7

The Admirals

With the whole French seaboard from Calais to Bordeaux under Nazi control after the fall of France, the Germans lost no time in building U-boat pens along the Atlantic coast. The U-boat war now turned even deadlier. During the last six months of 1940, U-boats sank 471 ships in the Atlantic, a total of more than two million tons of shipping. In the early months of 1941, the losses continued to rise alarmingly. Churchill was very aware of the need to keep the sea-lanes across the Atlantic open, not only for the supplies of guns, tanks and ammunition that were now coming out of America’s factories under Lend-Lease, not only for the reinforcements in troops and matériel from Canada and the rest of the Empire, but for the foodstuffs, metal ores, oil, chemicals and all the other imports that were essential for Britain’s survival. This was a struggle that Britain, as a trading nation, could simply not afford to lose.

Looking back on the titanic struggle for the Atlantic, Churchill wrote: ‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.’¹ This was a conflict that could be followed only on charts, and with the accumulation of statistics on a weekly or monthly basis. The U-boats attacked in so-called ‘wolf packs’, assembling at night once a convoy had been spotted and then attacking in numbers, overwhelming the convoys’ defences and sinking merchant ships almost at will. Added to the U-boat menace were the activities of surface raiders like the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, German battle cruisers that between them sank or captured twenty-two ships in early 1941. And the long-range Condor aircraft could also spot convoys and bomb them from the air. ‘How willingly would I have exchanged a full-scale attempt at invasion for this shapeless, measureless peril, expressed in charts, curves and statistics!’ wrote Churchill.² In February 1941, the command centre for the ‘Western Approaches’, as the Atlantic sea-lanes into Britain were called, was moved to Liverpool and Admiral Sir Percy Noble was put in command. The following month, after some particularly bad losses, Churchill met with Admiral Pound, the First Sea Lord, and told him that this struggle had to be given priority over everything else. Churchill gave a new name to this campaign: the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’. As before, his use of words created a new battle-cry. By delineating the struggle for the Atlantic as a battle, just like the Battle of France or the Battle of Britain, Churchill concentrated minds, rallied government departments and focused the public’s eye on a key matter of survival.³

A new committee dedicated to the Battle of the Atlantic was set up. For several months it met weekly, then fortnightly, to review all the information and to come up with new ideas and policies. It was chaired by Churchill himself and consisted of the rest of the War Cabinet, the naval and air Chiefs of Staff, other key ministers, and leading scientists such as Lord Cherwell and Professor Blackett, who brought the skills of Operational Research to bear on the subject. Churchill wrote a directive listing thirteen points to get the new committee going. It was a magisterial document calling for an offensive against the U-boat menace – as ever, Churchill wanted to take the attack to the enemy. It helped to galvanise the minds of all the key players in this new battle. It was Churchill at his aggressive, motivational and coordinating best.⁴

At the beginning of the war, the only real weapon Britain had against the U-boat menace was Asdic, which the Admiralty had developed in the inter-war years. This was a system that sent out sound pulses that bounced back when they hit something, a bit like an underwater version of radar. At the Admiralty, Churchill had been keen on Asdic. But its range was limited and it was unreliable. It could be disrupted by water turbulence caused by the wakes of ships or by depth charges. However, by 1941, new measures against the U-boats had begun to appear. One of these was a radio direction finding system that picked up the enciphered messages of U-boats as they sent signals to their headquarters near L’Orient in France. These messages could not be deciphered, but that didn’t matter as the objective was simply to locate where the signals were coming from. If two or more radio stations picked up the signals then they could ‘fix’ on the position of the U-boat. This could be done at long range and with impressive accuracy. The system, called ‘High Frequency Direction Finding’, or HF/DF, was nicknamed ‘Huff Duff’. The wizards were beginning to influence the war at sea as well.

Other improvements in 1941 included readjusting the depth at which depth charges ignited, the use of new forms of radar and the deployment of fast-moving destroyers as convoy escorts. Hitler also inadvertently helped the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic by ordering Admiral Karl Doenitz, the U-boat Commander-in-Chief, to redeploy some of his vessels to the Mediterranean. But a decisive breakthrough came in May and June 1941, when the Royal Navy captured the German U-110 submarine intact, along with two weather ships, and seized all of their Enigma code books. With them the code-breakers at Bletchley Park were at last able to break the German Navy’s encrypted messages. By deciphering key signals to and from the ‘wolf packs’, it was possible to confirm their locations and their intentions. The convoys could then be routed away from the waiting U-boats. This dramatically reduced shipping losses, from an average of about a quarter of a million tons per month in the first six months of 1941 to roughly half of that, and by the end of the year even less. This was a victory for this phase of the Battle of the Atlantic. But it would not last long.

