AMONG THOSE FLYING an anti-submarine patrol in the early hours of June 7 was Royal Canadian Air Force Flying Officer Kenneth Owen Moore at the controls of a Liberator bomber. The twenty-one-year-old Rockhaven, Saskatchewan native commanded a mostly Canadian crew assigned to Royal Air Force No. 224 Squadron of Coastal Command. Nicknamed “K.O.,” Moore had enlisted shortly after his nineteenth birthday in August 1941, quitting a 95-cent-a-day job at the Woodward’s Department Store in downtown Vancouver to do so. He had decided to enlist after ending up in a smoky Eastside pub one night with several young Americans who had crossed the border to join the RCAF and get into a war the United States seemed determined to stay out of. “Damn, if they’re prepared to do this, then what am I doing?” Moore thought. In the morning he and the ten Americans filled out enlistment papers at the RCAF’s Vancouver recruitment post and received immediate orders to report to the manning depot in Edmonton for processing.
“This will come as a little surprise to you,” he scribbled in a letter to his mother while sitting in a train car clattering through the Rockies, “but I’m now in the air force on my way to start training.”1 With just a high school education, Moore never dreamed of being selected for aircrew training. Instead, his ambition had been to become an aircraft mechanic and he only took the aircrew qualification tests at the urging of the depot’s staff officers, who sensed a young man with potential. Breezing through the tests, Moore was soon flying planes and loving every minute.
After initial training in Canada through the British Commonwealth Air Training Program, Moore reported to an Operational Training Unit in Nassau, Bahamas to learn the trade of flying Liberator bombers in an anti-submarine role. Originally designed as a long-range bomber for conventional raids against targets deep in Germany’s heart, the Liberator had been identified in 1942 as better suited for closing the air coverage gap that existed in the mid-Atlantic along the vital maritime convoy routes. Powered by four Pratt and Whitney 1,200-horsepower radial piston engines, the B-24 Liberator boasted a 5,000-pound weapons load and a range capability of 3,300 miles. Swapping the retractable belly turret for an air-to-surface radar unit enabled the Liberator to hunt U-boats, which had previously been free to roam the mid-Atlantic without fear of attack by aircraft.2Carrying a normal munitions load of six depth charges, a Liberator had a patrol time of 16.5 hours—more than sufficient to reach the mid-Atlantic from bases in the United Kingdom and Iceland and then to linger for lengthy periods.
In Nassau, then-Sergeant Moore was assigned as a co-pilot in a crew commanded by a pilot officer. Once training was completed, the pilot, Moore, and the navigator expected to be assigned to an active squadron where they would form the nucleus for a complete crew. To Moore’s dismay, however, the pilot washed out during training and he and the navigator were left high and dry with no prospect for posting to a squadron until after the next training course was completed. The two men spent a lot of time downtown bemoaning their fate over pints of beer and were joined in this task by others also awaiting the next course. One afternoon, four Wireless Operator Air Gunners (WAGS) wandered into the bar with a story of how they had been kicked back from a planned deployment because they made a fuss when it was announced they would be split up and scattered to other crews. Looking at the assembled beer-quaffing host before him, Moore said, “You know what’s sitting around this table—a crew. We’ve got four WAGs, two pilots, and a navigator. They’re supposed to want crews. What the hell are we sitting here for? We should be a crew.”
“Yeah, well, you go and convince them then,” one WAG snorted.
Arranging a meeting with the chief flight instructor, Moore said, “Understand your business is to train crews. We got a bunch of guys drinking beer every afternoon and I’m one of them, but we think we should be a crew.” Moore expected a curt dismissal and reprimand for his temerity. After checking the personnel files, however, the officer calmly agreed.3
With Moore in charge, the seven Canadians were assigned to No. 224 Squadron in St. Eval, Cornwall. They reported for duty in July 1943, almost two years after Moore’s enlistment, and added three more non-Canadian air crew to form the full ten-man complement required to man a coastal command Liberator. After flying several missions into the Atlantic, the squadron shifted to regular patrols of the Bay of Biscay and into the Mediterranean in support of the Allied invasion of Italy. By D-Day, Moore had about thirty missions under his belt and credit for crippling a U-boat during an action in March 1944.
