BACKS TO THE WALL
The number of U-boats rose to nearly 200 in the summer of 1942, about half of them in the Atlantic. The pickings along the eastern seaboard were no longer so easy, now that the Americans had introduced convoys, blacked out cities, and increased aircraft patrols. Consequently, Dönitz shifted many of his U-boats to the mid-Atlantic, where they renewed the assault on convoys sailing to the United Kingdom. Canadian maritime defences had improved significantly since the start of the war, but even the modified Canso flying boats could fly no farther than about 1,000 kilometres off Newfoundland. Beyond that, the U-boats could operate free from the prying eyes and exploding bombs of Allied seaplanes. Intercepted enemy communications sometimes made it possible to route the convoys around the areas of U-boat concentration, but when the surface vessels encountered the wolf packs, the odds were always against the prey. The RCN escorts tried to hold off the U-boats, as they sought to save the merchant ships. Killing the enemy was not the RCN’s first priority, although all captains looked for the opportunity.
In fact, Canadian warships had sunk only one Italian and one German U-boat in the first three years of the war. That changed in the summer of 1942, when they destroyed five U-boats in three months. The kills were largely due to finding U-boats on the surface and pursuing them doggedly, with surface radar and then asdic and depth charges when they dived. The most spectacular engagement occurred in early August, when convoy SC 94, which consisted of thirty-three merchant ships steaming in an easterly direction, came under attack.1 It was a slow convoy, at 7 knots, pursued by a wolf pack of sixteen boats. The first victim was a merchant ship that was torpedoed on August 5. This was only the prelude to a fierce battle as U-boats shadowed the convoy, waiting for the protection of nightfall before unleashing hell.
The convoy’s best weapon was HMCS Assiniboine, a River-class destroyer armed with four 4.7-inch guns, which was accompanied by six corvettes. Together the ships sought to hold the U-boats on the perimeter through the night of August 5 and the next day. The crews were at their battle stations constantly, all eyes straining to catch a glimpse of an enemy conning tower or torpedo’s wake. Asdic and surface radar revealed several U-boats and sent the corvettes racing across the water, but they were always gone when the Canadians arrived. The Assiniboine, faster than the smaller escorts, was in constant pursuit as well. It chased off and damaged a U-boat on the 6th. Later that day, the warship gave chase to U-454, which was spotted in the fog, and forced it to submerge and lose contact with the convoy. At 6:36 P.M., as Assiniboine returned to its position in the vanguard, its radar—the newer and advanced Type 286—detected a submarine on the surface. The destroyer revved up to 22 knots and raced towards U-210, aiming to ram it. The warship shook as it churned through the water. Commander John Stubbs ordered the crew to prepare for battle.
Lieutenant Rudolph Lemcke on U-210, an experienced naval officer who had recently been transferred to the U-boat arm, was horrified to see the Canadian destroyer loom out of the fog, a mere 50 metres away. U-210 lurched to action, managing to avoid the lethal ram, and its crew began to fire on the larger warship. Assiniboine manoeuvred for a shot with its 4.7-inch guns, seeking to open the distance, but the U-boat was too close. Nonetheless, its 50mm-calibre machine guns raked the German vessel, which responded with its 20mm flak gun. Allan Riley, a sparker (radio operator) experiencing his first battle, recounted the shock of feeling the U-boat shells tearing through the ship.2 The depth charge men were at their stations, anxious to release their deadly packages, but the manoeuvring went on, both ships firing and neither able to gain advantage.
For half an hour, the two snarling beasts circled each other, hammering away with their guns, slipping in and out of the fog. The U-boat sought to evade the destroyer on the surface and find safety in a fog bank, for if it had dived it would have been blown out of the water by depth chargers. The Assiniboine was bigger and had larger guns, but the U-boat was adept at staying inside the turning circle of the much larger ship. The submarine’s 20mm flak gun’s shells raked the destroyer, causing significant damage. “There was so much smoke and the smell and the taste of cordite was awful,” remembered Aimé Dorion, who was passing shells to the forward gun. “I was scared…. I never prayed so much in my life but I kept on handing up the shells.”3
HMCS Assiniboine trading blows with U-210. This remarkable photograph shows the U-boat barely escaping one of Assiniboine’s attempts to ram.
One of the stranger non-combatants on board Assiniboine was Dr. Gilbert Tucker, a mild-mannered official naval historian. Anxious for some experience at sea, he had begged for passage on the destroyer. Throughout the convoy crossing, Tucker had sought Nelsonian action and had been grumbling that he got only a lot of empty water and sea-sickness. Now he was on the deck, watching one of the RCN’s most thrilling naval engagements of the war. Shells ripped through the air and steel plating around him; he responded by cheering on his crew and shouting epithets at the enemy. An experienced medical officer saw the dangerously exposed historian and shouted, “Get your head down, you silly old bastard!” but Tucker refused to miss what was unfolding before him.4
German shells riddled the Assiniboine’s bridge, and soon started a fire. A number of the crew were hit by shrapnel and pieces of metal coming off the ship. Ordinary Seaman Kenneth Watson of Revelstoke, British Columbia, a member of “A” gun crew on the forecastle, was clipped in the arm and knocked down. When the eighteen-year-old scrambled up to pass another shell, he was hit directly be enemy fire and torn to pieces, his body thrown across the deck.
