CHAPTER 4
The Battle of the Atlantic, so fundamental to eventual Allied success, rolled on continuously from 1939 to 1945 but, for convenience, is divided here into three periods. The first, during the Phoney War, was characterised by failed strategies and mishaps on both sides. The Allies counted on a naval blockade to exercise the suffocating effect it had in 1914–18, although with the Soviet Union now supplying Nazi Germany with everything it needed, blockade could not be effective. The Germans calculated that the surface raiders that had put to sea before the outbreak of war would cause disproportionate disruption to British trade, but they were rapidly eliminated. U-boats scored early successes but the swift introduction of convoys limited the damage and the bulk of German anti-shipping activity was devoted to mine-laying off British ports by surface ships, submarines and aircraft. A counter to the magnetic mine (degaussing) was soon developed and Allied shipping also suffered less than it might because of a design flaw in the magnetic pistols on German torpedoes. Losses during the first four months were still significant: 323 ships, nearly a million tons. The Admiralty under Winston Churchill, meanwhile, used submarine hunting groups formed around aircraft carriers to search for U-boat needles in the immense haystack of the Atlantic instead of providing close escort for the convoys. The folly of such tactics was promptly underlined by the loss on 17 September of the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous to U-29. On 14 October, Günther Prien in U-46 penetrated the Royal Navy's principal base at Scapa Plow and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak. Following a lull during the extremely cold winter of 1940–41,when many U-boats were frozen into their Baltic bases, the entire Kriegsmarine was committed to the invasion of Norway and suffered devastating losses. However, the capture of the French Atlantic ports a month later freed the U-boat arm from the shackles imposed by Britain's geographical position across its lines of access to the Atlantic, and more than doubled its effective fighting power.
ADMIRAL KARL DÖNITZ
Commander U-boats 1939–43
In October 1918 I was captain of a submarine and in the Mediterranean, near Malta, in a dark night I met a British convoy with schooners and destroyers and I attacked and sank a ship. But after this I had to dive and then by a fault in the construction my boat was sinking and the depth of the water, the water was three or four thousand metres deep. I made it possible to come to the surface again, but then I had to go out of the boat with the whole crew. A British destroyer stopped and we came on board. I had the impression that there was a difference in our treatment because I thought that the captain of the destroyer had the feeling 'They are warriors and they had their orders like we too'. When I came home it was clear to me that it was only by chance in that light to find this British convoy, but the chance would have been very much greater if they would not have been only one submarine but a lot of submarines – and there were a lot of ships. And that is why I developed the idea to wolf-pack, to put the submarines together in all the years from 1918 until in 1935 we had the first submarines again.
COMMANDER PETER GRETTON
Royal Navy, Escort Group Commander 1942–43
The British Army is always accused of fighting a new war with the lessons of the past. Well, no one can accuse the Royal Navy of doing this. In 1919 we promptly forgot all the lessons of the last war, particularly the most unpleasant ones, and as a result the crisis of the spring of 1917, when the German U-boat attack was sinking hundreds and thousands of tons of Allied shipping every month, was completely forgotten. As a result very few preparations were made for protection of shipping in a new war. Some were made: the sonar-projection set Asdic was making considerable progress, but unfortunately far too optimistic claims were made for it and as a result we did not build nearly enough escort ships, and the Air Force didn't get enough anti-submarine aircraft for the job needed.
VERNON MINER
Merchant seaman
We'd come through a long period of depression and the ships were old; they hadn't been replaced even though there were tramp-ship subsidies in the Thirties. The wages of the seamen had depreciated since the end of the First World War and the conditions would take a long time to alter, to raise up any standard at all. The men that were sailing were basically seamen and this was their career from which they'd started out, and having come through this period of depression where they were so long unemployed that they never dared leave their ship. They were only too glad of the permanency of employment, the fact that all ships of whatever type were going to be running.
COMMANDER GRETTON
Despite the fact that the lessons had shown that air cover had a magical effect on convoy protection, and stopped attacks altogether, Coastal Command started the war with far too few aircraft and its main role was looking for surface ships instead of the anti-submarine role. What's more, cooperation between the Navy and Air Force was then very bad indeed, mainly due to stupid quarrels among senior officers in Whitehall.
VERNON MINER
If anybody decided they wouldn't sail then they were subject to the Merchant Shipping Act, which has now been changed – in 1971 – and could have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment not exceeding three months. I never thought we were paid commensurate with the risks we ran. The normal comparison that seamen made during the war of their wage for the hours they worked was with the ammunition workers who, we heard at the time, were making a fabulous amount of money for no more risk than a housewife left at home.
