"Our Gallant Doctor": Enigma and Tragedy: Surgeon-Lieutenant George Hendry and HMCS Ottawa, 1942

OUR GALLANT DOCTOR

Surgeon Lieutenant George Ainslie Hendry, RCNVR. (Courtesy of Dr. James Goodwin.)

OUR GALLANT DOCTOR

Enigma and Tragedy:

Surgeon Lieutenant George Hendry

and HMCS Ottawa, 1942

by James Goodwin

with forewords by

Michael Bliss, CM, PhD and

Tony German, Commander RCN (Ret’d)

Copyright © James Goodwin, 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Copy-editor: Jennifer Gallant

Design: Alison Carr

Index: Dennis Mills

Printer: Tri-Graphic Printing Ltd.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Goodwin, James

Our gallant doctor : enigma and tragedy : Surgeon Lieutenant George Hendry and HMCS Ottawa, 1942 / James Goodwin.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-55002-687-0

1. Hendry, George. 2. Ottawa (Ship). 3. World War, 1939-1945--

Campaigns--Atlantic Ocean. 4. Canada. Royal Canadian Navy--

Surgeons--Biography. 5. Ship physicians--Canada--Biography.

I. Title.

1    2    3    4    5              11  10  09  08  07

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

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In loving memory of

Betty Summers

(Elizabeth Audrie Minogue)

1918–2006

and

Latham Brereton Yogi Jenson

1921–2004

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Table of Contents

Foreword by Michael Bliss, CM, PhD

Fathers and Sons: The Lost Age of Medical Heroism

Foreword by Tony German, Commander RCN (Ret’d)

Dr. Hendry and HMCS Ottawa

Preface

Prologue

A Burial at Sea

Chapter One

The Hendrys: A Remarkable Family

Chapter Two

The Making of a Doctor: G.A. Hendry, Meds 3T5

Chapter Three

Is Anxious to Have His Entry Hastened

Chapter Four

HMCS Ottawa (H 60): The Ship and the Ship’s Company

Chapter Five

Into the Black Pit

Chapter Six

Doctor in His Cabin Operating Room Hero of Plunging Ottawa

Chapter Seven

She Was a Fine Ship, Number One

Chapter Eight

The Most Commendable Devotion to Duty

Epilogue

A Closed Book

Appendices

A:  Last Will and Testament of George Ainslie Hendry

B:  Marriage Certificate for George Ainslie Hendry and Jean Isobel Matthews, Preston, Ontario, April 3, 1941

C:  Letter from George Hendry to James C. Goodwin, November 23, 1941

D:  Findings of the Board of Inquiry into the Circumstances Attending the Loss of HMCS Ottawa on Sunday, 13 September 1942

E:  Casualty List: HMCS Ottawa, September 13, 1942

F:  List of Survivors: HMCS Ottawa, September 13, 1942

G:  Report of Proceedings for Task Unit 24.1.14 Escorting Convoy ON 127: HMCS St. Croix (LCdr. A.H. Dobson, DSC, RCNR, Commanding Officer)

H:  Report of Proceedings: HMS Witch, C 4 Escort Group for Convoy ON 127 (LCdr. S.R.J. Woods, RNR, Commanding Officer)

I:   Excerpts from U-91’s Kriegstagebuch (War Diary) (Oblt. z. S. Heinz Walkerling, Commanding Officer) and Schussmeldung für Überwasserstreitkräfte und U-boote; 14.9.42 (Shot Report for Surface Forces and Submarines)

J:   Transcript of a Taped Interview of Captain T.C. Pullen, OC, RCN (Ret’d), by Commander Tony German, RCN (Ret’d), on January 26, 1985

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword:

Fathers and Sons: The Lost Age of Medical Heroism

The history book you are about to read is a breathtaking, classic story of personal, military, and medical heroism. My dear friend and my late brother’s dear friend and classmate in medicine, Dr. James Goodwin, presents in these pages a world we have largely lost — a world of courage, duty, sacrifice, and enormous strength of character demonstrated by weak and ordinary young men.

