- 2 months ago
What drove German U-boat crews out of Canadian waters was not a single sinking, but a battlefield they could no longer trust. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canadian escorts and aircraft spent 1942 chasing submarines through water layers that broke sonar, hid contacts, and turned every attack into a gamble.
This military history story follows the U-boat campaign from the first torpedo attacks off Gaspé to the Canadian response: improvised convoy escorts, white-painted Hudsons, radar patrols, and relentless anti-submarine warfare. It traces the duels with U-132, U-517, U-165, and others, showing how suppression from the air and the failure of German assumptions convinced commanders to turn away before Canada ever got a confirmed kill in the Gulf.
For listeners who enjoy WW2 history, naval warfare, Canadian war stories, and narrated documentary-style storytelling, this is a gripping account of the Battle of the St. Lawrence. It also fits searches for military history podcast, World War 2 submarine stories, Canadian history, and anti-submarine warfare in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
This military history story follows the U-boat campaign from the first torpedo attacks off Gaspé to the Canadian response: improvised convoy escorts, white-painted Hudsons, radar patrols, and relentless anti-submarine warfare. It traces the duels with U-132, U-517, U-165, and others, showing how suppression from the air and the failure of German assumptions convinced commanders to turn away before Canada ever got a confirmed kill in the Gulf.
For listeners who enjoy WW2 history, naval warfare, Canadian war stories, and narrated documentary-style storytelling, this is a gripping account of the Battle of the St. Lawrence. It also fits searches for military history podcast, World War 2 submarine stories, Canadian history, and anti-submarine warfare in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the night of the 24th of September 1942, a Lockheed Hudson of 113 Squadron came down out of the
00:08darkness over the Gulf of St. Lawrence with both engines wide open.
00:13Flying officer M.J. Boulanger had been in the air for hours.
00:18Somewhere beneath him, in water that belonged to Canada, was a German submarine that had spent a month tearing the
00:26country's inland shipping apart.
00:28Earlier that day, another crew from his squadron had found the boat, lost it, dropped sea markers, and flown deliberately
00:36away, a trick borrowed from RAF Coastal Command called baiting.
00:41Fly off. Let the commander believe he is alone. Come back.
00:46It worked. The submarine surfaced, and by the time it did, five aircraft were quartering that stretch of the Gulf
00:54in the dark.
00:54Shortly before midnight, Boulanger found her. He pushed the Hudson down at her and released four depth charges across the
01:03hull.
01:03His report afterward was one sentence. One large explosion occurred around the hull.
01:09The submarine's motion stopped. Her bow lifted clear of the water. Then she settled by the stern and went under.
01:18Halifax marked her destroyed.
01:20She wasn't. The boat was U-517, commanded by Capitan-Lutnant Paul Hartvig, and in his own war diary, Hartvig
01:31recorded that the Canadian charges had been well placed.
01:34He was being generous to the men trying to kill him. Then he went deep, made his repairs, and lived.
01:41Now hold on to that, because here is the fact that makes everything else in this story strange.
01:47From May of 1942 until the end of the war, German submarines came into the Gulf of St. Lawrence over
01:55and over.
01:55Canadian aircraft attacked them. Canadian escorts depth charged them. Canadian crews rammed at them in the dark and missed by
02:05meters.
02:05And not one German submarine was ever sunk in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Not one. Not in three years
02:13of trying.
02:14And yet by the middle of November 1942, the Germans had stopped coming.
02:20One boat, ordered into the Gulf that autumn by Admiral Donets himself, arrived at the entrance, listened, looked at what
02:28its instruments were telling it, and refused to go in.
02:32Nobody drove those crews out with a kill. Something else convinced them. And what it was is not what most
02:39people assume.
02:40If these Canadian stories matter to you, a subscribe helps them reach more of the families whose fathers and grandfathers
02:47sailed that water.
02:49It had started four months earlier, and it started badly.
02:53On the night of the 11th of May, 1942, the people of Cloridorm, a fishing village on the north shore
03:00of the Gaspé Peninsula, were woken by an explosion that shook their houses like an earthquake.
03:06There were lights out on the water. Then the lights went out.
03:10In the morning, lifeboats came ashore. U-553, under Captain Lieutenant Carl Thurman, had chased the British freighter Nicoya for
03:19about an hour before firing.
03:22Nineteen minutes later, he put a second torpedo into her.
03:25Two hours after that, by pure chance, he found the Dutch steamer Leto, and sank her in 12 minutes.
03:34Twelve of the 43 people aboard Leto never got out.
03:38For Canadians, that night changed the shape of the war.
03:42This was not the North Atlantic. This was the river.
03:46The waterway that connected Montreal, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec City to the sea.
03:51The artery that carried aluminum, grain, and troops out of the heart of the country.
03:57Torpedoes were now going off within sight of Canadian kitchen windows.
04:01And mothers in Gaspé villages were pulling foreign sailors out of the surf.
04:06I want you to sit with what was actually defending that water in May of 1942, because the number is
04:13worse than you expect.
04:15One Bangor-class minesweeper.
04:18Two Fair Mile motor launches.
04:20Wooden patrol boats, 30 meters long.
04:23One armed yacht.
04:25Four vessels.
04:26For a waterway 575 kilometers long and 110 kilometers wide,
04:33plus a gulf the size of a small sea beyond it.
04:36The Royal Canadian Navy had actually planned for this.
04:40Since 1941, there had been elaborate schemes on paper.
04:45Strike forces of two corvettes stationed at choke points.
04:49Roving hunting groups working with air patrols.
04:53A base at Gaspé called Fort Ramsey.