Because of the invasion, St. Eval was bursting at the seams with planes and crews. Whereas, prior to the buildup for Operation Overlord, the base had supported two coastal command squadrons, five squadrons now used it. Shortly after midnight on June 7, Moore lifted off the runway and joined a formation of No. 224 Squadron Liberators carrying out a “Cork” patrol intended to close the English Channel’s southern approaches to U-boats coming up through the Bay of Biscay. Moore and his crew were jumpier than normal, still shocked by the events of an operation carried out two weeks earlier. On that night patrol, they had been one of four crews assigned to fly close to St. Nazaire, drop flares over the coast to simulate an invasion, and stir up a false alarm response by the enemy. Each plane operated alone and Moore’s flight proved uneventful. The crew had dropped their flares and returned home, but then learned that none of the other three planes had come back. Their disappearance remained a mystery on June 7, and Moore worried the Germans had developed a secret weapon that enabled night fighters to track down the Liberators and outfight them. Or perhaps it was some new form of anti-aircraft gun. Or perhaps the crews had simply run out of luck.
Luck was something most flyers believed in. Moore didn’t have a lucky charm as such, but the crew did have a mascot that accompanied them on every flight. Moore and his gang had purchased Dinty—a big teddy bear—in a Montreal bar shortly before they flew a Liberator out from Canada to England. In the morning, Moore and a couple of the other men had shrugged off hangovers and took the bear to a tailor so he could be readied for aircrew service, complete in a proper uniform. Dinty had been at their side ever since, always being positioned front and centre in crew photographs.
The Liberators spread out so that every fifteen minutes one passed over any given spot along the part of the Channel approaches they were corking shut near the French coast. Each plane had twelve depth charges aboard that would be dropped in sticks of six during an attack. It was a fine night with a full moon shining and only a two-tenths cloud cover concentrated along the French coast. Ukrainian-Canadian WAG Mike Werbiski was manning the air-to-surface radar, scanning for targets. “Got something,” he announced tersely on the intercom.
Moore quickly told him to shut the radar down to prevent detection by the enemy, if in fact the signal was that of an enemy ship rather than radar clutter. At the same time, he shoved the Liberator down to two hundred feet and roared at top speed past the position Werbiski had identified. Off to the flank, Moore clearly saw the silhouette of a U-boat running on the surface and started a slow turn that would bring the Liberator back in a complete 360-degree circle by holding a rate of three degrees turn per second. This rate of turn was standard procedure for coastal command during night operations, enabling a plane to hack back with precision onto a point passed over earlier on even the darkest of nights. Tonight, however, Moore could clearly see the U-boat pinned by the harsh moonlight as if by a wide searchlight. Standard operating procedure established by coastal command called for attacks to be brought in against surface craft at an altitude of three hundred feet. Moore believed that if something was SOP, then the enemy probably knew about it.
“Why attack at an altitude they know they’re going to be attacked at?” Moore had asked his crew previously. They agreed with the proposition and so Moore started attacking at a mere fifty feet or even less from the ocean, so low the four big props would lift a thick wake as the plane roared over the water. “There weren’t any steep turns involved,” Moore later said, “so you were pretty well set up and my little rule of thumb was that I kept the stuff going over the cockpit. If the enemy shellfire was going over top of it, you knew you were all right.”4 At just under fifty feet of elevation, Moore bore in on the target at 190 miles per hour while the crew got ready to execute the attack.
From his position in the front turret, navigator Warrant Officer Alex Gibb thought the submarine looked “as if it were painted on white paper.” He could see the conning tower quite clearly and the anti-aircraft gun bristling on its extended bridge. In early 1944, the Type VIIC U-boat—the workhorse of the German submarine fleet—had been up-gunned. As the Liberator roared down on the ship, its anti-aircraft gunners started running towards the ship’s 37-millimetre M42 automatic gun and the two double-barrelled 20-millimetre 38 ii guns.
