Atlantic

by Simon Winchester

  Burned and listing, the German commerce raider Admiral Graf Spee sinks outside Montevideo harbor on December 17, 1939, after being scuttled by her crew. Neutral Uruguay demanded she leave port before she was fully seaworthy—prompting her captain to set demolition charges and send the pride of the Nazi fleet to the bottom.

  For many years the wreck’s canted mast could still be seen poking above the muddy estuarine waters at low tide. One of the ship’s 150mm guns has been salvaged and is on display in a Montevideo museum, an anchor and a rangefinder are mounted on the foreshore, and the Graf Spee’s eagle crest was pulled from the water in 2006, its swastika covered with canvas to lessen any likely offense. Two cemeteries house the graves of those who died in the battle. But otherwise the burned and torn wreck of the ship remains untouched, marked on South Atlantic charts merely as a hazard to shipping—though somewhat less lethal a hazard today than she briefly had been in the southern spring of that first year of the war.

  8. ENEMIES BELOW

  Submarines were by far the greater hazard in the twentieth-century Atlantic, and during both of the conflicts. However, not at first: though they had been invented before the outbreak of the Great War—the world’s first was built in England in the seventeenth century; the first German submarine was made in 1850; the first German naval submarine in 1905—and though it was fairly obvious how these sinister boats could best be employed, as the unseen snipers of the ocean—the manner in which they were first used offered an almost courtly regard for the old-fashioned, gentlemanly values of seaborne warfare.

  There had never been any doubt Germany would deploy its small but growing fleet of submarines as commerce raiders, using their torpedoes to sink as many of Britain’s supply ships crossing the Atlantic as possible. As an island nation, Britain could be supplied only by sea, and Germany’s actions were meant to wreck the British economy, starving her people and forcing her to subjection and surrender. But initially there were rules of engagement that had been laid down in treaties signed in Paris in 1856 and then again in The Hague in 1899 and 1907, and they related to what was known as Prize Warfare—the seizing or destruction of merchant ships on the high seas. These agreements all held, for example, that passenger ships should never be attacked; that the crews of merchant ships should be placed out of harm’s way before their vessel was plundered and sunk (and lifeboats were considered to be out of harm’s way only if they were within sight of shore—if out of sight of land the crews had to be taken aboard the attacking ship); and that formal warnings had to be given before an attack.

  These rules were made, however, for the benefit of belligerent surface vessels—sailing vessels, in fact—and not for submarines. But of course, so far as submariners were concerned, the rules were absurd. The first to point out that a diesel submarine could hardly behave in the same way as a sail-powered ship was Jacky Fisher, the British admiral. A submarine had neither the manpower nor the room to deal with the crew of a merchant ship: “there is nothing a submarine can do,” said Fisher, “except sink her capture.”

  Churchill objected to this notion in an uncharacteristically Blimpish way; he thought that turning one’s back on the rules of naval gallantry was arrant nonsense: no civilized power, he harrumphed, could, should, or ever would do such a thing. And for the first few months of the war he seemed to be right: commanders of ships on both sides—submarines included—behaved in a manner he thought proper. Although German U-boats would torpedo any British warship they found (and for warships there was no warning), each time they came upon a merchantman they would surface, demand the evacuation of its crew, sink her with gunfire, and then submerge again. In purely military terms it was a fairly pitiful exercise (not least because it rendered the floating submarine vulnerable to attack herself), and the attempt to retain chivalric codes in submarine warfare resulted in the loss of only a few British ships and made hardly any economic impact on Britain at all.

  And then came May 7, 1915, and a sudden and horrific reversal. This was the day when the German U-20 sank the passenger liner RMS Lusitania, entirely without immediate warning, a few miles off County Cork, Ireland. The Lusitania had left New York six days before despite a formal notice from the German government that she would be entering a war zone and was liable to be attacked. The submarine that, more by luck than by judgment, managed to do so fired a single torpedo—the only one she had left, after sinking three small merchantmen a few days before. It hit the liner’s starboard side just below her bridge and triggered a massive explosion amidships—maybe (according to some survivors) even two. The Lusitania promptly keeled over in a steep list, took on water at the bows, and went down to the bottom in just eighteen minutes, within sight of the cliffs of Ireland.

  The death toll was staggering—almost as many died in this Atlantic tragedy as had three years earlier when the Titanic struck her infamous iceberg. More than eleven hundred Lusitania passengers, many of them Americans, drowned in the foggy waters off Ireland in what was long regarded as one of the most hateful episodes of the Atlantic war. The controversy surrounding her sinking has never fully abated, not least because her owner, Cunard, was found to have illicitly allowed the loading into the ship’s hold of large quantities of ammunition and other matériel, and which would have provided the German navy with considerable justification for attacking her. The story still fascinates many, not least because the Royal Navy, as recently as the 1950s, was thought to have bombed and depth-charged the wreck in an effort to prevent divers and other explorers from finding out exactly what the vessel had been carrying, and to keep the matter entirely secret.