04:56The plans were sound.
04:58Almost none of them existed in the water.
05:01Because every corvette Canada could crew was already escorting convoys across the Atlantic.
05:07And the Atlantic was being lost.
05:10So the Navy improvised.
05:13On the 21st of May, independent sailings were cancelled.
05:17And the Quebec to Sydney convoys began.
05:20The QS and SQ series that would run all season.
05:24On the 1st of June, the Gulf escort force was organized.
05:29Five Bangor minesweepers and three motor launches.
05:34Reinforcements came.
05:35Corvettes came.
05:36And it made almost no difference.
05:39Through that summer, escorts would race to the sound of a torpedo,
05:44sweep the water where the submarine had to be,
05:46and find nothing.
05:48Again and again.
05:51Crews who had trained for two years to do exactly this,
05:55stood over their equipment and heard nothing at all.
06:00The men in Ottawa reading those reports began to suspect something they did not want to write down.
06:07It was not that the escorts were untrained, or slow, or unlucky.
06:12It was that the St. Lawrence itself was doing something to them.
06:17Six weeks after Thurman sailed home, a Canadian minesweeper caught a U-boat in the river,
06:24hurt it badly, and drove it to the bottom, where it lay for twelve hours.
06:29What happened to that submarine during those twelve hours,
06:33and what it revealed about the water over it,
06:36would tell the Royal Canadian Navy that the single most important weapon it owned
06:41did not work in Canadian waters at all.
06:44The 6th of July, 1942, off the Gaspé coast.
06:50Convoy QS-15, twelve ships, moving up the river toward Quebec City.
06:56Capitan-Lutnant Ernst Vogelsang, in U-132, put himself in front of them and fired.
07:03In half an hour, he sank three ships, the British Deneric, the Belgian Hainaut,
07:09and the Greek Anastasios Pateras.
07:12Then, he crash-dived to get away from the escort.
07:16And here, the river did something to him that no German submariner had ever experienced.
07:22At 60 meters, U-132 slammed into a wall.
07:28Not rock. Water.
07:30The St. Lawrence carries an enormous volume of fresh river water
07:34out over the top of cold, dense seawater flooding in from the Atlantic.
07:39And where those two bodies meet, they do not mix.
07:42They stack.
07:44A submarine descending through that boundary hits a change in density so abrupt
07:49that the boat behaves as though it has struck something solid.
07:53Vogelsang's dive stalled dead.
07:56At the exact moment HMCS Drummondville, commanded by Lieutenant J.P. Fraser,
08:02laid a pattern of depth charges directly on top of him.
08:06The charges hurt him.
08:08Badly.
08:10Vogelsang did the only thing available.
08:12He flooded his forward torpedo tubes to add weight and punch through the layer.
08:18He punched through, and the boat turned into a stone.
08:22U-132 fell out of control to 184 meters before her commander could stop her.
08:30That is far below the depth German engineers considered survivable.
08:34She lay on the bottom for 12 hours, with a Canadian minesweeper hunting overhead while her crew listened to their
08:43own hull.
08:44Remember that Vogelsang survived it.
08:46Because Mark Milner, the historian who has spent a career inside these records, has written that if Drummondville had killed
08:54U-132 that morning,
08:57the whole of 1942 in the St. Lawrence might have gone differently.
09:02She didn't.
09:02And here is why.
09:04The same wall that nearly killed the German saved him.
09:09That density layer bends sound.
09:11A-S-D-I-C.
09:13The underwater detection gear the Royal Canadian Navy depended on completely, worked by sending out a pulse and listening for
09:22the echo.
09:23In the gulf and the river, those pulses hit the layer and skated off it.
09:29Worse, they came back.
09:31Off riptides, off temperature gradients, off the boundary itself.
09:35As contacts that looked exactly like a submarine and were not.
09:40Listen to a Canadian officer describing it in his own report.
09:45Lt. G. S. Hall, commanding the Corvette HMCS Trail in the Strait of Belle Isle, wrote that ASDIC conditions were
09:54bad,
09:55that false contacts could be obtained all around the ship on the riptides and temperature gradients,
10:00and that the effectiveness of an anti-submarine screen would be greatly reduced in that part of the strait.
10:07Read that again with a sailor's eyes.
10:11Contacts all around the ship, not none, all around.
10:15His set was screaming at him from every bearing at once, and every single one of them was a lie.
10:22Now put yourself on the bridge.
10:24You are 23 years old.
10:26You have a convoy of merchant ships behind you carrying men and food and aluminum,
10:32and your one instrument for finding the thing that is killing them is producing 16 submarines a minute, none of
10:40which exist.
10:41Which bearing do you attack?
10:44What do you drop your charges on?
10:46And what do you tell yourself afterward when the water goes quiet and another ship burns behind you?
10:53That is not a training problem.
10:55There is no amount of practice that fixes it, and the men out there knew, in the most humiliating way
11:02possible, that it was not their fault,
11:04because sometimes they could see the submarine with their eyes and still not hear it.
11:10On the night of the 1st of September, Paul Hartwig took U517 on the surface into Forto Bay on the
11:17Labrador coast
11:18and came within 20 meters of the wharf.
11:2120 meters. Close enough to see the buildings.
11:24As he withdrew, the Corvette HMCS Weyburn passed him in the dark, close enough that the deck watches on both
11:34vessels looked at each other.
11:36The Corvette spun around.
11:38The U-boat crash-dived.
11:41Weyburn's ASDIC never found her.
11:44Tony German, a junior officer aboard that night, said it plainly years later.
