They tried bailing. It failed.
“She filled full of water and rolled, and the people all went into the water, the poor women and children, all of them. It was dark …. I don’t know how many times she rolled over. When she was finished there were just a few of us left in her …. And when we were picked up there were only the four of us,” including Lundrigan.
Metcalf remembered that terrible moment as the boat turned. After its first turn, a woman clung to him. “I tried to speak to her but she couldn’t answer.” The woman was ripped away from him a moment later as the boat again turned over in the unforgiving sea.
Cuthbert’s orders were clear. At 3:39 a.m., his mission was to “ensure the safe and timely arrival of the convoy.” A minute later it had changed. He ordered a course for the stricken ship. Then, as if on cue, before Grandmère was even close enough to throw lifebelts to Caribou’s survivors, one of Cuthbert’s lookouts spotted a “U-boat on the surface ahead and to the starboard,” 300 yards away. Immediately, his helmsman turned a course to ram it.
Gräf’s war diary tells the story succinctly:
0821 At first, she [Grandmère, which Graf called a “destroyer”] turns toward the steamer but then apparently sights me and alters course toward and comes foaming toward me.
0825 Opening out on the surface will not be possible because of the good visibility [Gräf did not know that the “destroyer’s” flank speed was some 4 knots below his own]. Emergency dive! Went deep quickly. Turned in the vicinity of the sinking ship at full speed; the destroyer will not drop depth charges here. Loud noises of breaking bulkheads can be heard throughout the boat.
As Cuthbert ran over Gräf’s swirl, he fired six depth charges “by eye.” Gräf reported hearing only one explode, well above his pressure hull. For the next thirty minutes, Gräf and his crew heard the telltale ping of Grandmère’s asdic, but since no more depth charges hammered against his hull, he could guess that he “was not detected by the destroyer’s asdic.”
His message at 2000 hrs. to BdU makes one mistake. He signalled Dönitz that “my decoy device,” Nebelbold, which, like the Pillenwerfer, was designed to blind asdic by releasing tens of millions of bubbles into the water, “does not appear to have had any effect.” In fact, Grandmère never picked up an asdic contact.
Years later, Cuthbert responded to criticism that he had erred in not searching for the U-boat in the waters directly beneath the survivors (where, in fact, it had hidden): “Oh my God, I felt the full complement of things you feel at a time like that. Things you have to live with. You are torn. Demoralized. Terribly alone …. I should have gone on looking for the submarine, but I couldn’t. Not with women and children out there somewhere. I couldn’t do it any more than I could have dropped depth charges among them. Judge me how you will,” Cuthbert told Douglas How, author of The Night of the Caribou.
As Cuthbert searched for Caribou’s killer, the angel of death took the form of hypothermia and stalked the waters that glided over 47° 19° N, 59° 29° W. It found the wreckage of the lifeboat Fielding and eleven others clung to. “When we were picked up, there were only five of us left. Four of the women slid off the upturned shell and disappeared, as did several of the men, weakened with the cold water. We did everything we could to help them but it was futile,” Fielding recalled.
Neither hymns nor prayers could keep the avenging angel from finding the capsized lifeboat to which nursing sisters Wilkie and Brooke clung. “The waves kept washing us off, one by one,” recalled Brooke. “And eventually Agnes said she was getting cramped. She let go but I managed to catch hold of her with one hand. I held her as best I could until daybreak. Finally, a wave took her. When I called to her, she didn’t answer. She must have been unconscious. The men tried to rescue her, but she floated away,” Brooke told the Halifax Herald.8
Death claimed a woman here, a man there, a child. One shocked, cold and tired man was ripped from death’s clutches—the other men on his raft slapped him back to reason after he stood up and tried to throw himself off the raft and into a cold death. But though Gladys Shiers wouldn’t know it for hours, pity must have moved the angel of death, for it passed over Leonard Shiers and another infant, both of whom were kept afloat by air trapped in their rubber pants.
