The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  The battle of the Atlantic was a grim affair. ‘Seas the size of houses would come from every side,’ recalled one who fought in it, ‘so that on duty or off one could rarely rest, was always bracing the body, bending body and knees like some frozen skier to meet the motions of the ship.’26 Able Seaman Edward Butler, who served on an Atlantic convoy escort ship, told of how cold the crossings could get, when the ice was ‘freezing everything on the upper deck and the captain had to turn all hands to chip it off because it was 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, to get the ice off.’27 The best fictional account of the battle is Nicholas Monsarrat’s 1951 autobiographical novel The Cruel Sea, which was later made into a fine movie starring Jack Hawkins and Denholm Elliott. The story of the 1,000-ton, 88-man corvette HMS Compass Rose, from her commissioning in 1940 to her torpedoing in 1942, and then of the frigate HMS Saltash, the book covers the U-boat war, the Murmansk convoys and D-Day. Monsarrat particularly expresses his unstinting admiration of the men of the merchant marine who sailed in oil-tankers: ‘They lived, for an entire voyage of three to four weeks, as a man living on top of a keg of gunpowder: the stuff they carried – the life-blood of the whole war – was the most treacherous cargo of all; a single torpedo, a single small bomb, even a stray shot from a machine-gun, could transfer their ship into a torch.’28 The logistics of organizing a convoy were also well described; at any one time there might be more than 500 British ships at sea in a dozen or so convoys, and each ship:

  would have to be manned, and loaded at a prescribed date, railage and docking facilities notwithstanding… their masters would have to attend sailing conferences for last-minute orders: they would have to rendezvous at a set time and place, with pilots made available for them: and their readiness for sea would have to coincide with an escort group to accompany them, which itself needed the same preparation and the same careful routing. Dock space had to be waiting for them, and men to load and unload: a hundred factories had to meet a fixed dispatch-date on their account: a railway shunter falling asleep at Birmingham or Clapham could spoil the whole thing, a third mate getting drunk on Tuesday instead of Monday could wreck a dozen carefully laid plans, a single air raid out of the hundreds that had harassed the harbours of Britain could halve a convoy and make it not worth the trouble of sending it over the Atlantic.29

  A major problem with British strategy at the start of the war was that too much attention was paid to taking the offensive against the U-boat threat, and not enough to protecting convoys, which the Great War had proved was the best way of keeping the sea-lanes open. ‘Instead of employing the maximum number of vessels in the escort role,’ Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Gretton believed, the Royal Navy ‘wasted a great deal of energy in hunting for submarines in the open ocean’.30 When the captain of the unarmoured, converted passenger liner HMS Jervis Bay, Edward Fogarty Fegen, bravely but suicidally attacked the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer in November 1940, thereby allowing convoy HX-84 to scatter in a smokescreen at dusk, she had been the only escort vessel accompanying thirty-seven merchantmen. (Scheer nonetheless sank five of them. Fegen won a posthumous Victoria Cross.)

  It was not until May 1941 that convoys were escorted all the way across the Atlantic, and very often they were woefully under-protected even then. Although Liberator bombers from Britain had the range to search the Eastern Atlantic for enemy submarines on the surface, and then attack them before they could dive to safety, Bomber Command would release only six squadrons to Coastal Command, which was not enough to make a serious difference. Air cover was generally scanty, and completely non-existent in the mid-Atlantic ‘Ocean Gap’, the area several hundred miles wide which planes could not reach from Iceland, Britain or Canada. (The Gap was closed in 1943 by the introduction of Very Long Range Liberators.) RAF Coastal Command entered the war badly under-equipped, under-staffed and under-trained, considering that its main role was to search for surface ships rather than submarines. There was also an absurd rivalry between the Admiralty and the Air Ministry that stymied efficiency in the opening stages. The Americans took even longer to institute a proper convoy system. On the eastern seaboard of the United States, failure to douse lights in the ports, and the relocation of much of the US Navy to the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, led to the sinking of no fewer than 485 ships totalling 2.5 million tons by August 1942.31

