All Hell Let Loose (48 page)

To hunt and sink U-boats, close collaboration between two or three warships was vital: a single ship could seldom drop depth-charges with sufficient accuracy to achieve a ‘kill’. It became difficult for the Germans to operate close to the US or British coasts, within range of air patrols. U-boats could travel fast only on the surface; submerged craft struggled to intercept a convoy. Overhead aircraft forced them to dive, a more effective counter-measure than bomber attacks on the concrete-encased U-boat ‘pens’ of Brest and Lorient, which cost the RAF much wasted effort. In 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic focused increasingly on a thousand-mile width of sea beyond reach of most shore-based planes. There Dönitz concentrated his forces, and convoys ran the gauntlet for four to six days of peril.

SC104, a typical convoy of thirty-six merchantmen arrayed in six columns, sailed eastward in October 1942 at seven knots – barely eight mph of land speed – with an escort of two destroyers –
Fame
and
Viscount
– and four corvettes –
Acanthus
,
Eglantine
,
Montbretia
and
Potentilla
. The first hint of a looming threat came four days after leaving Newfoundland, at 1624 on 12 October, when ‘Huff-Duff’ detected a U-boat radio transmission to starboard; soon afterwards, a second submarine was identified. As night fell, in heavy seas the escorts took up stations ahead and on the flanks of the merchantmen. Conditions were appalling, especially aboard the corvettes, which rolled continuously. Half-drowned bridge crews struggled to keep awake and alert, knowing that even when their four-hour watches ended they were unlikely to find hot food or dry clothing in waterlogged mess decks. If engineers and stokers in machinery spaces were warmer below, they were unfailingly conscious of their diminished prospects of escape if a ship was hit – 42 per cent of such victims perished, against 25 per cent of deck ratings. For weeks on end, strain and discomfort were constants, even before the enemy struck.

That night of 12 October, visibility for convoy SC104 was four miles between snow showers. Just before midnight, a U-boat was detected four miles astern:
Fame
turned and raced to launch a radar-guided attack. Just before it reached the U-boat’s position, the pounding of the seas disabled the radar, blinding the destroyer. After a fruitless thirty-minute visual and Asdic search,
Fame
returned to its station. Soon afterwards
Eglantine
conducted another unsuccessful hunt for a U-boat to starboard. At 0508 the escorts heard a heavy explosion, and fired ‘Snowflake’ illuminants. Amid crashing waves which rendered both radar and Asdic almost useless, nothing was seen. An hour later, the escort commander learned that during the night three ships had been sunk without showing sight or sound of distress; a corvette was sent back to search for survivors.

Throughout the daylight hours of 13 October the convoy struggled through mountainous seas, occasionally glimpsing U-boats which submerged before they could be attacked. That night, two more merchantmen were torpedoed. At 2043
Viscount
spotted a submarine on the surface at a range of eight hundred yards. Spray blinded her gunners; the enemy dived as the destroyer closed to ram, the bridge crew catching a last glimpse of the U-boat’s conning tower thirty yards distant. Again and again through the night, escorts pursued contacts without success. The senior officer’s feelings, in his own words, ‘amounted almost to despair’. At dawn he found that half the convoy had lost formation during the night’s terrible weather; nine of the stragglers were rounded up, but six ships had been sunk, and the passage was only half over.

The struggle continued through 14 October, with four U-boats identified around the convoy. At nightfall, to captains’ relief visibility worsened, making submarine attacks more difficult. The convoy changed course repeatedly to throw off its pursuers. During the following night, escorts attacked six successive radar contacts. One of these took place at 2331, when
Viscount
picked up a U-boat at 6,200 yards. Her captain closed to ram at twenty-six knots; the U-boat commander took evasive action, but made a disastrous misjudgement which swung his craft across
Viscount
’s bows. The destroyer smashed into the submarine twenty feet aft of its conning tower, then rode up onto the stricken enemy’s hull. The U-boat swung clear, under fire from every calibre of British gun, and finally received a depth-charge at point-blank range. U-619 sank stern-first at 2347. Yet success was dearly bought: the damaged
Viscount
was obliged to set immediate course for Liverpool, where it arrived safely two nights later, needing months of dockyard repairs.

