The Battle of the St. Lawrence (29 page)

Lacking the centimetric radar that would be available in 1943, EAC’s planes were not always able to locate the U-boats in the St. Lawrence. Canadian
escort ships were also hampered by the bathyscaphe effect that blinded asdic. Nor were Canadians equipped with “hedgehogs,” which fired charges off the ship’s bow, thus ending the problem of having to run over the submarine—a manoeuvre that meant that asdic contact was lost at the very moment the weapons were being fired. It was “hedgehogs” that helped turned the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943.

Nevertheless, by mid-October 1942, while they may not have registered any kills, EAC and the RCN had learned to work together well enough that they were routinely breaking up attacks—attacks that, because they were foiled, were unknown to Roy, the editors of
L’Action Catholique
and even the staff at Naval Service Headquarters. Indeed, no less an authority than
Grossadmiral
Dönitz credited Canadian “air power” with making the St. Lawrence a less-than-felicitous place for his “grey wolves.”

OCTOBER 14, 1942

At 3:25 a.m., after a forty-three-second run, compressed between the hull of
Caribou
and the body of the Type G7e torpedo, the firing pin in the nose of torpedo No. 20236 touched its ground. Instantaneously, electricity generated by the spinning of the small five-bladed propeller on the tip of the nose cone surged from a coil to the primer in the detonator. Nanoseconds later, 260 kilograms of
Schieswolle 36
underwent what chemical engineers call a “change-of-state reaction,” which released enough energy to ignite the main charge. Within a second, the steel plates that divided
Caribou’s
engine room from the icy waters of the Cabot Strait were shattered by a white-hot bubble expanding at thousands of metres per second.

Before the geyser caused by the blast that ripped through
Caribou
‘s hull collapsed, thousands of tons of water were already pouring into the ship’s engine room. The combined effect of the explosion and the cold water washing over the ship’s boilers ensured that within a minute or two they blew apart. As the water spread through her shredded bulkheads—as hundreds of men, women and children on the ferry began to run for their lives—the ionosphere above the St. Lawrence carried the message to Sydney:
“Caribou
torpedoed.”

By morning, 137 men, women and children would be dead, including 31 of
Caribou’s
46 crew. The small town of Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, lost 16 men and 1 woman, including three Taverners—Captain Ben Taverner, First Mate Stanley Taverner, Third Mate Harold Taverner—Fireman Garf Strickland and his brother Albert, an able seaman; Bosun Elisha Coffin and his able-seaman brother Bert; Assistant Steward Jerome Gale and Oiler George Gale; and Chief Steward Harry Hann and his don-keyman brother Clarence. On October 19, an unnamed, unclaimed baby boy found floating in a white nightdress was buried in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

The attack on
Caribou
did not come as a complete surprise. Long before people died in the Cabot Strait, tensions ran high on the main link between Newfoundland and Canada. “A year or two before she was hit,” recalls Ruth Fullerton, who travelled to Newfoundland often to visit her parents, “there had just been a spate of sinkings off St. John’s, so it was too dangerous to take a ship directly to St. John’s. I took the
Caribou
to Port aux Basques (and then had to take the Newfie Bullet, the train to St. John’s). We were very apprehensive on that trip; we had the sense something was going to happen. We stayed dressed and up all night. Mercifully, we arrived safely.”

Even as EAC and the RCN were disrupting Gräf’s, Rasch’s and Schwandtke’s war cruises, tensions mounted. Why, people in both Sydney and Port aux Basques asked, did
Caribou
keep to her published schedule? Why did the navy insist on her travelling blacked-out, at night and with an escort—all signals that she was a military ship and thus a legitimate target? Though, according to the Geneva Convention, since she carried military personnel and equipment, she was. Wouldn’t her passengers and crew have a
better chance of survival if she travelled during the day? Seven months after Gräf’s torpedo struck
Caribou,
Onésime Gagnon, the unofficial deputy leader of the Union Nationale, told the Quebec legislature that federal air minister Power had been told of the planned attack fifteen days before it occurred.

On October
11
, at her brother’s urging, Fullerton abruptly changed her plans to travel from Sydney. “I had gone down to Sydney to see my brother, Lieutenant David M. Howrich, and wanted to go on to see Father, who was in Newfoundland,” recalls Fullerton. “But David told me, ‘Don’t go. Lord Haw Haw has been saying they are going to take her [the
Caribou
] out.’ I remember thinking that they’d never waste a torpedo on the poor old
Caribou
; three days later she was sunk.”