Another fire broke out near the flag deck. As smoke poured from the bridge structure, First Lieutenant R.L. Hennessy organized a fire control team using hoses that snaked along the starboard waist. In the wheelhouse—where the ship’s direction was controlled—Chief Petty Officer Max Bernays, an experienced sailor who had put in more than thirteen years on the oceans, and two junior mates, responded to Commander Stubbs’s commands from the bridge. As the smoke filled the wheelhouse, Bernays ordered his two companions out and remained at the helm, even as shell fragments whirled around him and fires encroached. Commander Stubbs continued to communicate from the bridge to Bernays, who, in the course of the engagement, carried out 130 telegraph orders, performing the job of three men— and doing so even after shell splinters gouged his face.
Assiniboine, pounded relentlessly by the U-boat’s gun, was on fire and smoking badly. The crew on the U-boat must have thought that they might escape. Yet the submarine too had been struck repeatedly by shells, and had barely missed destruction three times when it avoided ramming attempts. The dogged Assiniboine would not be deterred, however, and it finally silenced the U-boat’s main gun with machine-gun fire, in addition to smashing one of the port trimming tanks. More devastatingly, the bridge had been peppered with gunfire, leaving most of the senior German officers dead, including Lemcke. When the electric motors caught fire, the U-boat slowed. Unable to escape another ramming, the desperate crew finally dived, knowing that they would likely fall victim to depth charges, but aware that staying on the surface meant death. Stubbs ordered the destroyer full speed ahead. All hands prepared for impact. The destroyer ran over the U-boat, crushing it in a clash of grinding metal.
After smashing U-210 with shellfire, this photograph captures the death blow delivered by HMCS Assiniboine as it rams the stricken submarine.
The mortally wounded U-boat dived to about 20 metres, but foundered as water poured in through the crushed tower. The engineer officer, now in command, ordered the tanks blown, and the sub floated back to the surface—only to be run over by Assiniboine one more time. As the desperate Germans sought to escape the dead vessel, they found to their collective horror that the conning tower hatch was jammed, trapping them inside. As the sea rushed in, the desperate sailors worked feverishly and eventually pried it loose. Some thirty-eight men were picked up from the water, shortly after the sea closed permanently over U-210 at 7:14 P.M.5 “The Bones,” as Assiniboine was affectionately known, limped back to St. John’s, battered but victorious after its classic duel.
Commander Stubbs was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, but would not live to see the end of the war. He was killed when Athabaskan was sunk in April 1944. Bernays’s actions, believed the senior naval brass, were worthy of a Victoria Cross, and the RCN put forward the recommendation through the governor general. The Admiralty refused to support it, however, arguing that Bernays’s bravery, while incredibly important during the battle, did not warrant the Empire’s top honour. Canada’s high commissioner in London, Vincent Massey, was at a loss as to what to do, and he seems not to have pressed the case as effectively as he could. Bernays was instead awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, making him one of only two members of the RCN to receive this prestigious award. During the course of the war, no Canadian was awarded a Victoria Cross while serving on a Canadian warship. Only Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, a Fleet Air Arm pilot on a British aircraft carrier, was awarded the VC posthumously for his uncommon valour in continuing an attack, while mortally wounded, against a Japanese warship in the last days of the Pacific war. The Royal Navy high command appeared to have an anti-Canadian bias when it came to recognizing gallantry.6 The Royal Navy had a maximum strength of 863,000 men and women; 22 of its members were awarded the Victoria Crosses, and 60 were given Conspicuous Gallantry medals. The RCN, on the other hand, with a maximum strength of approximately 96,000 men and women, received just one Victoria Cross and two Conspicuous Gallantry Medals. The statistics are damning. The bias may not have been entirely against dominion sailors. Historically, the Royal Navy tended to award the Victoria Cross for big-ship actions rather than U-boat skirmishes. The senior RN officers were never quick to change their collective mindset.
The RCN sank two U-boats in the defence of SC 95, and was proud of the achievement, even though the convoy still lost eleven ships to the wolf pack. As one experienced Canadian officer noted, “The number of escorts that we had were so few it was impossible to give the Halifax convoys really adequate protection.”7 They did the best with what they had.
