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 onwards 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,* and by mines, and the passage of each convoy between the Forth and London became almost every day an action in itself.
The losses inflicted on our merchant shipping became most grave during the twelve months from July 1940 to July 1941, when we could claim that the British Battle of the Atlantic was won. The week ending September 22, 1940, was the worst since the beginning of the war, and sinkings were greater than any we had suffered in a similar period in 1917. The pressure grew unceasingly, and our losses were fearfully above new construction. The vast resources of the United States were only slowly coming into action. We could not expect any further large windfalls of vessels such as those which had followed the overrunning of Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940. Twenty-seven ships were sunk, many of them in a Halifax convoy, and in October 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 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. 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?
There was another aspect of the U-boat attack. At the outset the Admiralty naturally thought first of bringing the ships safely to port, and judged their success by a minimum of sinkings. But now this was no longer the test. We all realised that the life and war effort of the country depended equally upon the weight of imports safely landed. In the week ending June 8, during the height of the battle in France, we had brought into the country about a million and a quarter 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. I became increasingly concerned about this ominous fall in imports. “I see,” I minuted to the First Lord in the middle of February, 1941, “that entrances of ships with cargo in January were less than half of what they were last January.”
The very magnitude and refinement of our protective measures—convoy, diversion, degaussing, mine-clearance, the avoidance of the Mediterranean—the lengthening of most voyages in time and distance and the delays at the ports through bombing and the black-out, all reduced the operative fertility of our shipping to an extent even more serious than the actual losses. Every week our ports became more congested and we fell farther behind. At the beginning of March over 2,600,000 tons of damaged shipping had accumulated, of which more than half was immobilised by the need of repairs.
To the U-boat scourge was soon added air attack far out on the ocean by long-range aircraft. Of these the Focke-Wulf 200, known as the Condor, was the most formidable, though happily at the beginning there were few of them. They could start from Brest or Bordeaux, fly right round the British Island, refuel in Norway, and then make a return journey next day. On their way they would see far below them the very large convoys of forty or fifty ships to which scarcity of escort had forced us to resort, moving inwards or outwards on their voyages. They could attack these convoys, or individual ships, with destructive bombs, or they could signal the positions to which the waiting U-boats should be directed in order to make interceptions.
Powerful German cruisers were active. The Scheer was now in the South Atlantic, moving towards the Indian Ocean. In three months she destroyed ten ships, of sixty thousand tons in all, and then succeeded in making her way back to Germany. The Hipper was sheltering in Brest. At the end of January the battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, having at length repaired the damage inflicted upon them in Norway, were ordered to make a sortie into the North Atlantic, while Hipper raided the route from Sierra Leone. During a two-months cruise they sank or captured twenty-two ships, amounting to 115,000 tons. Hipper fell upon a homeward-bound convoy near the Azores which had not yet been joined by an escort, and in a savage attack lasting an hour she destroyed seven out of nineteen ships, making no attempt to rescue survivors, and regained Brest two days later. These formidable vessels compelled the employment on convoy duty of nearly every available British capital ship. At one period the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet had only one battleship in hand.
The Bismarck was not yet on the active list. The German Admiralty should have waited for her completion, and for that of her consort, the Tirpitz. In no way could Hitler have used his two giant battleships more effectively than by keeping them both in full readiness in the Baltic and allowing rumours of an impending sortie to leak out from time to time. We should thus have been compelled to keep concentrated at Scapa Flow or thereabouts practically every new ship we had, and he would have had all the advantages of a selected moment without the strain of being always ready. As ships have to go for periodic refits it would have been almost beyond our power to maintain a reasonable margin of superiority, and any serious accident would have destroyed it.
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My thought had rested day and night upon this awe-striking problem. At this time my sole and sure hope of victory depended upon our ability to wage a long and indefinite war until overwhelming air superiority was gained, and probably other Great Powers were drawn in on our side. But this mortal danger to our life-lines gnawed my bowels. Early in March exceptionally heavy sinkings were reported by Admiral Pound to the War Cabinet. I had already seen the figures, and after our meeting, which was in the Prime Minister’s room at the House of Commons, I said to Pound, “We have got to lift this business to the highest plane, over everything else. I am going to proclaim ‘the Battle of the Atlantic’.” This, like featuring “the Battle of Britain” nine months earlier, was a signal intended to concentrate all minds and all departments concerned upon the U-boat war.
