The Battle of the St. Lawrence (15 page)

When dawn broke over
Oakton
on September 7, it was alone, sailing toward the tip of the Gaspé.

“I was the second cook on the
Oakton,
so I had the early morning mess,” recalls Ted Read. “It was dark when I came out of the galley. When I left, I was surprised. Not only was the sea as smooth as a plate, but we were alone. It was like the days before the
Nicoya
got hit, before they had to start the convoys.” Read didn’t know it then, but after the second explosion Captain Brown had ordered his helmsman, Laurent Marchand, to “get the hell out of here; go south, we’ll take our chances with the shoals.”

“The
Oakton
wasn’t a fast ship,” recalls Read, “and we were carrying a full load of coal from Sandusky, Ohio, to Corner Brook, Newfoundland, so we were heavy and low. Like this normally we’d make 5 knots. But the engineer—he’d been with the ship and Captain Brown for years—must have known how to get more from her old engines. We were making tracks, going maybe 9 knots—anything, I guess, to get as far from where the shooting was and as close to Sydney as we could.” Before the afternoon was out, Read, Brown, Wilkinson and a few dozen other men would escape Paul Hartwig’s torpedoes with their lives; another seven wouldn’t.

Perhaps only war could have brought Read’s and Paul Hartwig’s lives so close. Nine years younger than the U-boat captain, whom historian Michael Hadley aptly refers to as the
enfant terrible
of the Battle of the St. Lawrence, Read was born in Montreal of Newfoundland parents. His father, C. H. Read, had served with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment under Sergeant-Major “Alf” Brown, who years later did his old friend a favour when he took the young, tall, thin, sandy-haired Edward aboard his ship as a deckhand.

“I’d had other jobs since finishing high school when I was sixteen. Odd jobs at first, then, as the war got Montreal humming, I got a job as a riveter at Fairchild Aviation down in Longueuil. I didn’t like working inside much, though. I remembered what it was like when my father lost his good job at Eatons; he’d been a manager. During the Depression we spent years without regular money coming in. Later, my father told me sometimes we survived on my paper route. So I jumped from it to a better-paying job that was outside and came with room and board too.

“I’d always wanted to go to sea. I’d grown up next to the Lachine Canal, seeing all those boats and those men going all over. And here was my chance.

“My father wouldn’t sign the forms allowing me into the navy at seventeen. And I wanted to do something for the war effort. He told me this was something I could do.”

Before
Oakton
sailed from Montreal, Read had talked his friend Nelson Puddester, also from a Newfoundland family, into signing on with him. When seasickness quickly put an end to Puddester’s career as second cook, Captain Brown told Read, “‘It’s easy to find a deckhand, but you can’t find a second cook everywhere.’ So I started doing dishes for nineteen men and peeling potatoes. Sufferin’ Jesus,” added Read when he recalled this story.

A flat-bottomed scow, designed to fit into the small locks of the Welland and Lachine canals,
Oakton
didn’t rise up and then slam down on waves during storms. “She didn’t have the V-shaped keel that could do that. Instead, she corkscrewed up and down, first toward port, then toward starboard, riding over the waves, but you never thought she was going to turn.” Captain Brown, Read recalls, was the gruff old type, but his bark was worse than his bite. “Sometimes when we were passing through the Lachine Canal he’d tell me to grab a cab to see my mother and father.”

*  *  *

About the time Read’s ship was making its final passage through the Welland Canal, U-517 was passing through the Strait of Belle Isle.

Like so many other U-boat captains, Hartwig was from Germany’s interior. Born in Saxony in 1919, Hartwig grew up in a Germany that extolled the
U-Bootwaffe
(the U-boat Arm) of the First World War. The
U-Bootwaffe,
not the battleships and cruisers of the blue-water navy, almost brought England to her knees. Even more important, the
U-Bootwaffe
remained clear of the twin stains of the Kiel Mutiny, when the kaiser’s imperial flag was struck and the Red flag flew in its place, and of the blue-water fleet’s ignominious end, its self-scuttling at Scapa Flow.

