There had been almost no daylight activity on 16 September and not a great amount the day after. Squally showers, localized thunder and a few bright intervals were not conducive to heavy air attacks, especially when the wounds were still being licked from the previous effort.
Hitler continued to prevaricate over Operation SEALION. Around him, his commanders were still trying to find a way of keeping their options open. Raeder now suggested 8 October as a potential invasion date, to allow the Luftwaffe a bit longer. Jodl, on the other hand, noted that by keeping all the troops and transports along the Channel coast, they would continue to draw the RAF’s bombers, which would expose them to fighter attacks under conditions more favourable to the Luftwaffe. Furthermore, with the RAF bombers so occupied, their raids over Germany would diminish, which would help improve German civilian morale. It is hard to think of a more spurious reason for keeping an invasion force at readiness.
Yet with 15 September so obviously failing to finish off the RAF, and with the 16th a day of no action, Hitler could not possibly give the go-ahead, because he could not guarantee that the right conditions would be in place in the ten days needed between giving SEALION the green light and it being launched. It was just too big a risk, so on the 17th he postponed the operation again. That he refused to cancel the operation, however, showed not his unwillingness to undertake the invasion, but rather his reluctance to abandon the project. Defeating Britain was still of tantamount importance. A successful invasion still offered him his best hope of achieving that, as he well knew.
*
However, there was some cause for cheer. The Luftwaffe’s efforts might be proving disappointing, but the same could not be said for Dönitz’s U-boat arm. There were now fourteen U-boats in the Atlantic, most in the Western Approaches to the coast of Ireland, waiting to pounce on any incoming convoys. Having had another successful patrol with a further six ships to her name, U-47, with just one torpedo left, was now loitering at a weather-reporting station some way to the west.
At 11.52 a.m. on 20 September, Rolf Hilse, on board U-48, received a coded message from Günther Prien in U-47. He had spotted a large eastbound convoy heading to Britain, and since U-48 had the latest most advanced radio equipment, he asked her to report this news to Dönitz at his command post in Lorient. ‘We reported to Lorient,’ says Rolf, ‘and the message we got back was, “Proceed to beacon.”’ This meant U-47’s beacon – U-48 was to converge with Günther’s boat and operate together. Then, at 5.15 p.m., they received another signal, directing four more U-boats towards U-47. ‘Received wireless message,’ noted Rolf. ‘U-48, 65, 43, 99, 100 assume attack formation.’
Dönitz was ordering them to form a wolfpack. This tactic was not new, but problems of communicating out at sea had made them difficult to co-ordinate successfully. However, radio technology had greatly improved in recent months, and by the following morning all six submarines were converging on U-47 ready to hunt together as instructed.
The mood aboard U-48 was already buoyant. The new skipper had more than proved he was up to the task, sinking four merchant ships on 15 September, and then, just after midnight on the 18th, sank two more, including the largest ship in the convoy, an 11,000-ton liner. The crew had been delighted, yet at the time they had no idea that the liner, the City of Benares, had been carrying some ninety British child evacuees to Canada, all members of an initiative set up by the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB). Two hundred and forty-eight of the 406 passengers drowned, including seventy-seven of the evacuees. The men on U-48 were not to know – it had not been marked as a Red Cross vessel, and neither had there been any indication that there had been children and civilians on board. As far as they were concerned, they had simply aimed for the largest ship in the convoy. What had really surprised them was the lack of any escort – the convoy was completely defenceless. ‘We were pleased,’ says Rolf. ‘11,800 tons – that’s an enormous ship.’ They had then sunk a further ship just after 5 p.m. the following day, making a total of seven ships sunk since leaving Lorient. It was not a bad bag for Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt’s first patrol in charge.