In order to follow this matter with the closest personal attention, and to give timely directions which would clear away difficulties and obstructions and force action upon the great number of departments and branches involved, I brought into being the Battle of the Atlantic Committee. The meetings of this committee were held weekly, and were attended by all Ministers and high functiona
ries concerned, both from the fighting services and from the civil side. They usually lasted not less than two and a half hours. The whole field was gone over and everything thrashed out; nothing was held up for want of decision. Throughout the wide circles of our war machine, embracing thousands of able, devoted men, a new proportion was set, and from a hundred angles the gaze of searching eyes was concentrated.
The U-boats now began to use new methods, which became known as “wolf-pack” tactics. These consisted of attacks from different directions by several U-boats working together. They were at this time usually made by night, on the surface, and at full speed. Only the destroyers could rapidly overhaul them, and Asdic was virtually impotent. The solution lay not only in the multiplication of fast escorts but still more in the development of effective Radar, which would warn us of their approach. The scientists, sailors, and airmen did their best but the results came slowly. We also needed an air weapon which would kill the surfaced U-boat, and time to train our forces in its use. When eventually both these problems were solved the U-boat was once more driven back to the submerged attack, in which it could be dealt with by the older and well-tried methods. This was not achieved for another two years.
Meanwhile the new “wolf-pack” tactics, inspired by Admiral Doenitz, the head of the U-boat service, and himself a U-boat captain of the previous war, were vigorously applied by the redoubtable Prien and the other tiptop U-boat commanders. But retribution followed. On March 8 Prien’s U.47 was sunk with himself and all hands by the destroyer Wolverine, and nine days later U.99 and U.100 were sunk while engaged in a combined attack on a convoy. Both were commanded by outstanding officers, and the elimination of these three able men had a marked effect on the progress of the struggle. Few U-boat commanders who followed them were their equals in ruthless ability and daring. Five U-boats were sunk in March in the Western Approaches, and though we suffered grievous losses, amounting to 243,000 tons, by U-boat, and a further 113,000 tons by air attack, the first round in the Battle of the Atlantic may be said to have ended in a draw.
Finding the Western Approaches too hot, the U-boats moved farther west into waters where, since the Southern Irish ports were denied us, only a few of our flotilla escorts could reach them and air cover was impossible. Escorts from the United Kingdom could only protect our convoys over about a quarter of the route to Halifax. Early in April a “wolf-pack” struck a convoy in longitude 28° West before the escort had joined it. Ten ships out of twenty-two were sunk, for the loss of a single U-boat. Somehow we had to contrive to extend our reach or our days would be numbered.
Between Canada and Great Britain are the islands of Newfoundland, Greenland, and Iceland. All these lie near the flank of the shortest, or great-circle, track between Halifax and Scotland. Forces based on these “stepping-stones” could control the whole route by sectors. Greenland was entirely devoid of resources, but the other two islands could be quickly turned to good account. It has been said, “Whoever possesses Iceland holds a pistol firmly pointed at England, America, and Canada.” It was upon this thought that, with the concurrence of its people, we had occupied Iceland when Denmark was overrun in 1940, and in April 1941 we established bases there for our escort groups and aircraft. Thence we extended the range of the surface escorts to 35° West. Even so there remained an ominous gap to the westward which for the time being could not be bridged. In May a Halifax convoy was heavily attacked in 41° West and lost nine ships before help could arrive.
It was clear that nothing less than end-to-end escort from Canada to Britain would suffice, and on May 23 the Admiralty invited the Governments of Canada and Newfoundland to use St. John’s, Newfoundland, as an advanced base for our joint escort forces. The response was immediate, and by the end of the month continuous escort over the whole route was at last achieved. Thereafter the Royal Canadian Navy accepted responsibility for the protection, out of its own resources, of convoys on the western section of the ocean route. From Great Britain and from Iceland we were able to cover the remainder of the passage. Even so our strength available remained perilously small, and our losses mounted steeply. In the three months ending with May U-boats alone sank 142 ships, of 818,000 tons, of which 99 were British.
