Once refuelling bases in Iceland had been set up, in the spring of 1941, Royal Navy escorts could take the convoys halfway across, to be handed over to the United States Navy, even before that country formally entered the war. The German response was the wolf pack, whereby submarines were spread across the likely shipping routes, and, when a convoy was sighted, submarines, which could move on the surface faster than the merchantmen, would mass to attack it. In early 1941 the British broke the German naval cipher sent on the famous Enigma machine, but then the Germans changed their cipher, added an extra wheel to Enigma and broke the British code that was used by all the Allies to marshal and control convoys. With over 100 U-boats now available, the German navy was able to attack American coastal shipping until the convoy system was introduced there too. November 1942 was a dreadful month for British shipping, the worst of the war, when over 700,000 tons were sunk by U-boats and German aircraft. This may have been less than the rate of 750,000 tons a month that, if sustained for a year, Admiral Dönitz claimed would force Britain to make peace, but British shipbuilders were unable to keep pace with the losses and the country became even more dependent upon the output of American yards (something which was to have a marked impact on Britain’s economic woes after the war). The prospects for 1943 looked bleak.
Like the Royal Navy, the United States Navy suffered from a lack of resources and a reluctance to spend between the wars. America had only two oceans to worry about, whereas the British had three, and the American government managed to avoid a naval arms race (which she could have neither afforded nor persuaded Congress to finance) by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. There were many Americans who had been convinced by Colonel ‘Billy’ Mitchell’s experiments with attacking ships from the air* that the days of large warships were numbered and that the available money would be better spent on aircraft and air defence. In the event, very little money was spent on either, and, when war broke out in 1939, the US Navy was smaller than the Royal Navy, even if it was none the less a formidable force. The US Navy knew what it might have to do in the Pacific – defend the Philippines – but was unsure of whether it might have any involvement in the Atlantic, and, although America maintained an Atlantic Fleet, her naval officers were very much looking west towards Japan rather than east towards Europe. There were, however, problems: a number of American battleships were either obsolescent or obsolete; there were insufficient oil tankers to keep a fleet at sea for long; transport and ammunition ships were woefully inadequate; most ships’ crews were under-strength; there were few bases west of Pearl Harbor and those that did exist were very basic; and a policy of moving key officers after sometimes only one year in post meant that improvements or new developments were often not carried through. With war raging in Europe, Congress at last agreed to Roosevelt’s request for funding for a naval expansion programme, but as Admiral Stark said, ‘Dollars do not buy yesterday’, and it would be some time before American shipyards could be geared up to produce the ships that were needed. None the less, by the time that Japan attacked the United States without warning in December 1941, Roosevelt had already proclaimed that the United States should be ‘the Arsenal of Democracy’ and that Britain should be given ‘all aid short of war’, American industry had cranked itself up far more quickly than anyone had predicted, and American ships were already escorting UK-bound convoys out into the Atlantic.
Gloomy though the prospects for 1943 in the Atlantic looked, that year was in fact the tipping point of the Battle of the Atlantic. The British cracked the new German cipher and changed their own; then the Germans cracked the new British code and for a time both sides could read each other’s signals. Then the British changed their code again and, after a bad time in early 1943 when it looked as if the U-boats might indeed win, technology and tactics began to alter the balance. Improved underwater detection; a radar that could pick up submarines on the surface; more powerful depth charges and also the means to hurl these ahead of a ship attacking a U-boat rather than drop them behind it; the deployment of very long-range aircraft; direction-finding equipment that could locate submarines by the radio transmissions they made; the building of small escort carriers that could accompany a convoy and use their aircraft to detect and attack submarines: all increased the attrition rate of U-boats and in July 1943 for the first time the total Allied tonnage built since the outbreak of war exceeded that sunk.