THE APPROACH TO ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND, was staggeringly beautiful. Alan Riley, then a signaller on board HMCS Galt, remembered that the entrance to the harbour looked like it had been “carved by a giant axe, allowing the sea to pour through a thousand-yard channel.”8 In St. John’s—known affectionately as “Newfy John” or the “Hole in the Rock”—ships’ crews became familiar with one another, and with the locals. Sailors got their land legs quickly as they strolled along the narrow, cobblestone streets. They were flush with cash—at least those who had not had to pay off gambling debts—and so the movie theatres were always full and the bars saw men packed inside shoulder to shoulder. “Beer was often in short supply,” wrote Frank Curry of HMCS Kamsack, “but it didn’t take long for us to discover the joys of Newfoundland’s famous Screech.” Curry was not the last visitor to Newfoundland to find that the overproof rum looked “innocent,” but that it was “powerful enough to knock out even the hardiest of drinkers.”9
Hal Lawrence remembered the raucous times in the St. John’s bars, filled to the gills with sailors, airmen, army grunts, uniformed women, and even the occasional civilian. Songs of service, humour, and vulgarity could bring the entire bar thumping to a new beat, and the “The Three Bastards” was a popular one. Lawrence described a night of revelry when a Wren—a member of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service—sat at the bar singing,
If I were a marrying girl,
Which thank the Lord I’m not, sir,
The sort of man that I would wed
Would be a rugby scrum-half.
And then the bar shouted out the chorus,
Oh, he’d push hard
And I’d push hard
And we’d push hard together;
We’d be all right in the middle of the night
Pushing hard together.10
And of course, there were other verses in which different rugby players sought to try different “positions” with the ladies.
Officers had a private club known as the Crowsnest, which was open day and night but was located perilously at the top of a steep fifty-nine-step outside staircase. Comfortable leather chairs awaited those who made the death-defying climb. Paintings of the crests of Canadian ships were hung on the walls. In a corner, a spike had been driven into the floor, put there by the commanding officer of HMCS Spikenard the night before it sailed and was sunk, leaving only eight survivors.11 “It was a home to all of us in the escort ships,” said one officer fondly.12
Harry Barrett grew up loving the sea. He enlisted in the RCNVR in February 1942 and was drafted for a short period to HMCS Saguenay. In early December, he was transferred to Assiniboine and waited for the ship’s return to join the crew, staying at the Knights of Columbus Hall in St. John’s. On December 12, 1942, a fire broke out in the attic and spread throughout the building. The power went out, and a packed crowd stampeded, trampling men under foot. Barrett was driven to the ground in the panic, but managed to find his feet and was more or less carried out the door by the crowd. He escaped just as a ball of flame blew out the doors and windows. “The sudden stench of burning hair and flesh, some of it mine, was sickening,” he remembered.13 The building was soon engulfed in flames and dozens were trapped inside, burned alive or taken down by smoke inhalation. Barrett went back to the ruins the next day to search through the charred remains for his friend. He found him, one of the ninety-nine dead.14
Despite the overcrowding of every known bar, theatre, or eatery, the Canadian and British naval personnel tended to get along well in ports, and while some tension existed among the senior brass, most Canadian sailors liked their British counterparts. The Royal Navy sailors were known informally as “juicers” or “limeys,” after the long tradition of issuing lime juice to sailors to prevent scurvy. Canadian Army personnel and RCAF flyers were also stationed in St. John’s, and generally eyed one another warily from across the bar or street, but “our greatest rivals,” recounted Frank Curry, were the Americans from Fort Pepperall and the US warships.15 Even if an occasion skirmish or pitched battle took place between the various national forces, much affection was felt towards the Newfoundlanders who found their city overrun by soldiers, sailors, and airmen. “Kind, friendly, generous and decent, rich and poor alike, they could not have been more supportive of all these strangers who had descended upon them” wrote Lieutenant L.B. Jenson of the RCN.16
In contrast to St. John’s, Halifax was an emotionally cold town, and Haligonians did not welcome the tens of thousands of service personnel who passed through, or who arrived on temporary leave. B.G. Macdonald, an RCAF air gunner who was shipping out for England, remembered the dreary streets and the inhospitable people. In one unhappy interaction, he was stung when he and a group of airmen passed two civilians and one of them shouted out, “So long, suckers!”17 Macdonald shrugged it off, but he worried that perhaps his hasty enlistment, while so many stayed behind, might indeed have made him a sucker. Paul Brick sailed for four years in the merchant navy during the war and he remembered that almost everyone called Halifax “Slackers,” and that anyone from there was a “slacker.” George Zarn declared that “all sailors hated” the city.18 This was certainly not the case, as many sailors remembered fondly their time there, but tension was indeed present between the RCN and civilians, the latter feeling their city was under occupation, and the former bristling at the ungrateful behaviour of the civilians.
