He Missed the Boat
The first published casualty reports of a 1942 torpedoing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off Gaspe indicated that V-33301, Rating Philip Francis Brady, age 34, from Montreal, a member of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve, was missing in action and presumed lost at sea.
Reports of Brady’s death were greatly exaggerated. He was not on board the armed yacht HMCS Raccoon, when a single torpedo from U-165 killed the entire crew of 37 and reduced the converted luxury boat to scrap.
Philip Francis Brady had missed the boat.
In the early morning of September 5, 1942, about 1 a.m., Brady was walking along the road when he was hit from behind by a car. The Fort Ramsay medical officer’s report reads: “He had not been drinking and was returning to his ship … He lost consciousness coming to the hospital.” He suffered “abrasions about his face, considerable swelling at the bridge of his nose … left little finger and left hand showed bruises … no apparent fractures … bruising on his left foot.” X-rays confirmed there were no fractures. Brady would remain a patient in the hospital in Gaspe for nine days.
His ship, however, sailed the next day, September 6. The HMCS Raccoon was part of an escort for convoy QS 33 (Quebec to Sydney). A few days earlier, lookouts had seen the unmistakable white furrows of two torpedoes under the Raccoon’s bow. The U-boat commander failed to account for the Raccoon’s shallow draft, and his torpedo settings were too deep.
The Raccoon, the corvette HMCS Arrowhead, the minesweeper HMCS Truro, and Fairmile motor launches Q065 and Q083 were riding shotgun on eight merchant ships en route to Sydney. The Greek freighter Aeas was hit by a single torpedo from U-165 and sank immediately. As the convoy rounded Riviere-la-Madeleine, an explosion rocked the night at 1 a.m. on September 7. The other escort ships presumed it was from a depth charge dropped by the Raccoon. Much later, they learned the explosion was from a torpedo that blew the Raccoon to smithereens. That same day U-517 sent three more merchant ships to the bottom.
From that point on, Quebec-Sydney convoys were halted and war matériel bound for eastern Canadian ports and from there to Europe was moved by rail through Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
The Battle of the St. Lawrence wasn’t a level playing field. The Canadian navy was unprepared to deal with a superior force of German submarines. Two U-boats sank 22 ships in the Gulf and not a single U-boat was lost. In June 1942, one U-boat sank four ships in broad daylight between Matane and Saint-Anne-des-Monts. Early in the war, Canada had one minesweeper and two Fairmiles responsible for patrolling the entire Gulf and St. Lawrence River. Fairmiles had little more than a three-foot draft and bobbed like corks.
Canadian warships had primitive sound detectors, puny deck guns, almost non-existent communications systems, and roll-off depth charges. Sub-chasers dropping depth charges had to pass directly over a submerged U-boat and had a six-percent success rate. A year later, some ships were equipped with British Hedgehogs, a 34-kilogram mortar bomb filled with 14 kilograms of TNT. Twenty-four Hedgehogs could be launched about 183 metres in an oval pattern. Hedgehogs exploded on contact. Even so, the Hedgehog’s success rate was only 14 percent.
Depth charges were both a blessing and a curse. When the corvette Charlottetown was torpedoed, depth charges rolled off her stern and exploded among Canadian survivors struggling in the water. The blast concussion broke blood vessels, and sailors died a slow and painful death.
German propagandists scoffed that “nine-tenths [of the Canadian navy] was composed of requisitioned fishing boats, coastal ships, and luxury yachts.” The Canadian navy establishment was, indeed, merely token. Most members of the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (RCNR) and the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR) had only dry-land training in inner towns and cities and on the Prairies. Regular navy officers wore straight gold rank stripes. RCNVR officers wore zigzag braid and earned themselves the nickname of “wavy navy.” Some anonymous wit once said the RCNVR were gentlemen trying to be sailors; the RCNR were sailors trying to be gentlemen and the RCN were neither, trying to be both.
Philip Francis Brady enlisted in the RCNVR in September 1941. His trade as an electrician probably landed him on the Raccoon to bring her electrical system up to standards. Brady served on board the HMCS Montreal and at Stadacona and Cornwallis before being posted to Fort Ramsay and the Raccoon on August 4, 1942.