The Germans had an average operational strength of forty-nine submarines in 1939 – that is, those available for operations, excluding those undergoing repairs or trials or being used for training – and the Royal Navy sank nine. In 1940 there was an operational strength of thirty-four and twenty-three were sunk. Then new builds began to overtake losses and in 1941 there was an operational strength of fifty, and thirty-five were sunk, rising to 137 in 1942, when eighty-eight were sunk. In 1943 new builds failed to keep up with losses and with an average of 208 operational boats there were 247 losses, ninety-six of them in the first five months and twenty-four in May alone.79 Now, with more powerful escorts and roaming carrier groups, instead of the convoys being a target for the wolf pack, the wolf packs became a target for the convoys and their escorts.
On 23 May 1943 Admiral Dönitz ordered a withdrawal of his U-boats from the North Atlantic. It was supposed to be a temporary expedient but, although they continued to sink Allied shipping, and although to the end of the war the Germans continued to develop faster and more powerful submarines, the U-boats never again dominated the ocean, and they never again looked like bringing Britain to her knees. The Battle of the Atlantic was won by the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and the RAF with the help of the US Navy. The interception of German naval codes certainly helped, but far more important was the closing of the air and sea gaps in mid-Atlantic.
Further north, the Allies ran perilous Arctic convoys to Russia. The British had tried to warn Stalin in 1941 that he was likely to be Germany’s next victim, warnings that were largely ignored as being British disinformation designed to drive a wedge between the signatories of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. When Barbarossa was launched, the immediate British reaction was to pledge all possible help to the USSR. That the Russians had provided Germany with essential war supplies when Britain stood in peril; that Radio Moscow had railed continuously about the linked evils of British imperialism and Wall Street capitalism; that the Communist Party of Great Britain had done its best to interfere with war work in factories: all was forgotten – it was in the British interest to do everything that could be done to keep the USSR in the war, even if it meant depriving their own forces. The first delivery, of mines for the Russian navy, was made at the end of July 1941 as part of a then largely inconclusive but later totally successful attempt to interrupt German coastal shipping between northern Norwegian and Finnish ports. Thereafter, convoys escorted by the Royal Navy set off about every three weeks relatively unscathed until the end of the year. Once the Germans realized that they were not going to defeat Russia in 1941, however, they turned their attention to the convoys, which had to make the journey round the north of Norway to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel by routes that could only be varied marginally. Never more than 300 miles from German air and submarine bases, in summer they sailed in perpetual daylight while the cover of perpetual darkness in winter was offset by the southern advance of the ice that restricted their routes even more.
Conditions on the Russian convoys were extreme: weapons and equipment that were never designed to operate in such low temperatures had to be modified; special winter clothing had to be issued to the crews, who knew that they could survive only a few minutes’ immersion in the sea even in summer. Convoys were liable to attack from aircraft, U-boats and surface raiders. Altogether, from 1941 until 1945 there were thirty-four outward convoys, given a number with a prefix PQ until December 1942, when the prefix was changed to JW (return convoys were prefixed QP and then RA), involving 1,400 merchant ships, of which eighty-five were lost. Royal Navy losses were
two cruisers, six destroyers and eight other escorts (corvettes, minesweepers and an oiler). Most convoys got through without too much damage, but the statistics are skewed by some severe losses, such as that of PQ 17, which left Reykjavik, Iceland, on 27 June 1942 with thirty-six merchant ships, of which two returned to port with engine trouble. Escorting the convoy were six destroyers and four corvettes. British naval intelligence thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) that the Germans were concentrating their heavy ships, including two battleships and a heavy cruiser, to attack the convoy, and, after three merchantmen had been sunk by German aircraft on 4 July, the Admiralty ordered the escort to withdraw and the convoy to scatter. Ten merchantmen were subsequently sunk by the Luftwaffe and ten by U-boats. The surviving eleven ships limped into Archangel over the next few weeks. Supplies intended for Russia that went to the bottom included 3,850 wheeled vehicles, 430 tanks and 210 aircraft.80 On the day after PQ 17 had been ordered to scatter, a returning convoy, QP 13, of thirty-five merchant ships ran into a British minefield in the Denmark Strait and an escort minesweeper and five merchantmen were sunk. Controversy still rages over the fate of PQ 17 and no more convoys were run until that September.*