At 3.16 a.m. on the morning of 21 September, U-48 had the convoy HX72 in sight. Just over two hours later, Rolf picked up an SOS from a ship called Elmbank, a large freighter, carrying timber and sheet metal, which had been hit by U-99. Peering through the periscope, Bleichrodt had seen flashes and the sound of dull explosions. Half an hour later, they were also in position to fire. Their first torpedo missed, fired at too far a range, but the second, fired twenty minutes later, hit, with huge detonation columns erupting into the air. Almost immediately, Rolf picked up another SOS signal – they had hit the Blairangus. Fires now broke out on the ship as her cargo began to explode. Lifeboats were hurriedly launched but the skies were grey with squally showers and after a while, the stricken ship disappeared from view. U-48 now turned her attention to a tanker, although, again, the torpedo missed. Another immediate shot was not possible because they discovered one of the torpedo fins had been dented. Turning around they now took over from U-47 as the convoy shadow, radioing position reports to the other U-boats.
All day, U-48 kept up with the convoy, waiting for darkness, as were the others in the wolfpack. Several were low on torpedoes, U-47 and U-48 included, but at twenty minutes before midnight Bleichrodt attacked with his last tube, hitting Broompark, which soon began to lilt.
That night the carnage really began as HX72 struggled on, the wolf-pack snapping at its heels. U-99 sank two, including a 9,200-ton tanker. U-47 then surfaced and with U-99 finished off the Elmbank, which had limped on all day, using their guns. In an extraordinary feat of daring, U-100 then manoeuvred into the heart of the convoy and sank three more. All through the next day, the wolfpack continued to keep up with the convoy, picking off one ship after another, U-100 sinking a further four. By the time both U-47 and U-48 turned for home, eleven ships had been sunk and a further two badly damaged. That was more than a quarter of the entire convoy.
A further 295,335 tons of Allied shipping were sunk by U-boats that month, and 56,328 tons by long-range Focke-Wulf Condors. The wolfpack mauling of HX72 proved indisputably the value of concentration of force; this principle that held true for the army and Luftwaffe applied equally to the U-boat arm, just as Dönitz had long been arguing.
‘We lost another large number of ships off the Bloody Foreland last night as well as the night before,’ noted Jock Colville on Sunday the 2nd. ‘These losses are assuming serious proportions and the PM is very displeased with the Admiralty.’ So too was Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, the C-in-C Home Fleet. Ever since Dunkirk he had repeatedly argued that placing unnecessarily large numbers of his ships in the south of the country was both unnecessary and pointless. He also strongly believed that using the Fleet to launch offensive blows against the enemy-held coast would force the Germans to disperse their forces and unsettle enemy invasion plans. He was almost certainly right.
What seemed to concern him even more, however, was that by insisting so many ships remain in the south-east on anti-invasion duty, the Admiralty was preventing him from protecting the convoys. It was no wonder the U-boats were having such a field day. On 28 September, he wrote again to the Admiralty pleading with them to let him be freed to carry out what he felt was the proper function of the Fleet – acting offensively against the enemy and defending Britain’s trade. His appeal fell on deaf ears. The First Sea Lord and the other Command chiefs viewed invasion prospects very differently, especially Admiral Drax, who commanded the Nore Command, which would most likely face any invasion. As far as they were concerned, there could be no question of giving up the vigil. Forbes argued again that while the RAF was still holding off the Luftwaffe any invasion was out of the question no matter what intelligence was offered to the contrary. He had hit a brick wall, however. For those in the south, living underneath the great sky battles and being fed daily reports of the German invasion build-up, it was proving impossible to stand back and
look at the situation with anything like a calm and logical approach.
So the convoys continued to cross the Atlantic virtually unescorted. The slaughter by the U-boats would continue.