  The thought that the Germans might introduce unrestricted submarine warfare to the Atlantic—that they might effectively throw away the rule book and deal with merchant vessels as harshly and uncompromisingly as with warships—peaked at the time of Lusitania. For the rest of 1915 it slowly ebbed away as the Germans, clearly dismayed by the worldwide hostile reaction to their sinking of an unarmed passenger liner, made some effort to rein in their more aggressive submarine commanders. But after the great Jutland battle—which, though it ended in a draw, effectively kept the German surface fleet in port, for fear of ever meeting the full might of the British Grand Fleet again—everything changed. Almost as soon as their surface ships returned to Wilhelmshaven, the German High Command announced that its submarine flotillas, by then based in Ostend, Belgium, would be allowed to roam the Atlantic at will and to sink and kill whatever Allied ship each might find. It was a decision that resulted in relentless Atlantic countersubmarine battles being fought in both wars—from the summer of 1916 onward in the Great War, and for all of the six years of the Second, during which the conflict was of such ferocity and duration that it became known, officially and now historically, as the Battle of the Atlantic.

  During the First World War, the German submarine threat was dire and many Allied ships were sent to the bottom of the ocean. But in the end the threat proved to be manageable—and Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare helped to draw the Americans into the war. U-boats sank an enormous number of Allied ships in 1917, but in time the various responses of the Allies, which included the introduction of convoys and the employment of newly invented depth charges and other explosive devices, began to take effect, and the threat steadily wound down.

  The same manageability was not possible during the early years of the second war, because by then the strategies of the German naval planners, the range and armament of the submarines, and the production rates of the German factories had evolved to an extraordinary level of sophistication. For many years the Allied navies faced an impossible task of suppressing the Nazi submarine attacks. In March 1940, Winston Churchill proclaimed the long fight between the Royal Navy’s surface fleet and Admiral Karl Dönitz’s German submarine armada as the new “Battle of the Atlantic,” and in later years—especially after the climacterics of 1916 and 1943, when Britain’s future appeared truly to be on the knife-edge of a balance—he had no doubts of
its importance: “The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war,” he said. “Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening on land, sea and air depended ultimately upon its outcome, and amid all other causes we viewed its changing fortunes day by day with hope and apprehension.”

  Germany’s strategy was to wage a tonnage war in the Atlantic, and its arithmetic was brutally simple. More and more submarines were ordered—Dönitz had command of 57 U-boats in 1939, but this had risen to 382 in 1942—and more and more wolf packs began to operate. A noose started to close around the Atlantic approaches to Britain—and as one by one, night after night, huge explosions and eruptions of oily fire marked where yet another lumbering merchant ship and her vital cargoes had been destroyed by a torpedo, the prospect of Britain’s maritime asphyxiation seemed all too real. The German fleet, with an exquisite sense of the grotesque, called this period “the happy time.”

  But then emerged the convoy system—with vast assemblies of ships grouping into bands, first in the shallow waters off Halifax, Nova Scotia,54 then making their way like herded cats under the protective supervision of increasingly powerful, watchful, and technically sophisticated naval escorts—and slowly, very slowly, the threat began to recede. Other transoceanic convoy routes were soon established: New York to Gibraltar, Port of Spain to Freetown, Natal (in Brazil) to Gibraltar, Freetown to the Clyde; and though the tales from so many of the individual convoys were all too often the stuff of heroic legend in the face of terrible tragedy—especially those slow convoys designated with the letters “SC,” and of dreadful vulnerability—by May 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic had reached its turning point.

  This was the moment when Allied aircraft were finally present in sufficient numbers—operating either from bases on land, or from aircraft carriers in mid-ocean—to offer a secure umbrella to the ships passing slowly underneath. The sinkings and the killings continued until the final day of the war, May 7, 1945—a little Canadian steamer the Avondale Park and a Norwegian vessel, the Sneland 1, were the last to fall victim to U-boat torpedoes on that very day, when they were but a few cruel miles from their destination in Scotland. But the U-boats never managed to bring Britain to her knees, did not prevent the assemblage of matériel that would be vital for the Normandy landings in 1944, and did not bring about surrender. The battle lasted all six years of the war: 3,500 Allied merchant ships and almost two hundred warships were sunk by submarines, and nearly eight hundred German U-boats were sunk in retaliation. The remains of sixty thousand young seamen now lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More men had died there in the five years of the Second World War than in all of the conflicts in the ocean since the first Romans had set out on their invading expeditions nearly two thousand years before.

  • • •

  As a battleground, the Atlantic is a different place today. No longer does a ship make war on another ship; no longer are broadsides fired at walls of steel across miles of empty sea; no longer are vessels built to collide with one another, nor do commanders require adherence to ancient codes of conduct ensuring gentlemanly behavior at sea, something once thought so necessary when all sides were fighting on the playground of an even mightier enemy, as the sea was widely regarded. High technology has usurped the courtly customs of the ocean; war is made today in a more businesslike fashion; senior sailors take a managerial approach to their navies; romance is all but gone.