This is intense drama. If it is ever translated to film it will be almost unbearably vivid — a true wartime tale of human frailty, lost love, almost unbelievable surgical daring and stoicism, overwhelming random violence, ghastly death, the final silence of the oil-smoothed sea, and the loneliness of lost lovers who live on almost to our times.

It is a magnificent war story, one of the most remarkable we have from the great days of Canada’s contribution to the Second World War. It is a hugely sad personal tragedy, the story of a young man entrapped by a single night of passion into a loveless marriage, from which the only escape seems to be service and sacrifice. But it is also a story of medicine and its values in an age that only a shrinking few of us still remember — the age before miracle treatments, high technology, insurance, bureaucracy, and shifting social values changed forever the meaning of being a doctor.

Medicine used to be a much more personally challenging profession than it is now. It was not hard to be admitted to studies in medicine, partly because the risks of being a doctor were very considerable and the rewards of the career were not always tangible. Risks? Notice that the hero of this book, George Hendry, is the second in his family to die while practising his profession: in 1933 his brilliant brother, Jack, gold medallist in his class, a splendid medical career opening up before him, is bitten by a laboratory monkey and dies of respiratory paralysis. Before the age of antibiotics and other miracle therapies, you often took your life in your hands to practise surgery and medicine. Perhaps more to the point — and this is still the existential barrier that confronts every medical student in our time — the doctor held other people’s lives in his hands. It was god-like power, responsibility and challenge, given to humans with anything but god-like abilities, and it could be terrifying almost beyond belief.

It could also be exhausting. Those stories we all remember of heroic country doctors, struggling for hours to reach sick patients — perhaps operating for hours on kitchen tables by lantern light — are prototypes of the surgical climax of this book, as George Hendry tries to save patients’ lives in a pitching, tossing, gerry-made operating room in the middle of the North Atlantic, with Nazi submarines literally lurking in the shadows. He probably felt by then that he was a lost soul, but he persevered. I have a vivid memory of coming down to breakfast one morning at about age thirteen and seeing my father, an ordinary country physician, sitting ashen-white at the breakfast table after a night spent in a futile attempt to save a mother and child. In another two years my father would be dead of overwork.

As Goodwin points out in lovely passages in Chapter Two, that generation of medical teachers and students, often literally medical fathers and sons, was often stronger in its idealism and dedication than in its professional proficiency. These kids and the crusty eccentrics who taught them were trying to do a little bit of good for humanity, trying to live out what Osler and the other patron saints of medicine saw as a secular vocation. When things went right, the satisfactions of the medical career must have been intense; as often as not the strains of personal living could undercut and ruin everything.

Jim Goodwin brings to this story not only his considerable passion and perfectionism as an amateur historian (I have always thought the amateur historians, like amateur athletes, are the best and purest of us all) but his own intimate experience with the medical world he describes. His father knew the Hendrys, he knew the Hendrys, he knew University of Toronto medicine just as the classic age was drifting to conclusion in the fifties, he knew what it meant to be a son challenged to live up to his father’s expectations. I have always believed that one way to understand Ernest Hemingway’s lifelong search for the roots of courage is to see him as a doctor’s son.

It goes without saying that Dr. Goodwin is still a book or two shy of having achieved Hemingway’s literary stature. But if you read this story carefully and think about it, you will come to realize that it has layers and layers of meaning. For the young it is about a world gone by, including a medical world now about to disappear. For a few of us, the intermediate generation, the sons of the fathers, whether medical or military, it is a book about the values passed on to us by heroic, tragic figures to whom we owe incalculable debts.

Michael Bliss, CM, PhD

University Professor Emeritus,

University of Toronto

Foreword:

Dr. Hendry and HMCS Ottawa

Our Gallant Doctor is a richly illustrated and quite unusual addition to the field of Canadian naval historiography. Its climax is the loss of HMCS Ottawa, torpedoed twice by a U-boat and sunk in mid Atlantic near midnight on September 13–14, 1942, with most of her crew while escorting westbound Convoy ON 127. Had she been equipped with 271 surface warning radar — as were all escort ships of the RN by this time — rather than the Canadian navy’s inferior and outdated 286M — she could well have survived and, quite possibly, sunk her enemy. Indeed, 114 very brave men might have been spared.