Another intense battle in the Atlantic attracted far more attention. After an intelligence tip-off from local agents, an RAF photographic reconnaissance Spitfire set out from Wick in the north of Scotland on 21 May 1941 and headed for the Norwegian fjords around Bergen. The pilots of these reconnaissance aircraft were true heroes. They flew without guns, sometimes for hours at a time, over enemy-occupied territory. Speed was their only weapon, and if fighters came after them it was only their ability to get away quickly at high altitude that saved them. On this afternoon, the pilot spotted a group of German warships, went down to have a look, then saw another two warships, one very large, about to sail. When the photographs were processed and examined, it transpired that the pilot had found the Bismarck and its support cruiser the Prinz Eugen about to head into the Atlantic. The Bismarck was the pride of Hitler’s navy and its newest addition. It was the biggest German battleship ever built and boasted eight fifteen-inch guns. At 45,000 tons it was also heavier than the largest British battleship, but just as fast. If it got among the Atlantic convoys it could cause mayhem. One of the most famous pursuits in naval history now began. The Admiralty ordered ships from Scapa Flow and from across the Atlantic to converge on the ice-bound stretch of water between Greenland and Iceland known as the Denmark Strait, where it was reckoned the Bismarck would attempt to pass into the ocean.

Churchill was at Chequers that weekend following the campaign that was raging on the island of Crete. At seven o’clock on the morning of Saturday 24 May, he was woken with dreadful news. In the first engagement with the Bismarck, HMS Hood had been sunk. Hood was the pride of the Royal Navy, one of its latest battleships. An inquiry found that a single shell from the Bismarck had penetrated the Hood’s ammunition store and the ship had exploded. Only three men from its crew of fifteen hundred survived. Another British battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, was also substantially damaged by the giant shells of the Bismarck and its bridge was put out of action. However, although it didn’t realise it, the Prince of Wales had managed to hit the Bismarck, which had slowed it down.

The signal went out ‘Sink the Bismarck’ and all available warships in the Atlantic were ordered to join the pursuit. Battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers and destroyers now raced to converge in the seas to the south of the Denmark Strait. On the evening of the 24th, Fleet Air Arm Swordfish aircraft flying from HMS Victorious spotted the Bismarck. The Swordfish was a biplane with canvas wings held together with bracing wire and was known by its crews as the ‘Stringbag’. Although it looked like a leftover from another era, it was sturdy and reliable and carried a torpedo. One of these scored a direct hit under the bridge of the Bismarck. Then, at this critical moment, the pursuing cruisers lost radar contact with their prey. For a whole day, the Bismarck could not be found, despite a frantic search. In what direction was she now heading? On the 26th, a Catalina flying boat from Lough Erne in Northern Ireland made a lucky identification. The Bismarck was heading for the port of Brest for repairs. It was about 700 miles out to sea. Soon, Swordfish from HMS Ark Royal found the battleship and more of their torpedoes hit home. Admiral Tovey, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, was aboard HMS King George V, which was now in hot pursuit along with HMS Rodney. But these two battleships were running low on fuel and it looked like they might have to give up the chase. Churchill ordered Admiral Pound to send a cable saying, ‘Bismarck must be sunk at all costs’, even if one of the British battleships had to tow the other back afterwards.⁵

By now, the damage to the Bismarck had caused her rudder to jam and she could sail only hopelessly round and round in a circle. On the morning of the 27th, King George V and Rodney finally closed in for the kill. The Bismarck’s heavy guns were still firing and caused damage to the Rodney, but the German ship was a sitting duck and a combination of shells and torpedoes ultimately did for her. Admiral Lutjens, the German commander, sent a final signal: ‘Ship unmanoeuvrable. We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Fuehrer!’ When the Bismarck went down, all but about 120 of its 2000-man crew, including Lutjens, went down with it. It was a victory for the Royal Navy, although with the loss of the Hood, a costly one. But it did deter the Tirpitz, another German heavy battleship, from ever putting to sea. Instead, it spent much of the war sheltering in the fjords of Norway.

