Hat
“searched the area of the sinkings, Fame to Fox Points, with no results,” reported the U-boat tracking report for May 1942.
The RCN’s immediate local response was the launching of HMCS
Venning,
an 18-metre converted fishing trawler that first had to be taken off its winter chocks. Ordered into the water by twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant Paul Bélanger,
Venning
had to manoeuvre around ice floes before getting out of Gaspé’s harbour.
James Essex’s memory of Engineer Clark trying to “squeeze every last ounce of energy from the wheezing engines” may sound like something out of a
Boy’s Own Magazine
story. The hard reality was, however, that though Gaspé had been designated a strike force, it was totally unprepared for antisubmarine warfare. Not only did
Venning
lack sonar and radar, it carried no depth charges and no machine gun. “If they did see a sub,” recalled Essex in his memoir,
Victory in the St. Lawrence,
“they did not even have a radio” to report it to Fort Ramsay.
MAY 13, 1942
Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin, in a section of his diary in which he praises the Protocol of the Elders of Zion (a late-nineteenth-century Russian creation that “outlines” how Jewish interests will take over the world), Joseph Göbbels writes, “There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.”
One thousand five hundred miles to the east, in the middle of the air gap, in the second day of a two-day battle, ONS-92, a slow convoy bound from the UK to North America and protected by six escorts, including the corvettes HMCS
Algoma, Arvida, Bittersweet
and
Shediac,
loses two more ships.
Two thousand miles south, Ulrich Gräf’s U-69 sinks the US freighter SS
Norlandic.
With the exceptions of the readers of the
Ottawa Evening Journal,
the
Vancouver Province
and the inside pages of Quebec’s
Le Soleil
newspapers of May 11, most Canadians learned of the St. Lawrence sinkings from the headlines on May 12—just about the time Gaétan Lavoie was watching the survivors of
Leto
come ashore in Pointe-au-Père. The news stories went considerably further than simply reporting that sinkings had occurred off “a St. Lawrence Port” (a phrase that quickly took its place beside the ubiquitous “East Coast Port”) and repeating the statement issued by Naval Services Minister Macdonald:
The minister for naval services announces that the first enemy attack upon shipping in the St. Lawrence river took place on May 11 when a freighter was sunk. Forty-one survivors have been landed from the vessel.
The situation regarding shipping in the river is being closely watched and long-prepared plans for its special protection under these circumstances are in operation.
Any possible further sinkings in this area will not be made public in order that information of value to the enemy may be withheld from him. It is felt, however, that the Canadian public should be informed of the presence of enemy U-boats in Canadian territorial waters and they are assured that every step is being taken to grapple with the situation.
While subsequent days would see confusion as survivor stories became jumbled and with the publication and then retraction of the baleful rumour that “a woman and her baby [had been left] ominously alone in an oarless lifeboat,” the articles that appeared on the thirteenth and on the days that followed were substantially accurate.
As he had for thousands of nights, before going to bed on the twelfth, Canada’s tenth prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, sat alone writing in his diary, accompanied only by his dog. King sat in a room on the second floor of Laurier House, a three-storey brick Victorian building that his predecessor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had given the Liberal Party. Amidst pictures of his mother and father, King recorded the first mention of theBattle of the St. Lawrence in Parliament. Toward the end of a Liberal caucus meeting,
“searched the area of the sinkings, Fame to Fox Points, with no results,” reported the U-boat tracking report for May 1942.
The RCN’s immediate local response was the launching of HMCS
Venning,
an 18-metre converted fishing trawler that first had to be taken off its winter chocks. Ordered into the water by twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant Paul Bélanger,
Venning
had to manoeuvre around ice floes before getting out of Gaspé’s harbour.
James Essex’s memory of Engineer Clark trying to “squeeze every last ounce of energy from the wheezing engines” may sound like something out of a
Boy’s Own Magazine
story. The hard reality was, however, that though Gaspé had been designated a strike force, it was totally unprepared for antisubmarine warfare. Not only did
Venning
lack sonar and radar, it carried no depth charges and no machine gun. “If they did see a sub,” recalled Essex in his memoir,
Victory in the St. Lawrence,
“they did not even have a radio” to report it to Fort Ramsay.
MAY 13, 1942
Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin, in a section of his diary in which he praises the Protocol of the Elders of Zion (a late-nineteenth-century Russian creation that “outlines” how Jewish interests will take over the world), Joseph Göbbels writes, “There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.”
One thousand five hundred miles to the east, in the middle of the air gap, in the second day of a two-day battle, ONS-92, a slow convoy bound from the UK to North America and protected by six escorts, including the corvettes HMCS
Algoma, Arvida, Bittersweet
and
Shediac,
loses two more ships.
Two thousand miles south, Ulrich Gräf’s U-69 sinks the US freighter SS
Norlandic.
With the exceptions of the readers of the
Ottawa Evening Journal,
the
Vancouver Province
and the inside pages of Quebec’s
Le Soleil
newspapers of May 11, most Canadians learned of the St. Lawrence sinkings from the headlines on May 12—just about the time Gaétan Lavoie was watching the survivors of
Leto
come ashore in Pointe-au-Père. The news stories went considerably further than simply reporting that sinkings had occurred off “a St. Lawrence Port” (a phrase that quickly took its place beside the ubiquitous “East Coast Port”) and repeating the statement issued by Naval Services Minister Macdonald:
The minister for naval services announces that the first enemy attack upon shipping in the St. Lawrence river took place on May 11 when a freighter was sunk. Forty-one survivors have been landed from the vessel.
The situation regarding shipping in the river is being closely watched and long-prepared plans for its special protection under these circumstances are in operation.
Any possible further sinkings in this area will not be made public in order that information of value to the enemy may be withheld from him. It is felt, however, that the Canadian public should be informed of the presence of enemy U-boats in Canadian territorial waters and they are assured that every step is being taken to grapple with the situation.
While subsequent days would see confusion as survivor stories became jumbled and with the publication and then retraction of the baleful rumour that “a woman and her baby [had been left] ominously alone in an oarless lifeboat,” the articles that appeared on the thirteenth and on the days that followed were substantially accurate.
As he had for thousands of nights, before going to bed on the twelfth, Canada’s tenth prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, sat alone writing in his diary, accompanied only by his dog. King sat in a room on the second floor of Laurier House, a three-storey brick Victorian building that his predecessor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had given the Liberal Party. Amidst pictures of his mother and father, King recorded the first mention of theBattle of the St. Lawrence in Parliament. Toward the end of a Liberal caucus meeting,
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