F
fraserdw
Guest
Honestly, looking at the better picture, if that black thing is a conning tower on it's side it is very German like in appearance. I would love to be on the expedition team even it means washing dishes!
U-Boat Wreck Possibly Found In Canadian River- fr CBC News
- Thread starter Ex-Dragoon
- Start date
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<fiction tangent>
The 1941 movie "49th Parallel" (starring a Raymond Massey, Leslie Howard and younger Larry Olivier, doing a cheesy French accent - all reportedly working on 1/2 pay for the war effort) is based on a fictional U-boat landing on Hudson Bay - interesting trivia on the flick here.
</fiction tangent>
The 1941 movie "49th Parallel" (starring a Raymond Massey, Leslie Howard and younger Larry Olivier, doing a cheesy French accent - all reportedly working on 1/2 pay for the war effort) is based on a fictional U-boat landing on Hudson Bay - interesting trivia on the flick here.
</fiction tangent>
J
jollyjacktar
Guest
Seen it. God is it ever cheesy, throughout. But that was to be expected of the times and propaganda needs of the day.milnews.ca said:
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From the trivia:
Really? :facepalm:
The last point of the trivia page is out to lunch, where it states correctly that the Niagara River flows south to north. It goes on to claim the United States is on the west side of the river. A glance at a map shows this to be bassackwards, as those of us who grew up in the Niagara region can attest.
Oldgateboatdriver
Army.ca Veteran
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GAP said:
You are bang on GAP.
The CBC picture is as nice and clear a sidescan picture as you can get, but the wreckage that is showing is far from identifiable as anything in particular at this point. And if you look under the two scraggly "wire" thingies right aft (forward?) of what is claimed to be the sail of the submarien, it looks strangely smooth to me. I suspect there is a good deal of something burried deep in the sand there.
Considering the size claimed by the dicoverer (30m.), the various elements we can see, etc. I would be willing to bet a bottle of Screech that, once this is properly uncovered, it turns out to be a WWII long range patrol plane or large bomber.
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Don't make me take the MilPoints away for having been informative!a Sig Op said:
;DIf anything, that overlay makes their claim a bit more dubious.
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I know I can't pick the bloody thing out.
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I love how CBC (the video more so than the article) is reporting it as "U-boat found at the bottom of the chuchill river!" rather then "Somthing was found, it looks vaguely like a u-boat, but we really have no idea what it is, and now we're curious"
The National Post has picked up the story, but takes a generally wait and see attitude. It is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act.
Check the link for some interesting images:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/26/search-team-returning-to-churchill-river-after-release-of-sonar-images-showing-suspected-nazi-submarine/
Search team returning to Churchill River after release of sonar images showing suspected Nazi submarine
Jake Edmiston Jul 26, 2012 – 11:35 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 26, 2012 11:37 PM ET
Until this week, proof of a sunken Nazi submarine in Labrador was confined to old rumours of dark shadows in the Churchill River.
The stories go back decades, suggesting that German U-boats had snaked along the river bottom and deep into Labrador.
Now newly released sonar images depicting a mysterious submerged shape near Happy Valley-Goose Bay have generated excitement among those who believe the old tales and skepticism among those who don’t.
The images were taken in the summer of 2010, when Brian Corbin volunteered to spend several weeks looking for the bodies of three drowning victims. He was using a sonar device beneath the boat when what looked like a large chunk of metal appeared on his screen.
Mr. Corbin noted the anomaly and moved on.
But when a film crew showed up in the area this month — chasing the local myth of a sunken submarine — Mr. Corbin decided to revisit the images he had stored on a computer.
With the help of colleague Junior Pinksen, Mr. Corbin compared old U-boat diagrams to a peculiar, 30-metre protrusion at the bottom of the river.
Most of the object appears to be covered by sand, but the pair say they can make out the deck of the ship, cables typically attached to the top of U-boats, a gun mount and a set of snorkels used to bring in air without surfacing.
“A lot of people will actually talk about their grandparents who saw the dark shadows,” said Mr. Corbin. “Everybody thought it was foolish. It’s a bunch of lies. It’s made up.”
The object reportedly sits 60 feet below the surface of the murky river, full of sand and silt that Mr. Corbin says kept the find secret for decades.