11:49They didn't get a sniff of him on ASDIC, although they'd seen him twice.
11:55Large as life.
11:57Twice.
11:58Large as life.
12:00The next day, Weyburn got him again.
12:03Turned toward him, opened fire, forced him under a second time.
12:08And a second time, he simply vanished.
12:11And the little Canadian steamer, Donald Stewart, went to the bottom.
12:15This is the first thing you have to understand about what happened in Canadian waters.
12:21And it is the opposite of what most people assume.
12:24The Royal Canadian Navy did not lose those months because it was amateur.
12:29It lost them because the ocean floor of the Gulf, the rivers pouring off the Laurentians, and the cold Atlantic
12:37tide underneath had combined into a piece of geography that the technology of 1942 simply could not solve.
12:46The Navy's official historians say it flatly.
12:50The hydrography of the river and Gulf could not be beaten with the equipment of the era.
12:56The German commanders worked it out fast.
12:59Hartwig would later complain about those water layers himself.
13:03They cut both ways.
13:05And we will come back to that, because it matters enormously.
13:09But in that first summer, the layers were a German ally.
13:13Dive, and Canada goes death.
13:16Which meant that if the U-boats were ever going to be pushed out of the St. Lawrence, the answer
13:21was not going to come from under the water.
13:24It was going to have to come from above it.
13:27And at that exact moment, in a hangar at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, a Canadian squadron leader was doing something to
13:35his aircraft that his superiors had not ordered and did not much like.
13:39He was having the underside of a bomber painted white.
13:43Within a month, that decision would put the first German submarine on the bottom, and put a clock over the
13:49Gulf of St. Lawrence that no U-boat commander could stop.
13:53The 31st of July, 1942, southeast of Sable Island, off the Nova Scotia coast.
14:01Squadron leader Norville Small was sweeping an area where a submarine had been attacked the day before.
14:08Small had been flying since before the war.
14:10He had already been decorated for his work, and among the aircrew, he was known as Molly.
14:16What matters here is not his record.
14:19It is what he had done to his aircraft, and why.
14:23Eastern Air Command patrolled at 500 feet.
14:26That was the standard.
14:28Small was flying at 3,000.
14:30And the belly of his Hudson had been painted white.
14:34Both of those choices came from studying what RAF Coastal Command had learned the hard way over the Bay of
14:40Biscay.
14:41And both were aimed at one target.
14:43The eyes of the men standing watch on a submarine's conning tower.
14:48A dark aircraft against a bright sky at 500 feet is a shape a lookout catches in time.
14:54A white aircraft at 3,000 feet dissolves into the overcast.
14:59And by the time anyone sees it, it is already coming down.
15:03That morning it worked exactly as designed.
15:07Small came over U-754 with her crew still running for the hatches.
15:12The Hudson was the fastest aircraft in Eastern Air Command, and he caught them before they could get under.
15:18Four 250 pound depth charges went into the water around the hull.
15:23The submarine went down, came back up, went down again.
15:27Oil and debris turned on the surface.
15:30Small circled that patch of ocean for 55 minutes.
15:34Think about that.
15:3655 minutes of watching nothing happen.
15:38Until a heavy underwater explosion came up through the sea and settled the matter.
15:43It was the first submarine Eastern Air Command ever killed.
15:47And this is the part that made Small dangerous to the Germans.
15:51Far more than the kill itself.
15:53He did not keep it.
15:55He pushed the tactics onto everyone.
15:57Same white paint.
15:59Same altitude.
16:01Same insistence on acting immediately when direction finding stations phoned through a fresh position.
16:08A few hours after Small sank U-754,
16:12pilot officer G.T. Sayer of the same squadron was attacking U-132,
16:20sent out on a fresh plot, flying the way his squadron leader had taught him.
16:25A weapon had just changed hands in this battle, and neither side understood yet how completely.
16:32Because at that same moment, the Germans were about to have their best weeks of the entire campaign.
16:38On the 27th of August, U-517 arrived at the northern entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle,
16:47and Paul Hartwig submerged at daylight to see what came past.
16:51What came past was extraordinary luck.
16:55Three small convoys converging on him at once.
16:59The fast section of an American convoy bound for Greenland.
17:03Its slow section a few hours behind.
17:06And, wedged between them, a small Canadian convoy for Goose Bay.
17:11Two merchant ships escorted by the Corvette HMCS trail.
17:17At 8.48 that morning, Hartwig put a single torpedo into the United States Army Transport, Chatham,
17:24with 562 people aboard.
17:27He saw none of it.
17:30The act of firing sent U-517 into an uncontrolled descent, the layers again.
17:38And it took 40 minutes to get back to periscope depth.
17:42By then, Chatham was gone.
17:45Almost everyone got off.
17:47And HMCS trail, having first walked her own little convoy safely into Forto Bay before going hunting,
17:54helped pull them out.
17:57Then, the mix-up.
17:58Word of the attack did not reach the slow section in time,
18:03and it steamed directly into U-165 under Corvetten Capitan Eberhard Hoffman.
18:11That night, Hoffman's torpedoes hit the freighter Arlen, loaded with dynamite and high-test fuel,
18:18and the oiler Laramie, full of aviation gasoline.
18:23Laramie should have vanished in a fireball.
18:26She didn't.
18:28Her American crew, at times standing ankle-deep in gasoline,
18:33working on a ship that could have gone up under their boots at any second,
18:37brought her all the way back to Sydney.
18:39Two commanders, both loose in Canadian water.
18:43Between them, Hartwig and Hoffman would account for two-thirds of everything sunk in the St. Lawrence that entire year.