The hours before and after
Caribou’s
sailing (right on schedule at 8 p.m. on October 13) were filled with prophetic warnings. After looking at his sailing orders, Captain Taverner told wireless operator Tommy Fleming, “They put us in a queer lane; this is the night we are going to get it.”
⁶
William Lundrigan, who just a week earlier had crossed from Newfoundland without a moment’s hesitation, was inexplicably uneasy. Nervous, both Vivian Swinamer and Gladys Shiers (who was travelling with her eighteen-month-old son, Leonard) decided to sleep with their clothes on. Hours before he found himself running for his life, William Metcalf told his cabin mate he had “a funny feeling that something is going to happened to this ship tonight.”

By contrast, Royal Canadian Navy nursing sisters Agnes Wilkie and Margaret Brooke, who were returning to Newfoundland after a short visit home, were unconcerned. “We were not apprehensive at all,” recalled Brooke, “when we boarded the
Caribou.
Usually you sleep with your clothes on, but for some reason, we just popped into our pyjamas.”

Lieutenant J. Cuthbert, RCNVR, commander of the Bangor minesweeper HMCS
Grandmère,
began this mission with concern. Standard operation procedures laid down by Western Approaches headquarters in Liverpool dictated that when escorting a single ship, the escort should sweep behind the ship being escorted. Whether Cuthbert pointed out to his superiors that all RN escorts were equipped with radar that could sweep
ahead
of the ship being escorted is unknown, but there is no doubt that he knew
Grandmère
could not sweep ahead of a ship she was following. Worse, he told the commander
of the Sydney naval base, if the
Caribou
was in front, the “noise of her engines would make it impossible for
Grandmère’s
Asdic operator to pick up the sounds of a U-boat’s propeller.” Cuthbert’s commander rejected his suggestion that
Grandmère
zigzag ahead of the ferry or circle it. Hours later, while keeping his assigned escort station behind
Caribou,
Cuthbert’s practised hand wrote, “very dark, no moon, funnel visible 2,500 yards. Very poor smoke dis-cipline”—words pregnant with meaning. For they tell us that despite
Caribou
‘s being blacked-out, the phosphorescence of the sea made the ship visible from at least a mile away.

At 12:30 a.m., as
Caribou
steamed into quadrant BB 5456, approximately forty miles off Port aux Basques, nursing sisters Wilkie and Brooke lay sleeping in their cabin. Lundrigan, who had given up his cabin to a couple with children, found that, unlike for his lounge mate Paddy Walsh of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, who went to sleep early, sleep would not come. Before he finally dozed off around 3 a.m., Lundrigan got up four times to trace his way to his lifeboat station. In the Mail Assorting Office, the domain of the Newfoundland Post Office, Ship Mail Clerk Howard Cutler tended to cancelling the stamps on the letters and cards in the 1,145 bags of mail that had been loaded in Sydney. On the bridge, Captain Taverner, perhaps having pushed his forebodings aside, no doubt savoured the feeling of command, for soon he’d relinquish the captaincy of
Caribou
to his eldest son, First Mate Stanley Taverner. Third Mate Harold Taverner’s presence on board was equally serendipitous; he was substituting for a friend who had taken a few days off to get married.

A thousand yards away, its conning tower not more than twenty feet above the water, rode U-69, which after days of evading EAC’s planes had been sent to the area to intercept three grain ships—SS
Eros, Formosa
and
Camelia—
only to find them to be Swedish ships and therefore neutral. In the darkened interior of the fetid submarine, clocks read 0530 Berlin time, and one-third of the crew clung to the last few minutes of sleep.

Four minutes later, Gräf spotted off his starboard bow “I silhouette … with another, small one beyond.” Helped by the “weak northern lights,” across a sea with two-foot swells, he identified it, more or less as
Jane’s Ships
for 1942 did: a “passenger cargo freighter of roughly 6,500 GRT [gross registered tonnes].” Like Cuthbert, he couldn’t help adding that it was “belching black
smoke.” Had his identification of its escort off its starboard quarter as a “2-funnel destroyer” been correct, the 131 men, women and children who died before 5 a.m. local time might have made it to Port aux Basques alive—such an escort would have been a River-class destroyer, equipped with up-to-date radar and asdic that just might have caught U-69 sometime over the next three hours, time Gräf used to manoeuvre himself into firing position.

