Merchant Vessel Empire MacKendrick was one such ship, once a prime target as a grain carrier working for the Ministry of War Transport, but converted to a small carrier, about 7950 tons, in December of 1943. With a length of just 412 feet, about half the length of a typical Royal Navy carrier, MacKendrick would carry just four Fairey Swordfish, and move about at a leisurely 8 to 12 knots when on escort duty. Those Swordfish had a new bite, up to eight RP-3 Rockets, sometimes called “60 pounders,” which also came in a smaller 25-pound armor piercing variant. Developed for use against enemy tanks, trains, trucks or fixed land targets, the rockets were deemed perfect fare for making attacks on ships, and particularly U-boats when caught on the surface. They were unguided, but the Swordfish pilots could get hits from a salvo if fired inside 1500 yards, and at that range the speedy rockets would be just three seconds to the target.
A hit from a 3-inch rocket was like taking a 76mm gun to the boat, though the warheads were actually 87mm armor piercing ordnance. In effect, the four Swordfish had the muscle of a light cruiser strapped to those wings. Even a near miss might pierce the U-boat hull beneath the water. Called “Rocket Spears” by the pilots, the first kill had harpooned U-752 that very day, the 23rd of May. Once the pressure hull had been pierced, the U-Boat could not dive, and was then ‘meat on the table’ for the Allied planes. And so the plane that had been famous for getting the German battleship Bismarck in one telling of these events, was now out after the U-Boats that Döenitz had floated in her place. That they came off the deck of a former merchant ship, was simply poetic justice.
The MAC Ships, as they were called (Merchant Aircraft Carriers) played an important role in closing the “Black Gap” in the Atlantic that was outside land-based air cover range. Now they routinely escorted any important convoy, where the losses that had once been staggering were now almost entirely prevented. Even if the Swordfish did not skewer the enemy U-Boats, their very presence was enough to discourage enemy attacks.
Living a double life, the Empire MacKendrick, (named after the former commander of HMS Audacity ) still retained and used her grain compartments, and would carry that cargo while on duty as an escort. Often the ship would sail right in the center of the formation, though no ship was ever positioned astern, allowing the MAC Ship to simply reduce speed and drop back and get clear of the convoy to launch her planes. This time out, those holds were empty, as the ship was operating with destroyer Whitehall on a dedicated anti-submarine patrol. The old W-Class destroyer had been laid down in 1918, eventually refitted to become a long range escort.
Whitehall had been one of the dogged ships pulling the British army off the beaches at Dunkerque in 1940, rescuing over 2750 soldiers. In her one chance to shine as a convoy escort, she was one of five escorts that failed to protect Convoy HX-79, which lost 12 merchant ships when attacked by a pack of five wolves on 10 October 1940. None of the German U-Boats were found or harmed. The destroyer had last tasted blood in the water in October of 1943, when she had found and sunk U-306 in the North Atlantic near the Azores. Lt. Commander Bell had taken the credit for that, but now Whitehall was now under Lt. Commander P.J. Cowell, and things had been rather uneventful for the ship and crew in recent months.
That was all about to change. Two little flotillas were about to meet at sea that day, a sideshow to a much bigger action underway to the north. Himmler had telephoned Grossadmiral Döenitz and impressed upon him the importance of creating a strong distraction out in the Norwegian Sea to take the pressure off the Norwegian coast. That was where U-181 and her escort would be traveling, and he wanted no mishaps along the way.
All that month, the British had been out trying to harass the German positions in Norway. On the 6th of May a small force built around the carriers Furious and Searcher attacked and sunk the German ore-steamer Almora and the tanker Saarburg off the coast, putting over 10,000 tons on the bottom. Then, six days later on the 12th, Vice Admiral Moore set out with the battleship Anson , carriers Victorious, Furious, and escort carriers Emperor and Striker , with cruisers Sheffield, Royalist , and ten destroyers. They were heading north to the Altafiord in the north cape area, between Tromso and Hammerfest, where a British submarine had spotted Tirpitz entering earlier that week.