The author, James Goodwin, has given us an especially intriguing picture of a Canadian wartime ship’s company. Individuals’ stories and perceptions abound. Among them are the First Lieutenant, Tom Pullen, and Sub-Lieutenant Yogi Jenson — the gunnery officer and outstanding author/artist whose drawings illuminate and enrich the book. These two, in particular, provided the author with closely observed and perceptive background on Lieutenant Commander Larry Rutherford, the commanding officer who was lost with his ship, the gallant doctor of the title, and many from the lower deck. Particularly ironic is Jenson’s account of a 271 radar set being delivered to the ship in Londonderry before she sailed to escort ON 127. He reported this to the captain, who replied that Naval Service Headquarters had dictated that 271 was not to be fitted to RCN destroyers as its antenna assembly would have to replace the main gunnery armament’s rangefinder/director.

Most unusual in non-fiction of this nature, the book has a well-developed central character — the ship’s medical officer, Surgeon Lieutenant George Hendry, RCNVR. He had joined the wartime navy to escape a misguided, disastrous marriage, gained respect and friendships in Ottawa, and developed close relationships with the lower deck. Then, during the stormy passage leading to her loss, he performed two emergency abdominal surgeries — one on a sailor with acute appendicitis, the other on a badly wounded DEMS gunner from a torpedoed merchant ship. His scrub nurse on both occasions was Tom Pullen. Sadly, both patients died. So, after Ottawa went down, did George Hendry. Our Gallant Doctor is a fitting memorial to him and to HMCS Ottawa.

Tony German, Commander RCN (Ret’d)

Author of The Sea is at Our Gates: The History of the Canadian Navy

Preface

I didn’t realize that this was a story that needed telling until many years after George Hendry’s death in the war. We Goodwins had a very close family link with the Hendrys. My dad, James C. Jimmie Goodwin, was first an assistant to George’s father, Professor W.B. Hendry, then a colleague and a close friend. Soon after his father, the much beloved Chief, died in March 1939 and after he had finished his postgraduate training, George joined my father in practice and took up a junior teaching appointment in the university’s department of obstetrics and gynaecology. Though I was but ten years old at the time, I clearly remember George giving my younger brother John and me hockey gloves at Christmas in 1940. I was always a bit of a nerd and my much more athletic brother made far better use of this gift than I did!

When George Hendry was lost in 1942, my dear mother, with a typically maternal penchant for exaggeration, invented a fanciful account of how George, being the great university athlete that he was, swam into the sinking Ottawa three times attempting to rescue shipmates and only managed to swim out twice. His framed photograph in naval uniform (the frontispiece and cover for this book) stood on a table in our north Toronto living room for several years after his death. George’s mother — all her men gone — lived alone with her memories in an upper duplex on North Avenue Road in Toronto. For several years, I used to take presents and flowers up to her door at Christmas and on anniversaries. It was all very sad.

This was the sum of all I knew about George Hendry’s heroism and death until the week after my father’s sudden death in August 1953. Wing Commander Hugh Bright, the commanding officer of the Institute of Aviation Medicine, then made his stunning revelation of George’s abrupt exit from Toronto and his entry into the navy. I was grieving for my father and I was in the middle of my professional education as a doctor, so I suppose that the thought that this had the potential of a strong story did not cross my mind. I finished medical school, did internship and postgraduate training in Toronto and Boston, then carried on with a research fellowship in Oxford and finally took up several academic teaching/clinical/research posts in Edmonton, Toronto, St. John’s, and overseas in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Sultanate of Oman. Add the advent of three children to this hectic professional life and it is scarcely surprising that for many years George Hendry and this story were not uppermost in my mind.

Then, when I returned to Canada at the time of the first Gulf War and set up practice in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, I read for the first time of George Hendry’s carrying out an appendectomy on board HMCS Ottawa in Commander Tony German’s superb history of the Canadian navy, The Sea Is at Our Gates. Finally, in 1999, I retired from practice and at last I could begin to tell the entire story.

This journey of search and research, writing and rewriting, has now spanned seven years. It has taken me to some widely disparate places, and on the way, I’ve met some wonderful and utterly unforgettable people. Now I want to recognize them and thank them.