Churchill had great experience of civilian command of the Royal Navy, going back thirty years to when he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Back then, he had found the men who commanded the senior service very conservative and suspicious of change. Now, in the Second World War, armed with the confidence and conviction that he knew best, he was determined to have his say in operational matters. This led to considerable strain in his dealings with the admirals, just as it did with the generals when Churchill interfered in army affairs. But Admiral Pound knew Churchill well, having worked with him since September 1939 as First Lord of the Admiralty and then as Prime Minister on the Chiefs of Staff committee. He knew how to put up with him and they formed a good partnership. In December 1940, he told Admiral Cunningham, ‘The PM is very difficult these days, not that he has not always been. One has however to take a broad view as one is dealing with a man who has proved to be a magnificent leader, and one just has to put up with his childishness as long as it isn’t dangerous.’ Later, Pound said to A.V. Alexander, Churchill’s replacement as First Lord, ‘At times you could kiss his [Churchill’s] feet. At others you feel you could kill him.’⁶

Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, universally known as ‘ABC’, commanded the Mediterranean Fleet until late 1943. He was the most successful British naval commander of the Second World War and has been called the greatest admiral since Nelson. He was behind the air attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto and masterminded the Battle of Matapan in March 1941, when he pursued his attack upon the Italian fleet at night and three Italian heavy cruisers were sunk for no British losses. He had a natural instinct to close with and destroy the enemy at every opportunity. Even when organising the evacuation of Greece and then Crete in April and May 1941, without air cover, he told his sailors that the ‘Navy must not let the Army down’. But even he was subject to Churchill’s detailed directives. Cunningham found these undermining, often believing that they cast doubt on his intention to take the fight to the enemy. Mostly he bit his lip and carried out his duties as best as he could. But after an argument over the blockading of Tripoli in April 1941, he admitted he was ‘beginning to feel seriously annoyed’ at being told how to do his job. He felt Churchill’s instructions could have ‘lost the whole fleet’ if circumstances had turned out differently.⁷

But Churchill never maintained his criticism of anyone for long. Not only did he warmly congratulate Cunningham but he also offered him several promotions. Churchill was good at prioritising and at seeing the overview. He was brilliant at making things happen and refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer. And, of course, he had to balance all the competing demands for limited war supplies and to set overall priorities which were bound to annoy whichever party lost out. But he could go too far, and his micro-instructions turned potentially friendly military chiefs against him. At times, his interference even risked the lives of soldiers, sailors and airmen. His commanders were right to resist some of his demands and to argue back. A lid was kept on these arguments during the war, but some of the frustration came out in memoirs published after the war.⁸

We have seen how Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States truly created a world at war. The pressure on the Royal Navy, fighting in so many oceans, was now immense. Three days after Pearl Harbor, on the morning of 10 December, Churchill was still reading his boxes in bed when the phone rang. It was Admiral Pound. Churchill later wrote, ‘His voice sounded odd. He gave a sort of cough and gulp and at first I could not hear him quite clearly.’ The news he brought was shocking. HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, two battleships that had been sent to the Far East before the attack on Pearl Harbor in a bid to deter the Japanese, had been sunk by Japanese aircraft. Churchill was distraught. He had sailed on the Prince of Wales only a few months before to meet Roosevelt in Newfoundland. He knew many members of the crew well. ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock,’ he wrote later. ‘As I turned over and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank in upon me.’ Coming so soon after the disaster of Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the two ships meant there were now no Allied capital ships left in the Pacific. Churchill reflected: ‘Over all this vast expanse of waters Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.’⁹

The sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, along with the pursuit of the Bismarck, proved how vital air power was at sea. The Bismarck had been found and critically injured by naval aircraft. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse had left their air cover behind and had been sunk by Japanese bombers. Then, the Battle of Midway in June 1942 was fought largely between aircraft flying from carriers. It would be one of the turning-point engagements of the Pacific naval war, with US naval aviators inflicting the loss of four aircraft carriers on the Japanese Imperial Navy. But still some in the Admiralty refused to recognise or accept the change that was taking place in naval warfare. The day of the heavy battleship operating as a floating steel platform for its giant guns was passing. The future, particularly in the Pacific, lay with aircraft carriers. And the United States soon began a huge aircraft-carrier building plan. By the end of the war in the Pacific, US shipyards had built twenty-four vast, 27,000-ton Essex-class carriers. They would slowly restore US naval supremacy across the ‘vast expanse’ of the Pacific Ocean.

