Danger appeared outside Scapa Flow at seven o’clock the following evening in the form of U-47, commanded by a thirty-one-year-old Dönitz protégé, Lieutenant Commander Günther Prien. In the first war, Dönitz knew, two U-boats had attempted to penetrate the deep, almost landlocked basin, and neither had returned. But studying aerial photographs of the anchorage, Dönitz reached the conclusion that an adroit navigator could thread his way past the three sunken ships meant to block Holm Sound.
Prien was his best U-boat Kapitän, and he almost failed. It took him nearly six hours to do it—at one point he seemed hopelessly ensnarled in a cable from one of the blockships—but at 12:30 on the morning of October 14 he was inside the basin. Dead ahead, at four thousand yards, lay the battleship Royal Oak. His first salvo missed, but the second time his spread of four torpedoes exploded in concert, mortally wounding the capital ship. In his log Prien wrote: “There is a loud explosion, roar and rumbling. Then come columns of water, followed by columns of fire, and splinters fly through the air.” Thirteen minutes later Royal Oak rolled on her side and sank, carrying with her 833 officers and men, among them their captain and the rear admiral commanding the Second Battle Squadron.36
“Poor fellows, poor fellows,” Churchill said when told, “trapped in those black depths.” He wept, then thought of the unknown submariner’s achievement and murmured: “What a wonderful feat of arms.” It was not so wonderful for him, however. He “understood,” he wrote, “how First Lords of the Admiralty are treated when great ships are sunk and things go wrong. If we were in fact going over the same cycle a second time, should I have once again to endure the pangs of dismissal? Fisher, Wilson, Battenberg, Jellicoe, Beatty, Pakenham, Sturdee, all gone!” He set down some lines of the nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Moore:
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
and all but he departed.37
Hoare wrote His Majesty’s ambassador in Washington: “Winston has been through some rough moments over the Scapa incidents. Being for the moment the war hero, he has come through it fairly well. I shudder to think what would have happened had there been another First Lord and he had been in Opposition.” Exactly. Chamberlain could hardly dismiss the chief critic of the prewar governments which had been responsible for Scapa’s vulnerability; the whole country knew that Winston bore no responsibility for the peacetime Royal Navy. Nevertheless, he took the setback personally, and took it hard. In the House he tried to balance the loss against the number of U-boats the navy had destroyed, but the books wouldn’t balance. Germany’s submarines were expendable; British warships were her lifeline. After informing the War Cabinet that the Home Fleet was being moved to the Clyde estuary in southwest Scotland as a “temporary disposition” prior to a move into an east coast base, Rosyth, he declared that the loss of the Royal Oak, “though an extremely regrettable disaster, does not materially affect the general naval position.”38
It did, though. Germany was jubilant, Hitler ecstatic, Lieutenant Commander Prien a national hero. Even William L. Shirer was impressed, writing in his diary that the British battleship had been sunk in “the middle of Scapa Flow, Britain’s greatest naval base!” Dönitz had scored a coup for U-boote. At the outset of hostilities the Führer had instructed U-boats to conform to the Hague Convention, which prohibited attacks without warning on enemy passenger and merchant ships. Prien’s achievement opened Hitler’s eyes to the possibilities of submarines and their lethal torpedoes. On October 16 Grossadmiral Raeder, speaking in Hitler’s name, formally announced that “All merchant ships definitely recognized as enemy can be torpedoed without warning.” So, it developed, could those flying neutral flags—except those of the United States—if their destinations were English ports. Neutral shipping had been sunk before, inadvertently or by reckless commanders. Now it was Kriegsmarine policy.39
All the billboards urging Englishmen to “Talk Victory” seemed to mock the Admiralty, and Clementine Churchill wrote her sister Nellie at Chartwell: “The war news is grim beyond words. One must fortify oneself by remembering that whereas the Germans are (we hope) at their peak, we have only just begun. Winston works night & day—He is well Thank God & gets tired only when he does not get 8 hours sleep—He does not need it at a stretch but if he does not get that amount in the 24 then he gets weary.”40
England needed, not talk of victory, but the real thing. Any bright news would almost have to come from the high seas; there was no fighting, nor the prospect of any, on land or in the air. So out of this nettle, frustration, the navy must pluck this flower, triumph. The issue was not merely civilian morale. Captain Pim’s maps told a sad tale, growing gloomier as autumn waned. Britain’s loss of shipping would approach 745,000 tons by spring—over two hundred vessels. On November 21 H.M.S. Belfast, a new cruiser just launched, was gravely damaged by a mine in the Firth of Forth; two days later the British merchant cruiser Rawalpindi, armed with only four six-inch guns, was destroyed by the Scharnhorst, which then returned safely home with her sister ship, Gneisenau. But the Admiralty’s greatest worry lay in the South Atlantic, where the pocket battleship Graf Spee was running amok. There, on the hundredth day of the war, an England famished for glory was about to be fed.
