We
Nova Scotians are accustomed to conceiving the Second World War as
something that happened someplace far away, in Europe and Asia
and the Mideast, but with our participation in the war and our
protrusion into the Atlantic, the war’s edges sometimes extended to
our shores.
The
evening of May 30 in 1942 was such a time. The SS Liverpool
Packet --
formerly the Sonia --
was passing Seal Island off Nova Scotia en route from New York to a
Newfoundland air base, laden with massive power generators, vehicles,
tires, etc. The Packet’s captain
was Nova Scotia’s own "Captain Norm", hero of the First
World War.
Captain
Norman Emmons Smith -- born in 1880 at Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia and
at sea by the age of 12 -- had captained munitions ships in the First
World War, managing an impossible 42 Atlantic crossings. Variously
nicknamed "Captain Norm", "Dynamite", and
"Iceberg", he was as near invincible as any mariner in Nova
Scotia’s maritime history.
Captain
Norm’s ship Ruby on
its return from a delivery to France caught the eye of a German
U-boat. Spotting torpedoes swimming for his broadside, Captain Norm
swung Ruby around
end-to, shrinking the target, and the torpedoes passed narrowly
without detonating. The German submarine then surfaced and "shot
away" Ruby’s
smokestack and mast, but Ruby outran
the sub and made it back to port above-water.
On
December 4 of 1917 Captain Norm had departed Halifax Harbour for
Europe carrying a cargo of TNT; it was all of two days later that
another munitions ship, the Mont
Blanc,
collided and caught fire in the harbour, and the resultant Halifax
Explosion killed 2,000 and constituted the greatest manmade explosion
before the Hiroshima bomb.
On
the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Captain Norm had
enlisted as a captain in the Merchant Marine once more, aged 59. He
was given command of the Belle
Isle,
establishing and supplying weather and radio stations on Greenland
whose advance forecasting for Allied operations in Europe was
life-and-death: Allied counter-intelligence saw to it that Germany
couldn't know the where of the D-Day landings, and as to the when,
Germany was confounded by a forecast from Greenland of a break in a
storm, for the 6th of June. Captain Norm crossed the Atlantic in the
second war as he had in the first, and not infrequently without
convoy protection, as when his ship was slower than the slowest
allowed in convoy.
Captain
Norm was in the middle of a solo supply run that evening of May 30 in
'42. His 3,000 ton Liverpool
Packet was
making its top speed: 8 knots. At 8:45, the Packet was
a dozen miles off Seal Island and only 30 miles from Captain Norm’s
native Woods Harbour when an undetected German U-boat slammed a
torpedo into its broadside. The torpedo tore through the entire
engineroom, killing the two firemen instantly and blasting such a
hole as to render the Packet unsalvageable.
Inside of five minutes, the Packet would
be altogether underwater. The lifeboat was launched and some of the
men scrambled aboard, while others jumped and swam clear of the
sinking ship and its deadly drag.
After
the Packet’s
survivors had been collected in the lifeboat, the German sub
surfaced. Its crew emerged and trained their guns on the Packet men,
half-dressed but no less dangerous. The German captain demanded to
know Captain Norm’s destination and cargo. Captain Norm was
uncommonly bold and brave even by the standards of a courageous age,
but with neither weapons nor ship and responsible for 17 now-helpless
crewmen whom the Germans might kill as easily as not, he gave up the
information, which blessedly was not critical military intelligence.
The U-boat then disappeared and the lifeboat rowed for land.
Before
they had got far, the Packet’s
survivors heard calls for help from what turned out to be the first
mate. He had been thrown by a secondary explosion some 25 yards, and made a life-preserver of the lid of a wood crate. That 19th
survivor was crammed into the lifeboat and it restarted for shore.
The Liverpool
Packet hadn't
been the first ship to be torpedoed just off Nova Scotia in the
Second World War, and it wouldn't be the last. Not three weeks
earlier, the Kitty’s
Brook had
been torpedoed about 40 miles off Lockeport. Two ships in three days
were torpedoed off Neils Harbour that October: the Waterton,
about 40 miles off, and the Caribou,
about 50. The Caribou attack
was particularly heinous, that ship being a passenger ferry and its
losses numbering 137. A couple years later in 1944 the Watuka was
torpedoed 35 miles off Little Harbour, and the Nipawan
Park was
torpedoed about 30 miles off that same point as late as January of
'45, just months before war’s end.
As
for Captain Norm, he carried on at sea for two years after the war,
which he outlived by 24 years. From the Arctic to the Mediterranean,
in two world wars, the only torpedo to sink Captain Norm came 30
miles from his Nova Scotia hometown.
