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In the North Atlantic off Halifax, a Canadian warship was sunk by a German U-boat, and weeks later the Royal Canadian Navy boarded that same submarine as it surrendered. The story of U-190 and HMCS Esquimalt becomes far more than a battle tale: it is a military history mystery about survival, revenge, and why Canada chose to keep the boat that killed its sailors.
This narrated history follows sonar operator Joe Wilson, the failed search for Esquimalt, the surrender of U-190, and the unusual decision to use the captured submarine for postwar trials. It also traces the ship’s public display in Canadian ports, the testing of Canadian anti-torpedo equipment, and the final sinking of U-190 near Halifax in a carefully staged end to the war at sea.
Created for listeners who enjoy Canadian war stories, WW2 naval history, submarine stories, and documentary-style military narration. It also fits searches for Halifax history, Battle of the Atlantic stories, Royal Canadian Navy, and wartime history explained in a calm, detailed format.
This narrated history follows sonar operator Joe Wilson, the failed search for Esquimalt, the surrender of U-190, and the unusual decision to use the captured submarine for postwar trials. It also traces the ship’s public display in Canadian ports, the testing of Canadian anti-torpedo equipment, and the final sinking of U-190 near Halifax in a carefully staged end to the war at sea.
Created for listeners who enjoy Canadian war stories, WW2 naval history, submarine stories, and documentary-style military narration. It also fits searches for Halifax history, Battle of the Atlantic stories, Royal Canadian Navy, and wartime history explained in a calm, detailed format.
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LearningTranscript
00:00May 11th, 1945. 20 minutes before midnight Greenwich time, 500 miles east of Cape Race,
00:08Newfoundland. The Corvette HMCS Thorlock eased alongside a long, low hole lying stopped on the
00:17swell, its lights burning. That hole had left Norway almost three months earlier. Under its
00:25deck were more than 50 German submariners who, a few days before, had still been at war.
00:32Lieutenant R.O. Blackford of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve had the boarding party.
00:39The war in Europe was over. The radio said so. But nobody could tell Blackford what was waiting
00:46under that hatch. A U-boat crew that did not want to give up its boat only had to open
00:53the right
00:53valves, and the Canadians who had just stepped aboard would be standing on a ship that was
00:59already going down. Blackford took his men across anyway. An hour later, a second party came over
01:06from the frigate HMCS Victoriaville, led by her executive officer, Lieutenant Fred Burbage. They
01:14came armed. They posted sentries. And in the early hours of May 12th, the German captain, a 25-year-old
01:24Oberlieutenant named Hans Edwin Reith, stood aboard Victoriaville in front of her commanding officer,
01:31Lieutenant Commander Lester Hickey, and signed a deed of unconditional surrender.
01:37Kevin Power, Victoriaville's young paymaster, was there. Decades later, he still remembered the words
01:44the German chose. Reith was surrendering, he said, my crew and my boat. My crew and my boat.
01:54It is a strange way to give everything up. The men first, then the steel. As if the boat were
02:01the
02:01smaller loss. That sheet of paper is in the Canadian War Museum today. It was the first formal surrender
02:08of a German submarine to Canadian forces. Most of the Germans were taken off onto the two Canadian ships.
02:15A handful stayed below to keep the diesels running, among them the boat's chief engineer,
02:20a 22-year-old named Werner Hirschman. Hold onto that name. Then the white ensign went up,
02:27and the boat turned west for Newfoundland, with Burbage in command.
02:32One more thing had happened before any Canadian reached her. The Germans had thrown their ammunition
02:39over the side, and their secret papers with it, in weighted bags. Whatever was left of her weapons
02:46was gone. Remember that. It is going to matter more than you think.
02:52Now here is the fact that changes everything about that night. The boat was U-190. And 26 days before
03:03Reith signed, U-190 had sunk a Canadian warship within sight of the lights of Halifax.
03:10If what the Canadians did with this submarine matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories
03:16reach more people. Thank you for being here.
03:21Think about what those boarding parties were standing on. The navy had kept that sinking
03:27out of the newspapers until the war was over. It had only just become public.
03:33These men were on the deck that fired the torpedo. And here is the question this whole story turns on.
