The sinking of the Caribou

At about 3.40 a.m. local time on 14 October 1942 the German submarine U-69 torpedoed the passenger ferry Caribou in the Cabot Strait, a few dozen kilometres from Port aux Basques. The ship, sailing from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Newfoundland, sank within minutes. Of the 237 people on board, 136 or 137 were killed, among them women and ten children. The sinking of the ferry is sometimes described as the deadliest U-boat attack off the coasts of Canada and Newfoundland during the war.

A ferry between two countries

The Caribou was built in Rotterdam in 1925 for the Newfoundland Railway. A steamer of about 2,200 tons, 80 metres long, she had run between North Sydney and Port aux Basques since 1928. The service was vitally important, because Newfoundland was not then part of Canada. It was a separate British dominion which, after the collapse of its public finances in 1934, had suspended self-government and handed power to a Commission of Government made up of officials appointed in London. The war turned the island into an important base. Canadian and American troops were stationed there, patrol aircraft flew out over the Atlantic from the airfields at Gander and Torbay, and convoy escorts were based at St. John’s. The ferry across the Cabot Strait was the main route by which soldiers, sailors, workers on military construction sites and whole families travelled to and from the island.

The crew knew what they were risking. U-boats had been operating in the Gulf of St Lawrence since May, and the campaign that began on the night of 11–12 May had by September forced the Canadian government to close the river and the gulf to ocean-going shipping. The ferry kept running, because there was no other way to the island, but since the summer she had sailed at night under the escort of a single warship. On the previous crossing the Caribou’s escort had attacked a submarine contact, without result.

The last voyage

At about 9.30 p.m. on the evening of 13 October the Caribou left North Sydney. On board were 46 crew members, most of them Newfoundlanders from around Port aux Basques, and 191 passengers: 118 service personnel (Canadian, Newfoundland, British and American) and 73 civilians, among them 11 children. Captain Benjamin Tavernor, whose two sons also served on his ship, had all passengers acquaint themselves with their lifeboat stations before sailing. The ferry was escorted by the Bangor-class minesweeper HMCS Grandmère under Lieutenant James Cuthbert. In accordance with British instructions for a single escort, the minesweeper followed the ferry rather than leading her. Cuthbert regarded this as a mistake: from that position his asdic could not sweep the water in the ship’s path. The night was dark and moonless, and the Caribou was making heavy smoke.

U-69, a Type VIIC (PL) boat commanded by Kapitänleutnant Ulrich Gräf, had entered the gulf through the Cabot Strait on 30 September. On the night of 8–9 October, in the St Lawrence River, she sank the steamer Carolus from convoy NL-9 only some 275 kilometres from Quebec City, causing outrage in Quebec and Ottawa. She then returned towards the Cabot Strait, where she lay in wait for a grain convoy. At about 3.20 a.m. she sighted a smoking ship with an escort. According to her log, Gräf took the Caribou for a passenger-cargo ship of about 6,500 tons and the minesweeper for a two-funnelled destroyer. He fired a single torpedo, which hit the ferry on the starboard side.

Five minutes

The explosion threw sleeping passengers from their bunks. Many rushed onto the deck in the darkness to look for their loved ones, since families had been put in separate cabins. Some of the lifeboats and rafts were destroyed by the blast, and others could not be launched. The Caribou listed and sank after about five minutes, leaving hundreds of people in the icy October water or clinging to capsized boats and wreckage.

The crew of HMCS Grandmère spotted the surfaced submarine in the darkness and made for her, intending to ram. Gräf, still convinced he faced a destroyer, crash-dived. Cuthbert dropped six depth charges over the spot where she had dived, and later three more. As his log shows, Gräf steered his boat towards the sinking ferry, knowing that the people in the water would deter his opponent from further attacks, and released a Bold acoustic decoy. The minesweeper hunted for the U-boat for about two hours. Her captain faced a choice that recurred many times in the Battle of the Atlantic: under his orders the escort was first to pursue the attacker and only then to rescue survivors. At about 6.30 a.m. Cuthbert broke off the search and began picking people out of the water. For many it was already too late.

