by Clay Blair
The Sea Hurricanes on Avenger focused on shooting down the German shadow aircraft, but they failed. Vectored in by the shadowers, that afternoon the Luftwaffe hit PQ 18 in a mass torpedo-plane and dive-bomber attack, “like a huge flight of nightmare locusts,” as one participant put it. Notwithstanding the heavy flak from the convoy and escorts, the tethered blimps, and some interference by the Sea Hurricanes, the German planes sank eight confirmed ships for 43,256 tons.
The next day, September 14, Karl Brandenburg in U-457 got around the escorts. He claimed he sank a tanker and a freighter for 10,000 tons and got two hits on a “destroyer,” but postwar analysis credited him with damage only to one ship, the 9,000-ton British tanker Atheltemplar. She was so badly wrecked that she had to be sunk by the escorts. The next day, Brandenburg reported that he missed another “destroyer” with a three-torpedo salvo.
The massive escort for PQ 18 delivered numerous attacks on the U-boats. Hunting cooperatively, British Swordfish from Squadron 825 on Avenger and destroyers, or destroyers alone, sank three.
• On September 12, a Swordfish spotted a U-boat six miles south of the convoy. This was U-88, commanded by Heino Bohmann. The destroyer Onslow peeled off to investigate. At a distance she saw exhaust “smoke,” then a conning tower. The boat dived, but Onslow got a good sonar contact and threw over thirty-six depth charges. Nothing more was ever heard from U-88. As proof of her kill, Onslow recovered wood deck gratings, green vegetables, boxes, and a sock.
• On September 14, another Swordfish from Avenger reported that a U-boat had dived four miles ahead of the convoy. This was U-589, commanded by Hans-Joachim Horrer. Sent to investigate, the destroyer Faulkner got a good sonar contact and dropped a salvo of five depth charges. Faulkner’s sonar operator heard a “loud noise,” then the contact diminished to “faint” and disappeared. No conclusive proof was found but the kill was deduced from Enigma intercepts. Four German airmen whom Horrer had rescued died in the sinking.*
• On September 16, the destroyer Impulsive of the close escort got a good sonar contact at eight hundred yards. This was U-457, commanded by Karl Brandenburg. Impulsive attacked immediately, throwing over five depth charges. Later she found an oil slick and “various pieces of wreckage,” which included numerous pieces of wood, some scraps of paper, and one black leather glove. The kill was also deduced from Enigma. There were no survivors.
The opposite-sailing convoys PQ 18 and QP 14 passed in the Barents Sea on September 15 and 16. There were twelve U-boats in the vicinity, tracking one or the other of the convoys. Klüber directed five to stay with PQ 18 and seven to attack QP 14. Reinhard Reche in U-255 reported two failed attacks against Avenger. Otto Köhler in U-377 reported a possible hit on a freighter. Rolf-Heinrich Hopmann in U-405 reported a possible hit on a fleet destroyer. Heinz-Ehlert Clausen in U-403 reported heavy depth-charge damage from a British escort, two failed attacks on his boat by confused German airmen, and a botched attack by a Soviet submarine. Reinhard von Hymmen in U-408 reported a failed attack by a British submarine.
Beginning on September 17, four Soviet destroyers joined PQ 18 to help escort the convoy into Archangel, which was still ice-free and less vulnerable to German aircraft. In a final attack, Luftwaffe aircraft hit and sank another ship, the 5,400-ton Kentucky, and wrecked the 6,500-ton freighter Troubador, which was beached to save her cargo. Allied losses in PQ 18: thirteen ships for 76,000 tons, of which three for 21,000 tons were sunk by U-boats only, the other ten by the Luftwaffe.*
The seven U-boats stalking QP 14 also achieved some successes. In two separate attacks, the leading shooter of the Norway-based boats, Siegfried Strelow in U-435, sank one of the escorts, the 835-ton British minesweeper Leda, and three freighters for 15,800 tons (two British and one American). For this exceptional achievement in the teeth of numerous escorts, and for past claims, Strelow was awarded a Ritterkreuz,† the first such honor for a Norway-based skipper. Heinz Bielfeld in U-703 hit the Tribal-class destroyer Somali. Taken in tow by her sister ship Ashanti, Somali foundered in heavy weather with the loss of forty-five men of her salvage crew. Reinhardt Reche in U-255 sank the 5,000-ton American freighter Silver Sword. Dietrich von der Esch in the newly arrived U-606 hit a British Catalina with his flak guns and forced it to land. Reinhard von Hymmen in U-408 reported hits on a fleet destroyer and a freighter, but they could not be confirmed. Alfred Hoschatt in U-378 reported firing four torpedoes at Avenger and four at a destroyer, but all missed.‡ Sinkings in QP 14 by U-boats: two escorts, Leda and Somali, and four merchant ships for 20,800 tons.