18:51And Canada could not touch them.
18:53On the 2nd of September, Hartwig fired at the Goose Bay convoy as HMCS Weyburn turned toward him with her
19:01gun already firing.
19:03He crash-dived.
19:04He disappeared.
19:05The steamer Donald Stewart went down.
19:08Hours later, a Digby of 10 Squadron caught him and attacked, and the depth charges detonated prematurely,
19:16doing more damage to the aircraft than to the submarine.
19:19That was the state of it in early September.
19:22Canadian aircraft with the wrong pistols on their bombs, Canadian escorts hearing riptides,
19:28and two German commanders working the gulf like men who had been given a map of a country with no
19:34police in it.
19:35Ottawa was now under siege of a different kind.
19:39The censors had forbidden reporting, so the country ran on rumor.
19:44Blackouts were enforced along the coast.
19:46Army units patrolled the roads and rail lines of the Gaspe.
19:51In the House of Commons, there was open fury about unpreparedness, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, with a conscription crisis
20:00burning through his cabinet,
20:02was not entirely unhappy to let the fury burn.
20:06Meanwhile, the men actually in the water were being asked to escort convoys through a place where their instruments lied
20:14to them,
20:15against opponents they could not find.
20:18On the 11th of September, off Capshat on the Gaspe shore, in broad daylight, Hartwig would announce himself by sinking
20:27a Canadian warship.
20:29Most of her crew got off her alive.
20:31Then, 90 seconds later, something happened in that water that had nothing to do with the German submarine at all,
20:39and it killed five of them where they floated.
20:43HMCS Charlottetown was a Flower-class Corvette, one year old, on her way back to Gaspe with the minesweeper HMCS
20:53Kleaquat,
20:54after delivering a convoy to Rimouski.
20:57Her captain was Lieutenant John Willard Bonner.
21:00It was late morning, the 11th of September, the sea flat, the Gaspe shore in plain sight about 11 kilometers
21:08away.
21:09She was not zigzagging.
21:11Two torpedoes hit her aft.
21:14She went down fast, fast enough that only the starboard lifeboat and a few Carly floats got clear.
21:21Most of the ship's company went into the river.
21:23Now, Bonner had done the thing a good captain does.
21:28He had made sure every depth charge aboard was set to safe.
21:32A Corvette carries 70 of them, and every man in the water knew what they were floating above.
21:38But the torpedo explosions appear to have damaged at least one pistol.
21:43As Charlottetown went under, a charge, historians still argue whether it was one or several, detonated beneath the survivors.
21:52The shot killed five men outright in the water, and seriously injured 13 more.
21:58Bonner was among the dead.
22:00His body was recovered and lashed to a piece of rudder from the portside lifeboat, and then it drifted away
22:07and was never found again.
22:09I want you to hold the next detail, because it is the one that stays with people.
22:15Charlottetown's sick birth attendant was a man named Cecil Bateman.
22:20He had been in the water with everyone else.
22:22He had been wounded by that same explosion, his own ship's depth charge going off under his body.
22:29He worked anyway.
22:30For hours, as Clackwatt brought men aboard, broken men, numbed men, men pulled out of a wide scatter of river,
22:40Bateman treated them one after another, with his own injuries untreated.
22:44He was mentioned in dispatches for it.
22:47Three more men died of their wounds after they reached Gaspe that afternoon, bringing the toll to ten.
22:54Clackwatt, for her part, had gone after the submarine first, dropping charges so hard she shook her own wireless set
23:02to pieces before she could signal anyone.
23:04The first word Gaspe received that a Canadian warship had been sunk came from civilians on shore.
23:11That is where Canada stood in the second week of September, 1942.
23:16And it was about to get worse, because Hartwig and Hoffman now did something the Royal Canadian Navy had feared
23:23since the first sinking.
23:25They started working together.
23:27By the 14th of September, Hartwig was in position off Cap de Rosier, waiting for SQ-36, the largest convoy
23:36of the season, 22 ships bound for Quebec.
23:39It also had the strongest escort yet assembled in the river, the British destroyer HMS Salisbury and the Corvette HMCS
23:48Arrowhead, both with modern radar, the Bangor HMCS Vegerville and motor launches.
23:56Watch what Hartwig does with it, because it is a masterpiece and it should be said plainly.
24:01He does not maneuver.
24:03He shuts everything down and lets the current of the St. Lawrence carry him into the convoy.
24:11Submerged.
24:12Silent.
24:14No motor noise for the hydrophones.
24:16No feather of spray off the periscope for the lookouts, because he is barely moving relative to the water he
24:24is sitting in.
24:24Salisbury passed within 150 meters of him, a destroyer with radar, 150 meters away, and she never knew.
24:35Minutes later, Hartwig fired four torpedoes.
24:38Two ships were hit.
24:40Both sank.
24:41The escort searched, counter-attacked, found nothing.
24:46Salisbury's British captain afterward complained bitterly about the sonar conditions in the river,
24:52which, as Milner dryly notes, was not news to any Canadian officer present.
24:58Hartwig then signaled Hoffman where the convoy was going.
25:02And when SQ-36 reached cap shot in the early hours of the 16th, Hoffman was waiting.
25:09He attacked submerged, in daylight.
25:12The merchant crews actually saw his periscope and opened fire on it while he was still completing his firing sequence.
25:20And he held his position and finished the job anyway.
25:24The Greek ship Joannis sank in 10 minutes.
25:28Two others were hit and salvaged.
25:31With his torpedoes gone, Hoffman turned for home.
25:35He never arrived.