In the absence of any Royal Navy offensive operations, it was left to Bomber Command to frustrate German invasion plans in what the bomber boys had christened the ‘Battle of the Barges’. By 18 September, the Channel ports were packed with some one thousand barges, with a further six hundred waiting further up the River Sheldt. Day and night the bombers were over. Andrew Jackson and his crew had attacked Channel ports on four different nights up to 20 September. They had to fly through increasingly heavy flak in order to drop their bombs at low level, but so far had come through unscathed. On 13 September, they had made a particularly successful trip to attack the barges massed at Antwerp. The following day, Konteradmiral Fricke’s planning team reported that the RAF’s raid had resulted in six naval vessels being damaged, three tugs and fifteen barges sunk, and three steamers sunk or put out of action. The report added that bomber and torpedo attacks on barges, trains, shipping and harbours had already caused severe delays to their plans, as had the amount of mines sown along the coastal route from the north German ports and the effects of long-range British naval shells being fired into ‘excessively crowded harbours and roadsteads’.
German naval planners had worked out that, in all, 1,133 barges were needed for the first crossing. There were 1,491 by 21 September, but these were not all in the right ports. By this time, 214 had already been lost or damaged – which was not in itself disastrous, but the uneven distribution combined with losses meant, for example, that there was a 30 per cent deficit in Boulogne. And that was a problem, because there was no way the invasion could start with such a large shortfall at one of the key invasion ports.
Bomber Command was also continuing to bomb Germany. Larry Donnelly had made a number of trips to hit the invasion barges, but on the night of 24/25 September he and his Whitley crew were sent to bomb Berlin. It was the second night in a row after nearly a fortnight’s break, and the target for Larry’s crew was once again Tempelhof. Over the city, they found broken cloud but were unable to spot the aerodrome. They did, however, see the main railway station clearly enough so dropped their bombs on that instead. With flak coming up thick and fast, they climbed into the cloud and finally got home at around 5.20 a.m. They had been airborne ten hours and forty minutes.
Still in Berlin, William Shirer noticed that most Berliners were quite shocked by the renewed attacks. Goebbels once again whipped the press into a new frenzy. NEW NIGHT ACT OF THE PIRATES announced the Nachtausgabe. The Börsen Zeitung reported that ‘last night Churchill continued the series of his criminal blows against the German civilian population. Frankly, Churchill belongs to that category of criminals who in their stupid brutality are unteachable.’
The German press response was quite different to that of the British; rather than shouting defiance, it merely raged against British criminality. ‘It does indicate,’ noted William, ‘that the Germans can’t take night bombing as the British are taking it.’ In this he was quite wrong, but certainly the night attacks were adding to the darkening mood of many Germans. The euphoria of midsummer had worn off. People wanted to know why the invasion had not happened, and it was beginning to dawn on them that the war might not be over soon after all. Else Wendel felt this mood keenly at her sister’s engagement party. ‘We can’t get away from the war, you know,’ the mother of the groom-to-be announced. ‘It’s no use pretending. It’s here right in the midst of our happiness.’
In Berlin, William Shirer caught up with an old friend of his who was a bomber pilot in the Luftwaffe and had been flying over London. Somehow, his friend had managed to get some leave, and presented a far more realistic picture of what was happening at the front than that offered by the Nazi media. He confirmed that the night bomber crews were certainly very tired and expected to fly four nights a week. He also told William that the British bombers were pounding the French and Belgian coasts every night. ‘And often they swoop down,’ relayed William, ‘and machine-gun the German bomber bases just as the German planes are taking off.’ How often this was happening and how much it was mere rumour is not clear; yet it showed just how much the Bomber Command attacks were contributing to the battle. ‘The British are slowly getting on our nerves at night,’ Ulrich Steinhilper wrote to his mother. ‘Because of their persistent activity our AA guns are in virtually continuous use and so we can hardly close our eyes. But there is nothing else we can do about that other than curse.’ Doubts were also beginning to creep in about the invasion. He and his fellow pilots were aware that a good stretch of fine weather was needed but that the chances of getting this window were diminishing as autumn approached. ‘I think we all felt,’ noted Ulrich, ‘that if the army didn’t get their fingers out before long, much of what we had done and suffered might go to waste.’