During the first weeks of the war Hitler had held back his fast, lethal Panzerschiffe, hoping to impose his peace terms upon a dispirited England. Once it became clear that His Majesty’s Government meant to stay the course, he unleashed them as surface raiders. Of his two pocket battleships, Deutschland proved a disappointment. She was recalled after sinking only two merchantmen, one a neutral, and capturing a third, the U.S. freighter City of Flint, a prize Hitler did not need. Flint became the eye of a diplomatic storm which ended only after a Norwegian vessel intercepted her and returned her to her American crew. The tale of Graf Spee was very different, however. Commanded by Hans Langsdorff, a gallant, Wilhelmine anachronism, Spee had sent nine British cargo ships to the bottom without the loss of a single German life.
His adversary now was Commodore Henry Harwood, RN, and His Majesty’s South Atlantic Fleet. Finding a single ship in so broad a vastness was almost impossible, but it was also crucial; Graf Spee was not only terrorizing merchant captains; the hunt for her was tying down over twenty Allied warships badly needed elsewhere, among them the carrier Ark Royal, the battle cruiser Renown, and the French battleship Strasbourg. Harwood believed that sooner or later Langsdorff would be irresistibly drawn to the fat, rich merchantmen emerging from the broad estuary of the River Plate, bound for England. He was right. Unfortunately, when the Spee hove into view at 5:52 on the morning of December 13, Harwood’s force was no match for her. His heavyweights were elsewhere, too far to be recalled in time. He commanded three vessels: the British heavy cruiser Exeter, with six eight-inch guns; and two light cruisers, Ajax (his flagship) and the New Zealand Achilles, with six-inchers. The range of the German battleship’s eleven-inchers was fifteen miles.
The commodore had issued a standing order to all RN vessels in the South Atlantic; should they find a Nazi battleship they were to “attack at once by day or night.” Now, after scattering his small command so that Langsdorff would confront warships from three different directions, he sent Exeter racing toward Langsdorff at flank speed, 33 knots. Because the enemy was lunging forward at 28 knots, the two vessels were approaching one another at 50 miles an hour. Ajax and Achilles were also pouring it on, but Exeter was the first to come within range of Langsdorff’s guns, and moments after she did, a 670-pound shell killed the crew manning the starboard torpedo tubes and crippled both communications and the ship’s gun control.
But Exeter kept closing. Her gunners had just straddled the German ship when another huge shell demolished the wheelhouse and tore away one of the British gun turrets. Still she continued to close. The captain, though wounded, took a compass from one of the lifeboats and organi
zed a line of tars to relay his orders to the helmsman abaft, where the strongest men in the crew, straining aching muscles, turned the cruiser’s rudder by hand. They did it, to no avail; two more German shells hit the Exeter, one tearing up the deck and gouging out a huge gash on a flank, just above the waterline, while the other left a gaping wound in her port flank. Several fires had broken out in the ship; she was enveloped in smoke; fifty-one seamen lay dead. But Exeter had done her job, for Ajax and Achilles now had the Panzerschiffe. They were within range, their gunners were skilled veterans, and their six-inch shells were riddling the Graf Spee. After ninety minutes of continuous combat, with the pocket battleship swinging about, trying to decide which of the three attackers threatened her most, Harwood ordered his captains to make smoke and break off action.