The gunner in the Liberator’s front turret opened fire with his dual 12.7-millimetre Browning machine guns before the Germans could bring their own guns into action. Gibb saw one German sailor clutch his stomach and pitch forward, while the others dived for cover. Then the Liberator was flashing over the conning tower. The second navigator, Warrant Officer J. “Scotty” McDowell, peering through the Mark 3, Low Level bomb sight, punched the release button and six depth charges plunged down on the U-boat in a perfect straddle of three to each side.
“Oh, God, we’ve blown her clean out of the water!” the rear gunner yelled as the plane passed over the stricken U-boat. Moore hauled the bomber around for another pass and saw water still heaving up from the explosions and “distinct patches of black oil in the dark green sea. In the patches were dark objects; almost certainly bodies.”5RAF intelligence analysts would later determine that the submarine sunk was U-629. All fifty-one hands aboard were lost.*
* Recently, there have been reports from various German sources that the identification of this U-boat as U-629 was incorrect and that it was instead U-441. Also a Type VIIC U-boat, 441 had been converted in late 1943 into an experimental boat called U-Flak 1. Fitted with a four-barrelled 22-millimetre fast-firing anti-aircraft gun on an extended front bridge, the boat was designed to lure Allied anti-submarine aircraft into attacking it so they could be destroyed by its deadlier firepower. The experiment proved largely a failure and by June 6 the boat and its three sister ships had been converted back to standard U-boats. Both U-boats had a crew of fifty-one and it is agreed by all sources that all perished when each of the two boats was sunk by Coastal Command aircraft in the early morning hours of June 7.
After carrying out the single pass that Coastal Command allowed for confirmation of a kill, Moore jumped the Liberator back into its assigned slot in the cork patrol. Little more than a minute later, just off the tiny island of Ushant, Werbiski reported the bearings of another contact dead ahead. As the radar operator shut down his set, Moore lost elevation and slipped to port in order to put the potential U-boat on the Liberator’s starboard side. McDowell was first to sight the German sub, up-moon of them and slightly to port. Moore dropped the bomber down to his preferred attack height of a little under fifty feet. When the nose gunner opened fire from a range of a mile, the German anti-aircraft gunners immediately answered back with fire from all their anti-aircraft guns. Navigator Gibb watched with horrid fascination as “a perfect fan of tracer from the conning tower” darted towards them and streamed overhead. The Liberator passed over the submarine seconds later, and he toggled the bomb release. Two depth charges struck on one side and four on the other in what was the crew’s second perfect straddle of the night.
When the depth charges exploded after such a well-placed straddle, a submarine normally broke apart. This time, however, the U-boat seemed to only drop a little at the stern and list slightly to
starboard. It then chugged slowly onward, trailing oil in its wake. With no depth charges remaining to renew the attack, Moore was just going to issue a call for a reinforcement bomber when mid-upper gunner WAG Don Griese shouted: “She’s going down! It’s like a Hollywood picture!” As Moore banked for another pass, he could see the U-boat’s bow sticking almost straight out of the sea. Then, surprisingly slowly, U-373 slid back into the sea and was gone. Flying over the spot where the U-boat had gone down, the bomber’s spotlight illuminated three dinghies crowded with sailors floating amid a cluster of debris and a thick oil slick.6
“Sighted two subs, sank same,” Moore had radioed back to base.7Despite the laconic nature of the message, Moore and his crew knew they had carried out a stunning feat. Everyone was slapping each other on the back and laughing. What they had feared would prove a night of ill luck had proved to be filled with good fortune.