The last big German ship that could endanger convoys to Murmansk, Moore wanted to cement his laurels that day by seeing if he could damage or sink the powerful enemy battleship. But foul weather protected the ship, and his planes had to abort their planned attack. So Moore moved south, west of Bodo, looking for other German ships hiding in the fiords. Yet the weather had hidden far more from him than the Tirpitz . The fast raiders Rhineland and Westfalen were both at Tromso, and the battlecruiser Scharnhorst was at Narvik, with five destroyers. It was the heart of the northern fleet, which was now mainly composed of these fast raiders and the newer Valkyrie class ocean going destroyer escorts, now nicknamed the “Shield Maidens.” (Valkyrie, Byrnhild, Grimhild, Gunnar and Mist ). They were speedy 4000 tonners, capable of 36 knots so they could run with the fast raiders, and with an endurance of 9000 miles.
The rest of the remaining German fleet, most notably the carriers Peter Strasser , and Brandenburg , were all hidden away in the Baltic, along with the old pocket battleships Admiral Scheer, Deutschland , cruisers Hipper, Karlsruhe, Koln, Konigsberg and Emden. Hitler had forbidden that part of the fleet from making an attempt to reach Nordstern, and Döenitz had been content to leave them in home waters. The Russians vainly mounted a few bombing raids against them, but without success.
Now Döenitz would order a rare sortie from all the ships of the Northern Fleet. Tirpitz would leave Altafiord on the 21st of May, with the two fast raiders joining her off Tromso, and then the Scharnhorst and destroyer group coming out from Narvik. So just as Admiral Moore had turned for home, news came from the Norwegian underground of all these sorties, prompting him to turn about and order all his assets towards the long finger of the Lofoten Islands that stretched out from the vicinity of Narvik. The Germans were out near Vaero Island, off the northern tip of that rocky outpost, called Nordland. There they maintained a radar and weather station, also serving as a communications relay back to Nordstern.
Most unexpectedly, Döenitz was thumbing his nose and dancing into the ring, a deliberate challenge to the British that was meant to pull in all their assets from the south and clear up the sea lanes near Trondheim, where the big naval base expansion had been named Nordstern years earlier. It was going to work. Admiral Moore was coming, confident that his carrier planes would cover him and pose a significant threat to the Germans, and with that failing, he was standing on a most capable battleship, Anson . The restless waters near Vaero had sometimes been called “The Maelstrom” on the older maps, and that was one thing that would tip the balance in favor of the Germans. Bad weather and rough seas were never good for carrier operations. Pitching flight decks were most unsuitable for launching and recovering planes.
So this was the big drama playing out in the north, while far to the south, the lowly hybrid grain ship MAC carrier MacKendrick, and the destroyer Whitehall, were busy looking for German U-Boats. No one knew at that time that MacKendrick’s mission was far more serious, and would have a major effect on the war if successful, whereas that of Admiral Moore would mean very little in the long run. Where Moore had three Barracudas up on long range scouting to look for the big German ships, the MacKendrick was getting ready to launch her first Swordfish, one of four in Sub-flight Z from 836 Squadron assigned to that ship. It would be Lt. Gifford out that morning on patrol, his wings laden with those dangerous RP-3 Rocket Spears.
They were, in fact, the only whisper of the rocket technology that had bedeviled the Kriegsmarine for years. Since the last big battle west of Gibraltar, not one naval rocket was seen to be directed against German ships by the British, which lent weight to the fact that those weapons had been early prototypes. The Germans could not see why they had not been mass produced, and only a very few knew the real truth, among
them Himmler, who had been informed by Volkov as to the real nature of the threat.
Lüth reached Kristiansand without incident on the 21st, and now with the fleet sallying forth to the north, he set out for Nordstern that very night after replenishing. They would hug the coast as far as Stavanger, but that was where Lüth knew the British planes out of Scapa Flow and other bases, including the Shetlands, would be looking for easy prey. So he angled northwest, intending to get at least 100 kilometers west of Bergen when he made the passage there, for he would not stop at that port. It would be a full day on the surface, sailing at 10 knots to reach that position from Kristiansand, and thankfully, the journey was only interrupted twice—once by a Sunderland, which spotted them while returning from an operation off Stavanger. The plane had already expended its ordnance, and so it could only note their position, sending both U-boats beneath the water on alert.