The mauled Exeter headed for the Falkland Islands and repair. Ajax and Achilles were less battered, though the captain of the Achilles had been wounded in both legs and Ajax’s after gun turrets had been knocked out. The real loser, however, was Langsdorff. He himself had been hit by one British shell; his casualty list included thirty-seven men killed in action. His ship was a wreck. She had been hit eighteen times. Gaping holes had been opened in the deck and both flanks, several guns no longer functioned, her galleys were ruined, and she was almost out of ammunition. A voyage home was out of the question; even if unchallenged she could never make it. Repairs were essential. He limped into neutral—but anti-Nazi—Uruguay and asked for two weeks to put his ship in shape. He was given seventy-two hours. Ajax and Achilles, he knew, would be radioing for reinforcements. He did what he thought was sensible. His men were given berths on German freighters in the port, his ship was scuttled, and he himself, after wrapping himself in an old banner of imperial Germany—not the Nazi swastika—shot himself. He left a note: “For a captain with a sense of honor, it goes without saying that his personal fate cannot be separated from that of his ship.”
The Royal Navy’s triumph, wrote Churchill, “gave intense joy to the British nation and enhanced our prestige throughout the world. The spectacle of the three smaller British ships unhesitatingly attacking and putting to flight their far more heavily gunned and armoured antagonist was everywhere admired.” His youngest daughter remembers: “It was a glorious victory, and brought a gleam of light into a dark December.” Harwood was knighted and made an admiral. The sea lords proposed to leave Exeter in the Falklands, unrepaired, until the end of the war, but Winston would have none of it. Instead, he proposed to bring Sir Henry and his British ships home. He had not exaggerated the country’s elation; acclaiming the heroes would guarantee their remembrance and give civilian morale a badly needed lift.41
By now Churchill had established his authority over the Admiralty. “Conveniently forgotten,” one historian writes, was “his role in scaling down the navy’s cruiser-building programme when Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924–29. Remembered was his experience of the Admiralty, his love of the sea and the navy, his deep knowledge of the role of sea power in British history, and his reputation for getting things done.” His weakness was his love of gadgetry and wildly improbable schemes. Admiral J. H. Godfrey notes: “Anything unusual or odd or dramatic intrigued him: Q ships, dummy ships, the stillborn operation ‘Catherine’ ” (of this, more presently), “deception, sabotage, and, no doubt influenced by Professor Lindemann, the application of novel scientific methods.”42
In retrospect some of his projects seem absurd. “White Rabbit Number 6,” as he called it, was a “trench-cutting tank,” capable of excavating an earthwork six feet deep and three feet wide at a rate of one mile an hour. Weighing 130 tons, standing eight feet tall, and stretching eighty feet long, it was to be used at night, penetrating the enemy’s lines and taking him by surprise. The cabinet approved it; no one seems to have asked how surprise could be achieved by a device whose noise would be deafening. At the Admiralty, according to Godfrey, these schemes were regarded as outlets for the first lord’s “demonic energy and extraordinary imagination,” and generally tolerated, though some were considered “offensive.” One pet project was an antiaircraft device which he called the Naval Wire Barrage (NWB). It looked like a large umbrella stand. In reality it was a multiple launcher into which were crammed fourteen three-inch projectiles, each carrying two thousand feet of wire with a small parachute at one end and a two-pound bomb at the other. Once the launcher had been rocketed aloft, the projectiles would be ejected at four thousand feet downward, their descent slowed by the parachutes. If an aircraft struck a wire, the bomb would be drawn upward and explode when it hit the plane’s wing. It was the Prof’s idea. Churchill thought NWBs marvelous, and despite his Ordnance Department’s advice he ordered forty of the ungainly contraptions mounted on forty RN ships. They proved worthless. Rear Admiral R. D. Nicholls puts it bluntly: “The NWB was considered by everyone except Winston as plain crazy.” Then he takes the larger view: “It was just part of the price—and not a very high one—that had to be paid to keep Winston going. Without him Britain and the Free World were sunk.”43
In fact, as the war progressed, many of his ideas were to generate highly useful innovations: “Window” (strips of tinfoil dropped by bombers to confuse enemy radar), “Pluto” (a pipeline under the Channel), “Gee” (a device for guiding pilots), and “Mulberry” (the artificial harbors used in the D day invasion of Hitler’s Europe).
