They appeared overnight as if by magic. Because of wartime secrecy, the residents of Sault Ste. Marie on both sides of the St. Marys River had no idea that while they slept on that early spring night in 1942, they would wake up to some 70 strange apparitions in the morning sky.
No, they weren’t hostile aircraft. In fact, they were there to try to hamper the enemy from destroying what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover referred to at the time as the “jugular vein” of the war production effort – the shipment of iron ore through the Sault locks. Of almost equal importance to the Allies was the delivery of grain from Western Canada to the hungry markets of the world – again through the potential bottleneck of the locks.
The fear was that German or Japanese suicide bombers with a heavy payload of explosives, or torpedo-bearing enemy aircraft, would get through the North American defence system and destroy this vital and highly vulnerable transportation network. A pre-war incident where a railway bridge over the locks collapsed had caused a massive traffic jam of vessels waiting for the damage to be repaired. An enemy assault would be that much more devastating – and might even adversely affect the outcome of the war.
Thus the decision to launch dozens of barrage balloons all over the city – with the heaviest concentration at the locks facilities in the twins cities of Sault Ontario and Sault Michigan. Further protection was provided by Canadian and American troops stationed at the facilities to guard against saboteurs or a ground incursion by enemy troops.
According to a SooToday Remember This? column from last October, between September 1939 when the Allies declared war on Nazi Germany and its partner nations and the end of hostilities in the summer of 1945 more that half a billion tons of ore mined from Northern Michigan and Minnesota passed through the Sault locks for war production in steel mills in Eastern North America.
In addition, millions of tons of Canadian grain reached the market after negotiating the shipping canals at the Sault.
As post-war military dependence on supersonic missiles took over from conventional bombers and fighter aircraft, the Sault’s location as a strategic target lessened considerably. But at the time, many residents of both Saults took a perverse pride in knowing that they were living in an area that was looked upon by the enemy as a prize worth pursuing.
Another canal - the Panama Canal - also figures prominently in Canada's war effort.
In the late 1930s, Canada purchased six British-built destroyers for the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) as the world braced itself for the inevitable war that a toothbrush-mustachioed former World War One corporal had been threatening for years. Finally, on September 3, 1939, two days after Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers and Luftwaffe attacked Poland, Great Britain declared war on Germany.
But Canada didn’t.
For the first time in this country’s history, we were not automatically at war with a hostile nation just because “Mother England”, as head of the British Commonwealth, had joined the fray. Some historians will say that it was our way of showing independence after our invaluable contribution to the winning of “The War To End All Wars” – as the 1914-1918 debacle had been naively called. Others will claim that with Canada’s parliamentarians on summer recess, it took that week for them all to skedaddle back to Ottawa to get the war machine cranked up.
But a former Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Squadron Leader, the late Wess McIntosh of Oakville, Ontario, had quite a different theory – and he had a front-row seat to an event that few Canadians were aware of – until Wess mentioned it in his memoirs that I helped him write.
In the 1930s, Canada had purchased six destroyers from Great Britain – and four of them were berthed on our west coast. Wess was a naval radio operator in Halifax during the days leading up to the war and often communicated with Canada’s ships at sea. Here’s his theory as to why we as a country took a week longer than the other Allied nations to declare war on the Nazis…
Sensing that the war balloon was about to go up, the RCN ordered two of our destroyers that were berthed on the west coast – HMCS Fraser and HMCS St. Laurent – to weigh anchor and head for Halifax via the Panama Canal. But before they could reach this shortcut from the Pacific to the Atlantic, German troops blitzkrieged across the Polish border and the game was afoot.
Canada desperately needed those two destroyers to reach Halifax as soon as possible so that they could join in the upcoming Battle of the Atlantic. But there was one big hurdle to overcome. The Panama Canal was under the control of the United States – and isolationist America was determined to stay out of the war. To this end, they had announced that no ships of any country that had declared war on Germany would be allowed to pass through the canal.
The less-than-perfect alternative under such a ban was to steam all the way down the west coast of North and South America, navigate the stormy seas around Cape Horn and head north to a much-delayed arrival on Canada’s east coast. So Canada had decided to hold off declaring war – and thus becoming a “hostile” nation in the eyes of the United States – until the two destroyers had safely passed through the Panama Canal.
Wess recalled the scene of excitement at his Halifax location as he kept relaying reports of the progress of the two ships: “As a telegraphist, I had a legitimate excuse to be in the wireless room, but it was amazing how many other sailors of all ranks found a reason to crowd into that tiny cubicle to hear the latest update. Senior officers kept poking their heads into the radio shack and asking whether the two vessels had made it through.”
Wess added that when the Fraser and the St. Laurent finally radioed that they had cleared the canal, a tremendous shout went up from the crowd of wall-to-wall people, followed by the blaring of horns by every ship in the harbour. The Canadian Parliament was recalled on September 7 and the formal declaration of war came three days later – exactly 83 years ago today. HMCS Fraser arrived in Halifax on September 14 and HMCS St. Laurent got there one day later.
Once Wess had delivered the good news of the two ships clearing the Panama Canal, he took off his headset and made for the nearby RCAF recruiting Station. Even though he had been associated with the navy since joining the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve in 1933, Wess had his heart set on fighting his war in the air.
“I brought along my log book showing 410 hours earned as a private pilot, and the RCAF recruiter said they needed people like me desperately – the navy at that point didn’t have an air arm – but that I was in the navy and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to transfer out.”
While his naval commanding officer was a bit upset that he wanted to switch from Canada’s “senior service” to the RCAF, he eventually granted the discharge – stamping Wess’s papers with the words: “Permission Granted”.
That became the title for Wess’s 2009 autobiography, which recounts his wartime service flying the mail to Canadian troops overseas as part of the RCAF’s 168 Heavy Transport Squadron – a seemingly safe assignment but one fraught with risks of being shot down over enemy-held Europe.
The prologue to Wess’s memoirs can be read at: https://tomdouglas.typepad.com/tom_douglas/2007/05/permission_gran.html