15

Ocean Peril

Disguised Surface Raiders — Excursion of the “Scheer” — The “Jervis Bay” Saves the Convoy — Further Depredations of the “Scheer” — A Surprise for the “Hipper” — Disproportionate Strains — The U-Boat Peril Dominates — Increasing Stranglehold upon the Northwestern Approaches — Grievous Losses — A Cruel Stroke of Fortune — The Diver’s Anxieties — Need to Shift the Control from Plymouth to Liverpool — Sharp Contraction of Imports — Losses off the Bloody Foreland — Withdrawal of the Irish Subsidies — My Telegram to the President of December 13 — A Sombre Admiralty Proposal — The Dynamite Carpet — Reinforcement and Stimulation of the Air Force Coastal Command — Eventual Success of Their Counter-Offensive.

THE destruction of the Graf Spee in the action off the Plate in December 1939, had brought to an abrupt end the first German campaign against our shipping in the wide oceans. The fighting in Norway had, as we have seen, paralysed for the time being the German Navy in home waters. What was left of it was necessarily reserved for the invasion project. Admiral Raeder, whose ideas on the conduct of the German war at sea were technically sound, had some difficulty in carrying his views in the Fuehrer’s councils. He had even at one time to resist a proposal made by the Army to disarm all his heavy ships and use their guns for long-range batteries on shore. During the summer, however, he had fitted out a number of merchant ships as disguised raiders. They were more powerfully armed, were generally faster than our armed merchant cruisers, and were provided with reconnaissance aircraft. Five ships of this type evaded our patrols and entered the Atlantic between April and June, 1940, whilst a sixth undertook the hazardous northeast passage to the Pacific along the north coasts of Russia and Siberia. Assisted by a Russian ice-breaker, she succeeded in making the passage in two months, and emerged into the Pacific through the Bering Sea in September. The object which Admiral Raeder laid down for the conduct of these ships was threefold: first, to destroy or capture enemy ships; secondly, to dislocate shipping movements; and, thirdly, to force the dispersion of British warships for escort and patrol to counter the menace. These well-conceived tactics caused us both injury and embarrassment. By the first weeks of September, these five disguised raiders were loose upon our trade routes. Two of them were working in the Atlantic, two others in the Indian Ocean, and the fifth, after laying mines off Auckland, New Zealand, was in the Pacific. Only two contacts were made with them during the whole year. On July 29, Raider E was engaged in the South Atlantic by the armed merchant-cruiser Alcantara, but escaped after an inconclusive action. In December another armed merchant cruiser, the Carnarvon Castle, attacked her again off the Plate River, but she escaped after some damage. Up till the end of September, 1940, these five raiders sank or captured thirty-six ships, amounting to 235,000 tons.

At the end of October, 1940, the pocket battleship Scheer was at last ready for service. When the invasion of England had been shelved, she left Germany on October 27, and broke out into the Atlantic through the Denmark Strait north of Iceland. She was followed a month later by the eight-inch gun cruiser, Hipper. The Scheer had orders to attack the North Atlantic convoys, from which the battleship escorts had been withdrawn to reinforce the Mediterranean. Captain Krancke believed that a homeward-bound convoy had left Halifax on October 27, and he hoped to intercept it about November 3. On the 5th his aircraft reported eight ships in the southeast, and he set off in pursuit. At 2.27 P.M. he sighted a single ship, the Mopan, which he sank by gunfire after taking on board the crew of sixty-eight. By threats he had been able to prevent any wireless reports being made by the Mopan. At 4.50 P.M., whilst thus occupied, the masts of the convoy H.X. 84, consisting of thirty-seven ships, appeared over the horizon. In the centre of the convoy was the ocean escort, the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay. Her commanding officer, Captain Fegen, R.N., realised at once that he was faced with hopeless odds. His one thought, after reporting the presence of the enemy by wireless, was to engage the pocket battleship for as long as possible and thus gain time for the convoy to disperse. Darkness approached, and there would then be a chance of many escaping. While the convoy scattered, the Jervis Bay closed his overwhelming antagonist at full speed. The Scheer opened fire at eighteen thousand yards. The shots of the old six-inch guns of the Jervis Bay fell short. The one-sided fight lasted till 6 P.M., when the Jervis Bay, heavily on fire and completely out of control, was abandoned. She finally sank about eight o’clock with the loss of over two hundred officers and men. With them perished Captain Fegen, who went down with the ship. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for his heroic conduct, which takes an honoured place in the records of the Royal Navy.

