Canada is far away from the main battlegrounds of WWII. But shots were fired and people killed just offshore. Even foreign soldiers landed on what is now Canada.
On the West Coast, on June 20, 1942, Imperial Japanese submarine I-26 surfaced offshore the Estevan lighthouse and fired 17 shells at the nearby Radio Direction Finding Station, unfortunately located near the Nootka village of Hesquiat.
The threat from Imperial Japanese forces even spawned an "invasion" of Alberta by U.S. workers and construction firms. The fear that Japanese forces would capture Alaska caused the building of the Alaska Highway starting shortly after Japan's declaration of war on Dec. 6, 1941. Construction took the energies of about 100,000 people over a span of seven months -- March 9 to October 28, 1942. The need for the highway was seemingly reinforced when Japanese forces captured two small islands in the Aleutian Islands in June 1942. These were diversionary attacks meant to confuse U.S. commanders during the Battle of Midway. Military historian Liddel-Hart said the small Japanese moves caused the mis-spending of massive numbers of personnel and money by the U.S. The U.S. as it turned out had the resources to be able to do this sort of thing and still contribute to ultimate victory for the Allies.
Although said to be built to connect the "lower 48" states to Alaska, the Alaska Highway actually stretched 2200 kilometres from a rail-head at Dawson Creek, northern BC to Alaska.
Edmonton was a major administrative and railway freight centre for the project. Old-timers later recalled with resentment how the U.S. Army office in Edmonton answered the phone - "U.S. Army of Occupation." The highway's construction may have turned out to be a double-edged sword - if Imperial Japanese forces had captured Alaska, the highway would have made their invasion of northern North America easier.
On the East Coast, German submarines entered the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence sinking ships in 1942 and 1944. They sank 21 merchant ships and two Canadian warships, a corvette (HMCS Charlottetown) and an armed yacht (the Raccoon), in 1942. A U-boat sank a further Canadian warship in 1944.
The first sinking happened on May 12, 1942. By that time Canada had been at war two and half years. Probably the U.S. staying out of the war until December 1941 had made earlier incursion into North America to be unprofitable as only about half the ships would have been legally attacked.
When U.S. joined the war, following declarations of war by Germany and Japan in late 1941, German submarines flooded into the eastern seaboard for the easy pickings there. At that time, U.S. merchant ships travelled singly, not in protected convoys. The U.S. refusal to impose blackout rules on coastal communities and amusements parks (it would have been bad for business) meant that merchant ships could be easily located and many were sunk by submarines, until U.S. wised up.
Some U-boats tried their luck in the St. Lawrence.
On May 12, 1942, U-Boat U-553 sank a British freighter and a Dutch freighter near Anticosti Island, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The seriousness of the situation was such that the Canadian government tried to cover up the incidents but local residents had seen the sinkings and it was difficult to conceal the evidence of human bodies and debris floating on to nearby tidal flats.
On a later excursion to the West Atlantic, July to September 1942, U-553 damaged the Belgian Soldier off Newfoundland, not yet a part of Canada.
Before her independent activities off Canada, U-553 had belonged to the West Wolfpack. The German word Wolfpack meant a group of submarines operating in union. From May 8, 1941 to June 20, 1941, the West wolfpack sank 33 ships (191,414 tons of shipping) in the Atlantic. It was one of the most destructive wolfpacks of World War II.
U-553's career of sinking many ships had been done without suffering any casualties. This held true until its end in January 1943. Just months after its attack off Newfoundland, it sank probably due to technical problems. Most German submariners did not survive the war.
Shortly after U-553's appearance off Newfoundland in August 1942, the Nazi German submarine U-69 intercepted the trice-weekly Nova Scotia-Newfoundland convoy on October 13, 1942. Its sinking of the civilian ferryboat S.S. Cariboo caused the deaths of 137 passengers, many of them women and children. This was a particular low point in the Battle of St. Lawrence.
The last sinkings in Canadian waters took place even after the Canadian army and other Allied armies had launched the liberation of France. They happened five months after the landing of Canadian troops on Juno Beach as part of the D-Day landings of June 6.
