The Secret Capture

by Stephen Roskill

  When Kapitänleutnant Herbert Wohlfarth of U.556 intercepted the shadowing reports sent by U.110 and 201 on the 9th, he at once set course to intercept the convoy. That afternoon and evening he dived regularly to listen for propeller noises on his hydrophones, and at 2 a.m. next morning he was rewarded by obtaining a clear bearing of such sounds. He surfaced, and found himself on the starboard bow of the convoy, which, as far as he could tell, had only one “ destroyer ” (actually the corvette Hollyhock) protecting it. The night was fairly light, but clouds periodically obscured the moon; and this and an increasingly rough sea made it easier for him to approach unobserved. He therefore decided to attack on the surface, and at 2.42 a.m. fired two torpedoes at ships whose size he estimated as 8,000 and 5,000 tons. He claimed that he hit them both, but in fact one torpedo struck the Aelybryn (No. 93), which was now the only ship remaining in the ill-fated starboard wing column of the convoy1, and the other missed. For some unexplained reason the Dutch ship Hercules (No. 83) now sent out a submarine attack report. Possibly she thought that she herself had been struck; but her message was picked up by Cuba radio, and also by several stations in Britain; and that evening Bremen wireless station very kindly broadcasted “ In English for England ” that “ The Dutch freighter Hercules of 2,317 tons has been torpedoed in the Atlantic.” The German propaganda service certainly worked quickly; but in this case its information was wrong, as the Hercules never suffered any damage at all. A good many hours elapsed, however, before either the Commodore or Lieutenant Davies of the Hollyhock, let alone the naval authorities at home, sorted out which ship had actually been hit.

  As soon as he heard the new torpedo explosion the Commodore ordered yet another emergency turn to port. Since first exercising that manoeuvre off the Butt of Lewis five days earlier the convoy had executed literally dozens of such turns. The Chaucer (No. 82) which was ahead of the Hercules and very close to the Aelybryn did not, however, wait for that order, but carried out a very prompt independent manœuvre. Her Master had noted that in every previous attack two ships had been struck, and he realised that his own position was now particularly vulnerable. He therefore fired a rocket, put his helm hard-a-starboard and went ahead at full speed. As his ship was swinging round a torpedo passed a short distance ahead of her. It is thus plain that the Chaucer was the second ship at which Wohlfarth fired, and that only her Master’s alertness saved her. Meanwhile the Hollyhock was coming round from her position on the starboard beam of the convoy to search on the quarter and to the rear of it; but she could not obtain any sign of the attacker. The Daneman, which had already done such excellent rescue work in the earlier attacks, at once closed the Aelybryn and picked up not only her Master, Captain H. W. Brockwell, and his entire crew of 44, but all the 52 survivors of the Gregalia who were on board the ship, and now had the experience of being torpedoed twice in the same convoy. The little Daneman thus had no less than 175 survivors from three different ships (Eastern Star, Gregalia, and Aelybryn) onboard her. Where she managed to put them all, and how she fed them is not recorded. Evidently her skipper, Lieutenant A. H. Ballard, R.N.R., regarded it all as part of the day’s work, for he seems never to have rendered any report on the adventures of his ship while escorting OB.318. Captain Brockweil, however, reported that he and his men “ were treated with the utmost consideration.”

  After his first attack was completed Wohlfarth withdrew from the convoy to reload his torpedo tubes and signal his report. His wireless office was listening on the normal mercantile wavelength (600 metres) and so picked up the Hercules’s incorrect report. Apparently he never knew the actual results of his attack. When reloading was completed he closed the convoy again, but found it too light for his liking, and therefore decided to draw ahead and postpone his next attack until a more favourable opportunity offered.

  At 3.11 a.m. Commodore Mackenzie carried out another emergency turn to port, and as there were now no escorts at all with the convoy, at 3.25 he made the signal to disperse. The position was 6o°12′ North 34°30′ West; but that, unfortunately, was not quite the end of the troubles suffered by the ships of OB.318, to whom we will return again shortly.

