The Battle of the St. Lawrence (6 page)
Read The Battle of the St. Lawrence Online
Authors: Nathan M. Greenfield
The suction of the sinking ship drew several men into a maelstrom of twisted wreckage and water made oily by coal dust.
Seconds ticked by.
Then air bubbles, some filled with coal dust, burst to the surface. Next, wooden hatchways that had broken apart and been pulled into the vortex bounded up from the depths.
Had there been only twelve men in the jolly boat, they would have braced themselves for the outwash waves created by the plunging ship. The twenty-two men knew the horrible truth: nothing could keep the outwash waves from pouring over the boat’s low freeboard, the first of many waves that would all but swamp the boat during the long cold night. “We were bailing the water as fast as we could, but we would just dip out one bucketful when two or three more would come surging in,” recalled twenty-one-year-old crewman Tommy Maxwell.
Leto
never got off a message; Gaspé knew nothing.
More seconds ticked by and then, among the detritus coughed up by
Leto,
were two living men: Captain Van Der Veen and George Brown. Van Der Veen’s story was told only in the classified operations report: “Shortly after I got there [to the portside lifeboat], the ship capsized and sank, dragging the portside lifeboat, including the people in it, with it. When I reached the water’s surface, I noticed that my watch stopped at 2:47 a.m.” Brown’s story, however, was read by millions. “That was the only time I was afraid,” Brown told the Canadian Press. “I had no lifebelt and I was sucked down
far under the water as our ship went down. I really did some praying then.”
Later Brown was able to save his gunnery mate, Clepson. Clepson, who told interviewers of the painful irony of being able to “see the lights of shore about six miles away,” didn’t remember how he got off the dying ship. “I passed out cold,” sprawled out on a bobbing packing case. After coming to, he saw Brown on a larger case and joined him there. As the night wore on, hypothermia began to affect Clepson. “I was wearing lighter clothes than Len, but the cold water didn’t affect me as much as it did him,” recalled Brown. Toward dawn, the cold almost claimed Clepson. “Shall we go over?” he asked Brown. “And, just as he got the words out I said, ‘There’s a ship in sight.’ He never said another word until we were rescued.”
Wilhelm Koning, who had survived another sinking just weeks earlier and was travelling back to England on the
Leto,
was picked up by another Dutch steamer, SS
Titus,
but died “because of the cold water and exhaustion.”
Neither
Titus
nor SS
Dutch Mass,
which was travelling with
Titus
and which also picked up survivors, radioed to Gaspé to alert Commander Armit. Both ships proceeded upriver. At 7:30 the next morning, the survivors and Koning’s body were transferred to the pilot’s boat and then landed at Pointe-au-Père (five miles east of Rimouski, Quebec) directly outside the window of then eleven-year-old Gaétan Lavoie, the Pointe-au-Père lighthouse keeper’s son.
“There were about twenty of them. I’d never seen anything like it before. There, at 7:30 in the morning, were twenty men covered in oil walking past my window from the wharf into the town. I didn’t know where they were going, but later learned they went to the hotel, where they were given dry clothes and food,” recalls Lavoie.
“I asked my father, the lighthouse keeper, what had happened. He told me he didn’t know. I thought he knew but didn’t want to frighten us.
“When I arrived at school, we learned something about them. We heard that they’d said they’d been sunk by a submarine. That’s what some of the kids who had parents who took them in and gave them clothes said.”
Young Gaétan almost certainly guessed right about his father. By the time
Leto
‘s survivors and dead were coming ashore, Canadian authorities already
knew that there had been at least one sinking in the St. Lawrence. Since 1939, Charles-August Lavoie and his fellow lighthouse keepers had listened for codes, broadcast on CBC and Radio-Canada, that told them when to dim their beacons because of enemy action.
Action Stations was rung at Fort Ramsay shortly after noon on May 12 after a phone call brought the first report of torpedoing survivors coming ashore. The boat that landed at L’Anse-à-Valleau, fifteen kilometres from Fox River (Rivìere-au-Renard), carried the thirty-nine men as well as Mrs. Silverstone and her son, whom Brice had entrusted to First Mate Inch.
