by Clay Blair
Based on information from British codebreakers, at 2:17 A.M., December 26, the Admiralty warned Bruce Fraser: “Emergency. Scharnhorst probably sailed at 1800, 25 December.” At about this same time, Luftwaffe aircraft and three of the northernmost U-boats of the eight in the Eisenbart line*reported fleeting contact with the eastbound convoy JW 55B near Bear Island and attempted to pursue.
In foul weather and Arctic darkness, the opposing forces jockeyed for position. Using Enigma decrypts from the Admiralty and superior radar on his ships, Bruce Fraser quickly got the upper hand. While he put his task force (Duke of York, Jamaica, and four destroyers) on a course to cut Scharnhorst off from retreat to Altenfiord, he ordered the task force of three cruisers (Belfast, Norfolk, Sheffield) commanded by Robert Burnett, joined by four destroyers from the escort group of returning convoy RA 55A, commanded by R. L. Fisher, to close and attack Scharnhorst from the opposite direction. From Berlin, Dönitz exhorted German forces: “Strike a blow for the gallant troops on the Eastern Front by destroying the convoy.”
In the early hours of December 26, Boxing Day, the Belfast found and reported Scharnhorst less her five destroyers, which had unaccountably separated. The four British destroyers from RA 55A joined Belfast, Norfolk, and Sheffield, but they could not get into position to fire torpedoes. The cruiser Norfolk, which had eight 8” guns, opened fire and scored two hits on Scharnhorst, which in turn twice hit Norfolk with her 11” guns. Suspecting correctly that Fraser’s modern battleship Duke of York with 14” guns was part of the trap, Erich Bey ordered his five errant destroyers to attack convoy JW 55B, while he turned Scharnhorst south at thirty knots for Altenfiord, outrunning the three British cruisers and four destroyers.
Bruce Fraser’s maneuver to cut off Scharnhorst worked perfectly. Late in the afternoon, his Duke of York got Scharnhorst on radar at a range of thirty miles. Fraser closed and opened fire with his 14” guns and achieved hits that slowed Scharnhorst. Thereupon, his cruiser Jamaica and Burnett’s overtaking Belfast and Sheffield opened up with 6” guns. Then Fraser’s four destroyers (Saumarez, Savage, Scorpion, Stord) and Fisher’s four destroyers from convoy RA 55A (Matchless, Musketeer, Opportune, Virago) closed on Scharnhorst to shoot torpedoes and fire 4.7” guns.
Realizing the Scharnhorst was doomed, Erich Bey radioed Hitler and Dönitz that he would fight to the last shell. In a near replication of the slaughter of Bismarck, the British ships closed and destroyed Scharnhorst with guns and torpedoes. The destroyers Scorpion and Matchless fished out thirty-six enlisted men of her 1,943-man crew. All other Germans perished, yet another major defeat and humiliation for the Kriegsmarine, one which naturally infuriated Hitler.
The U-boat line Eisenbart played only a minor role in this Arctic naval battle. No other boats found convoy JW 55B; one boat aborted with mechanical defects. Upon learning of the loss of Scharnhorst, Dönitz directed the seven remaining Eisenbart boats to the scene to search for German survivors, but no boat found any. On December 28, the newly arrived U-957, commanded by Franz Saar, age twenty-four, found and shot two T-5 homing torpedoes at two “fast ships” but neither hit, extending the period of U-boat nonperformance against the Murmansk convoys into January 1944, a fallow and frustrating ten months for the Germans.
The loss of Scharnhorst left only the Arctic U-boat force to interdict the Murmansk convoys and repel the long-expected Allied invasion of Norway. Although Dönitz knew well that the U-boats were practically useless for either mission, politics demanded further reinforcements, again at the expense of the Atlantic U-boat force; on December 27, Dönitz directed that the Arctic/Norway U-boat force be increased immediately to twenty-four boats, all VIIs adapted for Arctic operations. Six more new boats arrived in the Arctic in January.*
The Arctic/Norway U-boat force was organized into two combat flotillas, the 11th in Bergen, commanded by Hans Cohausz, and the 13th in Trondheim, commanded by Rolf Rüggeberg. Both bases had concrete U-boat pens like those in France. However, refit and repair facilities were limited. New Type VIIFs (torpedo-supply boats), the U-1060 and U-1062, ran back and forth with matériel for a modest advanced U-boat base in Narvik. On December 22, a flight of nine Beaufighters patrolling off southwest Norway found and attacked Karl Albrecht’s U-1062 with 20mm cannons and a torpedo, inflicting severe damage, but the boat reached Bergen the next day. The U-1062 and her escorting surface ship shot down two Beaufighters.
