Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 22.
One Family’s War
Tony German
A fine highway circles the Gaspé Peninsula joining small towns and fishing villages that were, even in the 1920s, linked only by the sea. The scenery is rugged and beautiful and this past October, 1995, when my wife and I drove down, it was quiet, lovely in its autumn colours, and peaceful. This was my personal battleficld revisit to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of ‘World War II, and each new vista of the Gulf of St. Lawrence was another reminder of a crucial battle which — little known to most Canadians — was fought right along these very shores.
In 1942 twenty-two ships were sunk by German U-boats in these Canadian waters, many within actual sight of shore. They were ships of all sorts: big ones loaded with war materiel from Montreal and Quebec City bound for Sydney to join ocean convoys to Britain and Russia; coasters with cargo for isolated outports and the strategically vital air base at Goose Bay; and their escorts like the tiny armed yacht HMCS Raccoon, sunk with no trace, and the corvette HMCS Charlottetown torpedoed with heavy loss of life.
There are no neat lines of gravestones, no monuments, not even an historic site plaque where the traveller might learn something more of our country’s past and ponder its sacrifices. Those ships and the sailors who manned them, whose bones lie just out there, are little remembered beyond local legend and the few left who were involved.
In that fateful summer of 1942 my father, Commander Barry German, was Naval Officer in Charge (NOIC) at the hastily built base in Gaspé and responsible for naval defences of the Gulf. He’d been one of the first class of seven cadets to join the Royal Canadian Navy when it was founded under Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, A minor cut on his thumb during a gun-drill session in early 1914 caused bloodpoisoning and he lost his left arm. He served at sea and ashore in World War I but at its end, in spite of his plea that Nelson continued to serve with one arm and only one eye to boot, he was deemed unfit for peacetime service and discharged in 1919. Back in uniform in September 1939 for shore duty, he was one of a very small band of Canadian naval officers with seagoing and wartime experience.
I had just been accepted for the new Royal Canadian Naval College at Royal Roads in Victoria, B.C., and had some leave before heading west, so I joined my family in Gaspé that July. The first sinkings had come in May 1942, just after the mnavigation season opened. They were due to a lone U-boat, sent to scout inside the Gulf en route to the rich killing ground along the eastern seaboard of the United States, which had torpedoed two unescorted ships within eight miles of the Gaspé shore.
Within two weeks all shipping moving in and out of the Gulf was organized in convoys of five to ten ships. To escort them only five minesweepers, three small 112-foot Fairmile motor launches and the little Raccoon could be spared from Halifax and Sydney. They all carried depth charges and ASDIC (a type of sonar) and were just adequate for the job. Seven corvettes, which were much more capable as anti-submarine escorts, and three more Fairmiles were added later. Three RCAF Catalina flying boats were stationed at Gaspé and more aircraft could be called in from Mont Joli, Chatham and Summerside, even some Anson trainers from the flying school at Charlottetown crewed by instructors and students. A patchwork force to defend a vital and vulnerable 1000 miles of the North Atlantic lifeline.
Very soon another U-boat sank three ships just off Cap Chat and another off Cap de la Madeleine. Survivors were brought in to Gaspé and the game was on in earnest. My father had little respite from urgent operational matters, and spent long periods in his operations room as well as administering the base with phone calls at all hours. Ilearned far more about him then than I had in all my seventeen years up to that time. He was gifted with a level head and sound judgment, a firm and steady hand, unfailing good humour and the ability to find and bring out the best in all those under his command.
My mother was endlessly busy organizing comforts for sailors at sea, corresponding with legions of people across Canada to raise money and resources, finding help for sailors’ families where sensitive antenna had detected that official channels wouldn’t or couldn’t fill the need, and keeping ongoing open house for ships” officers. She had a feel for all this; in the previous war she’d been a officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRENS) at the convoy escort base at Cork in southern Ireland. Soon after I arrived, the living room became an overflow hospital ward filled with survivors. My sister Gill was a‘constant support at home as well as working regular watches in the signals office. On one off-duty day, picnicking near Cap Desrosiers, she and her companions saw a surfaced U-boat and could only race in frustration to the nearest telephone.
It was a glorious Canadian summer in surroundings of rare beauty and things at sea were quiet for a time. There were beach parties. I fished Gaspé’s fabled rivers for salmon and the nearby estuaries for sea trout. I drove over to Percé and saw that earliest of Canadian images first described to Europeans by Jacques Cartier over four hundred years before. Monsieur Guité, our genial hotelier there, had a son who was an officer in the RCNVR, a daughter just off to join the WRENS and a young son whose appointed task was to comb the beaches for flotsam from sunken ships or even U-boats. Just beyond the great rock or looking down Gaspé Basin past the sandspit and the anti-submarine nets and the concrete emplacements of the gun batteries to the open sea, lay the cruel realities of war.
One convivial evening I jumped at a friendly invitation from Lieutenant Tom Golby, the captain of the corvette HMCS Weyburn, to go to sea for a couple of days of training before their next convoy. In mid-exercise a U-boat was reporied along the north shore of the Gulf. The Weyburn dashed off, with me aboard as a “makee-learn” or novice bridge watchkeeper, on a succession of searches and local escort tasks that took us far afield. The Gulf was due for more attention and on 4 September 1942, the Weyburn ran right into it.