But it would be some time before the disastrous defeats in the Far East could be avenged. More than any other incident, the humiliating loss of Singapore showed up British military weakness in Asia. Singapore is a small island at the tip of the five-hundred-mile-long Malayan peninsula. In the 1920s, it had been selected as the site for the construction of a huge naval base and a fortress with heavy guns as the centrepiece of British power in the region. Giant defences with heavy artillery pointing out to sea had been constructed to defend the city and the trading hub from seaborne attack. But Singapore’s land defences were left almost non-existent, and it was from the land, down the Malayan peninsula, that the Japanese came. Without doubt, this was a disastrous lack of foresight and planning, a blunder of historic proportions. Arguments have raged for years over who was to blame. Certainly Churchill was partly responsible, as he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the late 1920s and kept a tight rein on spending when the Singapore fortress was being built. And from 1939 he was first a senior member and then the leader of a government that failed to build up proper defences. But a war fought simultaneously with Germany, Italy and Japan had simply never been envisaged, and all planning since September 1939 had focused on Europe and North Africa. Despite his own culpability, though, Churchill was furious when he was told about the lack of defence against a land attack. He wrote that he was ‘staggered’, and in January 1942 he fumed to the Chiefs of Staff: ‘What is the point of having an island for a fortress if it is not to be made into a citadel?’ He continued that the provision of adequate land defence ‘was an elementary peace-time provision which it is incredible did not exist in a fortress which has been twenty years building … How was it that not one of you pointed this out to me at any times when these matters have been under discussion?’¹⁰

Thousands of Allied land troops packed into Singapore after a demoralising and exhausting retreat down the length of Malaya. General Arthur Percival was in command. Churchill instructed him to stand and fight, and said that the unit in the forefront of the battle, 18th Division, ‘has a chance to make its name in history … The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’¹¹ But the Japanese onslaught rolled relentlessly forward, and the dispirited defenders found they were in a hopeless situation. Water supplies were running out and the one million civilian inhabitants of the city were desperate. Ammunition and fuel reserves were also disastrously low. Churchill discussed the situation with Brooke and agreed that it was unrealistic to insist on holding out any longer. Through the regional commander, they gave Percival permission to cease resistance when he saw fit. On Sunday 15 February, Percival and his commanders marched out with white flags to signal the unconditional surrender of the fortress. Sixty-two thousand men went into captivity and began years of horror and torture in Japanese prisoner-of-war and work camps where half of them would die. Churchill wrote later that it was ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.¹²

That evening Churchill announced the fall of Singapore on the BBC. It was an emotional speech in which Churchill sought to review the progress of the war by asking: ‘Are we up or down?’ He insisted that with both the United States and the Soviet Union as allies, victory was ultimately certain. But he admitted that the position for Britain was severe, and that the country faced hard struggles on every front. He ended with a typical rhetorical flourish by saying that under the shadow of a disastrous defeat, it was now one of those moments

when the British race and nation can show their quality and their genius. This is one of those moments when it can draw from the heart of misfortune the vital impulses of victory … We must remember that we are no longer alone. We are in the midst of a great company … So far we have not failed. We shall not fail now. Let us move forward steadfastly together into the storm and through the storm.

Interestingly, the following day, Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that Churchill’s broadcast was not liked: ‘The country is too nervous and irritable to be fobbed off with fine phrases.’¹³ At this point of the war, it seems that the Churchillian magic was no longer working.

The global war was exacting its price. Neither the Royal Navy nor the British Army was capable of fighting effectively on so many fronts over such vast distances. Furthermore, Churchill never really empathised with the war in the Far East. He had never studied Japanese society and had very little understanding of Japan’s military culture. He had a tendency, which he shared with his military chiefs, constantly to underestimate this new enemy’s strength. Moreover, he had never visited Australia, and so never fully grasped the Australian fear that they were now at threat from the Japanese advance as it rolled mercilessly on across the region. He just couldn’t see why the Australians felt the need to withdraw their troops from the Middle East.