When the bomber touched down several hours later at St. Eval and the kills were confirmed by RAF intelligence, Moore learned that he had made aviation history—the war’s only double submarine kill by a single bomber during one patrol. The next day, Moore was given an immediate award of the Distinguished Service Order. A United States Silver Star soon followed. For their part in the attack, radio operator Warrant Officer William P. Foster and navigator McDowell received Distinguished Flying Crosses, while flight engineer Sergeant J. Hamer won a Distinguished Flying Medal. The Canadian government’s response to Moore’s achievement was bizarre. As he was seconded to the RAF, Moore’s DSO was considered an award granted by Britain rather than Canada. The DSO was only rarely awarded to air force officers, being generally reserved for the army, and a DFC would have been a logical Canadian decoration. Instead, Moore initially heard nothing at all from RCAF headquarters or the Canadian government. Several weeks later, however, he received a letter of appreciation from the government accompanied by the offer of one thousand complimentary cigarettes. He could either accept the cigarettes now or have them held in trust by the government until his return to Canada. A nonsmoker, Moore declined the offer by letter.8
WHILE MOORE AND HIS CREW were making military aviation history over the southern approaches to the English Channel, another dramatic event played out to the north of the Normandy beaches near the mouth of the Seine estuary. Here, four motor torpedo boats of the Royal Canadian Navy’s 29th MTB Flotilla patrolled about thirteen miles southwest of Le Havre. Although the sky was clear, a hard wind churned up the water and made it “a bad night for coastal craft” such as MTBs 459, 460, 465, and 466. Commanding the four-boat patrol was the 29th’s senior officer Lieutenant Commander C.A. “Tony” Law, aboard MTB 459.9
“In spite of the rough seas we maintained 20 knots,” Law later wrote, “the saucy MTBs creating plumes like the spread tails of haughty peacocks and leaving wakes like the powerful wings of seagulls… On we went, threading our way through the thickening flotillas of landing craft which made it impossible to steer a straight course… Our unit was to patrol three miles northeast of the Assault Area, adjusting our position every hour because of the strong tides.”10
Until the spectre of Nazism had touched his consciousness in 1937, Law had been basking in the limelight as one of Canada’s most promising young painters. In the early 1930s, he studied under Group of Seven artist Fred Varley and also with Franklin Brownell before going on to win the Jessie Dow Prize. His ability to harmonize colour and form, combined with an apparently instinctive grasp of natural subjects, gave his work a beguiling sense of effortlessness. Some said that Law’s artistic talent was inherited from his grandfather, who had also been a gifted painter. Had it not been for the rise of Hitler in a resurgent Germany, Law probably would have stayed unwaveringly on the artistic track to which he seemed ideally suited. But if his grandfather had provided him with a painter’s gift, he had inherited from his father an interest in things military. In World War I, Law’s father had served as a major in the Royal Canadian Regiment, and the young Law had in fact been born overseas in England in 1916 while his father was serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Force there. Although both his parents were Canadians, his mother had been living in England when she met her husband-to-be. In 1917, the Laws had returned to Canada and settled in Quebec City.
By 1937, Law was convinced that war was inevitable and so attempted to join the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve. Learning that there were no openings, he applied instead to the army and was accepted into the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps on April 20, 1937 as a second lieutenant. When war broke out, he was quickly promoted to captain, but still itched to get into the navy. Hearing that the RCN was actively seeking young officers to loan to the Royal Navy for service in Motor Torpedo Boats, Law finagled a transfer in January 1940. That spring, the young Acting Temporary Probationary Sub-Lieutenant, RCNVR arrived with a batch of other Canadian officers in England and passed through various courses relevant to MTB operations. A year later, he was appointed to a Motor Gun Boat Flotilla (precursor of MTBs) as a first lieutenant and boat navigator. In early 1944, Law and Lieutenant J.R.H. Kirkpatrick were selected to head up the two MTB flotillas Canada was forming to take part in the invasion—the 29th and 65th Motor Torpedo Boat Flotillas.
Law took command of the 29th. Each flotilla was equipped with eight MTBs of a different class. Kirkpatrick’s 65th was outfitted with eight ‘D’ class Fairmiles. Measuring 115 feet from bow to stern and powered by four 1,250-horsepower Packard engines, the Fairmiles were capable of twenty-nine to thirty-one knots. To compensate for this comparatively slow top end by torpedo boat standards, the Fairmiles came heavily armed. Each boat carried four 18-inch torpedoes, two six-pounders, two twin .5-inch power-mounted guns, twin Oerlikons, and twin Vickers hand-operated machine guns mounted on either side of the bridge. They also carried two depth charge launching rails and had an armour-plated bridge to protect the command and control centre. Each Fairmile had a crew of three officers and twenty-six ratings. Their size enabled the Fairmiles to weather severe seas and they were capable of staying out on operations for long periods. Being so much larger than normal torpedo boats, the Fairmiles were known as “Long Boats” or simply “Longs.”
