The Battle of the St. Lawrence

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  But such reveries aside, Marienfeld’s war diary makes clear (as Hartwig’s war diaries do for him) that Marienfeld’s was a finely tuned military mind. BdU criticized him for his rather longish reports and for excessive caution. His decision not to enter the river came in for special criticism: “Deductions about traffic wrong! First see whether traffic has really stopped after you have detected!” Still, BdU could also praise him for spotting the “destroyer” at 0210 Berlin time and for the “success” of the Gnat he launched twenty minutes later.

  Spotting the “destroyer” was something of a fluke. Marienfeld was on the cusp of deciding to give in to his technical problems and leave the gulf when, at 0150 Berlin time (9:50 p.m. local time), his hydrophone officer reported picking up a bearing at 200° off U-1228’s port quarter. Moments later, Marienfeld confirmed the sighting, the etchings on his attack periscope’s prisms telling him that the “destroyer” in his sights was actually at 210°. Marienfeld could have fired then and counted on the Gnat’s hydrophones and internal guidance mechanism to home in on the RCN ship’s screws. But, perhaps because he had not yet had any successes, he chose to be more careful and ordered his helmsman to come around 140°.

  Instantly, the 1,545-ton boat began to turn to the starboard. On paper the turn would make U-1228’s course look like a P, with the U-boat ending up on a line that corresponds to the bottom part of the loop that joins the letter’s stem. Then came the command “Open bow cap” and the reply “Bow cap open.” From his position in the attack room above the bridge came the co-ordinates for the attack computer: “90, speed 10 knots, depth 4, steering WS, aiming point stern, estimated range, 25 hm.” At 0230 Berlin time, the final order—“Los!”—the shudder as the “eel” was pushed into the sea, the clanking of the bow cap slamming closed.

  Thirty miles away from U-1228’s conning tower, at 10:30 p.m. on November 24, 1944, John L. Gullage, captain of SS Burgeo, the Newfoundland-Nova Scotia ferry that had replaced SS Caribou, lay in bed next to his wife. Gullage would be up early, for his ship was scheduled to rendezvous with Shawinigan before 8 a.m. for the return trip to Sydney. Suddenly, a “peculiar noise,” a “sort of rumble,” rolled through the deep quiet of the late fall Newfoundland night. Gullage and his wife disagreed about what they’d heard. He thought it was nothing but a car backfiring. She heard a deeper sound. The rumble, she told her husband, “made the house tremble.”

  At exactly the same moment, ten miles away in Grand Bay, Randall J. White and his wife were also in bed. There, the “explosion … sounded like a case of dynamite,” a sound they knew well from the previous year, when the US Army Air Force had been blasting near their home. An ADC member, White reported that two minutes after the first explosion they heard a second, which he described as “a roar like thunder.”

  Through U-1228’s hydrophones, twenty-four-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Friedrich-Wilhelm Marienfeld and the bridge crew of U-1228 heard things more clearly. First, just the sounds of the “destroyer’s” screw. Then the swish of the torpedo as it exited Tube VI at 30 knots. A moment later, the “torpedo and screw noises merge[d].” After four minutes, the “screw noises disappeared],” replaced by the “great roaring and crackling sounds” of a hit, loud enough to be heard by Spohn, who wasn’t on the bridge at the time. Less then two minutes later came six more explosions, which Marienfeld assumed were depth charges exploding as they sank.

  Most of the ninety-one officers and ratings on Shawinigan likely never heard a thing before the torpedo destroyed their ship.

  Like the loss of the Caribou two years earlier, the loss of Shawinigan involved more than the RCN and EAC. It also involved the Newfoundland Ferry and Railway Company. Only this time, the question wasn’t why the RCN insisted on nighttime sailings. Burgeo sailed to Newfoundland during daylight on the twenty-fourth and was scheduled to meet Shawinigan the next morning for a return trip to Sydney. Nor was the question why the escort was abaft (behind) the ferry. Burgeo was in port, and Shawinigan was patrolling off Port aux Basques; the US Coast Guard’s Sassafras, which had been part of Burgeo’s escort on the trip to Port aux Basques on the twenty-fourth, had departed about the time Burgeo tied up at the terminus of the Newfoundland Ferry and Railway Company dock.