When Hartwig was in his teens in Hitler’s Germany, books like
Alarm! Tauchen! U-Boot in Kampf und Sturm (Alarm! Dive! U-boat in Combat and Storm),
which extolled the chivalry of the U-boat forces and called for scrapping the limits placed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, were popular. According to Hadley’s
Count Not the Dead: The Popular Image of the German Submarine,
a year before Hartwig joined the
U-Bootwaffe,
one of the most popular pulp paperbacks was
Torpedo Achtung! Los! (Torpedo Away!),
which raised a paean to the new era: “The seed is sown! We, the war generation, see it rise with our own eyes; it’s a magnificent feeling to be here and to be able to help it happen.
Heil
to our
Führer”
—lessons that seem to have taken, for according to the Report on Interrogation of Survivors from U-517 (Hartwig’s boat was bombed to the surface on its second patrol on November 21, 1942), Hartwig was a “cold and calculating young Nazi, filled with ideals of false heroism and unyielding devotion to his Führer.”

Hartwig was two years older than Read when he decided to go to sea. He did not, however, join the German merchant marine. Instead, in 1935 he joined the
Kriegsmarine.
He volunteered for the
U-Bootwaffe
on September 9, 1939, the day Hitler’s troops invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. After the standard several months of submarine training, Hartwig served as first lieutenant on Günter Kuhnke’s U-125; Kuhnke was a highly regarded commander who won the Knight’s Cross in September 1940. Hartwig was then sent for two months of commanding officer training and to the command of the then-unfinished U-517.

Hartwig’s next few months would have differed little from those described by Herbert Werner in his memoir
Iron Coffins.
At that point in the war, cap
tains (and chief engineers) were assigned to their boats when they were still abuilding so that they would know every gauge, rivet and bilge pump—the guts of their ships. Launched in early January 1942 and commissioned on March 21, Hartwig’s U-517, a 740-ton Type IXC U-boat, passed its silent running test at Rönne on May 12 and her measured mile, crash-diving and speed tests three days later off Danzig. On May 20, Hartwig led his crew through torpedo-firing tests at Gdynia, and then gunnery trials at Pillau during the first week of June. During these weeks, Hartwig’s crew came to view him as “an efficient, if not very popular, captain,” in the words of the Allied officers who interrogated U-517’s crew.

Returning to Hamburg for final adjustments, Hartwig spent some time, before leaving Kiel on August 8, studying the charts of Canadian waters. More than a few of those charts would have been German. German naval ships explored both the British Columbia and the Atlantic coasts in 1904–5 and scouted anchorages as far as Montreal. In 1937, German agents, operating behind a dummy Dutch forestry company, surveyed Anticosti Island and its anchorages.

At times, Hartwig’s war diary, his actions and the banter reported to historian Michael Hadley belie the portrait of a hard-drinking, jealous martinet contained in the interrogation report. The report notes that Hartwig was apparently so jealous of his first first officer,
Oberleutnant zur See
Gustav-Adolf von Dresky, that he arranged to have Dresky transferred from U-517 before its first patrol. According to the interrogation report, “when von Dresky went ashore for the last time, the ship’s company gave him three cheers, which infuriated Hartwig.”

Indeed, even in translation, parts of his war diary betray a poetic mind. Upon entering the Strait of Belle Isle at 4:39 a.m. on August 27, he wrote, “Bright moonlit night, vis 30 nm winds freshening slightly. Steered toward land on Westerly course. Encountered fishing vessel showing navigation lights moving between Hare Bay and Anthony. She proceeds toward Anthony.”

This impression is strengthened by two stories. The first, told to journalist Warren Moon in the 1970s, is of his taking his “boat close to the shore in fog so that his men could hear the music coming from a bar.” The second, told to Hadley, is of an early Sunday morning when, from their conning tower, Hartwig and his men saw a tiny village and, in that village, “a
shack with lights on and smoke curling invitingly from its chimney.” Hartwig and the officer of the watch, engineer and lookouts then took time from looking for ships to torpedo to reminisce about home, about “freshly baked crusty rolls”—so far from the mould-covered food eaten within U-517. Hartwig told Hadley of their “half-earnest, half-whimsical banter about launching a dinghy for a trip ashore.”