03:41The orders for the end of the war were simple. Every U-boat still at sea was to surface, report
03:48its
03:48position, and give itself up to the nearest allied warships. The Canadians could have done exactly that,
03:56and nothing more. Take the prisoners. Hand the boat to whoever wanted it. Go home.
04:02That is not what happened. The Royal Canadian Navy commissioned this submarine, the one that had
04:09killed its ship, as one of its own. It sailed her up the St. Lawrence and opened her hatches to
04:16the
04:16public. When the great powers drew up their list of which U-boats would survive, Canada was not even
04:23at the table. And it asked anyway, in writing, to keep this one. It put her to work on something
04:31very
04:31specific. And two and a half years after that night, it towed her out of Halifax and finished
04:38her in 19 minutes. That is not what you do with a trophy. You keep a trophy. Something else was
04:46going
04:47on. To understand what, you need to meet a man who was on neither of those Canadian ships that night.
04:53Remember his name, because he is going to carry this story to the end. Joe Wilson.
05:0023. A sonar raiding in the Royal Canadian Navy. Before the war, he had cut meat for a living.
05:09He had joined up at 19. On the morning U-190 came for his ship, Wilson was in a small
05:16hut on the
05:17bridge of HMCS Esquimalt, listening. His job, the whole of it, was to hear a submarine before it could
05:26do anything to him. What came through his headphones in the last minutes of that patrol and what did not,
05:34is where the answer begins. April 16th, 1945. A little after six in the morning,
05:42the approaches to Halifax, five miles off Chibucto Head. Joe Wilson had the headphones on. Every few
05:51seconds, the ASDIC set sent a pulse of sound down into the water, and Wilson listened for what came
05:57back. Usually nothing. Sometimes a whale, or a school of fish, and a good operator learned to tell
06:06those from steel. That was the whole skill. The sea answers, and you decide what it is saying.
06:15The card on him is short. Wilson was born in Dunstable, in Bedfordshire, England.
06:21He came to Canada as a boy of five and stepped ashore at Pier 21 in Halifax. Years later,
06:29he told an interviewer the date, and added, Believe it or not. April 16th, 1927. 18 years to the morning.
06:39Keep that in your pocket. He grew up to cut meat for a living, joined the Navy at 19,
06:46and ended up as a sonar raiding on a small Canadian minesweeper called HMCS Esquimalt. Esquimalt had
06:55left Halifax the evening before on a routine anti-submarine patrol. At eight o'clock, she was
07:01due to meet her sister ship, HMCS Sarnia, off the harbor mouth. Her captain was Lieutenant Robert
07:09McMillan, a reservist who already wore the distinguished service cross and bar. Seventy-one
07:16men aboard. The night had not been quiet.
07:20At a quarter past five, a whistle sent the crew to action stations, and Lieutenant John Smart put
07:27the depth charge crews on the throwers. They waited. Nothing came. By ten past six, they had been
07:34stood down. I'm not going to pretend about what happened next. The families of the men aboard
07:40deserve the truth. Esquimalt was not zigzagging. Her radar was off. And on her stern sat two sets of what
07:49the Navy called CAT gear, the Canadian anti-acoustic torpedo gear, a noisemaker meant to be towed astern so
07:57that a homing torpedo would chase the noise instead of the propellers. Neither set was in the water.
08:03The inquiry would later note that this went against very specific Halifax patrol orders.
08:10Remember that gear. It is coming back into this story, and when it does, it will come back tied to
08:17U-190.
08:19At 627, Esquimalt sent her routine report to the Halifax signal station. No contact. Now go down.
08:28Below her, U-190 was already there. The boat had spent the better part of 50 days underwater,
08:36breathing through her snorkel, working in toward Halifax to hunt cargo ships.
08:42In her engine spaces was Werner Hirschman, 22, the chief engineer, the same man the Canadians would
08:49one day keep below to run her diesels. And what Hirschman and the rest of that crew heard that
08:56morning was Joe Wilson. Not his voice. His sound. The pulses from Esquimalt's Azdic were striking the hull
09:05of U-190 and ringing through it. To a submarine crew, that sound means one thing. You have been found.
09:15Then the minesweeper turned and came straight toward the periscope. It was not an attack. Esquimalt did
09:23not know U-190 was there. But Wreath at the periscope saw a warship pinging him and turning onto him.