What was needed now was a concept, a device, something that would make submarining so dangerous that Karl Dönitz would be walking the Kurfürstendamm looking for a job. Thus far, nothing had been found that surpassed the last war’s answer to the U-boat, the destroyer. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy was incredibly short of destroyers—and the prospects for more were dim. “It is most disconcerting,” Winston wrote Rear Admiral Fraser at the start of the war, “that we only get six destroyers in the present year, then no more for nine months, and only three more in the whole of 1940. Nine destroyers in sixteen months,” he declared, “cannot possibly be accepted.” Later, in his memoirs, he wrote: “Destroyers were our most urgent need, and also our worst feature.”44
Here was a void that wanted filling. He hadn’t forgotten the Nazi peril in the sky, so he called for the design and mass production of an “antisubmarine and anti-air vessel,” built with “the greatest simplicity of armament and equipment” to free the few destroyers in commission for duty elsewhere. The ships he had in mind, he wrote in an Admiralty memorandum, “will be deemed ‘Cheap and Nasties’ (cheap to us, nasty to the U-boat).” Because they would be “built for a particular but urgent job,” they would be useless once their mission was accomplished. Not to worry; the important thing was to “get the job done.” The Prof, now working full time at the Admiralty, told him modern warfare could certainly be nasty, but never inexpensive. The Unterseewaffe threat would continue to grow. The Admiralty would have to fight back with its very thin line of destroyers.45
Most senior naval officers who worked with Winston allude to this quintessential Victorian trait—the late Victorians believed inventors could accomplish anything, and in the world of their limited imagination they were right. Yet these same officers had exaggerated claims for asdic before Winston saw or heard it. And he and the Prof (whom the admirals had come to detest) did contribute to technological warfare. One early contribution was Britain’s effective response to the magnetic mine. Here Churchill revealed the double standard found in all warriors; a weapon is admirable if his side has found it first, despicable if found first by the enemy. In a memorandum to Inskip a year earlier, he suggested that disabling the Kiel Canal would be a prime objective in any war with the Reich, and recommended that “special fuses with magnetic actuation” be considered. But while the British were still studying the problem, the Germans solved it. In the first weeks of the war their magnetic mines, dropped by parachute in shallow waters of channels and harbors and activated when a ship passed over them, became a nightmare for merchantmen.46
Winston was outraged. The “Nahrze
es” (he was working on that idiosyncratic delivery, and each time, he came closer to making “Nazi” sound like an unspeakably vulgar moist petard) had stolen his idea. Briefly he persuaded himself that the device itself was criminal. The new mines, he said, were “contrary to the accepted rules of sea warfare,” and he told the House of Commons: “This is about the lowest form of warfare that can be imagined. It is the warfare of the I.R.A., leaving the bomb in the parcels’ office at the railway station. The magnetic mine… may perhaps be Herr Hitler’s much vaunted secret weapon. It is certainly a characteristic weapon, and one that will no doubt be for ever associated with his name.” Lacking a specimen of the mine, no counter could be devised. Then, as Churchill wrote, “fortune… favoured us.” The night of November 22 a Nazi plane was seen dropping a large object, attached to a parachute, into the mud of the Thames estuary off Shoeburyness. Before dawn two RN officers skilled in underwater weapons retrieved the device, which, as suspected, turned out to be a magnetic mine. Here the Prof intervened, devising a method of demagnetizing ships by girdling them with an electric coil—degaussing, as it is called. Before the winter was out, Winston had his own magnetic mines and had forwarded a plan to sow the Rhine with ten thousand fluvial mines, only to have it vetoed in the spring by the French, who feared Nazi reprisals.47
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