Canada had one radar station located at Herring Cove near Halifax. A second primitive installation was built on the Gaspe coast — Fort Ramsay. A young signals officer stationed there was Sub-Lieutenant Murray Westgate who later became “your friendly Esso dealer” on Hockey Night in Canada.
The Raccoon had been built by a shipyard in Bath, Maine, in 1931 for wealthy U.S. businessman, Charles A. Thorne. In June 1931, she was christened Halonia. Thorne sold the steel-hulled schooner to the VanCleef family (of VanCleef and Arpel jewellers) and, when war broke out and the United States was neutral, the VanCleefs sailed the Halonia from Cape Cod to Lake Ontario and donated the pleasure craft to the Canadian navy.
The Halonia was a twin-master schooner roughly the same size as the Bluenose. Dockyards in Saint John and Halifax were swamped with work so the Halonia sailed to Pictou, Nova Scotia, where the masts were removed. From there she went to the International Paper Company in Dalhousie, New Brunswick, where she was fitted with twin diesel engines and prepared for war. She was commissioned Raccoon and joined a dozen or so sister armed yachts for coastal patrol — the Grizzly, the Beaver, the Caribou, the Cougar, the Elk, the Reindeer, the Musky, and the Wolf. Some of the armed yachts were only 23 feet long.
The Canadian navy was ill prepared for combat. The first two of 14 corvettes had no guns in their turrets, so wooden posts were stuck in to present a silhouette that might scare off the German wolf pack. Canada also had 20 Fairmiles, 112-foot-long PT type boats — wooden sub chasers. A Fairmile carried a three-pounder gun on deck, depth charges, and Hedgehogs. They were powered by 1200 hp gasoline engines, which made them unsafe. A spark could ignite high-octane fumes, as happened once when a ship’s cook lit a galley stove. The Fairmile blew up, killing two crew members. At its peak, Germany was building one U-boat every day.
In September 1942, a U-boat fired a fish at the freighter Meadcliffe Hall and missed. The torpedo kept on going until it hit the beach where it exploded, breaking and rattling windows in the Quebec village of St. Yvon over one kilometre away. Sending the flimsy craft out to protect convoys and hunt down U-boats was akin to sending a boy on a man’s errand.
After the torpedo struck the Raccoon, an RCAF spotter plane sighted a life preserver with “Halonia” stencilled on it and two Carley floats — all of the Raccoon that was ever recovered. The only body recovered was found washed ashore on Anticosti Island a month later. It was Russ McConnell, a Royal Roads graduate and a promising pro prospect in the Montreal Royals/Canadiens system. Russ McConnell was wrapped in a weighted shroud and buried at sea five kilometres off Gaspe.
The night the Raccoon went down, Mike Sheflin, retired Ottawa-Carleton transportation commissioner, was three years old. His father, John Edward “Jack” Sheflin, was a supply assistant on the Raccoon. Mike, his mother and five-year-old brother, Jim, were on board CN’s Ocean Limited, rolling along the St. Lawrence. They were going home to Eureka in Pictou County so that Peggy and the boys would be closer to Halifax when the Raccoon docked. The Sheflins could not even see the St. Lawrence, because train conductors had orders to ensure all blinds were pulled down when lights were on so as not to present a target for U-boat deck guns.
Mike Sheflin says he believes that if he had looked out the train window the night of September 7 as the train rolled past Mont-Joli, he might have caught a glimpse of the Raccoon on the way to her rendezvous with death. A week after the Raccoon was torpedoed, the Sheflins received a telegram stating John Edward Sheflin was “missing and believed lost at sea.” Peggy received an insensitive form letter addressed “To the Next of Kin of” that was machine signed by Angus L. Macdonald, Minister of National Defence for Naval Affairs. A month later on October 17, another letter arrived informing her she had been awarded a monthly pension of $87 for herself and her two children. Newspaper coverage was heavily censored. A press release simply stated: the Raccoon was “torpedoed in northern waters where enemy subs have been active.”
U-165 met her end three weeks after sinking the Raccoon. She was sunk in the Bay of Biscay with all (51) hands lost. Philip Francis Brady’s next postings were to Stadacona and Shelburne, Nova Scotia. He was demobilized July 13, 1945, and given a rehabilitation grant and a $100 “Plain Clothes Gratuity.” He died April 18, 1961, at the age of 53. Peggy Sheflin passed away September 7, 1988, 46 years to the day her husband’s life was snatched from her.