The G-Type motor torpedo boats with which the 29th Flotilla was equipped stood at the opposite end of the MTB scale from the Fair-miles. They were only 71.5 feet long and could gallop along at forty-one knots, a pace made possible by three American Packard–built Rolls Royce 1,250-horsepower engines (later replaced by 1,500-horsepower engines). Normal crew size was two officers and four ratings, but as Law was the flotilla’s senior officer, his MTB 459 carried an extra officer and signalman.11 Although not as heavily armed as the Fairmiles, the G-Types still packed a lot of fighting teeth that convinced the RCN staff who commissioned them that they were “formidable as gun boats.”12 Each boat was armed with a power-mounted two-pound pom-pom gun forward, a twin-barrelled 20-millimetre Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun aft, and a pair of twin Vickers .303 machine guns mounted on the port and starboard sides of the bridge. Normally, they also carried four 18-inch torpedo tubes, but these were stripped from the 29th’s MTBs in April and replaced with two depth charge launching rails to enable the flotilla to perform a special antisubmarine role.
British intelligence had caught wind of the possibility that a “small very fast type of U-boat called a W-boat… might make its first appearance in the enemy’s attempt to defeat the invasion.”13 So-called because it was believed powered by a Walter hydrogen peroxide–fuelled turbine, the W-boat was reportedly capable of forty knots on the surface and a remarkable thirty knots when submerged.
For the sailors of 29th Flotilla, the loss of their torpedo fighting capability was “a hard blow” that left them feeling virtually unarmed.14 The prime offensive weapon that any MTB brought to bear against enemy surface ships was its torpedo firing capability. With torpedoes, the tiny boats that were normally sneered at by “big ship” men were “capable of sinking a battleship.” Law was quick to point out that a pair of Italian torpedo boats had sunk the large modern battle cruiser HMSManchester off Tunisia in August 1942 and that Allied MTBs had proven their worth by sinking thousands of tons of enemy shipping throughout the war.
So it was not surprising that he and his fellow torpedo boat sailors felt “the bottom had dropped out of everything, and our faces were long and sad as we watched our main armament and striking power being taken away.”15 To exchange the torpedoes for depth charges in order to undertake a job that “had the disadvantage of being purely hypothetical since there was no certain evidence of the existence of the W-boat” seemed the height of folly to the flotilla commander.
Within a matter of weeks, the foolishness of this decision was confirmed when the 29th was assigned not to chase phantom W-boats about the English Channel on D-Day, but to instead patrol the waters northwest of Juno and Sword beaches in order to protect the fleet from German surface craft. With no time to refit the boats with torpedo racks and tubes, the flotilla went into the operation still mounting depth charge racks and lugging forty-eight hundred-pound depth charges. Late on June 6, four of the MTBs departed Portsmouth for the French coast. In the lead was Law aboard MTB 459. Following in a closely grouped line behind was firstly Lieutenant Dave Killam’s 460, then Lieutenant Charlie “Chuff-Chuff” Chaffey’s 465, with Lieutenant Barney Marshall on 466 bringing up the tail. The first few hours of the patrol passed uneventfully, but at 0406 hours Law overheard a signal from Lieutenant Commander Don Bradford of the Royal Navy’s 55th MTB Flotilla reporting that his three-boat patrol was investigating a radar contact north of his patrol area. Soon, Law saw star shells bursting high in the night sky and lines of tracer flashing back and forth at sea level as the British ships tangled with what seemed to be a larger force of German vessels. With his own patrol area tediously quiet, Law decided to go to Bradford’s aid and ordered the MTBs to action stations.