25:37U-165 was destroyed reaching the Bay of Biscay.
25:41So, September 1942, and the Germans are at their peak in Canadian waters.
25:47A Canadian warship on the bottom off Cap Shat.
25:52The season's biggest convoy hit twice by two boats working in relay.
25:57An escort screen that cannot hear anything.
26:01That is the picture that went into Canadian newspapers after the war and stayed there for 30 years.
26:07The battle Canada lost at home.
26:10But underneath it, something had already changed.
26:13And neither Hartwig nor anyone in Ottawa had fully registered it yet.
26:18On the 9th of September, two days before Charlottetown died,
26:23Pilot Officer R.S. Keatley had been sent out to search after the little armed yacht, HMCS Raccoon, disappeared.
26:31He was flying one of the new machines, White Belly, High Altitude, Smalls Tactics.
26:38And he came down on Hoffman on the surface south of Anticosti with no warning whatsoever.
26:44Hoffman escaped, only because Canadian-based aircraft still lacked the right pistols for attacking a surfaced boat.
26:51But the thing that mattered was not the escape.
26:55It was that a German commander, on the surface in the middle of the Gulf, in daylight, in what he
27:01believed was empty sky, had been caught cold.
27:05Twelve days later, off Cap de Rosier, Hartwig would be at periscope depth stalking another convoy when the very water
27:13layers that had protected him all summer betrayed him.
27:17And a Canadian escort would come at him fast enough to ram.
27:21Midday, the 21st of September, 1942.
27:26Hartwig is tracking convoy SQ-38 off Cap de Rosier, submerged, doing what had worked all summer.
27:35Except, the layers that had hidden him were now moving him.
27:40He could not hold his depth.
27:41He said so afterward, in three words that tell you everything about what it was like to command a boat
27:48in that river.
27:49Those water layers.
27:52Part of his conning tower came out of the water in daylight, in front of a convoy.
27:56The Bangor-class minesweeper HMCS Georgian saw it and went straight at him.
28:04Not to attack, to ram.
28:07Acting Lieutenant Commander A. G. Stanley had the bow lined up and closing when U-517 crash-dived under him.
28:17Stanley did not lose his nerve or his contact.
28:21He set up a deliberate attack and put a pattern down on top of the German.
28:26He was turning to regain contact when U-517 broke the surface, rolled onto her side, and went under again.
28:37Stanley kept at it the rest of that day.
28:39He hunted that piece of water until every depth charge aboard Georgian had been thrown into it.
28:46Halifax reviewed the report and agreed with him.
28:49Submarine destroyed.
28:51She wasn't.
28:53Hartwig crawled north to clear the area, made repairs, and came back.
28:57And you can hear something in that sequence that the men involved could not hear at the time.
29:02All summer, the German had been the one deciding when to be seen.
29:07Now the river was deciding for him.
29:11Then, at the end of September, the RCAF stopped reinforcing and started flooding.
29:17Whole squadrons were pulled out of Nova Scotia and moved into the St. Lawrence.
29:2215 more Hudsons.
29:2420 more Kanzos.
29:26Most of them radar-equipped, which meant,
29:28and this is the sentence that ends the German summer.
29:31They could work the gulf at night.
29:34Think about what that does to a submarine of 1942.
29:38A U-boat is not a submarine the way we picture one now.
29:42She is a surface torpedo boat that can hide.
29:45On the surface, her diesels give her 18 knots and charge her batteries.
29:50Underwater, she has electric motors, 7 knots flat out for a very short time.
29:56And after that, she is a slow, blind object with a finite amount of stored power and a finite amount
30:03of air.
30:04Holding several dozen men in a steel tube.
30:07She must surface.
30:09To charge.
30:11To ventilate.
30:12To run anywhere at speed.
30:14To see anything at all.
30:16Take away the surface and you have not destroyed her.
30:19You have done something arguably worse.
30:22You have converted her into a target that cannot hunt.
30:25Moving at walking pace.
30:27With a crew slowly cooking in their own carbon dioxide.
30:31That is what the Canadians did in the last week of September.
30:34In one 24-hour stretch on the 25th and 26th, Hudson's of 113 Squadron caught Hartwig on the surface seven
30:44times.
30:45Seven.
30:46Including at night, which he had believed was his.
30:49They attacked him three times.
30:51The first attack should have killed him.
30:53Three of the four depth charges failed to release.
30:57The one that fell shook U-517 hard.
31:01Had all four gone, the boat was gone.
31:06After another attack, Hartwig surfaced to find something on his casing.
31:11A Canadian depth charge lodged on the deck of his submarine.
31:16Sit with that image for a second.
31:18His crew had to go out and roll a live charge over the side.
31:23And when it went, it detonated at its pre-set depth.
31:28The depth it would have reached if U-517 had dived instead of surfacing.
31:33If he had done the instinctive thing and gone deeper, it would have gone off inside his hull.
31:40Then came Belanger's attack.
31:42The one we opened with.
31:44The one Hartwig himself logged as well placed.
31:48Now here is the number that tells the real story.
31:51And it is not a number about sinkings.
31:54From the middle of September to the 6th of October, Paul Hartwig, the most successful submarine commander ever to operate
32:02in Canadian waters,
32:03a man Donnitz personally praised for an outstanding first patrol, achieved nothing at all.
32:10Not one ship.
32:11He spent his final days in the Gulf being hunted, surfacing in snatches, diving, repairing, running.
32:19He went home on the 6th of October with his boat intact and his tonnage board full, and his campaign
32:25over.
32:26And the Canadians who had done it did not know they had done it.