Nearly all of the players, the people who knew and worked with George Hendry more than sixty-five years ago, are dead: my parents, all the doctors and nearly all the nurses, and all but a small handful of HMCS Ottawa’s surviving sailors. So it is a particular godsend that Carol Hendry Duffus, the senior surviving member of the Hendry family, George’s biggest fan and favourite cousin, has such wonderfully clear memories of her Uncle Will, George’s father, William Belfry Hendry; of her Aunt Bessie, George’s mother, Elizabeth Robertson Hendry; of her two cousins, George’s older brother, Jack, William John Hendry, and George Ainslie Hendry himself. How often in the past seven years have I wished that I could raise some of these ghosts, just to talk with them!

I recall the many phone calls I had with the late Elizabeth Audrie (Betty) Minogue, George Hendry’s sweetheart and intended fiancée. Sweet, gentle, much-loved Betty died aged eighty-seven on April 10, 2006. I regret very much that I met this wonderful woman only once on an afternoon in Huntsville, Ontario, in late August 2001.

For the most part, there are no diaries and no dusty, forgotten boxes of letters. The letters went into the trash years ago and the diaries never got written. George Hendry had been cut down in his prime before he made his mark and before he could write many letters.

I am indebted to my cousin (and accomplished amateur genealogist), Ann Campbell Ward, RN, for conducting invaluable interviews on November 13, 2001, with Bernice Scott, RN, and Mildred Hall, RN, who were surviving TGH nursing classmates of George Hendry’s wife, Jean Isobel Matthews, and who have since died. These two ladies, in turn, contacted several other of their nursing classmates of the class of 1938. Their memories and observations are included in Chapter Three.

There are at least thirty books on the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic, convoys, and anti-submarine warfare, covering both the men and their machines. Only five deal with the sinking of Ottawa and only two of these deal with this in any detail: Latham B. Yogi Jenson’s superb book Tin Hats, Oilskins and Seaboots: A Naval Journey 1938–45 and Tom Pullen’s article "Convoy ON 127 & the Loss of HMCS Ottawa: A Personal Experience," published in the Northern Mariner in April 1992.

I will always be indebted to my dear friend, the late Yogi Jenson, and to the men who survived the sinking of Ottawa and shared their gripping firsthand stories, both those who have since passed on — Roe Skillen, Michael Barriault, Ed Fox, and George Johnson — and the five doughty old salts who live on today — Steve Logos, Sid Dobing, Al Underhill, Terry Terrabassi, and Norm Wilson. These were brave boys back then, along with all their other shipmates: I haven’t had the honour of meeting them face to face, but I know them by the sound of their voices over the phone.

There are only four brief references to George Hendry’s surgery, and only one of them describes the operations in any detail. The topic of wartime surgery on land is covered well in Bill Rawling’s book Death Their Enemy, but surgery afloat has received almost no attention in published works.

Michael Whitby, the chief of the Naval History Team at the Directorate of Heritage and History at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, was of absolutely indispensable assistance in making available through Library and Archives Canada the Reports of Proceedings (ROPs) for HMCS St. Croix, HMCS Arvida, and HMS Celandine, ships escorting convoy ON 127 in September 1942; the Kriegstagebuch (War Diary) of U-91; and the Records of Service for George Hendry, L.B. Jenson, T.C. Pullen, C.A. Rutherford, Dunn Lantier, and Lloyd Irwin Jones. ROPs and related memoranda for Ottawa from June 1938 to August 1942 were acquired through the Reference Services of Library and Archives Canada.

I could never have gained a fragment of the very necessary understanding of the Ottawa — the ship and its men — or the old Royal Canadian Navy and its contribution to victory in the Battle of the Atlantic without the wonderful advice and guidance given me by three people: Michael Whitby, Tony German, and the late Latham B. Yogi Jenson.