SEAMAN EDWARD BUTLER
Escort-ship crewman
We used to read in the papers about bombing Germany and coming back and often the lads would say, 'Well, I wouldn't mind just going over there for a couple of hours and coming back for a good night's kip.' When you're tossing your guts out on the deck for nearly three weeks at a time, there and back three weeks, a total of six weeks, it's a pretty tough life.
ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
Britain's sea trade across the Atlantic was of vital importance to her: British sea power must be able to control the trading routes and most of her food and raw materials and her armaments comes across the Atlantic. The most important strategic object of an enemy of England is to attack these routes, that is why in a war Germany had to send her warships into the Atlantic, and they had to be able to stay for a large enough time in the Atlantic in order to fight against the ships on the British sea routes.
VERNON MINER
One ship I sailed on broke down and we went to Cardiff for repairs, and leaving Cardiff she broke down and was repaired at Milford Haven. Eventually left in convoy, broke down off Anglesey and went to Birkenhead for repairs, left Birkenhead, anchored in the Mersey, broke down there – couldn't raise the anchor. Left with a convoy, too slow to maintain a convoy speed of seven knots. The steering gear bust in a gale, the chain steering gear, the spring buffers parted, it was a common occurrence with that kind of steering gear. I think everything that could have gone wrong with that ship went wrong, until a couple of U-boats sunk it for us.
ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
If from the point of view of the geographical situation of Germany is considered, then it is easy to see how unfavourable it was for the German surface warships to perform this task – they had to go on the surface from the distant German base, the long way through the North Sea until they could go north of [the] Shetland Islands, westward into the Atlantic Ocean.
CAPTAIN GILBERT ROBERTS
Director, Tactical Unit, Western Approaches, Liverpool
History books will tell you that at the end of the first war aircraft did operate alongside of, or with, the convoys and that from that moment on there was a very significant drop in the sinking of merchant ships. But this wasn't done in the first part of the second war and aircraft seemed to be going out into the Atlantic with their own plans and told to work by themselves.
EDWARD BUTLER
We always seemed to get the 'Rear End Charlie' of a convoy, the rear position, and we were always turning round to go and investigate why a ship was falling behind and this again entailed turning around in heavy seas, and the amount of crockery that was broken and the gear that swirled around, tables overturning if they weren't secured properly. There was always something that went wrong if you turned around. They tried to warn you, probably said, 'We're turning 180 degrees in five minutes' time', then the turn, and you'd get a full wave and everything would go over – pots, pans and all your cutlery would be smashed – and next morning you'd be fighting for a cup to have a cup of tea.
PILOT OFFICER WILFRID OULTON
Coastal Command
Throughout the Twenties and Thirties the techniques of over-water flying and navigation, and all the necessary techniques for Coastal Command were certainly being practised. But only in very, very small numbers and generally speaking they were steered towards cooperation with the Navy and not in the anti-submarine field, which was not part of the requirement laid on Coastal Command. You cannot switch from one role to another at five minutes' notice: it needs the development of equipment, the development of training methods, the development of tactics and it takes time to do all these things. So at the beginning of the war Coastal Command had a small number of very, very competent people and an enormous dilution of only partially trained people. So naturally the overall result to begin with was not what one could hope for.
VERNON MINER
I've no idea what the government paid for the tramp steamers. I should imagine they probably would have paid any price because we needed the ships, but I would suggest that they paid a lot more than the actual scrap value of the ships. I've no doubt that some of the ship owners were unscrupulous. Freight rates rose very rapidly because of the possibility of loss, but I'm afraid the increase in freights did not come the way of the seamen in the way of benefits and better accommodation. There's many millionaires who are around today who made their money through shipping in either one or both the world wars through the very high insurance on the ships because of the freight rates being raised and because of the possible loss of the ship, and through not paying sufficient attention to the upkeep of the ships, to the maintenance.
ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
Firstly, in these years before 1939 the U-boat was very less suited for the underwater torpedo attack. We also knew that the British had an invention, the Asdic, with which they could hear underwater submarine already by a distance of some thousand metres in every case. It was true that this instrument picked up all the other noises, for instance the sea waves and the noise of their own ships. This made it difficult to find the noises of German submarines so the British Asdic had its advantage but did not make an underwater attack by a U-boat impossible in every case. Secondly, the German U-boats in 1939 had a higher surface speed than they had in the First World War; that is why they were on the surface more manoeuvrable than before, and that is why they were very appropriate for surface torpedo attack at night. The U-boat had only a small silhouette consisting only of the conning-tower and that is why the submarine could only be seen with difficulty during a night attack. Gradual development in communications meant the submarines were no longer obliged to fight alone, but they could attack together. This enabled us to develop the wolf-pack tactics which became very useful against the British convoys.
COMMANDER GRETTON
After a tremendous amount of discussion between the wars it was eventually agreed that convoys would be the system used for trade protection. But unfortunately the ships set aside for trade-protection duties, instead of being used to escort the convoys, were organised into hunting groups and during the first few months of the war they spent a lot of useless time steaming many miles searching for U-boats without any success whatever.
VERNON MINER
The first time I was under attack I was on the wheel, I was steering the ship when the lookout reported that there was a U-boat on the starboard beam. The Chief Officer who was in charge of the watch ordered me to alter course to bring the U-boat astern of us. My feeling was one of excitement. This is it, I'm going to come home covered with glory – decorated – I'll strangle these submarines with my bare hands. Then the firing started and the first shell that hit the ship, the ship shuddered. There was a loud crack from it rather than a bang. There's a feeling that God is on your side but he certainly wasn't, and this is the period when it's frightening, the moment of truth. The order to abandon ship eventually comes and you look down on that grey North Atlantic, which doesn't look all that bad from the deck of a ship about twenty feet above the water but down at lifeboat level it looks rather ominous, and that's frightening also.
WILLIAM CLARK
Merchant seaman
When I saw all the other ships of the convoy going past and leaving us I did have a sickening feeling that this was going to be for a long time, because it was what I had done with other ships, like known they were torpedoed and we'd gone on, and I hadn't heard whether they'd been picked up. They always did say that there was a sort of straggler in the convoy that was picking these chaps up so I did hope that this was going to happen to us. But I didn't feel so good when I saw them all passing. Anyway, after a few hours HMS Sunflower arrived on the scene and picked us up. It was quite exciting then getting on board and they made us as comfortable as they could because it was very crowded with other survivors and immediately you went into action. You was on deck at the time and before you could say very much you sighted this U-boat and attempted to ram it. Everybody thought we'd cut it in half. I was very surprised years later to find that it had survived. There was so much action during the few days I was on the Sunflower, depth-charges would make it ring like a bell, you know, and it was such a fragile ship it just seemed it couldn't take all that punishment. I had a really good view from the funnel where I took up my living space because I didn't want to be shut down below when the action started and I took to living by the funnel – warm, and you could move around and see what action was going on.
CAPTAIN THOMAS D FINCH
Merchant Navy, SS San Emiliano*18
I had plenty of water, plenty of food so I wasn't worried on that score, but I had in the boat some injured people and no medical supplies. After a short while, to my horror, the first one to die was the young First Steward – he was only seventeen. He hadn't complained at all during the night of pain or anything. I went to him, took the blanket from him and his whole stomach had been ripped away, his intestines were hanging out. We had to bury him so we wrapped him in the blanket and slid him over the side and continued on our way. It was a terrible thing to have to do that. The next one to go was not long afterwards – he was in a terrible state, I've never seen anything like it as far as injuries. We buried him and carried on a wee bit and about ten o'clock we heard some sounds of an aircraft and sure enough one appeared very low and flew over us two or three times and opened the bomb doors and was trying to signal to us but we couldn't make out what he meant. I tried to signal back to him that I wanted medical supplies, pointing to the other injured people that were lying in the boat wrapped up, I wanted help for them, and he waved his hand and seemed to understand and came back later and dropped a wooden cask of water and as soon as it hit the sea it burst so we signalled to him that was no use and off he went again. We did use the parachute: we cut strips up because most of us were naked, we just had wisps of clothing left on, and we used the parachute cloth to soak in the sea water and bind these burns up to keep them cool and moist, and to make a shelter over the wounded just to keep the sun from them. Just about dusk he appeared again and this time he dropped what seemed to us a milk can and this had some food and some cigarettes but no medical supplies. But there was a message to say help was coming so we thought let's hope it does. We continued on our way and shortly after the Second Officer died, this must have been about eleven o'clock and we put him over the side the same as the others. By this time it was a boat-load of misery, pain and death. The young Senior Apprentice was terribly burned and he was singing away but I think this was more or less in an unconscious sort of way. He was singing with the hope of raising the morale of the people but he died about midday.