Not until the end of the fight did the Scheer pursue the convoy, but the wintry night had now closed in. The ships had scattered and she was able to overtake and sink only five before darkness fell. She could not afford, now that her position was known, to remain in the area, on which she expected that powerful British forces would soon converge. The great majority of this valuable convoy was therefore saved by the devotion of the Jervis Bay. The spirit of the merchant seamen was not unequal to that of their escort. One ship, the tanker San Demetrio, carrying seven thousand tons of petrol, was set on fire and abandoned. But the next morning part of the crew reboarded the ship, put out the fire, and then, after gallant efforts, without compasses or navigational aids, brought the ship into a British port with her precious cargo. In all, however, 47,000 tons of shipping and 206 merchant seamen were lost.

Scheer, determined to place as many miles as possible between herself and her pursuers, steamed south, where ten days later she met a German supply ship and replenished her fuel and stores. On November 24, she appeared in the West Indies, where she sank the Port Hobart, outward-bound to Curaçao, and then doubled back to the Cape Verde Islands. Her later activities were spread over the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and not till April, 1941, did she return to Kiel, after again successfully traversing the Denmark Strait. Her five months’ cruise had yielded a harvest of sixteen ships of 99,000 tons sunk or captured.

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From June onward the troop convoys (called by the code name “W.S.”)¹ sailed monthly under heavy escort round the Cape to the Middle East and India. At the same time the numerous troop convoys between ports in the Indian Ocean and the continuous stream of Canadian troops reaching this country from across the Atlantic threw the utmost strain on our naval resources. Thus we could not reinstitute the hunting groups which had scoured the seas for the Graf Spee in 1939. Our cruisers were disposed in the focal areas near the main shipping routes, and ships sailing independently had to rely on evasive routing and the vastness of the ocean.

On Christmas Day, 1940, convoy W.S. 5A, consisting of twenty troopships and supply ships for the Middle East, was approaching the Azores when it was attacked by the cruiser Hipper, which had followed the Scheer out a month later. Visibility was poor and the Hipper was unpleasantly surprised to find that the escort comprised the cruisers Berwick, Bona-venture, and Dunedin. There was a brief, sharp action between the Hipper and the Berwick, in which both ships were damaged. The Hipper made off, and in the mist succeeded in escaping to Brest, in spite of strenuous efforts by the Home Fleet and by Force “H” from Gibraltar to catch her, but only one ship of the convoy, which carried over thirty thousand men, the Empire Trooper, had to put into Gibraltar for repairs.

We could not regard the state of the outer oceans without uneasiness. We knew that disguised merchant ships in unknown numbers were preying in all the southern waters. The pocket battleship Scheer was loose and hidden. The Hipper might break out at any moment from Brest, and the two German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau must also soon be expected to play their part.

The enormous disproportion between the numbers of the raiders and the forces the Admiralty had to employ to counter them and guard the immense traffic has been explained in Volume I. The Admiralty had to be ready at many points and give protection to thousands of merchant vessels, and could give no guarantee except for troop convoys against occasional lamentable disasters.

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A far graver danger was added to these problems. The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. Invasion, I thought, even before the air battle, would fail. After the air victory it was a good battle for us. We could drown and kill this horrible foe in circumstances favourable to us, and, as he evidently realised, bad for him. It was the kind of battle which, in the cruel conditions of war, one ought to be content to fight. But now our life-line, even across the broad oceans and especially in the entrances to the island, was endangered. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.