09:31He
09:32fired a single acoustic torpedo from a stern tube at a range so short he expected it might be too
09:39close
09:39to work. Years later, Hirschman called it routine, training, a defensive shot. And he said one more
09:48thing which sits at the center of this whole story. The tragedy, he said, was that they believed they
09:55had been found when they had not. Think about that. The Canadian ship did not know the submarine was
10:02there. The submarine was certain the Canadian ship knew. Wilson heard no echo off steel. What he heard
10:11was the torpedo. Not a great explosion, he said. A dull thud. And then the ship went dead. It had
10:19struck
10:20the starboard side, into the engine room. The power went in an instant, and with it, the radio. Not one
10:28word reached Halifax. Down in that engine room, a stoker from Sandwick, British Columbia named Jack Ware
10:35went up through a ventilation hatch. Of the three men there, he was the only one who got out.
10:42Esquimalt rolled to starboard and started down by the stern. Macmillan gave the order to abandon ship.
10:50When Wilson finally looked at his wrist watch, it had stopped at 6.28, the moment the salt water reached
10:58it. Esquimalt was gone in under four minutes. From the rafts, the men could see the lights of
11:05Halifax. So hold this question, because the next part answers it. With the harbor that close,
11:13why was it more than six hours before anyone came? Wilson went across the upper deck near the funnel
11:20and jumped. As the stern went under, the after-mast came down. It hit him across the back and drove
11:27him
11:27under, along with the Carly float beside him. I went under and soon bobbed up, he said. He fought
11:35his way to the float and got in. Both his legs had been slashed open. The salt water, he said
11:42later,
11:43cauterized the wounds. A Carly float is not a boat. It is a ring of buoyancy, with a floor of
11:50netting and
11:51slats hanging down into the sea. And a man in it sits with half his body in the water. In
11:58April,
11:59off Nova Scotia, that water is close to freezing. Wilson sat in it for six and a half hours.
12:07So, the question from the end of the last part. Why so long? Because everything that could fail,
12:14failed, and none of it was dramatic. The torpedo had killed the power, so no distress signal went out.
12:22At 741, the Halifax station tried to raise a Squimalt and could not. And nobody passed that on
12:30when the watch changed. Soon after the sinking, aircraft went over on their morning patrol.
12:36We waved and shouted, Wilson remembered, but they ignored us. The air crews took the floats for fishing
12:44boats. Later, two minesweepers passed within two miles of the rafts and never saw them. So the men
12:51in the water did what was left to do. Stoker Petty Officer Carl Jacques, from Truro, Nova Scotia,
12:59swam to Petty Officer Terence Manuel of Fredericton, who could not swim, and dragged him to a float.
13:06Then Jacques died, worn out by the effort. Arthur Schwinger held a shipmate named Don White's
13:13head above the water until White died. White's father later wrote to thank him.
13:19Leading seaman Herbert Knight left his float to help others, and did not survive it.
13:25Able seaman Ab Campbell, from Quesnel, British Columbia, kept men's spirits up and kept men alive.
13:33Wilson called him a father figure to that crew, and on the rafts, Lieutenant McMillan led his men in
13:40prayer. Wilson and Jack Ware, the stoker who had come up through the vent, made a decision. They had
13:47no oars. We decided we'd try to paddle with our hands, Wilson said. So they did, hour after hour,
13:56toward the lightship off the harbor approaches. Meanwhile, HMCS Sarnia reached the meeting point
14:03at 8, and found nothing. Her captain, Lieutenant Robert Dowdy, tried the radio. Nothing. At 10 to 10,
14:13he reported Esquimalt missing, and minutes later, Sarnia's own Azdick picked up a contact.
14:20Dowdy did what the book said, hunt the submarine first. He attacked twice with depth charges.
14:27U-190 heard those charges from a safe distance. Dowdy lost the contact. At 25 past 11, he gave up
14:37the hunt
14:38and went looking for men instead. At half past 12, Sarnia found them. Her navigating officer,
14:46Lou Howard of Selkirk, Manitoba, went over the side into the same water and spent half an hour on the
14:53scramble net passing up the living and the dead. He gave one sailor artificial respiration for more
15:00than an hour and brought him back. That man died before they reached Halifax.
