CHAPTER 13
The figures for merchant-ship and U-boat losses tell the story of how the Battle of the Atlantic was so nearly lost, thanks in part to the US Navy's obstinate refusal to adopt convoys in 1942, granting the U-boats their second 'happy time' off the American coast, and then won by Allied technological advances, tactical refinements and sheer numbers as the massive US ship-building programme gathered pace. In 1942 the U-boats sank 1,859 ships (8.3 million tons) for the loss of 86 of their own; in 1943 they sank 812 ships (3.6 million tons) but lost 242. The turning point of the campaign was the battle for Convoy ONS-5 in late April and early May 1943, so well covered by The World at War interviewers, in which twelve merchant ships were sunk but eight U-boats were lost and a further seven were forced to withdraw because of battle damage. On 23 May Admiral Dönitz, who lost his youngest son, Peter, on U-954 in the ONS-5 battle, recalled all his U-boats from the North Atlantic. The closing of the air gap in the mid-Atlantic by long-range bombers, allied to the new airborne centimetric radar, was probably the most significant tactical contribution to the Allied victory, but strategically the greatest German reversal came in June 1943, when the Royal Navy introduced a new system of encypherment that defeated German attempts to break it, although Merchant Navy cyphers remained an open book to them. Meanwhile, from July 1943 British cryptographers at Bletchley Park were consistently able to read signals sent by the Kriegsmarine's four-wheel Enigma cypher machine, which had totally defeated them from February to December 1942. During the Battle of the Atlantic approximately 3,500 merchant ships (14.5 million tons) and 765 U-boats were sunk with the loss of seventy-five per cent of all operational U-boat crews, the highest loss-rate of any of the armed forces engaged in the Second World War. It is a curious fact that of the ten top-scoring U-boat commanders only Günther Prien, who sank Royal Oak in Scapa Flow in 1939, was killed in action.
ADMIRAL KARL DÖNITZ
Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy from 30 January 1943
In 1942 when the German warfare still was successful, there lacked a further development of the submarine weapon. The reason was the regular use of Anglo-American planes against the German U-boats in the Atlantic . . . The result was that submarine manoeuvrability on the surface was diminished, to the disadvantage of the operational and tactical use of the submarines. Secondly we learned the Anglo-American warships and all of the planes could find the position of the German submarine every time; this had become possible because they had made a short-wave radar instrument so the submarine could be attacked at night by a plane which the submarine could not have seen before.
PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH
Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development
Of course it was pretty gloomy after Pearl Harbor but it didn't take long for it to recover and how strange to look back on those days. I knew all of us who were in the middle of it knew that we were very close to losing that whole damn war on account of the submarines. We nearly lost the first war that way and so we nearly lost the second war. I don't think the people in this country had any idea that we were so close to the rim, but we were.
LIEUTENANT PETER-ERICH CREMER
Commanding U-333, May 1942
Before I was going to the American coast I had an attack from a Liberator; I lost two and a half metres off my bow. I went very close to the shore and the destroyers were protecting the steamers and tankers on the sea side so I picked out the biggest one and torpedoed him. Only one torpedo tube was still in action so I was obliged to shoot through one tube and must re-load the torpedo after torpedoing one ship. So I sank four ships in one night: the destroyers were running with full speed on the wrong side of the convoy and I could get out without the destroyers having seen me.
COMMANDER PETER GRETTON
Escort Group Commander 1942–43
We had tremendous disappointments at the start when we found that a bomb or a depth-charge had to be let off within a very few feet of a submarine before it did any serious damage, but we soon got much improved explosives and some improved anti-submarine weapons. Looking back, it's quite clear that one was inclined to forget at the time what our people were doing and the things like the high-frequency direction-finding sets, which we had in the ships and ashore and which let us fix the position of U-boats wherever they were in the Atlantic, were a tremendous advantage and the Germans never seemed to rumble to what we were doing there. In addition we got the ten-centimetre radar set in early 1942 and this let us detect submarine periscopes at quite short range, and the conning-tower of a submarine at quite reasonably long range, and this made a great difference too.