LIEUTENANT RAYMOND HART
Commanding destroyer HMS Vidette
The ship I was commanding was designed for the North Sea and for short World War One sorties by the Grand Fleet. She was certainly not designed for the Atlantic weather. One had to handle her very carefully in bad weather – it was extremely worrying with very heavy seas and I've known occasions where one literally had not been able to turn the ship around when she had very little fuel, with a very small metacentric height. On one occasion I found myself five miles from the convoy in the morning as I didn't dare risk turning round at night for fear of literally broaching to. The other anxiety in a ship that age was the metal fatigue we suffered. Frequently the plates used to split a little – it wasn't particularly dangerous but on one occasion I had only forty tons of usable fuel because salt water got into the fuel tanks.
SEAMAN BUTLER
One particular instance I remember when we went over during the winter and the spray and the seas were coming over and it was freezing – the ice was freezing on everything on the upper deck and the captain had to turn all hands to chip it off because it was fast becoming over top weight and there was a very severe danger of the ship capsizing. So we had to work during the night, in complete darkness as well, to get the ice off.
COMMANDER GRETTON
Convoy defence is not a very glamorous affair and between the wars, I think rather naturally, the Navy were inclined to concentrate on more glamorous activities like great mass torpedo attacks and that sort of thing. All the information about the lessons of World War One were available and for those who bothered to read them the lessons were there. But I'm afraid no one bothered and as a result trade defence as a whole was very badly neglected. It's easy to say this now, but I was as bad as anyone else at the time and I speak entirely in the light of hindsight.
ADMIRAL DÖNITZ
As the war against England had come contrary to the wishes of our political leaders, now we had to do everything to create our missing naval armament for a sea war against England. When the war began we only had twenty-six submarines which were able to go far into the Atlantic Ocean, of these boats only one-third on average would be operating in the Atlantic, because the other boats would be sailing to or from port or at home being repaired. With this small number any decisive success was not possible. That's why it was necessary for the building of submarines to get first place in the German armament plan. But this was not done in spite of all the requests made by Admiral Raeder, Chief of the German Navy. So in February 1941 we still only had twenty-two submarines which could go in to the Atlantic Ocean because our construction of new U-boats had not even replaced the losses we suffered in the war so far.
PILOT OFFICER OULTON
Coastal Command stations were sited on the outer edges of the land – in Cornwall, in Iceland, on little islands off Scotland, in Northern Ireland – and they were all in remote cow pastures with a village alongside, a little cluster of Nissen huts, a runway which was often not adequate and not very good support facilities. So the crews were living under poorish conditions despite the efforts of the administrative staff and operating without the aids which today you would expect aviation to have. So the problems of simply getting to the patrol area and back again, never mind any interference with the enemy, were daunting and really a triumph every time a sortie was accomplished. And particularly for young and inexperienced aircrew this was really a very severe task indeed. As time went on they became more skilful and better equipment was brought in. Navigation aids were introduced – the introduction of radar helped a great deal – and with improved training it took about three years to reach a reasonable standard of performance.
LIEUTENANT HART
I think that if the weather was reasonably good one didn't have very much on one's mind except to ensure that the crew were as well looked after as possible. We exercised action stations and our communications were good, and the next anxiety was when one had to refuel at sea. This was an art we hadn't developed very seriously before the war. I think it was something we neglected and it was quite an operation and quite an evolution. This certainly worried me very considerably: if one hadn't got fuel one would just have got stuck in the Atlantic and have to be towed home, so this was an operation we began to worry about twenty-four hours before it happened.
COMMANDER GRETTON
It took nearly two years before we had anything like the right sort of cooperation between ships and aircraft, which was inexcusable. It was a disgrace and a tragedy that so many ships were sunk and so many lives were lost unnecessarily during those first few years.
CAPTAIN WILLIAM EYTON-JONES
Merchant Navy, SS Ben Vrachie
I don't think the Merchant Navy's role was recognised – it's a silent service. We lost one out of every three men and without them this nation wouldn't have survived more than three or four months. They did a wonderful job of work and I can't praise them highly enough, wonderful people. Sometime after, on another ship I was rejoined by the old boatswain and other men from the lifeboat and I asked, 'How was it you all came back with me, you men from the lifeboat?' He said, 'Captain, if you hadn't done right we wouldn't be here.' It shows you how these men relied on you and trusted you; it was a great thing to think about.