Canada Under Attack

by Jennifer Crump

  With the majority of Canada’s few naval vessels engaged elsewhere, only a minesweeper, two motor launches, and a small yacht remained to protect the entrance to the St. Lawrence. The area was considered to be a secondary target by both the Germans and the Allies and therefore of secondary importance for defence. Even Operation Drumbeat was meant to be a lightning strike rather than a sustained action. It turned out to be a devastating action that more closely resembled a prolonged storm. The combination of freshwater from the river, saltwater from the ocean, and rapidly fluctuating temperatures wreaked havoc on sonar equipment in the gulf. The area’s notorious fogs helped hide the U-boats when they broke the surface. By the end of October, U-boats had sunk 19 merchant ships and two naval escorts.

  The most devastating attack was yet to come. The Caribou had ferried citizens between Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland, for years. On the morning of October 14th it was torpedoed by a German U-boat, a mere 60 kilometres from its destination. The ferry went down so quickly that only one lifeboat could be launched. The crew valiantly urged people into the lifeboat and when that was full they helped them on to pieces of debris and makeshift rafts. Other crew members lead disoriented, panicked passengers away from the sinking hull of the ship. When the last survivors were finally rescued they learned that only 15 of the 48 crew members had survived.

  Many of the crew had gone down with the ship, others helping to save as many as they could before they were forced to abandon ship. Despite the crew’s heroic efforts, the numbers were grim. Of the 237 souls who had set sail for Newfoundland that morning just over 100 survived. The loss of the Caribou ripped the heart out of Newfoundland. There were five pairs of brothers amongst the crew and several fathers and sons. Most were lost. Also lost was the Canadian sense of distance from the war, which had seemed so far away. The death and devastation that had, until then, been confined to a distant land had come home to Canada.

  In August, U-boats launched attacks against ships in harbours in Labrador and Newfoundland, and against a convoy in the Straight of Belle Isle. The continued U-boat attacks fuelled a bitter debate over conscription in the Canadian Parliament and damaged the already fragile relationship between Quebec and the federal government. Quebec members of Parliament were furious over the seemingly inability of the government to protect their coastal constituencies. The Royal Canadian Air Force frequently tracked the U-boats but just as frequently lost them in the fog or was grounded by the mercurial Maritime weather. The quick moving U-boats frequently attacked before the ships were able to gather into the safety of a convoy. In September, U-517 entered the St. Lawrence River, was almost immediately detected, and came under heavy fire from the RCAF. It was still able to escape and sink nine ships. By October 1942, U-boats had penetrated as far upriver as Rimouski, Quebec, just 300 kilometres from Quebec City.

  The Germans did not stay long in the St. Lawrence. Instead they turned their attention to targets that were more lucrative and easily attacked. Military authorities had long expected an attack on highly exposed Bell Island. Its harbour was frequented by large ships and the iron ore mined there was in high demand from the various war machines. Early in the war the Canadian government had agreed to furnish Bell Island with several large guns and searchlights to aid in the defence of the harbour. The Newfoundland government recruited a militia, the Canadians provided training for the men, and the iron ore companies provided the barracks to house them. Air Raid Patrol wardens patrolled the island’s streets to ensure that lights were doused and curtains drawn during blackouts.

  On September 5, 1942, the harbour was full of ships. The Saganaga and the Lord Strathcona, each with their holds filled with iron ore, waited for a convoy to escort them to Nova Scotia. The Evelyn B was loaded with coal and waiting to unload. Numerous other ships — the PLM 27, Rose Castle, and Drakepool among them — were busily exchanging the goods they had delivered to Bell Island for loads of iron ore. On the Lord Strathcona, Chief Engineer William Henderson watched as a torpedo tore through the calm waters of the harbour and slammed into the Saganaga. He checked his watch. It was 11:07 a.m. Less than three seconds later, “a second torpedo literally blew the Saganaga to pieces. Debris and iron ore was thrown up about 300 feet and, before the last of it had fallen back into the water, the Saganaga had disappeared.”1 Henderson immediately ordered his crew to their lifeboats and at 11:30 a.m. as the men of the Lord Strathcona were still attempting to rescue the men of their sister ship, the Saganaga, another torpedo slammed into the Lord Strathcona. A second torpedo slammed into the ship and it sank less than a minute and a half later. The crew of the Evelyn B immediately opened fire into the water where the torpedo had first appeared and is credited with driving off the U-boat, which was still lying in wait. The militia joined the fight from the battery and trained the heavy guns on the water. U-513 suddenly broke the surface and raced to the safety of the open ocean.