Equally unpopular with sailors was Iceland. The Icelandic people made few attempts to make the harbour friendly for sailors or airmen. “I don’t know of any [sailor],” wrote Hal Lawrence, “who ever had a hospitable word said to him by an Icelandic man or woman.”19 The inhabitants kept to themselves, and their chill was little surpassed by the dreadfully strong winds that blew down the fjord in Reykjavik and Hval Fjord. Nonetheless, the otherworldliness of the country made an impression on many Canadians. In November, when only a few hours of sunlight graced the skies, Lieutenant Dudley King of HMCS Arvida recalled, “Iceland appeared to be a bleak, windswept country devoid of trees. During the dark hours there were some spectacular displays of the aurora borealis.”20
Sailors on the inshore convoy run to New York or Boston had generally happier experiences. Not much was rationed in the United States, and the harbour-front economy catered cheerfully to the seamen. Much love was also heaped across the Atlantic, on the inhabitants at the end of the “Newfie-Derry run.” Londonderry, Northern Ireland, was the rest spot for most Canadian sailors, and much like St. John’s, war transformed Londonderry into a thriving naval base. “Never did anything look so softly green and lovely as those Irish hills towering on the starboard side of that beautiful spring day,” recounted a mesmerized Doug Murch of Cambridge, Ontario, a coder on HMCS Agassiz.21 “A Guinness is good for you,” went the advertisements, and many seamen agreed. However, wherever a sailor found his port, the turnaround was always too swift. Another convoy always was waiting to be shepherded to safety.
NOTWITHSTANDING ITS VICTORIES, the RCN continued to be plagued by an insufficiency of destroyers and corvettes, which left convoys vulnerable. The shortage was felt even more acutely after Canadian escort operations were moved from Iceland to Ireland in February 1942. Most of the old American-built destroyers could not safely make the Atlantic crossing, and so the Canadian corvettes and remaining destroyers were pressed into service over the longer route. At the same time, the technology gap continued to widen between the RN and the RCN.
In early 1942, the most modern British destroyers were equipped with HF/ DF sets, known as “Huff-Duff”—a high-frequency direction finder that provided another method of intercepting German U-boat wireless signals as they were broadcast back to their home base. The German naval command, under the firm direction of Admiral Dönitz, demanded constant updates from the ocean-going U-boat captains. Their messages were coded and made unreadable by the four-rotor Enigma machine throughout much of the year, but the signal alone could be tracked, thereby locating concentrations of U-boats.22 Even if the convoy lacked enough time to move hundreds of kilometres north or south of a wolf pack, if the escort group warships had two Huff-Duff sets (and this was the goal of the British Admiralty), then the operators could vector onto the U-boat chatter, locate it, and find a path around the U-boat concentration. Or the destroyers could steam at full speed towards the U-boats and compel them to dive, thereby giving the merchant ships time to pass over them.23 Either way, HF/DF gave the destroyers a sword-and-shield capability and, more importantly, usually purchased time for the convoys to escape. But no Canadian ship was equipped with HF/DF until late in the year, and then only after much pleading by senior RCN officers. The failure to equip Canadian warships with the most modern technology played out with deadly results during the battle of convoy ON 127 in early September 1942.
The senior officer of the convoy was Lieutenant-Commander Andrew “Dobby” Dobson of HMCS St. Croix. He had at his disposal HMCS Ottawa as a second destroyer, and four additional corvettes. The escort group left Londonderry on September 5, 1942, to rendezvous with the thirty-four ships in convoy ON 127. Seven German U-boats had also caught wind of the convoy and waited for it to steam into their lair. The U-boats struck on September 10, at about a third of the distance between Londonderry and Newfoundland, when two merchant ships were hit by torpedoes. The convoy was spread out over a dozen kilometres in nine columns, however, and the warships had little idea where the U-boats were skulking, so they arrived too late at the scene of the ship’s destruction. Desperate to catch the enemy, Dobson ordered Ottawa and HMS Celandine to sweep with St. Croix down through the convoy, hoping to catch one of the U-boats in the convoy’s wake. It was a dangerous manoeuvre, and could have led to a head-on collision, but the hope was that it might surprise the enemy. They found nothing. Late in the day, another tanker was “fished.” Lieutenant L.B. Jenson of Ottawa wrote in anguish, “It seems too strange when it is a beautiful day and one sees dreadful things happening. It is like a nightmare. Ships should only be sunk and people killed on dark, gloomy days.”24
With three ships sunk and another damaged, the water was filled with debris, flotsam, dead bodies, and lifeboats. Standing orders were to abandon the survivors for fear the U-boats would move in on any stationary vessel, but that struck the Canadian and British officers as inhumane. And so, as the merchant ships continued to steam ahead, the warships picked up the half-drowned seamen, leaving themselves vulnerable as they lay stopped in the water. It was a time of high stress: all day, the anxious crews had seen torpedoes racing through the water, narrowly missing the zigzagging ships.