At 5:20 a.m., Cuthbert broke off his search and began the delicate task of picking up the survivors, now spread out over several miles. Only the few who were in lifeboats could easily be brought aside his ship. The rest—ninety-six exhausted, cold men, women and children—were floating on bits of wood, on capsized boats or by the grace of their lifebelts, their arms and legs all but numb and thus unable to grasp the scramble nets thrown from Grandmère‘s side. Every advance into the human archipelago risked even more death. Even at its slowest speed, the movement of Grandmère through the water produced enough suction to bash rafts to pieces against her bow. Her engines may have moved safety toward the survivors, but they also threatened to pull them under. By 7:30 a.m., a Canso flying boat from North Sydney dropped smoke floats, telling Cuthbert that here, six miles away, were still more souls to save.
Half a continent away in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mackenzie King was waking out of what, no doubt, he later believed to be one of his prophetic dreams. As he recorded in his diary late on October 14, “Before waking this morning, I had a vision of standing, it seemed near a bookshelf in a library or church vestry where there were one or two books out. Suddenly, a bomb burst immediately outside.” King’s dream, however, differed greatly from the nightmare that had unfolded off Canada’s eastern waters. For in his vision, there was “no panic” and no death.
By 9:30 a.m., after picking up 104 survivors, Cuthbert ordered a course for Sydney; two people died before they reached the quay from which they had departed sixteen hours earlier.
As Grandmère steamed to Sydney and U-69 prepared to leave the St. Lawrence, a small armada of skiffs, dories, fishing boats and, ultimately, two corvettes sent from Sydney converged on German grid square BB 5198 to pick up the dead.
As Grandmère steamed for Sydney, Norman Crane, an officer in the Newfoundland Rangers stationed in Tompkins, was already heading for Port aux Basques to help with the recovery duties. The town he reached on that clear October day was in shock.
“In 1942,” he recalls, “Port aux Basques was not like small towns on the mainland. It was more like a nineteenth-century town. Yes, it was the terminus of the railway and the port, but the three towns around the harbour had maybe two thousand people. There was no electricity or running water. To take a bath you bought water for a quarter from a guy who sold it out of a wheelbarrow. There was one truck, one taxi, and if they encountered a horse-drawn cart, there was a traffic jam. They were a rough-cut bunch like most communities that relied on the sea were. But they were also very religious and respectful.
“The loss of the Caribou affected Port aux Basques more than you can imagine today. Ben Taverner wasn’t just a well-liked captain of the Caribou, he was a respected man, known to have devoted his life to his boat and thus to their link to the outside world. His sons weren’t just fun-loving fellows—although they were—they were Ben Taverner’s sons, and that counted for a lot.
“Her second engineer, Tom Moist, was a friend of mine. He was old enough to be my grandfather and he had actually retired. His replacement’s son was getting married, so he asked Tom to take the trip for him, so he could go to the wedding. Tom made the trip to help out a friend and never came back.
“When I got there, bodies had already started coming in.”
Crane—who as a Newfoundland Ranger was responsible for everything from law and order through tourism, wildlife and nature preservation to school inspection—commandeered a shed and set up a temporary mortuary. “It was a long shed, lit with bare bulbs every twenty feet. The bodies came in one by one. By the end, we had twelve bodies laid out on bales of hay under the bare bulbs.”
The macabre scene in the temporary morgue Crane helped set up was matched, he rec
alls, on the streets of the town. “The feeling was one of complete gloom. Eerie is probably the best way to describe it. The whole town felt like a mortuary—which in a real way it was.”
Three hundred miles away in Sydney, word spread too. Leilo Pepper, the twenty-two-year-old wife of Howard Pepper, commander of Fairmile Q-062, found out about it at 2:15 a.m., when her husband returned to their small apartment for a brief rest before taking his crew to sea at first light. “At first it was hard to believe what Howard had told me,” she recalls. “I knew that he’d just spoken to Captain Taverner a few days earlier and made plans to go fishing the next time the captain was ashore in Sydney. And now, here, in the middle of the night, Howard was telling me that the old ship we were so used to seeing was sunk.”
Late in the afternoon, while walking her nine-month-old son on the esplanade that overlooked Sydney Harbour, Pepper saw Grandmère come in laden with its human cargo.
“They landed a couple of hundred yards away across the street,” she recalls. “Some were able to walk. Many had to be helped. Others were carried on stretchers. The other women walking their children and I stood in a hushed group as the wind whispered over us.