The sixteen Arctic U-boats that operated against PQ 18 and QP 14 sank nine ships for 43,216 tons, including the escorts Leda and Somali.§ In return, three U-boats were lost with all hands (plus the rescued German airmen on board) in the attack on PQ 18. Arctic commander Otto Klüber aptly commented to the OKM that three U-boats lost to sink three freighters in PQ 18 was “too high a price” to pay. In addition, four boats incurred heavy battle damage: Heinrich Timm’s U-251, Reinhardt Reche’s U-255, Heinz-Ehlert Clausen’s U-403, and Rolf-Heinrich Hopmann’s U-405.
The diversion of British warships to prepare for and carry out Torch again shut down the Murmansk convoys, this time until mid-December. At the suggestion of President Roosevelt, some fast freighters attempted the voyage singly. Thirteen sailed, but only five arrived. Three aborted, two were sunk by U-boats unassisted, two by the Luftwaffe and U-boats combined, and one, hit by aircraft, wrecked on Spitzbergen. Upon the arrival of near twenty-four-hour Arctic darkness in November, QP 15, composed of twenty-eight empty ships of PQ 18 and earlier convoys, sailed from northern Russia to Iceland. Two U-boats, U-601 and the newly arrived U-625, commanded by Peter-Ottmar Grau and Hans Benker, respectively, each sank one freighter from QP 15, for an aggregate of 9,800 tons.
During the hunt for Murmansk-bound convoys, U-408, commanded by Rein-hard von Hymmen, patrolled close off the north coast of Iceland. On November 5, a Catalina of the U.S. Navy’s Patrol Squadron VP 84, piloted by Robert C. Millard, caught U-408 on the surface and sank her. The Catalina crew reported seven Germans in the water, together with “quantities of wood splinters, oil, and other objects,” but none of the Germans survived.
The loss in a period of about eighty days of forty-three* valuable ships in convoys PQ 17 (twenty-four) and PQ 18/QP 14 (nineteen), came as physical and psychological shocks to the Allies, and deservedly so. The news and newsreel reports and Allied and Axis propaganda that summer and fall, and talk among Allied merchant mariners and, later, war feature films, led to the impression that the “Murmansk Run” was the most dangerous convoy route of all. However, as Dönitz repeatedly informed Berlin, the Arctic was the least remunerative hunting ground for U-boats. Only a very few sank any more ships in that area. After the summer of 1942, the Luftwaffe was also ineffective against Allied shipping in the Arctic.
EYES ON THE NORTH ATLANTIC RUN
Karl Dönitz knew well that U-boat warfare by the obsolescent Type VIIs in the North Atlantic would be extremely difficult and that German losses were sure to mount to very high levels, but he remained convinced that that inhospitable arena was the decisive one in the naval war. If his Atlantic U-boat force could shut down the vital Allied North Atlantic convoy run, it was still possible that the British Isles could be isolated and starved out, denying the Allies a launching pad for an amphibious invasion of Occupied France. Therefore, despite the failures in the past to do so, Dönitz directed that every possible effort must be made to destroy that sea link.
For the first time in the war, the Atlantic U-boat force had what appeared to the Germans to be sufficient numbers of U-boats to carry out this difficult task. The clearing out of the logjam of U-boats in the Baltic in the summer of 1942 led to the first significant jump in the size of the Atlantic U-boat force. On September 3—the beginning of the fourth year of continuous U-boat warfare—Dönitz had 126 attack boats* at his Atlantic front: seventy-seven Type VIIs, forty-seven Type IXs, the IXD2 U-cruiser U-
179, and U-A.
Dönitz counted on additional large increases of Atlantic U-boats in September and October 1942, but it was not to be. Again the flow of new boats was whittled down by accidents and other delays in the Baltic,† and by further diversions. To replace losses in the Arctic force and to assist in the hunt for PQ/QP convoys, in September and October the OKM sent eight new VIIs to northern Norway for permanent and temporary duty,‡ and routed three to the Atlantic via slow transits of the Denmark Strait, where one, the new U-253, commanded by Adolf Friedrichs, age twenty-eight, hit a mine northwest of Iceland and sank with the loss of all hands. Furthermore, in order to rebuild the gutted Mediterranean force, the OKM ordered that six more Type VIIs were to be sent there in October. These diversions were to remove seventeen VIIs from the Atlantic force, ten permanently and seven temporarily. Owing to these diversions and to battle losses, the Atlantic force was to increase by only twenty-eight attack boats during September and October to a total of 152 on November 1: one hundred VIIs and fifty-two IXs.