15:06I was scared stiff that whole time, Howard said. Sarnia was a stopped ship in waters where a U-boat
15:15had
15:15just struck. Wilson's float was the only one that made it to the lightship. By then, fewer than half
15:23the men who had started on it were still alive. 44 of the 71 were dead. And U-190? Wreath
15:33took her
15:33inshore, settled her on the bottom, and shut her down. Hirschman later explained why that worked.
15:40The seabed off Halifax was littered with metal, anchors, and junk, and a quiet submarine lying among
15:48it was very hard for an ASDIC operator to tell from scrap. Rear Admiral Leonard Murray threw minesweepers
15:57and an escort group into the search. Motor launches depth-charged a wreck they took for a submarine.
16:04It was a Squimalt. On April 21, the search was called off. Now count what failed. Wilson's ASDIC had
16:14not heard her. Sarnia's ASDIC found her and lost her. A whole search group listened for five days and
16:23heard nothing. And the torpedo that killed Esquimalt was the very kind that Canadian gear on her own
16:31stern had been built to fool. That gear never went into the water. The country was not told.
16:40The navy held the news back until the war in Europe was over. Wilson spent those weeks in a Halifax
16:48hospital,
16:49with his legs, his feet, and his back. Less than a month later, the boat that had beaten every
16:56Canadian ear off Halifax would be lying alongside a Canadian Corvette with her lights on. But the one
17:04thing aboard her that had killed Esquimalt was the one thing she no longer carried. May 11, 1945,
17:12on board U-190, far out in the North Atlantic. The boat had left the Halifax approaches at the end
17:20of
17:20April. She was short of food and short of fuel, and by Hirschman's account she could not have made
17:27it back to Germany. Then the radio brought the order. Every U-boat was to surface, report itself,
17:35and surrender. Reith did not hurry. The order had come in incomplete, and he told his radio petty
17:42officer to send back a request for fuller details. That message never got out. So U-190 surfaced and
17:51broadcast her position in plain language to New York, Boston, and Cape Race. Cape Race answered.
17:58And then the crew did the thing you were asked to remember in the opening minutes. They threw
18:05the ammunition over the side, and the secret papers after it, in weighted bags. An RCAF liberator found
18:13her. Two Canadian escorts, the frigate Victoriaville and the Corvette Thorlock, were pulled off a West
18:21bound convoy and sent to meet her. Now come back to that night, because there is more to it than
18:27a
18:27signature. With the ships lying alongside, the Germans were moved across. Kevin Power watched them jump
18:36from one deck to the other while the hulls ground together. It was dangerous. At one point a sailor
18:44started to fall into the gap between the ships, and a young German officer, about six foot two by
18:51Power's reckoning, grabbed him and hauled him back. Power never forgot it. He said he disliked what that
18:59crew had done to Esquimalt, but he also said they were naval men doing their duty, and that the war
19:07had
19:07been their governments. Hirschman stayed aboard with the handful kept to run the boat. He wrote it down
19:14later. Eleven Germans, five Canadian officers, and about 25 Canadian sailors. The two cutters with our
19:23crew have disappeared into the darkness. With Burbage in command and armed sentries on deck, she made nine
19:31knots west. At dawn on May 14th, she came into Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, under the white ensign. The German
19:39first watch officer was allowed back aboard, with a few men to collect the crew's belongings. Nobody
19:46else. The other crew members, Hirschman wrote, will not be allowed back on our boat. Our boat. Notice that.
19:56Even then. So here is the first layer of the answer, and it is the simple one. The Canadians took
20:04her
20:04because she surrendered to them, the first German submarine ever formally surrendered to Canadian
20:10forces. And the Navy took off something the Germans had not thrown overboard, an Enigma machine.
20:17Today it sits in the collection of Canada's Signals Intelligence Agency in Ottawa. But if this were only
20:24about a trophy, the story would end at Bay Bulls. And look at what the trophy actually was. The base
20:32health
20:32officer inspected her and found her unsanitary. The Germans came off, and the DDT went on.
20:40The customs service wanted a list of the liquor taken from her. Kit went missing, and Victoriaville's sailors
20:47were searched on three separate occasions. Nothing was found. Lester Hickey, her captain, sent a memo to
20:55the naval officer in charge.
20:56The feeling in this ship, he wrote, is that unnecessary reflection has been put on us. And he asked that
21:05the shore authorities be searched the same way. The boat herself was in no shape to go anywhere alone.
