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On May 11, 1942, a German U-boat torpedoed SS Nicoya,violently ending a peace in Canada’s waters that stretched back to 1812. Bythe end of 1944, another 18 merchant ships and four Canadian warships would bedestroyed. More than 300 men, women and children—including at least 260Canadians—died by explosion, fire or icy drowning. Drawing on numerous first-hand accounts from both Canadians andGermans, respected writer and historian Nathan Greenfield has penned a lively,revealing narrative, the first popular account of World War II in Canadianwaters. This is a must-read for military history enthusiasts, veterans and theirfamilies.… (mehr)
Even small events of World War II deserve their memorials.
This book is one such attempt to do so. It covers one little corner of the war which doesn't get much attention in the general histories: The time in 1942 when the U-boats invaded the waters in and near the St. Lawrence river. The sub-title, The Second World War in Canada, might be misleading; this is not a book about Canada's participation in the war; it's about the (rather limited) fighting in Canadian waters, resulting in the loss of about two dozen Allied ships and several hundred lives.
As such, it's a topic worth studying. I wish this book had done it better justice.
I have four specific complaints. One is that it spends much too much time on human interest stories -- on just what this particular officer or rating experienced at a time a ship sank. Obviously people care a lot about these stories. There are books devoted specifically to them. But, in this case, they make it much harder to follow the thread of what is happening.
The second gripe is the author's bile against Nazis. Now I'm not trying to defend Nazis; they should always remind us of what happens when political tribalism is taken to its ultimate limit. But not every German submariner was Adolf Hitler, and even if they were, it's hard to see how that would have affected the course of the Battle of the St. Lawrence, where no soldiers ever came into direct contact. The "rules" of submarine warfare were inhuman -- but the Allies treated the Japanese in just the same way as the Germans treated their victims. There is only one instance of a man throwing an enemy into the sea in this book, and it was a Canadian doing it to a German (epigraph, facing the Table of Contents); nor does he comment when Canadians machine gunned a U-boat's crew (I lost the page reference on that one).
The third is that the book probably needed a better proofreader; the discussions of physics made me cringe (not that the average reader is likely to care), and there were errors in the descriptions of many ships -- e.g. on p. 44 we read of the "20,000 ton Prinz Eugen" -- but the Prinz Eugen, although she went vastly over her intended 10,000 tons, came out at around 14,500 tons, not 20,000 (no one would want a 20,000 ton heavy cruiser!). Similarly (p. 180), the USS Bogue is called a "fleet aircraft carrier"; it was an escort carrier.
All of the above are nitpicks, really. The final complaint is more serious, and that's that this book is so close to its topic that we never get any strategic sense of the battle. Why did the U-boats come to Canada in 1942? Well, we can probably answer that: it was an undefended region. But why, then, did they quit in 1942? They were sinking ships, and they weren't suffering losses, but they stopped coming (except for a brief return in 1944). It makes no sense, and author Greenfield doesn't explain it. The book isn't really an overview of the Battle of the St. Lawrence; it's more like a bunch of accounts of infantrymen telling their personal experiences with no idea of what their commanders were up to. We do hear quite a bit about Canada's internal debates about the war, but nothing about Germany's.
All that said, this is a topic that deserves coverage, and it's good that this book was published. But I really wish I could get a book on the slightly bigger picture. ( )
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No Allied seamen could ever stomach the arrogant posturing of the U-boat men that we watched in movie newsreels: the brass bands, the vainglorious songs, the strutting admirals, the buxom maidens draping garlands of flowers about the necks of their returning warriors. Only a Nazi could transform the sinking of helpless merchant ships and the drowning of unarmed sailors into Wagnerian heroics. Certainly we had no such illusions, and when one U-boat survivor attempted an arrogant, arm-in-the-air Nazi salute upon being hauled aboard a Canadian corvette, he was unceremoniously bundled back over the side to rethink the situation. -- JAMES LAMB
Widmung
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This book is dedicated to my children -- Pascale, whose excitement when I turned up something or someone new almost equalled my own, and Nicolas, who asked all the right questions when we toured the naval base in Halifax, and to Micheline, who waled with me as I travelled through the undiscovered country of the past.
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PREFACE The subtitle of this book -- "The Second World War in Canada" -- will, no doubt, surprise many.
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On May 11, 1942, a German U-boat torpedoed SS Nicoya,violently ending a peace in Canada’s waters that stretched back to 1812. Bythe end of 1944, another 18 merchant ships and four Canadian warships would bedestroyed. More than 300 men, women and children—including at least 260Canadians—died by explosion, fire or icy drowning. Drawing on numerous first-hand accounts from both Canadians andGermans, respected writer and historian Nathan Greenfield has penned a lively,revealing narrative, the first popular account of World War II in Canadianwaters. This is a must-read for military history enthusiasts, veterans and theirfamilies.
Google Books — Lädt ...
(3.33)
3
This book is one such attempt to do so. It covers one little corner of the war which doesn't get much attention in the general histories: The time in 1942 when the U-boats invaded the waters in and near the St. Lawrence river. The sub-title, The Second World War in Canada, might be misleading; this is not a book about Canada's participation in the war; it's about the (rather limited) fighting in Canadian waters, resulting in the loss of about two dozen Allied ships and several hundred lives.
As such, it's a topic worth studying. I wish this book had done it better justice.
I have four specific complaints. One is that it spends much too much time on human interest stories -- on just what this particular officer or rating experienced at a time a ship sank. Obviously people care a lot about these stories. There are books devoted specifically to them. But, in this case, they make it much harder to follow the thread of what is happening.
The second gripe is the author's bile against Nazis. Now I'm not trying to defend Nazis; they should always remind us of what happens when political tribalism is taken to its ultimate limit. But not every German submariner was Adolf Hitler, and even if they were, it's hard to see how that would have affected the course of the Battle of the St. Lawrence, where no soldiers ever came into direct contact. The "rules" of submarine warfare were inhuman -- but the Allies treated the Japanese in just the same way as the Germans treated their victims. There is only one instance of a man throwing an enemy into the sea in this book, and it was a Canadian doing it to a German (epigraph, facing the Table of Contents); nor does he comment when Canadians machine gunned a U-boat's crew (I lost the page reference on that one).
The third is that the book probably needed a better proofreader; the discussions of physics made me cringe (not that the average reader is likely to care), and there were errors in the descriptions of many ships -- e.g. on p. 44 we read of the "20,000 ton Prinz Eugen" -- but the Prinz Eugen, although she went vastly over her intended 10,000 tons, came out at around 14,500 tons, not 20,000 (no one would want a 20,000 ton heavy cruiser!). Similarly (p. 180), the USS Bogue is called a "fleet aircraft carrier"; it was an escort carrier.
All of the above are nitpicks, really. The final complaint is more serious, and that's that this book is so close to its topic that we never get any strategic sense of the battle. Why did the U-boats come to Canada in 1942? Well, we can probably answer that: it was an undefended region. But why, then, did they quit in 1942? They were sinking ships, and they weren't suffering losses, but they stopped coming (except for a brief return in 1944). It makes no sense, and author Greenfield doesn't explain it. The book isn't really an overview of the Battle of the St. Lawrence; it's more like a bunch of accounts of infantrymen telling their personal experiences with no idea of what their commanders were up to. We do hear quite a bit about Canada's internal debates about the war, but nothing about Germany's.
All that said, this is a topic that deserves coverage, and it's good that this book was published. But I really wish I could get a book on the slightly bigger picture. (