  Damage to the Scotia Pier caused by a torpedo fired by the German submarine U-518 on November 2, 1942. Taken on Bell Island, Newfoundland, November 3, 1942.

  The first battle of Bell Island was over. The second would begin just a few months later. On the night of November 2, 1942 U-513’s sister ship, U-518, crept into Conception Bay. The U-boat stayed above the waterline but hugged the craggy cliffs on the side of the bay, listening to the sounds of cars travelling on the cliffs above them as it crept closer to its target. The searchlights from the battery illuminated two ships at anchor. The U-boat commander fired at the first, the Anna T, but missed. The torpedo slammed into the Scotia Pier, blowing a portion of it to pieces and causing $30,000 damage.2 The battery immediately responded and while the searchlights swung wildly in an attempt to locate the U-boat it fired again, sinking the Rose Castle. Once again the attacking U-boat was able to escape unscathed.

  The Canadian government was so concerned about Newfoundland that it created a secret plan to burn St. John’s to the ground should it be captured by the Germans. But Newfoundland was not the government’s only worry. U-boat activity in the St. Lawrence did not slow and in 1942 was still showing signs of increasing. The Canadian government was busy contending with a growing rumour mill, its angry provinces, and frustrated allies.

  On September 9, 1942, an exasperated Canadian government finally closed the St. Lawrence to all but local, coastal traffic. The closure had no discernible effect on North American shipping and was seen as more symbolic than strategic. However, the closure did mean that the ships would no longer have to wait in the dangerous Gulf for other ships to arrive from Montreal and Quebec City before forming a convoy to cross the Atlantic. It also shifted the centre of Canadian shipping away from Quebec and into the Maritime provinces.

  Buoyed by their successes in disrupting Atlantic shipping routes, the Germans discovered another use for their U-boats. In May 1942, they landed a spy using the alias of Lieutenant Langbein in the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick. In November a U-boat deposited German agent Werner von Janowski near the town of New Carlisle, on Chaleur Bay in the Gaspé region of Quebec. Von Janowski roused the suspicions of a local innkeeper’s son when he used outdated money and Belgian matches. He was picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police the day after he landed and soon agreed to act as a double agent for the RCMP. Langbein managed to remain in Canada undetected until 1944, but it is unlikely that he was inclined to do much damage as a spy. He and von Janowski had both been tasked with monitoring shipping traffic on the St. Lawrence but that traffic had virtually halted soon after they landed. In fact, RCMP records suggest the Langbein was a friendly man with an encyclopedic memory who had lived in Canada prior to the start of the war and was eager to take advantage of an opportunity to return. According to most contemporary reports, Langbein simply lived off the money provided to him by the German Foreign Office until it ran out and then he turned himself into Canadian authorities.

  In September 1943 a U-boat left the village of Kiel, Germany, bound for Canada. Unlike the many other subma
rines that had gone before it U-537 was not after North American convoys or cargo. U-537 carried an interesting cargo of its own, a small group of scientists and technicians. Their mission was to land in Newfoundland and install a weather station nicknamed “Kurt” that could be used by the German High Command for assessing possible invasions of Canada and North America. The weather station was a complex instrument that was able to translate temperatures, wind speed, air pressure, and direction into Morse code and transmit the data every three minutes.