In this growing tension the President, acting with all the powers accorded to him as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and enshrined in the American Constitution, began to give us armed aid. He resolved not to allow the German U-boat and raider war to come near the American coast, and to make sure that the munitions he was sending Britain at least got nearly half-way across. From plans made long before there sprang the broad design for the joint defence of the Atlantic Ocean by the two English-speaking Powers. As we had found it necessary to develop bases in Iceland, so Mr. Roosevelt took steps to establish an air base of his own in Greenland. It was known that the Germans had already installed weather-reporting stations on the east coast and opposite Iceland. His action was therefore timely. By other decisions not only our merchant ships but our warships, damaged in the heavy fighting in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, could now be repaired in American shipyards, giving instant and much-needed relief to our strained resources at home.
Great news arrived at the beginning of April. The President cabled me on April 11 that the United States Government would extend their so-called Security Zone and patrol areas, which had been in effect since very early in the war, to a line covering all North Atlantic waters west of about West Longitude 26°. For this purpose he proposed to use aircraft and naval vessels working from Greenland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the United States, Bermuda, and the West Indies, with possibly a later extension to Brazil. He invited us to notify him in great secrecy of the movement of our convoys, “so that our patrol units can seek out any ships or planes of aggressor nations operating west of the new line of the security zones”. The Americans for their part would immediately publish the position of possible aggressor ships or planes when located in the American patrol area. I transmitted this telegram to the Admiralty with a deep sense of relief.
On the 18th the United States Government announced the line of demarcation between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres to which the President had referred in his message of April 11. This line became thereafter the virtual sea frontier of the United States. It included within the United States’ sphere all British territory in or near the American continent, Greenland, and the Azores, and was soon afterwards extended eastwards to include Iceland. Under this declaration United States warships would patrol the waters of the Western Hemisphere, and would incidentally keep us informed of any enemy activities therein. The United States however remained non-belligerent and could not at this stage provide direct protection for our convoys. This remained solely a British responsibility over the whole route.
The effects of the President’s policy were far-reaching, and we continued our struggle with important parts of our load taken off our backs by the Royal Canadian and the United States Navies. The United States was moving ever nearer to war, and this world-tide was still further speeded by the irruption of the Bismarck into the Atlantic towards the end of May. In a broadcast on May 27, the very day that the Bismarck was sunk, the President declared, “It would be suicide to wait until they [the enemy] are in our front yard.… We have accordingly extended our patrol in North and South Atlantic waters.” At the conclusion of this speech Mr. Roosevelt declared an “Unlimited National Emergency”.
There is ample evidence to show that the Germans were greatly disturbed at all this, and Admirals Raeder and Doenitz besought the Fuehrer to grant greater latitude to the U-boats and permit them to operate towards the American coast as well as against American ships if convoyed or if proceeding without lights. Hitler however remained adamant. He always dreaded the consequences of war with the United States, and insisted that German forces should avoid provocative action.
The expansion of the enemy’s efforts also brought its own correctives. By June, apart from those training, he had about thirty-
five U-boats at sea, but the new craft now coming forward outstripped his resources in highly trained crews, and above all in experienced captains. The “diluted” crews of the new U-boats, largely composed of young and unpractised men, showed a decline in pertinacity and skill, and the extension of the battle into the remoter expanses of the ocean disrupted the dangerous combination of the U-boats and the air. German aircraft in large numbers had not been equipped or trained for operations over the sea. None the less, in the same three months of March, April, and May 179 ships, of 545,000 tons, were sunk by air attack, mainly in the coastal regions. Of this total 40,000 tons were destroyed in two fierce attacks on the Liverpool docks early in May. I was thankful the Germans did not persevere on this tormented target. All the while the stealthy, insidious menace of the magnetic mine had continued around our coasts, with varying but diminished success. We developed and expanded our bases in Canada and Iceland with all possible speed, and planned our convoys accordingly. We increased the fuel capacity of our older destroyers, and their consequent radius. The newly formed Combined Headquarters at Liverpool threw itself heart and soul into the struggle. As more escorts came into service and the personnel gained experience, Admiral Noble formed them into permanent groups under Group Commanders. The team spirit was fostered and men became accustomed to working in unison with a clear understanding of their commander’s methods. The Escort Groups became ever more efficient, and as their power grew that of the U-boats declined.
The Second World War Page 53