German submarines were known to roam off the Eastern Canadian coast during the Second World War, destroying 23 Allied cargo vessels and warships in the St. Lawrence River. In the 1980s, remnants of a German weather station were discovered in Northern Labrador.
One of the most famous Nazi attacks in the Western Atlantic destroyed a passenger ferry, the S.S. Caribou, between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island in 1942, killing about 140 passengers.
But the recent sonar images come from a portion of the Churchill River that is more than 200 kilometres from the ocean — a fact local historians are finding problematic.
The theory that the images depict a German sub is largely based on local folklore stemming from the 1992 novel Hard Aground.
The story refers to a German U-boat captain who is fed up with the war’s bloodshed and scuttles his vessel in the Churchill River, allowing his crew to escape safely.
There are some U-boats that essentially vanished without anyone knowing the cause It’s fiction, says the author, 93-year-old veteran Walter Sellars, who was stationed in Goose Bay during the latter part of the Second World War.
Mr. Sellars returned to the area in the 1960s to reconnect with two Inuit hunters who saved his life in a severe blizzard during the war. They told him about seeing dark shadows moving under the surface of the river.
“I have no other proof at all,” says Mr. Sellars. “I think the present search will not find a submarine there.”
The search team plans to revisit the site next week to photograph the peculiar object using a remote-control vehicle.
Canadian historians and academics who are following the story are anxious to see what comes from the mission.
“I’m always skeptical. This is only based on a shape in a sonar,” said Mike O’Brien, a history professor at Memorial University in St. John’s. “I’m only saying it’s not impossible.”
A spokesperson for the German Embassy in Ottawa told CBC News that about a dozen U-boats remain unaccounted for.
According to the Canadian War Museum, radio communications became compromised halfway through the war and many U-boat captains were warned not to report their whereabouts to headquarters for fear of being intercepted by Allied forces.
“There are some U-boats that essentially vanished without anyone knowing the cause,” said Jeff Noakes, the War Museum’s Second World War expert.
However, there is no evidence of submarine conflict in the Churchill River, and experts are questioning what a submarine would be doing so far from the Atlantic and how it would have sunk.
“I’d be surprised if a submarine wound up there,” said Mr. Noakes.
The search team has submitted its sonar images to the Canadian authority for sunken ships, the Receiver of Wrecks, which is also conducting an investigation.
And until further evidence surfaces, the mystery of the Churchill River shadows is likely to stay wedged between fiction and fact.
Check the link for some interesting images:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/26/search-team-returning-to-churchill-river-after-release-of-sonar-images-showing-suspected-nazi-submarine/
Search team returning to Churchill River after release of sonar images showing suspected Nazi submarine
Jake Edmiston Jul 26, 2012 – 11:35 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 26, 2012 11:37 PM ET
Until this week, proof of a sunken Nazi submarine in Labrador was confined to old rumours of dark shadows in the Churchill River.
The stories go back decades, suggesting that German U-boats had snaked along the river bottom and deep into Labrador.
Now newly released sonar images depicting a mysterious submerged shape near Happy Valley-Goose Bay have generated excitement among those who believe the old tales and skepticism among those who don’t.
The images were taken in the summer of 2010, when Brian Corbin volunteered to spend several weeks looking for the bodies of three drowning victims. He was using a sonar device beneath the boat when what looked like a large chunk of metal appeared on his screen.
Mr. Corbin noted the anomaly and moved on.
But when a film crew showed up in the area this month — chasing the local myth of a sunken submarine — Mr. Corbin decided to revisit the images he had stored on a computer.
With the help of colleague Junior Pinksen, Mr. Corbin compared old U-boat diagrams to a peculiar, 30-metre protrusion at the bottom of the river.
Most of the object appears to be covered by sand, but the pair say they can make out the deck of the ship, cables typically attached to the top of U-boats, a gun mount and a set of snorkels used to bring in air without surfacing.
“A lot of people will actually talk about their grandparents who saw the dark shadows,” said Mr. Corbin. “Everybody thought it was foolish. It’s a bunch of lies. It’s made up.”
The object reportedly sits 60 feet below the surface of the murky river, full of sand and silt that Mr. Corbin says kept the find secret for decades.