  At daylight Captain Brockwell and some of the Daneman’s crew returned to the Aelybryn to estimate the chances of salving her. They found that, although her rudder and propeller had been blown away, and there was water in the engine and boiler rooms, the main bulkheads appeared to be sound. The Hollyhock, which was also standing by the damaged ship, therefore signalled to Admiral Noble asking that a tug should be sent. To that the Commander-in-Chief replied that the Hollyhock was to continue to stand by the Aelybryn until the tug arrived, but the Daneman was to be sent straight to Iceland to land her many rescued merchant seamen. Four days later the Zwarte Zee, which had originally left England with OB.318 but had been detached to Iceland on 7th May1, located the damaged ship and took her in tow. Escorted by the Hollyhock they arrived safely in Reykjavik on the 17th, and thus was another fine merchantman salved and repaired to continue in Allied service.

  We must now continue with the story of the other merchantmen. In the half light of dawn Wohlfarth saw that the convoy had dispersed, and his hopes of collecting some easy victims rose; but the visibility was indifferent, and at first he could not make out any ships distinctly. Suddenly he sighted a single ship coming up from astern. He dived at once, fired two torpedoes as she steamed into his sights, and saw her sink very quickly indeed. His new victim was the Empire Caribou, which had set a westerly course from the dispersal point, to discharge her cargo of chalk at Portland, Maine. At 4.45 a.m. she was struck by two torpedoes in quick succession and sank in about two minutes.2 Some of her crew of 45 managed to get away on rafts; but their experience was a terrible one, as the sea was now fairly rough and no rescue ship was in sight. Thirty-eight hours later the destroyer Malcolm, one of the ships sent to search the scene of the disaster, found eleven exhausted men on rafts and an overturned lifeboat. The ship’s carpenter was picked up alive holding on to a crate; but not one deck officer survived. In casualties it was by far the worst blow suffered by the ships of OB.318, which had until then been extremely fortunate in that respect. Nor was that the end; for Wohlfarth had only withdrawn to reload again, and at 6 a.m. he resumed the pursuit of the dispersed ships. His next attack, however, failed. He fired at a zigzagging merchantman at 9.17, but did not realise until too late that she was in ballast and high out of the water. The torpedo probably passed under her, but no ship reported the attack. Wohlfarth then reloaded once more, surfaced and steered to the south-west. At 3.30 p.m. he sighted two more ships, one of which was zig-zagging while the other was steering a straight course. He decided to attack the latter, actually the Belgian ship Gand, which had stopped zig-zagging because she believed herself to be clear of the danger zone. Just before 6 p.m. Wohlfarth fired a torpedo which struck her beneath the bridge and brought her to a stop with a heavy list; but she remained afloat. The U-boat commander circled her, watching through his periscope, and saw the crew abandon ship; but he had no intention of letting her escape. At 7.20 he therefore came to the surface and sank her by gunfire, while her crew looked on helplessly from the lifeboats. They declared later that he had also shelled the boats, but it seems unlikely that this was deliberate. More probably some shots which missed the ship fell near them, and gave the impression that they were being fired at. In his own account Wohlfarth merely states how he dealt the ship her death blow. After this success he was unable to continue the pursuit because he was having trouble with his air compressor, and was unable to rectify it while running on his diesel engines. He therefore turned back to the north-east, looking for stragglers. Happily he found none.

  Though on this occasion Wohlfarth profited skilfully from the dispersal of the convoy, U.556 did not survive long afterwards. On her very next cruise, when operating against the homeward-bound convoy HX.133 to the south of Greenland on 27th June, she was forced to the surface and sunk by the escorting corvettes’ depth charges. Wohl
farth himself was picked up, and passed the rest of the war in a prison camp.

