The Battle of the St. Lawrence
Page 33
7 The 4,570-ton freighter SS Pan York was also torpedoed but did not sink and suffered no casualties.
8 That same night, more than thirty men responded to the threat of three U-boats in the gulf by taking advantage of the full moon on a clear night and manning six Avro Ansons in what, for the time, was an extraordinary operation: an entire escort patrol at night.
9 To man the ships that were to be commissioned by the spring of 1941, in 1940 the RCN had to train fully 7,000 men and 300 officers—none of whom were even in the RCN yet.
10 The “any ship is better than none” philosophy adopted by the Admiralty in 1940 crippled Canada’s ability to produced a trained cadre. At the Admiralty’s request, 840 of the RCN’s best-trained men were assigned to six of the four-stacker destroyers the United States had transferred to the RN. An additional 540 officers and ratings remained in Britain, manning the ten corvettes they were supposed to transfer to British crews.
CHAPTER SIX
1 The “militia myth,” which in his recent Canada’s Army Jack Granatstein has traced back to Bishop Strachan and Egerton Ryerson—the belief that citizen soldiers can rise like a Spartan band to protect the nation and its interests—is at the core of Canadian military thinking.
2 RCNVR officers were easily discernible by the gold bands on their uniforms. Instead of the solid band of the RCN, theirs was a wavy band; hence the nickname “wavy navy.”
3 See Appendix B for a further discussion of anti-Semitism.
4 Mauritius-born de Marbois was the leading force behind the establishment of the WRCNS in 1942. De Marbois, who ran away to sea when he was twelve, could have stepped directly out of a John le Carré novel. According to John Bryden, whose Best-Kept Secret tells the story of Canada’s electronic intelligence during the Second World War, by the time de Marbois was seventeen,
he had been around the world twice in sailing vessels and had survived two shipwrecks and a bloody mutiny in which the captain and all his ship’s officers died. During the First World War, he had served as a British Liaison officer aboard a Russian cruiser and had fled the Bolshevik revolution with his fiancée, a Russian countess. After the war he settled for a time in Nigeria before finally coming to Canada. He spoke French, Spanish, German and Russian fluently, and had a smattering of Arabic, Turkish and about a dozen Far Eastern languages ….
He enthralled the boys of Upper Canada College [including GeoífTey Smith, who credits de Marbois with igniting in him the desire to join the navy] with tales of typhoons at sea, rescue by cannibals, and escape from Argentinian desperadoes. His colleagues at Naval Headquarters were skeptical. Yet the stories were true and de Marbois could tell them vividly.
5 For a discussion of how German newspapers spun the St. Lawrence sinkings see Hadley’s U-Boats Against Canada, 129f.
6 My narrative of Caribou’s final voyage is reconstructed from Douglas How’s The Night of the Caribou (Lancelot Press, 1988), “The Caribou Disaster: William Lundrigan’s story as told to Newfoundland Woman (Newfoundland Woman, vol. 3 no. 3–5, October-December 1964), “I survived the Wreck of S.S. Caribou: The Words of John (Jack) T. Dominie” (Downhomer, vol. 12 no. 1, June 2000, and “The Caribou Disaster: Thomas Fleming’s Story” by Cassie Brown (St. John’s Woman, October 1963).
7 Lines on the bow that tell to what point a ship can be loaded.
8 Wilkie’s body was recovered. A Newfoundland Ranger found a twenty-dollar bill safety-pinned to the inside of her jacket.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1 Courchènes was nothing if not consistent. In the early 1950s, he successfully opposed National Defence’s plans to turn the old EAC base at Mont Joli into a Strategic Air Command base. A new base was ultimately built at Bagotville, north of Quebec City. In 1953, Courchènes complained about the moral attitude of the Fusiliers; he was especially critical of Friday-night dances.
2 For a full discussion of the relationship between Quebec’s political and religious leaders’ attitudes toward Vichy, see Eric Amyot’s Le Québec entre Pétain et De Gaulle: Vichy, la France libre et les canadiens français 1940–1945. This book is the source of Monseigneur J. Charbonneau’s quote below.