German submarines were known to roam off the Eastern Canadian coast during the Second World War, destroying 23 Allied cargo vessels and warships in the St. Lawrence River. In the 1980s, remnants of a German weather station were discovered in Northern Labrador.
One of the most famous Nazi attacks in the Western Atlantic destroyed a passenger ferry, the S.S. Caribou, between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island in 1942, killing about 140 passengers.
But the recent sonar images come from a portion of the Churchill River that is more than 200 kilometres from the ocean — a fact local historians are finding problematic.
The theory that the images depict a German sub is largely based on local folklore stemming from the 1992 novel Hard Aground.
The story refers to a German U-boat captain who is fed up with the war’s bloodshed and scuttles his vessel in the Churchill River, allowing his crew to escape safely.
There are some U-boats that essentially vanished without anyone knowing the cause It’s fiction, says the author, 93-year-old veteran Walter Sellars, who was stationed in Goose Bay during the latter part of the Second World War.
Mr. Sellars returned to the area in the 1960s to reconnect with two Inuit hunters who saved his life in a severe blizzard during the war. They told him about seeing dark shadows moving under the surface of the river.
“I have no other proof at all,” says Mr. Sellars. “I think the present search will not find a submarine there.”
The search team plans to revisit the site next week to photograph the peculiar object using a remote-control vehicle.
Canadian historians and academics who are following the story are anxious to see what comes from the mission.
“I’m always skeptical. This is only based on a shape in a sonar,” said Mike O’Brien, a history professor at Memorial University in St. John’s. “I’m only saying it’s not impossible.”
A spokesperson for the German Embassy in Ottawa told CBC News that about a dozen U-boats remain unaccounted for.
According to the Canadian War Museum, radio communications became compromised halfway through the war and many U-boat captains were warned not to report their whereabouts to headquarters for fear of being intercepted by Allied forces.
“There are some U-boats that essentially vanished without anyone knowing the cause,” said Jeff Noakes, the War Museum’s Second World War expert.
However, there is no evidence of submarine conflict in the Churchill River, and experts are questioning what a submarine would be doing so far from the Atlantic and how it would have sunk.
“I’d be surprised if a submarine wound up there,” said Mr. Noakes.
The search team has submitted its sonar images to the Canadian authority for sunken ships, the Receiver of Wrecks, which is also conducting an investigation.
And until further evidence surfaces, the mystery of the Churchill River shadows is likely to stay wedged between fiction and fact.
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Now, I am not very knowledgeable about underwater exploration of anykind, but isn't 60' kind of shallow?
Instead of all these cameras and sonar and such, why don't we get a couple of divers in dry suits with some big honking flashlights and a shovel go down there and have a peek?
Of course, not much self-generating press in that I suppose ....
Instead of all these cameras and sonar and such, why don't we get a couple of divers in dry suits with some big honking flashlights and a shovel go down there and have a peek?
Of course, not much self-generating press in that I suppose ....
Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
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Divers are expensive and generally annoying.... 
ROV's aren't
A couple of the U-boat classes were 45m but whre meant as coastal boats.
ROV's aren'tA couple of the U-boat classes were 45m but whre meant as coastal boats.
exspy
Full Member
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An English language news report on the found U-Boat from a German news service.
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CBC.ca, 7 Aug 12
A German U-boat is superimposed over a sunken mass that some believe is a German submarine sitting at the bottom of the Churchill River in central Labrador. (CBC )
And the lost U Boat won't go away. Rather than start a new thread, I decided to continue the one from last year. While the whole thing is long on speculation, missing only chemtrails to bring it up to date, it probably will never go away. It is reproduced from the National Post site under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act.
Group on mission to prove there is truth in legends that Nazi submarines went far inland from Canadian coast
Tristin Hopper | 13/04/19 | Last Updated: 13/04/20 2:33 PM ET
It was the fall of 1944 and the Canadian navy corvette HMCS Arrowhead had just finished escorting a convoy into Goose Bay, Labrador when its skipper, Lester Hickey, ordered the vessel to stop outside the Inuit community of Rigolet.