  Maybe the last Atlantic Ocean conflict to sport echoes of Trafalgar and Jutland and the Glorious First of June was the British war fought in 1982 over Argentina’s snatched sovereignty of the Falkland Islands; and since this was a war tied up in history, and bound to the security of the distant colony of an ancient island realm, it had some Nelsonian romance and derring-do about it. The fact that a British naval force felt obliged to sail a third of the way around the world from its docks and arsenals, and to come down to the winter storms of the South Atlantic, and to operate there with supply lines eight thousand miles long while the enemy, coming from bases on the Argentine coast nearby, had fresh stores and munitions and men not three hundred miles away—the fact that such a classic imbalance of advantage could be overcome by courage and cleverness and good planning remains remarkable still.

  The stated reasons for going to war over the Falkland Islands may never be fully accepted by many, and it may well be that the weapons employed in the fight, and the manner in which the fights unfolded, bore little resemblance to the fights of old; but the heroism, the romance, and the poignancy of many of the events of the war’s three months will still stir old sailors for many years to come. Not the least of these is the tragic sinking of HMS Sheffield, with which this chapter began.

  The sinking of the Argentine cruiser the General Belgrano in early May 1982 remains to date the last lethal use of torpedoes in the Atlantic. The cruiser, formerly a Brooklyn-built stalwart of America’s Pacific war, had been sold to Argentina some years before; at the time of her sinking she and two escort destroyers were steaming back toward their home port of Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego, after patrolling just south of the Falklands. The flotilla was spotted by a British nuclear submarine, HMS Conqueror, which sent two elderly torpedoes into the cruiser’s port flank. One blew off her bow; the other hit amidships, knocked out her electrical systems, caused floods and fires, and killed scores of men. The great ship, listing heavily to port, was abandoned within twenty minutes and sank shortly thereafter. More than three hundred Argentine sailors died in the attack, which excited much controversy over the legitimacy of the British naval action.

  HMS Conqueror returned to her home base in Scotland some weeks later. Considering that so much of modern naval battle tactics originated in the seventeenth-century fights with Atlantic pirates, it might be regarded as something of an irony that as the submarine rose to the surface and sped home along the sea loch, she was flying from her sail the skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger, the dreaded black pirates’ flag—the device by which the modern Royal Navy still displays to sister ships and in friendly ports any notable success in doing battle with an enemy at sea.

  9. WHAT NO SUBMARINER SUPPOSED

  The consequences of the Atlantic wars were many; among the least expected is that which links the ocean, albeit in a tenuous and speculative way, with the foundation of a state very far away from its shores, after a series of events that started to unfold in the autumn of 1915. This was when the Royal Navy began to have particular difficulty in repulsing a relentless series of German U-boat attacks—a problem that arose not from a lack of warships or poor training or any lack of political will, but as a simple matter of chemistry: the Royal Navy’s gunners did not have sufficient quantities of the smokeless explosive known as cordite to be able to attack the surfaced submarines.

  Cordite is made from a mixture of nitroglycerine and guncotton, acetone and petroleum jelly; and it was in short supply in 1915 because Britain was unable to produce sufficient quantities of one of its key components—acetone.

  In the early summer of 1916, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott,55 happened to have lunch with a middle-aged and avuncular White Russian émigré and science professor at the University of Manchester, a man named Chaim Weizmann. Over coffee after lunch, Weizmann mentioned to Scott that he had developed a new bacterial method for producing acetone in large quantities. The following week, and also at lunch, Scott—who knew about the navy’s problems—told all of this to his friend David Lloyd George, the politician (soon to be prime minister) who was then heading the Ministry of Munitions. Weizmann was in consequence hastily summoned down to London, given research space at a big London laboratory, and finally handed the keys to the disused Nicholson’s Gin Distillery in east London, where he could employ his new techniques to create the much-needed chemical. All he needed for his process to work, he declared, was a goodly supply of cellulose—something that could be found aplenty in maize, or even, he added, in chestnuts.

  That autumn, school
children all over England were asked to collect horse chestnuts, which they normally gathered for their ritual games of “conkers,” and thousands of tons of these soft nuts were brought to the gin factory and thrown into the hoppers and vats and stills. Within days pure acetone began to drip, then stream, then cascade, and finally gush into the carboys. Long tanker trains would take the acetone down to the Royal Navy’s top-secret cordite factory on the Dorset coast, and before long, boxes of the sticky high explosive of which it was so critical a component would be delivered to the naval dockyards, the ships’ guns would start firing once more, and the tide of the Great War’s Battle of the Atlantic would very slowly but surely begin to turn in Britain’s favor.

  Storytelling and mischief-making, handmaidens to much in history, have since made a series of intriguing connections from the bare bones of this story. An oft-repeated yarn begins with British government circles deciding that Chaim Weizmann should be given an official honor for his role in so profoundly changing the direction of the Atlantic war. Lloyd George, by then prime minister, demanded that his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, be asked to suggest the honor to Weizmann, who after all was not a Briton but a White Russian. Crucially, he also happened to be the leader of the British Zionist league, and a prominent figure in the worldwide movement to create a state for the world’s stateless Jews.