3 On October 25, 1940, L’Echo du Bas St-Laurent also indicated its distance from the antiSemitism of Le Devoir and Quebec’s Catholic Church. In an editorial entitled “La réconstruction de l’étâtpalestinien,” L’Echo called for the re-creation of a Jewish state in what was then the British mandate of Palestine. Over a year before the factories of death were built at Auschwitz and Treblinka, L’Echo wrote that the Germans were “attacking the Jews with savage ferocity.” The editorial closed with an attack on Vichy: “The men of Vichy, wanting to ape the Nazis, press themselves to also practise anti-Semitism. They are, no doubt, familiar with the writings of St. Paul [which, as the editorial stated earlier, speak of the Jewish people as ‘bearing witness to the Scriptures’] and no less with the pope’s decree of September 15, 1928, which condemns anti-Semitism.”
4 After the war Laval was found guilty of treason; he was executed on October 15, 1945.
5 The distance between the ultranationalist view represented by Le Devoir or L’Action Catholique and the views, of the men and women who lived in the Gaspé is, perhaps, best measured from the fact that on July 9, 1942, with political emotions still rubbed raw by the conscription debate, 176 members of the Fusiliers volunteered for combat duty overseas.
6 On March 25, Roy sought to correct the impression Macdonald left—that Roy had said he, Roy, had witnessed the “battle” when, in fact, Hansard records Roy saying that Laurent Giroux claimed to have witnessed it; I’ve not found any newspaper that picked up Roy’s correction.
7 POW Camp 30 in Bowmanville, Ontario, 65 kilometres east of Toronto, was one of twenty-six POW camps across Canada. Camps were in such unlikely places as Kingston, Ontario; Sherbrooke and St. Helen’s Island (Montreal), Quebec; and in the resort at Kananaskis, Alberta. After being transferred to Canada in late 1942, Paul Hartwig spent the rest of the war in this last camp.
8 According to Michael Hadley, the Ireland code “was a system in which letters of the alphabet represented dots and dashes of the Morse code; it permitted the terse communication of lean data in seemingly innocent correspondence …. The first letter of every word in any piece of correspondence indicated either a dot or a dash …. A censor would scarcely twig to the fact that a U-boat commander’s lament “Meine Kameraden und auch ich waren langen in Sorge, denn …” (“My comrades as well as I were worried for a long time, for …”) actually named the weapon that sank them. Transposed into symbols, the first letter of each word spelled “mine.” In this case, nine words of seemingly innocuous plain language provided but a single word of coded communication. Clearly one could not write a lengthy military report by this procedure. But it allowed an inventive writer (or an identifiable group of writers) considerable flexibility and scope.”
9 On April 30, 1943, Admiral Murray was named commander of the Canadian North West Atlantic, making him the only Canadian to ever command a theatre of battle.
10 Quoted and translated by Hadley in his U-Boats Against Canada, p. 176; Hadley, p. 183 is also my source for “Kiebitz verpiffen”: “Operation Magpie blown” on p. 215.
11 Unless otherwise indicated, the following quotes from Rolf Schauenburg and Wolfgang Von Bartenwerffer come from Melanie Wiggins’s U-Boat Adventurers: Firsthand Accounts from World War II (Naval Institute Press, 1999), 126–131.
12 I thank Rodney Martin, author of Silent Runner: Wolfgang Heyda, U-boat Commander, for this information.
13 See chapter 8 for a fuller discussion of the Gnat, an acoustic torpedo.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 Despite Dönitz’s remonstrances, Hitler ordered the Grossadmiral to keep twenty U-boats in Norwegian waters to defend against an invasion that never came.
2 Quoted and annotated by Martin Middlebrook in Convoy (Penguin, 1978), p. 73. At 0314 Berlin time on May 7, 1944, Dönitz signalled U-548’s commander, Heinric
h Zimmermann: “Daughter born 4 May. Mother and daughter well. Congratulations. Admiral Commanding U-boats.” One hour and twenty minutes later, Zimmermann torpedoed the frigate HMCS Valleyfield, killing 125 officers and ratings. Among her 44 survivors was the same Lieutenant Ian Tate who in 1942 had been signals officer at HMCS Fort Ramsay.
3 In July 1943, researchers at I. G. Farben informed Reich armaments minister Albert Speer that they would soon be able to supply a material that absorbed 100 per cent of radar waves. Anti-sonar panels were tested in 1941 and again in 1944 but were found wanting, first because they tended to break off, and second because they created noise that Allied hydrophones could pick up.
