Within a short time there were six merchantmen and an armed trawler of the escort lying stopped, with heavy seas breaking violently over them and rapidly pounding them to pieces. It was this sight, of waves breaking broadside over a ship, which had warned the master of the Betswood. It means only one thing — the ship is aground; and in this area that meant one other thing — the Haisborough Sands, which form the northern entrance to E-boat alley.
There were 171 men in the stranded ships. Nothing could save the ships, they were disintegrating underneath their crews minute by minute; but it might still be possible to save the men. The roar of the waves pounding on that strip of half-submerged sand, lying in a great arc round the curve of the Norfolk coast, was sufficient warning of the peril into which their boats must go.
To this pass they had come, by blindly playing follow-my-leader, not bothering to do their own navigation, as a check, just in case. One after the other, like the mythical soldiers who marched over a cliff on parade formation because no one said ‘Halt!’ they had driven in succession upon the foam-covered sands. And now, in this August gale of 1941, they must soon drown, unless rescue came.
It did come, in the shape of the two Cromer lifeboats under Coxswain Blogg, G.C., and the efforts of the surviving ships of the convoy. But for thirty-seven of them rescue was too late or utterly impossible by reason of the height and fury of the seas, and they drowned that night upon the Haisborough.
In the whole of 1941, 268 ships were sunk or wrecked, not by the enemy, but by the perils of the sea. They totalled 418,164 tons. It was inevitable, for the ships were unnaturally massed and marshalled together, passing at night down narrow treacherous channels where, at first, all navigational signs had been removed. Later, very dim lights, shaded from above, were shown by the buoys — but in a night of driving rain or howling storm, with the vessels shipping it green and spray bursting like hail continually over the bridge, it was not hard to make a fatal error. To these hazards, the perils of the enemy were only additional; though they were serious enough.
*
On 26th November, 1940, two months to the day after she had lain alongside Phoenix Wharf as it was swept by the bombs, the Tamworth steamed slowly up the Itchen and again came alongside — the first ship to be discharged there after the bombing as she had been the last before it. The grabs swung out and began to discharge her, and all was as it had been. No single blows could cripple the island — only a sustained, throttling pressure on the ports and sea routes. This the Germans now set out to apply.
They were well situated to do it, for they held the Low Countries and Northern France. Since the time of the first Elizabeth, Englishmen had gone to fight and die there; to deny that area to a potential enemy had been the first aim of British policy for centuries. It was a dagger pointed at the mouth of the Thames. Though the Germans increased the scale of their attacks against the western lifelines in the Atlantic, at first by U-boats and raiders and then increasingly with long-range bombers, the main weight of their attack throughout 1940 fell in the area of the Nore Command.
The centre of gravity of that Command was the Thames Estuary — the focal point of the east coast and Channel convoys, the great assembly and dispersal area of the ships. Its right wing was the ‘hot spot’ of Dover Straits, where England comes nearest to France; its left wing was the Essex and Norfolk coast, where England comes nearest to Holland, and that was the ‘hot spot’ of E-boat Alley. In the Dutch Naval bases of Den Helder and Ijmuiden, the Germans built up a striking force of E-boats to harry the east coast convoys at the point nearest to them; in Northern France and the Low Countries they had already Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2, with its specially-trained anti-shipping Air Group IX.
The E-boats used the mine and the torpedo; the aircraft used the mine, the torpedo, and the bomb. It was the mines which claimed the most, and most of them were laid in the area of the Nore Command. One hundred and sixteen ships (355,776 tons) were sunk by mines in this small area during 1940, whereas the loss by mine of all the other commands put together was only 85 ships. As minelayers, the aircraft and the E-boats were complementary; for the bombers laid their mines where the E-boats could not penetrate — inside the estuaries; and both together, sometimes aided by destroyers, mined the swept channels outside.
By daylight air action they increased the difficulty of reopening the mined channels and making safe the estuaries; they attacked the minesweepers so incessantly that, in August 1940, the decision was taken to discontinue day sweeping and carry it out at night, a much more difficult and costly process. In this way, all their efforts led towards one goal — and the Battle of the Blockade had begun.