Darkness brought no relief. The U-boats continued to attack throughout the nights of September 11 and 12. The attackers had worked out an efficient tactic: they built up speed during the day, sailed around the convoy beyond visual range, and then positioned themselves in front of the convoy to line up new targets. Aware that the U-boats would begin their attack runs as the sun set, the RCN warships illuminated the sky with starshells and spotlights, and searched the water in methodical patterns. Again, no U-boats were caught on the surface. It was frustrating and terrifying to watch the merchant ships picked off, one after another. More tankers were hit. Some sank while others attempted to keep up with the convoy, their hulls ripped open and smoking. By the next day, September 13, the convoy appeared to have outrun the U-boats, but another straggling vessel was torpedoed and sunk. “Every day we were losing ships,” remembered a desperate Steve Logos, who served on Ottawa.25
With all the crews tense and sleep deprived, after living for days with the threat of death, there was no relief until long-range aircraft from Newfoundland—about 725 kilometres away—found the ravaged convoy. Most of the warships were short on fuel, having expended reserves by chasing phantom U-boats; they would be hamstrung if the subs attacked again. But then they got word that two additional destroyers were coming to support them: it seemed the danger was past. They let down their guard. The weary found sleep.
HMCS Ottawa sank an Italian sub in November 1941 but was sunk in turn by German U-boat U-91 on September 14, 1942, as part of convoy ON 127.
But that night, at 12:05 A.M. on the 14th, U-91, a Type VII boat on its first patrol, fired a spread of two torpedoes at Ottawa. One torpedo went racing by the ship. The second hit. There was a tremendous blast and the entire ship was briefly shrouded in an orange glow. And then the power went out. Thomas Pullen, the second-in-command, raced from his cabin, feeling along the walls in the blackness. When he went topside, he was greeted by the smell of sulphur and found to his shock that the forward section of the ship had been blown off. Twisted and torn steel created an apocalyptic scene. Far worse was the stoker’s living quarters, which had taken the full force of the explosion. The dead and wounded lay under debris. Pullen looked up to see a number of bloodied bodies impaled on the overhead fittings.26 The detonation had hurled these men upwards and left their corpses skewered on the jagged deckhead ceiling, bodily fluids raining down on the wounded below. Lieutenant J.B. Jenson also survived the attack, and described a group of the wounded: “Men with grotesquely twisted limbs were lying there; it was like a scene from hell.”27
Sid Dobing enlisted in the Royal Navy as a Boy Seaman in May 1939, and served on several British destroyers until his parents wrote to the naval authorities in 1942, demanding that he be returned to Canada. He was sent home but re-enlisted as a nineteen-year-old and was training as a torpedo man on HMCS Ottawa when it was hit. After the strike, Dobing recounted his horror at assisting comrades in the bowels of the dead ship. The torpedo blast had compressed the steel frames of the doors, so that the men in the sonar compartment, deep below deck, could not be released. “Every effort was made to get them out … and we could hear them shouting, crying.”28 The trapped men called up the voice pipes with shrieking, desperate pleas for help and—when they realized they would never be released from their pitch-dark coffin—cries for their mothers.
Despite the gaping hole, the ship was afloat, although dead in the water. The sailors knew it would not last for long, as it was vulnerable to a second attack. About ten minutes after the first hit, Ottawa was struck by another torpedo, this time striking below the Number Two boiler room, breaking the ship’s back. The captain called out to abandon ship. The vessel had lost power, and few of the 180 men in the destroyer’s company heard the order, but all knew that the second torpedo blast had sealed the destroyer’s fate.
A few men were hurled overboard by the second explosion, but climbed back aboard the ship to stay out of the numbing cold. The desperate crew, finding temporary safety on the deck, but operating in the dark and aware the ship could go down at any time, scrambled to release the ship’s Carley floats. A number of them had been blown up, damaged, or were already in the water, but those that remained were lowered over the side. Overcrowded and in rough seas, a few of the boats flipped, drowning several exhausted and wounded men, some of whom, surprisingly, given their profession, did not know how to swim.29 Within a few minutes, Ottawa listed and began to go down. Survivors still on deck dived into the water and swam for their lives to escape the suction created by the sinking vessel.
Before going in the drink, Lieutenant Jenson had inflated his Mae West to keep him buoyant. He was warmly dressed in a heavy sweater, shirt, battledress trousers, and wool socks, but he had kicked off his shoes because they would have filled with water and dragged him down. “Clothes keep one warm in water just as in the open air,” Jenson noted, “and men with less died more rapidly.”30 Thomas Pullen also went into the water, dressed in layers, but almost drowned as his seaboots filled up and dragged him down like weights on his feet. He was able to kick them off, and he resurfaced into a slurry of bunker oil and broken wood.
The survivors swam or rowed away from the destroyer, but turned to watch sadly as it gave an inhuman groan. The ship’s stern rose above the surface, its rudder and propellers briefly visible, before it slipped under. Jenson worried that the depth charges on board might go off and kill them all, but they had been disarmed by their attentive crews. More oil rose from the ship, like blood from a mighty beast, and soon, as the polluted waves broke over them, all the men in the water were slathered in the viscous black muck.