The Grandmère took on board 102 people and carried them to Sydney, where the hospitals were better equipped. Two of those rescued soon died of exposure, so 100 people survived. Fifty-seven service personnel, 49 civilians and 31 crew members were killed, 137 people in all, including the two who died after being rescued. Some sources, including the Newfoundland online encyclopaedia Heritage NL and the uboat.net database, give 136 victims, and that figure is often repeated in the literature. Of the eleven children, only fifteen-month-old Leonard Shiers of Halifax survived, kept alive on an upturned lifeboat. Captain Tavernor and both his sons were lost, as were the first and third officers. The Tapper family (five people), the Toppers (four), and the Allens and Skinners (three each) were hit especially hard. Among the dead was the Canadian naval nursing sister Agnes Wilkie. Her colleague Margaret Brooke held her up in the water for several hours by the rope of an overturned boat, until Wilkie lost consciousness and the waves carried her away. For this Brooke was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Wilkie was the only one of some 4,500 Canadian nursing sisters of the war to die as a result of direct enemy action.

Outrage and mourning

This time the Canadian censors did not conceal the sinking, since it concerned a passenger ship and hundreds of families. The newspapers wrote of “whole families wiped out”. The Naval Minister, Angus L. Macdonald, declared, as quoted by the press, that if any Canadian still needed proof of the vileness of the Nazi way of war, he now had it. In St. John’s, The Royalist wrote that it had been a crime of no military use, which would only strengthen the resolve to remove the “Nazi stain” from the world. The mourning fell most heavily on Port aux Basques and the surrounding settlements, where most of the crew came from. At the funeral of six of the victims on 18 October the procession, according to accounts, stretched for two kilometres.

For the Germans the Caribou was a target like any other. She was sailing under naval escort and carrying service personnel, and Gräf’s report described the sinking of a passenger-cargo ship escorted by a destroyer. The U-boat war waged by Karl Dönitz had long since ceased to spare passenger ships sailing in convoy or under escort. For Newfoundlanders and Canadians, however, what mattered was that women and children had died on the ferry they used every day.

Consequences

The Royal Canadian Navy changed its rules for escorting the ferry. The Caribou’s route was taken over by the smaller Burgeo, which now sailed only by day, and the escort was from then on to zigzag ahead of the ferry rather than follow behind. The affair also came up again in Ottawa, where for months the opposition and the press had accused the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King of neglecting the defence of the gulf. The navy’s answer was the same as in the summer: there were not enough ships, because most of the new corvettes and minesweepers were escorting ocean convoys. In September a Canadian escort group had lost several ships of convoy ON 127 in mid-Atlantic, and in the autumn some warships had to be given up to cover the Operation Torch convoys. Only modest and poorly trained forces remained in coastal waters, and the hydrographic conditions of the gulf hampered the asdic sets of the day.

U-69 remained off Newfoundland for a few more days. On 20 October she attacked the ore carrier Rose Castle off Bell Island, but the torpedo failed to explode. With no torpedoes left, the boat returned to France. In February 1943, on her next patrol, she was sunk in the Atlantic by a British destroyer with all hands, Gräf included.

Place in the war

Militarily, the sinking of the Caribou changed nothing. The U-boat campaign in the Gulf of St Lawrence was drawing to a close for 1942. At the beginning of November U-518 sank two ore carriers, the Rose Castle among them, off Bell Island in Conception Bay on the east coast of Newfoundland, and then landed a German agent on the shore of the Gaspé Peninsula, who was quickly caught. The gulf remained closed to ocean-going shipping until 1944. For the Battle of the Atlantic, whose outcome was being decided on the convoy routes of the mid-Atlantic, it was a side episode.

In the memory of Canadians, and still more of Newfoundlanders, however, the sinking of the ferry became one of the most painful events of the war. It showed that the submarine war had reached their own waters and was striking people who were neither soldiers at the front nor seamen in the convoys. Newfoundland, which joined Canada in 1949, commemorated the victims with, among other things, a monument at Port aux Basques, and the story of Margaret Brooke and Agnes Wilkie became part of the tradition of the Royal Canadian Navy, which named one of its patrol ships after Brooke.