Glossary

Introduction

The Battle of the Atlantic was the biggest battle of World War II, and yet little known to the public. It was big in geographical extent; from British harbours to North America on the convoy routes is some 3,000 miles, whilst the battle ranged from Greenland in the north to the Caribbean in the south. It was big in human tragedy; some 23,000 merchant seamen were lost, together with numerous RN, RCN and other naval personnel, air force crews of many nationalities and, on the Axis side, 27,000 U-boat crew. It was the longest battle of the war, with the first sinking taking place on 3 Sept 1939 and the last on 6 May 1945.

A W Watson, Assistant Director of Naval Construction, was responsible for most British escort design. The Director of Naval Construction, Sir Stanley Goodall, was to write in 1940, ‘Watson is a really good man’.

There have been fine general histories of the battle¹ but the subject is too vast for any one book. This volume will deal with escort vessels, their crews, sensors and weapon systems, together with the supporting systems that directed the battle, trained their crews and maintained their hardware. No tool is effective if the operator is unskilled and some crew members had never seen the sea before their first operational voyage.

Surface escort vessels sank 225 submarines, mainly in the earlier years of the war, when the RAF operated obsolescent aircraft that were of short range and equipped with ineffective weapons. From 1943 onwards these faults were overcome and, with ships and aircraft operating under common control, the RAF, RCAF and FAA came into their own, sinking 228 U-boats at sea. However, it is not unfair to say that the battle was largely won by the time that aircraft became effective.

This book only outlines the operational aspects of the battle itself, showing how problems in equipment, training and operational control were overcome. Reaction to a new threat was inevitably slow; it took fifteen to eighteen months to get a new class of ship from drawing bench to sea, and new weapons took even longer. Success depended more on anticipation than reaction time, though sometimes reaction was very swift; for example, the original aerial for the 268 radar was designed and built within a week.

A central theme is the inevitable conflict between the need for numbers and the capability of individual units – quality versus quantity – a balance in which the parameters changed with time. Under this heading we may mention the stupendous efforts in Canada in building and manning so many escorts.

The battle was won not by any single weapon or sensor but by the combined effects of many technologies used by well trained and coordinated crews, and by the lasting courage of the merchant men.

This book is intended as a tribute to the designers and builders of the escort vessels, as well as their operators, not forgetting the three commanders-in-chief.

A Note on Numbers

For many reasons, there is a lack of certainty about most of the numbers used in this story. For example, the figure of British merchant ship deaths in the battle is given above as 23,000. The total number of deaths in the merchant service was 34,000 but many were not due to U-boats, while others did not occur in the North Atlantic. This raises another problem: what are the geographical boundaries of the Battle of the Atlantic? I have excluded Arctic convoys and the east coast (North Sea), but where does the English Channel become the Atlantic – and should the South Atlantic be included?

In addition, I do not think that a long line of figures conveys much to the reader; 831,123 is more easily understood as ‘about 830,000’, though I will omit the ‘about’ unless it is of special significance.

This sketch map is based on a gnomic projection which shows a ‘Great Circle’ route as a straight line avoiding the distortion of a Mercator’s projection at high latitudes. The typical convoy route deviates only slightly from the Great Circle to bring it within air cover from Iceland and provide some degree of evasion.

Structure

The first seven chapters of the book are arranged chronologically, each chapter opening with a brief narrative of that phase of the battle. This is followed by a section on technical developments, mainly sensors and weapons, and then the significant ships joining during the period.

Maps

The maps reproduced here illustrating phases of the battle were first published in an official booklet, The Battle of the Atlantic (price one shilling! – now out of copyright). They show the positions in which U-boats and merchant ships were sunk. These positions were based on wartime information; post-war research has shown them to contain a few errors but they still give a vivid impression of the geographical shifts in the battle. The chronological divisions of the phases shown on the maps differ slightly from those used as chapter headings, but a month or so makes little difference to the picture.

The maps are drawn using Mercator’s projection, which uses an increasing scale as the latitude gets more northerly, so that a convoy route appears to be far from being a great circle. The sketch map reproduced left is based on a gnomonic projection, which shows a great circle route as a straight line. It will be seen that the typical convoy track departs only slightly from a great circle.

Acknowledgements

Ian Buxton, Rob Gardiner, Cdre (now Rear Adm) James Goldrick RAN, John Lambert, George Moore, John Roberts and Phil Sims.