At sunrise on 16 October came the welcome sight of a long-range Liberator, the first covering aircraft to reach the convoy: SC104 had passed through the mid-Atlantic ‘air gap’. The Norwegian navy’s
Potentilla
transferred a hundred survivors from her packed messdecks to a merchantman. The morning was uneventful, but at 1407
Fame
’s Asdic detected a U-boat at 2,000 yards, and attacked with depth-charges five minutes later. The subsequent drama was played out in the midst of the convoy, with merchantmen steaming past on both sides. A large bubble exploded onto the surface, followed by the dramatic spectacle of a U-boat bursting forth with water cascading off its hull, to meet a hail of gunfire.
Fame
ran alongside, scraping her bottom, and launched a whaler as German crewmen dived over the side. A courageous British officer scrambled into the conning tower, seized an armful of documents from the submarine’s control room, then made his escape seconds before U-253 sank.

But
Fame
, like
Viscount
, suffered heavily in the collision. Her captain repented his decision to ram, as crewmen struggled for hours to close great gashes in the ship’s hull with collision mats and baulks of timber. With pumps straining to keep ahead of sea water gushing into the engine room,
Fame
followed
Viscount
towards Liverpool, and thence into dockyard hands. Four slow corvettes now remained to escort twenty-eight ships. At 2140 that night of 16 October, yet another U-boat was detected by
Potentilla
. The two approached each other at full speed before
Potentilla
’s captain swerved at the last moment, to avoid a thirty-two-knot collision which must have been fatal to his own small vessel. The corvette’s four-inch gun, pom-poms and Oerlikons blazed at the submarine, but it escaped almost unscathed. This was SC104’s last serious action: despite some false alarms, 17 October passed in thick fog without significant incident. Two days later, the merchantmen entered the Mersey, cheered by news that a VLR Liberator had sunk a third submarine, U-661, close to their track.

This convoy’s experiences, each one sufficiently harrowing to represent the drama of a lifetime save in the circumstances of a world at war, were repeated again and again by merchantmen and escorts on the Atlantic run. Moreover, such losses were relatively light for the period. Later that October fifteen ships of SC107 were sunk, while SC125 lost thirteen in a seven-day battle, without destroying a single U-boat. In 1942 as a whole, 1,160 Allied merchantmen were sunk by submarines. Just as the tide of the war was turning dramatically against the Axis, Britain was confronted with its most serious import shortfall. In the winter of 1942 Dönitz’s wolf packs reached their greatest strength, with over a hundred U-boats at sea. The North African campaign, and especially the November
Torch
landings, obliged the Royal Navy to divert substantial resources to the Mediterranean.

Canadian corvettes, which had assumed much of the burden of western Atlantic escort duties, proved to lack both equipment and expertise to match Dönitz’s wolf packs: some 80 per cent of mid-Atlantic losses between July and September were suffered by Canadian-escorted convoys. Contemporary reports highlighted a critical shortage of competent captains with adequate training, and of skills in using Asdic. The Royal Canadian Navy had expanded much faster than its small nucleus of professional seamen could handle – 3½ times more than the Royal Navy or the USN. Of one RCN warship arriving in Britain, a reporting officer concluded: ‘This low state of efficiency appears to be evident generally in all Canadian-manned corvettes.’ A historian has noted: ‘These problems often resulted in poor performance against U-boat packs.’ The Canadians had to be relieved of mid-ocean responsibilities for some months early in 1943, as soon as the Royal Navy could spare its own ships to replace them.

In March that year there was another breakdown of U-boat radio traffic decryption at Bletchley. In consequence, for two months half of all Atlantic convoys suffered attack, and one in five of their merchantmen were sunk. Yet this proved the final crisis of the campaign. That spring, at last the Western Allies committed resources which overwhelmed the U-boats. Escort groups equipped with 10cm radar, VLR aircraft with improved depth-charges, small carriers and renewed penetration of Dönitz’s ciphers combined to transform the struggle. Admiral Sir Max Horton, who became C-in-C Western Approaches in November 1942, was a former World War I submariner of the highest gifts, who made a critical contribution to victory, directing the Atlantic campaign from his headquarters in Liverpool.