The Royal and Merchant Navies got little thanks for their freezing, unpleasant and often dangerous efforts to deliver aid to Russia (most American aid came through Persia or via the Pacific). In between his constant demands for a second front, Stalin continually grumbled that not enough was being supplied, or that it was the wrong sort or that the quality was poor. Facilities at the Russian ports were primitive and the Russians claimed that they could not provide fuel, so convoys had to take fuel for the return journey with them. Accommodation for the British handling teams at the ports was of the most basic nature, contact with Russian civilians was discouraged and liaisons with local girls were dealt with by the simple expedient of arresting the girls and locking them up. The Russians thought little of Allied tanks (12,700 supplied) – the British ones were too lightly armed and their tracks too narrow, whereas the American ones ran on petrol (the Russians called the US M3 the ‘coffin for seven brothers’ because of its tendency to explode and incinerate the crew when hit) – but they did like British tank engines, which were much more reliable than their own, so British tanks were used for training rather than in front-line units. The production line for the Valentine, long superseded in British service, was kept open until the end of the war solely for the Russians. What the Russians really did like, however, were Western wheeled vehicles, of which 51,500 jeeps and 370,000 trucks of various types were delivered. British radar, too, was an indispensable aid that allowed the Red Air Force to control its own operations right across the Front and to detect incoming Luftwaffe raids. Tempting though it must have been for the British and the Americans to leave the Russians to stew in their own juice, the USSR had to be kept in the war and there is no doubt that Allied aid and Lend-Lease enabled them to do so, reluctant though they still are to acknowledge the contribution of the factories of Detroit and the shipyards of the Clyde to victory in the Great Patriotic War.
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The Mediterranean had long been considered a British lake, and, as long as Italy, an ally in the first war, was considered friendly, that continued to apply. Once Italy joined the Axis, however, the balance began to shift, and, once she joined the war and France was defeated, German submarines and surface vessels, if they could get into the Mediterranean (which meant running the gauntlet of the British Strait of Gibraltar), posed a serious threat to British dominance. In general, the Italian surface fleet was manageable, having been fatally weakened on 11 November 1940 when twenty-one Swordfish, venerable torpedo bombers each flown by a crew in open cockpits with a torpedo slung beneath, took off from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious and attacked the Italian naval base of Taranto, sinking two battleships and damaging others, with all but two of the aircraft returning safely. It was the first major attack on a fleet in harbour by aircraft alone, and was studied with great interest in Tokyo. The Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, when in one night the Royal Navy sank three heavy cruisers and two destroyers, and that of Cape Bon in December 1941,whentwo light cruisers went down, persuaded the Italian navy to avoid fleet actions, but they were more successful with small boats and small numbers. Italian soldiers, sailors and airmen all seemed to be better at doing things individually or in small groups rather than in large, formed bodies. In the first war the Italian navy had achieved considerable success with motor torpedo boats: on 10 June 1918 one of its MTBs (cost: a few hundred pounds) had sunk the 20,000-ton Austro-Hungarian battleship SMS Szent Istvan (cost: millions of pounds). In this war, Italian midget submarines had penetrated Gibraltar and in an escapade of great daring human torpedoes got into Alexandria harbour in December 1941 and attached explosive charges to the hulls of the British battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, sinking them both.As it happened, the harbour was shallow and, with the keels resting on the bottom, the superstructures were still above water, and the British managed to level both ships and pretend to enemy air reconnaissance that they were undamaged, but it was a time of considerable embarrassment, particularly as the other battleship in the Mediterranean, HMS Barham, had been lost only a few weeks before.