21:12When she moved to St. John's for repairs, she went with a minesweeper, six motor launches,
21:18and a rescue tug around her. A U-boat with no torpedoes, no code books, a de-lousing order,
21:27and a hull that needed a nursemaid. That is what Canada had won.
21:34That same spring, Joe Wilson made a decision of his own. Thousands of Canadians had joined the Navy
21:42for the duration only, and with the war over, they were going home.
21:47Lou Howard, the officer who had gone over Sarnia's side, was one of them. He went back to civilian life
21:55and became an engineer. Wilson could have gone too. He had the scars on his legs to prove he had
22:02done
22:02enough. He stayed. He would serve 25 years in all, and he spent them as a sonar instructor.
22:10The man who had sat in Esquimalt's hut and heard nothing would spend two decades teaching young
22:17Canadians what to listen for. Keep him there, in front of a classroom. Because the Navy was about
22:26to start listening too. Within days of Babels, it did something no rule required. It commissioned
22:34U-190 as a Canadian warship, and the first job it gave her had nothing to do with fighting.
22:41June 17, 1945. Harvey's No. 2 Wharf, St. John's, Newfoundland.
22:49For three days the soldiers and airmen had come first. The American Army on the 13th, the RCAF the next
22:58day. The Canadian Army the day after. Then, on the afternoon of the 17th, the Navy opened the wharf
23:06to the public, and the people of St. John's walked down to look at a U-boat. Not a photograph
23:14of one.
23:15Not a silhouette in a recognition manual. The real thing. Freshly repainted, Canadian sailors on her
23:23deck. The officer who had her for most of those first weeks was Lieutenant Kenneth Tryon of the
23:31Canadian Volunteer Reserve. He commanded her from late May, and when an officer of the Royal Naval
23:38Reserve took over for the summer, Tryon stayed on as first officer, the senior Canadian aboard. And he
23:46kept something. In 1968, Tryon gave the Canadian War Museum the deed of surrender Reith had signed.
23:55The paper you heard about in the first minutes of this story came to the museum from one Canadian
24:01Lieutenant, who had held on to it for 23 years. Now watch what the Navy did next, because this is
24:09the
24:10second layer. On July 3rd, it approved a tour. The reason was put down plainly. To show the public an
24:18enemy submarine lying beside a Royal Canadian Navy anti-submarine ship. Not just the enemy. The enemy and the
24:27kind of ship that had hunted him. With the frigate Thetford Mines and Company, U-190 went up the St.
24:35Lawrence. She reached Montreal on July 27th and stayed. About 30,000 people came to see her. Then
24:44Trois-Rivières, Quebec City, Gaspé, Campbellton, and Chatham in New Brunswick. Charlottetown, Pictou,
24:52Sydney. At every stop the crowds came. Think about where she was sailing. Three years earlier, U-boats
25:01had come into that same river and that same Gulf and sunk ships off Canadian shores. And here is a
25:09detail almost nobody mentions. HMCS Esquimalt had fought there. Her battle honors include the Gulf of
25:18St. Lawrence, 1942. The boat that sank Esquimalt spent her first Canadian summer on display in the
25:27waters Esquimalt had guarded. At Trois-Rivières, a loose plate on her hull needed fixing, and her
25:34captain had a local firm repair it without asking permission first. The fleet engineering officer
25:41objected. The captain's superior backed him, judging he had acted in the interest of the service,
25:47and the bill was paid. A small thing. But it tells you how badly the Navy wanted that tour to
25:53keep
25:53moving. And between the crowds, something else was happening. In mid-July, at Halifax, the Navy ran
26:01hydrophone trials with U-190 and a second surrendered boat, U-889. U-190's ears were a German listening
26:11array. 48 hydrophones. The same ears that had picked up Esquimalt's ASDIC in April.
26:18Jo Wilson's new career rested on a simple idea. You learn a submarine by listening to one. Now the Navy
26:26had one. And it was finding out how she had listened to them. So that is the second layer. Show
26:33her.
26:34Study her. By the autumn, the Canadians had every reason to think she was theirs. She wasn't.
26:43On October 10, 1945, the Tripartite Naval Commission issued its allocations. At Potsdam, Britain,
26:52the United States, and the Soviet Union had agreed to keep about 30 surrendered U-boats between them
26:59and sink the rest. The Commission could hand boats to those three countries and to no one else.
