The Battle of the St. Lawrence (18 page)

The loss of twelve merchant ships totalling 80,144 tons in the month of August led Britons and the English to take desperate defence measures. Now, for example, the Canadian navy, which is nine-tenths composed of requisitioned fishing boats, coastal ships and luxury yachts, is obliged to create an escort system … with these third-class ships. This service comprises a third of the threatened maritime route between Canada and the British Isles.
¹⁰

O
fficially, only the captains of the escort ships of SQ-35 that put out from Sydney for Quebec City on September 8, 1942—the corvettes HMCS
Charlottetown
and
Weyburn,
the Bangor minesweeper HMCS
Clayoquot
and the two Fairmiles—and the convoy’s commodore knew of the mauling of QS-33. Unofficially, the seamen’s messes were awash with talk of the battle that had claimed men they knew on
Raccoon
and men they didn’t know, men who had sailed on the four freighters now on the bottom.

“The mess was abuzz with it,” recalls Donald Murphy,
Clayoquot’s
leading stoker. “We’d heard that the
Raccoon
had gotten it. And we knew that we were about to sail into the same waters. We weren’t scared, though. We were sailing as part of a large escort: two corvettes, us and the Fairmiles. But we had no illusions. Ships were being torpedoed since May. We knew we’d have to be careful.”

For most of the ratings, being careful meant straining their eyes as they stood watch. Each of the endless hours—two of every eight on watch—spent staring across the ever-changing canvas of light, reflection, shadow and moving mist was one more hour passed safely, one more hour closer to Bic Island, where it was too shallow for U-boats to operate.

For others, such as nineteen-year-old Allan Heagy,
Charlottetown’s
newly minted radar operator, who joined the ship only hours before it left port on September 8, being careful meant sitting for four hours at a time in the
small radar hut on the port side of the bridge turning a crank that rotated his ship’s radar antenna on the main mast and staring into a ten-inch-diameter oscilloscope watching for an unexpected jagged line—a reading that would trigger Action Stations.

“Radar then,” recalls Heagy—who, after joining the navy in London, Ontario, in April 1941, volunteered to be trained on a new secret weapon, the cover for which was a radio-repair course at the University of Western Ontario—“wasn’t anything like it is today. It wasn’t even as good as the radar—then called radio directional finding (RDF)—then in use on British ships, which were equipped with 271 or centimetric radar, which rotated automatically and operated on a shorter wavelength that allowed them to ‘see’ both trimmed-down U-boats and even periscopes, and at closer range.
¹

“We rotated our 286 radar by turning a crank that was connected by a series of rods to the antenna (called a Yagi), which was shaped like two of those old TV aerials that used to be on top of houses. As we rotated the Yagi, we watched for jagged lines. Unfortunately, as we rotated it, we picked up as many back echoes as true readings. Figuring out what the oscilloscope was telling you took a lot of guesswork.”

SQ-35 was a milk run, just like the other ten patrols telegraphist Fred Rush recalled in a 1993 interview: “Looking back, it was quite a time. We were a bunch of green kids. I was an old man of twenty-three or twenty-four. It was a holiday with pay, with no thought of war. We ate good—navy style—and slept good. One day up the river to pick up our small convoy, three or four days back to Sydney and then back to Gaspé for a layover. A real holiday with pay.”

Amidst the endless cleaning and painting, there was time for baseball and swimming, “a very gentle time.”

SQ-35 would be
Charlottetown’s
last patrol.

Across the St. Lawrence and even in Ottawa, action swirled.

A HF/DF report on September 8 placed one U-boat north of Anticosti Island, squarely in the middle of the Jacques Cartier Passage, one of the convoy routes. The next morning, Heagy’s opposite number on
Char-lottetown’s
sister ship, HMCS
Summerside,
called out Contact Co-ordinates.
Captain F. O. Gerity chased the U-boat for six miles and fired star shells, but his lookouts saw nothing. On the ninth, after Flight Officer R. S. Keetley returned to his base at Chatham, the following signal was sent to Naval Service Headquarters, on the second floor of a building on Sparks Street in Ottawa:

The U-boat, identified as Eberhard Hoffmann’s U-165 by historian Roger Sarty, escaped Keetley’s depth charges by seconds. Several hours later, two corvettes and a minesweeper ordered by Commander German to search the same waters off Anticosti dropped four depth charges after having gained asdic contacts. Hartwig spent most of the same day under, spotting either escorts or patrol aircraft at 6:30 a.m., 3:35 p.m., 5:15 p.m. and 7:46 p.m.