LIEUTENANT CREMER
Commanding U-333, 6 October 1942
Some submarines were staying near Freetown [Sierra Leone, West Africa], because the convoys were coming from America to Freetown with transports of goods and soldiers, and they hadn't seen much ships so I was obliged to look in the harbour; so I went very close to this port and the destroyer I met [corvette HMS Crocus] had radar installed on board. We didn't know during this time that they had radar so he had me on his screen and with full speed ahead he rammed me for the first time. When I saw him it was too late to dive. I tried to torpedo him but the distance, one hundred and fifty yards, was too close and the torpedo wouldn't explode. So I tried to get a bigger distance between the destroyer and the U-boat and he was shooting during one hour or two hours with machine guns. My sailors were on deck and I tried firstly to take the sailors in the boat because I did not know how much they were wounded. An officer next to me was dead and another officer he had a bullet through his throat and I had got a bullet in my chest and I had some thirty shell splinters in arm and leg and a bullet in my head. After the sailors were in this boat to escape I was sailing with very low revolutions so the enemy had the impression the boat was sinking, and when he came very close I got full speed ahead and then he rammed me two or three metres off the stern and then I dived.
ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
We still had in 1942 and in the beginning of 1943 great success on the U-boat warfare. Some wolf-packs attacked a convoy on March 1943 in the Atlantic and sank twenty-one ships and only one U-boat was lost but this defeat of the Anglo-Americans had its consequences. It accelerated the use of warships with, on board, all possibilities of anti-submarine weapons, and they had an instrument with which they could take the bearings of a U-boat when it made a wireless message. By this and also radar instrument they could find and track the positions of the U-boat and then attack it. But the breaking down of the German submarine warfare in May 1943 happened because the German submarines had lost the operational and tactical quality of surface manoeuvrability.
PROFESSOR BUSH
At the height of the submarine war there were about forty ships being sunk for each submarine that was being sunk. The Germans were building submarines faster than they were being sunk. We were losing ships faster than we were replacing them and it looked very bad indeed. Six months later the ratio of sinkings had dropped down to nearly one to one. What had happened in the meanwhile? The British introduced their anti-submarine rocket [Hedgehog] in the Bay of Biscay, which was a magnificent weapon against the submarine. I saw it tested in Britain and it scared the hell out of me – terrifying. Americans introduced Fido, which was a target-seeking torpedo. You dropped one where a submarine submerged and the torpedo would hunt it out. Soon there would be the radar which could pick up a periscope. A dozen weapons came in right at that time and it changed the tide, and also the introduction of hunter-killer groups. And on that, the British were ahead of us, largely because US Fleet Commander Admiral King was stubborn on that particular subject.
SQUADRON LEADER WILFRID OULTON
RAF Coastal Command.
Bearing in mind the fact that we were two people separated by a common language, I don't think we could have done very much better than we were doing at the time. The Americans had their problems too and they weren't going to believe everything we said without trying it out for themselves. Certainly things could have been better, but whether they could have been better in the light of the political history of the time, I doubt very much.
ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
Very late, in the beginning of 1943, the number of German submarines began to approach for the number 1 had asked for before the war. It had become too late, for the problem of timing was of great significance in the Battle of the Atlantic. We had to sink as many ships as possible before our Anglo-American opponents could develop an effective anti-submarine defence and could replace the merchant ships which had been sunk. For this reason it was of strategic importance to deploy submarines economically. This principle was that submarines had to be sent into action where every submarine every day could sink the greatest tonnage of the enemy's ships. This also meant that German submarines must not be used for any other purposes: their main strategic purpose was to sink as many ships as possible in the Atlantic. Other seas, for instance the Mediterranean, had their importance but they were only of secondary importance in comparison with the Atlantic, and the German use of U-boats in this or other seas had to be weighed against the disadvantage of having fewer boats in the Battle of the Atlantic before any order was issued. But this was not always calculated; the use of German submarines for other purposes hampered German success in the Battle of the Atlantic in the first three and a half years of war.
SQUADRON LEADER OULTON
I was fortunate enough to get command of the first well-equipped aeroplanes for the job, Halifaxes, diverted from Bomber Command and equipped with the new centimetric radar. I had command of this squadron for about a month on the 31st of May 1943; we were carrying out offensive patrols in the Bay of Biscay. We'd gone off before dawn as usual and were on patrol when suddenly in the middle of eating a sandwich I saw something odd ahead, which turned out to be a U-boat [U-440]. We stalked it, that is we climbed up into cloud to get nearer, and then dived and carried out our attack at very low level, fifty feet, and crossed the U-boat, dropped a stick of depth-charges which exploded correctly, and that would ultimately have been the end of the story. But it was a very tough U-boat and we came round again and carried out a second attack with the remaining depth-charges and the U-boat was still there circling gently and firing at us whenever we came close enough.
