawa released to it following Laurent’s articles contributed either to a November 4 article published in the Nazi party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter that trumpeted the U-boat attacks “from Capetown to Canada” or to a December 18 article (five weeks after the German army occupied Vichy) that accused Churchill of “flimflam” in deny
ing that there had been “numerous sinkings in the Gulf of St. Lawrence” and that taunted Ottawa over the fact that its attempts to keep the sinkings secret had failed.5

  Ironically, the perception of defeat, heightened by the sinking of Caribou, took hold just as EAC and the RCN had learned their trade. Not one of the four successful or twelve unsuccessful attacks in the St. Lawrence that followed Gräf’s October 9 sinking of Carolus was carried out by a surfaced U-boat. As Gräf’s and Rasch’s war reports make clear, by mid-October 1942 there were few places in the St. Lawrence not blanketed by radar waves. The “screamingly loud detections” of Rasch’s Metox and the resulting crash-dives so unnerved Rasch that he radioed to Dönitz that “we need a device that indicates distance as well as bearing.”

  In twenty days of patrolling after torpedoing Waterton, airplanes or Metox warnings forced Rasch under eleven times. On October 22, in his report of a failed attack, he told Lorient that air surveillance was not only “co-operating with surface search forces but also operating everywhere without surface forces.” This is a tribute to EAC’s coverage of the St. Lawrence: in response to the Caribou tragedy, twenty-four-hour coverage was being maintained only over the Cabot Strait.

  Rasch’s messages to Lorient on October 30 clearly indicate that EAC’s patrols were not only disrupting his mission but also causing him to begin to question his own judgment. At 0400 he spotted a ten-to fifteen-ship convoy. Two hours later he wrote, “Gave up pursuit as the continuous air cover that has been observed in this area means that a pursuit in daylight in this calm weather will be impossible.” Forty-five minutes after that, after having dived and lost the convoy, he wrote in his war diary, “This decision was incorrect. I should have attempted to pursue after all.” Later on the thirtieth, he reported to Lorient another price exacted by EAC’s efforts: “Will have to depart [for home] in 8 days because potash cartridges will be expended.” (Potash cartridges removed carbon dioxide from the air when it accumulated as a result of the inability to surface and fill the boat’s air tanks.) The cost of having spent forty-two of ninety-seven days submerged, he confided to his war diary, was high: “Too much running under submerged ruins the fighting spirit.”