"Nazi submarines went far inland from Canadian coast?" Topic

"It was the fall of 1944 and the Canadian navy corvette HMCS Arrowhead had just finished escorting a convoy into Goose Bay, Labrador when its skipper, Lester Hickey, ordered the vessel to stop outside the Inuit community of Rigolet.

The skipper tossed an explosive over the side and when a school of stunned cod rose to the surface, he scooped them up, cut off their heads and threw the prime fillets and the rest of the fish back into the sea. All he wanted was the critical ingredient for his signature cod head soup.

"The soup went down pretty good," said Glenn Martin, 90, a former Arrowhead crew member now living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan

Fast forward to 1954 and Mr. Martin is a young machinist in Prince Albert getting a routine chest x-ray from a Czechoslovakian-born doctor.

The men began chit-chatting about the war and, upon learning that Mr. Martin was aboard the Arrowhead, the doctor said, "Remember the time you went fishing off of Rigolet?"

The doctor had also been off the Labrador coast that day, he explained, hiding just beneath the waves in a German U-Boat. "He was watching us through the periscope," said Mr. Martin.

This month, Mr. Martin's story of a sub lurking at the mouth of the Churchill River became valuable evidence for an East Coast group on a mission to prove that a strange protrusion recently discovered near Muskrat Falls in central Labrador is a long-lost Nazi submarine that went down nearly 200 kilometres inland from the coast; much farther into Canadian territory than any German U-Boat is known to have gone during the entire Battle of the Atlantic…"
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Amicalement
Armand

OT:

Bear Island is a 1979 British-Canadian thriller film loosely based on the novel Bear Island by Alistair MacLean.

Pretty good film about looting gold from a German submarine.

long-lost Nazi submarine

Amazing to think that a submersible craft can have a political ideology

The Nazi U-boats went pretty far down the St Lawrence seaway, you can still visit some of the coastal fortifications along the Gaspe coast.

Apparently, it was a lot safer to hide out inland, than along the coast, or at sea, where the patrol aircraft were concentrating their searches.

Still, surprised some people didn't spot them, and report it to the military, but perhaps there may have been very few people on shore at night, in such a remote area.

One of my father's better stories involves the night he was on duty on HMCS Chaleur II (RCN headquarters at Quebec) when calls started coming in about a U-boat attack on the St. Lawrence, and all hell broke loose.

Certainly when I look at a map, it appears farther from the ocean then these folks are claiming.

Rick

The coastline along Gaspe is very isolated, with small fishing villages here and there. During the 1940's many of the hamlets would not have had regular electricity service. I visit my wife's family up there just about every summer, and while things are much better, the communities are still very isolated in some areas. You can drive for about an hour in some cases, skirting the water, before you see another village.

Allegedly one was sunk in the Cape Cod canal – which would make sense if a German captain were feeling lucky in 1942 to make a try on shipping that was using it to avoid Atlantic patrols. However a search can't find anything that links an actual U-Boat number to a site in the canal where it allegedly is. Maybe someone's Google-fu is better than mine. If so then the idea of them using rivers is plausible but really risky. The ability to turn around is very limited and the ability to escape total destruction if caught is about nil.

There's rumours that there's a sunken Vichy submarine off Prince Edward island. Not allowed to dive on a wreck there, so rumours abound!

Marc Milner wrote a novel about it that is very good. Incident off North Point.