COMMANDER GRETTON
Commanding Escort Group, Convoy ONS-5
My group had been running for three or four months during the winter in very bad weather and we had done very little until the convoy before ONS-5, which was HX-231. We had a big battle [4–7 April 1943]: we lost twelve merchant ships but we sunk three submarines, and at that time this was considered all right. Then we had a rest in harbour and sailed again to escort ONS-5 westwards across the Atlantic. ONS-5 was a rather small and very slow and of course unladen convoy, and we had a lot of trouble. The weather was very bad, the ships got disorganised and south of Iceland after three or four days we had several attacks by submarines, most of which we drove off successfully [ U-386 and U-528 damaged], and only had one ship sunk. Then after a spell we had a long series of very bad gales indeed, combined with a little nip into the ice pack off Greenland, and at this stage my ship was running short of fuel. I couldn't fill from the tanker because of the weather and I had to leave on the 3rd of May. It was a decision I've always regretted, but I had no idea that forty-eight U-boats were building up ahead of us in the way that later they were shown to be.
SQUADRON LEADER OULTON
I signalled for help and began to home in other aircraft. The first to arrive was another Halifax of my own squadron and he, poor chap, the first time in his life he'd seen a U-boat, there it was, and he went in to attack and he was a bit nervous and he missed it, the first time and the second time. So he went home, no use him staying. A little while later I spotted a Sunderland and flew over to it and formated and tried to indicate to the captain that he should attack my U-boat but he wasn't interested at first; but eventually I got him to come around, he saw it, did a double take and dived on the U-boat, attacked it but not fatally. So another time passed and I saw another aeroplane, another Sunderland going by, and this was an Australian – you know how very individual they are – and this chap didn't want to get mixed up with an RAF aeroplane and certainly not with a Halifax. He wouldn't have anything to do with me but in the end I shouted and banged my microphone and pointed down and flashed on the signal lamp and crowded around him until in the end he saw the U-boat and went in to the attack.
LIEUTENANT HARTWIG LOOKS
Commanding U-264
I torpedoed two ships each with two torpedoes and one of the ships after the explosion of the torpedoes another big explosion happened on board the ship, perhaps the boiler also exploded, and in our glasses during the dark night we could observe that this ship was sinking very quickly. Then I turned around with the submarine to fire the stern torpedo but it had a malfunction and ran straight on the surface with a big, white, shining wake. As it didn't run with the exact speed this torpedo passed the target ship behind the stern and came to the second column of the convoy and hit there another steamer, but I couldn't observe any result, just the explosion of the torpedo, because at that time one of the escort vessels certainly picked me up and got contact with me so I was forced to submerge. This escort vessel depth-charged me for some minutes and then joined the convoy. I had the chance to reload two of the bow torpedoes and after about one hour I surfaced again and proceeded on the last bearing of the convoy and I was once more successful to get contact with the convoy and I did just the same as the time before. I proceeded on the port side of this convoy to a position where I had the chance to attack and once more was lucky by slipping through into the gap between two of the escort vessels and closing to the port column of the convoy and both torpedoes hit the target ships and then the escort vessel was alerted and close in about one thousand metres distance and I had to disappear. I got once more depth-charges for about one hour without hitting me but this happened just before dawn so I had no more chance to find the convoy during the darkness, and of course now we had the daylight coming up and I had to stay underwater for a longer time.
CAPTAIN RODNEY STONE
Merchant Navy, SS Gharinda, Convoy ONS-5
I was having a cup of tea because there hadn't been an alarm for over an hour – I mean it was as bad as that, if you've got a clear hour it's not too bad going. Normally when you're in command if you get an hour or two hours' consecutive sleep you're very lucky. You've got your clothes on all the time; you never take your clothes off. Well, I got up on the bridge and a ship on my port beam got it in number-five or number-four hatch and she went down very quickly indeed. I didn't see the actual explosion, I arrived a moment after it happened but I looked around first to see if anything else might be in the vicinity because that's somebody else's ship, not mine. But having looked round I looked back and saw the captain when he jumped from the bridge into the sea. There was a lifeboat near by, 1 know that. Well, I couldn't stop and pick him up and I suppose it was a matter of half a minute when I got one myself, I believe from the same submarine, which hit me forrard of the bridge in number-one hatch. It blew my derricks clean over to the starboard side – you know, those huge steel things – it blew them over as if they'd been bean sticks. I ordered abandon ship and all the crew went to stations – the boats were turned out, you keep them turned out you see – and the boats were lowered and one boat of the six was dropped bow-first because one of the sailors, his hands were probably numb with cold, let go of the rope. That didn't matter because any three boats could have taken my crew. They were all Indians except two or three Chinese and I never gave any orders in English at all. There was no sign of panic at all, I'm pleased to say.