The skipper tossed an explosive over the side and when a school of stunned cod rose to the surface, he scooped them up, cut off their heads and threw the prime fillets and the rest of the fish back into the sea. All he wanted was the critical ingredient for his signature cod head soup.
“The soup went down pretty good,” said Glenn Martin, 90, a former Arrowhead crew member now living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
Fast forward to 1954 and Mr. Martin is a young machinist in Prince Albert getting a routine chest x-ray from a Czechoslovakian-born doctor.
The men began chit-chatting about the war and, upon learning that Mr. Martin was aboard the Arrowhead, the doctor said, “Remember the time you went fishing off of Rigolet?”
The doctor had also been off the Labrador coast that day, he explained, hiding just beneath the waves in a German U-Boat. “He was watching us through the periscope,” said Mr. Martin.
This month, Mr. Martin’s story of a sub lurking at the mouth of the Churchill River became valuable evidence for an East Coast group on a mission to prove that a strange protrusion recently discovered near Muskrat Falls in central Labrador is a long-lost Nazi submarine that went down nearly 200 kilometres inland from the coast; much farther into Canadian territory than any German U-Boat is known to have gone during the entire Battle of the Atlantic.
It is a theory that has long lingered in the minds of elders who swore they saw dark shadows floating under the surface of nearby Lake Melville and the author of a 1992 novel about a war-weary German crew that scuttles their submarine in the river before escaping to safety. “What was fiction is becoming fact in our mind,” Perry Trimper, one of the alleged sub’s discoverers, told the Prince Albert Herald last week during a visit to Mr. Martin.
However, with the claim flying in the face of every conceivable scrap of historical evidence, experts fervently maintain it is just another Canadian U-Boat legend.
Almost since the opening shots of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Maritimes and the coast of Quebec have abounded with legends about U-Boats that prowled the East Coast in the latter half of the Second World War.
“German sailors, the stories go, were everywhere,” writes Michael L. Hadley in the introduction to his 1985 book, U-Boats Against Canada.
Future prime minister Pierre Trudeau hiked into the Gaspé region in 1943 and 50 years later told in his memoirs the local tales of U-Boat crews coming ashore to buy provisions from genial Quebec shopkeepers.
During the war, records hold that a Newfoundland woman called in a report of a flying U-Boat. Other villages around the Gulf of St. Lawrence yielded “people who claim flat-out that they were out in their fishing vessel and they went aboard a u-boat and they were held there for several days — very convincing stories,” said Roger Sarty, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of the recently released War in the St. Lawrence.
Even Mr. Martin has his own story of a Nazi close encounter. In 1944, he and his crewmates were drinking at a Quebec City tennis club, when, several tables over he remembered hearing the distinctive guttural inflections of a group of men speaking German, although he dismissed it at the time.
Looking back at Canada’s light coastal defences – and Quebec’s reputation as a province that was not altogether unsympathetic to the Axis cause – Mr. Martin thinks it is entirely within the realm of possibility.
“There was nothing to stop them, there was no police on the shores.… It would have been the easiest thing in the world.”
‘To these parochial communities, speaking Norwegian would be all the same as speaking German’
.Mr. Hadley, a former Navy Reserve captain and Germanic Studies professor, is well-regarded as the Canadian expert in the movement of U-Boats through Canadian waters during WWII.
Over a matter of many years, he dug up every available U-Boat log, every German navy dispatch record and every confirmed Royal Canadian Navy U-Boat sighting, and meticulously plotted the data on maps that now hang in the collection of the Canadian War Museum.
His conclusion? “The closest they got to what you could call the Canadian heartland is within 172 miles of Quebec City in the St. Lawrence River,” he said.
The farthest-inland U-Boat, thus, would have come roughly within sight of Baie-Comeau just as a young Brian Mulroney was taking his first steps.
As for Germans stepping ashore, “it’s all nonsense; what people were confusing is flight trainees from Norway,” said Mr. Hadley. “To these parochial communities, speaking Norwegian would be all the same as speaking German.”
U-Boat crews themselves have had a similar reaction to Canadian tales of German naval dash.
One of the more persistent East Coast U-Boat legends concerns U-190. Only days after the submarine sank the HMCS Esquimalt just outside Halifax harbour, the vessel received word that the war was over and surrendered to Canadian corvettes, including Mr. Martin’s HMCS Arrowhead.