In May 1943 forty-seven U-boats were sunk, and almost a hundred in the year as a whole. Sinkings of German submarines by aircraft alone rose from five between October 1941 and March 1942, to fifteen between April and September 1942, to thirty-eight between October 1942 and March 1943. Dönitz found himself losing a U-boat a day, 20 per cent of his submarine strength gone in a month. He was obliged drastically to curtail operations. There was a steep fall in merchant ship sinkings, so that by the last quarter of 1943 only 6 per cent of British imports were lost to enemy action. The wartime Atlantic passage was seldom less than a gruelling experience, but for the rest of the war British and American forces dominated the ocean, challenged by a shrinking U-boat force, and German crews whose inexperience and waning morale were often manifest.

Britain’s merchant fleet was devastated to a degree which contributed to the nation’s post-war economic woes: almost all the fourteen million tons of new Allied shipping launched in 1943 were American. But the immediate reality was that Germany had lost its war against Atlantic commerce. In the last seven months of 1943 sinkings of Allied shipping fell to 200,000 tons, around a quarter of this total by submarines. Though shortage of tonnage never ceased to be a constraint on strategy, no important Allied interest was thereafter imperilled by enemy naval action. Before the war, Britain’s annual imports totalled sixty-eight million tons. While this figure fell to 24.48 million tons in 1943, in 1944 it rose again to 56.9 million tons.

Perhaps the most vivid statistic of the Battle of the Atlantic is that between 1939 and 1943 only 8 per cent of slow and 4 per cent of fast convoys suffered attack. Much has been written about the inadequacy of Allied means to respond to the U-boat threat in the early war years. This was real enough, but German resource problems were much greater. Hitler never understood the sea. In the early war period, he dispersed industrial effort and steel allocations among a range of weapons systems. He did not recognise a strategic opportunity to wage a major campaign against British Atlantic commerce until the fall of France in June 1940. U-boat construction was prioritised only in 1942–43, when Allied naval strength was growing fast and the tide of the war had already turned. Germany never gained the capability to sever Britain’s Atlantic lifeline, though amid grievous shipping losses it was hard to recognise this at the time.

2
ARCTIC CONVOYS

When Hitler invaded Russia, the British and American chiefs of staff alike opposed the dispatch of military aid, on the grounds that their own nations’ resources were too straitened to spare arms for others. The Royal Navy saw a further strategic objection: any materiel shipped to the Soviets must be transported through their Arctic ports, Murmansk and Archangel, the latter accessible only in the ice-free summer months. This would require convoys travelling at a speed of eight or nine knots to endure at least a week-long passage under threat or attack from German U-boats, surface warships and aircraft based in nearby north Norway. Britain’s prime minister and America’s president overruled these objections, asserting – surely rightly – that support for the Soviet war effort was an absolute priority. Hitler at first took little heed of the significance of the Arctic link to Russia, despite the fact that his obsession with a possible British landing in Norway caused him to fortify its coastline. Churchill remained a strong advocate of such an assault until as late as 1944, though he was thwarted by the implacable opposition of his service chiefs. What mattered in 1942, however, was the strong German naval and air presence in the far north, which threatened Arctic convoys.

The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, deplored the diversion of resources from the Battle of the Atlantic to open a hazardous new front merely to aid the repugnant Soviets, who seemed likely soon to succumb to the Germans. Pound was especially uneasy about the prospect of outgunned elements of the Home Fleet meeting one of Hitler’s capital ships, most likely the
Tirpitz
: the navy was scarred by memories of its difficulties and losses before the
Bismarck
succumbed. Apprehension was heightened by an unsuccessful carrier air strike against German coastal shipping off north Norway on 30 July 1941, which cost eleven of twenty Swordfish torpedo-bombers dispatched – one of the Royal Navy’s notable strategic failures was interdiction of the vital German iron-ore traffic.