  The battle of the Atlantic provided some nerve-wracking moments for British strategists: in March 1941 alone, U-boats sank forty-one ships. Yet that same month three of Dönitz’s best U-boat captains were neutralized. Germany’s top ace Otto Kretschmer – who had sunk forty-six ships totalling 273,000 tons – was captured after his U-99 was depth-charged and forced to the surface. Günther Prien, who had torpedoed the British battleship Royal Oak in Scapa Flow in October 1939, was killed when his U-47 was sunk by the destroyer HMS Wolverine. Finally Joachim Schepke was killed in an attack by an escort group commander, Captain Donald MacIntyre. An even greater blow fell that month when – in an escalation of ‘neutral’ America’s aggression – the United States announced that the waters between Canada and Iceland would thenceforth be protected by her Navy, thus allowing the Royal Navy to concentrate on protecting convoys. In September 1941, Roosevelt gave American ships permission to fire on German submarines wherever they saw them. ‘So far as the Atlantic is concerned,’ the American Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark noted privately of the shooting war, ‘we are all but, if not actually, in it.’

  After Enigma had been cracked in April 1941, between July and December 1941 Allied convoys were re-routed so expertly that not one was intercepted in the North Atlantic.32 Although there were still significant losses – over 720,000 tons were sunk in that period – experts calculate that more than 1.6 million tons were saved. Of course, if the Germans had started the war with enough U-boats, thereby closing the gaps in the ocean between them, no amount of re-routing could have saved the convoys. In May 1941 Churchill warned Roosevelt that if 4.5 million tons of shipping were lost during the next year, with the USA building 3.5 million and Britain 1 million, they would be ‘just marking time and swimming level with the bank against the stream’.33 Yet that month was the first that a west–east convoy was given escorts that sailed the whole way across the Atlantic with them. By September 1941, however, Hitler’s belated submarine-building programme had started to bear fruit, and Dönitz now had no fewer than 150 U-boats in commission, with which he would try to wrest victory in the battle of the Atlantic.

  When the war broke out, both the British and German Admiralties assumed that the great German surface ships would be crucial in deciding whether Britain survived or starved. It was thought by London and Berlin that if these capital ships could dominate the Ocean Gap, the New World would be incapable, to adopt Churchill’s phrase in his ‘fight on the beaches’ speech, of stepping ‘forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old’. If, on the other hand, the Royal Navy and its Canadian and later American counterparts could sink these huge vessels, the danger was thought to be far less great. On the outbreak of war Graf Spee and Deutschland were already stationed to attack the trade routes, and Scharnhorst and Gneisenau put to sea in November 1939.

  As recounted in Chapter 1, the forced scuttling of Graf Spee outside Montevideo harbour on 17 December 1939, the victim of a brave naval action at the battle of the River Plate but also a brilliant British deception operation, dented the myth of invincibility that had begun to surround the big German raiders. Similarly, although it was successful the German invasion of Norway in April 1940 cost the German Navy dear – almost half its entire destroyer force. But the fall of France in June allowed the Kriegsmarine to establish itself right along France’s Atlantic seaboard, with major bases at Lorient, Brest, La Rochelle and Saint-Nazaire. October 1940 saw Admiral Scheer break into the Atlantic Ocean, followed two months later by the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. The British Admiralty seemed incapable
of preventing German raiders from sailing through the Denmark Straits between Greenland and Iceland. ‘For the first time in our history,’ Vice-Admiral Günther Lütjens told the crews of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in January 1941, as they passed through the Faeroes–Iceland gap, ‘German battleships have today succeeded in breaking through the British blockade. We shall now go forward to success.’34 He was right in the short term: in two months the two ships together sank 116,000 tons of Allied shipping.