That position report would reach MacKendrick , which was the reason a Swordfish was up early on the 23rd to look for the German subs. At dawn, the Germans would spot the plane on radar, and Lüth gave the order to submerge immediately. For some reason his escort, U-673 , did not clear her decks and dive. Instead, her Commander, Heinz Gerd Sauer, wanted to make this encounter his first test of the new 37mm flak turret installed on his boat. He waited, looking like a lost sheep on the sea below as he saw the Swordfish eventually spot him and flutter in his direction. Then, long before the plane could get into range to fire its rockets, that multi-barreled 37mm gun began darkening the sky with steel and smoke. Two rounds went right through the Pegasus engine on the plane, which caught fire and sent it wheeling down to an unceremonious crash in the choppy seas.
The flak crews on U-673 were elated, cheering their first kill as a new Flak Boat, but some hours later, at about 10:00 when both boats were again on the surface, Lüth sent a strongly worded message to Sauer, indicating his anger over what had happened.
“What’s gotten into that man’s head?” Lüth said to Kapitan Freiwald. “He was told to submerge at the first sign of any enemy air activity.”
“I think he wanted to test his new flak guns,” Freiwald guessed correctly.
“Yes, but at the risk of giving our position away.” Lüth was fuming.
“At least he got the plane,” said Freiwald. “He noted it was a Swordfish. He goes after the birds, because he can’t get any fish these days.”
U-673 had never sunk an enemy ship with her torpedoes, and never would. Its fate in the old history was to be ignominiously beached on the Smaskjer reef at the entrance to Felsafjord north of Stavanger, and that after colliding with U-382, another hungry boat out of Bergen. The Germans would salvage the boat from that reef, because it had the new experimental 37mm turret, but it would be decommissioned shortly after that.
“So he got himself a Swordfish,” said Lüth. “Well, where did it come from, Scapa Flow? Not likely. That’s 275 air miles away, which is more than half the combat radius of that plane. No, it came off the deck of a British aircraft carrier, and probably one of the smaller escort carriers. So there is someone out there with a bone to pick now, and they are surely looking for us. If Heinz fires that damn 37 again, I’ll see he’s busted down to a Korvettenkapitän for disobeying orders. Signal him again that he is to dive immediately upon contact with enemy aircraft. The less we are seen, the better, but I’m afraid the jig is up now.”
It was.
MacKendrick and Whitehall were just 50 miles to the west, and cruising north on a course they surmised to be roughly parallel to the course of the German sub that had been engaged. The Master of MacKendrick that day was John Toland, and he was also steaming over the incident. His plane had been caught by a flak boat. That was how he saw things, and now he was determined to use his remaining three planes to get revenge. The seas were running high now, but there was fair weather promised for the following day. So Toland had to think things through.
“Biggs,” he said to his first officer, Lt. Commander Herman Biggsley. “Those boats might have been bound for Bergen, in which case we won’t get a crack at them tomorrow. If, however, they are out as part of this business up north, then they might even be heading our way.”
“They might be bound for Nordstern,” Biggsley suggested, hitting the nail right on the head.
“In that case, I’ll want another bird aloft to look for them today, but we’ll sight and shadow. Let’s get word to Scappa about this. Perhaps we can get a Sunderland or Catalina out here.”
It would be Number 210 Squadron that would answer that call. Toland’s Swordfish spotted not one, but now two German U-boats on the surface, and heading north before they quickly submerged. That would see Catalina V arrive after 18:00, loitering in the area until dusk, which was not until an hour before midnight in this latitude in May. They saw nothing on the grey sea below, and Lüth was fortunate that it was the dark of the moon that night.
The seasoned Kapitan was still angry about the incident that gave away their position. The two boats had remained submerged until an hour after sunset, when Lüth was thinking to surface again at midnight to pick up speed and stay on schedule. Yet he would have only five more brief hours of relative darkness, for the sun would rise on the 24th at just a few minutes after 05:00.