At 3:21 a.m.—while in Berlin commuters were thankful that the night of the thirteenth had passed without a heavy bombing—torpedo No. 20236 exploded, three feet below the waterline of a ferry in the St. Lawrence.

As Cuthbert’s radio man tapped out the words
“Caribou
torpedoed,” Cuthbert called Action Stations, rang for full speed and ordered a course toward the stricken ship. Engine artificers turned valves that let hundreds of pounds more of steam into the engines, which instantaneously started the reciprocating cranks—and thus the propeller—turning faster.

Several hundred yards away, another set of unyielding physical laws was at work. Thousands of tons of 54°F (12°C) water poured into the blasted hull, washing over the hot steel of
Caribou
‘s already damaged boilers. The first few thousand gallons turned immediately to steam. Then, as the outside of the boiler’s steel plates cooled toward the water temperature and the temperature inside the boiler remained above 300°F (150°C),
Caribou’s
boilers experienced thermal shock and, like a cold ceramic pot placed on a red-hot stove element, blew apart, further rending the ship.

The human drama in the ship’s tilted, blasted passageways was compounded by other forces. The pressure of the water surging into the passages and hatchways nearest the shredded hull approached that in a firehose—enough to bowl over all but the strongest or those lucky enough to grab a fitting securely enough joined to the ship’s bulkheads.

Laden with 235 souls, 450 tons of cargo, 4 railroad cars of PEI potatoes and 50 lowing cattle destined to feed Newfoundland, Taverner’s ship was already sailing at the height of its Plimsoll lines.
⁷
Before Cuthbert’s propeller was turning at full speed, those lines were irrelevant.
Caribou
had listed “down to her [port] railings,” according to Gräf.

The blast, which destroyed two of the starboard lifeboats, knocked Harry
Jones, the ship’s chief cook, from his bunk on the ship’s port side, some ten feet behind the farthest reach of the wreckage caused by the torpedo’s blast. Despite a fractured hip and shoulder, he managed to open his cabin door and then fought his way through the rushing water and tilting passageways to his lifeboat station.

Lundrigan was blown off the chaise longue upon which he’d finally fallen asleep. At first, he and the other men in the cabin were stunned. Then they realized they’d been torpedoed. People ran in all directions. The lights went out. They could hear the steam escaping from the blasted boilers—and the water rushing into the ship. Lundrigan ran to his lifeboat station, losing on the way a shoe that he’d carefully tied in the dark.

Asleep in the lounge when the torpedo hit, A. R. Fielding was just yards away from his lifeboat station. But because his wife was asleep in their cabin, as the ship began to tilt he ran into the darkened interior. Each step was a fight against the human tide of passengers who were struggling through the topsy-turvy passageways and hatchways. Somehow he found her, and together they joined the human tide rushing toward the main deck. When they got there, he put a lifebelt on her and, thinking it was her only chance, threw her overboard.

Before Fielding could dive in, a woman ran by and handed him her child, saying she was running back to her cabin for another. “I passed it on to someone on a raft …. She never reappeared.” He never saw the baby again.

Captain Taverner could see none of this. He was in his cabin when the torpedo hit, and by the time he ran to the bridge, the deck was totally obscured by steam escaping from the blasted pipes and boilers. He then ran to the boat deck, where he discovered two horrible truths that Lundrigan and almost two hundred others were discovering: there were too few lifeboats and rafts left and too few crew left alive to properly launch them. The last sight anyone had of Taverner was of his returning to the bridge after trying and failing to launch a raft.

At Lundrigan’s lifeboat station, a disaster unfolded. The lifeboat’s lines were twisted, and, to make matters worse, men and women had boarded it before the lines were straightened. Still, Lundrigan and some other men tried to launch
Caribou’s
No. 2 boat. “We couldn’t get the boats out. The ropes were twisted and they wouldn’t slide down.” Then apparent success,
followed by more tragedy: “After a long time working at it, we got it down, [but] she wouldn’t go down in a proper fashion …. And when she went down, she went down suddenly. When the twist came out of the ropes there was not a single soul in her when she went down into the water,” he later told an interviewer.