Sink and Destroy Read online

  For the veterans who shared their stories with me, especially John Schumacher, RCN.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Iroquois, Ontario, September 10, 1939

  Chapter Two: October 1940

  Chapter Three: Spring 1941

  Chapter Four: Mid-April 1941

  Chapter Five: Mid-April–mid-June 1941

  Chapter Six: Mid-June 1941–January 1942

  Chapter Seven: January 1942

  Chapter Eight: January 1942

  Chapter Nine: February–March 1942

  Chapter Ten: March 1942–February 1943

  Chapter Eleven: February 1943

  Chapter Twelve: Spring 1943

  Chapter Thirteen: Summer 1943–Spring 1945

  Chapter Fourteen: Spring 1945

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Images and Documents

  Credits

  About the Author

  Other books in the I Am Canada series

  Copyright

  Prologue

  “Incoming torpedoes!” shouted the ASDIC operator. “Sounds like a freight train! They’re coming straight at us from the stern, off to port side!”

  Without a moment’s hesitation the captain called out, “Hard to starboard!”

  The bow swung round and the ship leaned over at a crazy angle. I hung on to my 4-inch gun to keep from getting thrown overboard. From my position I could see two trails of bubbles racing toward us from out of the dark, frigid water. Beyond that, there was just the blackness of a North Atlantic night.

  After months of preparing and waiting, I finally had my first encounter with a U-boat. And now, as I watched the torpedo trails homing in on us and felt the ship turning agonizingly slowly as the helmsman threw the wheel around, I wondered if it would be my last.

  I thought back to how this had started. It seemed so far away, almost another lifetime.

  Chapter One

  Iroquois, Ontario, September 10, 1939

  The first thing I felt was a gentle tug on the end of the fishing rod, so light that you could almost mistake it for the lure being drawn along by the current. But my dad had trained me to do this since I was eight years old, so I knew exactly what it meant.

  I opened my eyes, almost reluctantly, despite knowing there was a fish nibbling at my lure. I had been enjoying the warm, late-summer sun on my face, the gentle rocking of the rowboat on the waves. But now all my senses were focused on that fishing line. I tried not to move, tried not to breathe. This was where you could lose the contest before it even started. If the fish sensed any unnatural motion, it would get spooked, let go of the bait and bolt away. But if you waited too long to make your move, it would nibble the bait right off your hook, then leave you in the middle of the river, minus one fish, feeling like an idiot.

  It was the first weekend after Labour Day. The summer vacationers, most of them from the American side of the river, had gone home and wouldn’t be back again until school was out next June. So the St. Lawrence was quiet. It was one of my favourite times of the year. No mosquitoes or deer flies to annoy me, no powerboats and water skiers scaring the fish away. Nothing to disturb me. Just the golden September light shimmering across the wavetops. But I knew that it couldn’t stay this way for long. In just a couple of weeks there would be a chill in the morning air and the leaves on the maple and oak trees along the riverbank would turn to a blaze of colour. Icy winter winds would close in soon after that, then the river would freeze over completely and there’d be no more afternoons on the boat until the ice thawed the next spring.

  But right now that was far from my thoughts. The pole bent slightly as the fish at last took the bait. I gave the rod a short, sharp tug upward, the way Dad had taught me, to set the hook firmly into the fish’s mouth. An instant later the line jerked hard as the fish dove, trying to escape.

  “Looks like a big one, Billy!” my brother George whispered to me.

  I let out some line. I always did that at the beginning of a fight. If you didn’t give a big fish like this some play, it could easily snap your line and get away. I knew I had to be patient and let it gradually wear itself out. Whenever I felt the line go limp, I reeled in the slack. When the fish began to tug again, I released a bit of line. When there were only a few yards of line left, I saw a dark green shadow down in the water off the left side of the rowboat — a big bass. They were a smart fish with a lot of fight. Sometimes when a bass got this close, and catching it seemed like a sure thing, it would summon its remaining strength and make a run straight at your broadside, just like a torpedo. At the last possible moment, it would dive under you and out the other side, so your line would get snagged under the keel and snap. Then you’d have nothing to show for your efforts but a lost lure and a story about a big bass that outsmarted you. And that’s just what this one started to do.

  I called to George, “It’s heading straight for us! Get ready with the landing net.”

  George scrambled to the side, using his strong arm muscles to compensate for his polio-withered legs. He moved fast.

  As the fish shot toward our boat, I drew the rod away and led it around the bow so the line wouldn’t get snagged. George reached over the side and plunged the landing net in, all the way to his elbow. Then he whipped the net upward. There was an explosion of sun-fractured water. A moment later the big bass was flopping around in the bottom of our boat.

  I felt a rush of triumph. And it wasn’t just the thrill of the hunt. The Great Depression had hit my town hard, and my family with it. My father had spent half of the past ten years unemployed or doing menial jobs like chopping wood and shovelling snow to pay the bills. My three brothers and my sister and I needed to be fed, so every fish we caught, we ate. It was never just for sport. It was survival. Whenever I came home with a good catch, I knew that I’d see a look of happiness and relief on my mother’s face. Counting the fish I’d just caught, George and I now had two large bass and a pickerel.