27:06Canada had escorted convoys across the Atlantic for six years. Canada was not on the Commission.
27:13U-190 was not on the list. She was to be sunk by the middle of February. And by then,
27:20even her own Navy had doubts. Her crew was down to 11 men on maintenance. That same month,
27:28the command at Halifax reported a fault in one of her main motors and recommended getting rid of her
27:34early. U-889 had gone to the Americans and in the new year, a Canadian crew would sail her down
27:41to
27:41Portsmouth, New Hampshire and hand her over. A Navy that only wanted a trophy would have let U-190 go
27:48then.
27:49She had been shown. She had been photographed. She was wearing out. On December 22, 1945,
27:57Canada asked anyway. It put in a request to keep U-190 for up to one more year.
28:04The reason came down to a few words. To finish the experiments. Those experiments were about the
28:11weapon that had killed Esquimalt. And to run them, the Canadians needed this particular boat to do the
28:18one thing she had done to them in April. Fire. February 5, 1946, London.
28:25The answer came from the Foreign Office. U-190 could stay with the Canadian government for one year.
28:33It had taken some doing. Back in November, the British member of the commission, Admiral Sir
28:39Geoffrey Miles, had proposed an exchange. The American Admiral raised no objection. Neither did
28:46the Soviet one. But the rules still allowed boats to go only to the three great powers. So U-190
28:54was
28:54put down as a British boat on loan to Canada. And a British allocated U-boat was sunk in her
29:01place.
29:02You will read in many places that Britain gave U-190 to Canada as a gift in recognition of what
29:09the
29:09Royal Canadian Navy had done in the Battle of the Atlantic. It is a fine story. The documents say loan.
29:17One year and then back to the Admiralty if it wanted her. I would rather give you the paper than
29:23the
29:23legend. And the paper is remarkable enough. Three great powers adjusted their list so that Canada
29:31could keep the boat that had sunk her ship. So what were the experiments? You have been carrying the
29:37answer since part two. Remember the gear on Esquimalt's stern? CAT, the Canadian anti-acoustic torpedo gear,
29:47designed in Canada, towed behind a warship so that a homing torpedo would chase the noise instead of the
29:54propellers. Esquimalt had two sets aboard on the morning of April 16th. Neither was in the water.
30:02And a homing torpedo found her propellers. Now here is the third layer, and it changes the meaning of
30:09everything before it. From May to the autumn of 1946, U-190 was kept in commission for one job.
30:18She was the firing platform for the Naval Research Establishment's trials of the CAT gear. The torpedoes
30:25were real German acoustic torpedoes, four of them recovered from U-889. The plan was to run the trials
30:34at night in the Halifax approaches. Hold that picture. The boat that sank Esquimalt with an
30:41acoustic torpedo. Off Halifax, firing acoustic torpedoes at Canadian gear. The same gear Esquimalt
30:49never put over the side. The Navy was not keeping a trophy. It was making the enemy's own boat run
30:56the
30:56attack again, under Canadian control, to prove the answer to it. This also does away with another legend,
31:04You may have read that U-190 spent these years as a target for training ASDIC operators.
31:11The historian who went through the files, Derek Waller, says that is wrong. Her one real job in
31:18Canadian hands was firing torpedoes for these trials. But I promised you this story would not
31:24be told as if it went smoothly. It didn't. On August 2nd, 1946, her commanding officer, Lieutenant Johnston,
31:32signed a report on the state of his boat. It is blunt. She could not dive, he wrote, for lack
31:39of men to
31:40maintain her. One of her main motors had developed a full earth, so she could not maneuver on her own.
31:47And his conclusion? In my opinion, U-190 is not capable of leaving Halifax Harbor.
31:55The trials carried on as best they could into the autumn. Then winter came. In January 1947,
32:04the head of the research establishment reported that the weather had made further torpedo trials
32:10impossible. The commander-in-chief at Halifax ordered them abandoned. The torpedoes were landed
32:17and put in storage. The trials were never finished.
