The Battle of the St. Lawrence (26 page)

T
he age-old tradition of sailors picking up survivors of ships that their munitions destroyed—what
Grossadmiral
Karl Dönitz called a “fine Freemasonry”—and the emotion-charged meetings of veterans who, generations after they fought each other, meet and reminisce about their all-too-human battle against steel, shell and the ever-present sea should not elide the differences between His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy and the
Kriegsmarine.
Still less should the passage of time obscure the marked differences in training and in beliefs between the men who manned the U-boats that invaded Canada and the officers and ratings who served on the armed yachts, corvettes, Fairmiles and Bangor minesweepers that defended Canada.

The
U-Bootwaffe
had risen from a secret Weimar program to the most professional of Hitler’s armed forces. Like the crews of the RCN, the RN and the USN, its crews were volunteers. U-boat commanders were products of a three-year training program that began with three months of basic infantry training on Dänholm, what U-553’s captain, Karl Thurmann,
called a “godforsaken island” in the Baltic. Then three months on a square rigger; next, a year as a midshipman aboard a cruiser. A nine-month course in navigation, tactics, naval architecture, marine engineering, oceanography and English (to study Nelson and Drake in the original) followed. Commissioning came after still another cruise—with an experienced commander. The expansion of the U-boat Arm from 40 submarines in 1939 to 265 in the beginning of 1943 (and the need to replace crews lost in action) meant that as the war continued, training was speeded up. Still, an engineering officer cadet of 1940 underwent over two years of training. As late as 1944, U-boat crews trained for up to nine months before undertaking operational cruises.

Men like Lieutenant Desmond “Debbie” Piers, RCN, captain of the destroyer HMCS
Restigouche,
spent years earning their command qualifications, most of it with the British navy and staff colleges. But the initials RCNR (Royal Canadian Naval Reserve) after the names of the men who commanded most of the small ships—captains Skinner, Bonner, Lade and Cuthbert—and RCNVR (Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve) after those of captains Denny (Fairmile 074), Simpson (Fairmile 063) and Strange (Fairmile 084), as well as of most of the ratings who served in the St. Lawrence, indicate that the vast majority of the men who matched wits with Dönitz’s marksmen belonged to the maritime equivalent of the militia.
¹

With twenty years at sea, Bonner may have had almost a decade’s more experience than did Hartwig, but prior to the outbreak of the war Bonner’s military training consisted only of a course every year or two. The men of the RCNVR trained one or two nights a week at local drill halls and two weeks a year at Halifax or Esquimalt. Upon being activated, these men received another two months of training. Of course, both naval lore and training experts agree that while it may take two years to build a ship, it takes five years to train a sailor.

By 1942, the navy’s need for men to crew its more than two hundred ships meant that training could be measured in weeks. Between 1939 and the end of 1942, the navy grew from 131 officers and 1,634 ratings (backed up by another 181 reserve officers and 1,649 reserve ratings) to more than 1,514 officers—the vast majority of whom were “wavy navy” (RCNVR) men—and some 45,000 ratings.
²
By 1945 the total number of men serving
in the navy was over 95,000. Gavin Clark became executive officer on Fairmile 085 straight from a four-month training program at Royal Roads in Victoria, British Columbia; less than a year later, at twenty years, five months and seventeen days old, he took command of the Fairmile. Like thousands of others, Léon-Paul Fortin had never been aboard a ship before
Charlottetown’s
commissioning; most of the crew were so green that they were seasick in the first storm.

Depending on the experience of a U-boat’s captain, the time allotted for working up a crew varied. In 1942, six months was the norm—six months that included torpedo-firing drills, diving drills, emergency-escape drills. Six months that included navigation and more English study. Six months that included wolfpack tactics.
Charlottetown
worked up for eighty-five days—less than three months—most of which included more chipping paint than gunnery practice. Its regimen did not include training with a Dutch submarine that had been seconded to Halifax.

The U-boat captain—the lone wolf, wearing a worn leather jacket, looking through a periscope, finding his prey—and his “band of brothers” fearfully trusting that the pressure hull of their 160-foot trench will hold are powerful and romantic images that, especially as the decades have passed, have come to obscure the essential difference between the men who sailed under the swastika and those who sailed under the White Ensign.

Even on such useful Web sites as uboat.net, debates rage about whether Dönitz was a Nazi. Both he and his deputy were card-carrying members of the Nazi party, as was U-boat ace Eric Topp (U-552). Participants on uboat.net endlessly point out that the tens of thousands of officers and ratings who made up the
U-Bootwaffe
were not Nazis and that, in fact, the service itself was officially apolitical. If so, the reason is because it could afford to be—the men who crewed Hitler’s U-boats had had years of National Socialist indoctrination.

By 1942, nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old midshipmen had all been part of Nazi-run organizations for almost a decade. They had seen their primary schools “cleansed” of Jewish teachers. Their school readers likened Jews to animals and disease: “The Poisonous Serpent” ended with
the words, “If we do not kill the Jewish poisonous serpent, it will kill us!”
Deutschland: Sechster Teil,
a middle-school geography textbook, inveighed against the
Versailles Diktat
and called for the return of Germany’s African colonies. Even math textbooks were Nazified. Algebraic word problems asked how much a bomber weighs when empty if “on takeoff [it] carries twelve dozen bombs, each weighing ten kilos. The aircraft takes off for Warsaw, international centre of Jews. It bombs the town.”