  On October 22, U-537 hovered just off the northern end of Labrador. Despite the danger presented by the numerous air patrols that swept the region, the submarine broke the surface and dropped its anchor. Under cover of one of the area’s notorious fogs, the submarine waited at the surface while technicians muscled the 220 pound canisters containing the weather stations components onto rubber boats. The Germans had cleverly marked the canisters with the Canadian Weather Service logo in order to forestall any suspicions should the canisters be discovered. The only problem was that there was no organization known as the Canadian Weather Service in 1943. The German technicians had also brought along American cigarettes and matchbooks to leave at the site and forestall any suspicions should the site be explored by the Canadians. They need not have worried. The remote weather site was never investigated by the Canadians or their allies. The station operated perfectly for a few days, sending out regular signals, and then it abruptly stopped transmitting. It was never used by the Germans.

  The existence of the weather stations was a closely held secret known only to a handful of scientists and to the officers of the U-boat who had landed it. The Canadians remained oblivious to the existence of the German weather station until the 1980s when a German historian found a photograph of a weather station that did not fit with the images he had seen of known German weather stations in the arctic. The coast looked much more like that he had seen in Labrador, Canada. He wrote to W.A.B. Douglas, the official historian of the Canadian Armed Forces. Douglas and members of the Canadian Coast Guard made a trip to the suspected location and were able to recover the remnants of the weather station. The historians had also discovered that a second weather station had been dispatched in 1943 but it had been sunk along with the U-boat that carried it in the Atlantic.

  During the Second World War, Canada was home to several extensive military prisoner of war installations. One of these prisoner of war camps was in Bowmanville, just outside Toronto, Ontario. Camp 30 was located in a former boy’s school and housed some illustrious prisoners including Otto Kretschmer, an infamous U-boat commander who had sunk no less than 42 ships before he was captured in 1941. In October 1943, the commanders of Camp 30 ordered that

  Attack on Estevan Point

  The east coast was not the only Canadian shoreline under attack during the Second World War. Japanese submarines frequently cruised off the west coast, drifting down from battles in the Aleutian Islands and other locations in the north Pacific. Most British Columbians were blissfully unaware of the danger that lurked just offshore.In the spring of 1942, two incidents occurred that severely challenged the sense that the war was confined to battlefields far from Canada.

  On June 19, 1942, a Canadian freighter, the Fort Camosun, was just rounding the tip of Cape Flattery on the northwestern shore of Washington, when it was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-25. Luckily the ship was carrying a load of wood, which allowed it to stay afloat until it reached port. The attack on the Fort Camosun was particularly frightening for British Columbia. Canada’s Navy was still tiny in the early days of war and the convoy system used to protect ships on the eastern seaboard had not been duplicated on the west coast. The only ships available to protect the west coast of Canada were the Fisherman’s Reserve, a motley collection of fishing boats whose owners and crew had offered their services to the Royal Canadian Navy.

  While one Japanese submarine was attacking the Fort Camosun off the southern tip of Vancouver Island, another was turning its guns on the Estevan Lighthouse on the northern tip of the island. The submarine fired 25 to 30 rounds of 5.5" shells but failed to hit the lighthouse or the nearby village of Hesquiat. No casualties were reported, but the attack marked the first time that enemy shells had struck Canadian soil since the war of 1812.

  In response to the attacks, the Canadian government ordered all lights doused at the outer stations, which proved disastrous for merchant ships attempting to navigate the area. A rudimentary early warning system on the outer islands proved to be only slightly more helpful. Teams of watchers, consisting of a woodsman, a cook, and two telegraph operators, were installed on the remote Queen Charlotte Islands to watch for any sign of a Japanese attack on the Pacific. None came. The next attack was launched in the sky rather than in the sea.

  100 German officers, including Kretschmer, be shackled together in retaliation for a recent German order to shoot to kill Allied Commandos.3 The German officers refused to cooperate and barricaded themselves in the camp mess, armed with iron bars and sticks. Unable to dislodge the POWs, Camp 30 called for reinforcements from another camp. One hundred guards from another camp, armed solely with baseball bats, arrived to help and attempted to storm the mess. The German POWs held them off for three days until an exasperated camp commander finally ordered his men to turn the camp’s fire hoses on the mess. The Germans finally emerged and surrendered. The “Battle of Bowmanville” was over.