August 1940 was the month of decision. In that month, the Channel convoys ran the Straits by night instead of by day; the A.A. Guard, the Mobile Balloon Barrage Flotilla, the ‘Maritime A.A.’ were formed; the Hunt-class destroyers, with their heavy A.A. armament took over escort duty in the Channel; the minesweepers turned to work by night instead of by day; the Admiralty codes and ciphers, broken by the Germans, were changed; and the number of ships in the Channel convoys was reduced. So that, while the Battle of Britain was only just beginning and invasion was a possibility, the Admiralty had laid already the framework on which they would fight the Battle of the Blockade.
And in August the Germans struck twice with new weapons. On the 23rd Naval aircraft of the IX Air Group attacked with torpedoes a convoy in the Moray Firth, sinking two ships and damaging a third. It was an impressive debut for the German airborne torpedo, and the threat seemed serious; but, as they possessed only about two dozen of these specialised aircraft, no large or sustained attacks were possible. On the 25th the Admiralty issued a warning that there had been recently a number of mysterious explosions near ships, and that the cause was probably a new type of mine, working on the acoustic principle and tired by the sound waves caused by the movement of ships through the water.
In September, one of these mines was dropped on land, by error, and the theory was confirmed. In that month also, the E-boats moved to their Dutch bases and began to strike at the east coast convoys off Sheringham with a force which varied between ten and fifteen boats; and German destroyers ventured once across to the west coast to lay a big minefield off Falmouth. It contained new booby-traps, known as explosive sweep-cutters, which make sweeping a much more difficult business. No E-boat was sunk until October, when Nore Command destroyers nailed one of these elusive mosquitoes. But the E-boats sank 23 ships (47,986 tons) during the year. Then, the Germans introduced a delay-action device into the magnetic mine, so that it would lie on the bottom without reacting at all to the sweepers passing it; the area would be declared free of mines — and days later would come the shock.
Captain Sclanders of the Tamworth experienced this, on his way into the Thames, but, like Potts of the Betswood, he seemed unsinkable. The Tamworth was queuing to get through the ‘Gate’, with one small 400-ton ship ahead of her and a big 14,000 tonner abeam. The pilot of the big fellow hailed him to go first, which he did. As he went through, it followed. There was a flash and a spurt of water, then the roar of the exploding mine, and the 14,000 tonner started to settle down. There was another roar ahead, and as Captain Sclanders looked round, he saw the last of the small ship, as she disappeared under the water. Some of her crew had just had time to jump for it, and they were swimming around in the wreckage; but before he could lower a boat, a motor launch came out to them.
Scenes like these were repeated many times in the Thames Estuary. On one night — 12th/13th December, 1940 — at least fifty magnetic mines were laid between Southend and the Isle of Sheppey; they were fitted with a 4½-day delayed action fuse, and became ‘live’ simultaneously. That day, seven ships were sunk. And from then on, for more than two weeks, ships were stumbling over others and sending them up. By laying magnetic mines, delayed-action magnetic mines, and acoustic mines all in the same area, the Germans could and did produce a ‘marmalade’ of unpleasantness difficult to swe
ep and nerve-wracking to sail over. Some masters hardly dared go astern, even in emergency, for fear the sound would put up an acoustic mine under them.
All this, and a good deal more elsewhere, was produced by a small force of about eighty night-bombers whose losses were negligible. It was a very paying proposition indeed, as the R.A.F. discovered, too, but boring for the crews who rarely or never saw the certain results of their labour, though they saw it in general — the steady growth of that ‘paling fence’ of masts and funnels sticking out of estuaries and beside the swept channels, to which the bombers and the E-boats also contributed.
To begin with, the only defence against these attacks was the odd patrol boat, armed only with machine-guns. The minelayers had to fly low, and some did fall victim in this way. Early in 1941, construction work began in the Thames on a vast project to raise great sea towers on stilts across the estuary and off Harwich. These were the Maunsell Forts, referred to in Chapter 4.
