The Battle of the St Lawrence begins

Shortly before midnight local time on 11 May 1942 the German submarine U-553 torpedoed the British steamer Nicoya in the Gulf of St Lawrence, a dozen or so kilometres off the northern coast of the Gaspé Peninsula. A few hours later, at around 2.30 a.m. on 12 May, the same boat sank the Dutch steamer Leto a little further west. U-553 was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Karl Thurmann. The boat’s log, kept in German time, recorded both attacks under 12 May, and that is the date tradition has adopted. Canada dates the Battle of the St Lawrence – the U-boat campaign in waters Canadians regarded as their own inland waters – from that night.

A boat that came in from the Atlantic

U-553 was a Type VIIC (PL) boat, the workhorse of the German submarine fleet. Thurmann had commanded her since her commissioning in December 1940. She left Saint-Nazaire on her seventh war patrol on 19 April 1942. Since January, when Operation Drumbeat began, German submarines had been sinking ships off the coasts of Canada and the United States. After the Americans began escorting ships by day from anchorage to anchorage in April, the U-boat commander, Karl Dönitz, shifted more and more boats south towards the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. American defences were in any case beginning to score their first successes: on the night of 13–14 April the destroyer USS Roper sank U-85. Canadian waters, however, remained the hunting ground of individual boats.

The Kriegsmarine had planned no separate operation in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The Canadian naval historian Marc Milner writes that U-553 was meant to operate in the Atlantic off Newfoundland, but damage sustained during the patrol led Thurmann to look for quiet waters in which to carry out repairs. That is how he came into the Gulf. Veterans Affairs Canada presents the incursion as part of the German offensive on the North American coast. Both versions agree on one point: the attack was not a prepared operation but the exploitation of an opportunity. The shipping season on the St Lawrence River had only just begun, and ships from Montreal and Quebec were sailing down the river singly and without escort.

The night of 11–12 May

The Nicoya, a ship of 5,364 gross register tons owned by the London firm of Elders & Fyffes, had left Montreal on 10 May for Avonmouth with about 3,800 tons of general cargo, including aircraft. According to Milner, Thurmann shadowed her for about an hour. The first torpedo struck the ship a dozen or so kilometres north of Pointe-à-la-Frégate, between the Gaspé Peninsula and Anticosti Island. She did not sink at once, and only a second torpedo, fired a quarter of an hour or so later, sent her to the bottom. By then most of those aboard had managed to get into the boats. Six men were killed: five members of the crew and one gunner. More than eighty survivors, among them several passengers, reached the shore near the Fame Point lighthouse and the villages of Cloridorme and L’Anse-à-Valleau.

A few hours later U-553 came across the Leto by chance, a Dutch steamer of 4,712 tons carrying grain from Montreal via Quebec and Halifax to Britain. She was sailing on behalf of the British Ministry of War Transport. A single torpedo hit her in the engine room, about 8 nautical miles north of Cap de la Madeleine. The Leto sank within a quarter of an hour or so. Only one small boat and a raft could be put in the water, and survivors spent as long as several hours in the cold sea. Twelve men died, among them the chief engineer and one of four Dutch officers travelling as passengers after the loss of their own tanker. He was pulled from the water still alive but died of hypothermia.

Veterans Affairs Canada, like many studies, describes the attack as the first since the War of 1812 (1812–1815) in which a foreign enemy had killed people in Canada’s inland waters. The U-boat campaign against Canadian shipping, however, had already been under way since January in the Atlantic, off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. What was new was that the war had penetrated deep into the country, onto the route that led straight to its largest ports.

Canada’s response

In May 1942 the Gulf was guarded by modest forces. The base at Gaspé, HMCS Fort Ramsay, had been commissioned only a week before the attack. Since the beginning of 1942 the Royal Canadian Navy had given first priority to escorting ocean convoys, and the new Flower-class corvettes and minesweepers served above all in the Atlantic. Pre-war plans had assumed that in the event of an attack in the Gulf, striking forces made up of pairs of corvettes would go into action. In the spring of 1942 not one of them yet existed.