While Hartwig was lying low, King’s war cabinet was meeting in Ottawa to consider Churchill’s request of a “loan” of escort vessels for Operation Torch, the amphibious assault on North Africa planned for November 1942. Macdonald reported that Canada could supply up to seventeen vessels but that doing so would mean denuding the Gulf Escort Force of twelve corvettes and would thus require the closing of the St. Lawrence to all but essential coastal and ferry traffic, which would be escorted by the few ships left at Gaspé. Later in the day, after Rear-Admiral Nelles sent a signal closing the river and the gulf to transoceanic shipping, Naval Control of Shipping in Halifax ordered the immediate diversion of all inbound shipping to Halifax, Saint John or Sydney; new convoy schedules were drawn up to allow ships at Montreal or Quebec City to sail as soon as was practicable.

Although the possibility of closing the St. Lawrence had been discussed as early as 1939, doing so created an immediate communications problem
for King’s government. Official naval documents state the obvious: closing the St. Lawrence “undoubtedly represents a severe moral and physical defeat to Canada’s war effort.” Hard truths from a military pen, however, did not square with rules laid down by the censor’s office after the sinking of
Nicoya.
Accordingly, there was no public statement announcing the closure of the St. Lawrence.

JUNE 7, 1941

Shortly after 7 a.m., Foreman Duncan McCorquodale and some two hundred other men walked out of the warehouse-like building that housed the Kingston Shipyards offices and the machine shops that fashioned steel into any of ten thousand parts of a ship. They stopped some hundred yards away, in the middle of a 300-by 60-foot slip that just a few days earlier had been filled by Hull 19, shortly to be called HMCS
Prescott
—the third corvette built by Kingston Shipyards. Soon the gentle rustling of the breeze coming off the narrowest part of Lake Ontario, which lapped the US shore a few miles south and which less than two miles east formed the headwaters of the St. Lawrence itself, was drowned out by the ear-splitting sound of pneumatic hammers driving rivets into I-beams and plates. The beams formed the keel and the plates formed the hull that Hartwig’s torpedoes would destroy on September 11, 1942, 361 days after Naval Service Headquarters in Ottawa received a one-sentence signal from the naval officer in charge in Quebec City:
“H.M.C.S.
‘
CHARLOTTETOWN’ COMMISSIONED THIS DAY.”

“The men,” recalls Francis MacLaughlin, who in 1943 worked at the yard while other corvettes were being built, “took their cue from General
Manager T. G. Bishop.” Tommy Bishop was from the old school, as were McCorquodale and even Donald Page (who at twenty-five was almost forty years younger than the other two), who headed the Design Office. “They were no-nonsense men, very much aware, and made us very much aware, how important our role was.”

The controlled mayhem of the shipyard was their battlefield. Beyond the smoke and glow of braziers that turn cold plugs of steel into red-hot rivets was an endless ballet in which one strong, sweaty man tossed one, then another, red-hot rivet up twenty, thirty, forty feet to another man standing on a staging plank, who caught it in a cup and plucked it out with tongs. Before it could cool and lose its red heat, he held it straight, and a third man drove it through a narrow hole in three-quarters of an inch of steel. Sixteen rivets, and one more plate was held in place—one small contribution to the defeat of the U-boats that prowled the North Atlantic.

