All Oberleutnant zur See Paul Ackermann, commander of U-1221, had to show for his Canadian sojourn was the loss of Able Seaman Emil-Heinz Motyl, who apparently committed suicide by jumping overboard after having been disciplined for falling asleep on watch.
The two other U-boats drew Canadian blood. On October 14, 1944, two years to the day after the sinking of SS Caribou, a Gnat fired by U-1223, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Albert Kneip, crippled the frigate HMCS Magog, killing three men. Six weeks later, on the night of November 25, Oberleutnant zur See Friedrich-Wilhelm Marienfeld (U-1228) destroyed the corvette HMCS Shawinigan, killing ninety-one officers and ratings of the Royal Canadian Navy.
OCTOBER 14, 1944
Three thousand five hundred miles east, workers at Deutsche Werft AG lay the keel for U-2354; workers at AG Weser in Bremen lay the keel for U-3024.
Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who is suspected of complicity in the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, chooses suicide instead of a public trial for treason. Doing so protects his family from prosecution and he is given a state funeral.
Four thousand miles east in Greece, British and Greek forces capture Athens.
Seven thousand five hundred miles southwest in Burma, under heavy attack by the Japanese 33rd and 55th divisions, the British 123rd Indian Brigade is forced from its defensive positions at Rathedaung in Arakan.
At 10:25 a.m., some five miles off the Point-des-Monts lighthouse, the five-month-old River-class frigate Magog zigzagged off the starboard side of convoy ONS-33. Magog and two other 301-foot 6-inch, 1,440-ton frigates, HMCS Stettler and Toronto, were escorting a twelve-ship westbound convoy. Normally at this time in the morning, Magog‘s captain, Lieutenant Commander Louis T. Quick, RCNR, would have been on the bridge. The crew would be mustered on the quarterdeck, where the officer of the watch, Sub-Lieutenant Herb Montgomery, would be leading a centuries-old duty: distributing the daily ration of grog.
At thirty-four minutes before eleven bells, however, Quick’s first officer, Lieutenant Edgar T. Stanger, RCNVR, was officer in charge on the bridge. Quick, Montgomery and two other officers, Lieutenant Verdun P. Gilbert, RCNVR, and Lieutenant (Engineering) Bertil F. Larson, were in the captain’s cabin a short distance away. Quick, whose career began when he joined the RN at the age of fourteen and who had quite a reputation for drinking when on shore, was “weighing off” Leading Seaman Ted Davis, known as “the Buffer,” and several other ratings who had “raised hell in one of the pubs” on the thirteenth, the night before Magog departed Gaspé.6
“I was in the captain’s cabin listening to him weighing off the sailors,” recalls Montgomery, “when all of a sudden we felt a tremendous jolt and the ship took an immediate list.”
The jolt was caused by the explosion of the first of two Gnats Kneip aimed at Magog. (The second exploded harmlessly fifty yards off Magog‘s port quarter.) The blast that killed Petty Officer Ted E. Davis, Ordinary Seaman Gordon T. Elliot and Able Seaman Kenneth J. Kelly and badly injured three other ratings also blew off sixty feet of Magog’s stern. Half of the wreckage, thirty feet of hardened steel weighing at least one hundred tons, was literally peeled ten feet up over the remaining boat deck. Only the mass of one of the aft-deck guns, upon which part of the deck came to rest, saved the life of nineteen-year-old George G. Hunter, an engine-room artificer: “I was standing at the gun platform when the explosion occurred. Part of the [quarter]deck lifted up and folded over the top of my head …. The gun mounting took the shock of the weight …. I was knocked to my knees and dazed,” he told the Canadian Press.
As Magog struggled to find buoyancy, settling finally at a 9° list, Kneip’s Leitender Ingenieur ordered the closing of the compensation ballast tanks that he had opened in the seconds after the torpedo sped away from U-1223. Kneip’s boat was back on an even keel before Montgomery, Gilbert, Ted Davis and Quick ran from the captain’s cabin.
It took Quick about thirty seconds to get to his bridge. Stanger had arrived (from the chart room just off the bridge) seconds before, while debris was still falling from the sky.
Neither could see the ship’s stern, which had been demolished.