We were in the Strait of Belle Isle inbound from Goose Bay and about midnight a small freighter called Donald Stewart, running in a nearby outbound convoy, was torpedoed. She was loaded with aviation gas and instantly ablaze and there, in the reflected light, was a U-boat running fast on the surface and so close ahead of the Weyburn that the conning tower literally filled the field of view of my binoculars. Tom Golby rang “full ahead” to ram. Our four-inch gun’s crew, who said later, “You could have hit her with a deck scrubber,” got off two rounds before she submerged, and missed. Our depth charges drew no blood; the contact went cold and the U-boat slipped away. All the escort could do was pick up the few survivors who were neither burned to death nor drowned.
The sinkings went on — more off Cap Chat and Cap de la Madeleine, one off the fashionable summer resort of Métis only 173 miles from Quebec City; one Uboat’s torpedo missed its mark and exploded on the beach at St. Yvon. And, in a dreadful close to this sombre chapter of our war, SS Caribou, the ferry between Sydney and Port aux Basques, was torpedoed with the loss of over half the two hundred and thirty-seven people aboard, including fourteen out of fifteen children. Not one U-boat was sunk in return.
I went my way to the Naval College. The Weyburn with her cheerful crew, including the lively mongrel mascot called Posh, headed off with sixieen other Canadian corvettes to support “Operation Torch,” the gigantic Allied landing in North Africa. The Weyburn distinguished herself in the Mediterranean, but just five months after I’d said good-bye to many new-found friends she struck a mine off Gibraltar and went down with heavy loss. I heard that Tom Golby, doing his best to see his men get clear, went with her. So did Sub-lieutenant Wilf Bark whose letters to his mother were a moving feature of the 1995 CBC television documentary War at Sea. First Lieutenant Hip Garrard had his crushed foot amputated aboard the rescue destroyer. The doctor had run out of ether and the only anaesthetic was a giant belt of navy rum. Able Seaman Tom Clark told me later how he’d clung to a floating shot mat and watched the ship go down. A buckled depth charge that couldn’t be disarmed exploded at depth and massively ruptured two friends right beside him. One of them died. Tom, a little further up on the mat, was spared. Posh also survived.
I went on o join a Royal Navy battleship based at Scapa Flow covering Russian convoys against attack by the German surface navy. A specially intriguing assignment was bringing Winston Churchill back from Gibraltar after he had met Josef Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt at Teheran in North Africa in late 1943. Then I was with the Eastern Fleet engaging the Japanese with air strikes in the Bay of Bengal and on Sumatra, and then across the Pacific en route to Britain to touch base with my family again in Esquimalt.
This was in early 1945 and my father was now NOIC in Esquimalt, having been transferred there from Gaspé the previous year, my mother busy at her side of naval affairs and my sister at work in the signals office and engaged to be married to (surprise) a naval officer. He, Fred Frewer, had spent the major part of the past five years in a destroyer on the North Atlantic. At the height of one major convoy battle his captain had a total breakdown, was sedated and confined to his cabin, and Fred, the young First Lieutenant, took command and fought the convoy through. And his two brothers were also at sea with the navy. By this time too my wife-to-be Sage Ley had been in the WRENS for some time as a telegraphist specially trained to intercept Japanese radio transmissions. Her brother, who’d been torpedoed in a Royal Navy aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, was at this point in an RCN destroyer.
When in Esquimalt I went to see Tom Golby’s widow. A good fighting ship has its own sense of family and sailors are ever resourceful. The Weyburn s survivors had contrived to have Posh delivered to Mrs. Golby all the way from Gibraltar.
In fifty years many tales unfold and a lot is revealed. The heavy loss of shipping in the Gulf in those brief months was the final straw in the Canadian War Cabinet’s decision in the autumn of 1942 to close the Gulf to ocean shipping. It stayed closed until spring 1944. This meant a huge and costly reorganization of shipping patterns, re-routing vast quantities of war materiel via New England ports. It was a major victory for the U-boats. The extraordinarily mixed water conditions in the Gulf gave them near-immunity from the escort vessels’ rudimentary ASDIC equipment which had stacked the odds strongly in their favour. There’s no doubt, though, that the U-boats fought with implacable skill and real daring.
The Weyburn’s adversary on that 4 September had been U-517, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Paul Hartwig. A real U-boat ace, Hartwig sank nine of that season’s total of twenty-two ships in the Gulf. He was captured on the way to his next patrol and spent the balance of the war in prison camp in Canada. Later, as a Rear Admiral in the Federal German Navy, he held senior NATO command positions. He vividly remembered lying stopped on the surface close in to the Gaspé shore in the pre-dawn dark. The hatches would be open to give his crew a breather on deck. They could actually smell the woodsmoke drifting from the nearby houses and even catch the wonderful scent of baking bread. And they would remember home and families before they slipped underwater to seek the next target.
Remembrance Day each year in our own small Chelsea Pioneer Cemetery brings back to me the many friends, many gone, with whom I served. But it brings back most strongly the thought of family, our own among the untold numbers of Canadian families — the true strength of our country — who made their contribution in war that Canada might live and grow and prosper as it has in these past fifty years. Many, far less fortunate than ours, gave lives. Wars are started by megalomaniacs and monsters. But they are fought, and finished at last, by ordinary people. Like us.