The Battle of the St. Lawrence (34 page)

Equipped with a false identity card for Fred Thomlinson of Toronto, a Northern Electric Company licence issued by the Royal Canadian Engineers and a document apparently signed by Admiral Murray authorizing geological research in the area of Pointe Maisonnette, New Brunswick, Heyda headed east. He stopped first in Montreal, where he hid for a day in a theatre, apparently watching a western. Then he caught a train to the Baie des Chaleurs.

As Heyda was making his way to the Baie des Chaleurs, Piers received the message “Only Aunt Kate is coming to dinner,” telling him that an escape had occurred and that the attempted pickup operation was on. “We’d been there a couple of days before I got that signal,” recalls Piers. “The radar units and shore patrols were set up, as was my headquarters in the lighthouse. And the ships were hidden a mile or two away. We played a lot of cards waiting.”

Three or so miles away, another naval commander, U-boat captain Schauenburg, also waited. Early in the evening, he’d had a close call. “Just after going under,” recalled his executive officer, Wolfgang Von Bartenwerffer, “we heard propeller noises, and this was surprising because everything had been so quiet.” Von Bartenwerffer’s commander summoned his officers to the mess and then asked each of them what he thought about the situation. “Something is wrong. We have a bad feeling, and it looks like a trap,” they agreed. They then checked their map of the bay and found that there was only one spot with a depth of at least forty metres, deep enough for the U-boat to have a chance at surviving a depth-charge attack. Without risking raising his periscope again, Schauenburg ordered a course for the deepest water available to him.

“On the day we’d been told to expect something [September 26],” recalls Piers, “about 9 p.m., I got a call telling me that the radar had picked up the submarine. I decided to wait before calling the ships into action. Then I got another call, this one from the shore patrol. The message—‘We have a guy here making his holiday. He’s pretty mad. He says you are ruining his holi
day. Should I let him go?’—was code. I immediately knew we had our man and replied, ‘No, don’t. Take the fellow and bring him up here. If he tries to get away, shoot him in the legs. Whatever you do, don’t let him escape.’

“Twenty minutes later or so, they brought him up. I wasn’t in uniform, so he did not know I was a naval officer. He began to harangue me about interfering with his holidays. He tried to make a strong case for himself. I asked if I could look in his briefcase. He produced a few papers that were in German. One of his papers was from Northern Electric. It thanked him for the work he’d done for the Battle of the Atlantic.”

Piers then asked him, “What do you do for money?” The prisoner’s wallet was full of ten-dollar bills, hundreds of dollars worth. “The only thing,” recalls Piers, “was that they were all from 1911, honouring the coronation of George V. I knew they’d gone out of circulation years ago.”

Piers reached into Heyda’s briefcase and pulled out a circular typewriter-ribbon box. “I opened it and found in it a compass. ‘That’s what I use for orienteering,’ he said.”

Next Piers pulled out a small object wrapped in paper. He unwrapped it and found German chocolate issued by the Red Cross.

Finally, Piers pulled out a letter, apparently signed by Chief of Naval Staff Percy Nelles. “His other documents were rather finely done. His ID card, especially, looked just like a real one, even though it had been forged by hand. Nelles’s signature was, however, nothing like the real one, which I knew quite well. After looking at it for a moment, I looked straight at him and said, ‘I am Lieutenant Desmond Piers of the Royal Canadian Navy and you are Wolfgang Heyda, an escaped POW, and I will have to turn you over to the RCMP.’”

Just as Heyda was finishing giving his name, rank and serial number, Piers’s radar operator called out, “Sir, we’ve got a contact.” Piers alerted
Rimouski
to close in.