For Churchill, the key front in the Far East was the defence of India, the jewel in the imperial crown, a place of course very close to his heart after his service there as a young cavalry officer and his championing of imperial interests in the country ever since. Defending India meant defending Burma, and so for Churchill this was the critical aspect of the war against Japan at this stage. In January 1942, he argued that Singapore should be abandoned in order to build up the defence of Rangoon, the Burmese capital. But to his regret, under pressure of other events he did not push for this. Burma fell to the Japanese in the spring. Sensing this moment of British weakness in Asia, a few months later the Congress Party in India launched a series of demonstrations and riots against British rule. With Germany advancing into southern Russia, potentially threatening the northwest frontier of India, and with Japan strident to the east, it looked to many that British rule in India might be entering its final days.

Back in the Atlantic, a fatal blow was struck when the German Navy changed the configuration of its Enigma machines. When the Bismarck had sailed, five supply ships had been dispatched to various points in the Atlantic so the mighty battleship could refuel at sea. Bletchley Park deciphered their codes, learned their locations, and passed on the information. Once the Bismarck had been sunk, four of the supply ships were tracked down and also sunk. The fifth was spotted by chance and sunk. Admiral Doenitz, the commander of the U-boat fleet, began to get suspicious that the British were decoding his Enigma signals. Then U-570 was captured by a British destroyer south of Iceland, and it was feared that the Royal Navy might have seized the U-boat’s Enigma machine and code books (in fact, this time, it had not). An investigation into possible code-breaking was carried out by Captain Stummel, an experienced naval signals officer with an almost comic-book Prussian appearance straight out of central casting with a glass eye and a limp. Stummel concluded that it was impossible to break Enigma, but Doenitz still wanted to tighten up the whole system. As a result, a fourth rotor blade was added to the Enigma machines, meaning that the code permutations were increased by a factor of twenty-six. The new system came into effect on 1 February 1942.¹⁴

Overnight, this resulted in a complete blackout at Bletchley Park of the German naval codes. The code-breakers called the new, seemingly impenetrable code ‘Shark’. It created a major crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic. And it coincided with a glorious period for U-boats along the the eastern seaboard of the United States. Ignoring the lessons that had been so painfully learned by the British about the need for convoys, single ships continued to sail up and down the US coast and there was not even a blackout in the port towns. The U-boat crews enjoyed the easiest hunting of the war in what they called ‘the happy time’. They sunk 31 American ships in January 1942, 69 in February, and the numbers continued to rise over the next six months until sensible precautions and a system of integrated convoys were brought in.

From the summer of 1942, the number of ships lost crossing the Atlantic also grew to frightening levels. In the six months following the launch of the new Enigma system, U-boats sank about five hundred ships in Atlantic convoys, getting on for three million tons of shipping (in addition to all the ships lost along the eastern seaboard of the United States). At this rate many more ships were being sunk than could be built to replace them. And quite apart from the terrible loss of life, so many supplies were ending up at the bottom of the Atlantic that Britain risked running out of rations and the raw materials necessary to fight the war. By now, the Germans had also broken Britain’s naval cipher and their code-breakers were picking up the routes of and instructions to the convoys as they set out from North America. The Admiralty stepped up the pressure on the code-breakers at Bletchley to crack the new Enigma. In Hut 8, where Alan Turing was based, they worked day and night. But they were operating almost blind and made little progress.

By November 1942, Churchill was once again facing a potentially catastrophic situation in the Atlantic. A second committee was formed, the Cabinet Anti-U-boat Warfare Committee. Like its successful 1941 predecessor, it was chaired by Churchill and consisted of senior ministers, the service chiefs and top scientists, including Robert Watson-Watt, Lord Cherwell and Professor Blackett. The presence of the scientists was key, and the committee increasingly brought scientific thinking to bear on the Battle of the Atlantic. A series of important developments soon followed. U-boats travelling on the surface had developed the technology to pick up traditional radar signals and therefore knew when they had been spotted by Allied aircraft. They could then dive below the surface and evade an air attack. However, new, more sophisticated forms of short-wave radar (made possible by the development of the cavity magnetron at Birmingham) could not be detected by the U-boats. This dramatically increased the ability of patrolling aircraft to attack and sink U-boats, especially in the Bay of Biscay as they set out for or returned from their missions. A new searchlight known as the ‘Leigh Lamp’ was fitted to the aircraft so that they once they had tracked a U-boat using the new short-wave radar they could then attack at night. A new class of frigate was developed and dispatched in groups of four as independent flotillas to hunt down U-boats. Several escort carriers were built so that convoys could be accompanied by aircraft, and this extended the range at which U-boats could be hunted down. The boffins in Operational Research did their sums and noted that the U-boats were obviously limited by the number of torpedoes they could carry. So the loss rate was proportionately lower in a big convoy than in a small one. Accordingly, the convoys were enlarged. All of this helped. But some masterstroke was still needed to overcome Shark.