  Instead, the Board of Inquiry charged with the “Investigation of the Circumstances Surrounding the Loss of HMCS Shawinigan” focused on the Newfoundland Ferry and Railway Company ship’s actions on the morning of the twenty-fifth. Burgeo left port on schedule at 7:45 a.m., expecting to rendezvous with its escort at Channel Head, some five miles from the quay that juts out from the Newfoundland Railway ferry terminus.

  At first Gullage was not alarmed when he didn’t find his escort waiting for him. According to his report, “It was not very light at 1015Z (7:45 a.m.) and the fishermen round about the mouth of the Harbour were still showing their lights …. We sailed without expecting to see HMCS SHAWINIGAN until it got lighter.”

  Soon, though, Gullage became concerned. “I was about 11 miles off when I decided he was not around. The visibility was about 12 miles. I kept calling him on R/T [radio-telephone] but got no reply.”

  For this crossing, Naval Control of Shipping had given Gullage routing R. Convoy instructions, however, never varied. If for any reason the convoying vessel failed to meet the escort, it was “to return to Port aux Basques Harbour.”

  Gullage’s decision to continue across the Cabot Strait unescorted earned him a stern rebuke from W. G. Mills, undersecretary of state for external relations (Newfoundland was a British colony in 1944). Mills dismissed Gullage’s reasoning—that “there was every indication of a heavy northeasterly [storm] coming up and as my ship had not much stability due to lack of cargo, I decided to continue to Sydney”—curtly: “It is considered that the Master [of the Burgeo] took an unjustifiable risk” in “crossing the Straits unescorted.”

  Mills was equally blunt about Gullage’s decision to maintain radio silence and not inform Sydney of Shawinigan’s absence. The time lag meant that naval authorities did not learn of Shawinigan’s absence until Burgeo arrived at the Sydney anti-submarine gate at 4:38 p.m. on October 25. “If any of ‘SHAWINIGAN’S’ crew survived the loss of their ship during the night of the 24th to 25th, they may have lived through most of the day but hardly through the following night.”

  Escorts were not always on their charge’s tail. Accordingly, since the authorities in Sydney did not know that Burgeo had had no contact with Shawinigan, its absence at 4:38 p.m. when Burgeo arrived at the anti-submarine gate did not raise immediate alarm.

  A little over a half hour later, however, concern began manifesting itself. “On the assumption that H.M.C.S. SHAWINIGAN had lost contact with S.S. BURGEO,” Anti-Submarine Commander J. M. McConnell (who may or may not have known that Burgeo had had no contact with its escort ship) told the board of inquiry, “a signal was originated to H.M.C.S. SHAWINIGAN informing her that S.S. BURGEO had passed inward.”

  Standard operating procedure called for Shawinigan to respond. It did not. However, since atmospheric conditions, especially those associated with deteriorating weather (by the afternoon of the twenty-fifth a northeast gale had blown up), often resulted in difficulties in ships both receiving and broadcasting W/T (wireless telegraphy) messages, there was little surprise that Shawinigan did not answer the signal sent at 5:03 p.m.

  Two hours later, at 6:54 p.m., McConnell began to assume the worst and notified Admiral Murray and the RCAF controller in Sydney of Shawinigan’s absence. He also ordered the first of twenty-three signals ordering Shawinigan to “signal position, course and speed.”

  Murray immediately tasked Escort Group 16, consisting of HMS Anticosti and HMCS Springhill and Ganonoque, to search for survivors.9 Poor weather grounded EAC until dawn of the twenty-sixth. The weather also hampered EG-16 and prevented it from being reinforced by Fairmiles. Nothing was found until well after daylight on the twenty-sixth, when Anticosti found an unmarked Carley float and a few pieces of wreckage that t
he wind and waves had pushed over forty miles southeast of where Shawinigan had been patrolling. At 1:24 p.m. on the twenty-seventh, Springhill rendezvoused with HMCS Truro to transfer to it the bodies of Leading Stoker Gordon MacGregor, Telegraphist Howard Barlow and Able Seaman Dudley Garrett, as well as three unidentified bodies.

  “Even before we got the message to put to sea to search for survivors, we knew from word of mouth that something had happened to Shawinigan,” recalls John Chance, then commander of Fairmile 058. “The mood was very sombre. It was the first time for me or for my crew that we were involved in such an immediate action. We knew it had been the first run for Shawinigan since her refit. And now, she and all her crew were feared lost. We were out for a couple of days but didn’t find anything.”

