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

to the west is favourable attack area. Intercept shipping in the narrowest portion of the pipe [strait]. Traffic pulses occur particularly on Saturdays. Sundays are also a possibility. Surface forces are weak. It is probable that only aircraft will be encountered. Establish whether outbound traffic also proceeds via 22 [Strait of Belle Isle]. If the area proves unfavourable after careful and tenacious observation, you are granted permission to manoeuvre according to your own initiative.
    Three thousand miles away in Lorient on France’s Bay of Biscay, Admiral Dönitz must have smiled to himself when he composed this order. Just over a week earlier,
Kapitänleutnant
Ernst Vogelsang had declined Dönitz’s order to return to La Pallice, U-132’s base on the Bay of Biscay, where the officers drank absinthe at the inaptly named Café de la Paix and ratings quaffed beer at the equally incongruously named Susie and Buffalo Bill bar. After learning of the damage U-132 had suffered during a mid-ocean encounter with HMS
Stork
and
Gardena,
whose shells damaged the submarine’s periscope and whose depth charges cracked open diving tanks, resulting in telltale slicks, Dönitz ordered Vogelsang home for repairs. Vogelsang’s reply,that despite the increased danger that resulted from the damage he and his men would “carry out the convoy task to the end,” was not insubordination. Rather, for Dönitz it was proof of the mettle of the men who joined the so-called
Frei Korps
Dönitz, a name that harkened back to the ultranationalist troops who destabilized the Weimar Republic and who formed the backbone of Hitler’s first storm troopers, the SA.
    Despite Naval Service Minister Angus Macdonald’s assurance that “long-prepared plans for the defence of the St. Lawrence” had been put into effect, the waters into which Vogelsang sailed, unobserved, in the early morning hours of July 2, 1942, differed little from those Thurmann had entered in early May. No doubt because of Thurmann’s May 21 report “Cap Gaspé and other lights farther out extinguished,” Vogelsang expected Canada’s coasts to be blacked out and its radio beacons silent. Hence the surprise that comes through in his war diary entry for July 2: “Navigational radio beacons are operating as in peacetime according to the list of nautical radio stations.”
    As was the case on the US east coast, where lights from New York, Atlantic City, Savannah and Miami silhouetted ships, making them easy targets for U-boats, Canadian authorities resisted imposing a blackout. Unlike the Americans, however, who resisted largely because of pressure brought by tourist interests in Miami and Atlantic City, Canadian authorities resisted because without navigational lighting and radio beacons, shipping in the St. Lawrence would have been endangered. As Prime Minister King reminded the House of Commons on March 25, 1942, “These are some of the foggiest shores in the world, winds change direction rapidly, and the seas make themselves felt.”
    Resistance to imposing a blackout or dim-out (which is what Canadian authorities opted for, although it was still popularly referred to as a “blackout”) did not, however, mean that Canadian authorities did not ready the Gaspé and the rest of eastern Canada for one should it become necessary. On November 12, 1939, just two months after the war began, instructions were sent to lighthouse keepers instructing them when to extinguish their lights. A year later, a more comprehensive system was developed that used the CBC’s and Radio-Canada’s broadcasts to signal lighthouse keeperswhen to turn off their lights. Rémi Ferguson, who kept the lighthouse at Cap-des-Rosiers, not far from Gaspé, told a historian the radio messages that were broadcast at 2:30 and 10:30 a.m. and at 2:30 and 10:30 p.m.: “‘A notice to lighthouse keepers: execute instructions A for Alphonse,’ and they repeated that three times. That meant to keep the lighthouse