Torpedoed in the St. Lawrence (Part 2 of 2)

Heroes Remember

Torpedoed in the St. Lawrence (Part 2 of 2)

Transcript

That's difficult to say. I had gone down to the chart room, I wasn't on the bridge at the moment. I had gone down to the chart room to check something in, you know, where we were on the charts and all of a sudden there was an awful banging... ship shook. By the time I hit the deck I saw clouds of dust and steam, and I thought we'd blown a boiler. My first reaction because in the St. Lawrence you don’t think you're going to get torpedoed. We saw the second torpedo going around, but by that time we were still in the water and there was no noise and it was an acoustic torpedo. It blew up somewhere off our beam, quite a distance away, but you could hear the sides of the ship go in and out, you know the way with the tin can, you pop it goes The boiler room, engine room crew had been very swift and the engineer officer had been extremely fast and had a good crew. He shored up the after part of the engine room and kept us from taking on too much water. Interviewer: I'm impressed. It took two days to round up a volunteer crew in Quebec City to bring a tug down and pick us up because we were south of Murray Bay quite a bit, and they had to get us up river. So they took us in tow after two days and we, we lived in life jackets. And they got us up into Quebec City and the back was broken of the ship actually and you watched the plates opening on the deck and the sides as she went through the rough water at Murray Bay. Hoped you weren’t going to swim! Yes, it was unnerving and yet you, there was so much to do and you were excited at the same time, to get through everything, that it really didn’t prey on your mind too much. There were other things more important to get done.

Description

Mr. Stanger talks about being torpedoed while sailing up the St. Lawrence river.

Edgar Thorne (Peter) Stanger

Mr. Stanger was born on September 19, 1923 in Montréal, Québec. His father was an electrical engineer for Southern Canada Power in Montréal and also served in the First World War. His father had told him of memories of Vimy and Passchendaele when he was part of the artillery. Mr. Stanger started as a midshipman when he was 17 and from there he went to Kings College at the age of 18 and received his sub-lieutenant stripe and then went to sea. He was recommended for the navigation course in 1944. He believed they were grooming him to take over command on one of the ships, but the war had ended before his training was complete. During a convoy in early 1944, up the St. Lawrence, their ship was struck by a torpedo. As a result, they ended up spending two days waiting for a tugboat to rescue them and take them back to land.

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