32:22So here is the limit. The Canadians had taken the boat, fought for the right to keep her,
32:28and put her to work on the exact thing that had killed their ship. And she wore out before the
32:34job
32:35was done. In March, the admiralty wrote, it had no further need of U-190. Did Canada want her as
32:43a war
32:43relic? If not, she was to be scrapped or sunk, and not handed to anyone else. On April 16th, 1947,
32:53the chief of the naval staff made his recommendation. Strip her and use her as a target for ships and
33:00aircraft. The minister agreed. Look at that date again. April 16th. Two years to the day since Esquimalt
33:09went down, and 20 years to the day since a five-year-old Joe Wilson came ashore at Pier 21.
33:17Nothing I have
33:18found says the date was chosen on purpose. It doesn't have to be. It is simply the day the Navy
33:25decided.
33:26Then the staff officer sat down and wrote her last day as a script, with a scenario for the
33:32attacking ships to work from. When you hear the story they gave her to play, you will recognize
33:38every line of it. October 21st, 1947. Trafalgar Day, the sea off Halifax.
33:47The dockyard tug Riverton had U-190 on the end of a tow line. She no longer looked like a
33:54U-boat.
33:55She had been painted in long stripes of red and yellow. Her sea valves were shut, her ventilation
34:02sealed, her rudder lashed, her hatches dogged down. She had been trimmed for one last trip.
34:12The periscope was already gone. It survives today in the Crow's Nest Officers Club in St. John's.
34:20Here is the script. Listen to it slowly.
34:23A U-boat has been damaged in the Halifax approaches. She has sunk a patrol vessel with a gnat acoustic
34:32torpedo. She is trying to escape on the surface. That is April 16th, 1945. A patrol vessel. A gnat.
34:44The Halifax approaches. Every line of it is a Squimalt. Except this time,
34:51the U-boat does not get away. The Navy's own files call it exercise scuppered. The newspapers called it
35:00Operation Scuttled. The stated purpose was training for young post-war sailors. The Navy invited the
35:09press and about two dozen reporters, commentators, and photographers came out to watch. The historian
35:15Michael Hadley called it a final touch of rather raffish theater. He writes that she was towed to the
35:23waters where she had sunk Esquimalt. The Navy's planning memo had marked a point farther out,
35:29in deep water. Either way, she was going down off Halifax, on the anniversary of Nelson's great victory.
35:37The forces were all Canadian. The destroyers Newtka and Haida, the minesweeper New Liskard,
35:44which was to finish her with Hedgehog, and the aircraft of the 18th Canadian Carrier Air Group,
35:51Seafires, Fireflies, Ansons, and Swordfish. The plan allowed 90 minutes. At 11 o'clock,
35:59the aircraft came in with rockets. It was over almost before it began. After that first rocket attack,
36:06U-190's bow rose into the air and she slid under. Newtka got off two salvos. Both missed. New Liskard
36:16never got her turn. Less than 19 minutes after the start, the boat was gone. Her wreck has never been
36:23found. The Navy's press release said the once deadly sea raider came to a swift and ignominious end.
36:32And, in a line that tells you how badly the Navy had wanted that day to run to plan,
36:38the Naval Secretary later called it, a disappointment that not enough of U-190 had
36:44been left for the destroyers to finish.
36:47So now you have nearly the whole answer. The Canadians took over the boat that sank their ship
36:52to show her, to study her, and to make her fire again, under Canadian control, at the gear that
37:00should have saved Esquimalt. And when she wore out, they took her back off Halifax and played April 16th
37:07over again, with the ending they wanted. But the takeover was not finished. One part of U-190 was
37:15still above water, her chief engineer.
37:19Verner Hirschman was not off Halifax that day. After the surrender, he had been held in a prison
37:24camp at Gravenhurst, Ontario, on Lake Muskoka, which he later said was comfortable compared with
37:31life in a submarine, and then in England. He was released in August 1947, went home to Germany,
37:38Germany, and married two months later, the same month his boat went down.
37:43Then he did something remarkable. In 1952, he came back. He immigrated to Canada, to Ontario,
37:52put his degree in mathematics and physics to work, and helped build the computing industry in this
37:58country, at the University of Toronto, the Bank of Montreal, the City of Toronto. For more than 40 years,
38:05he and Joe Wilson lived in the same country and never met.
38:10May 1993, Halifax, the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic.
38:18Hirschman had come to speak to a reunion of naval veterans. And there, in the city where Wilson had
38:24first come ashore as a little boy, the sonar instructor, who had heard nothing that morning,
38:30met the engineer who had heard him. Wilson could have walked away.