After eighteen months of development, on November 6, 1943, Speer ordered 287 Elektro boats. The first was launched on April 17, 1944, and commissioned June 12, six days after D-Day. Both the Russian advance from the east and Anglo-American bombing disrupted Speer’s plan for the launching of sixty Elektro boats per month in 1944.
4 Quoted and translated by Roger Sarty in his “Ultra, Air Power, and the Second Battle of the St. Lawrence, 1944” (in To Die Gallantly: The Battle of the Atlantic, ed. Timothy J. Runyan and Jan M. Copes, Westview Press, 1994), 189f.
5 Quoted and translated by Hadley in his U-Boats Against Canada, 228.
6 “Weighing off” involved docking pay and cutting off shore leave.
7 The Canadian anti-acoustic torpedo (CAT) gear was an ingenious low-tech solution to the problem raised by the acoustic torpedo. According to Marc Milner, it consisted of “one five-foot pipe (soon reduced to thirty inches) bolted to a bracket with another loosely fitted above so the two rattled, and the whole thing attached to a wire yoke. The pipes lasted for over fourteen hours and could be towed at nearly 18 knots.”
8 On November 2, Kneip torpedoed the 10,000-ton Canadian steamer SS Fort Thompson six miles off Matane. The blast, which was originally attributed to either a mine or a boiler explosion, blew a large hole in the Vancouver-built ship’s starboard bow but did not kill or injure any of its crew. Thinking that the ship was sinking, however, seventeen crew members abandoned ship. Their appearance on the shores of Quebec renewed alarm about “l’action de l’ennemi,” as L’action catholique put it on November 3. The remaining forty-five officers and crew remained on board, and Fort Thompson made port under its own steam.
9 It is unclear whether Murray ordered a search for the U-boat, though given the time that had elapsed since the last sighting of Shawinigan and in the absence of huff-duff reports, his searchers would have little idea where to look. In fact, by the time Murray was alerted, U-1228 had transited the Cabot Strait and was some fifty miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, over two hundred miles away from where it sank Shawinigan.
10 Kapitän zur See Hermann Lessing’s U-1231 entered the St. Lawrence in late November 1944. This last invader left on or about December 8 after twice firing dud torpedoes.
11 I’d like to thank Professor Mike Whitby of the Department of Defence History Directorate for drawing my attention to these two reports.
EPILOGUE: 1945
1 December 1944, which saw thirty-one U-boats launched, was, in fact, the peak of U-boat production.
2 Exactly why Macdonald chose to announce HMCS Annan’s role in the sinking of U-1006 on April 3, 1945, almost six months after the U-boat was destroyed, or why he overstated the facts—Annan shared battle honours with HMCS Loch Achanalt and other ships in Escort Group 6—is unclear.
3 Quoted and translated by Peter Padfield in Donitz: The Last Fuhrer (Cassell & Co., 1988), 419.
IN MEMORIAM
1 It is unclear whether Triantafyllarous was aboard SS Mount Pindus or Mount Taygetus. His assignment to Mount Taygetus is undertaken with knowledge that it might be in error.
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Naval actions are indexed under the ship name or number for the vessels involved. References in the text may be by ship name or by name of commanding officer (in parentheses).