The few Carley floats were packed with survivors—both from Ottawa and merchant ships’ crews who had been picked up from the sea in the previous days—and so a number of men, like Pullen, had to stay in the water, holding on to ropes with hands that soon lost feeling from exposure. Few of the dry men offered to change places with those in the water, knowing that it was a virtual death sentence. They averted their eyes. Those in the water knew their fate, and throughout the night, many fell away, too exhausted to hold on to life.
Jenson was luckier than Pullen, as he had been pulled into a float. He sat shivering in his wet clothes, and soon turned to prayer. In the distance, he could hear depth charges exploding and he knew the battle with the U-boats continued. It meant that danger still lurked beneath the surface, and no warship could break off combat to look for the survivors. Much to the horror of all, the floats were slowly drifting away from one another and becoming lost in the night. Merchant ships continued to steam past. Men cried out, shouting pleas and curses. They went unanswered.
After several hours, when all the ships were gone and the depth charge attacks faded, darkness and desolation settled in. But then one of the groups of men huddled in a Carley float started to sing songs from the Great War, such as “Pack up Your Troubles” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”—cheerful tunes that had sustained a previous generation in the sometimes cold, muddy, and hopeless trenches. Jenson tried a few bars, but found his jaw paralyzed by the cold. Still, he took comfort in the familiar music. As the night wore on, he lost feeling in his extremities, except for his hands, which felt like they were on fire from a brush he’d had with a jellyfish. The pain reminded him that he was still alive.
And then, out of the darkness loomed the corvette HMS Celandine. It sounded no horns and flipped on no searchlights, for fear of attracting the U-boats. In the dark, the crew desperately gathered all those they could find. It was a race against time. How long would the ship stay vulnerable in the water? Would its crew find all of the Carley floats that had drifted far from one another? The warship’s steel hull could be seen occasionally in the gloom, and the sound of the rescue of the survivors carried in the stillness. At the last moment, Celandine turned towards Jenson’s boat, skilfully coming alongside, with the scramble net let down the hull. Jenson began to climb, but he was so weary that he fell back into the water. Someone hauled him out, a spluttering, exhausted mess, barely alive.
Another corvette, Arvida, picked up twenty-two men from Ottawa. Lieutenant Dudley King, the second-in-command, was overseeing the rescue operation when he saw two men in the water, flailing and sinking under the surface only to rise again. Judging that they could not swim to the net, he jumped into the water. “By the time I reached them, one man had gone, but I managed to grasp the other who was covered with oil, only to lose my grip…. The man sank out of sight.” Years later he wrote, “It always has haunted me that I did not save him.”31 Life was but a grasp away, but often that was too far in the cold Atlantic.
Thomas Pullen, too, was saved, along with 75 other men; 137 went down with Ottawa or perished in the sea. In the end, ON 127 lost seven merchant ships and a destroyer, and four additional ships were damaged. It was a clear-cut victory for Dönitz and his U-boat captains. Yet in the kill-and-be-killed Battle of the Atlantic, U-91, which delivered the death blow to HMCS Ottawa, was itself sunk in February 1944 on its sixth patrol. Few of Ottawa’s survivors would have shed a tear for the ship, but maybe a shudder was in order for the German crew who went down into the dark depths, forever.
IN THE BATTLE’S AFTERMATH, the British were scathing in their condemnation of the Canadians for the drastic losses and the ineffectiveness of their sweeps.32 The usual explanations came from Ottawa about why their warships had failed, but the refrain seemed less convincing as the trail of sunken ships and bloated corpses grew ever longer. The Canadian failure was all the more apparent because the British warships were beginning to incorporate their effective surface radar, especially the Type 271 sets, into new tactics that allowed them to hunt U-boats and take control of the sea lanes. Captain H.C. Fitz, an American naval officer, reported on meetings with his Royal Naval counterparts around this time, observing, “There is no doubt that the British naval officers as a class think the Canadians very ineffective. In all the time I was there I did not hear one single word in their favour.”33
The merchant ships took a battering in 1942, with some 7.8 million tons sunk.34 Allied shipping capacity had been reduced sharply by the losses, and was further stretched by the North Africa and Pacific campaigns. In light of this dilution of capacity, the British became acutely concerned about the continued security of merchant shipping in the Atlantic. There was open speculation in the Allied halls of power and in the fourth estate that Britain might be starved out of the war. It seemed unlikely, but no one wanted to test whether it might turn out to be true. When the Admiralty examined its reams of statistics, one depressing series of numbers, gathered between July and December 1942, revealed that Canadian escorts in the MOEF, which numbered about 35 percent of the total Allied fleet in the North Atlantic, had been responsible for safeguarding about 80 percent of the shipping lost to U-boats.35 Merchant ships fared far worse when escorted by Canadian warships. The numbers did not lie, although they offered no clue as to the real reasons for the losses: the failure to equip the RCN ships with the proper technology, the shortage of destroyers and corvettes, and the too-eager desire of the Canadians to meet the Admiralty’s demands for escort work that could not be achieved with their worn-out crews. A rest was needed.