Guessing the Germans might be using the darkness to run on the surface, Master Toland requested a Mosquito night fighter, but none were available. So Whitehall had been detached, steaming ahead to get itself into a position to intercept any possible U-boat sighting, or to try and spot the German subs on the surface. What they really needed was another Sunderland or Catalina with good downward looking radars, but they, too, were all being pulled up north to look for Tirpitz and the rest of the German North Seas Fleet.
Just after dawn, Toland was informed that Liberator S of Number 59 Squadron RAF would be diverted to offer him support. It would get a sighting, but see only one U-Boat, not two. The previous night, Lüth had decided that he gained no benefit from the flak wielding escort, and sent a coded message that U-673 was to angle northwest, as though bent on joining the action to the north. It was a faster boat than U-181 while submerged, and now Lüth would use it to decoy the British hunting assets away from his boat, allowing him to angle northeast towards the coast.
That decision saved him from the grueling fate that would now overtake U-673 . That Liberator had long legs, and it spotted the Flak Boat on the morning of the 25th, brazenly still sailing on the surface. Word was passed to Master Toland on the MacKendrick to coordinate the attack, and this time, all three remaining Swordfish were up and vectoring in on the German boat. It was perhaps foolish of Heinz Sauer to linger on the surface like that, his crews eager at the new 37mm turret, and thinking to shoot up more Swordfish. The Liberator had deliberately turned away, as if it were leaving the scene, and now the three Swordfish appeared in a cluster on the radar, but Sauer did not dive.
As they approached, all three planes suddenly split up, and now they began to accelerate to make their attack runs from three separate directions. That would make it very difficult for the Germans to put the flak gun on them all before one got close enough to fire those rockets. The RP-3’s soon tore up the sea around the boat, its 37mm gun frantically firing away and putting damage on two of the three Swordfish. The rockets came in at a shallow angle, some plunging into the sea near the boat, and that was the fate that would overtake U-673 in this history. When fired at that angle, the rockets entering the water had a tendency to rise and swerve upwards slightly, and one struck and penetrated the pressure hull of the boat. Now, whether he wanted to take Lüth’s riveting advice or not, and follow the order to dive on sighting any enemy planes, it was too late. With that pressure hull compromised, Liberator S would turn about and do the rest of the work with its bombs.
U-673 was straddled and badly damaged by the blast of several bombs, and it would sink at 11:40 on the 25th of May. Thankfully, Lüth and U-181 were already 60 miles away to the northeast, and he would slip away, unseen to make
his much-anticipated appointment at Nordstern. The external cargo container was not a new torpedo, as Freiberg had thought when he saw it being loaded, but the last of the silver shark’s teeth that had been found by the Kaiser Wilhelm in the South Atlantic. It was, in fact, Germany’s sole nuclear warhead, still mounted on the missile that had been recovered, and it was bound for Nordstern, destined for the ordnance rack aboard a German airship. U-181 was carrying the tangible rage of Heinrich Himmler, no longer willing to wait for the delivery by Ivan Volkov. After that 1000 plane raid on Berlin, the gloves were coming off.
Chapter 15
Döenitz had been very reluctant to sortie with his capital ships, deciding that the very “fleet in being” was just as much of a threat as anything the ships might accomplish on the high seas. The days of the German raiders were long over. Admiral Raeder had taken the cream of the surface fleet into the Med, and there it had died in the slow battle to guard the sea lanes to North Africa, and eventually the southern coast of France itself. If he so decided, Döenitz could use the remaining ships at his disposal as a commerce raiding fleet, but the enemy command of the air above the sea would lead that strategy to a sure and unpalatable end. But this maneuver would do what was asked of him.
The British had reacted as he thought they would, and Naval Intelligence could now paint him a fairly good picture of what was out there in Admiral Moore’s fleet. Ship for ship, he could best them, that he knew for certain, except for the one category that mattered now—aircraft carriers. Moore had at least two that had been identified earlier, Victorious, andFurious. Undoubtedly there were more smaller escort carriers about as well.
Breakout (Kirov Series Book 38) Page 12