32:30They thought they had failed.
32:31Because the standard of success everyone understood was a submarine on the bottom.
32:36And there wasn't one.
32:38They had actually invented something.
32:41Not a weapon, a condition.
32:42Canadian aircraft did not need to hit anything.
32:46They needed to be overhead often enough that surfacing became a gamble a commander took only when he could not
32:52avoid it.
32:53Suppression.
32:54That is the whole answer in one word.
32:57And if the story ended here, you would have most of it.
33:00But it doesn't end here.
33:02And the reason is Carl Donnitz.
33:05Because Donnitz was not reading Canadian frustration.
33:09He was reading Hartwig's tonnage.
33:11Nine ships, plus a corvette, in two weeks.
33:15To the officer commanding the U-boat fleet, the Gulf of St. Lawrence looked like the most profitable and least
33:22defended water in the western Atlantic.
33:25So in the middle of September, he ordered a fresh wave into it.
33:29Six more boats.
33:31Canada never saw them coming, and, far more disturbing, Canada had no idea afterward that they had been there at
33:38all.
33:38In February of 1942, the Germans had changed their submarine cipher, and for nearly a year, the Allies could not
33:47read the orders sending boats anywhere.
33:50What those six commanders found in the Gulf that autumn stayed buried in undecrypted signal traffic until the year 2002,
33:58and it is the reason Germany walked away from Canadian waters.
34:03The first of them, U-69 under Oberlieutenant Ulrich Graf, reached Cabot Strait on the night of the 29th of
34:11September, and she carried something new.
34:14It was called METOX.
34:16It was a radar warning receiver, and it had been rushed to the U-boat fleet because Allied aircraft were
34:23beginning to find submarines in darkness and in fog.
34:27METOX listened for radar transmissions, and howled when it heard them.
34:31On paper, it was the perfect answer to what the Canadians had just built over the Gulf.
34:37Understand exactly what it did, because this is the hinge of the whole story.
34:43METOX told a commander that a radar set was transmitting somewhere near him.
34:48It could not tell him the direction.
34:50It could not tell him the range.
34:52It could not tell him whether the source was an aircraft two kilometers away and closing, or a corvette twelve
34:59kilometers off doing nothing about him at all.
35:02It gave him an alarm and no information.
35:05And the Gulf of St. Lawrence in October of 1942 was now full of radar.
35:13Radar in the Hudson's.
35:15Radar in the Kansas overhead at night.
35:19Radar in the Escorts.
35:20Every one of those sets, sweeping empty water, walked into a German boat's control room as a scream.
35:30So Graf dived.
35:32And dived.
35:33And dived.
35:35On the 9th of October, METOX actually gave him something.
35:40The transmissions of convoy NL-9 up in the river.
35:45He stalked it in the dark for hours while the alarms kept sounding.
35:50And at one point, he remarked that the Canadian radar operators must be asleep.
35:56They were not asleep.
35:58The radar of the corvettes Hepatica and Arrowhead simply could not pick out an object as small as a surfaced
36:07conning tower.
36:08While Graf could use their own transmissions to find them.
36:12He fired two torpedoes from 2,000 meters and sank the little Canadian freighter Keralis.
36:19Eleven people died on Keralis.
36:22One of them was John Millmine, 16 years old, from Verdun, Quebec.
36:27A galley boy on his first ship.
36:30That was the entire achievement of U69 in the St. Lawrence.
36:35One small freighter.
36:36Harried by aircraft, with his compressors failing, Graf pulled back toward Cabot Strait, submerged.
36:44As he came out, U106 under Capitan-Lutnant Hermann Roche was going in.
36:50Roche sank the steamer Waterton near St. Paul Island on the 11th and got an immediate, fast, accurate depth charge
36:59attack in reply from an armed yacht and a Canso.
37:03By the time he reached the river, his crew were rattled hollow by the constant Metox alarms.
37:08His war diary from the middle of October is one of the most revealing documents in this entire campaign.
37:15Strong defenses, he recorded.
37:18Search units using ASDIC.
37:20Air surveillance working with the surface forces.
37:23And also, he noted, operating everywhere without them.
37:27That last clause is the sentence Canada won the Gulf with.
37:31The aircraft were no longer tied to convoys.
37:34They were simply everywhere, all the time, on no schedule a submarine commander could learn.
37:43U106 abandoned the Gulf.
37:45U-43 followed a few days later under Oberlieutenant Hans Joachim Schwantke, hit the same wall of patrolling, and decided
37:54to stay and try his luck anyway.
37:56On the 21st of October, he attacked convoy SQ-43 off Gas Bay and failed, and the Bangor HMCS Ganonok
38:07put six depth charges on him.
38:10Those six charges knocked out his lighting, blew his battery circuit breaker, and activated a torpedo sitting in one of
38:18his own stern tubes.
38:20Schwantke ran for 130 meters, convinced he was being worked over by a coordinated hunting group.
38:27He wasn't.
38:28When Ganonok failed to regain contact, her crew wrote the whole thing off as another false echo.
38:35A shoal of fish or a riptide.
38:37The same lie their sets had been telling them all summer.
38:41They never knew.
38:43Three days later, Schwantke tried again against another convoy.
38:47They achieved nothing and left.
38:50Then, Donnett sent two more, and one of them delivered the verdict this entire video has been building toward.
38:58U-183 arrived at Cabot Strait on the 18th of October with orders to enter the Gulf.
39:05Her commander looked at the traffic, listened to his instruments, weighed the patrolling, and reported back to headquarters that shipping
39:13was completely dead and the air patrols were oppressive.
