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

operating. B for ‘bonbon’ meant that there was the threat of a submarine offshore. That’s when we turned off the lighthouse and stopped the foghorn until further notice.” By the end of 1939, both the British territory of Newfoundland and the Free French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were incorporated into Canada’s dim-out regimen.
    Few aspects of the Battle of the St. Lawrence were as much discussed during the Battle or are as well remembered today as the dim-out. “Some people,” recalls Lorraine Guilbault, who in 1942 was twelve years old, “said that the dim-out regulations were just part of the government’s publicity campaign to support the sale of war bonds.” 3 For most Gaspesians, however, the dim-out was serious.
    The Fusiliers du St-Laurent enforced
l’obscuration.
Hundreds of men in uniform checking to see if houses and other buildings were properly blacked out and manned checkpoints at which cars that had more than a ¾-inch slit of their headlights unpainted were stopped and their headlights were painted. In response to fears about dangers to highway traffic, in 1943 the regimen was changed to painting out the “upper half of the headlights down to half-an-inch below [the] centre” of the headlights. Dozens of stories reported the preening of mayors such as Gaspé’s Davis, who on February 27, 1942, declared that
l’obscurcissement
exercise held on the Sunday before February 27 was “a complete success…. Private homes, community and religious buildings, the harbour, everything was in total darkness for nine hours.” The dim-out was one of the few aspects of the war that was openly discussed at school, recalls Guilbault. “When it came to the defence of the river, the thing we talked about most at school was the blackout. We were taught how to put up curtains to darken our houses and how to do the blackout at school.”
    On the whole, the dim-out regulations were well observed. When they were not and when that fact became widely publicized, the dim-out became a bone of contention between English and French Canada. In June 1943,Brigadier-General Edmond Blais, the army officer commanding the Quebec military district, told the Canadian Press that “while the dim-out is fairly generally observed, in most of the fishing villages along the rugged coast many car headlights remain untreated.” The
Halifax Chronicle Herald
wasted little time before editorializing, “It is true that last year dimout regulations were not fully observed but no attempt appears to have been made to enforce them.” On June 9, the Montreal
Daily Star
applauded the government for a planned “campaign to enforce ‘dimout’ regulations,” non-compliance with which it immediately went on to equate with “careless talk”—which everyone knew, from the ubiquitous posters warning against repeating shipping information, “costs lives”—and with “the circulation of sensation and inaccurate rumours.” In other words, the
Daily Star
all but branded those who failed to paint out their headlights or who let light shine through their curtains as fifth columnists.
    Nor were the air defences what Vogelsang might have imagined from Thurmann’s having reported that in the days after the sinking of
Nicoya
and
Leto
defences were “very alert.” Memoranda that declared where his planes were to be stationed aside, Air Vice-Marshal A. A. L. Cuffe, commander of EAC, was shuffling his planes around the gulf as bases at Gaspé and Mont Joli became available and, even more important, poor communication systems undercut Cuffe’s men’s effectiveness. Poor communications between EAC and the US Air Force in Newfoundland prevented Canadians from finding out about the May 10 sighting and bombing of U-553 by a B-17 flying out of Gander until late on the eleventh, far too late to launch their own planes for a follow-up attack.
    But it was the sheer size of the river and gulf, some quarter million square kilometres, that posed