Quick called Action Stations. Since he was not sure that the buzzer could be heard, he shouted it down from the bridge to ensure that the call was repeated throughout the stricken ship.
Deep in the ship, twenty-year-old electrical artificer Harold Robertson was stunned but alive. “I was just leaving the electrical stores,” he told Canadians in an article not published until April 17, 1945. “I don’t remember anything of what happened, but I do know that I came right through a steel bulkhead and landed in the water. There was a steel deck above me, below me and a steel wall around me, and even though I was injured, I figured I’m mighty lucky to be here.” Robertson was one of three men picked out of the water by damage-control parties.
Gilbert ran first toward the wheelhouse. Then, after realizing the damage was to the stern, he ran aft. “As I reached the quarterdeck, I saw a man was stunned and walking toward the stern of the ship, so I grabbed him and two ratings took him forward. At the same time there was a man in the water and two ratings pulled him up,” Gilbert wrote in his report.
Gilbert then headed for the engine room. By the time he got there, Chief Stoker Norman Howse was putting out a fire in one of the boiler rooms. Gilbert’s report explains why Howse received special commendation for his actions: “Fire broke out in one of the boiler rooms. Howse put on a smoke mask and went down and saw that it was extinguished. That in itself may not have been remarkable, but at the time he went down [below the water-line] we were disabled and a pretty easy target.”
After being told by an engine-room artificer that the “after bulkhead of the engine room was holding [and that there] was no water in the engine room,” Gilbert ran back to the bridge and told Quick that he “thought she would float.”
Gilbert wasn’t the only one to bring Quick this hopeful news. Larson ran straight from Quick’s cabin to the engine room. The artificers had already stopped the ship’s 5,500-hp main engine, so he went straight to check the bilges for “signs of water.” There were none, which told him that the aft bulkhead was holding. A few moments later, after examining the bulkhead itself and finding, despite the huge explosion that ripped one-fifth of the ship apart, that the aft “bulkhead had in no way been affected and was very sound,” Larson sent a messenger to Quick to tell him that Magog was in no imminent danger of sinking.
Taking no risks, Larson ordered the engine-room staff to begin shoring up the aft bulkhead with two-by-fours. Using cloth-covered wooden wedges, he patched a small leak in the starboard side. Then he turned to correcting the ship’s list. He ordered the pumping of fuel oil from the starboard and port tanks until Magog was once again on an even keel.
“Sub-lieutenants,” recalls Montgomery, “didn’t have a ‘station’ in the same way that the captain or the engineering officer did; we were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ship. I was officer of the watch, so when I ran from Captain Quick’s cabin, I went first to my cabin to get my life jacket and then to the deck. Once there, I found myself being yelled to come here, come there.”
Montgomery ran toward what was left of the stern. Men blackened with oil were crawling out of the wreckage. Some were covered with red, which Montgomery at first assumed to be blood. “It took me a moment to realize it, but the torpedo had blasted apart the ship’s stores and almost everyone and everything was covered in tomato sauce.”
Under the wreckage that covered the 12-lb. cannon on the boat deck, Montgomery saw legs sticking out. Together with some other men, he used two-by-fours to pry the wreckage up. As the wreckage lifted, “suddenly an arm popped out. And in the open hand, we saw a penny,” recalls Montgomery. “We knew immediately that it was Ted E. Davis, who had a habit of flipping a penny and asking us to call it.
“Had I not been in the captain’s cabin when the torpedo hit, the
toll would have been much worse; I and a good part of the crew would have been on that quarterdeck.”
* * *
At 16 knots, Toronto quickly bore down on the path cut by the torpedo through the water.
Kneip’s hydrophones heard every turn of Toronto’s screw. They also heard what sounded to them like the squeal of a circular saw—the sound made by the anti-Gnat “CAT gear” streaming behind Toronto.7 Soon they heard the explosions of depth charges and the firing of Toronto‘s gun at what one lookout thought was a periscope.
Toronto‘s attack was undone by the devilish waters of the gulf. Neither Toronto nor Magog, whose asdic continued to work, ever heard the ping that would signal Kneip’s boat.
Stettler too sprang into action, recalls Fred Linnington, then a twenty-two-year-old able seaman. “I was portside lookout on the bridge. Suddenly, I saw that instead of steaming along normally, Magog just slowed down and then began to list towards the stern. Lieutenant Commander D. G. King, our captain, immediately rang Action Stations. Our asdic operator got an echo, and soon we were running it down and dropping depth charges. After dropping a few, we kept searching but could not find another echo.”
Just moments after the gruesome discovery of Davis’s remains, Montgomery saw an even more ghastly sight. “There, just floating where the stern of the ship used to be, in amongst the wreckage, was a life jacket with just a torso in it. No head. No legs. Just a torso. We took note of the number on the jacket and realized it was Able Seaman Kelly, who’d been on lookout, who’d been killed there.” The official report records that the remains of Kelly’s body were lost while Magog was being towed to safety.
Shortly before 11:00 a.m., Toronto broke off its search and steamed back to Quick’s ship. Before taking it in tow, Captain H. K. Hill sent his medical officer, Surgeon Lieutenant Léon Beicque, to Magog, which did not have a medical officer of its own. Beicque cared for the three injured sailors as Magog was towed to Godbout Bay by Toronto‘s sister ship HMCS Shawinigan. “Just before dark,” Montgomery remembers, “a twin-engined Catalina seaplane” appeared.
The transfer of men from Magog to the cutter and then to the Catalina was both difficult and dangerous. Decades later, Vancouver journalist Gordon Hunter recalled for Michael Hadley “the harrowing experience of lying strapped immobile in a Neil-Robertson stretcher and being lowered over the Magog‘s ravaged side to the small boat surging and pitching below. One slip of the crew … would most certainly [have sent] him plummeting helplessly into the depths.” Writing a day later, Surgeon Lieutenant Commander J. R. Smith, HMCS Fort Ramsay’s medical officer, who was aboard the Catalina flying boat, still wondered that Magog‘s men had been able to transfer the injured to the Catalina. Manoeuvring Magog‘s cutter over to the aircraft, he wrote, seemed “physically impossible without jeopardizing both the craft and crew members.”
In addition to the choppy seas, the cutter’s crew also had to contend with the stream of the propellers, which were not turning (had they been stopped, it would have been impossible to line up the Catalina and the cutter). To keep the boat alongside the plane, the men in the boat had to reach out and grab hold of the plane. Smith made special mention of the farthest forward member of the boat’s crew, who “crouched on the bow of the boat [and] was greatly endangered by the starboard propeller, wing and spars of the plane” as time after time he “tried to grasp the edge of the plane’s starboard gun ‘blister.’”
The torpedoing of Magog put an end to almost seven months of relative quiet for EAC’s airmen. Between the beginning of the shipping season in April 1944 and that October, EAC’s pilots had logged thousands of hours. With the exception of a relative handful of sweeps after the HF/DFing of U-802 in August (it was the appearance of U-802 that prompted Admiral Murray to reinstate the St. Lawrence convoys), they’d found nothing. Thousands of hours of uneventful flights led the diarist of one squadron based in Summerside, PEI, to write on July 1, 1944, “the crews returned with that monotonous rhyme on their lips, ‘Nothing seen but miles and miles of waves and whales.’” A little over two weeks later he wrote, “Inclement weather overtook us and were I gifted with the philosophical wit of Plato, the rapier-like sarcasm of Voltaire or the analytical power of Tolstoy, I could not the more aptly pen a summary of the day than in the following words: ‘Nothing further to report.’”
On the morning of October 14, a Canso flying boat escorting ONS-33, flying a search pattern fourteen miles ahead of Magog, immediately turned back and started to search for the U-boat. Shortly after it flew over the stricken ship, it dropped sonobuoys. For some eighteen minutes the buoys picked up what the Canso’s anti-submarine officer reported to be the sound of the U-boat’s propeller. However, according to historian Roger Sarty, “the sound was obliterated as the other frigates in the escort raced to counter attack.” The Canso continued looking for the submarine for three hours before it was relieved by four other Cansos. Bad weather forced EAC to order all but one plane back to base at around 8 p.m.
As soon as the weather cleared on the fifteenth, EAC sprang into action again. Cansos from Gaspé and Sydney flew the “salmon” search pattern. This pattern called for the Cansos to patrol in three concentric squares around the suspected location of the submarine. One square was eight miles away from the contact point, one twenty-four and the third forty. The middle patrol group flew in a clockwise direction at one altitude; the other two flew counterclockwise at different altitudes. The patrol was flown for twenty-four hours, using the Leigh light during the night. After the cancellation of “salmon” on the afternoon of the sixteenth, other flights were made over the river and western gulf until the eighteenth.8
At 7:35 a.m. on October 17, the tug Lord Strathcona slipped its lines after having towed the shattered Magog to the jetty in the basin on the north side of Quebec’s Lower Town. Later on the morning of the seventeenth, Francis MacLaughlin, who in 1941 had watched the men of Kingston Shipyards build HMCS Charlottetown and who was now an eighteen-year-old naval rating in training at HMCS Montcalm (a naval base in Quebec City), was part of a hastily trained honour guard that paraded through the streets of Quebec City’s Upper Town. After the parade, MacLaughlin and some of his fellow ratings walked down from the heights of Quebec to the jetty.
“We had never seen anything like it before. We knew she’d been torpedoed and thought she’d have a hole in her. But what we saw was just as if a big hand had crumpled the aft part of the ship upward. The torpedo had folded her stern up onto the deck. The aft-peak bulkhead held, so she was still floating,” recalls MacLaughlin, who after the war became a naval architect.
NOVEMBER 24, 1944
Three thousand five hundred miles east, the US 3rd Army captures crossings over the Saar River, about twenty-five miles north of Saarbrucken, Germany.
Three thousand miles east, the French 2nd Division (an element of the US 7th Army) takes Strasbourg, France.
Six thousand five hundred miles west, the first B-29 Superfortress raid on Tokyo is conducted by 111 planes.
Four thousand miles east, prisoners at Auschwitz are ordered by the SS to begin demolishing Crematorium II.
Few Canadian ships had seen more types of action than K136, a corvette built in Lauzon, Quebec, in 1941. Commonly known as HMCS Shawinigan, K136 was on the North Atlantic run in the early months of 1942, during the worst days of the “Second Happy Time,” when German U-boats savaged shipping off the North American coast. In the last days of January, thirty-five miles or so southeast of St. John’s, Shawinigan came across empty lifeboats from either SS Williman Hanson or SS Belize, both of which were sunk by U-754 on January 22. On September 7, 1942, Shawinigan was sent from Gaspé to search for HMCS Raccoon. It was part of the escort of NL-9, and it counterattacked after Ulrich Gräf sank SS Carolus within sight of Rimouski on October 9, 1942. Six months after its first refit, during which its fo‘c’sle was extended and its bridge enlarged, Shawinigan was with HMCS Rimouski in the Baie des Chaleurs. A year later, on Septem
ber 3, 1944, it picked up the fourteen survivors of SS Livingston, sunk by Kurt Peterson (U-541) after he left the St. Lawrence. On October 14, Shawinigan was sent to aid Magog and helped tow the stricken ship to Godbout Bay.
At 10:30 p.m. on November 24, 1944, Shawinigan was patrolling some thirty miles off Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, squarely within the sights of U-1228, which had entered Canadian waters eleven days earlier.
Of all the war diaries penned by the U-boat captains who invaded Canada’s inland sea, Oberleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Marienfeld’s is, perhaps, the most beguiling. As one reads of the recurring troubles Marienfeld had with his gyroscope, echo sounder and Schnorchel—the float valve caused him no end of difficulty—one is almost liable to feel a certain sympathy, if for nothing else than for the simple frustration that comes through even in translation. After Dr. Günther Spohn, who a lifetime earlier was Marienfeld’s Nummer Eins, told me that following the war Marienfeld earned a PhD in philosophy, it became hard not to see a certain quality of mind in such entries as this: “Porpoises putting on a running show. A great deal of squealing, crackling and humming, sometimes to be heard with unaided ear,” from November 14, 1944. Or in the entry for the morning of the twenty-fifth, “Coast shining beautifully in the moonlight, Table Mountain, Sugar Loaf, Cape Ray beacons showing up as gleams on the horizon.”
The Battle of the St. Lawrence Page 27