Had Schauenburg’s Metox been working, he would have known he’d been picked up by Piers’s radar, but since late on September 26, he had already suspected that the Canadians were waiting for him. According to his second lieutenant, just before leaving the Baie des Chaleurs on the twenty-sixth (so
that he could surface and recharge his batteries), Schauenburg spotted Piers’s task force. Instead of moving out of the bay, he stayed submerged, watching the disposition of the ships. At one point he saw “the corvette, lying off the point [where the pickup was to occur], move off” and be replaced by another, a manoeuvre that, in the words of the Allied intelligence officer who interviewed Schauenburg, made it “abundantly clear to him that the German plans were known.”

Later, Schauenburg’s suspicions were confirmed. Despite a dazzling display of the northern lights, he saw a light flashing
“Komm Komm”
(“Come closer, come closer”) in plain Morse code instead of the pre-arranged signal. Scant moments later, “distant explosions of depth charges” were “heard.” Taken on their own, they could have been “exercise bombs,” but taken with the deployment of ships and the unexpected signal, Schauenburg recorded the explosions as either “scare bombs,” designed to make him move and show himself, or real depth charges fired at a false target.

Schauenburg’s assumption was wrong. The depth charges were real enough, but were not fired off as part of a carefully co-ordinated attack but, rather, as a defensive measure. “We cruised in,” recalls Pickford, “feeling naked indeed. We had no defence against the Gnat torpedo. The tactics were to drop a depth charge from time to time “to distract the acoustic homing torpedo.”
¹³

Piers’s radar bearings gave Pickford a general idea of where to attack, but, as had so often been the case in the Battle of the St. Lawrence, the RCN’s plans were undone by the bathyscaphe effect. “The asdic conditions in the shallow Baie des Chaleurs were just hopeless,” Pickford recalls. “We got no contact.”

Schauenburg’s next manoeuvre compounded the RCN’s problems. Instead of making a run for it, he decided that the only way to save his ship was to do exactly what the attacking ships would never expect: to head for shallower waters, where the U-boat would be in greater danger if it were depth-charged but so would the attacking ships.

The ploy worked.
Rimouski
and its consorts and Piers’s radar spent the rest of the day and the night searching the waters off Maisonette Point. “They couldn’t find a bloody thing,” recalls Piers. “The next morning, there was the sun sparkling on the water and nothing in sight, as if nothing had happened there.”

Forty metres below the dappled water, however, the situation aboard U-536 was rapidly deteriorating. They’d been underwater for almost two full days. “We had no fresh air in the boat, and the crew needed to get out because without air we would start feeling sleepy and die.”

With the Canadian ships still trawling for him, and with just a few metres of water above his conning tower and as little below his keel, Schauenburg used his silent electric motors to ease U-536 out of the Baie des Chaleurs. One officer recalled the nerve-racking experience during his interrogation: “We could hear with our own ears the propellers of the ships going over our boat, and we guessed that in the coming seconds depth charges would explode and sink or damage us, but nothing happened …. We said to each other, ‘Our last hour has come.’”

But the gambit worked, though not before U-536 got caught in a fishing net. The fishing trawler was so close that Schauenburg’s crew heard the sound of the boat’s winches pulling in the net. Not until October 5, when he was within 180 miles of Cape St. Mary’s, Newfoundland, did Schauenburg radio Lorient,
“Kiebitz verpfiffen”:
“Operation Magpie blown.”

Six weeks later, on November 20, east of the Azores, U-536 became the only submarine that invaded the St. Lawrence to be sunk by a largely Canadian force. As Hadley writes,

Most of the seventeen men who survived the depth-charging and the subsequent machine-gunning of those who made for U-536’s deck gun were picked up by
Snowberry.
A story published on February i, 1944, quoted
Snowberry’s
captain, Lieutenant J. A. Dunn, RCNVR, telling the Canadian people—who by then had endured four years of war, the disaster of Dieppe, the loss of nine warships including
Raccoon
and
Charlottetown
to enemy fire and the sinking of nineteen ships in Canada’s inland waters, and who were now daily reading of their troops fighting in Italy—something they desperately wanted to hear: “There was no evidence to make us believe that these [men] were members of a ‘Master Race.’ They were a very docile and thankful collection of survivors.”