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER ROBERT SHERWOOD
Commanding HMS Tay, took over escort of Convoy ONS-5
The crew of the Gharinda were all rescued without getting their feet wet. Her captain, a man called Rodney Stone, was sitting in the stern of his boat and I looked down from the wing of the bridge and I could see him sitting there with the biggest gun I've ever seen between his knees. I remember saying something to him about it – I trust it wasn't loaded – but he got it on board and he still has it as far as I know.
CAPTAIN STONE
I did the quickest run around the ship I've ever done in my life to make sure that nobody else was on board and then I went down the ladder to the lifeboat – I suppose I was about three or four feet above water level. I'd got all my boats in a line, which made it fairly easy for Captain Sherwood on HMS Tay, who didn't have to go from one boat to another, all dotted around the place. That was something we were taught – if you get sunk get all your boats together and keep together, because if an aeroplane looks for you it's much easier to find a bunch of boats than one solitary boat. I had one of my rifles, which I was very proud of, with me and didn't want to lose it. The only reason I had it was because I'd been cleaning it and I grabbed it as I went down those few steps. Sherwood did ask me if the damn thing was loaded and I said no it wasn't. I was picked up very unceremoniously by the scruff of the neck and thrown on the deck – the same as the rest of my crew and my officers – and I went forward and made myself known to Captain Sherwood. My only casualty was the Third Officer who went over the side into the drink – he sat on the gunwale after I'd told him not to. We pulled him out almost instantly and he couldn't speak, he was so bloody cold. So he was picked up, thrown on deck and taken straight down to the lay's engine room, otherwise he'd probably have frozen to death. I don't know the temperature of the sea water but I think it was below freezing at the time, because we'd just come out of the ice floes.
LIEUTENANT RAYMOND HART
Commanding HMS Vidette, Convoy ONS-5
I'd just been out some two thousand yards to a particular contact and given it a pattern of depth-charges [U-514, damaged]. Sweeping back to my station I was just reducing speed to eight or ten knots when I got a very firm Asdic contact about eight hundred yards from the nearest ship in the convoy. My immediate reaction was to increase speed and give it a five-charge pattern straightaway to keep the chap's head down – it would put him off his stroke if he was going to fire torpedoes – but I was short of depth-charges at that stage. Conditions were perfect, the night was relatively calm, a bit of fog, but perfect for a deliberate attack, so I decided to do a deliberate attack with our forward-throwing weapon, the Hedgehog, which as you probably know threw twenty-four bombs ahead of the ship and the bombs only exploded if they made contact with a submerged object. We had to fire by voice pipe because the bad weather which we had encountered before had upset the electrical communications. I gave the order to fire when I thought we'd approached the right spot and some literally few seconds after the bombs hit the water we all saw two vivid flashes as the two bombs hit the U-boat [U-630]. If I remember rightly one of them was on the port side and one of them just on the starboard side of my bow. This was quite an exhilarating moment and I think I remember striking the First Lieutenant on the chest and the next thing we heard was from the Asdic operator and the Asdic officer that there were noises of a submarine breaking up. Well, we'd seen a tremendous kerfuffle in the water and the bow of the ship was virtually lifted out of the water as we went over the spot where we'd hit the U-boat.
LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER SHERWOOD
Somewhere in the region of ten o'clock the attacks started and they became fast and furious. It was not an attack as we had known it in the past – escorts were reporting submarines coming in, ships being torpedoed – and this was of course absolute hell; it was the first time it had ever happened, certainly least to me. Shortly afterwards there were reports that submarines had been hit and presumably sunk. Must have been pretty late in the night when I asked Vidette to come back in, which she did, and on the way she ran into a submarine and that was another one gone. Of course this was very distressing to me because all I was doing was sitting there putting marks on a chart as the actions took place and not getting any action myself. But I suppose thereby lies the tale that the more exercise you do between ships of a group produces better answers.