Whatever Hartwig’s attitude toward poetry, his war diary also makes clear that by the time he shaped a course through the Canadian waters, his was a finely honed military mind that could spot and capitalize on his opponents’ errors.
⁸

Just hours after entering the Strait of Belle Isle on August 27, Hartwig saw two ships that were running ahead of both the main body of SG-6F and its air cover: the US Coast Guard cutter
Mojave
and
Chatham,
a passenger ship outbound from Montreal carrying 562 men, 428 of whom were US Army troops bound for Greenland. At first they presented a textbook anti-submarine defence,
Mojave
conducting a zigzagging sweep ahead (and, by virtue of the zigzag, both a bit to starboard and a bit to port) of
Chatham,
and on it, “9 trained lookouts stationed 1 on the forecastle, 2 on bridge wings, 2 on wings fantail, 1 aft at the gun, 2 on the pilot house [and] 1 on top of the pilot house.” In theory,
Chatham’s
odds (one ship, one escort and one U-boat) should have been better than they were for the ships on the Newfie-Derry run. On those convoys, sixty or more ships could be spread out as much as 50 square miles, protected from as many as twenty U-boats by as few as five escort ships.

But Hartwig quickly noted the flaw: “The escort is zigzagging at regular [that is, predictable] intervals. The other ship is rigidly steering 052.”

In the moments before he fired his salvo of two torpedoes, he manoeuvred his 77-metre U-boat into the opening on
Chatham’s
starboard side. Years later, Hartwig told Moon that all the while he kept up a running commentary that “painted a picture of what was happening” as U-517 made its first attack. His “quiet commentary” was whispered from man to man throughout the U-boat. “As soon as we heard it hit [one torpedo missed] there was a great cheer from the crew,” Hartwig recalled.

Just under one thousand yards away, the death cries of fourteen men went unheard, lost in the roar of the torpedo’s exploding charge, which blew her
boilers fifty feet upward, through five decks of hardened steel. Across the length of the ship, deck after deck was ruptured. Transverse bulkheads designed to hold back tons of water were torn. Metal shards moving at hundreds of miles an hour cut through still more steel, wire, flesh. The crew’s dining room, which at 8:45 a.m. was filled with men eating reconstituted powdered eggs, black coffee and toast, was now filled with the acrid, choking fumes of burning oil, ship’s stores and melting lead-based paint. Only exemplary rescue work by
Mojave
and USS
Bernadou
kept the death toll from reaching horrifying proportions.

The obvious pride Hartwig took in telling Moon about the address to his crew after the sinking of
Chatham
shows that he was no simple villain sent from central casting: “I told them they should always remember that it could easily be the other way around—that they themselves could have been killed. I said they had to live in a kind of humility—that they would not necessarily be victors all the time. And that while we had a duty to
our
country, so had the other side to
their
country. I said that while we had to be successful, we did not have to hate the enemy.” Courtliness aside, however, Hartwig was a professional warrior commanding a state-of-the-art warship on a mission to attack men plying the river and gulf of what to him was a foreign land.

Hartwig’s torpedo brought the war home to the small fishing village of Battle Harbour, recalls Dudley Crowther, then a twenty-three-year-old member of the Newfoundland Ranger Force who organized relief efforts for the injured men coming ashore. “I commandeered a wooden one-room school that, like every building in Battle Harbour, was still lit by oil lamps. We put out mattresses, blankets and everything else the men needed. We cared for 160 men for the better part of a week until an American warship came to pick them up. But a number of them were badly burned and we couldn’t care for them.

“There was a Grenville Mission school in St. Mary’s Harbour, about a few miles away in the bay. We used the same lifeboats the men used to come ashore to take them to St. Mary’s Harbour. Luckily, the weather was good so it was not a difficult trip to the hospital.

“Of course we’d been following the war and we’d seen many convoys. But when they came ashore, the war suddenly struck home to us.”

Three days later, Hartwig was almost undone by the image he tried to create within the cramped pressure hull of U-517. There—amid the stink of sweat, diesel fumes, oil, fungus, mould, gases given off by the lead-acid batteries, and semen—Hartwig strove, like all U-boat commanders, to create a world in which the hard realities of life were dissolved not just by the mission
Grossadmiral
Dönitz had handed them but, more immediately and more symbolically, by the men’s own part in Hartwig’s command. Each man knew that more than any other captain, their captain was alone; alone among naval captains, U-boat captains aimed the weapons at their targets. Each man relied on others more than did crewmen on surface ships, so that the captain’s will must be theirs. According to Hadley, “Hartwig’s approach was a deft combination of that consciously understated image making and calculated tactics common to many navy leaders. It always remains important for a crew’s
esprit de corps
that a captain demonstrate he can indeed perform, for that above all else inspires confidence. If he can carry it off with style, so much the better.”