In fact, the lucky breakthrough had already occurred on 30 October, but it took some time for its impact to be realised. Early that morning, a Sunderland flying boat patrolling over the eastern Mediterranean picked up a radar contact with what it reported was possibly a submarine. A group of the latest class of Royal Navy destroyers was on patrol in the area and rushed to the coordinates supplied by the plane. The ships’ Asdic underwater sonars picked up the presence of a U-boat and they began to launch depth charges. Throughout the afternoon and evening, the destroyers circled and dropped more explosives into the sea. The U-boat dropped to its maximum depth, below five hundred feet, but the charges continued to come. The stench of sweat, fear and diesel fumes inside the submarine grew worse and worse. At about 10 p.m she was struck despite her depth. The captain decided he had no alternative but to surface. When U-559 came up, one of the circling destroyers, HMS Petard, opened fire and holed the conning tower. The U-boat crew abandoned ship and leapt into the sea. The Petard’s captain realised he might be able to capture the U-boat and tow it to port. So a boarding party was quickly sent across and clambered on to the U-boat. In this party was Lieutenant Anthony Fasson, who knew the importance of secret radio documents held on each U-boat. He descended into the U-boat, where the lights were still on. It was holed badly and taking in water. In the captain’s cabin, Fasson broke open a cabinet, took a key and opened a drawer where he found books and papers. With the help of another member of the boarding party, Colin Grazier, Fasson brought up several piles of these documents to the conning tower. On their third trip back down to the captain’s cabin, the U-boat suddenly started to sink. The officers on the conning tower managed to get off with most of the documents, but Fasson and Grazier were caught inside by the inrush of water and went down with the U-boat. They were both awarded posthumous George Crosses for their heroism.¹⁵

When the code books seized by Fasson and Grazier from U-559 finally arrived at Bletchley Park, they provided the missing link. In the language of cryptology, the code-breakers were now able to find their cribs and kisses, and use their bombes. On the morning of 13 December, a cry went up from Hut 8: ‘It’s out!’ They had cracked the four-rotor Enigma cipher. They could now read Shark. Within days, they had identified the positions of fifteen U-boats. Within weeks, the process of diverting convoys away from the waiting wolf packs could be resumed. By January and February 1943, shipping losses had dropped to half of what they had been before the breakthrough. It was the decisive moment in the Battle of the Atlantic. But the situation was to get a lot worse before it finally got better.

In the final months of 1942, the alliance of interests that had united Britain and the United States began to diverge. Admiral King, the head of the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur, the charismatic commander who had led the US garrison in the Philippines, both argued forcefully that more resources were needed for the war in the Pacific. This challenged the Germany First principle that Roosevelt had agreed with Churchill soon after Pearl Harbor. And General Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, who had gone along with the idea of Operation Torch and the landings in North Africa, now argued that an invasion of northern France in 1943 should be a higher priority than continuing the war in the Mediterranean. Roosevelt suggested to Churchill that they should meet with Stalin to review strategy for the year ahead. But Stalin announced that at this critical point in the Battle of Stalingrad, he could not leave Moscow. Churchill and Roosevelt decided to go ahead without him, and plans were drawn up for the two men to meet at Casablanca in Morocco. The summit was fittingly given the code name ‘Symbol’.

On 12 January 1943, Churchill set off in a Liberator bomber for the nine-hour flight to Morocco. He travelled with his usual small entourage, his doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, John Martin from his private staff, his detective Tommy Thompson and his valet Frank Sawyers. It was, as ever, an uncomfortable flight, and at one point Churchill awoke to find a pipe overheating and feared that it would ignite petrol fumes in the cabin. But they arrived safely and the warm winter sun of Morocco brought welcome relief. ‘Bright sunshine, oranges, eggs and razor-blades,’ wrote Martin, all four items being in short supply in Britain at the time.¹⁶ A small, discreet hotel had been taken over on the coast to the north of Casablanca. Churchill and Roosevelt had their own private villas, and the whole compound was sealed off and guarded by US Marines. Attending the conference were the British and American Chiefs of Staff, who met separately each day and then usually had two daily meetings together as the Combined Chiefs. The British had prepared their position and their arguments well. Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff had talked through all the key points and were now in agreement. The Americans were less well prepared and indeed had not even agreed on a unified position.

