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 Sovi
ets, 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.
Churchill remained implacable: he insisted that the navy must brave the passage, whatever its perils, carrying to Russia such weapons and supplies as Britain and America could spare. He was undeterred by the prospect of battle. In 1941–42 one of his foremost objectives was to exploit opportunities to engage German forces; he thus demanded the establishment of a continuous cycle of Arctic convoys. The few merchantmen which Britain sent to Russia in late 1941 arrived unscathed, carrying small quantities of tanks, aircraft and rubber. The Germans barely noticed their passage.
In 1942, however, as the British began to transport substantial shipments eastwards, Hitler’s forces intervened with mounting vigour. The experiences of the ‘PQ’ convoys, as they were designated, and of the return ‘QP’ series, became one of the war’s naval epics. Even before the Germans entered the story, Arctic weather was a terrible foe. Ships often found themselves ploughing through mountainous seas, forty feet from trough to wave crest, while laden with a topweight of hundreds of tons of ice. More than a few men were lost overboard, and a monstrous wave once stripped the armoured roof from the cruiser Sheffield’s forward turret. The merchantman J.L.M. Curry sprang its plates and foundered in a storm. On the Murmansk passage, almost every ship suffered weather damage, to which even the greatest ships were vulnerable. Midshipman Charles Friend served aboard a carrier: ‘I remember looking out from a furiously rolling and pitching Victorious to see King George V, nearly eight hundred feet long, climbing up the slope of a wave … These waves were moving mountains … the billows a thousand feet from crest to trough … even Victorious’s high freeboard did not always prevent her from taking it green, the bow driving through the crest of a wave which crashed down on her flight deck … One banged down so hard the forward aircraft lift was put out of action … The sea had bent the four-inch armour.’
British dockers, especially in Glasgow, gained a deplorable reputation for carelessness in cargo stowage which contrasted with painstaking American practice. Not only did much materiel arrive damaged at Murmansk, but ships’ very survival was threatened by loads breaking loose. On 10 December 1941, for instance, crewmen on the 5,395-ton tramp steamer Harmatis opened a hatch after noticing smoke rising, to discover a flaming lorry careering about the hold, smashing crates and igniting bales. A mate wearing the ship’s only smoke hood descended into the fiery shambles, playing a hose until he was overcome. The captain relieved him, and eventually suppressed the flames so that the ship could limp back to the Clyde.
Crews were obliged to labour relentlessly, hacking dangerous weights of ice from upperworks and guns, testing weapons on which lubricants froze. Men moved sluggishly in heavy layers of clothing which never sufficed to exclude the cold. Alec Dennis, first lieutenant of a destroyer, tried to nap on deck because he knew that if he took to his bunk he would be pitched out: ‘While one could keep one’s body reasonably warm, I found it impossible to keep my feet warm in spite of fur-lined boots.’ He spent the first hour of every four off-watch thawing his frozen feet sufficiently to be able to sleep. Crews subsisted on a diet of ‘kye’ – cocoa – and corned-beef sandwiches served at action stations, snatching sleep during brief intervals between German attacks. They hated the darkness of Arctic winter, but unbroken summer daylight was worse. The beauty of the Northern Lights mocked the terrible vulnerability of ships beneath their glow. The unlucky Harmatis experienced another drama on 17 January 1942: she was struck by two U-boat torpedoes, one of which blasted open a hatch, strewing the rigging with clothing blown loose from the cargo. As sea water flooded into her gashed hull, the captain stopped the ship to prevent her from driving under. Somehow the damage was contained. Harmatis was towed into Murmansk by tugs, amid further attacks by Luftwaffe Heinkels.
Others were less fortunate: when a torpedo detonated in the magazine of the destroyer Matabele, only two survivors were rescued. The sea was dotted with corpses in lifejackets, men who froze to death before help could reach them, for the cold killed within minutes. George Charlton, serving in a destroyer sunk by gunfire when the heavy cruiser Hipper attacked a convoy in the last days of December 1942, described the horror of attempting to climb the scrambling net of a rescuing trawler: ‘I waited for the swell to take me up to the net and then I just [pushed] my arms and legs through the mesh and I was left hanging there until two ratings came down over the side and pulled me aboard, with a third helping me up by the hair. I flopped on the deck … and then the numbness started wearing off and the cold hit me. I have never before or since felt anything like the pain that wracked my body.’