acoustic torpedo, 214, 219–220, 223
Aeas, SS, 78, 82–84, 85
air cover. See Eastern Air Command
airborne radar (Leigh Light), 51, 180
Aircraft Detection Corps (ADC)
communications failures, 52, 149–151, 161, 201
establishment, 52
organization, 151, 200
reliability of reports, 205
training of volunteers, 196–197, 200
Allied shipping losses, 217–218
Alvater, Arthur (Laramie), 80
Anastasios Pateras, SS, 54, 55–56
Anti-Submarine defence strategy, 94, 128. See also convoys; SQ-36
Anti-Submarine strike forces. See Royal Canadian Navy
Anti-Submarine technologies. See asdic; H/F D/F; radar; star shells
Arlyn, SS, 79–80
Arrowhead, HMCS (Skinner) against U-165, 85
against U-517, 105–107
disposal, 241
escorting NL-9 (Carolus), 168, 170–173
escorting QS-33, 76–77, 78, 83–87, 105–107
escorting SQ-36, 146, 147–148, 148–149, 151–153
asdic (sonar)
bathyscape effect, 60, 85, 101, 214, 221, 237, 269n.8
British faith in, 12, 45
countermeasures, 107, 189, 219
limitations in use, 126, 180–181, 184 operation of, 144
range, 126, 127
Battle of the Atlantic, 44, 217
blackouts. See also diffused lighting
compared with dim-outs, 69
effectiveness, 184, 210
observance of, 178, 203
procedures, 49–51
Boards of Inquiry
Charlottetown, 127–128
Raccoon, 87, 89
Bonner, Grace, 122
Bonner, Lt. John Willard (Charlottetown)
background, 10, 122–124, 160
death of, 133, 135–136
Bowmanville. See POW camps
Bowser, AB Donald (Charlottetown), 136–138
Brice, Capt. Edward H. See Nicoya, SS
Brillant, Senator Jules A., 193–194, 202
Britain, economic aid, 46
British Admiralty
comparison with Royal Canadian Navy, 10-11, 160–161, 272n.4
faith in asdic, 45
on German submarine restrictions, 12
ship-building capability, 271n.1,3
SQ-36 attack analysis, 148–149, 158, 160
U-boat capture plan, 209
broadcast beacons, 21, 49, 69
Brown, Capt. “Alf” (Oakton), 84, 90–91, 99, 103, 104, 108
Brown, George (Nicoya), 31, 32–33
BS-31, convoy, 174–176
buoyancy theory, 23, 25, 129
Burgeo, SS (Gullage), 231, 231–233
burn treatment, 85–86
Canada. See also Federal government
naval estimates, 7–9, 11-12, 116, 197–198
pre-war culture, 166–167
ship-building capability, 9, 116–119
war economy, 201
war effort, 45–46, 113, 139–142, 269n.i
war strategy, 52–53, 68
Canadian anti-acoustic torpedo (CAT) gear, 226, 275n.7
Canadian Naval Intelligence, 207–208
Caribou, SS (Taverner)
casualties, 181, 189–190
evacuation, 186–188
impact on Port aux Basques, 191–192
news of, 178
rescue of survivors, 189–190
schedule, 182–183
sinking by U-69, 180, 181–182, 185–188
Carley floats. See lifeboats
Carolus, SS, 170–172
censorship, 2–3, 38–39, 66–67, 113, 200, 202, 203–204. See also morale; press coverage; propaganda broadcasts
Chance, Cdr. Joh
n (Fairmile 058), 166–167, 234
Charlottetown, HMCS, (Bonner)
anti-submarine action, 126–127
armaments, 124–127
commissioning, 113, 121–122
construction, 116, 120–121
damage, 126–127
escorting ON-84, 124–127
escorting SQ-35, 110-111
evacuation, 130–133
launching, 119
morale, 123–124
sinking by U-517, 129–132, 149
survivors, 134–136
Chatham, SS, 94–95
Chedabucto, HMCS, 71, 151–152
Chevrier, S/L Jacques A. (RCAF), 62, 70, 194
chipping, 119
Church, Thomas L. (MP), 40–4:
Churchill, Winston (British PM), 143, 158
Clayoquot, HMCS (Lade), 110, 128, 136 against U-517, 131, 134
Clepson, Leonard (Nicoya), 31, 32–33
code books, 25, 31
code breaking, 168, 207, 209, 217
code systems, 206
Commonwealth Air Training Plan, 100–101
communications systems. See Aircraft
Detection Corps; Eastern Air
Command; Royal Canadian Navy compasses, 11
conscription, 18, 37, 67, 195, 269n.8, 274n.5
convoys. See also BS-31; NL-9; ONS-33; QS-15; QS-19; QS-33; SG-6; SG-6F; SQ-36; shipping losses
Caribbean oil run, 53, 68, 69–70
designations, 17
effectiveness, 11, 47, 53–54, 69–70, 158–159, 160–161, 204, 272n.3
escort orders, 58
escort organization, 73, 148–149, 183–184 fixed routes, 51, 142
Gulf Escort Force, 71, 112, 143, 204, 227
instructions, 79, 232
loading, 139–142
schedules, 112
system setup, 47
corvettes
armaments, 124–126
conditions aboard, 13, H4-H5
construction, 118–121
design, 13, H4-H5, 120, 234, 271n.4
launch process, 119
naming, 13