39:17Then, he turned south and went to Nova Scotia instead.
39:22That is what convinced them.
39:24Not losses.
39:25There were none.
39:26A German commander, fueled, armed, ordered into Canadian water by the commander of the U-boat fleet, sat at the
39:35entrance and decided the Gulf of St. Lawrence was not worth what it would cost him to go in.
39:41Six boats ordered.
39:43Four made the attempt.
39:45Three ships sunk between them.
39:48Sardi's conclusion, from the records, is blunt.
39:52Canadian forces shut down the U-boat assault in the St. Lawrence.
39:56But there is a price attached to that sentence, and it was paid in the early hours of the 14th
40:03of October, by a boat that had already given up.
40:07Graff, retreating out of the Gulf with nothing left to show for his patrol, was crossing Cabot Strait when he
40:13found the ferry SS Caribou running from North Sydney to Port O'Basques with 237 people aboard, soldiers, sailors, civilians,
40:25and 11 children.
40:26What happened in that water in the next five minutes remains the worst loss of life in Canadian waters in
40:33the entire war, and the decision one Canadian officer had to make while it was happening is one I am
40:40not sure any of us could make.
40:42Caribou was hit at 3.51 in the morning, about 37 kilometers southwest of Port O'Basque.
40:49She sank in five minutes.
40:51Aboard her were two Royal Canadian Navy nursing sisters coming back from leave, Agnes Wilkie from Carmen, Manitoba, and her
41:01friend Margaret Brooke.
41:03Brooke later wrote to her brother that the explosion threw her across the cabin on top of Agnes.
41:09They got their coats, they got to the boat deck, and they did not know the one thing that would
41:15have saved them, which was to jump clear.
41:17The ferry took them down with her. They came back up.
41:21A piece of an overturned lifeboat drifted past, and they got to it, and a soldier helped Brooke haul Wilkie
41:29out of the water and onto the wreckage.
41:31Then they waded in the North Atlantic in October.
41:35Wilkie lost consciousness from the cold.
41:37Brooke held the rope with one hand and her friend with the other, in the dark, in rising seas, for
41:44hours.
41:44At daybreak, a wave took Agnes Wilkie out of her frozen hands.
41:50Escorting caribou was the minesweeper HMCS Grandmare under Lieutenant James Cuthbert.
41:57He saw U69 on the surface, turned to ram, and the boat dived.
42:02He put six charges over the spot and hunted, and his sonar could not hold anything in that water any
42:09better than anyone else's had all year.
42:12And then Cuthbert had to choose.
42:15Doctrine said, keep hunting. The submarine was still there.
42:19But there were hundreds of people in the water behind him, and among them were children.
42:24He broke off the hunt at twenty past five and went back for survivors.
42:30He said afterward that he could not have kept looking for the submarine, not with women and children out there.
42:36He was, in his own words, torn.
42:39One hundred and thirty-seven people died.
42:42Fifty-seven service personnel, forty-nine civilians, thirty-one crew.
42:47Captain Ben Tavener went down with his ship, and so did both of his sons, who served as his officers.
42:55Five other pairs of brothers died.
42:57Agnes Wilkie became the only Canadian nursing sister killed by enemy action in the Second World War.
43:04One hundred and one people came out of that water alive because Cuthbert turned around.
43:10Now hold caribou in your mind, because Canada did not forget it for one hour of the rest of the
43:17war.
43:18From that night on, every ferry on that crossing sailed with a warship beside it.
43:24Remember that. It matters in about four minutes.
43:28Through all of 1943, the Germans stayed away from the Gulf.
43:32One boat came, and not to hunt.
43:35U-536, under Capitan-Lutnant Rolf Schauenberg, was sent to Chalure Bay in September to collect four captured U-boat
43:44officers escaping from a prison camp in Ontario.
43:48Canadian intelligence had been reading the prisoner's mail for months, and was waiting with a task group and a portable
43:55radar set on the shore.
43:57Schauenberg came in on the 26th, saw the signal light, and did not trust it.
44:02His hydrophones were picking up propellers that should not have been there, and the shipping traffic he expected to see
44:09was absent.
44:11He stayed under. He escaped.
44:13He also fouled a fishing trawler's nets on the way out, was spotted and attacked,
44:19and had to crawl for the open sea through shallow water for so long that men and his crew lost
44:26consciousness from the poisoned air inside the boat.
44:29That is the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1943.
44:33A submarine could get in, and could get out, and the price of it was a crew going down one
44:40by one on the deck plates because the air had run out.
44:44Then, in the autumn of 1944, they came back, and this time they had the answer.
44:50It was called the Schnorkel, a tube that let a boat run her diesels while submerged, charging batteries and ventilating
44:58without ever showing herself.
45:00It was designed precisely to defeat what Canada had built. It gave the U-boats their air back.
45:06On the 14th of October, near the Pointe de Montlite, U-1223 put an acoustic torpedo into the stern of
45:15the frigate HMCS Magog.
45:18Three men were killed. 60 feet of the ship's stern was gone, and her crew kept her afloat.
45:25Damage control held her together all the way up the river under tow to Quebec City, where she was written
45:31off as a total loss.
45:33But her people came home. On the 2nd of November, the same boat badly damaged the grain carrier Fort Thompson
45:41near Mitane.
45:43Two ships in a month out of an entire patrol. That was what the miracle device bought.
45:49Because the Schnorkel gave back air and took away everything else.
45:54A boat on Schnorkel crawls. She is nearly deaf because her own diesels are hammering.