The conference formally opened on 13 January and the divisions between the military leaders immediately became evident. The Americans wanted to plan for an invasion of Northern Europe. The British wanted to concentrate on victory in the Mediterranean and considered an invasion of France in 1943 too great a risk. They argued for postponement until 1944, when more resources would be available and the U-boat threat should have been defeated. For several days, the two sides were locked in disagreement as to their strategy for the following year. General Brooke recorded in his diary the ‘very heated’ meetings with the Americans which seemed to be making ‘no progress’, and on the fifth day he wrote: ‘A desperate day! We are further from obtaining agreement than we ever were!’¹⁷ The British chiefs feared the Americans were already reallocating resources from Europe to the war in the Pacific. The Americans thought the British were obsessed with the Mediterranean for reasons of self-interest and traditional imperial concerns to retain the Suez Canal as a link to India.

While all of this was being thrashed out, Churchill and Roosevelt were getting on famously. The President seemed more relaxed than his Chief of Staff Marshall on the issue of the Mediterranean strategy. In return, Churchill responded to American fears that Britain would pull out of the war as soon as Germany was defeated by pledging to continue the fight against Japan. The warm friendship between the Prime Minister and the President blossomed in the winter sunshine. And Churchill was in his element, with his military chiefs around him, seeing Roosevelt regularly, and being at the heart of a global war machine. Harold Macmillan, who joined the conference a few days after it had started, wrote: ‘I have never seen him in better form. He ate and drank enormously all the time, settled huge problems, played bagatelle and bezique by the hour, and generally enjoyed himself.’¹⁸

On 18 January, the Combined Chiefs finally reached an agreement on strategy. Many of the Americans felt comfortable dealing with Field Marshal Sir John Dill who had been head of the British Mission in Washington for over a year and who was on excellent terms with Marshall. He played a central part in bringing both sides together. The Combined Chiefs presented their findings to Churchill and Roosevelt, who enthusiastically endorsed the new plans. Most of what the well-prepared British team had set out to achieve had been accepted. Defeat of Germany was still the first priority. Overcoming the U-boat threat and winning the Battle of the Atlantic was the leading objective. The Mediterranean strategy was endorsed, with agreement to invade Sicily once the Allies had finally expelled the Afrika Korps from North Africa. America agreed to support a British invasion of Burma later in the year. In Europe, Operation Bolero, the build-up of US troops in Britain, was to go ahead with maximum urgency. And the bombing offensive against Germany was to continue with new vigour. Later in the conference, Roosevelt added the condition that the Allies would accept only the ‘unconditional surrender’ of both Germany and Japan. This was agreed by Churchill on the spot and became the ultimate Allied war objective.

For the British planners, the summit was an enormous triumph. A joint strategy had been agreed by negotiation between the military chiefs, and the British had persuaded the Americans of the strengths of their case. It had not been handed down by edict from the US Commander-in-Chief and the British Prime Minister. In many ways, Casablanca represented the high water mark of British influence over the planning of the war. During 1943, the vast scale of the US war effort would overtake Britain and leave Churchill and the British chiefs as very much the junior partner in the alliance. But now, fittingly, Churchill and Roosevelt left Casablanca and travelled together to Marrakech, a city that Churchill had fallen in love with years before on holiday. The Prime Minister climbed to the roof of the villa that had been requisitioned for them to watch the beautiful sunset over the snow-capped Atlas mountains. He insisted that Roosevelt must see it too, and the disabled President was literally carried to the roof by two of his staff. Together they watched as the light magnificently changed colour in front of them. Churchill murmured that ‘this was the most lovely spot in the whole world’. They concluded their business over dinner by drafting various communiqués, including a summary for Stalin of what had been agreed. And then they sang songs together.¹⁹ The following morning, the President left for the United States and Churchill took a rare break. He painted the view of the mountains from the roof that he and Roosevelt had so admired the evening before. It was the only painting Churchill produced during the whole war.