  In the early hours of 12th May, nearly two days after the sinking of the Gand, the destroyer Burwell found her boats and rescued 43 of her crew. Though we have no first-hand report from her survivors it appears that they had only one casualty. Their good fortune, compared with the fate of the Empire Caribou’s men, was doubtless due to their ship staying afloat long enough for them to get away from her in properly equipped lifeboats. Nor were these two ships the last of OB.318’s number to fall victim to U-boats; for those which were bound to Freetown and more southerly ports still had to run the gauntlet of the U-boats which the Germans had sent to operate off the coast of Sierra Leone. Although there were never more than 6 or 7 present in those waters they found a great deal of unescorted traffic, and between the end of April and the middle of July 1941, they sank no less than 81 Allied merchantmen. We then managed to catch and sink the two supply ships Egerland and Lothringen on which the U-boats depended to prolong their cruises, and this, combined with the extension of convoy, brought a rapid decline in the enemy’s successes. Unfortunately the merchantmen from OB.318 reached the dangerous waters at the height of the German successes. On the 23rd May the Dutch ship Berhala (originally No. 64 in the convoy), which had formerly been the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s Rheinland, and had been captured in Sumatra in 1940, was sunk by U.38; and three days later Commodore Mackenzie’s Colonial was hit by two torpedoes fired by U.107 when she was only 100 miles off Freetown. Her Master, Captain J. J. Devereux, sighted the U-boat quite close to him, and made a gallant endeavour to ram; but it was of no avail, and at 10 p.m. a third torpedo sank his ship. The Commodore and his staff got away on a raft, and all the rest of the 83 souls on board (including two injured men) were saved in the two port side boats, the starboard ones having been destroyed by the explosions. A wireless message was sent before the ship sank, but it was not until 20 hours later that the crew were picked up. The rescue ship was the old battleship Centurion, formerly wireless-controlled target ship for the fleet, which was then masquerading under the nom-de-guerre of H.M.S. Anson and had recently called at Gibraltar after escorting the carrier Furious from Britain with fighter aircraft which were to be flown on to Malta. In his report on the loss of his ship Captain Devereux told how “ Sharks were jumping at the boats, and we beat them off with our oars. We had plenty of biscuits … and found them very eatable; but the water supply was very small.” Luckily he and his men were rescued before suffering the worst tortures of thirst in open boats in the tropics. Commodore Mackenzie lost all his papers, and although on his return to England he pieced together a very good report from memory, it was inevitable that he should have been unable to recall many points of detail; and this has made it all the harder to reconstruct the journey of OB.318 with full accuracy. His experiences were, however, fairly typical of an Atlantic convoy of those days. Though strongly escorted and protected, and excellently disciplined in its own manoeuvres, it lost four ships (23,539 tons) and had two others damaged while in convoy; and four more ships (21,777 tons) were sunk after they had dispersed. Thus of the 42 ships which sailed in the convoy (including the sections which left for and joined from Iceland) only 32 reached their destinations.

  On 10th May Dönitz’s staff at Lorient summarised the results of the various attacks on OB.318. They remarked that it had been “ strongly escorted, was first reported by U.94, then by U.110, and was also attacked by U.201 and U.556.” So far their entries were perfectly correct, but in assessing the results achieved they were fairly wide of the mark. The claims made, and the actual results achieved were as follows:—

  The U-boat command staff continued in their War Diary for 10th May with the remark that they “ received many air and U-boat reports on this day.” They concluded that the British “ do not keep to certain convoy routes, but disperse their traffic over a wide area ”; and that “ they do not on principle avoid areas where sinkings by U-boats have occurred.” Finally they noted, correctly, that “ U.110 gave no position report as requested, and must be considered lost.”

  On the same evening that Dönitz’s staff thus summarised the attacks on OB.318, the Admiralty sent a message to all authorities telling them that the convoy had dispersed, and giving the expected times of arrival of each ship at its destination. That signal might be expected to mark the end of the story of our particular convoy; but such is not the case. For the next week the aftermath of its adventures figured prominently in the Admiralty’s signal files, and those messages provide us with a very clear picture of how our world-wide shipping control organisation worked. There we can see the Western Approaches Command and its subordinate authorities organising the salvage and towage of the damaged ships, the Naval Control Service Staff in the overseas ports signalling the arrival of each merchantman and particulars of the survivors disembarked; we hear the Malcolm report over the ether that she had found the few survivors from the Empire Caribou; the Flag Officer in Charge, Iceland, signals the return to base of each warship engaged on the operation; and finally the same authority gives Admiral Noble the experiences gained in the four attacks on the convoy. Nor should it be thought that this process was being carried out for one convoy only; for an equally careful watch was in fact being kept on at least a dozen others which were crossing the Atlantic, homeward or outward, at the same time as OB.318.