The Admiralty, with whom I lived in the closest amity and contact, shared these fears, all the more because it was their prime responsibility to guard our shores from invasion and to keep the life-lines open to the outer world. This had always been accepted by the Navy as their ultimate, sacred, inescapable duty. So we poised and pondered together on this problem. It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achieve ments. It manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.

How much would the U-boat warfare reduce our imports and shipping? Would it ever reach the point where our life would be destroyed? Here was no field for gestures or sensations; only the slow, cold drawing of lines on charts, which showed potential strangulation. Compared with this there was no value in brave armies ready to leap upon the invader, or in a good plan for desert warfare. The high and faithful spirit of the people counted for nought in this bleak domain. Either the food, supplies, and arms from the New World and from the British Empire arrived across the oceans, or they failed. With the whole French seaboard from Dunkirk to Bordeaux in their hands, the Germans lost no time in making bases for their U-boats and co-operating aircraft in the captured territory. From July onward we were compelled to divert our shipping from the approaches south of Ireland, where of course we were not allowed to station fighter aircraft. All had to come in around Northern Ireland. Here, by the grace of God, Ulster stood a faithful sentinel. The Mersey, the Clyde were the lungs through which we breathed. On the east coast and in the English Channel small vessels continued to ply under an ever-increasing attack by air, by E-boat ² and by mines. As it was impossible to vary the east coast route, the passage of each convoy between the Forth and London became almost every day an action in itself. Few large ships were risked on the east coast and none at all in the Channel.

The losses inflicted on our merchant shipping became most grave during the twelve months from July ‘40 to July ‘41, when we could claim that the British Battle of the Atlantic was won. Far heavier losses occurred when the United States entered the war before any convoy system was set up along their eastern coast. But then we were no longer alone. The last six months of 1940 showed extremely heavy losses, modified only by the winter gales, and no great slaughter of U-boats. We gained some advantage by larger patterning of depth-charges and by evasive routing; but the invasion threat required strong concentrations in the Narrow Seas and our great volume of anti-U-boat new construction only arrived gradually. This shadow hung over the Admiralty and those who shared their knowledge. The week ending September 22 showed the highest rate of loss since the beginning of the war, and was in fact greater than any we had suffered in a similar period in 1917. Twenty-seven ships of nearly 160,000 tons were sunk, many of them in a Halifax convoy. In October, while the Scheer was also active, another Atlantic convoy was massacred by U-boats, twenty ships being sunk out of thirty-four.

As November and December drew on, the entrances and estuaries of the Mersey and the Clyde far surpassed in mortal significance all other factors in the war. We could of course at this time have descended upon de Valera’s Ireland and regained the southern ports by force of modern arms. I had always declared that nothing but self-preservation would lead me to this. But perhaps the case of self-preservation might come. Then so be it. Even this hard measure would only have given a mitigation. The only sure remedy was to secure free exit and entrance in the Mersey and the Clyde.

Every day when they met those few who knew looked at one another. One understands the diver deep below the surface of the sea, dependent from minute to minute upon his air-pipe. What would he feel if he could see a growing shoal of sharks biting at it? All the more when there was no possibility of his being hauled to the surface! For us there was no surface. The diver was forty-six millions of people in an overcrowded island, carrying on a vast business of war all over the world, anchored by nature and gravity to the bottom of the sea. What could the sharks do to his air-pipe? How could he ward them off or destroy them?

As early as the beginning of August, I had been convinced that it would be impossible to control the western approaches through the Mersey and Clyde from the Command at Plymouth.