Throughout 1942, U-boats had been launched at an average of eighteen vessels each month. By early 1943, Doenitz had about a hundred operating in the North Atlantic. There was a zone in the centre of the ocean that aircraft could not reach from either the United States or Britain. Inside this gap the U-boats continued their killing spree. Churchill came under considerable pressure from the Admiralty to divert the big, four-engined RAF aircraft like the Liberator from Bomber Command to Coastal Command in order to fly sorties over the middle of the Atlantic to protect the convoys. But he and his advisers remained convinced that in the absence of a second front to satisfy Stalin, the bombing offensive was the principal method available to them to destroy the Nazi war machine. The Admiralty’s request for the long-range aircraft was turned down. Instead, more bombing raids were made on the U-boat pens along the French coast. But the concrete roofs were so massive that despite literally thousands of bombing missions, not a single bomb ever penetrated to the U-boat docks below.

In March 1943, the sheer number of U-boats meant that shipping losses increased to over 600,000 tons, an appallingly high figure. Britain could not survive for long with this rate of loss. The Admiralty calculated that in the first twenty days of this month, communications between the Old World and the New nearly broke down completely. Stephen Roskill, the official naval historian, wrote: ‘in the early spring of 1943 we had a very narrow escape from defeat in the Atlantic … had we suffered such a defeat, history would have judged that the main cause would have been the lack of two more squadrons of very long range aircraft for convoy escort duties’.²⁰ Churchill’s adherence to the bombing offensive very nearly led to defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic.

The advances in science came to the rescue just in time. All of the developments that had been taking place at last began to kick in. With Bletchley Park now able to read the German naval signals again, with the new short-wave radar systems picking up more and more U-boats on the surface, and with the new escort groups in place, the hunters became the hunted. Aircraft patrolling the Bay of Biscay were spotting and sinking U-boats as they set off on or returned from their missions. In March and April, twenty-seven U-boats were sunk in the Atlantic, more than half by attack from the air. In May, forty were sunk, eighteen of them by air attack. In total, this amounted to over 50 per cent of the available U-boat fleet. No force could sustain this rate of loss. On 22 May, Doenitz called off the campaign and ordered the withdrawal of his U-boats from the North Atlantic. The convoy code-numbered SC130, which reached Liverpool on 23 May, was the last to be seriously menaced by U-boats.

The sea-lanes from North America to Britain had been cleared of the U-boat menace. It was as vital a turning point as Stalingrad or El Alamein. It was inconceivable that an invasion of Europe could have been mounted without mastery of the North Atlantic. And the great shipyards of North America were now working at full throttle, many producing what were known as ‘Liberty Ships’. These were basic transport vessels that could be prefabricated in several parts. Henry Kaiser, the shipbuilding magnate, realised that speed of construction was of the essence, and that as the shipyards expanded much of the available labour was going to be unskilled. The genius of Kaiser’s idea of prefabricating the ships was that many of the parts could be produced at inland factories, then transported by railway to shipyards on the coast for assembly. A giant ship’s hull could be designed in a series of subsections, and new techniques like electric arc-welding were used to bond the plates together. This was faster than riveting and used less steel. More than 300,000 men and women were employed in the US shipyards up and down the east and west coasts. Many of them had never been near a shipyard in their lives before. Just as ‘Rosie the Riveter’ became the media darling of the aircraft manufacturing plants, so ‘Wendy the Welder’ became the generic name for women workers in the traditionally male-dominated world of heavy engineering and shipbuilding. The whole manufacturing process of the Liberty Ships was one of the most remarkable examples of mass production ever achieved. The speed at which these basic cargo ships could be assembled and launched got faster and faster. The first of the Liberty Ships took about 150 days from laying the keel to launch, itself impressively fast in shipbuilding terms. As techniques improved and systems became even more efficient, the time came down to fifty days. Then the American media got interested and a friendly rivalry was set up between the shipyards. Average production time fell to just ten days, and the fastest of all, the Robert E. Parry, was built at a yard in California in November 1942 in an incredible four days and fifteen hours. This speed of production was exceptional but in total 2700 Liberty Ships were manufactured during the war.

The U-boat threat was defeated by the application of scientific ideas at sea and by the revolutionary concept of mass-producing ships in America. As Professor Blackett put it: ‘the anti-submarine campaign of 1943 was waged under closer scientific control than any other campaign in the history of the British Armed Forces’.²¹ In July 1943, a key milestone was passed when the number of ships being built and launched exceeded the volume of shipping being lost. The War Lab had played its part and the Battle of the Atlantic had been won.