Each Fort was actually a complex of towers, holding a useful selection of heavy and medium-range A.A. guns, together with radar and searchlights. The artillery included four 3.7-inch guns and two 40-mm Bofors. Three of the Thames Estuary forts were Army-manned — the romantically named Great Nore Tower, Red Sand Tower and Shivering Sand Tower; two were Navy-manned — Tongue Sand Tower and Knock John Tower; and, in addition, the Navy also had two others off Harwich — Roughs Fort and Sunk Head Fort. But the first of these was not completed until February 1942 — the process of ‘springing to arms’ being necessarily a lengthy one.
By the time the first of the Maunsell Forts was in operation, there were also twelve ‘Eagle Ships’ cruising in the estuary. These were flak-ships, but pre-war holiday-makers in Southend would have had little difficulty in recognising them — they were mostly paddle-steamers which had formerly taken them for excursions. Owing to their exceptionally broad beam, they made excellent anti-aircraft gun platforms.
To this mass of fixed and floating artillery were added an extensive balloon barrage, radar-fitted escort vessels, and greatly improved fighter protection; more important, the work of all these was dove-tailed to make the life too difficult and dangerous for the minelayers. But, by the time they did so, the bulk of the Luftwaffe had been for over a year in Russia, leading the advance of the German armies eastward on a thousand mile front, nearly a thousand miles on to Moscow and the Caucasus. The Battle of the Blockade would undoubtedly have been different if Hitler had not made his decision to turn east, the Naval history hints that it might have been fatal; but there can be no certainty of this. The bulk of the German war effort was necessarily devoted to the ground forces and their support; and all of these were useless in face of the Channel. In fact, Hitler had come up against the basic dilemma which confronts the leading land power in Europe. In order to control Europe, the economy must be geared to producing great armies; when these have conquered, they are useless — what is now needed is a great navy. No European power has ever been strong enough to conquer its land neighbours and at the same time maintain a great and superior navy. A part only of the mass of men and material which Hitler sent driving across the eastern plains had any practical application at all to the problems of blockading Britain. They were not a great subtraction from that battle, because the specialised units which alone could strike at our shipping had been left in the west in order to do so. It took two years to defeat them, finally, with of course only a proportion of our war effort — for we were thinking in terms of going back to the continent and of erasing the German cities.
By March 1941, the authorities had woken up to the fact that the blockade was in fact a battle — or, more strictly speaking, a campaign made up of a continuous series of raids — and that it was, for the most part, being fought by civilians on a week-to-week basis. Hardly ever can a major battle have been fought so casually.
Not only had the authorities waging it no control over their forces, but they did not know how many men they had, or what their casualties were, or where reinforcements were to come from; indeed, no arrangements for reinforcements had been made. Every Army Commander, as a matter of course, estimates his casualties in advance and gathers a substantial number of replacements in Reinforcement Holding Units behind the front. Even this can go wrong, if he underestimates battle casualties — as it did in Normandy where, though the assault losses were well below the estimates, they thereafter greatly exceeded them and a reinforcement crisis arose which resulted in the breaking up of divisions.