The repeated severe losses in the northwestern approaches are most grievous, and I wish to feel assured that they are being grappled with with the same intense energy that marked the Admiralty treatment of the magnetic mine. There seems to have been a great falling-off in the control of these approaches. No doubt this is largely due to the shortage of destroyers through invasion precautions. Let me know at once the whole outfit of destroyers, corvettes, and Asdic trawlers, together with aircraft available and employed in this area. Who is in charge of their operations? Are they being controlled from Plymouth and Admiral Nasmith’s staff? Now that you have shifted the entry from the south to the north, the question arises, Is Plymouth the right place for the Command? Ought not a new Command of the first order to be created in the Clyde, or should Admiral Nasmith [C.-in-C. at Plymouth] move thither? Anyhow, we cannot go on like this. How is the southern minefield barrage getting on? Would it not be possible after a while to ring the changes upon it for a short time and bring some convoys in through the gap which has been left? This is only a passing suggestion.

There were always increased dangers to be apprehended from using only one set of approaches. These dangers cannot be surmounted unless the protective concentration is carried out with vigour superior to that which must be expected from the enemy. He will soon learn to put everything there. It is rather like the early days in the Moray Firth after the east coast minefield was laid. I am confident the Admiralty will rise to the occasion, but evidently a great new impulse is needed. Pray let me hear from you.

I encountered resistances. The Admiralty accepted my view in September of moving from Plymouth to the North, rightly substituting the Mersey for the Clyde. But several months elapsed before the necessary headquarters organisation, with its operation rooms and elaborate network of communications, could be brought into being, and in the meantime much improvisation was necessary. The new Command was entrusted to Admiral Sir Percy Noble, who, with a large and ever-growing staff, was installed at Liverpool in February, 1941. Hence-forward this became almost our most important station. The need and advantage of the change was by then recognised by all.

Towards the end of 1940 I became increasingly concerned about the ominous fall in imports. This was another aspect of the U-boat attack. Not only did we lose ships, but the precautions we took to avoid losing them impaired the whole flow of merchant traffic. The few harbours on which we could now rely became congested. The turn-round of all vessels as well as their voyages was lengthened. Imports were the final test. In the week ending June 8, during the height of the battle in France, we had brought into the country 1,201,535 tons of cargo, exclusive of oil. From this peak figure imports had declined at the end of July to less than 750,000 tons a week. Although substantial improvement was made in August, the weekly average again fell, and for the last three months of the year was little more than 800,000 tons.

The new disaster which has overtaken the Halifax convoy requires precise examination. We heard about a week ago that as many as thirteen U-boats were lying in wait on these approaches. Would it not have been well to divert the convoy to the Minches? Would this not have been even more desirable when owing to bad weather the outward-bound convoys were delayed, and consequently the escort for the inward-bound could not reach the dangerous area in time?

Pray convene a meeting to discuss the measures to be taken to reduce the burden on our shipping and finances in consequence of the heavy sinkings off the Irish coast and our inability to use the Irish ports. The following Ministers should be summoned: Trade, Shipping, Agriculture, Food, Dominions. Assuming there is agreement on principle, a general plan should be made for acting as soon as possible, together with a time-table and programme of procedure. It is not necessary to consider either the Foreign Affairs or the Defence aspect at this stage. These will have to be dealt with later. The first step essential is to have a good workable scheme, with as much in it as possible that does not hit us worse than it does the others.

I am obliged to you for your note of December 3 on steel, and I hope that you are pushing forward with the necessary measures to give effect to your proposals.

In present circumstances it seems to me intolerable that firms should hold wagons up by delaying to unload them, and action should certainly be taken to prevent this.

A sample shows that the average time taken by non-tanker cargo ships to turn round at Liverpool rose from twelve and a half days in February to fifteen days in July and nineteen and a half in October. At Bristol the increase was from nine and a half to fourteen and a half days, but at Glasgow the time remained steady at twelve days. To improve this seems one of the most important aspects of the whole situation.