SEVEN
ALLIED PLANS: SEXTANT AND EUREKA
President Roosevelt for more than two years had sought a face-to-face talk with Joseph Stalin. He finally agreed to meet with Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran, Iran, in late November 1943. This first meeting of the “Big Three” was one of the most important conferences of the war, and the preparations for it were immense and complex.
Encouraged by Roosevelt, China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek sought a seat at the conference. However, this was easier said than done. China was formally at war with Japan, but not with Germany. The Soviet Union was formally at war with Germany but not Japan. For these and other reasons, both Stalin and Churchill opposed the inclusion of the Generalissimo. So it was arranged that Roosevelt and Churchill would first meet with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo (Sextant), then meet with Stalin in Teheran (Eureka).
Churchill and a large British party, including the new First Sea Lord, Andrew Cunningham, boarded the battlecruiser Renown at Plymouth and sailed on November 12, a Friday. After a leisurely eight-day voyage, Renown arrived at Alexandria, Egypt, on November 21. The British party traveled overland to Cairo to await the arrival of the American delegation.
Roosevelt and party, which included Harry Hopkins and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, boarded the new battleship Iowa on the same day, November 12. Inasmuch as Roosevelt subscribed to the sailor’s superstition that it was bad luck to sail on a Friday, Iowa waited to leave Norfolk until six minutes after midnight, Saturday, November 13. To avoid any possibility of a U-boat attack, Iowa cruised at a steady 25 knots. While matching that speed and carrying out escort duties, her screen of three destroyers burned fuel at a terrific rate. Since the Navy was loathe to slow down Iowa to refuel the escorts while under way, three groups of escorts (from the States, the Azores, and the Mediterranean) had to be employed in relays.
On the second day at sea, November 14, one of Iowa’s escorts very nearly achieved what the U-boats could not. During a battle drill, the new destroyer William D. Porter accidentally fired a live torpedo at Iowa. Luckily, Iowa was able to evade, and the torpedo exploded harmlessly in her wake. Thoroughly embarrassed, Admiral King moved to sack the destroyer skipper immediately, but, King remembered, “to his great amazement,” Roosevelt told him to “forget it.”*
The Iowa arrived at Mers el-Kébir, the seaport for Oran, on November 20. Welcomed by Dwight Eisenhower and others, the Roosevelt party boarded four C-54 transport aircraft (including Roosevelt’s personal plane, the “Sacred Cow”) and flew to Tunis, where Eisenhower had arranged special VIP quarters, dinner, and a sightseeing tour of the ruins of Carthage. By then, Admirals King and Leahy and General Hap Arnold of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had concluded that George Marshall was indispensable in Washington and that not he but Eisenhower should command Overlord. In a private (and awkward) meeting with Marshall and Eisenhower, King informed Eisenhower of his views. However, later, over dinner, Roosevelt told Eisenhower that Marshall was his choice for the job.
On the day following, November 21, the Roosevelt party boarded the four aircraft and flew on to Cairo. Since that city was still very much a British area of responsibility, Churchill had arranged quarters for the Americans and, reluctantly, also for the Chinese. Over the next five days, from November 22 to November 26, Roosevelt and Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff conferred, and from time to time invited the Chinese to join the discussions. The proceedings relaxed on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 25, when, in another gesture of hospitality, the British arranged a special religious service at a cathedral in Cairo.
The American and British delegates met in a decidedly optimistic frame of mind. In the ten months since the Casablanca conference (Symbol), when the delegates had declared that the defeat of the U-boat had “first charge” on Allied resources, that goal had been achieved. The U-boats had sunk only three cargo ships in the North Atlantic in October; none in November and December. The massive Allied Atlantic convoy system, enhanced by the recent Allied occupation of the Azores,† now operated with scant to no fear of the enemy. Besides that (and partly owing to it), Allied forces were on the offensive against Axis forces in every part of the globe.
• Italy had been knocked out of the war. Although the Germans had occupied the northern half of the Italian peninsula, the Allies held the southern half, including the important seaports of Taranto and Naples. The Allies had approved plans to liberate Rome for political and psychological reasons, and to build a huge airfield complex at Foggia (on the Adriatic coast) to carry on the destruction of the German-held oil fields in Romania (Ploesti, in particular) and cities in middle and southern Germany.