“We’d all heard by then that the loss of life was heavy. And we knew enough to know that that meant that women like us and children like ours had died in the cold Atlantic waters.”
Two days later, on October 17, naval minister Macdonald rose and told the House of Commons, “The sinking of the SS Caribou brings the war to Canada with tragic emphasis. We deplore the loss of officers and men of our fighting forces …. Yet those for whom our hearts bleed most are the … women and children …. if there were any Canadians who did not realize that we were up against a ruthless and remorseless enemy, there can be no such Canadians now. If anything were needed to prove the hideousness of Nazi warfare, surely this is it. Canada can never forget the SS Caribou.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
1943s OPERATION KIEBITZ
And if it’s sweeping mines (to which my fancy somewhat leans) Or hanging out with booby-traps for the skulking submarines, I’m here to do my blooming best and give the beggars beans
—C. FOX SMITH
The war that began washing up on the shores of the little villages of Cloridorme and L’Anse-à-Valleau on May 15, 1942, altered the lives of the men, women and children who lived in the scores of towns, villages and hamlets strung out along the north shore of the Gaspé Peninsula, at the end of which Jacques Cartier planted his cross in 1534. In 1939 Gaspesia, the name given to the region by the locals, counted just under 2,000 residents, 65 per cent of whom were English. By 1943 the population had increased to over 2,300, with another 650, mostly English-speaking soldiers, airmen and sailors stationed in the five military bases built around the town. Gaspesians, used to fishing and hunting where they wished, now found large tracts of land and the shoreline cut off by the fences of forts Prevel, Peninsula and Haldimand. Workers who had never built anything larger than a train barn or a small railroad bridge were hired to build structures they had perhaps imagined only as children playing with toy soldiers: an anti-submarine net to protect Gaspé’s inner harbour and huge concrete emplacements that housed two 75-mm guns, two 4.7-inch guns and, after July 1941, two huge 10-inch guns.
Rimouski and the surrounding fields changed too, though not without debate. In 1939, Mont Joli was but a plateau twenty feet above the river, adjacent to the village of Sainte-Flavie, a mere point on the map ten miles east of Rimouski. On June 20, 1940, Senator Jules A. Brillant, who had extensive land holdings in Rimouski and on the Gaspé coast, called for the establishment of an air training school at Mont Joli. Built over the objections of Rimouski’s archbishop, Monseigneur Georges Courchènes, by 1942 the base had almost six hundred pilot and bombardier trainees—the largest of the thirty British Commonwealth Air Training Plan air bases in Canada.
Monseigneur Courchènes’s opposition to the base was of a piece with his opposition to Brillant’s role in the Fusiliers du St-Laurent. According to Major François Dornier, historian of the Fusiliers, Courchènes saw Brillant as a rival moral authority who threatened the church’s control of the Rimouski diocese. The benediction Courchènes delivered at Mont Joli’s (long-delayed) official inauguration on August 15, 1942, refers obliquely to Sub-Lieutenant Jacques Chevrier’s death the previous month but not to any of the naval officers, ratings or merchant sailors who had died in the Battle of the St. Lawrence in the preceding three months. Courchènes took time, however, to remind the airmen of their duty to uphold the “moral climate” of Rimouski. A year later, his attitude hadn’t changed. After an episcopal visit to the parish of Mont Joli on September 12 and 13, 1943, Courchènes recorded that his “concern has grown because of the presence of strangers in the parish who are part of the neighbouring aviation base.”1
The archbishop’s prestige was immense, but it did not carry the day with the civilian authorities or, interestingly enough, with his own flock. A survey of the articles in Rimouski’s L’Echo du Bas Saint-Laurent reveals public support for both the Fusiliers and the airbase—and for the money that building it would pump into the local economy. Perhaps even more telling is this February 1942 letter from Rimouski resident J. B. Côté to Claude Melançon, director of the federal Press, Information and Propaganda Service, occasioned by the visit of one of Vichy France’s representatives to Courchènes’s home in Rimouski:
At the very moment that I am writing to you, a certain Mr. Coursier is being hosted by Mgr. Courchènes, and do you know what they are debating? That the English propaganda is poisoning us, that the English are traitors to France, that the French are free under the German occupation and that their newspapers are not censored, that the Franco-mercenary English are the cause of all of France’s unhappiness, etc., etc. Everyone around the archbishop is converted to this beautiful doctrine which he spreads throughout the diocese while Mr. Coursier will go and implore another bishop to be well disposed to these colonialized ideas.2
Côté’s anti-Vichy sentiment was not shared by Quebec’s clerical and secular opinion leaders centred in Montreal; they continued to support Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government through the end of 1942. Le Devoir routinely published transcripts of Radio Vichy’s broadcasts, which were praised in Quebec for pointing out “the oppression exercised on French Canadians by Jews and the British.”