I see that oil imports during September and October were only half what they were in May and June, and covered only two-thirds of our consumption. I understand that there is no shortage of tankers, that the fall is the result of the partial closing of the south and east coast to tankers, and that a large number had to be temporarily laid up in the Clyde and others held at Halifax, Nova Scotia. More recently some tankers have been sent to the south and east coasts, and oil imports increased during November.

From the reply your predecessor ³ made to my Minute of August 26, I gathered that he was satisfied with the preparations in hand for the importation of oil through the west coast ports. His expectations do not appear to have been fulfilled.

There are two policies which can be followed to meet this situation. We can either expose oil tankers to additional risk by bringing them to south and east coast ports, and thus increase our current imports; or we can continue to draw upon our stocks, relying upon being able to replenish them from the west coast ports when arrangements have been completed for the handling of the cargoes, and accepting the resulting inconvenience. I should be glad if you would consider, in consultation with the First Lord, to what extent each of these two policies should be followed.

I am sending a copy of this letter to the First Lord.

Let me have a full account of the condition of the American destroyers, showing their many defects and the little use we have been able to make of them so far. I should like to have the paper by me for consideration in the near future.

What have you done about catapulting expendable aircraft from ships in outgoing convoys? I have heard of a plan to catapult them from tankers, of which there are nearly always some in each convoy. They then attack the Focke-Wulf and land in the sea, where the pilot is picked up, and machines salved or not as convenient.

How is this plan viewed?

As we shall see in the next volume, this project was fruitful. Ships equipped for catapulting fighter aircraft to attack the Focke-Wulf were developed early in 1941.

It is said that two-fifths of the decline in the fertility of our shipping is due to the loss of time in turning round ships in British ports. Now that we are confined so largely to the Mersey and the Clyde, and must expect increasingly severe attacks upon them, it would seem that this problem constitutes the most dangerous part of the whole of our front.

Would you kindly give me a note on:

a. The facts.

b. What you are doing, and what you propose to do.

c. How you can be helped.

These [U-boat decoy ships] ⁴ have been a great disappointment so far this war. The question of their alternative uses ought to be considered by the Admiralty. I expect they have a large number of skilled ratings on board. Could I have a list of these ships, their tonnage, speeds, etc. Could they not carry troops or stores while plying on their routes?

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My indignation at the denial of the Southern Irish ports mounted under these pressures.

* * * * *

The straits to which we are being reduced by Irish action compel a reconsideration of these subsidies [to Ireland]. It can hardly be argued that we can go on paying them till our last gasp. Surely we ought to use this money to build more ships or buy more from the United States in view of the heavy sinkings off the Bloody Foreland.

Pray let me know how these subsidies could be terminated, and what retaliatory measures could be taken in the financial sphere by the Irish, observing that we are not afraid of their cutting off our food, as it would save us the enormous mass of fertilisers and feeding-stuffs we have to carry into Ireland through the De Valera-aided German blockade. Do not assemble all the pros and cons for the moment, but show what we could do financially and what would happen. I should be glad to know about this tomorrow.

I gave you and each of the C.O.S. a copy of the Irish paper. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s comments are also favourable, and there is no doubt subsidies can be withdrawn at very short notice.

We must now consider the military reaction. Suppose they invited the Germans into their ports, they would divide their people, and we should endeavour to stop the Germans. They would seek to be neutral and would bring the war upon themselves. If they withdrew the various cable and watching facilities they have, what would this amount to, observing that we could suspend all connections between England and Southern Ireland? Suppose they let German U-boats come in to refresh in west coast ports of Ireland, would this be serious, observing that U-boats have a radius of nearly thirty days, and that the limiting factor is desire of crews to get home and need of refit, rather than need of refuelling and provisioning? Pray let me have your observations on these and other points which may occur to you.

I thought it well to try to bring the President along in this policy.

