After its audacious convoy ambush had catastrophically backfired,
the German U-94 submarine was forced to surface in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea.
The U-boat had been struck by several depth charges from an Allied warplane
and was now engaged in a lethal dance against HMCS Oakville to avoid getting sunk.
The Canadian corvette fired its guns at the German submarine as its crew rushed
from below deck, eager to take part in the epic fight. Oakville continued to fire,
demolishing the vessel's main gun and dropping additional depth chargers to further disable it.
Desperate for a swift victory, Oakville then attempted to ram the damaged U-boat
but ended up with more damage than the Germans.
With Oakville's propulsion disabled,
her captain ordered 12 of his men to board the enemy ship while they were still nearby.
As the sailors prepared to board the submarine,
the gunner fired Oakville's jammed cannon and blasted the boarding party into the deck below.
Injured and with their ears ringing, Sub-Lieutenant Hal Lawrence and
Petty Officer Art Powell jumped into the U-boat's deck and almost fell to the sea.
The sailors fought against the raging waves while struggling
to walk towards the conning tower as their ship drifted away. And what they did next
would forever carve their names in the annals of Canadian naval history…
Struggle In the Caribbean
In 1942, Germany's U-boat campaign in the Atlantic was in full swing,
and the Allies were devoting massive naval assets to protect their large supply convoys
heading for Europe from the wolfpack assaults carried out by Karl Dönitz’s submarine tactics.
Even though much of the action in the battle of the Atlantic took place in the gray cold
waters of the north, some pivotal encounters happened in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico,
where German U-boats were moving freely by that summer.
Germany's efforts to cripple the Allies were expanding;
not only were they sinking supply convoys, but they were now also hunting down oil shipments
from South America as they were crucial for Canada's continuous naval expansion.
By July, the issue had become too big to ignore; 48 merchant ships had been lost
to German U-boat attacks in the Caribbean, and another 21 had been sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
Consequently, Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles deployed four Royal Canadian
Navy corvettes to the Caribbean, where they would escort Canada-bound shipments.
Soon, a convoy system known as TAW 15 was implemented,
not unlike the one used in the North Atlantic. The special task force
was tasked with coordinating movements with every friendly cargo ship passing through
the area to guarantee their safety while deterring German submarines from attacking.
Leading to The Attack
On August 24, several ships from TAW 15 assembled off the coast of Port
of Spain in Trinidad led by Commander J.F. Walsh aboard the USS Lea destroyer.
Smaller patrol craft also took up station around the tankers, the Dutch gunboat HNMS
Jan Van Brakel and three Canadian corvettes: HMC Halifax, Snowberry, and Oakville.
The task force planned to travel to Key West in Florida where additional tankers
were waiting to be escorted. After that initial journey, TAW 15 would join with
another convoy for a reinforced voyage to New York and finally Halifax in Canada.
The entire convoy operation suffered from too many cargo ships being escorted by only a few warships,
which resulted in tankers having to wait for their escorts or moving unaccompanied.
However, there was always the threat of German U-boats creeping on unescorted merchant ships
before they met their convoys, which is what happened when U-558 sighted several cargo
ships around the Jamaican Channel before their scheduled rendezvous with TAW 15.
During the encounter, the German submarine fired a single torpedo sinking the British
freighter Amakura. Thankfully, a Catalina Patrol Bomber Consolidated Aircraft engaged the U-boat
and forced her to submerge, allowing the other ships to escape.
On August 26, TAW 15 finally rendezvoused the
fast tankers off Aruba and headed north through Cuba and Hispaniola.
The convoy could not have known, but U-94 was in the area hunting down Allied ships.
American Catalina air patrols were drastically increased ahead of the
tanker's incursion in the region to cover the vulnerable units from a possible attack.
Lieutenant Otto Ites, commander of U-94, suspected that the increased
airborne activity might signal a convoy approaching, but he decided to push his luck.
Just after noon, U-94 spotted TAW 15 and immediately dispatched the convoy's position,
course, and speed to the German headquarters. Soon,
all the U-boats in the area intercepted the convoy in true wolfpack fashion.
However, the Allied Intelligence had intercepted the message,
and Commander Walsh knew of the incoming assault. He then ordered his escorts into
defensive positions around the convoy and prepared for battle.
Ambush Gone Wrong
Unwilling to act alone, U-94 trailed the convoy while waiting for reinforcements. Then, on the
night of August 27, U-511 arrived on the scene, led by Lieutenant Commander Friedrich Steinhoff.
Both submarines immediately prepared to strike, and U-94 pierced the convoy's perimeter between
Oakville and Snowberry. Still, before she could position her torpedo tubes,
she was spotted by a USN Catalina Patrol Aircraft.
U-94 then crash-dived as the aviator, Lieutenant Gordon Fiss, immediately engaged the target,
dropping four depth charges that exploded around the submarine and caused considerable damage.