When the captured German crew members stepped ashore in Halifax, say accounts of Royal Canadian Navy veterans that lingered until the 1980s, they carried in their pockets Halifax streetcar tickets, Canadian cigarettes and even pictures of Canadian girls.
FilesThe U-190, a German U-boat, which was surrendered to the Canadian navy in 1945 and later commissioned as HMCS U190, one of Canada's first naval submarines...Werner Hirshmann, a crew member of U-190 who later immigrated to Canada, dismissed the claims as “the product of an overactive imagination” in a 2004 memoir.
From the perspective of a submarine commander, many of the Canadian stories just do not make strategic sense. U-Boats were vulnerable to even the smallest hole in the hull; a strong motivation to steer clear of the shoreline for something so frivolous as a night of drinking.
Snaking up narrow rivers, similarly, is unnecessarily risky, particularly when they had a whole Atlantic Ocean in which to hunt Allied ships. “U-Boats ultimately abandoned even the St. Lawrence River.… With airplanes regularly over top, they were just paralyzed and useless,” said Mr. Sarty. “They alway preferred deep water.”
Which is not to say that U-Boats were not a regular presence along the Canadian shore. U-Boats sunk 23 vessels in the St. Lawrence and, in 1942, in a mission to drop off a spy, a U-Boat skulked so close to shore that it was briefly caught in the headlights of a passing car, although the driver did not notice.
The spy, Werner von Janowski, was quickly captured, although not before he checked into a New Carlisle, Que. hotel and attempted to pay for his room with large out-of-circulation bills from 1917.
In his book, Mr. Hirshmann told of an emergency that forced the U-190 to surface just outside Halifax harbour for more than two nerve-wracking hours. “Today, I find it hard to believe that we could spend so much time on the surface near one of the busiest ports in the world and not be discovered,” he wrote.
A year later, a U-Boat crew stepped ashore into Northern Labrador to install an automated weather station that would remain undiscovered until the early 1980s.
The supposed Churchill River U-Boat first emerged in 2010 when crews were scanning the waters below Muskrat Falls for signs of three drowning victims when they came upon a mysterious shape.
A sweep of the area with a remotely operated vehicle in August proved inconclusive because the object had subsequently been buried with sediment and clay from nearby cliffs. Still, said diver Brian Corbin st the time, “there’s something there.”
For years, the people of P.E.I. spoke proudly of an obscure 1943 battle in which quick-thinking air and naval units sunk a U-Boat that was attempting a brazen mission to rescue a breakout of German prisoners of war from an island POW camp.
A U-Boat did indeed attempt the manoeuvre, but there are no records of any battle. Naval corvettes were indeed seen turning sharply offshore, but it was simply because of a navigational error. Locals heard explosions, but it was merely a live-fire exercise. There was low-flying aircraft in the area, although they were conducting a routine patrol.
“Myths,” wrote The Beaver (now Canada’s History) in a 2007 account of the supposed battle, “must always be treated with caution.”
As for Mr. Martin’s mysterious doctor, he did not catch his name nor the vessel’s and the doctor was transferred to another hospital before the two veterans could trade war stories over coffee.
And the question remains; if a U-Boat spotted the HMCS Arrowhead sitting idle at the mouth of the Churchill River, why did they not sink it?
In 1993, Mr. Martin shared a table with the U-190′s Werner Hirshmann at an event in Halifax where the former submariner expressed pride in seeing his crew survive the war, a rare feat for a German submarine crew.
Similarly , Mr. Martin thinks his life may have been spared by a commander who wanted to assure his crew a similar fate.
“If those guys would have attacked us, then somebody would have attacked them,” said Mr. Martin. “I don’t think they were in a fighting mood.”
Group on mission to prove there is truth in legends that Nazi submarines went far inland from Canadian coast
Tristin Hopper | 13/04/19 | Last Updated: 13/04/20 2:33 PM ET
It was the fall of 1944 and the Canadian navy corvette HMCS Arrowhead had just finished escorting a convoy into Goose Bay, Labrador when its skipper, Lester Hickey, ordered the vessel to stop outside the Inuit community of Rigolet.
