Jake Warren, Valleyfield Survivor
Thirty years after their frigate was torpedoed off Cape Race, Newfoundland, in 1944, two shipmates met accidentally in London. Irving Kaplan had been chief petty officer, signals yeoman, on the Valleyfield, which sank within minutes of being hit. He was attending a memorial service for the Athabaskan, a Canadian destroyer sunk by an E-boat in the English Channel on April 29, 1944.
The Athabaskan, the Iroquois, and the Haida had
been sweeping the channel for U-boats and E-boats for
weeks before D-Day. One of two torpedoes hit the Athabaskan’s magazine. The glow of her funeral fire was visible 48 kilometres away. She sank within 10 minutes: 128 died and 86 were captured.
Kaplan was inching along the receiving line when he heard a bellow: “YO!” (every yeoman was nicknamed “YO”). The bellow came from one of two officers who had survived the sinking of the Valleyfield — Lieutenant Jack “Jake” Hamilton Warren. Jake was Canada’s high commissioner to Britain — the main man in the receiving line.
The Valleyfield’s life was short. She was a frigate, a stretch corvette (96 feet longer) powered by twin screws. Her top speed was 19 knots. The other surviving officer, Lieutenant Ian Tate, jokes that “the best she could do was 17 knots downhill.” She was 301 feet long and weighed 1,445 tons. She was launched on July 17, 1943, and commissioned in December.
The Valleyfield made one overseas crossing. She was assigned to convoy escort duty to England, but was detached to assist the disabled Dundee to an Azores port. She then took the damaged Mulgrave under tow to Scotland. On April 27, 1944, the Valleyfield left Londonderry with a convoy to return to Canada. The crossing was uneventful. Five escorts handed the convoy over to a local escort group and made smoke for St. John’s. Ian Tate remembers the Valleyfield’s heading: 002 North, 80 kilometres off Cape Race. The corvette’s companions were the Halifax, the Frontenac, the Giffard, and the Edmunston. They sailed line abreast, about 4 kilometres apart, at 13 knots.
Tate also recalls that they did not follow evasive zigzag courses because of the danger from “growlers” — submerged, waterlogged ice floes. Nor did they have their “CAT gear” out. CAT gear was clanking metal pipes, which vessels streamed behind to attract acoustic torpedoes.
On May 6 at 11:40 p.m., “convoy time” — May 7, 12:40 a.m. Newfoundland time — the four corvettes heard an explosion. They thought the Valleyfield was dropping practice depth charges, because there were no reports of U-boat activity. The last enemy disposition report had indicated one U-boat 241 kilometres due east and south of Cape Race. It was four minutes before the corvettes realized that the Valleyfield had disappeared from Asdic sweeps (anti-submarine detection investigation committee, the British equivalent of sonar).
A torpedo had hit the Valleyfield port side, amidships. She broke in half and the forward part sank in less than two minutes. Less than a third of the crew of 12 officers and 152 sailors managed to get over the side in zero-degree (Celsius) water.
Lieutenant Commander Dermott English of St. John’s and Boston, the captain, and Lieutenant Tate hit the water together. In civilian life, Dermott English had been captain of the Furness-Withy cruise ship Monarch Bermuda. He was not wearing a life jacket. He and Tate clung to a Carley float. Tate remembers the surface was covered with thick bunker “C” oil — “like Vaseline.” Three corvettes dropped depth charges. The Giffard searched for survivors and picked up 38; 126 were lost.
Tate recalls, “The skipper found a life jacket and slipped it on, but didn’t secure it. He looked across the float at me and said, ‘Mr. Tate, are you still there? If I don’t come out of this alive will you write to my wife?’ When the crew of the Giffard pulled him out of the water, the only thing they could grab was his life jacket. He slipped out of it, back into the water. We never saw him again.”
The survivors were taken to sickbay in St. John’s, where they were guinea pigs for a new treatment for hypothermia developed by Dr. Charles Best of insulin fame. Tate says survivors were in the water “from half an hour to an hour and a quarter. The greatest danger was immersion fingers or immersion feet — too cold too long. The accepted treatment was to raise body temperature quickly with warm water. That’s when gangrene set in.
“Dr. Best put us all in a room, elevated our feet and hands; fans blew cold air over blocks of ice. We were there 10 days, but it worked. In our group of 38 one man had one finger amputated.” New Brunswick Senator Mabel DeWare’s brother-in-law, the late Nobel DeWare, was a survivor and later a Moncton fireman. Roy “Buck” Whitlock, a 20-year-old able seaman from Charlottetown, was another survivor. He is better known as one of the Maritimes’ finest senior hockey players. He scored 50 or more goals five times with the powerful Moncton, Saint John, and Charlottetown teams. Maritime sportswriters are unanimous in their opinions he was born generations too soon: “In today’s NHL he’d be a super star.” Halifax broadcaster Pat Connolly, the dean of Maritime sportswriters, says the “time he spent adrift in the cold water was reportedly the cause of leg problems that dogged him throughout his career.”
World War II was not just fought “over there.” It was fought on Canada’s doorstep by a navy whose primary role was convoy escort. All of Britain’s oil and most of her war matériel depended on convoys: 26,000 merchant ships crossed the Atlantic carrying 181 million tons.
The east coast war was costly. In 1942, Germany had 300 U-boats, and they hunted in wolf packs of 20. The armed yacht Raccoon was torpedoed on September 7, 1942, in the St. Lawrence River. The entire crew of 37 was lost. Four days later, on September 11, 1942, the corvette Charlottetown was also torpedoed in the St. Lawrence. A month later, on October 14, 1942, the North Sydney–Newfoundland ferry Caribou was torpedoed off Newfoundland; 137 perished. The corvette Shawinigan was torpedoed off Cape Breton on November 25, 1944, and 91 crew members were lost. The minesweepers Clayoquot and Esquimalt were torpedoed near Halifax harbour. The Esquimalt went down on April 16, 1945, with a loss of 44 lives — the last Canadian vessel sunk in World War II.
Raymond Goldman, a Glace Bay fish dealer, recalls touring a fish plant in Hamburg in 1967. The manager of the plant was “Herr Koch and he served on a U-boat during the war. He said he developed an ear for cowboy music — especially yodelling — in Canada. He told me ‘we used to surface at night off Glace Bay harbour to recharge our batteries and I tuned in to CJCB Radio, Sydney, to listen to Hank Snow, (Hank the Yodelling Ranger), and Wilf Carter.’”
Two Glace Bay fishermen, Joe Young and Jimmy Nolan, were hand lining codfish off Glace Bay when a U-boat surfaced. The conning tower almost capsized them. The submarine crash-dived when a sub-chaser flew overhead. Ian Tate, 82, now lives in Port Hope and has a country retreat near Kinburn. Jake Warren, 80, lives in Chelsea, Quebec, after a distinguished career in the foreign service capped by ambassador’s posts in London and Washington.