  “Well, that’s a good haul for one day,” he said. “Let’s head home.” We didn’t have an outboard motor. We couldn’t afford one, or even the gas to run it. George began rowing us back, his big arms propelling the boat forward.

  As we rounded a bend, our house came into view on the shoreline. My parents were standing near the dock. I figured Mom would be thrilled to see how many fish we’d caught, so when we got within hailing distance, I shouted, “They’re biting!” and held up one of the bass in my right hand and the pickerel in the other. But neither Mom or Dad smiled. Their arms were crossed and they both had a strange sort of heaviness in their expressions. I knew straight away that something really bad had happened.

  As George brought us up to the dock, I jumped out, grabbed the bow rope and quickly tied it up to the cleat with a hitch knot. I held the boat steady as George hauled himself out onto the dock.

  “What is it, Dad?” I called out. “What’s the matter?”

  “Prime Minister King was just on the radio,” he replied. “We’re at war with Germany and Hitler.”

  An icy sensation shot through me when I heard those words. It was like some horrible nightmare you couldn’t wake up from. From the time I was ten years old, I’d heard about Hitler. He’d been around almost as long as that other big nightmare in our lives, the Great Depression. But for most of that time, unlike the Depression, it was possible to ignore Hitler. The only time I saw him was in a movie theatre, in one of the newsreels they showed before the main feature, and my family didn’t have enough money to take us to the pictures very often. So I had only seen Hitler in action a few times. That was more than enough though.

  The speeches he g
ave were like nothing I’d ever seen or heard before. We couldn’t understand a word he said, because it was all in German. But there was no mistaking his meaning or tone. He didn’t talk. He ranted, shouting angrily, while he waved his arms in the air as if he was striking out at something. The crowds that he ranted at ate it up. On a newsreel I saw, Hitler bellowed “Sieg Heil!” — German for “Hail victory!” The entire mob, a hundred thousand people, responded by shouting “Heil!” and they all threw a Nazi salute, a stiff right arm extended on an angle upward.

  In another newsreel, I’d seen the Nuremberg rallies — thousands of people in a huge outdoor arena, shouting, marching around holding flaming torches above them, moving together to make the shape of a giant Swastika, the Nazis’ symbol. With their torches and their shouting, they reminded me of the angry mob in the movie Frankenstein. I could never forget Hitler, any more than I could forget the terrifying image of Frankenstein’s monster roaring down at the crowd of peasants from the top of his burning tower.

  Most of my friends at school had the same bad feeling about Hitler and the Nazis as I did. We thought something should be done to stop him before he got too powerful. We knew we’d be the ones who’d have to go fight his armies if he wasn’t stopped. But Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and the other world leaders like the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, did nothing. They just seemed to hope that Hitler would go away despite all his ranting and his threats.

  Now we were seeing Hitler’s rants turn to action. Just over a week earlier, his army had invaded Poland. The CBC radio reports told us how German Luftwaffe bombers were blasting Poland’s cities into rubble, killing thousands of civilians, using them as bargaining chips to force the Polish government to surrender. Now, unprepared, Canada had been pulled into the conflict.

  The timing of the war seemed all the more cruel, because when it started, the Depression had begun to ease up a little. Not as many businesses were closing, and a few new ones were even opening.

  Things were looking up for my family too. Every single lake freighter travelling between Montreal and Thunder Bay had to pass through the lock here in Iroquois, where the St. Lawrence River’s rapids made it too dangerous for ships to sail through. The government had built those locks, and my father, who’d spent his life fishing on the river and knew its tricky currents better than anybody, was hired to be the lockmaster. It brought in some steady income for my family at last.

  Within a few months of starting that job, my father knew the captains of all the ships. A week after school had finished that summer, the captain of one of the freighters, Frank Jameson, told my dad that a deckhand had jumped ship and asked if he knew of anyone who could fill in. Dad suggested me. Captain Jameson was skeptical about hiring a fifteen-year-old. But he was in a bind, so he took a chance. Mom wasn’t very happy about me working on the ship. It meant I would be gone for the next two months until school started again. But even with my father’s new job, we could use the extra income, and me being on the ship also meant there was one less mouth to feed. I knew I would miss my family, but the thrill of getting out of Iroquois, earning some money and seeing the world was too tempting to resist. I started work aboard the SS Huronia that same day.

  We sailed west, reaching Lake Ontario the next morning. It was my first time being on open water and it was an amazing feeling — I figured it was what being at sea must be like. Some of the Great Lakes, like Superior, were so huge that when we sailed across them, we didn’t see land for days at a time. I felt far away from the world and its troubles.

  By the time the summer was over and I had returned to Iroquois and to school, I felt like Marco Polo, a world traveller returning from distant places with exotic names like Toledo, Detroit and Sault Ste. Marie. I’d also saved a bit of money to help my family out, which was a first. I was so caught up in life aboard the Huronia that I had almost forgotten about all the trouble building up overseas. Until that Sunday afternoon when I came home from fishing.