PQ11 in February 1942 was the last convoy to enjoy a relatively easy passage. Its successor encountered severe early difficulties in pack ice. Thereafter, PQ12 played blind man’s buff with the Tirpitz, which intelligence reported at sea. Ships’ masters vented their rage when a BBC news bulletin announced that ‘a valuable cargo is on its way to Russia’. As so often in the war, the demands of propaganda clashed with those of operational secrecy. In March, the Royal Navy had its best chance of the year to sink the German battleship, when Albacore torpedo-bombers intercepted and attacked it at sea; two planes were lost, but no hits scored. Churchill angrily contrasted the Fleet Air Arm’s failure with the achievement of Japanese aircraft three months earlier in sinking two British capital ships. The most plausible explanation was that the Japanese off Malaya were highly trained and experienced fliers, while most of the Albacore crews were relative novices.
A quarter of PQ13’s twenty-one merchantmen, 30,000 tons of shipping, were lost to U-boats and bomber attacks after the convoy became badly scattered in a storm. A torpedo malfunction caused the cruiser Trinidad to inflict crippling damage on itself while attempting to sink a damaged German destroyer. As for merchant ship survivors, the experience of those from the Induna, sunk by a U-boat on 30 March, was not untypical. Two lifeboats got away in the darkness, carrying many badly burned or scalded men. Hypothermia quickly killed the injured – seven died on the first night. The boats’ fresh water froze solid. A lifeboat was eventually found occupied by nine men of whom only one, a Canadian fireman, remained alive. Of Induna’s crew of sixty-four, twenty-four were rescued, among whom all but six lost limbs to frostbite.
Because of the Tirpitz threat, each convoy required the protection of almost as many warships as there were merchantmen. Destroyers provided close protection against U-boats. Merchantmen were fitted with AA guns, and the assembled ships could mount a formidable barrage against attacking Heinkels. Cruisers offered cover against German destroyers as far east as Bear Island, to the north of Norway – Edinburgh fought off such an assault on PQ14. Over the horizon lurked big ships of the Home Fleet, hoping to intervene if German capital units sortied.
Two days east of the Icelandic assembly point, a German long-range aircraft – usually a Focke-Wulfe Condor – approached the convoy and thereafter circled just out of gun range, transmitting position signals to the Luftwaffe in Norway. Sailors hated the taunting menace of ‘Snoopy Joe’, harbinger of almost continuous air and U-boat attacks for days thereafter. The slow stammer of ships’ automatic weapons, the black puffs of exploding shells filling the sky, pillars of water from near-misses and detonating torpedoes, the roar of low-flying aircraft and dull explosions of bombs bursting below decks imposed themselves on a seascape made by waves, ice and ‘Arctic smoke’ – a layer of mist that often overlay the freezing water.
Primitive air cover was introduced in April 19
42 with the first CAM ship – a merchantman fitted with a catapult Hurricane, whose pilot was expected to parachute into the sea after completing his only sortie. The CAM ships’ planes seldom achieved success – they were usually launched too late – and demanded suicidal courage from aircrew, who had at best an even chance of being snatched from the sea before they froze. Each convoy experienced its own variation of tragedy. Six homeward-bound ships of QP13 were lost after straying into a British minefield off Iceland. When PQ 14’s commodore’s ship was torpedoed, the engine-room staff were immediately blown to fragments as its cargo of ammunition exploded. Forty others survived to jump into the sea, where all but nine died from blast injuries inflicted when a trawler attempted to depth-charge the attacking U-boat. Far to westward, a destroyer was cut in half when it crossed the bows of the battleship King George V, which itself became a dockyard case as a result of damage inflicted by detonation of the stricken destroyer’s depth-charges. The cruisers Trinidad and Edinburgh were sunk after bitter engagements and noble damage-control efforts. An engineer officer of the mortally injured Trinidad refused to abandon his stokers, almost invariably doomed men when ships sank. Though concussed by bomb blast, he was last seen crawling to try to free them from beneath jammed hatches, even as the cruiser foundered. His name should be known to posterity: Lt. John Boddy.
Not all those engaged in the Arctic battles displayed such heroism. On the Allied side, while some merchant navy personnel showed remarkable spirit, others too readily fled damaged vessels, like the American crew of the Christopher Newport, who boarded a rescue ship jauntily dressed in their best suits and carrying baggage, abandoning 10,000 tons of munitions. Panic-stricken British sailors on several occasions lowered lifeboats so clumsily that their occupants were tipped into the sea. As for the Germans, convoy crews were surprised by the irresolution of some Luftwaffe pilots, who failed to press attacks through heavy barrages. The German navy, meanwhile, was hamstrung by Berlin’s insistence on making all decisions about when and whether to deploy capital ships. Again and again, disgusted Kriegsmarine officers were ordered to break off action and scuttle for the safety of Norwegian fjords.
All Hell Let Loose Page 39