Even though the growth of the Atlantic force was disappointingly slow, Dönitz was able to mount an unprecedented 109 war patrols by attack boats in September and October 1942. The great preponderance of these boats (seventy-three) went to the North Atlantic to hunt convoys sailing to and from the British Isles. The other attack-boat patrols (thirty-six) were divided equally between American waters and those off West and South Africa.§
In some histories of the “Battle of the Atlantic,” the authors segue from one convoy battle to the next, omitting all the failed interceptions and/or attacks. This selectivity gives the quite wrong impression that the U-boats in the North Atlantic in September and October 1942 inflicted an absolute massacre on Allied shipping. In spite of the good information on Allied convoys derived from the German break into British Naval Cypher Number 3, which B-dienst provided Dönitz, for various reasons the U-boats were able to mount notable attacks on only six of thirty-five convoys that sailed to and from the British Isles in those two months, and to sink only fifty-seven of about 1,700 merchant ships (3 percent) in those convoys, of which thirty-nine (2 percent) were eastbound.* This was another tough blow for the Allies but hardly a massacre. From the German point of view, the renewed campaign on the North Atlantic run to cut this vital sea link had to be judged a failure.
Cargo convoys on the North Atlantic run in this period were heavily protected by Allied warships and aircraft.
The warships were divided into three commands: the Canadian Western Local Escort Force (WLEF), the Allied Mid-Ocean Escort Force (MOEF), and the British Eastern Local Escort Force (ELEF). The Canadian WLEF protected convoys in Canadian waters to and from the Western Ocean Meeting Point (WESTOMP). Warships of the Allied MOEF sailing east from St. John’s, Newfoundland, took over at the WOMP and protected eastbound convoys to the East Ocean Meeting Point (EASTOMP), where the British ELEF took over. In the reverse process, warships of the British ELEF, sailing west, escorted westbound convoys to the EOMP, where warships of the MOEF, sailing west from Londonderry, Northern Ireland, took over the task.
The heaviest ocean-escort responsibilities fell on the warships of the Allied MOEF. These were subdivided into eleven close escort groups, six British (B-1 to B-6),* four Canadian (C-1 to C-4), and one American (A-3). Under optimal circumstances, the British and Canadian groups were comprised of about seven ships: two or three destroyers and four or five corvettes. The American group usually included one or two big, Treasury-class Coast Guard cutters (Bibb, Campbell, Duane, Ingham, or Spencer), a mixture of British and Canadian corvettes, and, from time to time, a British or Canadian destroyer.
The MOEF groups sailed on a thirty-three-day cycle, commonly known as “Newfie to ‘Deny.” Eastbound from St. John’s, Newfoundland, they crossed the Atlantic to Londonderry in nine and one-half days. They laid over in Londonderry for eight days for refit or upgrading and crew R&R. Westbound from Londonderry, they crossed the Atlantic in nine and one-half days to St. John’s, where they laid over for six days before restarting the cycle.
Most of the British and American escorts were fitted with improved sonar and with rotating centimetric-wavelength radar (Type 271), with Planned Position Indicator (PPI) scopes, which displayed surface ships and U-boats in relation to the escort. The Canadian warships had the older sonar and meter-wavelength radar (Type 286). At least one and usually two ships in the convoy were fitted with high-frequency direction-finding gear (Huff Duff), which enabled the escorts to detect and home on the radio reports from a shadowing U-boat and to attack. All escorts carried depth charges with the more powerful Torpex warheads, which could be set to explode down to six hundred feet. Many of the British escorts were fitted with the Hedgehog, a foward-firing contact mortar. Land-based submarine attack simulators and sophisticated radar and sonar shipboard attack plotters were in “mass” production.
The Western Local Escort Force (WLEF), manned and commanded exclusively by the Royal Canadian Navy, was comprised of forty-six warships—eighteen Canadian and British destroyers, and twenty-eight corvettes. These were assigned to eight Canadian escort groups, usually with four ships per group, the rest being in training, refit, or overhaul. A number of the destroyers were old (World War I) Royal Navy “V” and “W” class, which were unsuitable for operations in the cold, harsh northwest Atlantic waters in winter, because they lacked sufficient reserve stability to allow for the inevitable buildup of ice topside. The hope therefore was to replace the Vs and Ws with the winterized ex-American four-stack (or Town-class) destroyers acquired by the Commonwealth in the 1940 “Destroyer Deal.”