Before Law’s MTBs had gone very far, however, the battle abruptly fizzled out. A few minutes later, Law saw Bradford’s boats approaching. When the 55th’s MTBs passed about two hundred yards ahead of his boats on a southerly course, Law decided to track on astern of them. As his patrol was just coming about, Law made out the silhouettes of six enemy ships to the northeast. “I broke off and headed in that direction,” Law wrote, “radioing to Dave, Chuff-Chuff, and Barney: ‘Maximum speed; we’re going in to attack.’”16
When Law had his pom-pom gunner fire star shells, the silhouettes were clearly illuminated in the harsh red glare and identified as six R-boats heading on an easterly course in line-ahead formation. Law’s boats quickly closed abeam of them. Designed for service as minesweepers, R-boats were also commonly used as attack vessels and for convoy protection. There were numerous classes of these vessels, but all were generally about 125 to 135 feet long and capable of twenty to twenty-four knots. Crewed by either thirty-four or thirty-eight men, the R-boats were far more heavily gunned than Law’s MTBs. General armament consisted of one 37-millimetre gun and up to three two-barrelled 20-millimetre guns.17 A RCN report on operations during the invasion stated dryly that the R-boats possessed a “marked superiority in firepower” over the small G-Type MTBs.18
Despite being outnumbered and outsized, Law never considered breaking off and running. Instead, he made the R-boats scurry for survival. “At 700 yards all four of our boats opened up with intense, concentrated fire, and we closed in to 150 yards. It was a furious battle. The tracer, thick and penetrating, hit 459 in several places, including the chart-house, thus putting the QH (electronic navigational aid) set out of action. [First Lieutenant] John Shand, shaken by the explosion, pulled aside the curtain and looked up to the bridge to see what was going on. He was confronted by three pairs of glassy, frightened eyes. [Third Officer] Footsie, the coxswain, and I had also been shaken by the force of that last resounding Oerlikon shell.”19
Able Seaman W. Bushfield, the pom-pom gun loader, was badly wounded by shrapnel. Despite being in intense pain, he kept on loading ammunition into the continuously firing gun, an act that earned him a Distinguished Service Medal. Aboard MTB 466, another gunner, Able Seaman J. Wright, displayed the same courageous spirit. “When wounded in the back by Oerlikon splinters he nevertheless kept up rapid and continuous fire until action had broken off,” read his subsequent DSM citation. Wright only stepped away from his gun when the boat’s first lieutenant ordered him to seek first aid treatment.20
Able Seaman T. Howarth was also wounded on MTB 466, and aboard MTB 460 Able Seaman P. Durnford suffered injuries. All four of the craft sustained superficial hull damage in the fierce running gun battle.21 Even though the German boats were more heavily gunned and numerous, they took the worst of the fight, with one bursting into flames and exploding. A fire that was quickly extinguished broke out aboard another.
Suddenly, mines started exploding all around the racing boats and Law realized that they had strayed into a “British minefield known as the Area Scollops a few miles off Le Havre. After our ten-minute engagement at close range, I was forced to disengage, making a smokescreen as we steamed northwards out of the dangerous minefield, which had doubtless frightened the wits out of the enemy as well as out of me.”22
Realizing where he and the R-boats were now situated, Law decided that the Germans had been attempting to break off the action and escape into the city’s heavily protected harbour. Le Havre was known to be a primary base for R-boats operating on this area of the European coast, with some fifty-five R-boats based in the city’s port. The ones Law had engaged were almost certainly part of this formation.23
Given the small size of the MTBs, only rudimentary first aid was available for the wounded men, as the crew had no room for specialized medical personnel. On MTB 459, the third officer could only wrap Bushfield’s wounds with field dressings, give him a shot of morphine, and then have him carefully moved down to the coxswain’s cramped cabin, where he was made as comfortable as possible.
Returning to their original patrol area, the boats closed in together so that the officers could discuss damages and casualties. Then Law had “McAulley, the wireless operator, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and his tin hat pushed far back on his head, bang out a coded message… giving… a brief outline of our engagement with the six R-boats.”24
The MTBs resumed their patrol until relieved at 0500 hours just as a “cold dawn broke over a sea still capped with ruffled foam.” Only then could Law turn the boats and carry his wounded homeward.25