  Yet both Admiralties were wrong in assuming that the big battleships would be decisive. In fact, it very soon became clear that the U-boats posed the primary threat, especially during what their crews were later to dub ‘the happy times’ of 1939–41. U-boats were often faster than their prey, averaging 17 knots on the surface, where they often sailed at night (they managed only 3 knots when submerged). Long after the war, Dönitz enumerated the advantages of the U-boat, which were more manoeuvrable than their Great War predecessors and:

  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 that became very useful against the convoys.35

  After April 1941 Dönitz pioneered Rudeltaktik (herd tactics), by which the first U-boat to spot a convoy shadowed it while sending out signals to headquarters and other U-boats in the area, prior to a concerted night-time, surface, close-range torpedo attack by them all, acting as a wolf-pack. Monsarrat described how the U-boats took the upper hand in 1941:

  The enemy was planning as well as multiplying. At last, the U-boats were co-ordinating their attack: they now hunted in packs, six or seven in a group, quartering a huge area of the convoy route and summoning their full strength as soon as a contact was obtained. They had the use of French, Norwegian and Baltic ports, fully equipped for shelter and maintenance: they had long-range aircraft to spot and identify for them, they had numbers, they had training, they had better weapons, they had the spur of success.36

  By March 1941 the Allies had lost over 350,000 tons of shipping in the Atlantic, but the following month this rose to 700,000 tons. Since in 1939 Britain’s entire merchant marine totalled a gross tonnage of 17.5 million, the largest in the world, the danger to her from losing more than 1 million tons in two months was obvious.37 Setting up the Battle of the Atlantic Committee on 6 March 1941 to co-ordinate ministers, civil servants and the services, Churchill announced that ‘the Battle of the Atlantic has begun… We must take the offensive against the U-boat and the Focke-Wulf wherever we can and whenever we can. The U-boat at sea must be hunted, the U-boat in the building yard or in the dock must be bombed.’38

  Yet it was the Germans who took the initiative, unleashing the battleship Bismarck and the new heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic shipping lanes, in the hope of asphyxiating Britain and forcing her to sue for peace. Bismarck had been launched in Hamburg by the Iron Chancellor’s granddaughter, Dorothea von Löwenfeld, on 14 February 1939, and Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Bormann, Keitel and of course Raeder were all present; the Führer gave a speech. The ship was one-sixth of a mile long, recalled the British writer Ludovic Kennedy, who was a junior reserve lieutenant when he took part in the operation to try to sink her,

  120 feet wide, designed to carry eight 15″ guns and six aircraft, with 13″ armour made of specially hardened Wotan steel on her turrets and sides. Listed as 35,000 tons to comply with the London Treaty, she would in fact be 42,000 tons standard displacement and over 50,000 tons fully laden. There had never been a warship like her: she symbolized not only a resurgent Navy but the whole resurgent German nation… Warships combine uniquely grace and power, and Bismarck, massive and elegant, with the high flare of her bows and majestic sweep of her lines, the symmetry of her turrets, the rakish cowling of her funnel, her ease and arrogance in the water, was then the most graceful, most powerful warship yet built. No German saw her without pride, no neutral or enemy without admiration.39

  Furthermore she had twelve boilers, her four gun turrets each weighed 1,000 tons – they were nicknamed Anton, Bruno, Caesar and Dora – she could sail at 29 knots and her crew numbered 2,065. Prinz Eugen, meanwhile, displaced 14,000 tons, had eight 8-inch guns and a speed of 32 knots.

  These two warships left port at Gotenhafen (present-day Gdynia) at 21.30 hours on Sunday, 18 May 1941 in Operation Rheinübung (Rhine Exercise), a break for the Atlantic. Because several Polish labourers had been killed by oil fumes while cleaning her tanks, Bismarck sailed 200 tons of fuel short, something which her captain, Ernst Lindemann, was later bitterly to regret. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen skirted as far as possible away from the major British naval base of Scapa Flow and sailed through the Denmark Straits, where on the afternoon of Friday, 23 May they were shadowed with radar by the Royal Navy heavy cruisers HMS Norfolk and HMS Suffolk, until HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Hood were able to intercept them at dawn the next day. ‘If any one ship could be said to have been the embodiment of British sea-power and the British Empire between the wars,’ wrote Kennedy, ‘it was “The mighty Hood”, as Britain and the Navy called her.’ Built on Clydeside in 1916, she was, at 860 feet, 38 feet longer even than the Bismarck. Like Bismarck she had eight 15-inch guns in four massive turrets. With her maximum speed of 32 knots – she was the fastest ship of her size afloat – a ton of oil only got her half a mile. She had everything except upper-deck armour, because she had been built just before the battle of Jutland, when three British battle cruisers had been lost from shells falling vertically through their decks. Despite this, she had not been reconditioned.