I would add my warm appreciation to others for encouragement and assistance: Bill Rawling, Naval History Team, Directorate of Heritage and History, Department of National Defence; Alma Jenson, Yogi Jenson’s widow; Betty Pullen, Tom Pullen’s widow; Kit Pullen, Tom Pullen’s nephew; Captain (N) Dick Steele, RCN (Ret’d); Commander Fraser McKee, RCN (Ret’d); Commander Bob Rutherford, RCN (Ret’d); Stephen Kimber, King’s College; Commodore H.A. Mike Cooper, RCN (Ret’d); Dr. Walter Hannah; J.G. Goodwin, QC; and, in Winchester (U.K.), Captain W.M. Mike Caswell, MVO, Royal Navy. I am most grateful for the considerable publication support extended by the Naval Officers Association of Canada through the good offices of its national president, Archdeacon Ronald E. Harrison.

I want now to thank some very special people who helped and encouraged me very considerably throughout this exhilarating seven years’ journey: Michael Bliss, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto; Dr. Tom Baskett, Professor of Gynaecology, Dalhousie University; Dr. Jock Murray, Dean of Medicine Emeritus, Dalhousie University; C. David Naylor, President, University of Toronto; Lennart Husband, University of Toronto Press; Ani Orchanian-Chef, University Health Network Archives; Lagring Ulanday, Robarts Library, University of Toronto; Peter Shipp, Frank Shipp’s eldest son; Susie Minogue and Peter Minogue, Betty Summers Minogue’s daughter and son; Dr. Robert Meiklejohn; Jane Bryans; Leslie Ainger; Eleanor Wallbridge Lloyd; Dr. Bruce Thomas; Dr. Edwin Janke; Jodi Williamson, my last secretary; and computer guru extraordinaire Joe Doucette. I apologize if, in my dotage, I have inadvertently forgotten anybody.

Back at the beginning of this venture, my agent and my friend, the truly remarkable Elsa Franklin, asked me in that wonderfully direct way of hers, Where are you going with this story? So, just as the late Pierre Berton used to advise, I rewrote and rewrote this story six times until I felt it would hold the reader. I will always thank Elsa for that question.

I can’t sufficiently thank the truly impressive people who make up The Dundurn Group for their great skill, their wisdom, and their patience in putting up with my infirmities: publisher Kirk Howard, editorial director Tony Hawke, editor Jennifer Gallant, and designer Alison Carr.

Finally, I owe more than can be said to my wife, Alison, my darling love and my best friend. She has not only confronted a debilitating illness with dignity and forbearance but has also tolerated my obsession with this book, my incessant talk of history, my absent-mindedness, and my absences with patience and cheerfulness. This is truly a gift.

Prologue:

A Burial at Sea

"Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to receive unto Himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the deep, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead . . ."

The North Atlantic Ocean, five hundred miles east-northeast of Newfoundland. The late afternoon of Sunday, September 13, 1942. The quarterdeck of the Canadian destroyer HMCS Ottawa.

The ship’s first lieutenant (executive officer), Lieutenant Thomas C. Pullen, is conducting to the best of my ability . . . a solemn burial service from the Book of Common Prayer.¹ Clustered around him are a group of perhaps thirty-five men. Some of them, the seamen of the destroyer (ratings, or members of the lower deck), are turned out in their full dress uniforms — number ones, or in Navy argot pusser rig. There is also a group of men in rough working gear: pea jackets and dungarees. These are the rescued crew members of a torpedoed merchant ship, the tanker Empire Oil.

One of their number, a Royal Artillery marine gunner named Jones, has died this morning as a result of the excruciating abdominal injuries he received when the tanker was torpedoed three days ago. His body has been sewn into a canvas hammock and, following an ancient custom of the sea, the last stitch passed through the tip of the nose. A fifty-pound practice shell has been fixed between the legs to prevent the body from rising to the surface after being committed to the deep. The body in its canvas shroud has been laid out on a six-foot wooden plank, covered with a large White Ensign (the flag of the Royal Canadian Navy), and placed on a deck railing. An armed guard of honour consisting of an officer and eight men stands in a file on one side of the body.

The sky is a cheerless grey, but the sea is calmer than it has been for several days now. The ship is slipping along at ten knots, and the only sounds other than some voices are the hum of the ship’s machinery and the gentle rippling of the bow wave. This scene is incongruously serene because the Ottawa is steaming five thousand