The skipper tossed an explosive over the side and when a school of stunned cod rose to the surface, he scooped them up, cut off their heads and threw the prime fillets and the rest of the fish back into the sea. All he wanted was the critical ingredient for his signature cod head soup.
“The soup went down pretty good,” said Glenn Martin, 90, a former Arrowhead crew member now living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
Fast forward to 1954 and Mr. Martin is a young machinist in Prince Albert getting a routine chest x-ray from a Czechoslovakian-born doctor.
The men began chit-chatting about the war and, upon learning that Mr. Martin was aboard the Arrowhead, the doctor said, “Remember the time you went fishing off of Rigolet?”
The doctor had also been off the Labrador coast that day, he explained, hiding just beneath the waves in a German U-Boat. “He was watching us through the periscope,” said Mr. Martin.
This month, Mr. Martin’s story of a sub lurking at the mouth of the Churchill River became valuable evidence for an East Coast group on a mission to prove that a strange protrusion recently discovered near Muskrat Falls in central Labrador is a long-lost Nazi submarine that went down nearly 200 kilometres inland from the coast; much farther into Canadian territory than any German U-Boat is known to have gone during the entire Battle of the Atlantic.
It is a theory that has long lingered in the minds of elders who swore they saw dark shadows floating under the surface of nearby Lake Melville and the author of a 1992 novel about a war-weary German crew that scuttles their submarine in the river before escaping to safety. “What was fiction is becoming fact in our mind,” Perry Trimper, one of the alleged sub’s discoverers, told the Prince Albert Herald last week during a visit to Mr. Martin.
However, with the claim flying in the face of every conceivable scrap of historical evidence, experts fervently maintain it is just another Canadian U-Boat legend.
Almost since the opening shots of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Maritimes and the coast of Quebec have abounded with legends about U-Boats that prowled the East Coast in the latter half of the Second World War.
“German sailors, the stories go, were everywhere,” writes Michael L. Hadley in the introduction to his 1985 book, U-Boats Against Canada.
Future prime minister Pierre Trudeau hiked into the Gaspé region in 1943 and 50 years later told in his memoirs the local tales of U-Boat crews coming ashore to buy provisions from genial Quebec shopkeepers.
During the war, records hold that a Newfoundland woman called in a report of a flying U-Boat. Other villages around the Gulf of St. Lawrence yielded “people who claim flat-out that they were out in their fishing vessel and they went aboard a u-boat and they were held there for several days — very convincing stories,” said Roger Sarty, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of the recently released War in the St. Lawrence.
Even Mr. Martin has his own story of a Nazi close encounter. In 1944, he and his crewmates were drinking at a Quebec City tennis club, when, several tables over he remembered hearing the distinctive guttural inflections of a group of men speaking German, although he dismissed it at the time.
Looking back at Canada’s light coastal defences – and Quebec’s reputation as a province that was not altogether unsympathetic to the Axis cause – Mr. Martin thinks it is entirely within the realm of possibility.
“There was nothing to stop them, there was no police on the shores.… It would have been the easiest thing in the world.”
‘To these parochial communities, speaking Norwegian would be all the same as speaking German’
.Mr. Hadley, a former Navy Reserve captain and Germanic Studies professor, is well-regarded as the Canadian expert in the movement of U-Boats through Canadian waters during WWII.
Over a matter of many years, he dug up every available U-Boat log, every German navy dispatch record and every confirmed Royal Canadian Navy U-Boat sighting, and meticulously plotted the data on maps that now hang in the collection of the Canadian War Museum.
His conclusion? “The closest they got to what you could call the Canadian heartland is within 172 miles of Quebec City in the St. Lawrence River,” he said.
The farthest-inland U-Boat, thus, would have come roughly within sight of Baie-Comeau just as a young Brian Mulroney was taking his first steps.
As for Germans stepping ashore, “it’s all nonsense; what people were confusing is flight trainees from Norway,” said Mr. Hadley. “To these parochial communities, speaking Norwegian would be all the same as speaking German.”
U-Boat crews themselves have had a similar reaction to Canadian tales of German naval dash.