Consequently, the authorities waging this battle were soon out of their depth from causes not only beyond their control, but beyond their knowledge. They simply did not know what was happening. It was a time to re-fly the famous Mediterranean Fleet signal at the time of the Abyssinian crisis: ‘Pro bono publico: no bloody panico.’ But in February 1941, a meeting of the National Union of Seamen, presided over by the Minister of Shipping, came to the conclusion that ‘The main cause (of the shortage) appeared to be a drift of deck and engine-room ratings to shore occupations’.[8]
In short, with no casualty or sickness returns to go on, they had jumped to the conclusion that the men were funking it. Indeed, some of the evidence pointed that way. After a particularly rough trip, with perhaps half the convoy destroyed, the masters of the surviving ships might have to look around for a new crew. For any of the officers to duck out, even for one trip, was a matter for contemptuous comment among his former friends; but we have seen how the crews of bombed ships came ashore in a highly nervous state, just as did the survivors from Dunkirk. Most were temporarily ‘bomb happy’, a few permanently. For the moment, some of them thought they had had enough, and indeed they had. All this is a commonplace of land operations and to meet it, where possible, the three Brigades of a Division are rotated — ‘two up and one behind’ — and the complete Division is taken out of the line at intervals. Very bad individual cases are evacuated, temporarily, marked down accurately as suffering from ‘Battle Exhaustion’. They are in fact, exhausted — nervously — but will recover if rested.[9]
No such arrangements were made for merchant seamen; instead they made their own, and it was this which caused the uproar and panic. A man may volunteer for one of the Services, but once he had made that decision, he has no further choice; there are Service police and Service prisons and, in the last resort, a Service firing squad if he should waver thereafter. But a merchant seaman was a civilian, without any compulsion except pride and stubborness: he made a new choice every time he sailed; he volunteered weekly, sometimes twice weekly, to go out to the mines and the bombers and the E-boats, to the guns, and the perils of the sea itself.
It was no wonder that men escaped to shore from a sunk or damaged ship took a week or two off from it. There were many sirens on that shore. The man had no protection against his wife, if he had one. Some women don’t mind their husbands going off to war; most of them do, particularly if there are children who need a father to look after them. If he was often at home — and, in a coasting job, he would be — he was likely to be faced with a continual urging to give it all up, to think of her and the children. A poor man, with no resources, was particularly vulnerable, as he dreaded leaving his family to the imagined mercy of a faceless clerk in a Government office controlled by a miserly Treasury. And many men would, besides, rather face a complete U-boat pack than continual argument and ill-feeling at home. But many women sent their men away to war, going down to watch the ship sail and wave goodbye — and hid what they felt. They, too, were in the battle and helped to win it.
In the spring of 1941, the authorities clapped down with the Essential Work Order, which gave the Ministry of Labour power to keep merchant seamen at sea, recall others who had taken up shore occupations, and employ at sea men dismissed by the shipowners. And it did not solve their problem. There was still a shortage of men.
They had, in fact, read the situation wrongly; having no facts and figures to go on, they had jumped to obvious — and insulting — conclusions. They h
ad forgotten the dead. In 1940 alone, not including the first three dangerous months of 1941, there were 6,000 merchant seamen dead at sea, besides thousands of others crippled and injured. Probably more than a quarter of the original merchant navy failed to survive the war, or survived it broken in body or mind. The exact figures will never be known, for no returns were made.
Casualties among particular commands of a Service could be higher than this: Bomber Command of the R.A.F., the German U-boat service, and the infantry everywhere, but no Service as a whole would ever be called upon to take losses such as these. But, since they were not a Service, the tendency was to drive them too hard; and, without rest, men all the more quickly reach ‘Journey’s End’.
The process has never been better depicted than in that play, though the doctors have ably analysed the underlying reasons. The Germans, too, were reaching that point.
Aircraft could be seen nipping in and out of the clouds, over the east coast convoys, obviously nervous and unwilling to press home an attack; they were looking for the smaller ships, which would be lightly armed, or not armed at all. It was a very far cry from the tumultuous stuka attacks pressed to masthead height, of only a year or two ago. Once, a bomber fled from the light on a gun shield. It was sunset, and as the gun swung round, the shield reflected the rays with a brilliant flash of light towards the aircraft, which turned away — thinking it was being fired at! The D.E.M.S. officer who saw this, was very relieved to find that Germans were human after all. But the scene on the decks of the ship were no better.
Guns which required six men to handle them were undermanned, because some of the crew members nominated for the job were below. The two or three men at the gun had to leap around like mad, each one doing several jobs, and in consequence the rate of fire was slow. Sometimes, as the alarm bells kept ringing and the guns fired from the deck above, they would think better of it; and, deciding that they’d better give the lads a hand, came slowly on deck to the gun. One man, who was late in this fashion, got his head above the gun platform just as the gun fired, the muzzle just over his skull. He fell down the ladder, shocked and deafened.
The Coal-Scuttle Brigade Page 9