St. John's and the Battle of the Atlantic
edited by Bill Rompkey

St. John’s, at the eastern edge of North America, had been used by Europeans since the 15th century. It had known its share of both fishing and war. Tradition has it that the harbour got its name from John Cabot who entered it on 24 June 1497, followed later by other seafarers. By 1500 the harbour was so well-known and well-used by European fishermen that in 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed through the Narrows and claimed the island for Britain. Virtually landlocked, the harbour opens to the Atlantic through the Narrows, bounded on the north side by Signal Hill and on the other by the Southside Hills, providing protection from wind and storm but limited shore space for commercial or residential development. Through the centuries it had been no stranger to war, whether from the Dutch Admiral Michiel De Ruyter in 1674 or, more savagely, from Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville in 1696 until William Amherst finally retrieved it for Britain in 1762. Thereafter, under the often less than benign rule of British admirals followed by a period of unstable administration, the port was able to concentrate fully on trade and commerce which covered its shores with wharves and fish flakes.

Now, in 1939 it was once more sought after. Now it was once more in the middle of a war. And from time to time the port was once more under fire. After the German capture of French Biscay ports, Admiral Dönitz, commander of Germany’s U-boats, pushed his submarines farther into the western Atlantic, eventually bringing the war to North America. A German submarine fired two torpedoes at an old coastal steamer in the Narrows, hoping to block the harbour entrance, but one struck the rocks below Fort Amherst, the southern bulwark, and the other lodged in one of the anti-submarine nets without exploding. The SS Ocean Vanguard was torpedoed 3.5 miles east of St. John’s Harbour. Ten miles east of Cape Spear, U-845 fired five torpedoes at the freighter SS Kelmscott, which had sailed from St. John’s to join convoy HX-278. On 5 September, 1942, and again on 9 November, submarines attacked Bell Island in nearby Conception Bay, and two ships at anchor and two in convoy were struck with a total loss of 69 lives. In the same year the Caribou, a ferry between Port aux Basques and North Sydney, was torpedoed with a loss of 137 military and civilian passengers and crew. Many years later the remains of a German weather station that had been set up in October 1943 were discovered at Martin Bay on the north coast of Labrador (the only time that armed Nazis ever set foot on what is now Canadian soil). Newfoundland was at war and St. John’s was a target. There was no question about that.

At the outset of the war, in spite of the experience of WWI, neither the British Empire nor the Dominion of Newfoundland was fully prepared. And yet, Britain alone could never have faced the rapidly arming Nazis without the shipping of crucial supplies, equipment, and troops across the Atlantic. The mission of the expanding German submarine fleet was to sever this lifeline by sinking those merchant ships. If they had been successful in this, the world would be quite a different place today. Following the fall of Britain’s French and Scandinavian allies, Canada was her sole support in the North Atlantic region. So it was that St. John’s, the port closest to Europe, was to play an important role in supplying Britain’s needs.