O
n June 6, 1944, against almost 7,000 vessels (including 110 Canadian destroyers, frigates, corvettes and minesweepers) standing off the Normandy coast, the once powerful
U-Bootwaffe
could muster only 36 operational U-boats.
¹
Over the course of D-Day, as the Allies disgorged more than 130,000 troops along a fifty-mile strip, famously divided into Gold, Sword, Juno, Utah and Omaha beaches, Dönitz’s men sank a single ship, the Norwegian destroyer
Svenner.
Allied ships and planes sank nine U-boats before BdU ordered back to their bases the remnants of the fleet that had once terrorized the Atlantic and sailed as far up the St. Lawrence as Rimouski.

In the year since Black May, when 41 U-boats were sunk and another 37 badly damaged—numbers that prompted Dönitz to withdraw U-boats from the North Atlantic and to confide to his diary, “We have lost the Battle of the Atlantic”—thousands of Allied ships and planes had relentlessly pursued the U-boats. Deployed according to ever-more-accurate intelligence (Ultra decrypts were in Admiral Murray’s hands in Halifax almost as fast as U-boat commanders had the original signals in theirs), Allied ships and planes with more accurate radar and sonar and more deadly munitions sank 286 U-boats. Allied shipping losses dropped from almost 525,000 tons in March 1942 to just under 165,000 tons in May 1943. A month later they
had fallen to 18,000 tons. The average monthly losses in the six months leading up to D-Day were some 30,000 tons; in the month before D-Day, U-boats destroyed only 15,000 tons of shipping, the second-lowest monthly total since the war began.

Though overshadowed by the USN and the RN, which between May 1943 and D-Day sank fifty-six and eighty-five U-boats respectively, the RCN acquitted itself well. Between May 13, 1943, when HMCS
Drumheller
received partial credit for sinking U-753, and April 22, 1944, when HMCS
Matane
and
Swansea
combined to sink U-311, fourteen RCN ships had taken part in sinking another nine U-boats. By the end of 1944, another eleven RCN ships would sink eight more U-boats. On July 7, 1944, an attack group composed of HMS
Statice
and HMCS
Ottawa II
and
Kootenay
sank U-678. On August 18, 1944, an entirely Canadian attack group, EG-
11
(HMCS
Ottawa II, Chaudiere
and
Kootenay),
sank U-621; it was U-984’s turn two days later. Thus did the RCN demonstrate that it had overcome the manning and training difficulties that had caused its withdrawal from the North Atlantic in 1943.

But even as the
Freikorps Dönitz
lost thousands of men between May 1943 and October 1944, the U-boat force fought on. From the beginning of the war,
der Löwe
(the Lion), as his men called Dönitz, assiduously cultivated the
U-Bootwaffe’s
esprit de corps—by greeting returning boats at the dock, by arranging for special trains to transport crews on liberty to spas and other rest areas, by making allowances for misbehaviour on shore, by personally lending money, by ensuring that U-boat crews had special food and chocolate. He even allowed personal messages to be broadcast from Lorient, the most famous being the news to one expectant father that “a U-boat with a periscope arrived today. “
²

Morale held among the “grey wolves” despite devastating losses. During the first four months of 1944, 80 per cent of U-boats that put to sea were sunk. Still, Werner Hirschmann, chief engineer of U-190, recalls, “We were young and sure of ourselves; it was always the ‘other guy’ who wasn’t going to make it back.”
Kapitänleutnant
Helmut Schmoekel, commander of U-802, recalled in an interview, “We left Kiel in January 1944. I was so optimistic that I told my fiancée that when I get back in May we will be married.”

As both Herbert Werner (U-415) and Peter Cremer (U-333) make clear
in their memoirs, one of the reasons morale held was the
U-Bootwaffe’s
faith that Dönitz’s long-delayed promise of new technologies would be fulfilled. In the middle of Black May, historian Peter Padfield notes in his biography of Dönitz, the
Grossadmiral
signalled all boats: