Black May

by Michael Gannon

  34. NARA, Action Report, Box 855, Serial 026, USS Bogue (CVE-9), Report of Operations of Hunter-Killer Group built around U.S.S. Bogue furnishing air cover for Convoy ON-184 from Iceland area to Argentia area; from Commander, Sixth Escort Group, to Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches, 29 May, p. 3.

  35. Hezlet, Electronics, p. 189.

  36. Hessler, U-Boat War, Vol. II, p. 75; Charles M. Sternhell and Alan M. Thorndike, Antisubmarine Warfare in World War II, Report No. 51 of the Operations Evaluation Group (Washington, D.C.: Navy Department, 1946), p. 41; Syrett, Defeat of the German U-Boats, p. 12.

  37. PRO, ADM 237/113, Convoy ONS.5, Appendix G, HF/DF Report, H.M.S. Duncan 24/4/43–515/43; HF/DF Report H.M.S. Tay, 24/4/43–7/5/43.

  38. Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Gretton, K.C.B., D.S.O., O.B.E., D.S.C., Convoy Escort Commander (London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1964), p. 157.

  39. NARA, KTB-BdU, “Final Survey of Convoy No. 41 [SC.130],” 20 May 1943.

  40. Rohwer, Convoy Battles, p. 198.

  41. Ibid., pp. 49, 196–197. Rohwer’s findings, based on studies of sea and air escort action reports, conflict with those represented in Table 10.4, p. 239 in Hackmann, Seek & Strike, where reliance is on the Admiralty’s Monthly Anti-Submarine Reports.

  42. Robert Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), chap. 4, “A Line in the Ether,” pp. 77–97.

  43. P. M. S. Blackett, Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), p. 221.

  44. James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists Against Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), p. 142. Besides the magnetron, the Tizard mission brought new weapons hardware and specifications; see Ronald W. Clark, The Rise of the Boffins (London: Phoenix House, Ltd., 1962), pp. 138–139.

  45. PRO, AIR 41/47, Captain D. V. Peyton Ward, R.N., “The R.A.F. in Maritime War” [typescript], Vol. Ill, ff. 485, 534; Clay Blair, Hitlers U-Boat War: The Hunters 1939–1942 (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 319; Alfred Price, Aircraft versus Submarine: The Evolution of the Anti-Submarine Aircraft, 1912 to 1980 (London: Jane’s Publishing Company, Ltd., 1980), p. 146. Also see Terraine, U-Boat Wars, pp. 428–429. In Bomber Command’s favor, it does appear that bombing of U-boat yards did prevent widespread introduction of the U-boat Type XXI, which could have altered the course of the war at sea in 1945.

  46. Price, Aircraft versus Submarine, pp. 54–58, 78; Derek Howse, Radar at Sea: The Royal Navy in World War 2 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993), passim.

  47. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, vol. 6 of The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), p. 127.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. NARA, Box 108, CINCLANT, King to CNO Harold R. Stark, U.S.S. Augusta, Flagship, undated but after 14 December referred to in the message and before 30 December, when King left Augusta to become Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet (COMINCH).

  2. The story of Drumbeat is given in Gannon, Operation Drumbeat. The messages referred to are described on pp. 211–212, and one message, together with U.S. Navy Daily Situation Maps, is reproduced between pp. 330 and 331. The documents and maps confirming U.S. Navy receipt of Winn’s updated information, as well as the messages themselves, are readily accessible in: PRO, ADM 223/103, “F” Series, Admiralty Signal Messages, October 1941-February 1942, DEFE-3 [hereafter cited PRO, DEFE-3], 2 and 10 January 1942; NARA, RG 457, National Security Agency, “German Navy/U-Boat Messages Translations and Summaries,” Box 7, SRGN 5514–6196, 9 January [German Time] 1942; NARA, SRMN-033 (Part I), COMINCH File of Messages on U-Boat Estimates and Situation Reports, October 1941-September 1942, Naval Message 121716, 12 January 1942; NARA [from the Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center], U.S. Navy Daily Situation Maps, 12–15 January 1942.

  3. Montgomery C. Meigs, Slide Rules and Submarines: American Scientists and Subsurface Warfare in World War II (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1990), pp. 46–51, 92.

  4. Blair contends that this writer’s criticism of King for sending or holding his destroyers for other missions instead is not justified, because King sent or held his destroyers for other missions instead(!); U-Boat War, pp. 465–466. The point is that ASW was the mission of the moment. The Royal Navy, in the same circumstance, one is confident, would have sent out every ship available—“More of the Dunkirk spirit, ‘throw in everything you have,’ “ Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in another context—if only to force the U-boats down and out of the hunt. This was one of the many lessons the British had learned that King and his subordinates chose not to heed. U—123 was sitting on the surface off Coney Island while seven U.S. destroyers stood inert in New York Harbor. Had the destroyers fulfilled the primary mission for which King had assembled them, the U.S. Navy might well have achieved a Paukenschlag in reverse, and possibly have saved the massive expenditure of flesh and steel it went on to lose, as shown below. The mission given most of the destroyers instead was escort of American troopships to Iceland and Northern Ireland. In a new book, British historian Peter Padfield rightfully questions why in early 1942 that was the emergency, Peter Padfield, War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict 1939–1945 (London: BCA, 1995), p. 532, n.61. See Gannon, Drumbeat, pp. 238–240, 412–414.

  5. NARA, KTB-BdU, 17 January 1942.

  6. Quoted in Roskill, War at Sea, Vol. II, p. 99.

  7. Dönitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959), p. 219; Beesly, Special Intelligence, p. 120. Of its 700 tons of fuel, a U-tanker would have to reserve about 100 for its own operations. The replenishment contacts of each U-tanker during the war are given in Rössler, U-Boat, pp. 166–167. The boats’ armament was limited to one 37mm gun and two 20mm anti-aircraft guns. Ungainly and slow to dive, none of the tanker Types XIV and XV survived the war.

  8. NARA [from the Naval Historical Center], War Diary, Eastern Sea Frontier [hereafter ESF], March 1942, p. 231. The point is one that has been missed by some naval writers who think that after March 1942 the Army continued to share this responsibility with the Navy.

  9. NARA, ESF, November 1943, pp. 31–32.

  10. Ibid., pp. 32, 37, 38; Miami Herald, 8 July 1942.

  11. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, U.S. Navy at War 1941–1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy (Washington, D.C.: United States Navy Department, 1946), p. 80.

  12. Gannon, Drumbeat, pp. 382–384.

  13. Roskill, War at Sea, Vol. II, p. 97; Robert William Love, Jr., “Ernest Joseph King, 26 March 1942–15 December 1945,” in Love, ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1980), p. 154.

  14. Terraine, U-Boat Wars, pp. 92, 413; Rear Admiral William Sowden Sims, U.S.N., The Victory at Sea (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1921), chap. 3, “The Adoption of the Convoy,” pp. 88–117.

  15. Beesly, Special Intelligence, pp. 113–115; and interview with Beesly, Lymington, England, 9 July 1986.

  16. Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952), p. 457. Sir John Slessor argues that King erred even in his conversion statement—“proved wrong … as much by King’s carriers in mid-Atlantic as by Coastal Command in the Bay [of Biscay].” The Central Blue: The Autobiography of Sir John Slessor, Marshal of the RAF (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), p. 492.

  17. George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia, Marshall Papers, Box 73, Folder 12, “King, Ernest J. 1942 May-1942 August,” Marshall to King, 19 June 1942.

  18. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 378. The argument has been made by U.S. Navy historians Dean C. Allard and Robert W. Love, Jr., and repeated in Blair, U-Boat War (p. 692), that the defeat on the American littoral was offset by the “naval victory” achieved by USN warships in safely transporting American troops across the Atlantic to Iceland, North
ern Ireland, and the British Isles during January-August 1942. The U.S. Navy’s escort of troopships was successful throughout the war, and certainly deserves commendation. But the argument of offsetting victory assumes that because the Navy performed properly in one responsibility it need not be held accountable in another. That principle was not accepted in naval doctrine at the time. Furthermore, it should be noted that during the period cited, the U-boat presence in the transatlantic transport lanes was greatly diminished (Blair himself says that “all available Atlantic submarines including medium-range Type VIIs” were sent to the American coastal campaign; p. 693) and only three small U-boat packs (Hecbt in May, Endrass in June, and Wolf ‘in July) could be formed. “Naval victories” are usually won against an enemy at his strength. The argument also assumes that King was “forced to choose” between escorting troopships and escorting merchant ships, Blair, U-Boat War, p. 693. That was a false choice in mid-January, when the sailing of a troopship convoy could easily have been delayed in order to take care of Paukenschlag’s appearance, as such troopship movements were frequently delayed thereafter in Operation Bolero. Blair worries about the possible “wrath of the American Army” (p. 466), should the troopships be delayed; but who, knowing anything about him, seriously believes that the gun-metal eyes of Ernest J. King ever blinked at the emotions of the Army? (Blair states that troopship escorts were, after all, passing through Canadian waters, “where there were by far the greatest number of Drumbeat boats”; p. 466. There were two Drumbeat boats in Canadian waters at the time, U-/09 and U-130; there were three off New York to Hat-teras, U-123, U-66, and U-124) It was a false choice later as well, when other available destroyers, together with multiple small craft, made convoying possible and effective, as demonstrated woefully late in May.

  19. Dönitz, Memoirs, pp. 207–208; Hessler, U-Boat War, Vol. II, p. 16. While the new boats would eventually become available with the Baltic thaw, Hessler writes: “Yet it was the dearth of new boats in the critical early months of 1942 that constituted an irreparable handicap to the whole [American] campaign.”

  20. Triton (called SHARK at GC&CS) was first introduced operationally on 5 October 1941 and overlapped with three-rotor Heimische Gewässer (called DOLPHIN at GC&CS) until 1 February 1942. See Ralph Erskine and Trade Weierud, “Naval Enigma: M4 and Its Rotors,” Cryptologia, Vol. XI, No. 4 (October 1987), pp. 235–244. Triton was introduced not to make decryption more difficult for the Allies—Dönitz had no idea his signals were being decrypted by the Allies—but as an internal security measure: to keep signals traffic out of the hands of German personnel with no “need to know.”

  21. Hinsley speculates: “Had the U-boats continued to give priority to attacks on Atlantic convoys after the Enigma had been changed, it is likely that there would have been such an improvement in their performance against convoys that the U-boat Command might have concluded that its earlier difficulties had been due to the fact that the three-wheel Enigma was insecure”; Hinsley, et al., British Intelligence, Vol. II, p. 230.

  22. Donald Macintyre, The Battle of the Atlantic (New York: MacMillan, 1961), p. 140; John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989), pp. 218–219.

  23. From an appreciation of Blackett by Sir Edward Bullard, quoted in Sir Bernard Lovell, F.R.S., P.M.S. Blackett: A Biographical Memoir (London: The Royal Society, 1976), preface.

  24. Clark, Boffins, p. 141.

  25. Quoted in ibid., pp. 146, 215.

  26. Blackett, Studies of War, pp. 216–217.

  27. Ibid., pp. 214–215. Professor C. H. Waddington, who was a member and later head of the Operational Research Section, provides statistics that show the rise in lethality of attacks following adoption of the 25-foot setting through December 1942. He suggests, however: “Some part in the overall improvement was undoubtedly contributed by the more powerful filling employed [Torpex Mark XI after July 1942] and another part by the gradual increase in the number of heavy aircraft, and thus in the average weight of bomb-load”; Wadding-ton, O.R., pp. 177–178.

  28. Ibid., pp. 220–225.

  29. Ibid., passim; Brian McCue, U-Boats in the Bay of Biscay: An Essay in Operations Analysis (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1990), passim.

  30. Waddington, O.R., pp. xvi-xvii. In 1942 the U.S. Navy formed a civilian research group corresponding to O.R.S., which it called Anti-Submarine Warfare Operational Research Group (ASWORG).

  31. PRO, AIR 41/45–48, “The Royal Air Force in the Maritime War” (typescript), four volumes.

  32. Unnamed crewman quoted in Price, Aircraft versus Submarine, p. 166. O.R.S. studies found that it took an average of 200 hours of flying time to result in one attack; Waddington, O.R., p. 168.

  33. NARA, Box 419, folder marked Command File World War II. Shore Est. Hydrographie Office, “Submarine Supplement to Sailing Directions for the Bay of Biscay,” June 1943.

  34. PRO, CAB 86/3, A.U.(43)98, The A/S Offensive by Aircraft in the Bay of Biscay, Memorandum by the First Lord of the Admiralty, 28 March 1943.

  35. Until recently it was thought that U-206 (Kptlt. Herbert Opitz) was sunk in the Bay on 30 November 1941 by a Whitley bomber of 502 Squadron, but a reassessment by the Naval Historical Branch, Ministry of Defence, establishes that U-206 struck a mine off St.-Nazaire on 29 November.

  36. Quoted in Price, Aircraft versus Submarine, p. 65, which is an excellent source on the Leigh Light. The best source for actual in-flight operation of the L/L is “Leigh Light Wellingtons of Coastal Command” by Air Commodore Jeaff H. Greswell, C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., D.F.C., R.A.F. (Ret.), typescript, May 1995; letter, Greswell to author, 6 November 1997. Greswell participated in the development and testing of the L/L and made the first damaging attack employing it.

  37. An account of the unusual adventures of Luigi Torelli is given by Price, ibid., pp. 88–91. The first destruction of a U-boat at night was achieved by a conventionally equipped Swordfish of No. 812 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm, on 21 December 1941 off the Strait of Gibraltar. The victim was U-457 (Kptlt. Eberhard Hoffmann). A detailed account of the procedures to be followed in making a Leigh Light attack is given in PRO, AIR 41/47, Peyton Ward, “R.A.F. in Maritime War,” Vol. Ill, Appendix VI, ff. 595–596. In the Wellington the Light was mounted in a retractable under-turret. Later the Light was mounted on Liberators and Catalinas in a nacelle slung from bomb lugs on the wing.

  38. NARA, KTB-BdU, 16 July 1942.

  39. PRO, AIR 41/47, Peyton Ward, “R.A.F. in Maritime War,” Vol. Ill, ff. 535–536.

  40. Ibid., Vol. Ill, ff. 495–497.

  41. Richard Baker, The Terror of Tobermory: An Informal Biography of Vice Admiral Sir Gilbert Stephenson, KBE, CB, CMG (London: W. H. Allen, 1972).

  42. Quoted in Mark Williams, Captain Gilbert Roberts R.N. and the Anti-U-Boat School (London: Cassell, 1979), p. III.

  43. Ibid., pp. 94–95.

  44. “Artichoke” and “Observant” are described in chap. 4. “Beta Search” evolved from the fact that the W/T transmissions of a shadower U-boat began with the Morse B (Beta), or B-bar. The new tactic forced the shadower to dive while, unseen to the enemy, the convoy changed course.

  45. McCue, U-Boats in the Bay, pp. 30–31; Hinsley, et al., British Intelligence, Vol. Ill, Pt. i, p. 212. Historian J. David Brown considers August 1942 a more dangerous period for Allied shipping than early spring 1943. Comments to author.

  46. PRO, AIR 41/47, Peyton Ward, “R.A.F. in Maritime War,” Vol. Ill, ff. 512, 515. The ship torpedoed, but not sunk, was U.S.S. Thomas Stone.

  47. Quoted in Rear-Admiral W. S. Chalmers, C.B.E., D.S.C., Max Horton and the Western Approaches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954), p. 143.

  48. Williams, Gilbert Roberts, p. 117.

  49. Chalmers, Max Horton, pp. 150–155 and passim; Terraine, U-Boat Wars, pp. 502–503.

  50. NARA, KTB-BdU, 31 December 1942.

  51. Quoted in Padfield, Dönitz, p. 295. Raeder also nominated Generaladmiral
Rolf Carls.

  52. Graham Rhys-Jones, “The German System: A Staff Perspective,” in Howarth and Law, eds., Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 138–157; Chalmers, Max Horton, p. 152.

  53. Michael Howard, Grand Strategy, Volume IV, August 1942-September 1943 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972), Appendix III(D), “Conduct of the War in 1943,” p. 621.

  54. Slessor, Central Blue, pp. 446, 464; Thomas B. Buell, Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 276.

  55. PRO, AIR 41/47, Peyton Ward, “R.A.F. in Maritime War,” Vol. Ill, f. 500.

  56. The various volumes of A.U. Committee papers are found in PRO, CAB 86/1,2,3,4. After 12 May, when the Atlantic struggle was turning in the Allies’ favor, the Committee met several times fortnightly, then, after June, monthly. W. J. R. Gardner, “An Allied Perspective,” in Howarth and Law, eds., Battle of the Atlantic, p. 524.

  57. PRO, CAB 86/3, A.U.(43)84, “The Value of the Bay of Biscay Patrols, Note by Air Officer Commanding in Chief Coastal Command.” Slessor made the interesting comment on the O.R.S. analysis: “It will be observed that the proportion of attacks to sightings round the convoys is only about 47% as compared with 75% in the Bay. The reason for this is of course, that only very rarely does an aircraft get more than one sighting on a patrol in the Bay, while round the convoys 3 or 4 is not exceptional, and the number has been known to be as high as 7 on one sortie”; f. 352.