Outside of school, the Hitler Youth taught obedience to Hitler. German rearmament would secure them their living space and their place in the sun. Hartwig’s twenty-one-year-old
Leutnant zur See
(second lieutenant) was, according to the
Report of the Interrogation of Survivors from U
517, “a typical Hitler Youth movement product, entirely lacking in manners and making a very poor impression.” The twenty-five-year-old Hartwig himself was “filled with ideals of false heroism and unyielding devotion to his Führer.”
Kapitänleutnant
Rolf Schauenburg, who took U-536 into the Baie des Chaleurs in 1943, was described in a similar report as a “fanatical and idealistic Nazi.”

Older officers, such as Helmut Martin, Hartwig’s engineering officer, born in 1913, might have been out of school by 1933 when Hitler took power, but they were no less influenced by the currents that Hitler melded into National Socialism. Even during the Weimar Republic, Germany’s schools denounced Versailles as a
Diktat
and pressed for its removal. Naval histories—not to mention wardroom chatter—blamed Germany’s loss in the First World War on politicians who temporized before authorizing “unrestricted submarine warfare” until it was too late; a mere seventeen U-boats almost brought England to its knees.

As historian Michael Hadley has shown, popular culture hardly depicted the navy as being free of anti-Semitism.
U-boots-Maschinist Fritz Kasten (Fritz Kasten: U-boat Engineer),
published in 1933—the year Hitler consolidated power—underlined the “breakthrough of the racial ideal” embodied by National Socialism and tellingly ended with a scene of German sailors marching in columns with Nazi “brown shirts who were ready to sacrifice their lives for this hour.” A year after the war began, U-boat ace Joachim Schepke wrote in
Submarines of Today: Narrated by a U-boat Commander
that while the youngest member of a U-boat crew might
be called Moses, no one should think that he was a Jew, for no “seaman would … share their space with such an aberration of nature.”
³

The men who saluted the White Ensign grew up singing “God Save the King” and believing that the swath of pink that girdled the map on the wall was as immutable as the white cliffs of Dover. Their history was of expansion across an all-but-empty continent, of stopping the Americans at Lundy’s Lane in Niagara and at Crysler’s Farm and, more recently, of defeating the kaiser’s army at Vimy Ridge. But though Canadians had shed blood in South Africa, their imperialism was more imaginative than real. Fed by the writings of Rudyard Kipling and the now-forgotten George A. Henty, Canadian boys grew up wanting to be like
Clive in India
—while at the same time learning that the real end of empire was self-government, something even discussed for India.

Canadian school readers contained stories about dogs stealing food from unsuspecting country folk. Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” is typical of the fare in the 1927 edition of
The Atlantic Readers.
The 1935 edition of
A Reader in Canadian Civics
surveyed the municipal, provincial and federal governments, explained how taxes are collected and pointed out the “curious fact that the Dominion cabinet has no base in law, and is not even mentioned in any statute, but is what is called a ‘convention’ of the constitution.” Published the same year Hitler pulled Germany out of the League of Nations, the reader ended with a chapter explaining Canada’s relationship to the League. History textbooks in the thirties gave as much space to the conscription crisis as they did to Passchendaele, the Somme and, of course, Vimy Ridge.

For men such as Geoffrey Smith, Ian Tate and John Chance (Chance, as commander of Fairmile 058, would search for survivors of HMCS
Shawinigan
in November 1944), the words “for King and Country” were redolent of more than just George VI and the land north of the 49th parallel. At Upper Canada College, Smith learned of the Long Parliament and the English Civil War, and of Drake and Nelson, who were honoured for both their martial brilliance and the part they played in the story of protecting English liberties. Tate, who came from a long line of naval men,
learned the same at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, and Chance studied the same Whig interpretation of history at Lisgar Collegiate in Ottawa. “When King George VI spoke on the radio at Christmas,” he remembers, “the three Chance boys stood up in the living room.”

For others—perhaps for most of the lower decks—political theory and even Nelson and Drake meant less than did the rough-hewn democracy of local elections and family allegiance to the Grits or the Tories. Theirs was the same democracy that made it difficult for Canadian servicemen to salute when the officer was the fellow who lived in the same town and used to deliver the mail, the same democracy that shocked the British officer corps when Canadian troops booed Prime Minister Mackenzie King when he visited them in England.

Frank Curry, who ended the war as a leading seaman of HMCS
Caraquet,
remembers growing up in Winnipeg. “My father and older brother didn’t believe war would come, but I knew from listening to Hitler’s rantings and ravings through the 1930
S
that war was coming. When I joined the navy in 1940, I left a good clerking job in Ottawa, one that I’d just gotten after taking a nationwide test; it paid $90 a month, which was fantastic money after the long, dark years of the Depression.

“I joined a day after another guy from the office joined. I remember he told me he was going to join, and then I realized that I had a duty to my country. And the men who joined with me, we all felt that Canada had taken on this war and that we had to stand up with Britain and against Hitler and all he represented. There was no rah-rah enthusiasm, but we knew what we were fighting against and why.”

OCTOBER 9, 1942

At
11:48
p.m. on October 5, 1942, the day after NL-9, a convoy of four merchant ships escorted by HMCS
Arrowhead
and
Hepatica,
sailed from Collinghams Cove, Labrador, for Rigolet, Quebec, Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service) manning secret listening posts at East Baccaro, Nova Scotia, heard a “whurrp” and reached for their pencils and blue message pads. Over the next few seconds, they copied down dots, dashes and call letters, which were then sent by secure land line to Halifax. A year earlier, the code would have been sent on to Bletchley Park, England, where Alan Turing’s “bomb,” the electronic marvel that unbuttoned the German Enigma code, would have been able to decode the message. Within an hour or two, it would have told the Admiralty precisely what
Kapitänleutnant
Ulrich Gräf on U-69 was telling Lorient.