One of the more persistent East Coast U-Boat legends concerns U-190. Only days after the submarine sank the HMCS Esquimalt just outside Halifax harbour, the vessel received word that the war was over and surrendered to Canadian corvettes, including Mr. Martin’s HMCS Arrowhead.
When the captured German crew members stepped ashore in Halifax, say accounts of Royal Canadian Navy veterans that lingered until the 1980s, they carried in their pockets Halifax streetcar tickets, Canadian cigarettes and even pictures of Canadian girls.
FilesThe U-190, a German U-boat, which was surrendered to the Canadian navy in 1945 and later commissioned as HMCS U190, one of Canada's first naval submarines...Werner Hirshmann, a crew member of U-190 who later immigrated to Canada, dismissed the claims as “the product of an overactive imagination” in a 2004 memoir.
From the perspective of a submarine commander, many of the Canadian stories just do not make strategic sense. U-Boats were vulnerable to even the smallest hole in the hull; a strong motivation to steer clear of the shoreline for something so frivolous as a night of drinking.
Snaking up narrow rivers, similarly, is unnecessarily risky, particularly when they had a whole Atlantic Ocean in which to hunt Allied ships. “U-Boats ultimately abandoned even the St. Lawrence River.… With airplanes regularly over top, they were just paralyzed and useless,” said Mr. Sarty. “They alway preferred deep water.”
Which is not to say that U-Boats were not a regular presence along the Canadian shore. U-Boats sunk 23 vessels in the St. Lawrence and, in 1942, in a mission to drop off a spy, a U-Boat skulked so close to shore that it was briefly caught in the headlights of a passing car, although the driver did not notice.
The spy, Werner von Janowski, was quickly captured, although not before he checked into a New Carlisle, Que. hotel and attempted to pay for his room with large out-of-circulation bills from 1917.
In his book, Mr. Hirshmann told of an emergency that forced the U-190 to surface just outside Halifax harbour for more than two nerve-wracking hours. “Today, I find it hard to believe that we could spend so much time on the surface near one of the busiest ports in the world and not be discovered,” he wrote.
A year later, a U-Boat crew stepped ashore into Northern Labrador to install an automated weather station that would remain undiscovered until the early 1980s.
The supposed Churchill River U-Boat first emerged in 2010 when crews were scanning the waters below Muskrat Falls for signs of three drowning victims when they came upon a mysterious shape.
A sweep of the area with a remotely operated vehicle in August proved inconclusive because the object had subsequently been buried with sediment and clay from nearby cliffs. Still, said diver Brian Corbin st the time, “there’s something there.”
For years, the people of P.E.I. spoke proudly of an obscure 1943 battle in which quick-thinking air and naval units sunk a U-Boat that was attempting a brazen mission to rescue a breakout of German prisoners of war from an island POW camp.
A U-Boat did indeed attempt the manoeuvre, but there are no records of any battle. Naval corvettes were indeed seen turning sharply offshore, but it was simply because of a navigational error. Locals heard explosions, but it was merely a live-fire exercise. There was low-flying aircraft in the area, although they were conducting a routine patrol.
“Myths,” wrote The Beaver (now Canada’s History) in a 2007 account of the supposed battle, “must always be treated with caution.”
As for Mr. Martin’s mysterious doctor, he did not catch his name nor the vessel’s and the doctor was transferred to another hospital before the two veterans could trade war stories over coffee.
And the question remains; if a U-Boat spotted the HMCS Arrowhead sitting idle at the mouth of the Churchill River, why did they not sink it?
In 1993, Mr. Martin shared a table with the U-190′s Werner Hirshmann at an event in Halifax where the former submariner expressed pride in seeing his crew survive the war, a rare feat for a German submarine crew.
Similarly , Mr. Martin thinks his life may have been spared by a commander who wanted to assure his crew a similar fate.
“If those guys would have attacked us, then somebody would have attacked them,” said Mr. Martin. “I don’t think they were in a fighting mood.”
- Reaction score
- 21,850
- Points
- 1,360
Old Sweat said:
Having been to Muskrat Falls and knowing how shallow the Churchill is from the Base westward to Muskrat Falls, I would be incredibly skeptical that a U-boat could even navigate the waters, much less the Captain actually want to take his boat that far inland.
#subtrails
Regards
G2G