Indeed, the real threat in the Mediterranean was not from Italian human torpedoes or midget submarines but from the air and from U-boats. In 1940 the Luftwaffe had transferred 150 bombers to Sicily, at a time when there were but fifteen Hurricanes on Malta and only another eighteen delivered by Ark Royal in April 1941. The one carrier in the Mediterranean, HMS Illustrious, was so badly damaged by air attack in January 1941 that she had to be withdrawn for repairs in America. There was another carrier with Force H, the naval force stationed at Gibraltar whose role was to guard the Strait, but she could not be detached from that vital task and the replacement for Illustrious,HMS Formidable, sent out via the Cape, could not arrive before March. The Royal Navy transported British troops to Greece, then evacuated them from Greece and from Crete and, given that the Luftwaffe enjoyed almost complete air superiority, it suffered severely in so doing. The removal of a portion of the German bomber force from Sicily in preparation for Barbarossa lessened the threat from the air, but the undersea threat was increased with the despatch of twenty-six U-boats into the Mediterranean. In November 1941 U-331 sank HMS Barham and then U-557 sank the cruiser Galatea. In December the cruiser Neptune and a destroyer ran into a German minefield and sank and the Luftwaffe dropped mines in the Suez Canal. The army’s advances and subsequent retreats along the North African coast would not have been possible without Cunningham’s Inshore Squadron that delivered ammunition, fuel and rations, evacuated wounded and bombarded Axis positions on shore, but nevertheless the naval position in the Mediterranean at the end of 1941 was precarious.
The next year started badly for the British with the huge embarrassment of the Channel Dash, or Case Cerberus as the Germans named it, when the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen with their accompanying escorts, all under the command of Vice-Admiral Otto Ciliax, left the French port of Brest at 2245 hours on 11 February and sailed up the Channel heading for Norway, where Hitler expected a British invasion. Despite having warning that the squadron was liable to come out, the British, through a combination of faulty planning, lack of liaison between the navy and the air force, signals jamming by the Germans and sheer disbelief that the Germans would actually attempt the Strait of Dover in daylight, were slow to respond, and, when they did, it was in a piecemeal fashion.All the ships involved reached German ports on 13 February, even if they did suffer some damage from mines laid by the RAF. As a Times editorial put it: ‘Vice-Admiral Ciliax has succeeded where the Duke of Medina Sidonia failed… Nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea power has happened in Home Waters since the 17th Century.’*
In the Mediterranean, the situation became critical by the summer of 1942 when Axis air attacks on convoys to the island of Malta were so severe that at o
ne stage the submarine flotilla had to be removed and it looked as if the few aircraft stationed there might be grounded for lack of fuel. At last, in August, a convoy from the west, Operation Pedestal, succeeded in getting through, but at very heavy cost to the escorts and to the convoy: only five out of fourteen merchantmen got through but this included the vital fuels in the tanker Ohio, chartered from America with a British crew, her decks awash and lashed to a destroyer on either side. Eventually, with many of the Luftwaffe aircraft removed to the Eastern Front, the appearance of American warships to support Operation Torch, the landings in French North Africa and the removal from Axis hands of air bases in North Africa, the balance swung in favour of the Allies. The subsequent surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia and the necessary build-up of naval forces for the invasion of Sicily and later Italy, then the surrender of Italy herself, meant that naval supremacy was finally restored.
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From the late 1930s the British Admiralty had reluctantly accepted that a sizeable Far Eastern fleet could only be maintained in time of war if the French assumed responsibility for the Mediterranean, but with the French defeat and surrender in 1940 that option no longer existed. When Japan entered the war, there was no sound strategy to guide the Royal Navy and, even when a unified command to coordinate the efforts of the British, the Americans and the Dutch was established in Java under an American admiral, he had but a motley collection of ships that lacked balance as a force. With the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse there was nothing at sea to prevent the loss of Malaya, Singapore and Burma, and by March 1942 the Royal Navy had abandoned the South Pacific except for toeholds on Fiji, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia, which had to be held as staging posts on the route by which ships and men might travel from America to Australia. The efforts of the Royal Navy now had to be based on Ceylon, and a new Eastern Fleet of five battleships, seven cruisers and sixteen destroyers was assembled under Admiral Sir James Somerville, late of Force H in Gibraltar. On the face of it, this seemed a powerful force, but four of its battleships were old and slow and the Japanese carrier force could muster far more aircraft, so it was no match for Japan, which was now, if only temporarily, the regional naval superpower.
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