At a Canadian-American “Convoy Conference” in Ottawa in the summer of 1942, senior naval officials had hashed over the escort situation in great detail. They agreed that with the onset of winter weather, on or about November 1, the harsh conditions would force the North Atlantic convoys to slow down, extending the escort’s time at sea. In order to compensate for this slowdown and for the need to repair storm and ice damage to the escorts, the conferees estimated that at least one more escort group would be required for the MOEF and that the groups in the WLEF should be increased from four ships to six. Hence, the Allied convoy experts calculated that come winter they faced a shortage of forty-seven warships, nine destroyers, and thirty-eight corvettes, of which twenty-six vessels (six destroyers and twenty corvettes) were to be allotted to the WLEF, the rest to the MOEF.
In the meantime, the plan to sail all transatlantic convoys from New York commencing in mid-September was revalidated. As one step of this process, the Canadians closed Sydney, Nova Scotia, after the departure of Slow Convoy 94. From August 4 on, succeeding Slow Convoys (95 through 101) consisting of an aggregate of 318 vessels, departed from Halifax, reducing the need for the cumbersome, time-wasting Halifax-Sydney convoy run. On September 19, Slow Convoy 102 became the first of this category to sail from New York. On September 17, the fast Halifax 208 was the first of that category.*
The protection of North Atlantic convoys by Allied aircraft had grown dramatically—far more so than the Germans realized. In September-October 1942, there were about seven hundred planes assigned to frontline ASW units around the perimeter of the North Atlantic (North America, Greenland, Iceland, and the British Isles†). Counting squadron reserves (not shown here), these included almost three hundred aircraft capable of long-range or very-long-range missions:
138 Catalinas or Cansos (a Canadian version of the Catalina)
48 Sunderlands
42 B-24 Liberators
36 B-17 Flying Fortresses
12 Halifaxes
These ASW aircraft and others were being equipped as rapidly as possible with the latest weaponry and electronic gear. The standard armament, the Mark XIII aerial depth charge with Torpex warhead, had been reshaped, strengthened, and fitted with shallow-set pistols (fuses), that exploded at a depth of twenty-five feet, giving the aircraft the improved ability to attack a crash-diving U-boat. Some planes had been fitted with the more pow
erful and effective Mark III ASV centimeter-wavelength radar, replacing the Mark II ASV meter-plus wavelength model. The American-made Fido homing torpedo, disguised as the “Mark XXIV mine,” was in high-priority production, as were the hydrophone sonobuoys, which could be dropped into the water to detect U-boat noises and positions.*
After leaving the heavily patrolled waters of the United States East Coast, the eastbound convoys fell under protection of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). This organization, like the Royal Canadian Navy, was a relatively inexperienced and impoverished stepchild. There were nine frontline RCAF ASW squadrons based in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. These were comprised of over one hundred combat-ready aircraft: forty-eight Catalinas-Cansos, twelve Digbys (a Canadian version of the USAAF B-18), and forty-eight Hudsons. The RCAF was backed up by twenty-four U.S.-manned aircraft: twelve B-18s of USAAF Squadron 20 at Gander, and twelve Catalinas of the U.S. Navy’s VP 84 at Argentia.†
The sixty Cansos and Catalinas in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland could effectively escort Allied convoys out to about five or six hundred miles, depending on a number of factors, including weather. In a stretch, the B-18s and the Digbys could reach to about four hundred miles, the Hudsons about three hundred miles. Although there were glaring gaps and inefficiencies, the Allied convoy air escort in the northwest Atlantic was a steadily growing force with which to reckon.
In September 1942, the so-called Battle of the St. Lawrence was still in progress. Several U-boats had penetrated the relatively confined waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and had sunk a number of ships.‡ These enemy excursions into the “home” waters of the Maritime Provinces had caused local panic and a political uproar in Ottawa. As a consequence, the Canadian Prime Minister, W. L. Mackenzie King, closed the gulf to oceangoing ship traffic indefinitely and redeployed a substantial number of frontline aircraft to offensive ASW patrols over the gulf, thus reducing air forces available for ocean-convoy air escort. During this “crisis,” United States Army Air Forces B-25s from a base in Westover, Massachusetts, assisted the RCAF, flying from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.