In mid-December 1942, Churchill wired a birthday message to William Lyon Mackenzie King. The two had an uneasy relationship, but they had grown closer during the war. King remained wary of the British exerting pressure on his government, demanding more and more forces to the point where the strain would lead to conscription. Churchill was content to accept the Canadians’ substantial commitments on the land, in the air, and at sea, but he excluded King and his cabinet from any influence over the strategic direction of the war. This was fine with King, who was firmly committed to skilfully guiding Canada’s domestic war effort, but perhaps this arrangement was not fully befitting Canada’s massive contribution of munitions, supplies, and fighting forces. Yet now, given the desperate situation in the Battle of the Atlantic, Churchill observed that analysis of transatlantic convoys revealed the RCN was suffering from overstretch and needed time to regroup and train for the brutal year that was to come.36 If King agreed, much of the RCN would be pulled off the critical North Atlantic run and redirected to the less intense United Kingdom-to-Gibraltar route. In his more than fifteen years as prime minister, King had delivered his share of harsh messages wrapped in soft padding; now he was on the receiving end. King and the cabinet agreed the RCN should take a break from its arduous assignment. The Canadian admirals were less sanguine and refused to accept the snub gracefully. Time and time again, the government had denuded the fleet to assist the Allied war effort—and now this vote of non-confidence. But the die had been cast. The British not-so-veiled declaration of incompetence was a blow to the navy’s prestige and pride, even though its senior officers had long demanded a slowing of the frantic operational pace in order to upgrade equipment and training. Christmas 1942 was the low point of the war for the Royal Canadian Navy.
Survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship in a small boat awaiting rescue.
THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC was, according to one senior Canadian officer, the “trench warfare of the seas.”37 And in this war of attrition, by the end of 1942 it appeared that the Allies were losing. The Royal Canadian Navy entered the fifth year of the war battered and badly bruised. The citizen navy had seemingly failed in the defence of the St. Lawrence River, and it had been pulled temporarily from convoy duties by the British. Despite these embarrassments, the navy had shepherded thousands of war-winning merchant ships across the Atlantic. One Royal Navy official report noted candidly in January 1943, “The Canadians have had to bear the brunt of the U-boat attack in the north Atlantic for the last six months.”38 In the Atlantic battlefield, by the end of 1942, the Canadian navy supplied warships for 48 percent of the convoys as opposed to 2 percent for the US navy, while the other half was picked up by the Royal Navy.39 It was the RCN who had guided the merchant ships to safety and kept Britain in the war. And despite the terrible losses, the lifeline Canada provided was never cut. The steady attack against the merchant navy was an ongoing threat, but Britain’s wartime production never slowed down, and all the hardships caused by shortages of food were borne. While the Battle of the Atlantic was a test of endurance, not a single month of the war passed when 95 percent of the shipping did not arrive in British ports, and throughout the war 99 percent of shipping leaving from North America arrived at its destination.40 By any account, this was a monumental victory for the Allies, and especially the hard-pressed RCN. Despite tactical stalemate, and occasional defeat, the Canadians could claim strategic victory.
By January 1943, the RCN had about 200 warships, and about as many ships again being built, including modern frigates and destroyers. That same month, three of Canada’s four escort groups were transferred to British command, and the Canadian role in the North Atlantic was much reduced for several months. But by February, when the U-boats began yet another campaign in the North Atlantic, the desperate Admiralty again needed Canadian warships. By March, most of the Canadian escort groups were returned to North American waters, where they began the Atlantic crossings anew. It was not much of a rest.
A casualty of the RCN’s failure in destroying U-boats was Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, the naval chief of staff, who was brought down by a palace revolt led by his own reserve officers. He had never been an inspiring commander, and he had failed signally to convince the British to share their resources, but he had overseen the largest expansion of the Canadian navy in its history. The whispering campaign against him that led to his removal was internecine infighting at its worst. Nonetheless, the ongoing and debilitating equipment crisis that plagued Canadian warships on the Atlantic apparently bypassed Ottawa, as few of the senior politicians seemed even aware of the issue. This did not reflect well on naval defence minister Angus Macdonald, or on Nelles. As one desperate sailor wrote, “In retrospect, it appears to have been an almost nightmarish example of how a military Headquarters can become so remote from the realities as actually to stultify its own raison d’être. They were living in cloud cuckooland, while sailors were dying.”41 The King government dropped its senior naval officer in January 1944, replacing him with the vice-chief, Rear-Admiral G.C. Jones, who had no operational service during the war, but was adept at political manoeuvres. Jones’s appointment was not the solution to the equipment problem. It did, however, shake up the naval service. While viewed by many as the viper that had brought down Nelles, Jones proved to be an effective chief, and was more willing than his predecessor to show his displeasure with the Admiralty.42 Under Jones’s command, the Canadians embraced the new King’s Regulations for the Canadian Navy, another small yet important step in distancing the Dominion’s navy from that of Britain, as the document provided Canadian rules and regulations to guide the actions of its sailors and forces.
