HMCS Raccoon is not one of His Majesty’s mightier warships. Once the private yacht Halonia, property of millionaire jeweller R.A. Van Clief of New York, she came into the Royal Canadian Navy on June 22, 1940 with a crew of 33 ratings and four officers, and little more than a machine-gun and a coat of pusser’s paint to prepare her for battle. Of course, in 1940 no-one imagined U-boats sinking ships literally in sight of the St. Lawrence shore, so the Navy’s original idea of using converted pleasure boats like Raccoon as examination vessels and coastal patrol craft was quite sensible. But since the US declared war on Germany, and especially since the ice-free shipping season opened, the U-boat flotillas have been devastatingly effective in North American waters. This campaign has particularly shocked Canada, where the last naval battle was fought in 1813, so the RCN has put all its available vessels to work escorting convoys between Quebec and ports in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. With the bulk of Canada’s Navy deployed in the north-eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean, most of the escorts on the Gulf convoys are minesweepers, Fairmiles and armed yachts.
HMCS Raccoon has a depth-charge launcher for attacking submarines, but no radio-telephone; she uses flags and Morse code by Aldis lamp or wireless to communicate with the other ships in the convoy— which means that, at night with a U-boat lurking, she doesn’t communicate at all. The other escorts are busy picking up survivors from the Aeas and not particularly concerned about Raccoon. At 1:12 a.m., when HMCS Arrowhead is sweeping the convoy to port, lookouts aboard several ships see two columns of white water flung into the air, and hear two mighty explosions. The Arrowhead lookouts note that Raccoon is not in her appointed place, and decide hopefully that the noise is the yacht depth-charging the U-boat. In the morning, Arrowhead reports that Raccoon is still missing, and a signal goes out from HMCS Fort Ramsay, the base at Gaspé, demanding that she report her position. Nothing is heard.