Invasion anxiety was still very much at the front of the minds of Britain’s leaders. Photographs clearly showed massed barges at Antwerp and the various Channel ports. Even the President of the United States was passing on invasion rumours. On Sunday, 22 September, he sent a message to Churchill warning him that he had heard from a ‘most reliable source’ in Berlin that the invasion was to begin at 3 p.m. that afternoon. Churchill, although rather sceptical, rang a number of people about it, including Lord Gort, who told the Prime Minister he thought it very unlikely. ‘12.50 p.m.: The prospects do not look good for invasion,’ Jock Colville hastily scribbled in his diary that same Sunday. ‘Pouring rain and a gale brewing up.’ Not for the first time that summer, the weather seemed to be very much favouring the defenders.
Siegfried Bethke would have agreed. ‘Days too quiet, always waiting,’ he jotted on 18 September, ‘weather always too unfavourable.’ Three days later he wrote, ‘Yesterday no mission because of weather. Bad again today.’ On the 23rd the weather had forced him to land at Le Havre after a brief local flight. Finally, on the 24th, he flew two missions, on the first encountering nothing and the second a ‘light encounter’ with Spitfires.
But whenever it was dry, there was still plenty of aerial activity. On 18 September, three large raids had come over from the Pas de Calais. That day, Tony Bartley was shot down. He was firing at a Dornier, pressing down on the gun button rather longer than he should have in an effort to shoot the bomber down, and forgot the cardinal rule about watching his back. A cannon shell suddenly exploded behind his armour plating, a bullet tore through his leather helmet, grazing his head and smashing into the gunsight, and several more punched into his oil and glycol tanks, and then an Me 109 flashed past him.
With fumes quickly filling his cockpit, he knew that his plane was doomed and prepared to bail out. But as was doing so he saw his attacker lining up again and, realizing his adversary could well shoot him as he tumbled free, quickly sat back down in the seat and turned towards him. The ruse worked, and having fired a burst for good measure, he saw the Messerschmitt turn away. By this time, however, he was too low to jump so picked out a field and hoped for the best.
He was still a hundred feet off the ground when the engine seized. Blinded by oil, Tony hit the ground moments later, was catapulted out and landed in a haystack completely unhurt, apart from the graze to his head. He had had a remarkably close shave, actually and metaphorically. Releasing the buckle of his parachute he discovered he had been even luckier. As his parachute fell to the ground, the pack burst open, shredded silk billowing across the ground. ‘If this fellow hadn’t come at me again,’ he says, ‘I would have jumped and I would have killed myself because one of his shells had ripped my parachute to pieces.’ Soon surrounded by several locals, he was escorted to the pub, plied with beer and then whisky and finally driven back to Biggin Hill, where he learned that Roy Mottram had been killed and Bob Holland wounded.
Five days later, a massive free hunt by some 200 Luftwaffe fighters had swept over. No fewer than twenty-four squadrons were scr
ambled to meet them. Certainly, for those in Fighter Command waiting to be scrambled, these were still long, tense days interspersed with frenetic action. Even on a quiet day, a pilot might end up fighting one of the toughest engagements of his life. Aircraft were still being shot down, pilots were still losing their lives.
Some were still able to enjoy euphoric moments of victory, however. On 26 September, Allan Wright was leading Green Section from his flight and managed to intercept a formation of Dorniers in perfect fashion. ‘Most glorious fun,’ he noted. He shot down one of the bombers, which dived into the ground and exploded. The next day he shot down a further Dornier and damaged a Junkers 88. ‘Two squadrons met 20 Ju88s with many 109s,’ he wrote in tiny neat writing in his logbook. ‘Latter very shy.’ In fact, 27 September marked the biggest day’s fighting for nearly a fortnight. In the morning, bomb-carrying Zerstörers had attacked London, and were followed close after by formations of Dorniers and Ju 88s. These latter raids were largely split up by British fighters.
The Battle of Britain Page 71