The Battle of the St. Lawrence (5 page)

Nor was he fooled by the fact that his ship was still on an even keel. The fact that even with a gaping wound
Nicoya
‘s hull was still able to distribute the added load across her length and breadth was a tribute to her designers as much as it was a twist of fate. Had the torpedo hit the forward hold, now, some two minutes after being hit,
Nicoya
would be going down by the bow. Again, Brice’s words—“she was obviously sinking rapidly”—hide more than they reveal, but since Brice doesn’t mention a list, it’s safe to assume that
Nicoya
was settling quickly into the dark waters of the St. Lawrence.

Within minutes of Brice’s ordering Abandon Ship, forty-one of the passengers and crew were safely aboard the one remaining portside boat and the aft starboard boat. Moments later, Brice and thirty-five men still aboard the fast-sinking ship watched in horror as the forward starboard boat they were preparing to board “was lowered too quickly and became waterlogged immediately [after] she hit water,” Brice reported.

Even if there had been room in the two just-launched boats, neither would have returned to pick up Brice and the other men. Once shipped, lifeboats follow their own imperative: move as quickly as possible away from the stricken ship. This seemingly heartless manoeuvre is necessary to ensure that the lifeboat and the survivors in it are not pulled down by the suction caused by the sinking ship. As soon as his boat was free of its lines, Inch started his boat’s Austin outboard engine and moved away from the wrecked
Nicoya.
Moments later, the men in the other boat used their oars to do the same. Twelve hours later, Inch’s boat would be the first to reach shore and thus bring Canada the word that war had come to our inland shores.

Perhaps because
Nicoya
was settling on an even keel, Thurmann thought it had not been mortally wounded. Had she been torpedoed in the open sea, he would likely have surfaced and used his deck gun to hole her hull again and ensure that she sank while saving one of his few torpedoes for another ship. Eight miles from Canada’s shore, such a gambit was too risky. Still, he could not take the risk that
Nicoya
might be beached ashore, where it could be salvaged. As historian Peter Padfield has shown, Dönitz’s
guerre de course
demanded not that ships be badly damaged but that they be sunk: “The enemy’s shipping constitutes one single, great entity. It is therefore
immaterial where a ship is sunk. Once it has been destroyed, it has to be replaced by a new ship. In the long run the result of the war will depend on the result of the race between shipping and new constructions.” This time, Thurmann’s war diary doesn’t record the co-ordinates or running time, saying only, “0611
Coup de grâce
from Tube II, hit amidships.”

In the moments before Thurmann’s second torpedo hit, Captain Brice led the remaining men in launching the ship’s Carley floats. Built out of balsa wood and shaped like a large square doughnut with netting in the middle, Carley floats were standard equipment on both merchant ships and warships.
Nicoya
carried four, each attached to a skid secured to the ship’s rigging. On some ships, Carley floats launched themselves, their own buoyancy being enough to detach them from their skids. On others, such as
Nicoya,
Carley floats were launched by pulling a pin.

Just as Brice had ordered his men to dive into the water and make for the just-launched floats, Thurmann’s second torpedo slammed into the stricken ship, setting off what one resident told the Canadian Press was a “terrific explosion that rocked the houses [several miles away from
Nicoya]
as though there was an earthquake.” Scant seconds before Thurmann’s
coup de grâce
hit their dying ship, thirty men reached one of
Nicoya’s
rafts. The disaster continued.
Nicoya
“plung[ed] to her grave,” pulling the raft and the men on it under the St. Lawrence waters.

“The raft had been thrown over and we jumped in and swam to it,” Burby told British United Press. “About thirty of us scrambled on. But no one had cut the rope attaching the raft to the ship, and as she plunged we were dragged right under the water.”

As desperate men hacked at the rope with whatever they could find, the other end was securely attached to a now deadweight of some 10,000 tons. The raft was pulled under and then the rope parted. The raft sprang back to the surface with six fewer men than it had supported just moments earlier—the first men to die from enemy fire in Canada since the Riel Rebellion in 1885.