So the navy did what it could. Independent sailings in the Gulf were suspended, and on 17 May the first convoys of the new QS–SQ series sailed from Sydney and Quebec. Their protection was entrusted to the newly formed Gulf Escort Force: two corvettes, five Bangor-class minesweepers, three Fairmile motor launches and one armed yacht. The Royal Canadian Air Force, which had begun patrolling the Gulf on 11 May after a false submarine report on 8 May, sent aircraft to the training airfield at Mont-Joli and moved No. 117 Squadron, with its Canso and Catalina flying boats, to North Sydney, with a detachment forward at Gaspé.

On 12 May naval headquarters issued a brief communiqué: the first attack on shipping in the St Lawrence River had taken place on 11 May, and any further sinkings in the area would not be announced, so as not to give information to the enemy. The Minister for the Navy, Angus L. Macdonald, issued a similar statement when news of the Leto came in. Keeping the matter secret proved impossible. Lifeboats were coming ashore on the Gaspésie coast in full view of the inhabitants, and on 13 May German radio boasted that U-boats were operating so far from the open sea for the first time. The press and Parliament began to ask how the navy could have allowed this to happen.

The affair came at a delicate moment. Two weeks earlier, in the plebiscite of 27 April, Canadians had released the government from its promise not to send conscripts overseas, but Quebec had voted against. News of the sinkings reached Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King on 12 May, just before a meeting with embittered members of parliament from that province. According to the official history of the Royal Canadian Navy, King, who was given to spiritualism, received it with relief and saw it in his diary as a sign of “guidance”: war on Quebec’s own shores was the best way of convincing its people that the war concerned them too.

The rest of the campaign

Thurmann did not wait for a counter-attack. He left the Gulf and by 21 May was in the Bay of Fundy, at the entrance to the port of Saint John. At the beginning of June he sank one more British ship, and later that month he returned to France. The next U-boat appeared in the Gulf only in July. On 6 July U-132 sank three ships of convoy QS-15 near Rimouski. In late August and September U-517 and U-165 inflicted the heaviest losses of the whole campaign on the convoys. U-165 sank the armed yacht HMCS Raccoon with all 37 hands, and U-517 the corvette HMCS Charlottetown. On 9 September the government closed the St Lawrence River and Gulf to transatlantic shipping; traffic was restricted to essential coastal voyages, and cargoes from the interior were carried by rail to Halifax and Sydney. The closure lasted until 1944. On 14 October U-69 sank the ferry Caribou, sailing from Sydney to Newfoundland, in the Cabot Strait. Either 136 or 137 people died, among them women and children. The 1942 campaign ended in November with the landing at New Carlisle of the German spy Werner von Janowski, who was arrested almost immediately.

According to figures compiled by Veterans Affairs Canada, in 1942 U-boats sank 19 merchant and passenger ships and two warships in the Gulf, the St Lawrence River and the Cabot Strait. By 1944, when U-boats briefly returned there, the losses had risen to 23 vessels. U-553 did not survive to see the end of the campaign. In January 1943, a few days after leaving La Pallice, Thurmann reported damage to his periscope. The boat then disappeared without trace in the Atlantic south-west of Ireland with all 47 of her crew.

Place in the war

For the course of the Battle of the Atlantic the Battle of the St Lawrence was a side show. Yet a handful of submarines in the confined waters of the Gulf, where layers of water of different temperature and salinity hampered the sonars of the day, tied down forces that Canada lacked on the ocean. Closing the route put a strain on the railways but simplified the organisation of the Atlantic convoys, which sailed from Halifax and Sydney in any case. The Canadian navy did not withdraw ships from escorting convoys to Britain, the Soviet Union and later North Africa, even though calls in Parliament for it to do so grew ever louder.

The political consequences proved the most lasting. The people of Gaspésie watched burning ships and wreckage washed ashore, while the censors would not let the newspapers write about it. Many French-speaking Canadians took this as proof that Ottawa was neglecting the defence of their province. When in the summer the member of parliament for Gaspé demanded an explanation, Macdonald accused Quebec of complaining more than his own native Maritime provinces. The dispute fed into the tensions over conscription that were to last in Canada until the end of the war. The night of 11–12 May 1942 remained in Canadian memory as the moment when the war in the Atlantic reached their own river.