  The Board of Inquiry was unable to determine conclusively what had sunk Lieutenant William J. Jones’s redoubtable corvette. Not until the interrogation of U-1228’s crew after its surrender in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on May 13, 1945, did naval authorities confirm that Shawinigan had been sunk by the last functioning torpedo to be fired in the Battle of the St. Lawrence.10

  Since the torpedo was a homing torpedo, it’s more than likely that it would have hit Shawinigan either squarely in the after peak or at the propeller. The similar attack on the frigate Magog destroyed sixty feet of its stern; Magog stayed afloat because its aft bulkhead held. Such an explosion on Shawinigan (a corvette like Charlottetown and thus built to maritime and not Admiralty standards of watertightness) would have demolished more than one-quarter of the ship, including the aft bulkhead.

  In large measure, however, the last moments of this original Flower-class corvette had already been eerily foretold—indeed, twice foretold—by men who had miraculously survived the sinkings of two of Shawinigan’s sister ships. On August 8, 1944, HMCS Regina sank in twenty-eight seconds after U-667 torpedoed it off Cornwall, England. Thirteen days later in the English Channel, HMCS Alberni sank in twenty seconds, the victim of a Gnat fired by U-480.11 The official report of Alberni’s sinking describes the scene:

  The ship was hit on the port side towards the after end of the engine room …. The explosion blew all her aft bulkheads for in less than ten seconds her stern was awash up to the funnel and she was beginning to list to the port.

  Not only had she sunk in 20 seconds, turning over on top of many of those who were trying to leave the ship by the port side, but those that managed to fight their way to the surface found no Carley Floats to help them. There had been no time to release one float or whaler …. Probably [the] very few [who] did escape from the mess decks must have dashed up without their life jackets on, since they were sitting down to lunch at the time and would have taken off their life jackets to eat …. In some cases, therefore, one lifebelt had to support two or three in the water.

  Only one stoker escaped from the stoker’s mess deck and he was the only man of his branch to survive from the engine room [which] was immediately flooded by the explosion …. None of the officers got up from the wardroom.

  Could he speak, MacGregor surely would tell, as Regina’s Surgeon Lieutenant G. A. Gould did, of “an ear-splitting detonation”; of their ship being “blasted from under [them] and debris scattered for hundreds of yards”; of crewmen “mortally shattered by the tremendous blast [who] had already ceased to struggle”; of “others, trapped helplessly beneath the decks, [who] never had a chance.” Perhaps Barlow would tell, as Gould did of himself, of being trapped under water by a “mass of tangled metal”; of “finally, after what seemed an eternity of suffocation,” breaking the surface only to be blinded by a “film of oil.” Had not Garrett’s tongue been stilled, he too might have told of still more horror: “When the blinding film of oil cleared from my eyes, there, towering above me, were the last few feet of our funnel. It seemed certain to pin me beneath its massive form, but just as it was about to strike, it rolled away, then slithered beneath the surface.”

  Some minutes after 10:30 p.m. on November 25, 1944, the echo of the last Nazi torpedo to explode in the St. Lawrence rumbled over Port aux Basques. Within seconds, the sea once again opened to receive its dead before collapsing on itself like a “great shroud” that, as Herman Melville wrote at the end of Moby Dick, “rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

  EPILOGUES: 1945

  At the start of the 1945 shipping season, Canadian planners remained worried. True, in the eight months since D-Day the combined navies of Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States had destroyed 205 U-boats. Their armies had seized the ports of Saint Nazaire, Lorient and La Pallice, which since the fall of France in 1940 had given the “grey wolves” easy access to the Atlantic. Dönitz had been forced to pull his boats back to Bergen in occupied Norway and to Germany’s Baltic ports. As shipping began that April, Allied armies had invaded Hitler’s Germany from both the east and the west.

  Still, the U-Bootwaffe remained a potent threat. On February 8, 1945, the Times of London carried a long article warning of a new U-boat offensive to be carried out by Schnorchel-equipped boats. Left unsaid were the Admiralty’s worries about the Elektro boats and even the Walter boats, both of which were faster than most escort ships and all but immune to the existing munitions. Despite almost constant bombing, U-boat construction continued in secret underground factories staffed with slave labour, and even at the well-known Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg.1 On April 25, 1945, the day U-2552, the last of the more than 1,100 U-boats built for Hitler’s Germany, went into service in Hamburg, the Allied armies were less than eighty miles away at the Elbe River. One hundred and fifty-four U-boats surrendered after the war.

