Free The Battle of the St. Lawrence by Nathan M. Greenfield

corporation sailed more than 170 vessels. 1
    For almost three years before the Battle of the Atlantic spilled over into waters that glide past Rimouski, Cap Sainte-Anne and Baie Comeau, it was also being fought in the manning halls of Quebec City and Halifax and at Montreal’s Place Viger Hotel. Ships such as the Greek steamer SS
Anastassios Pateras
and the Belgian merchantman SS
Hainaut,
both of which were sunk on July 6, 1942, were manned by crews whose homelands had long been occupied by Hitler. Propaganda broadcasts naming ships and sometimes even crews made it clear that back in Bruges or Kosovokis or Bergen, families and friends could be endangered.
Agents provocateurs
tried to disrupt the finely tuned convoy system by whispering, “Britain is willing to fight—to the last Norwegian, Dutchman, Belgian, Greek, Pole, Dane or Free Frenchman.” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s victory in Libya in early 1941 sapped merchant seamen’s morale, for the fall of Tripoli netted the Desert Fox huge quantities of munitions and equipment that merchant seamen had braved the wolfpacks to bring across the ocean.
    Canadian authorities fought back with legislation and organization. AnOrder in Council, PC 4751, passed days after the convoy system was set up on September 7, 1939, gave authorities the power to jail foreign merchant seamen who refused to sail on ships on which they had signed the ship’s articles. The July 1941 conviction of three Greek deserters made it considerably less attractive for any of the thousands of Greek sailors who moved through Montreal to try to disappear into the city’s large Greek immigrant community.
    But it was the efforts of the Naval Boarding Service (NBS), established in June 1940, that ensured that thousands of men would sail. Led by Commander Frederick B. Watt, the NBS quickly moved beyond its original mandate to ensure that ships’ crews were not a security threat (that is, that there were no
agents provocateurs
aboard) and that both the ship and its crew were sound enough to depart.
    Watt’s NBS won the confidence of tens of thousands of sailors by preventing unsafe ships from departing harbour and by adding to the NBS a social welfare role. Watt’s officials took it upon themselves to provide sailors with books and magazines to read. Over the course of some 20,000 boardings in Halifax, the NBS distributed 78,000 ditty bags, 4 million cigarettes, 11 ,0OO fur vests and 35,000 bundles of woollens, many knitted by society ladies. Watt oversaw the creation of professional manning pools and the institution of training programs; Montreal’s NBS ran the empire’s largest centre for DEMS gunnery training. Most important, Watt wrote in
In All Respects Ready,
the NBS killed rumours by giving the sailors “the facts—even the hard ones” about what was occurring on the North Atlantic run.
    Of all the charts and figures that tell the tale of the Battle of the Atlantic, the NBS’s is perhaps the easiest to read. Compared with the more than 27,500 ships carrying more than 166 million tons of cargo in some 2,750 North Atlantic and coastal convoys that sailed between 1939 and 1945, only a relative handful were unable to put to sea because of crew problems or sabotage. 2
    JULY 6, 1942
    Three thousand miles east, workers at Flensburger Schiffbau in Flensburger lay the keel for U-367.
Three thousand miles east in Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s family goes into hiding.
Three thousand five hundred miles east in Berlin, Hitler gives orders to enlarge the Nuremberg stadium where the annual Nazi Party meetings are held “to accommodate a minimum of two million in the future.”
    At 6:23 p.m. on June 27, the radio operator aboard U-132 decoded the following message:
    To Vogelsang.
    Proceed into ordered area QU BB 14 and QU 36 [the mouth of the St. Lawrence] in the period when moon is waning. Approach area unobserved. Remain submerged by day. According to report by Thurmann QU BB 14 and QU 36 in the major quadrant