Articles by Author

The attacks on Nicoya and Leto on May 12, 1942, signalled the commencement of what became known as the Battle of the St. Lawrence, the most important enemy intrusion into Canadian territory—and the Canadian psyche—of the war. Although the threat was continuous throughout the shipping season and 22 vessels were lost in the river and gulf in 1942, the battle divides into three distinct phases. The first was the cruise of U-553 and the first sinkings on May 12 (The Battle Of The St. Lawrence Begins, January/February). In early July, U-132 arrived and sank five vessels over several weeks, marking the first attacks against organized and escorted convoys in the area. But the heaviest and most dramatic events took place in late summer when a tandem of skilled and aggressive submariners did enough damage to force the RCN to close the gulf and river to oceanic shipping. That devastating third phase had its origins in the tail end of the U-132’s cruise, and it brought the war to the most remote region of the gulf: the Strait of Belle Isle.

In the early morning darkness of May 12, 1942, U-553, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Karl Thurmann, sank the steamers Nicoya and Leto, 16 kilometres off the Gaspé coast. Thurmann had pursued the 5,364-ton British freighter Nicoya for roughly an hour before the first torpedo struck. In the 19 minutes it took to deliver the final killing shot, most of Nicoya’s 87 crew and passengers got safely away. They landed at the tiny Gaspé villages of Cloridorme and L’Anse-à-Valleau. Those aboard Leto were less fortunate. Thurmann found the 4,712-ton Dutch steamer by chance several hours later and sent her to the bottom in 12 minutes with one well-placed torpedo. Only a small boat and a raft got clear, and most of the survivors were in the water for a couple of hours before being rescued. Twelve of Leto’s 43 passengers and crew perished.

While residents of British Columbia waited for the war to reach their shores in the early months of 1942, submarines attacked along the east coast for the first time since 1918. For most historians the assault on Canada’s shipping began with the sinking of the steamers Nicoya and Leto in the mouth of the St. Lawrence on May 12. There is no denying the impact on the collective Canadian psyche of this brazen incident in the main seasonal artery of Canadian trade, but Canada’s trade links had been under siege for months by then.

In 1939, the bulk of the pre-war Royal Canadian Navy—four of six destroyers—had been deployed on the Pacific coast in response to the very real threat of war with Japan. War with Germany soon stripped British Columbia of its naval forces, so that when war with Japan came there was little in place.

The expansion of the war in 1942 pulled Canada’s small ship navy in several directions simultaneously, stretching it thin and leading—ultimately—to the greatest crisis in Canadian naval history. The navy’s senior officers were sharply criticized for the way in which they handled these challenges and the Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Percy Nelles, was dismissed in January 1944.

Events off the American eastern seaboard in early 1942 typically capture the attention of historians when it comes to examining this phase of the Atlantic war. But for the Royal Canadian Navy’s escorts on the North Atlantic Run, early 1942 transatlantic escort of convoys remained a perilous and critical task. Winter weather was vile and the U-boats—many of them by then in transit to warmer hunting ground off the United States—required constant vigilance. Evidence of that danger was made plain in February with the tragic loss of the corvette Spikenard while escorting slow convoy SC 67 south of Iceland.

Naval historians have naturally concentrated on the great naval base of Halifax, and on the secondary naval bases developed at Sydney, N.S., and St John’s, Nfld. And much has been written on the role of minor ports and bases, such as Gaspé, Que., in the Battle of the St. Lawrence in 1942. Through it all, Canada’s major east coast commercial port, Saint John, N.B., scarcely earns a nod, but between the freeze-up of the St. Lawrence River in late November until its re-opening for shipping in May, Saint John was Canada’s busiest commercial port.

On the night of Jan. 11-12, 1942, the war at sea reached the Western Hemisphere when U-123 torpedoed and sank the British steamer SS Cyclops southeast of Cape Sable, N.S. Kapitainleutant Reinhard Hardegen’s U-boat was the first of a wave of five submarines ordered into the west 10 days earlier by Admiral Karl Donitz. They were to operate between Newfoundland and Cape Hatteras, N.C., and, if conditions allowed, move further south.

The small ships of the Sheep Dog Navy at war in the vile North Atlantic came to be seen as Canada’s naval war, and as the origins of the modern Canadian navy. But during the Second World War the overriding objective of the professional Royal Canadian Navy was securing the basics of a balanced postwar fleet—destroyers and cruisers, and later aircraft carriers.

The winter of 1941-42 is usually treated by historians as a quiet one on the North Atlantic Run, but it is doubtful anyone guarding the convoy routes saw it that way. The North Atlantic was its typical vile self, with storm-battered ships and weary men standing to their duty in the face of a constant threat from U-boats. In fact, weather proved to be a major factor in the loss of two Royal Canadian Navy escorts to marine accidents in December 1941. This brought to an end a series of losses to weather and collision dating back to May 1940, when the battleship His Majesty’s Ship Revenge sideswiped and sank the gate vessel His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Ypres in Halifax. The destroyers Fraser and Margaree are also counted in this category. The navy suffered only one loss to marine accident after 1941: a testament, perhaps, to the introduction of effective radar by 1942 and improving seamanship.