  We left Baker-Cresswell’s Bulldog steering towards Reykjavik at midnight on 9th–10th May with U.110 towing satisfactorily; but the sea and wind continued to rise during the night, and by the time that dawn broke it was blowing so strongly that the U-boat started to yaw badly, and it had become impossible to hold her on a steady course. She was, moreover still more down by the stern, and had begun to labour badly. At 7 a.m. Baker-Cresswell decided that he must heave to, keeping the towing wire barely taut, and allowing the U-boat to head down wind. On the Bulldog’s bridge every man’s stomach felt as though it was filled with lead; but their suspense was at any rate not very prolonged, for at 10.50 a.m. U.110 suddenly and defiantly reared her bows up into the air till they were nearly vertical. She then slowly sank until the only sign of her was the wire trailing in the Bulldog’s wake. When it tautened out the men on the quarterdeck knocked off the slip by which it was secured to the ship, and as the end splashed into the water all their hopes seemed to have gone overboard with it. But, although, they did not know it at the time, what they already had on board their ship was far more valuable than the U-boat’s empty hull could have been.

  Baker-Cresswell at once signalled his bad news to Admiral Noble, and set course for Reykjavik at 20 knots. He arrived there at 11 p.m. that evening with only a few tons of fuel remaining. Early next morning the Amazon reached Hvalfiord with the prisoners. Meanwhile the Admiralty had ordered Baker-Cresswell himself to take over the prisoners, and proceed to Scapa Flow with all despatch. The Bulldog therefore refuelled during the night, collected the prisoners from the Amazon and set course for Scapa early on the 11th at 25 knots. On the way round Baker-Cresswell spoke to his ship’s company about the need for absolute secrecy regarding what they had seen, and he had his own ship searched for any tell-tale signs of the capture she had made. After he had given permission for the Germans to come on deck for exercise he suddenly saw a boat hook which was plainly not of British pattern, and had actually been brought back from U.110. He had it hastily put out of sight, and none of the Germans noticed it. While on passage to Scapa Baker-Cresswell had a long talk with Loewe on the Bulldog’s bridge, in his halting German and his erstwhile enemy’s much better English. To his great relief he found that all the German survivors were completely convinced that their ship had sunk very soon after they had abandoned her. Loewe would hear nothing said against the Nazi regime, and was confident that he would be shot on reaching England. He plainly disbelieved Baker-Cresswell’s assurance that, on the contrary, he would be accommodated in a country mansion, where he would spend the rest of the war in far greater comfort than his British
captors could hope to enjoy.

  On the afternoon of 12th May the Bulldog passed through the Scapa boom defences, and then secured to an oiler. Two representatives from the Admiralty, who had flown north to take over the captured trophies, at once came aboard. They had brought with them small briefcases in which they apparently expected to carry back a few papers. When they saw the two large packing-cases in the Captain’s cabin full of books, documents and equipment their eyes nearly popped out of their heads. “ What! ” said one of them, handling a trophy, “ this …? And this …? We’ve waited a long time for one of these! ” Far into the night worked the experts, to make certain that no item was deteriorating due to damp. When they left one of them said, “ Never mind about losing U.110. From our point of view it is a good thing. Not a word about this to a single soul—except of course the C.-in-C ”; and Baker-Cresswell then knew that the blow which had seemed to strike him between the eyes as his prize slid beneath the waves two days earlier had been an illusion.

  Next day Baker-Cresswell lunched with Admiral Sir John Tovey, the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet, in his flagship the King George V, and told his story. The Admiral listened quietly and then said, “ You fellows get all the fun. I just stay here and wait for the enemy to come out. It’s a dull job. Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.” Little did he then know that, ten days later, he and his whole fleet would be at sea in pursuit of the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. That night a message from the First Sea Lord, originated at 11.10 p.m. reached Baker-Cresswell. “ Hearty congratulations,” it said, “ the petals of your flower are of rare beauty.” One can visualise Sir Dudley Pound, sitting at his big desk overlooking the Horseguards’ Parade, at the end of another long and tiring day, writing out that message in his own hand after hearing from the Director of Intelligence what the 3rd Escort Group had achieved.