A sailor aboard Oakville heard the explosions and saw four water pillars climb towards the sky.
Subsequently, Oakville's experienced wartime Captain,
Lieutenant Commander Clarence Aubrey King, ordered his ship to battle stations.
Meanwhile, emergency alarms woke up Sub-Lieutenant Hal Lawrence,
who had been asleep below Oakville's deck; the sailor rushed out in a hurry wearing just
a pair of shorts. Back on deck, he found the crew sweeping the anti-submarine beam light.
The beam appeared to make a minor contact, and Oakville dropped a series of five depth charges
along the suspected course of the enemy.
The damaged submarine surfaced one hundred yards, and Captain King adjusted course to
a ram trajectory. The idea was highly dangerous, as Oakville was a corvette and was not designed
to conduct ramming maneuvers, prone to go over low obstacles instead of piercing them.
Still, U-94 dodged the charging corvette, forcing her to use her 4-inch gun instead. The submarine's
conning tower was immediately disabled as it attempted to escape from the Canadian ship.
Another barrage of well-aimed blasts soon blew the U-94's 88-millimeter deck gun into the sea,
leaving her primarily incapable of counterattacking Oakville's fire rain.
King set his ship to ramming speeds for a second time, and Oakville missed again, barely grazing
her target. Oakville's guns could not be lowered enough to fire into the submarine, but this didn't
stop the Canadian sailors, who threw dozens of coke bottles into the submarine as it passed them.
As soon as Oakville was a safe distance from U-94,
King fired a series of depth charges which detonated directly beneath the submarine.
As U-94 was now unresponsive, King turned his ship around for a third ramming attempt,
finally embedding the ship squarely abaft the conning tower.
Away Boarding Party
As the corvette pulled back from the submarine and sailed beside her, the crew realized that
Oakville had withstood significant damage, and her engines had been disabled. Still,
eager to finish what he started, King ordered a team of 12 men to prepare to board U-94.
Sub-Lieutenant Hal Lawrence, Petty Officer Art Powell, and 10 other sailors swiftly
took revolvers, grenades, flashlights, and steel helmets and prepared to jump.
As the men got ready, the deck’s gunner desperately tried to clear his jammed weapon
before another threat arose. Suddenly the gun was cleared,
reloaded, and fired, but Oakville's boarding party was mere feet from the weapon,
and the blast blew the men over the side and onto the deck below.
Lawrence awoke from the concussion with his ears and nose bleeding,
and the petty officer standing over him begged him to stand up and board
the submarine with him as their window was closing. Oakville was now slowly drifting away.
The two men jumped 10 feet down onto the submarine’s deck,
but the harsh landing snapped the elastic on Lawrence's shorts,
and except for some boarding equipment and a life belt, he was not wearing any clothes.
The remaining members of the boarding party could now only watch as their ship drifted
away from the submarine, and the boarding task was left to a naked sailor and his comrade.
Captured
The sea grew restless as the two Canadians made their way to the U-boat’s conning tower,
and Lawrence was swept over the side of the deck by a powerful wave.
Powell instantly reached for his comrade and pulled him back.
The men aboard Oakville took advantage of Powell's rescue and unleashed machine-gun fire
into the submarine, blasting the conning tower with lead
and preventing any German attempts to attack the two sailors.
Lawrence and Powell then reached the conning tower and found it blasted open,
with the area around it covered in pieces of glass from the coke bottles hurled into the deck.
The two barefoot sailors then approached the hatch opening,
and two unnerved German sailors approached them.
They were directed to the back of the deck, where they unpromptedly jumped to the water.
Lawrence and Powell then pointed their pistols towards the hatch, and as two
other German crew members emerged, the Canadians repeatedly ordered them back into the submarine.
Soon, they were forced to open fire, and the German sailors were taken by the sea.
Lawrence then climbed down into the hull, where he found the rest of the petrified German crew.
He then asked them to rise to the deck where Powell could watch them.
Escape
Alone inside the sinking hull of U-49, Lawrence frantically scoured
the rapidly flooding submarine in the dark, his flashlight dimming and the metal creaking.
He was looking for anything that could be used for the Allied intelligence efforts.
Lawrence found himself dog paddling to keep his head above the water. Seeing the imminent doom,
Powell began to yell for him to come out of the hull before it was too late. Finally,
the sailor complied, emerging only with what he had taken down into the submarine’s bowels.
Powell took the prisoners of war to the water
as Lawrence kept watch from the sinking submarine's deck. Naked and injured,
Lawrence waited until the last possible second to jump as U-94 was swallowed by the sea.
Explosions could be heard at a distance as U-511 torpedoed two tankers,
immediately sinking them, but the second U-boat would escape undetected
as USS Lea rescued the Canadian sailors and the German prisoners.
Severely damaged, Oakville was then towed away to Guantanamo Bay for repairs.
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