“The true impact of what had happened, that the war had now come home to Canada’s inland shores, did not dawn on us,” recalls Tate. “I don’t remember where on the base I was when I first heard the news, but I know that within a few minutes I’d grabbed my camera and joined a rescue party of eight men, including Commander Armit and an army medical officer.
“It took us about an hour and a quarter to get there. We took the base station wagon as far as we could, but there was still a great deal of snow on the ground and it drifted across the only road on the coastline. Some ways away, we had to abandon the station wagon and walk, carrying the supplies through the village to the beach.
“By the time we arrived at the beach, the number of survivors had grown by more than a score. We arrived just in time to see another of the
Nicoya’s
boats land, towed by a motor fishing boat that was filled with survivors we later learned had been on the raft when the boat came out to get them.”
Although Minister of Naval Services Angus Macdonald would soon be assuring the nation that the navy had put in place “long-prepared plans for the protection of Canada’s territorial waters” and that the 1942 memorandum entitled “Defence of Shipping—Gulf of St. Lawrence” called for the immediate dispatch of “adequate hunting and striking forces,” Canada’s immediate military action was negligible.
Searching did not begin until dawn on the thirteenth. Even then, the existing plans could not be fully put into effect because the slipways, fuel dumps, seaplane tendering and even barracks necessary to base a detachment of Cansos (a flying boat) at HMCS Fort Ramsay were not yet complete.
HMCS
Medicine Hat,
a Bangor minesweeper tasked with being the lead ship to patrol the waters around Gaspé once a submarine alert was sounded, was in Sydney, Nova Scotia, over 250 miles away. It did not arrive in the area where
Nicoya
and
Leto
were torpedoed until the afternoon of the thirteenth.
Medicine Hat
“searched the area of the sinkings, Fame to Fox Points, with no results,” reported the U-boat tracking report for May 1942.
The RCN’s immediate local response was the launching of HMCS
Venning,
an 18-metre converted fishing trawler that first had to be taken off its winter chocks. Ordered into the water by twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant Paul Bélanger,
Venning
had to manoeuvre around ice floes before getting out of Gaspé’s harbour.
James Essex’s memory of Engineer Clark trying to “squeeze every last ounce of energy from the wheezing engines” may sound like something out of a
Boy’s Own Magazine
story. The hard reality was, however, that though Gaspé had been designated a strike force, it was totally unprepared for antisubmarine warfare. Not only did
Venning
lack sonar and radar, it carried no depth charges and no machine gun. “If they did see a sub,” recalled Essex in his memoir,
Victory in the St. Lawrence,
“they did not even have a radio” to report it to Fort Ramsay.
MAY 13, 1942
Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin, in a section of his diary in which he praises the Protocol of the Elders of Zion (a late-nineteenth-century Russian creation that “outlines” how Jewish interests will take over the world), Joseph Göbbels writes, “There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.”
One thousand five hundred miles to the east, in the middle of the air gap, in the second day of a two-day battle, ONS-92, a slow convoy bound from the UK to North America and protected by six escorts, including the corvettes HMCS
Algoma, Arvida, Bittersweet
and
Shediac,
loses two more ships.Two thousand miles south, Ulrich Gräf’s U-69 sinks the US freighter SS
Norlandic.
With the exceptions of the readers of the
Ottawa Evening Journal,
the
Vancouver Province
and the inside pages of Quebec’s
Le Soleil
newspapers of May 11, most Canadians learned of the St. Lawrence sinkings from the headlines on May 12—just about the time Gaétan Lavoie was watching the survivors of
Leto
come ashore in Pointe-au-Père. The news stories went considerably further than simply reporting that sinkings had occurred off “a St. Lawrence Port” (a phrase that quickly took its place beside the ubiquitous “East Coast Port”) and repeating the statement issued by Naval Services Minister Macdonald:
The minister for naval services announces that the first enemy attack upon shipping in the St. Lawrence river took place on May
11
when a freighter was sunk. Forty-one survivors have been landed from the vessel.