For weeks, even as astute an observer of the Kingston yard as young MacLaughlin would not have been able to tell Hull 20 from the previous two corvettes built on the same slip. HMCS
Napanee
and
Prescott
belonged to the Flower class, so named, it was said, because a wag in the Admiralty looked forward to the propaganda value of the headline “HMS
Pansy
Sinks U-Boat.” Hull 20 belonged to the revised Flower class. Originally slated to be inshore patrol vessels, the first corvettes were built with short fo‘c’sles and noticeably unflared bows. Once forced onto the North Atlantic run, they were admired by the British Admiralty for their ability to weather the heaviest Atlantic gales “without material damage.” They were, however, notoriously uncomfortable ships.

At 205 feet 1 inch long, corvettes of the first building program were too short to straddle the North Atlantic’s waves; at 905 tons, they were too light to cut through the rollers. Instead, they climbed over them, bobbing like corks. Their short draught, 13 feet 5 inches, made them roll violently in the heavy seas of the North Atlantic. Men who sailed in them proudly said “they’d roll on grass in heavy dew.” This short draught also accounted for their extraordinary manoeuvrability.
Charlottetown
and its sister ships could turn a complete circle in a hundred seconds, much faster than either a surfaced or a submerged U-boat.

“They corkscrewed all over the place,” recalls Max Korkum, who late
after the war commanded HMCS
Sackville,
the “last corvette,” now berthed in Halifax. “But what really wore the men down about the first corvettes was that they were a wet ship. Because of their short fo‘c’sle (the short raised deck at the bow of the ship), water poured over the deck, running down in torrents onto the boat deck (behind the fo‘c’sle but in front of the superstructure). From there, water ran onto the main deck, and could run into the ship itself via ventilators and hatchways. Inside the ship, water shorted out electrical equipment and made for hellish living conditions.”
²

Frank Curry, who joined the RCN in 1940 when he was twenty years old and who served on an original Flower-class corvette, HMCS
Kamsack,
remembers that sea water was constantly backing up into the mess deck. “When they [were] not floating in dirty salt water on the deck, loaves of bread were soggy and almost always mouldy because of the mess’s dampness.”

“Our clothes too,” Curry says, “were always wet—and so were our hammocks, because we had to crawl into them in our wet clothes. During the winter runs on the North Atlantic, the watch going on duty had to put on the ice-covered and chilled duffle coat of the watch coming off duty.

“The battering of the ship in the North Atlantic—and remember, these ships rolled in even the slightest seas—took its toll on our bodies. Our hips were constantly being wrenched by the ship’s roll and the fact that we had to hold on to the stanchions while we walked and she rolled. The battering also took its toll on our dishes. I remember leaving port time and again with a full set of dishes for the crew and that by the end of the patrol we were eating out of empty jam tins because every one of our dishes had been smashed.”

The addition of 3 feet 3 inches to the corvettes’ length (to 208 feet 4 inches) and 2 feet 2 inches to their draught (to 15 feet 7 inches) in the revised program begun in late 1940 did not materially alter either their manoeuvrability or their sea-keeping ability. The first change to appear was an increased flare to the bow (which drove water away from the ship’s deck). Even more important was the extension of the fo‘c’sle, which made the ships drier, quite literally because there was more ship between the deck and the sea.

“The extension of the fo‘c’sle did one other thing,” says Korkum. “It changed the rolling of the ship. They still rolled a lot, but the ones with the extended fo‘c’sle didn’t pitch and yaw with the same speed or ferocity.”

Ensuring that over the 373,000 man-hours it took to build Hull 19,
shipwrights, boilermakers, platers, riveters, coppersmiths, steam-and pipefitters, and chippers and caulkers had the pieces they needed took, wrote Lesley Roberts in 1944, 55,000 phone calls.
Part IV—Machinery (Steam—Reciprocating) Including Electrical Generators of the Specifications for an Admiralty Single-Screw Corvette of the 1941 Programme
ran to more than fifteen pages. Whatever supply bottlenecks Bishop faced while overseeing the building of Hull 20—and the National Archives contains more than a dozen pages of correspondence pertaining to the Kingston Shipbuilding Company’s requisitioning of a ship’s telegraph from Marine Industries in Montreal and to Marine Industries’ demands for payment of $1,850 for the “telegraph and fittings”—they would be far easier to overcome than those he had faced just eighteen months earlier when Kingston began building HMCS
Napanee.