• The Red Army, grown to a massive force of 6.5 million men and women, amply supplied with tanks, artillery, and other weapons, was on the offensive in almost every sector of its two-thousand-mile front. Stalin had prepared plans for a final, huge assault (Bagration) to coincide with Overlord. In a momentous shift in strategy and resources, on November 3 Hitler had secretly declared (in Fuhrer Directive No. 51) that an Allied invasion of France and/or Norway appeared to be imminent and that therefore defenses in the western sector could no longer be neglected in favor of reinforcing the eastern sector.
• The Allied heavy-bomber attack on Germany (Sickle/Pointblank) had at last moved into high gear. As Roosevelt and Churchill conferred on the evening of November 22, RAF Bomber Command mounted the heaviest attack yet on Berlin. Among other damage, this raid destroyed the buildings housing Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and Munitions and that of the Kriegsmarine* On November 26, Allied bombers hit Frankfurt and Bremen. On November 29, the Allied target was again Bremen.
• In the Southwest Pacific, Allied forces in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands steadily closed on the Japanese stronghold of Rabaul. Highly effective carrier and land-based aircraft raids in November forced Japanese naval and air forces to abandon Rabaul and to withdraw a considerable distance to the islands of Truk and Palau, a stunning defeat that would enable the Allies in this sector to leapfrog Rabaul and recapture all Japanese bases on the north coast of New Guinea.
• At the same time, American naval and ground forces launched a second line of attack against the Japanese (Galvanic) in the Central Pacific. On the day the Iowa reached North Africa with the presidential party, November 20, these forces invaded the Gilbert Islands (Tarawa, Makin, Betio) and by November 23, that island area was firmly in American hands, another costly but electrifying Pacific victory.
The conferees at Cairo soon fell into acrimonious debate for several reasons. The most important bone of contention in American eyes was what appeared to be a slackening in British enthusiasm for Overlord. The primary cause in British eyes was Roosevelt’s stubborn insistence that Washington and London provide Chiang Kai-shek increased military power to help eject the Japanese from Burma and China, and greater political participation in grand strategy. Further complicating everything, Churchill renewed his campaign for major Allied operations in the Mediterranean, including an invasion of the Balkans, his “soft underbelly” strategy. Since the Americans believed Churchill’s proposal would delay Overlord to 1945 or perhaps indefinitely and deny Chiang Kai-shek military assistance to carry out American proposals in the Far East, it increased tensions to the point that the usually cool and reticent George Marshall blew up and shouted down Churchill.
The Cairo meetings thus adjourned on November 27 with a number of important strategic issues unresolved. Chiang Kai-shek returned to China; the American and British delegations flew on to Teheran to meet with Stalin (Eureka) for a week, from November 27 to December 2. The American and British delegations then returned to Cairo for yet another round of strategy talks. One upshot of the Teheran and second Cairo conferences was a closer alignment of Washington and Moscow at the expense of London, which left Churchill in a black mood.
The second Cairo meeting concluded on December 7, the second anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Heavily influenced by Stalin at Teheran, the Allies agreed irrevocably that:
• Overlord was to take place in May or June 1944. Bowing to the advice of the American military chiefs (Stimson, Knox, Leahy, King, Arnold), Roosevelt reversed himself and named Eisenhower rather than Marshall to command Overlord, effective January 1944.
• Operations in Italy were to continue to the liberation of Rome, but the shift of ground troops and landing craft from the Mediterranean to the British Isles for Overlord was to proceed. At Churchill’s urging, to break the German line at the Rapido River and facilitate the liberation of Rome, a limited Allied “end run” amphibious invasion (Shingle) farther up the “boot” at Anzio would be carried out in January 1944.
• Partly at the insistence of Stalin, Churchill’s plan to invade the Balkans and the Dodecanese Islands with the hope of enticing Turkey into the war on the Allied side was shelved absolutely. Instead, Allied forces remaining in the Mediterranean after the liberation of Rome were to assist Overlord by a near-simultaneous invasion of southern France between Toulon and Nice (Anvil, renamed Dragoon).