46:00She cannot see. And above her by 1944 were Canadian escort groups, Canadian aircraft, and radio direction finding that could
46:11put a fix on a boat the moment she transmitted.
46:14Which brings us to the 24th of November, and to Capitan-Lieutenant Friedrich Wilhelm Marienfeld in U-1228, sitting near
46:24Cabot Strait with a broken Schnorkel.
46:26He had sunk nothing on the entire patrol. That moonlit night, he tested his repairs, found them useless, and made
46:35the only sane decision available.
46:37Without the Schnorkel, he would not risk the Cabot Strait. He gave the orders to take his boat home to
46:44Germany.
46:44And while he was giving them, a Canadian Corvette came over the horizon. Her name was H.M.C.S.
46:52Shawinigan.
46:52She was a Flower-class Corvette, three years in the water, a veteran of the St. Lawrence convoy battles.
46:59That day, she and an American Coast Guard cutter had escorted the ferry, Bergio, across to Port Obasques.
47:07Because since Caribou, no ferry crossed that Strait alone.
47:12The cutter was detached.
47:14Shawinigan saw the ferry safely in, told her she would meet her in the morning, and went out alone on
47:20an anti-submarine patrol.
47:23Marienfeld fired one acoustic torpedo. Four minutes later, Shawinigan was gone. All 91 men aboard her died.
47:32It was the Royal Canadian Navy's greatest loss of life in the battle for the Gulf, and nobody knew it
47:39had happened.
47:40The ferry sailed at dawn into fog, could not find her escort, kept radio silence as ordered, and made the
47:47crossing alone.
47:48The first sign anything was wrong came when bodies began coming ashore.
47:54Then, the ice closed the Gulf, and the U-boats never came back to it.
47:59The last act happened off Halifax.
48:02Early on the 16th of April, 1945, U-190 put a torpedo into the minesweeper H.M.C.S. Esquimalt,
48:12five miles off Chibucto Head, within sight of the Canadian shore.
48:16She sank so fast, no distress signal got out.
48:21Twenty-seven of her 71 men survived six hours in the water.
48:26Forty-four did not.
48:28She was the last Canadian warship lost to enemy action in the war.
48:32And what her killer did next is the entire story of Canadian waters in one sentence.
48:38Her commander, Hans Edwin Reith, took U-190 down into shallow water and stayed there for seven days.
48:47Seven days on the bottom, off a Canadian port, for one attack.
48:51He said afterward that the Canadian search groups worked excellently, and that they never suspected he had gone into water
48:58that shallow.
48:59That was the arithmetic in the end, not sinkings, cost.
49:04By 1945, firing a single torpedo in Canadian water bought you a week in the dark, listening.
49:11On the 11th of May, three days after the war in Europe ended, U-190 received the order to surrender,
49:19surfaced, and broadcast her position in plain language.
49:23H.M.C.S. Victoriaville and H.M.C.S. Thorlock came out to her.
49:29Her captain signed the surrender document, and on the 14th, she came into Bay Bowles, Newfoundland, under Canadian escort with
49:37the white ensign flying over her conning tower.
49:40Two days earlier, U-889 had given herself up off Nova Scotia the same way.
49:47Canada kept U-190.
49:48In 1946, she was sailed up the St. Lawrence on a public tour.
49:54Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Quebec City, Gaspé, Sydney.
49:59Past every shoreline where people had once been woken by explosions, and had gone down to the beach in the
50:05morning to pull strangers out of the surf.
50:07On the 21st of October, 1947, she was taken back to the exact position where she had killed Esquimalt, and
50:16sunk there by Canadian ships and aircraft.
50:19Now let me give you the numbers the country was never told.
50:24Not one German submarine was ever sunk in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
50:30Not one, in three years.
50:32And in 1942, the loss rate for convoys in the Canadian coastal zone was one and two tenths of one
50:43percent.
50:44Of the hundred convoys that ran the St. Lawrence that year, U-boats intercepted twelve.
50:51The men who flew those patrols mostly died believing they had failed.
50:57Norville Small, who painted his aircraft white and changed the war in the Gulf,
51:02was killed on the 7th of January, 1943, when his canso came down after taking off from Gander.
51:11Belanger, whose depth charges a German commander called Well-Placed, received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
51:19Margaret Brooke was made a member of the Order of the British Empire for the hours she spent holding her
51:25friend above the water.
51:27And in 2015, the Royal Canadian Navy named a ship after her.
51:33John Bonner's body was never found.
51:35Paul Hartwig never operated in Canadian waters again.
51:40Four days out of Lorient on his next patrol, British carrier aircraft caught U-517 on the surface and sank
51:50her under him.
51:51And he spent the rest of the war a prisoner.
51:54So, what convinced German submarine crews to give up Canadian waters?
52:01Not defeat in battle.
52:03They were never beaten in battle there.
52:06Canada beat them by taking away the surface.
52:09And for a submarine of that war, the surface was air, speed, sight, and sleep.
52:16In the end, a German commander with full tanks and full torpedo tubes sat at the mouth of the Gulf
52:24of St. Lawrence,
52:25reported that the traffic was dead and the patrolling was oppressive, and turned away.
52:31Because the price of going in had become more than anything inside was worth.
52:37Nobody sank him.
52:39They simply made it impossible to breathe.
52:42Thank you for staying to the end.
52:44These men fought a battle in their own country's water and spent most of their lives believing they had lost
52:51it.
52:52The records that proved otherwise did not surface until 2002.
52:58If that story deserves remembering, a like genuinely helps it find more people, and we're here every week.
53:06If anyone in your family sailed the Gulf or flew those patrols, I'd be honored to hear about it.