Before Nelles was driven out, the Canadians gained a significant new command. With British, Canadians, and Americans in the western Atlantic, the nations controlled multiple and overlapping jurisdictions. Canada’s two commands at Halifax and Newfoundland had learned to work together, but they were responsible only for waters inside the twelve-mile territorial limit, beyond which command devolved to the British (even though Canadian warships continued to take convoys through those waters). Nothing about this arrangement adequately reflected the exertions of a nation that had been at war since 1939 and had contributed significantly to the struggle. The Canadians demanded more control. After a series of meetings, the Americans and British eventually agreed, on April 30, 1943, to the appointment of Rear-Admiral Leonard W. Murray as Commander-in-Chief Canadian North West Atlantic. Murray, who had command experience in the RN and RCN, was the only Canadian theatre commander. He was responsible for Allied forces—air, land, and naval assets—in a large zone, stretching from 47 degrees west and south to 29 degrees north.
THE GERMANS WERE WINNING the Battle of the Atlantic in early 1943. In March, Dönitz deployed more than 160 U-boats in the Atlantic, and they tore into the convoys, sinking 108 merchant ships weighing in at 627,377 tons.43 The lifeline was being gnawed through. Desperate discussions were held at the Admiralty on the merits of abandoning the convoy system and letting the merchant ships sail by themselves, making every vessel responsible for its own survival. Perhaps, if the enemy’s prey was scattered, the fleet would suffer fewer wolf pack slaughters?44 The Royal Navy was saved from this gut-wrenching decision later in the month when its cryptologists broke the German naval cipher codes, Triton, and the convoy controllers were able to divert some of the vessels away from the massacre that awaited them. As always, running from the wolves made more sense than trying to fight through them.
And then a nearly miraculous turnaround occurred, especially as improved Allied tactics and technology were finally providing the warships with tactical and technological advantages over the enemy. Convoy support groups, including four increasingly experienced RCN U-boat-hunting formations, known as C groups, were taking the battle to the German U-boats when they converged on the convoys. The convoys retained their close protective escorts, but the support groups also accompanied them and could be detached to go on the attack. The support groups were now, in the words of Rear-Admiral Louis-Philippe Brodeur, able to “destroy the present submarine menace.”45
B-24 Liberator bomber flying protective cover over a convoy.
The convoys were also assisted by long-range aircraft that caught more U-boats on the surface or forced them to be submerged for longer periods. After the brutal losses of shipping in late 1942, Churchill and his staff had finally agreed to divert some VLR (Very Long Range) bombers from the offensive against German cities and assign them to U-boat patrols. The American-built, four-engine VLR Liberators, with their range of 1,600 kilometres, were devastating against U-boats in British waters. The RAF also agreed to send fifteen of their Liberators to the RCAF for the summer of 1943, and these bombers flew from Newfoundland to drive German U-boats back deep into the Atlantic.46 Eastern Air Command’s Canso flying boats and other aircraft were also aggressive and effective, leading to the sinking of three U-boats in 1942 and another three in 1943.47 The unspectacular, lumbering Canso patrolled deep into the Atlantic, and several of No. 5 Squadron’s crews dropped depth charges on surprised U-boats, damaging a number of them in February 1943. Despite these victories, in Ottawa there was grave disappointment that no RCN ships could claim to have destroyed a U-boat during the reversal of German fortunes in April and May 1943, although HMCS Drumheller, fighting as part of the C2 support group, was credited with a shared kill after a May 13 depth charge attack on U-753.48
The high-water mark of the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic was May 1943. Up to that point, 2,190 Allied ships had been sunk.49 Even with a mass of new constructions, particularly the American Liberty ships, more vessels were lost than built until late summer 1943. But with the hunting groups, long-range bombers, and newbuild escort aircraft carriers, the U-boats were being hounded. From April 10 to May 23, in twelve convoy battles, the U-boats sank only twenty ships, and at the cost of twenty-two U-boats. In all of May, Dönitz lost thirty-five U-boats, a crippling blow to his force in the North Atlantic.50 With the Air Gap almost closed by long-range bombers, the hunters became the hunted. Dönitz, whose own son was killed during this striking reversal, pulled back the U-boats to safer waters on May 24.51 During these remarkable two months, and those that followed, the sea channels were not free of the U-boats, but the steel gauntlet that had been squeezing Britain’s throat was finally pried loose.