  In January 1945, four months before the opening of the shipping season, Canadian authorities already knew that in an effort to draw Allied naval forces away from Europe BdU planned on attacking shipping in the St. Lawrence. Indeed, as early as November 1944, the British Admiralty and the United States Navy believed that in 1945 Dönitz could send as many as seven U-boats back into these waters where the bathyscaphe effect would hide them from asdic searches. In January 1942, Operation Paukenschlag, the U-boat offensive against the United States, had been launched with a mere seven U-boats. On November 20, 1944, Air Vice-Marshal G. O. Johnson signalled C. G. Power, secretary of defence for air, “We must … expect and be prepared for a renewed submarine offensive in our area which may be very difficult to combat and will strain all available resources to the utmost.”

  Despite—or, rather, because of—the successes in Europe, keeping the St. Lawrence open to shipping was more important in 1945 than it had been in 1943. The armies that were liberating Europe consumed vast quantities of materiel. Diverting any appreciable proportion of the 705,000 tons planned to be shipped from Montreal alone to either Halifax or Saint John would have hopelessly overburdened those ports. Recognizing this, on March 7, the War Committee directed Minister Macdonald to “review and report on the anti-submarine measures to be taken in the Lower St. Lawrence.” On April 16, the day the first transatlantic convoys entered the gulf, Naval Service Headquarters estimated that there were forty-five U-boats in the Canadian zone of the North Atlantic.

  As they had in 1942, naval officials sought to prepare Canadians for attacks in the St. Lawrence. Citing Allied naval sources, the Ottawa Journal of March 31, 1945, warned of “Nazis Embarking on Last Minute U-boat Campaign.” Four days later, in an article that announced that HMCS Annan had destroyed a U-boat, the Halifax Herald quoted Macdonald: “There is no reason to believe that Canadian coastal waters will be free of these underwater marauders.”2 And, as had happened six years earlier after the sinking of SS Nicoya, in the waning days of the war British underwriters raised the war risk premium on transoceanic shipping.

  The RCN’s plans for the defence of the gulf were ambitious. As in previous years, they were built around the redoubtable corvettes; five were to be recalled from mid-ocean groups. These ships were augmented by Bangor minesweepers (called back from the post-D-Day duty of sweeping the English C
hannel), trawlers and Fairmiles. Plans were put in place to quickly deploy two groups of frigates if the need arose. By mid-April, the RCAF “Plan for Air Defence of Canada 1945–46” was in operation. The Canso squadrons at Sydney and at inner gulf stations were augmented to eighteen aircraft. Even as Germany surrendered on May 7, a detachment of eleven Cansos, soon to be equipped with centimetric radar capable of picking up Schnorchels, took up station at Gaspé.

  There was no final U-boat offensive in the St. Lawrence.

  The war off Canadian shores ended with a ghastly coda—a coda that replayed not only the sinking of the minesweeper HMCS Clayoquot in the same waters four months earlier, on Christmas Eve 1944, but also the experience of the hundreds of men, women and children torpedoed in the St. Lawrence. At 6:35 a.m. on April 16, 1945, U-190, commanded by twenty-five-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Edwin Reith (her chief engineer being Weiner Hirschmann), torpedoed HMCS Esquimalt, then on patrol just out of sight of Halifax. Most of Esquimalt‘s crew of seven officers and sixty-four ratings managed to get off the ship in the four minutes before it plunged to the bottom. But five officers and thirty-nine ratings died in the frigid waters off Halifax as they waited more than six hours for rescue.

  Sixty years later, Terry Manuel, then a twenty-year-old ship’s writer from New Brunswick (as ship’s writer, Manuel was an administrator who reported directly to Esquimalt‘s captain, Lieutenant Robert Macmillan, DSC, RCNVR), recalls this last torpedoing of one of His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Ships in the Second World War and the last awful struggle of His Majesty’s officers and ratings to survive in the cold waters off their own shore: “At around 6:10 a.m., I was released from my dark-hours watch at the starboard depth-charge thrower and went below to my quarters in the chief and petty officers’ mess in the forward part of the ship, where there were three other officers. I figured I had an hour to catch a nap before I had to report for my regular duty post, so I stripped off my pants and socks and used my life jacket as a pillow.