38:35Nobody would have blamed a man who still carried that morning in his legs.
38:39He shook his hand. A newspaper reporter put it down in words that matter more than any press release
38:46about rockets. Former enemies, now fellow countrymen, shaking hands for the first time.
38:54Fellow countrymen. Hold on to that. Because two years later, the Esquimalt men would give Hirschman a
39:01title of their own. And it is the last answer to the question this story began with.
39:071995. Esquimalt, British Columbia.
39:11Fifty years after the sinking,
39:14Werner Hirschman laid a wreath at the memorial to HMCS Esquimalt in the Pacific coast town that gave the
39:22ship her name. And the HMCS Esquimalt Memorial Association made him an honorary life member.
39:31That is the title. Not guest. Not former enemy. Member. For life.
39:38Of the association that exists to remember the 44 men his boat had killed. He had already started
39:45meeting them. On August 4, 1994, in Comox, British Columbia, he met Jack Ware for the first time,
39:54the stoker who had climbed out of Esquimalt's engine room through a ventilation hatch and paddled
40:00a Carly float with his bare hands alongside Joe Wilson. At the 50th anniversary reunion of the Esquimalt
40:08and Sarnia crews, he met Lou Howard, the officer who had gone over Sarnia's side into the freezing
40:15water. The two became friends and stayed friends for the rest of Hirschman's life. In 2005, the Globe and
40:24Mail brought three of them together at a small stone cairn in Esquimalt. It called them the Survivor,
40:31the Rescuer, and the Submariner. The Rescuer was Morris Schoenfield, who had commanded Sarnia's
40:39sea boat that afternoon in 1945. The Submariner was Hirschman. We were not there to sink little
40:47Canadian warships, he said. Our number one enemy was always the sea itself. The survivor was Joe
40:55Wilson. He had retired from the Navy in 1966 as a chief petty officer, first class, after 25 years,
41:04a war in Korea, and two decades of teaching young Canadians to hear what he had not heard.
41:11Then he farmed in the Annapolis Valley for close to 30 years before moving west to the village of
41:17Chase near Little Shuswap Lake. And every April 16th, for as long as he could, he made the
41:24trip to the coast for the ceremony. Again and again, the chief engineer of U-190 was there with him.
41:32Asked what that day did to him, Wilson put it simply,
41:36it brings back things you try to forget. He went anyway, every year. In 2008, at a reunion in St.
41:46John's, Hirschman said he was sad the meetings were coming to an end. The survivors, he said,
41:53had become good friends. He died in Toronto on November 7th, 2019, at 96. A Canadian.
42:03Now come back to the man who carried this story. Joe Wilson died on New Year's Day, 2012, two days
42:12before his 90th birthday. He was the last of the Esquimalt survivors. His ashes, in an urn draped with the
42:21Canadian flag, were lowered into the sea from a Navy training vessel. His widow, Joan, had never been
42:29aboard a ship before. An emotional ceremony, she said. Think about the shape of that life.
42:37He came ashore at Halifax on April 16th, 1927. He went into the water off Halifax on April 16th,
42:461945, and his watch stopped at 628. And at the very end, the Navy he had served for 25 years
42:56took him
42:56back to the sea. So why did the Canadians take over the German U-boat that sank their ship?
43:03Not to keep a trophy. They took her because a navy of volunteers had lost 44 men within sight of
43:11its
43:11own harbor. And it would not let that morning stand as the last word. They showed her to the people.
43:18They borrowed her back from the great powers. They made her fire again at the Canadian gear that should
43:24have saved Esquimalt. And when she was finished, they took her out off Halifax and gave April 16th a
43:32different ending. And then they did the last thing and the hardest. They took in the man who had run
43:38her engines and made him one of their own. Joe Wilson heard nothing that morning. He spent the
43:45rest of his working life making sure other Canadians would. And when the enemy came back to Halifax 48
43:53years later, Wilson shook his hand. Thank you for spending this time with the men of Esquimalt and the
44:02Canadians who brought U-190 home. If you think what the Canadians did here deserves to be remembered,
44:09a like genuinely helps it find more people. And if you'd like to hear more of these stories, we're here
44:16every week.
44:17If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War,
44:23I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.