William John George, a sixteen-year-old ordinary seaman, was dead. So too were James Stanley Newcomb, a thirty-five-year-old third engineer, likely the man who ordered the
Nicoya’s
engines stopped. H.V.
Woodthrope, a twenty-year-old carpenter; and two other thirty-five-year-olds, Frank L. Smith and Douglas Phillips, too had drowned. Henry Mills, an anti-aircraft gunner, would also never be seen again. Brice didn’t know the names yet—that would have to wait another two days—but within minutes, one count and then another had been taken, and he knew that six of his crew had vanished.

As U-553 cruised away on a northwesterly course that would take it farther into the river,
Nicoya’s
crew struggled to survive. Knowing that the raft would slow down whichever boat took it in tow, Brice ordered Inch to proceed independently to shore. Inch’s orders were as simple as they were obvious: “send out assistance” and report
Nicoya’s
loss to Captain Armit, commander of Fort Ramsay, the newly opened RCN base at Gaspé. Through the rest of the night and well into the next day, Inch, the wind whipping his thick mane of hair, needed every ounce of his extensive knowledge of the sea to pilot his little boat, upon which forty-one souls depended, through the strong currents of the St. Lawrence.

The bitterly cold night was dangerous to the men in the remaining boat, but they were relatively dry. Brice knew that he and the men who swam to the raft were in mortal danger.
⁷

Just moments after seeing his ship destroyed and learning of the death of six of his crew, Brice had to make the most difficult of command decisions. Leaving men, including himself, on the raft, where they would be partially submerged or constantly soaked by the choppy sea, was a death sentence. Ordering that a rotation be established with the men in the chief engineer’s boat (which had taken the raft in tow) could be a death sentence to some already in the boat. Brice’s report betrays no hint of the strain he faced, saying only, “It was bitterly cold during the night, so we pulled on the oars in order to keep warm, transferring the men from the raft to the lifeboat frequently during the night.”

MAY 12, 1942

Sixteen miles southwest of the waters in which Brice and his men were struggling to survive, the St. Lawrence rolls on to the Gaspé Peninsula, the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River. Four miles from the centre of the town of Gaspé, a mixed crew of sailors and two local civilian women, all specially trained in wireless, codes and ciphers, were on duty with their sub-lieutenant in the Signals Office on the second floor of a clapboard building in Fort Ramsay. Through the long hours of their watch, which began a scant five minutes after Thurmann fired his first torpedo, the wireless receivers brought not a word of the sinking of
Nicoya.
Nor did the telegraphists hear of Thurmann’s second victim, SS
Leto,
a Dutch freighter torpedoed seventeen miles north of Cap-de-la-Madeleine at 2:38 a.m. on May 12, two hours later.

“I wasn’t on duty that night, or even the next watch, when word of those sinkings reached the base,” recalls Ian Tate, then a twenty-one-year-old sub-lieutenant just arrived from Halifax. “That watch, the one that came
on duty at midnight on the eleventh, was the last of its kind, the last before the war moved into the St. Lawrence.

“We all knew why we were there, even though, to be frank, the whole thing had a certain unreality to it. We knew, and, looking back on it, surely our C/O, Commander Armit, knew that there was a real threat, but it was still so hard to believe. True, for two years we’d been hearing of sinkings: ‘the mighty
Hood,’
HMS
Repulse,
Pearl Harbor, HMCS
Spikenard
(one of our corvettes sunk in the mid-Atlantic earlier that year in February). And, of course, we knew of the slaughter of the ‘Second Happy Time’ off the American coast and up to the approaches to Halifax.

“But the news was always ‘over there.’

“Here we were, in a naval base commissioned just twelve days previously, that wasn’t even finished. The wardroom wasn’t up and running yet, and neither were the barracks. The half dozen officers weren’t even able to sleep on the base, staying instead at Baker’s Hotel in the town of Gaspé.