North Atlantic transport remains the prime anxiety. Undoubtedly, Hitler will augment his U-boat and air attack on shipping and operate ever farther into the ocean. Now that we are denied the use of Irish ports and airfields, our difficulties strain our flotillas to the utmost limit. We have so far only been able to bring a very few of your fifty destroyers into action on account of the many defects which they naturally develop when exposed to Atlantic weather after having been laid up so long. I am arranging to have a very full technical account prepared of renovations and improvements that have to be made in the older classes of destroyers to fit them for the present task, and this may be of use to you in regard to your own older flotillas.

In the meanwhile we are so hard pressed at sea that we cannot undertake to carry any longer the 400,000 tons of feeding-stuffs and fertilisers which we have hitherto convoyed to Eire through all the attacks of the enemy. We need this tonnage for our own supply, and we do not need the food which Eire has been sending us. We must now concentrate on essentials, and the Cabinet proposes to let De Valera know that we cannot go on supplying him under present conditions. He will, of course, have plenty of food for his people, but they will not have the prosperous trading they are making now. I am sorry about this, but we must think of our own self-preservation, and use for vital purposes our own tonnage brought in through so many perils. Perhaps this may loosen things up and make him more ready to consider common interests. I should like to know quite privately what your reactions would be if and when we are forced to concentrate our own tonnage upon the supply of Great Britain. We also do not feel able in present circumstances to continue the heavy subsidies we have hitherto been paying to the Irish agricultural producers. You will realise also that our merchant seamen, as well as public opinion generally, take it much amiss that we should have to carry Irish supplies through air and U-boat attacks and subsidise them handsomely when De Valera is quite content to sit happy and see us strangle.

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One evening in December I held a meeting in the downstairs War Room with only the Admiralty and the sailors present. All the perils and difficulties, about which the company was well informed, had taken a sharper turn. My mind reverted to February and March, 1917, when the curve of U-boat sinkings had mounted so steadily against us that one wondered how many months’ more fighting the Allies had in them, in spite of all the Royal Navy could do. One cannot give a more convincing proof of the danger than the project which the Admirals put forward. We must at all costs and with overriding priorities break out to the ocean. For this purpose it was proposed to lay an underwater carpet of dynamite from the seaward end of the North Channel, which gives access to the Mersey and the Clyde, to the hundred-fathom line northwest of Ireland. A submerged mine-field must be laid three miles broad and sixty miles long from these coastal waters to the open ocean. Even if all the available explosives were monopolised for this task, without much regard to field operations or the proper rearmament of our troops, it seemed vital to make this carpet – assuming there was no other way.

Let me explain the process. Many thousands of contact mines would have to be anchored to the bottom of the sea, reaching up to within thirty-five feet of its surface. Over this pathway all the ships which fed Britain, or carried on our warfare abroad, could pass and repass without their keels striking the mines. A U-boat, however, venturing into this minefield, would soon be blown up; and after a while they would find it not good enough to come. Here was the defensive in excelsis. Anyhow, it was better than nothing. It was the last resort. Provisional approval and directions for detailed proposals to be presented were given on this night. Such a policy meant that the diver would in future be thinking about nothing but his air-pipe. But he had other work to do.

At the same time, however, we gave orders to the R.A.F. Coastal Command to dominate the outlets from the Mersey and Clyde and around Northern Ireland. Nothing must be spared from this task. It had supreme priority. The bombing of Germany took second place. All suitable machines, pilots, and material must be concentrated upon our counter-offensive, by fighters against the enemy bombers, and surface craft assisted by bombers against the U-boats in these narrow vital waters. Many other important projects were brushed aside, delayed, or mauled. At all costs one must breathe.

We shall see the extent to which this counter-offensive by the Navy and by Coastal Command succeeded during the next few months; how we became the masters of the outlets; how the Heinkel 111’s were shot down by our fighters, and the U-boats choked in the very seas in which they sought to choke us. Suffice it here to say that the success of Coastal Command overtook the preparations for the dynamite carpet. Before this ever made any appreciable inroad upon our war economy the morbid defensive thoughts and projects faded away, and once again with shining weapons we swept the approaches to the isle.