The distance between Le Devoir and other Quebec nationalists’ views and that of L’Echo du Bas St-Laurent could not have been greater. In 1940 the Rimouski paper editorialized against “Les dupes de l’Allemagne,” the French who thought that peace could be negotiated with the Nazis. L’Echo identified them with “certaines tête chaudes [hot-heads] canadien-français” who, like the Irish, “grasp with frenzy at a chimeric neutrality.” On August 9, 1940, L’Echo declared outright, “We thank God that England’s morale remains intact. Speaking honestly, England is at this moment alone capable of saving the world—and that includes Canada—from the darkness of barbarism and slavery.”3
During August 1942, however—the same week in which Admiral Jones and Percy Nelles, chief of the Naval Staff, reiterated Prime Minister King’s warning of a possible U-boat assault on the St. Lawrence—L’Action Catholique editorialized in support of the return of Pierre Laval to the Vichy cabinet. Laval, who had lived in Paris under the protection of the German army after Pétain sacked him in 1940, was one of the most Nazified of Vichy’s politicians, notorious for seeing off French volunteers who served with German units that attacked Russia and, after his return to power, for agreeing to sending skilled French workers to Germany and giving the Gestapo permission to hunt down Jews in unoccupied France.4 On April 16, in the run-up to the conscription plebiscite and one month before the sinking of SS Nicoya, L’Union, a small ultranationalist and anti-Semitic publication, called for a Vichy-like regime in Quebec. In September 1942—fully five months after men began dying off Quebec’s shores—the Bishop of Montreal, Monseigneur Joseph Charbonneau, speaking at the dedica
tion of a new building of Collège Stanislas (to which the Vichy government had contributed funds), praised Pétain, claiming, “Despite the ordeals he has gone through, Marshal Pétain is a Good Samaritan and his blessed country always thinks of us. He dreams of France’s traditional role. Here, like there, he says, ‘I will maintain.’”
Despite the fact that the Bas St-Laurent was the part of Quebec that best received both Radio Vichy and the Nazi-controlled Radio Paris, Gaspesians were less interested in remaining faithful to notre mère-patrie, la France than were the intellectuals safely ensconced in Montreal. In 1940, despite Courchènes’s public disapproval of the Fusiliers du St-Laurent and despite Radio Vichy imprecations to les canadiens français to refuse military service, 500 men volunteered for the Fusiliers. Two years later, No. 1 Battalion of the Fusiliers alone counted 773 men and 34 officers. A year later, the 2nd Battalion had more than 1,000 men and officers; by autumn the battalion’s rolls had grown to 1,251 officers and men. Nor was the Gaspé’s support for the Canadian military limited to enlistees; during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays of 1941 and 1942, more than two hundred francophone families welcomed Australian, British, New Zealand, Canadian and American air trainees into their homes.
As the losses mounted in the St. Lawrence during 1942, more men enlisted in the Fusiliers. Between September and November 1942, 1,500 men enlisted, enough to create four new subdivisions.5 In 1943, the 3rd Battalion alone had 49 officers and 1,877 men, 50 per cent of whom had had field battery training. Rimouski’s 2nd Battalion counted 972 men. Along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, 737 men and 35 officers stood guard, in addition to 187 civilian ADC personnel. Across the Gaspé Peninsula, more than 1,000 ADC members watched the waters nervously.
The Battle of the St. Lawrence Page 23