SQUADRON LEADER OULTON
As soon as he appreciated the situation the Australian immediately went into the attack, and because he was going to have a very rough time with the heavy deck armament of the U-boat I flew slightly ahead of him and gave him cover with my machine guns. He went in and dropped his depth-charges perfectly, they exploded and then there was a tremendous orange and blue explosion and when that subsided there was nothing but wreckage, the U-boat had gone and a lot of survivors in the water. So I flew round and dropped out Mae Wests [life jackets] and dinghies in the hope of getting some of the survivors. I knew there was a British escort group about a hundred miles away and then my wireless operator intercepted what was clearly traffic between Brest and Junkers 88 fighters coming out to the area, so I thought we'd better go home.
LIEUTENANT LOOKS
I thought we would have a good chance for the next night because we picked up quite a lot of signals from other submarines getting contact to this convoy and so we thought that this convoy would be absolutely dead during the night. Then suddenly dense fog came up, we could only see fifty metres, not more, so it was nearly impossible to find the convoy again. I submerged for one period to listen with my hydrophone but we couldn't find the ships again, and staying on the surface during the dark time, now in dense fog of course, it was very dangerous. I was nearly rammed by one of the British escorts, it passed just five or ten metres behind the stern using his searchlight but they couldn't see anything, as we couldn't see more than just the shadow of the destroyer passing our path and then disappearing in the dense fog. I submerged because it was not so nice to be in such close contact with a destroyer and this escort vessel turned around and depth-charged me for about one or one-and-a-half hours without result. And then I thought it was useless to try to find the convoy because underwater the submarines at that time were merely sitting ducks. We were very slow using our electric motors underwater and so we had no chance to find the convoy again, and as I was running out of fuel I decided to go back to the base the next day.
COMMANDER GRETTON
Well, of course, I was delighted by the battle for ONS-5. One felt that the long training we had – we had slogged at training and really practised our manoeuvres and various dodges – had paid off and we were beginning to get on top. As a result after a very hectic week in St John's, Newfoundland, there was a lot of alcohol consumption and much writing of official reports, then we sailed for the next convoy, SC-130 [11–26 May], on top of the wave and despite the fact that we had a very heavy battle with about twenty U-boats: we sank three of them and we didn't lose a single ship. Dönitz in his book says that after SC-130 and another HX convoy which was coming across about the same time as us, he felt it was no good going on and withdrew from the North Atlantic.
SQUADRON LEADER OULTON
The RAF as a whole had nothing like enough aeroplanes and it must have been very difficult to apportion the resources. And I think that on the whole they didn't do too badly in sharing it out fairly. Surely, if there had been more aircraft, more Liberators allocated from America, then we could have improved the situation much earlier and saved the lives of a lot of seamen. But I don't think it would have brought the war to an end very much earlier. D-Day would not have been much earlier whether or not the Battle of the Atlantic had been won six months earlier or not.
ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
Another heavy disadvantage was the breaking down of submarine warfare, which happened in May 1943, which until this time had prevented the sea powers from having enough ships to carry out landing operation on the Western European continent. In consequence of the defeat of the submarine the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy on July 1944 was now a success and now we knew clearly that we had no more chance to win the war. But what could we do?
LIEUTENANT CREMER
The beginning of the end is the year 1943 when Captain Walker had trained the escort crews. After each attack you get depth-charges at least twelve or fourteen hours, and then it's a terrible stress not only for the sailors but also for the commander. Water comes into the boats, there's no electricity, there is no more hydraulic, there's only the possibility to handle the controls by hand and there's no possibility to give messages to the stern or to the bow except by voice. These twelve hours, everybody of course, after every attack, has to do a lot to repair, and this gives a little help not to think. But during the time when the destroyer is coming the propeller revolutions are changing in the frequency so you could know when perhaps two or three seconds later comes the depth-charges. This is a very bad moment for the crew and they are looking at their commander, how are his nerves and at his face, and it was also for him not too easy. It is very nice now, twenty-five years later, to talk about it but during that time it was always the death before the eyes. From thirty-six thousand sailors we have lost thirty-two thousand, so you can imagine it was a terrible sacrifice.