  A few weeks later we heard that Germany had defeated Poland. From the outset, the war seemed to be one series of blunders after another for the Allies. The Royal Air Force sent planes to attack the German battleship Admiral Scheer and scored three direct hits, but the bombs failed to explode. On September 17 the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous, which was critically important for Atlantic convoy patrol, was sunk by a German submarine. Even then our military leaders insisted that U-boats didn’t pose a serious threat. That changed, and soon. A month after the Courageous was sunk, another U-boat sailed right into the supposedly impenetrable Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow in northern Scotland and sank the battleship Royal Oak, sending 833 crewmen to their graves.

  It was infuriating to hear about all these failures. Our side just seemed to bumble and fumble at every turn. Then for a while, over the winter of 1939–1940, things seemed to settle down. After that initial flurry of action, there wasn’t much military activity. The press started referring to it as the Phoney War.

  Mr. Martin, my grade 11 history teacher, told our class one day that, “This lull could mean that diplomats are working behind closed doors, trying to negotiate a settlement. With any luck, the war will be over by the time you go on summer vacation.”

  My best friend, Jack Byers, leaned over from the next row of desks and whispered to me, “Is he kidding? We’ll be lucky if it’s over by the time we graduate — from university.”

  That’s how I felt too, although a lot of the adults didn’t seem to share our opinion.

  People all over town began to hope that maybe Hitler really did have everything he wanted now, and things would get back to normal. But I kept thinking of him ranting in those newsreels like Frankenstein’s roaring monster, and had a sick feeling that Hitler had barely begun to get everything he wanted.

  With the war going on, it was hard to concentrate on school. Guys just a couple of years older than me were enlisting in the forces. I was sixteen now, and could legally leave school and work full-time. In late March of 1940 when the ice broke up and the lake freighters resumed operating, I quit school and signed up on the SS Huronia again. Mom was really upset that I had dropped out. She never said so, but I know she must have been thinking of all the hardship we had endured because my father didn’t have an education. But with the war on, high-paid jobs were suddenly there for the taking, even for grade 11 dropouts. After ten years of being broke and doing without just about everything that we couldn’t grow or catch, and the embarrassment of wearing hand-me-down everything with patches and worn spots, the possibility of a paycheque every two weeks and a decent set of clothes was just too tempting.

  By the first week of April, I was back out on the Huronia, carrying grain that would be sent to England to help feed Allied troops and civilians. At first it made me feel like I was doing my bit for the war effort, but as the reports of U-boat attacks in the Atlantic began to trickle in, I felt less and less like what I was doing mattered. Those German submarines were sinking our merchant ships faster than they could be built, meaning that a lot of the grain we carried out from the Lakehead on the Huronia never made it to the people in Britain who needed it. But I tried not to think about that and just get on with my work aboard the ship. Because I was so used to helping my mom cook for our big family, I had started working in the ship’s galley, helping prepare meals for the crew of twenty.

  Barely a month after I’d started on the Huronia again, I was in the kitchen, just about to serve up breakfast, when there was breaking news over the ship’s radio. The phony war was no longer phony. Early that morning the Nazis had invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, moving so quickly that by the time we even heard the news, German troops had already advanced deep into those countries.

  Over the next week, every radio broadcast reported a fresh defeat for our side. First the Netherlands surrendered, then Belgium. The Allied armies were pushed back to the English Channel, and France was on the verge of c
ollapse. The reports got so consistently grim that at one point, while we were eating dinner and the news came on announcing yet another German victory, Captain Jameson lost his temper.

  “O’Connell, will you turn that damned radio off and give us all a break?” he snapped.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied sheepishly. I jumped out of my chair and quickly shut it off.

  From then on we only played music during our meals. I still listened to the news when I could, but only when I was alone in the galley. It was almost always bad news for the Allied side.

  By early June the Allied armies had been forced to retreat across the English Channel, leaving their tanks, trucks and artillery behind. Less than three weeks later, the Nazis had defeated France. Germany now had all the resources of Europe at its disposal; Britain none. Any food and weapons that Britain imported from now on would have to come from Canada and the United States, and there was only one way to do that: cross the Atlantic Ocean. That job would get a lot more difficult now too, because the German submarines moved from Germany to bases on the Atlantic coast of France, bringing them hundreds of miles closer to the combat zone and allowing them to stay out on patrol for an extra two weeks at a time. The result was that they sank more Allied merchant ships than ever. The only bright spot was that Neville Chamberlain had resigned as British prime minister and been replaced by Winston Churchill — who reminded me a bit of a bulldog, with the defiant set of his jaw, and his tough, inspiring speeches.

  Through the summer I was really starting to doubt whether my work on the Huronia was helping the war effort at all. Everything came to a head one Saturday night in October of 1940. We were picking up a load of grain from the terminal in Port Arthur. Captain Jameson had given most of the crew the evening off. A few of us went for a stroll down the main street in search of something fun to do and ended up in a movie theatre. I bought a Coke and some popcorn, a luxury I would never, ever have considered spending my money on just a year ago.