“I was one of the four pretty green officers in charge of a mixed watch system, varying from eight to twelve hours. I’d had all of one month’s training. Two months earlier, I’d been at University of Toronto studying arts so that I could go to law school.”

At 2:30 a.m., at the end of a 1,200-metre run, the torpedo fired from U-553’s Tube III struck the SS
Leto
‘s starboard side some 60 metres from her bow, 3 metres below the waterline. For a moment a “big stream of water and coal” towered over the Dutch ship. Before it collapsed, forty-three men were running for their lives through a ruined ship.

The
Leto’s
first chief engineer, C. Spaan, ran to the engine room but never made it. Finding his way blocked by steam and feeling that the engines had stopped, Spaan knew that the engine room had been blown apart. Through the torn bulkheads he could hear “two screams and that was it,” as the six men of the third watch who weren’t incinerated by the 3,000° C bubble or obliterated by the 50,000 atmospheres of pressure were scalded to death by the ship’s own steam. The explosion trapped a seventeen-year-old trimmer in the coal hold at the bottom of the ship.

As Spaan ran toward the engine room, his captain, Egbert Henrik Van Der Veen, paused only long enough to don his life jacket before running to the bridge. Once there, he sent his second navigation officer to the quarterdeck to supervise preparations for launching
Leto
‘s boats. Then, together with J. Breet, his first navigation officer, Van Der Veen scanned the night for the submarine, ready to issue orders to twenty-year-old George Brown and twenty-one-year-old Leonard Clepson, two British DEMS gunners who had been able to make it to their guns.

Asleep in their bunks deep in the ship when the torpedo hit, London-born twenty-five-year-old Bill Middladitch and James Hullican, twenty-four, of Welsey, never got to their guns. “We couldn’t realize what had happened at first,” Hullican told the
Ottawa Evening Citizen
‘s reporter a day later. “But when we leaped out of [our] bunks and stepped in knee deep water we knew we must have been hit.”

By the time they got to the deck,
Leto
had started to list and Van Der Veen had ordered Abandon Ship. Before leaving the bridge, he threw the secret code books into the water he’d soon be swimming in.

Unlike
Nicoya,
which settled on an even keel,
Leto
quickly took on a list to starboard as thousands of tons of water poured into her ruptured hull. Just moments after reaching the boat deck to help launch the lifeboats, maybe two minutes after the ship had been hit, Van Der Veen heard “water entering the between-decks” (an area several decks above the waterline) when he ran past the starboard bunker window.

Leto
carried five lifeboats, more than enough for her forty-three men and two passengers (including O. Nuzink and M. A. A. Overzier, both from Rotterdam, who were returning to England after having been torpedoed seven weeks earlier in the North Atlantic)—had they all been launched.

One boat on the starboard side had been destroyed by the explosion. Because of the list, the main port boats lay heavily against
Leto
‘s side. Johannes Boerklaar told the
Montreal Gazette
that in the few anxious moments before the ship began to heel over, “some of the men tried to swing [the boats] out in twos and threes, but it was useless.”

While the men near Boerklaar tried to swing the boats out, Van Der Veen ran back up to the bridge, where still another lifeboat was lashed to the
stricken
Leto.
He freed it, but his efforts were in vain. It slid down its stays too quickly and foundered when it hit the water.

By now, the first boat to be launched (a jolly boat designed for twelve men but carrying twenty-two, including gunners Hullican and Middladitch) had got safely away from the fast-sinking
Leto.
The portside boat that Van Der Veen ran for was in the water too. As he got to it, the
Leto’s
4,712 tons began to heel over.

In the moments before
Leto
capsized, members of the crew heard the first navigation officer shouting that he had a passenger with him who couldn’t swim. He asked the donkeyman, an oiler and a fuel man if they could take care of the passenger while he and the first navigation officer, who also didn’t have a lifebelt, swam for it as the ship plunged.