In October, 1944, U-Boat 1223 severely damaged the frigate HMCS Magog and two weeks later sank a Canadian freighter. It left without doing more damage but another Nazi submarine took its place.
On the night of November 24/25, German submarine U-1228 sank a Canadian corvette in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. A corvette is a vessel somewhat smaller than a destroyer but larger than a bathtub in my landlubber's perception. It is equipped with guns and an 85-member crew.
That night, the corvette, the HMCS Shawinigan, was waiting to meet the ferryboat Burgeo to escort her on her trip to Newfoundland. The Burgeo ironically had replaced the ill-fated Cariboo on the N.S.-Newfoundland run. The Shawinigan was torpedoed and sank so quickly that all of her 85 crew members died with her. (The death toll was 91 according to one source.)
Those were the last shots fired in the Battle of the St. Lawrence.
By the next spring the war in Europe was over. Germany surrendered. In May, U-889 surrendered to the Royal Canadian Navy at Shelburne, Nova Scotia. U-190 surrendered to the Royal Canadian Navy at Bay Bulls, Newfoundland.
Victory in Europe was celebrated with a holiday across Canada. But the day was blemished by a riot of servicemen in Halifax. Talking to a former navy-man, I learned what caused the riot. The city authorities in Halifax had ordered a holiday but had given no thought to the needs of the thousands of workers, such as seamen who worked on the freighters filling the harbour. They needed food, and the restaurants and grocery stores were closed for the holiday. It was not long before shop windows and doors were busted open by the hungry men.
(That businesses do more than just make money is a lesson learned in the COVID pandemic. Essential services must stay operating even during lock-down. Garbage removal, grocery stores, pharmacists, hospital and much more are essential. The Alberta government seems to feel that the operation of all businesses is essential because they need to make money. But actually making money is often not most important priority of a business. And those that do that as a priority are the ones who show little loyalty to its employees (management included), customers, local neighbourhoods,. They scrimp on quality and wages; they try to keep costs down to a fault, by polluting and forcing governments to give them break in taxes, or ask for kickbacks from governments to cover unforeseen costs. They set up stores on main streets to drive out local businesses, then close their doors, making local customers drive to the big box stores on the edge of town. Businesses are more than profit-making machines or should be anyway.)
Returning to WWII, we look at a short-lived invasion of Canada's Arctic coast.
Only after WWII was over was it discovered that Nazi Germany had landed armed technicians on the Arctic coast of what is today Canada in October 1943.
They and their equipment were carried by a German submarine to North America. They were landed on the north coast of Labrador, which was then part of the British colony of Newfoundland. They installed an automatic weather station.
One of the Allies' advantages was knowing the weather pretty much around the world and thus being better able to make weather forecasts. Nazi Germany's knowledge, derived from stations in Occupied countries and newspapers of neutral countries, was less complete.
The automatic weather station installed in Labrador only operated for a month before Germans stopped receiving its radio transmissions. Perhaps its transmissions were discovered and jammed, or extreme cold stopped its operation. Eventually its transmissions must have stopped altogether. Being camouflaged and in an inaccessible part of the country, the installation was not discovered until 1977. (It now sits in the National War Museum in Ottawa.)
The Allies' weather forecasting advantage played a part in the successful D-Day landings.
As the date for the massive invasion of northern France - June 6 - grew closer, the weather in the English Channel grew foul. There was a very good possibility the invasion would have to be postponed.
But British meteorologists assessed the information coming in from weather stations around the world and could see it was likely there would be a break in the foul weather on June 6. So the decision was made to go ahead with the invasion.
Meanwhile, German military leaders had no idea of the forthcoming break in weather. The weather did calm as predicted. And when Canadian paratroopers landed and Canadian soldiers stormed ashore on Juno Beach, and other Allied soldiers landed on other beaches, they caught the defenders off-guard. The leader of the defenders, General Rommel, was not even on the scene. Thinking nothing could happen due to the rough weather, he had gone to Berlin.
Related Wikipedia articles:
Battle of St. Lawrence
Weather Station Kurt
HMCS Shawinigan (K136) (Do not be misled by reference to ferry boat Sassafras. it is not fact. Name of ferry was Burgeo.)
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