The situation regarding shipping in the river is being closely watched and long-prepared plans for its special protection under these circumstances are in operation.
Any possible further sinkings in this area will not be made public in order that information of value to the enemy may be withheld from him. It is felt, however, that the Canadian public should be informed of the presence of enemy U-boats in Canadian territorial waters and they are assured that every step is being taken to grapple with the situation.
While subsequent days would see confusion as survivor stories became jumbled and with the publication and then retraction of the baleful rumour that “a woman and her baby [had been left] ominously alone in an oarless lifeboat,” the articles that appeared on the thirteenth and on the days that followed were substantially accurate.
As he had for thousands of nights, before going to bed on the twelfth, Canada’s tenth prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, sat alone writing in his diary, accompanied only by his dog. King sat in a room on the second floor of Laurier House, a three-storey brick Victorian building that his predecessor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had given the Liberal Party. Amidst pictures of his mother and father, King recorded the first mention of the
Battle of the St. Lawrence in Parliament. Toward the end of a Liberal caucus meeting, in which the prime minister reminded his members of the need for both cabinet and caucus unity in dealing with the contradictory vote in the April 7 plebiscite that freed King from his 1940 campaign promise not to bring in conscription, he made a most uncharacteristic detour into technical military matters:
8
I then went on to say that I had pretty good evidence of what I had said about space and time being eliminated. Matters were moving very rapidly and distance being overcome. I drew from my pocket a brown envelope with red seals and said that they would be surprised to learn that therein was word that an enemy submarine had torpedoed a ship in the waters of the St. Lawrence west of Gaspé and that this morning the survivors were being landed on the shores of the river in the province of Quebec. I said that I hoped they would not imagine that this was an isolated happening, and that they might expect to find it followed by further raids and the probable approach of the enemy into our country both on the waters and overhead, with the probable destruction of Canadian lives, homes, etc.
Vague as ever, King’s words did more than tell his MPs that new technologies were altering the time and space of war. His words were preparing them—and through them, ultimately, the nation—for something entirely new: battle deaths in Canada.
* * *
The stories pieced together by reporters grabbed the attention not only of the Canadian public but also of the German and Canadian governments. Even before Thurmann radioed his report to Admiral Dönitz at U-boat Command (
Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote
, or BdU), Germany knew of the sinkings from Canadian sources, published on the twelfth. At 9:15 a.m. on May …, hours before young Gaétan saw
Leto
’s survivors arrive on land, Berlin radio broadcast the (somewhat fictionalized) report, which indicates, incidentally, that Radio Berlin’s wordsmiths did not fully understand the geopolitical division of North America:
German U-boats are now operating in the St. Lawrence River, the nearest approach to land. A German U-boat sank an American 6,000-ton freighter yesterday, carrying a cargo of jute from India for Montreal. The ship had made the long voyage from India safely, only to be sunk in the St. Lawrence. This is the first time that U-boats have operated so far from the sea. The news broke like a bombshell in Canada and the United States. The United States Navy Department announced that no further report will be given of any future sinkings that may occur in this region.
9
Concerned about the extent of detail published in the aftermath of the sinkings—including the naming of survivors and such information as “we never used watches in the St. Lawrence river and we were only due to start them the morning after we were sunk”—the director of censorship of the Canadian naval staff prepared guidelines that told news editors what types of information should not be published. The legal foundation for Memorandum No. 1, prepared by Walter Scott Thompson and entitled “Sinkings in the St. Lawrence, May 11, 1942: Notes on Publication of News Stories,” was an Order in Council passed on September 1, 1939, nine days before King George VI signed Canada’s Declaration of War: “No person shall print, circulate or distribute a book, newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, picture or documentary of any kind containing any material, report or statement, false or otherwise, intended or likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty, or to interfere with the success of His Majesty’s forces … or which might be prejudicial to the safety of the state or the efficient prosecution of the war.”