185 Morden sank U-756, captained by Klaus Harney, about 440 nautical miles south-west of Cape Farewell, Greenland. One of the Morden’s crewmen, Larry Restall, gave this account of the sinking for the record: We detected surfaced sub attempting to break into convoy at night. I was on the after-gun crew during action stations firing at the sub which dived. We attempted to ram but the sub was able to submerge. Passed over sub and dropped a pattern of depth charges. According to German records, the sub never reported again. It took 46 years for the navy to confirm and acknowledge the sinking. As one commentator put it, “the mills of the gods grind exceeding slow!” U-756 and its 43man crew sank with no survivors. The Battle of the Atlantic was, at times, a merciless business. Of the 41,000 men recruited for U-boat duty, 28,000 lost their lives. RCN casualties totalled 2,000, and 1,600 Canadian Merchant Navy seamen died in the conflict. In 2024, my wife, Gabrielle, and I had the opportunity of touring a type VIIC/41 U-boat, U-995, preserved in the seaside town of Laboe, near Kiel on the Baltic coast of Germany. The towering Laboe Naval Memorial stands nearby, commemorating the First World War dead of the Kaiserliche Marine and the Kriegsmarine dead of the Second World War. How the 40-man crew stood the claustrophobic conditions aboard U-995 is hard to comprehend. To move about the vessel, crewmen needed to squeeze by one another in narrow passageways and duck through small circular hatchways. They worked in cramped, noisy rooms in the stale air and took turns sleeping in uncomfortable bunks between shifts. To make matters worse, they had to share a single toilet which could not be flushed when the submarine was cruising at significant depths. And all the while the men laboured in the knowledge that their submarine might become their coffin. One must admire the fortitude of the U-boat crewmen who served in such daunting circumstances. While on escort duty, Morden gained a reputation for saving lives at sea. On 22 October 1942, the Winnipeg II— a 9,807-ton Canadian Pacific Steamships passenger vessel sailing in convoy ON-139 from Liverpool, England, to Saint John, New Brunswick—was torpedoed and sunk by U-443. Morden’s crew rescued all 194 sailors and passengers from the Winnipeg II. The passengers included seniors, women, children, and even babies. One of the passengers, Lt. Donald Sutherland on his way home from foreign leave with his friend SLt. James George, wrote an account of the ordeal. He and fellow survivors spent hours in one of the lifeboats before the Morden arrived. Lt. Sutherland picks up the story: a corvette loomed out of the night’s darkness and threw us a line. She had to keep way on as no ship dare stop and leave itself vulnerable in U-boat infested waters. Oars were stowed. The moment had come to get the survivors aboard the corvette. Understandably, the ladies were terrified because the lifeboat went up and down past the deck of HMCS Morden like an elevator trying to stop at the right floor. On the ups, the lifeboat was catching the protective grill over a porthole on the corvette’s starboard quarter threatening to dump us all in the sea over the turning screws of the Morden Left: U-995 Top: Gabrielle in a tight passageway on board U-995
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