  Additional attempts were made to liberate German POWs in the Maritimes. One U-boat, en route to a hoped for rendezvous with escaped prisoners from POW Camp 70, came under heavy fire from the Canadian Navy when the escape attempt was foiled. The Germans might have thought that the Canadian Navy was underfunded and unprepared, but by 1943 Canada was the third largest naval power in the world and controlled a fleet of no less than 400 ships. The RCN’s efforts to expel the German U-boat menace were getting more successful. The Royal Canadian Air Force was becoming equally successful in its efforts to harass the U-boats. Even the Germans acknowledged that their naval efforts were stalling. In late 1943, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz despaired, “We’ve lost the Battle of the Atlantic!” The U-boat wolf packs had become flocks of lambs. The St. Lawrence was reopened in April 1944.

  The German High Command, faced with the growing threat and a dearth of successes was desperate to recover their star U-boat commander, Otto Kretschmer. An elaborate plan was concocted in which Kretschmer would be removed from Camp 30 via a tunnel. A U-boat would pick him up in New Brunswick. The plan was expected to take nine months to complete. Throughout the summer of 1943 the POWs worked in shifts, digging the tunnel with tin cans. The dirt was removed in bags that were scattered over the rafters in the attic of one of the cabins housing the POWs. By the end of the summer the tunnel, dug 4.5 metres below ground, extended over 90 metres. Unfortunately for the ecstatic would be escapees, the Canadians knew all about their tunnel.

  When the escape attempt was made only one man managed to get away. He was eventually recaptured in New Brunswick before he was able to meet the expected U-boat.

  Surrender of the German submarine U-889 off Shelburne, Nova Scotia, May 13, 1945.

  U-boats remained in Canadian waters until the end of the war. The HMCS Clayoquot was sunk near Halifax on Christmas Eve, 1944, and on April 16, 1945, the HMCS Esquimalt was sunk near the same spot where the Clayoquot had met her end. The U-boat that had taken the Esquimalt surrendered to the Royal Canadian Navy one month later and the submarine was recommissioned by the RCN before it was purposely sunk in an elaborate ceremony — in the very spot that it had sunk the Esquimalt — several years after the war had ended.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  THE FIRE BALLOONS

  The Japanese Attack on Western Canada

  The war in Europe and the war in the Pacific had dragged on for over five years, but in the rural Saskatchewan community of Minton it still seemed very far away. On January 12, 1945, the war came crashing down on Saskatchewan. An 11-year-old boy named Tony Fri
schholz1 was one of the first to see it. As he walked along a rural road he saw a strange object bouncing down the road in toward him: a huge hydrogen-filled balloon, almost 10 metres wide. Tony did not know it at the time but the balloon also carried a payload of bombs, enough to destroy the entire Frischholz family. The balloon had already travelled several thousand kilometres across the Pacific Ocean and floated over the Rocky Mountains to drop its payload in the Saskatchewan badlands.

  Others had also encountered the balloon that day. It did not take 13-year-old Ralph Melle long to figure out what the balloon carried. Melle was wedged between his uncle and his dad as they travelled in his dad’s pickup truck on their way into town. The balloon suddenly appeared alongside the road and Melle watched, entranced, as the enormous globe slowly descended into a badlands valley. His father slowed the truck and all three jumped out to take a closer look. Melle unknowingly stepped on one of the incendiary devices. Luckily that bomb failed to go off, but another destroyed a fence when it suddenly exploded. The group noticed that the balloon and its dangerous cargo had strange markings on it, markings that were soon identified as Japanese characters and numbers.

  The strange sight that Frischholz and Melle had encountered was a Japanese fire balloon — a fu-go — and it was one of nearly 1,000 that landed in Canada, the United States, and Mexico between the fall of 1944 and April 1945. Japanese engineers had designed the balloon bombs to take advantage of the continuous jet stream of air that occurs high in the atmosphere, which could be counted on to carry the balloons all the way from Japan to the vulnerable American coastline. Their plan was simple and might have proved devastating, if it had worked.