  When the Hood and Prince of Wales exchanged fire, at a range of 13 miles, with Bismarck and Prinz Eugen at 06.00 on Saturday, 24 May 1941, Norfolk and Suffolk were not close enough to provide support. In his fine memoir Pursuit: The Sinking of the Bismarck, Kennedy described how ‘For a moment the world stood still, then the guns spoke with their terrible great roar, the blast almost knocked one senseless, thick clouds of cordite smoke, black and bitter-smelling, clutched at the throat, blinded the vision, and four shells weighing a ton apiece went rocketing out of the muzzles at over 1,600 miles per hour.’40

  Without the Norfolk and Suffolk to harry Bismarck from the rear, there was nothing to draw her fire from Hood, which was also taking fire from Prinz Eugen, and because the two German ships had swapped places since the last visual report, Hood was firing at the wrong target – Prinz Eugen rather than Bismarck – as the two looked alike at that distance despite their very different displacements.41 The Germans also had the weather gauge working in their favour, so that the British range-finders on the forward turrets were drenched with spray and other, less accurate instruments in the control tower had to be used instead. Furthermore, only the front turrets could be engaged as the British ships sailed towards the Germans, whereas their antagonists were able to deploy every high-calibre weapon they had.

  Nonetheless, what happened next could not have been avoided whichever range-finders were used, whatever Norfolk and Suffolk had done, and however many guns Hood had managed to deploy. Only a thorough re-armouring of Hood’s upper deck in the inter-war years could have saved her. For a shell from Bismarck, in Kennedy’s phrase,

  came plunging down like a rocket, hit the old ship fair and square between centre and stern, sliced its way through steel and wood, pierced the deck that should have been strengthened but never was, penetrated the ship’s vitals deep below the water-line, exploded, touched off the 4″ magazine which in turn touched off the after 15″ magazine. Before the eyes of the horrified British and incredulous Germans a huge column of flame leapt up from Hood’s centre.42

  No one who witnessed that flame ever forgot it, as Hood exploded and then sank, with only three survivors out of a crew of over 1,400. Captain John Leach of the Prince of Wales continued firing at Bismarck,
hitting her twice but only on the seventh salvo, yet once he was himself hit by German 5- and 8-inch shells, he was forced to escape under smoke cover. In an engagement lasting only twenty minutes, the Germans had sunk the maritime pride of the British Empire. Thereafter, their luck changed. One of the two 14-inch shells that the Prince of Wales landed on Bismarck had ruptured her fuel tanks, and she started leaking oil, which, because she had also sailed under-oiled and had not been resupplied when she might have been, meant that her skipper had to try to reach her supply ships and, he hoped, lead his antagonists into a wolf-pack.43 Meanwhile, Prinz Eugen broke off westwards, covered by an attack by Bismarck on Norfolk and Suffolk.

  At sunset on 24 May, nine Fairey Swordfish torpedo-bombers from the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious braved Bismarck’s sixty-eight anti-aircraft guns and scored a hit with their 18-inch torpedoes. With the battleship still leaking oil steadily, it changed course for Brest. Then Enigma made its vital contribution, when a senior Luftwaffe officer in Athens using the Lufwaffe Enigma code enquired of his son serving in Bismarck where he was headed, and received the reply ‘Brest.’ Had it not been for Bismarck breaking radio silence in a code that Bletchley had cracked, she might have reached the port. She almost escaped anyway after her bearings were incorrectly plotted, but at 10.30 on 26 May she was spotted by a US Navy patrol pilot called Leonard Smith in a Consolidated Catalina flying-boat, part of RAF Coastal Command (and seven months before America entered the war).44