By John Henry

Soon after Canada entered World War II in 1939, many CSL freighters left their normal peacetime routes on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River to sail on vital missions carrying cargoes through submarine-infested waters as far away as the British Isles and South America and as close to home as the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where more than 20 Allied ships were sunk by German U-boats.

Sadly, the company would lose ships from enemy action in all three places.

The majority of CSL’s canallers requisitioned during the conflict were used in British coastal waters, where they replaced larger ships that moved to longer routes. (Four of the company’s U.K.-based vessels carried supplies in the Normandy invasion in 1944, to liberate France and Europe.) But thousands of miles away, at least three CSL canallers were assigned to a far different task, no less crucial.

These ships carried bauxite from mines in northeastern South America to a transhipment centre in the Caribbean Sea. The steamers had a shallow enough draft and short enough length to be able to sail the winding rivers in Suriname and British Guiana (now Guyana) to pick up the bauxite, which was used to make aluminum for war planes.

Once the ships reached the transhipment centre, located for most of the war on the island of Trinidad, the bauxite was loaded onto larger, deep-sea ships that would take it to North America. Ultimately, it ended up in an aluminum smelter like the one at Arvida in Quebec’s Saguenay region.

The bauxite run proved to be very dangerous for the canallers; two of the CSL ships in the trade were sunk in by German subs, the same number as the company’s losses to enemy action off the British and Irish coasts.

The company’s other war loss occurred during the first naval conflict in Canadian waters since the War of 1812, the little-known Battle of the St. Lawrence. That name referenced two crucially important waterways — the lower St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence — where, according to Canadian Military Journal, German submarines torpedoed 21 merchant ships and five warships between 1942 and 1944. 

July 1940

The first CSL casualty of the war was the Magog. She was shelled, then torpedoed in the Atlantic about 60 miles off Ireland by U-99 on July 5, 1940, while carrying lumber from Halifax to northeast England. After her crew launched a lifeboat and raft from their sinking ship, they were visited by the U-boat’s commander, who inquired if anybody was hurt (no one was) and thoughtfully gave them a bottle of brandy. All 23 crewmen were rescued by a steamer that took them to a port in Ireland. 

Just five days later, CSL lost another canaller, theWaterloo, which was bombed and sunk by a Luftwaffe plane off England’s east coast in what was a rarity; she was destroyed by a German aircraft, not a U-boat or surface warship. Although the Waterloo carried a three-inch 12-pounder gun, her captain said later that “we never had a chance of using it” because the plane flew so high. It hit the ship with what he estimated to be six bombs. All 20 crew members reached shore safely in their lifeboats.

FEBRUARY 1942

The next sinking of a CSL canaller occurred in February 1942, when the Lennox was torpedoed and sunk by U-129 in the Caribbean while carrying bauxite. “Within a couple of minutes, the ship began to break in two and was hurriedly abandoned into a lifeboat by 11 crew, with another seven leaping into the sea,” writes Fraser Mckee in “Sink All the Shipping There.” Two other crew members perished. A tanker picked up the survivors and took them to British Guiana, where they were sent home to Canada.

SEPTEMBER 1942

Then, in September 1942, tragedy struck CSL’s Donald Stewart as she approached the Strait of Belle Isle, at the eastern end of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On her deck were hundreds of drums of aviation fuel for an airfield in Goose Bay, Labrador, that was a base for planes that provided air cover for Atlantic convoys. A single torpedo fired by U-517 hit the ship, igniting the fuel and causing a raging inferno. Although the Stewart sank in about seven minutes and flames engulfed much of her, miraculously only three of her 20-member crew perished; the others, who fled in boats and rafts, were picked up by a Canadian warship.

Later the same month, the Norfolk became the fifth and final of CSL’s war casualties. Her demise was a particularly painful loss. On Sept. 18, she was carrying bauxite in the Caribbean when she was hit by two torpedoes from U-175 off the coast of British Guiana. The immense explosions they triggered killed six people aboard the canaller, including her master. The ship is believed to have sunk within a minute, so the 13 survivors had no choice but to dive overboard. A freighter rescued them and took them to Trinidad.

Survivors

• Anticosti
• Dundas
• Granby
• Kindersley
• Knowlton
• Lanark
• Mapleton
• Oxford
• Sherbrooke
• Winona

Casualties

• Magog
• Waterloo
• Lennox
• Donald Stewart
• Norforlk