• Also, partly at the insistence of Stalin, who promised to enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany, the Americans greatly scaled back plans to assist Chiang Kai-shek militarily. One result was that a tentative plan (Buccaneer) for the British to invade the Andaman Islands to cut the Japanese supply line to Burma, while other Allied ground forces struck into northern Burma from India (Tarzan), was also shelved, much to the relief of Churchill, who was still adamantly opposed to any aid for Chiang Kai-shek.
• Pacific operations were to be greatly intensified in 1944. Allied forces were to converge on the Japanese home islands by “two roads”: a “southern route” through New Guinea to the Philippines and Formosa, and a mid-Pacific “island-hopping route” from the newly captured Gilberts to the Marshalls (Eniwetok, Kwajalein, Majuro), Marianas (Guam, Saipan, Tinian), Bonins (Iwo Jima), and Okinawa. Thereafter the “two roads” were to merge in an assault on the Japanese home islands. To facilitate that last huge undertaking, the Army Air Forces was to establish massive air-base complexes on Guam and Tinian and Iwo Jima to accommodate the newest big heavy bomber, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.
The Roosevelt party departed Cairo in its four C-54 aircraft on December 7 and returned to Tunis, where Roosevelt informed Eisenhower that he, not Marshall, was to command Overlord. Afterward Roosevelt visited Allied troops in Malta and Sicily, then flew to Dakar, where the battleship Iowa and her screen were waiting. Returning via Bahia, Brazil, Roosevelt reached Norfolk on December 17, concluding an absence of thirty-seven days from Washington, a period he called “a haven of rest” from the wartime toil and the toll on his deteriorating health. Marshall and Arnold returned to the States via the Pacific. King flew home by way of Accra, Brazil, and Puerto Rico.
Disconsolate and debilitated by a cold that developed into pneumonia, Churchill remained in the Mediterranean area, settling into a villa at Marrakesh, Morocco (near Casablanca), “a haven where I could regain my strength.” On January 14, he left that “delectable asylum” and flew to Gibraltar, where the next day he boarded the battleship King George V. He returned to the British Isles on January 18, concluding an absence from London of well over two months.
Numerous important sea changes occurred or were set in motion during those two months. Not the least of these was the emergence of the United States as the dominant partner in the Allied alliance, the sudden ascendance of the Soviet Union, and the further decline of the power and prestige of Great Britain, which, like Churchill, was worn to the nub by four years and
four months of all-out warfare.
Although the Canadians were partners in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Royal Canadian Navy was still regarded as an immature branch of the Royal Navy and therefore its views at Cairo and Teheran were not accorded the respect and discussion they deserved. Moreover, there was in Ottawa a major naval administrative wrangle afoot, blood spilling into the scuppers.
Facing important elections in the summer and fall of 1943, the Liberal government of Prime Minister William Mackenzie King was running a bit scared. King had announced that his party’s strongest suit was its “splendid record” in the war effort. “There was only one thing that could undo it,” King cautioned, and that was “a failure at some point on the Government’s part to have anticipated the needs of the soldiers that had to be met.”
In fact, the Mackenzie government had already failed in one respect. The Chief of Naval Staff, Percy Nelles, had not been sufficiently demanding of the Admiralty to provide the Canadians with the latest and best available warship designs and weaponry. As related, on every level (radar, sonar, Huff Duff, ASW weapons, and so on) the Canadian Navy lagged far behind the British. Even British ships manned by Norwegians and Poles had better equipment. Canadian sailors well knew these facts and morale had suffered. It was possible that if these shortcomings became known to the general public, the Mackenzie King government might well be toppled.
Whether politically inspired or not, in the fall of 1943 a number of official and unofficial reports of the insufficiency of Canadian warships compared to those of the other Allies had circulated in Ottawa. Thereupon, the naval minister of the King government, Angus L. Macdonald, perhaps to protect himself, commenced bombarding Nelles with queries, asking, in effect, “What are the exact facts and why haven’t I been kept informed of this disgrace?” In return, Nelles dissembled, excused, and waffled. The exchange became so tedious and acrimonious that by December 1943, Macdonald had concluded that he could no longer trust Nelles. At the end of 1943, King and Macdonald sacked Nelles from the post he had held since 1934 (perhaps too long a tour for any man). They named his deputy, George C. (“Jetty”) Jones, who may have conspired against Nelles, to replace him. They exiled Nelles to London and he retired in January 1945, before the war was over. Jetty Jones held the post of Chief of Naval Staff until February 1946, when he suddenly died.*