Joining them in Aberdeen were also the 16th A/S Striking Force led by the no less flamboyant Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Congreve in Aston Villa and accompanied by Arab, Angle and Gaul. Their patrol area was the North-Western Approaches and the entrance to Scapa Flow. To ease the burden on the men of the small ships, Sherwood and Congreve used their old networks and obtained permission to keep Aberdeen as home port while using Scapa Flow as the operational base. For the seamen and officers this meant a most welcome spell in Aberdeen for boiler cleaning and maintenance every five to six weeks and a more varied entertainment ashore.17
In spite of high expectations, the results of the A/S Striking Forces during the first winter of the war were rather meagre. Few U-boats were intercepted and most of the patrols were routine, fighting the weather more than the Germans. Only on one occasion in February was a contact gained and depth-charges dropped. Oil came to the surface and the contact vanished, but no U-boats were lost or damaged in the area at the time so it might not have been a U-boat at all.
It would be quite some time before the Royal Navy realised that finding a lone U-boat in deep waters was extremely difficult, basically down to serendipity, and that resources would be better spent protecting convoys.
The Kriegsmarine also employed trawlers extensively for numerous tasks. This is V404 Gebrüder Kähler in the autumn of 1938 off Bremerhaven. (Author’s collection)
— 9 —
‘All Clear For’ard’
THE BRITISH MERCHANT FLEET consisted of some 21 million tons of shipping at the outbreak of the war. Anticipating hostilities, the Cabinet Committee responsible for Defence Preparedness placed the British merchant fleet under the direction of the Trade Division of the Admiralty, led by Acting Chief of Naval Staff Rear Admiral Harold Burrough, on 26 August 1939. This ‘Control of Shipping’ gave the Trade Division, through the Naval Control Service Officers (NCSOs) stationed in most ports used by British vessels, the authority to organise routes and issue orders for the convoys, including the organisation of their escort. The use of British merchant shipping through purchase or charter rested with the Ministry of Shipping (later joined with the Ministry of Transport to become the Ministry of War Transport), as did the manning of the merchant navy.1
After securing necessary auxiliaries for the Royal Navy, it soon became clear that, contrary to pre-war assumptions, the British merchant navy was incapable of sustaining even a minimum of imports. Neutral shipping was desperately needed, and a large number of Greek, Danish, Dutch and Belgian vessels were chartered. Polish ships outside German control were also integrated in the British merchant navy. Many of these had British masters appointed to them and sailed under a British flag. Other neutral merchant ships, Swedish and Norwegian in particular, were secured for British use through bilateral shipping agreements.
In May 1938, the Admiralty had concluded that a convoy system would most likely have to be introduced after the outbreak of war. A ‘restricted’ U-boat warfare, it was believed, could be countered by existing A/S technology, independent routing, arming of merchant ships and so on, but it was far more likely that ‘unrestricted’ warfare would develop. Staff officers were earmarked and trained for the planning and organisation of convoys, but parallel training and development of dedicated escort forces was limited and the A/S branch was left with low priority. As a result, few senior British officers had an A/S background and very few of the active commanders at sea in 1939 had much knowledge or competence in A/S technology or tactics.2
The sinking of Athenia on the first day of the war seemed to indicate that an unrestricted U-boat war was a reality, and within days the first convoys were organised. It would be mid-October before Admiral Burrough’s Trade Division formed the Anti-Submarine Warfare Division to develop tactics and means to protect them.
At first, the convoy system was met by resistance from the shipowners, who, thinking largely of short-term profit, did not welcome the perceived delays and added fuel cost of not being able to take the shortest route. Many captains found the convoys unnecessary, trusting their own speed and luck. It soon became clear that this was ill-advised. During the first months of the war the loss rate was less than 1 per cent for ships sailing in convoy. For those sailing independently it exceeded 10 per cent. When it became obvious that these numbers owed as much to mines as to torpedoes, the majority of captains and shipowners submitted to the inevitable and accepted that any effort to stay within the convoy was worthwhile.
Initially, only ships capable of maintaining sustained speeds between 9 and 15 knots were included in the convoys. Faster ships were considered immune and left to sail independently. Ships that could not maintain 9 knots were left to their own fate or occasionally bundled up in slow convoys along the coast. Neutral ships were at first not included in the convoys, but these were clearly also in danger and after a while were included in the convoys too.
The main outbound Atlantic convoys assembled either in the Thames Estuary, proceeding west through the Channel past Land’s End (OA convoys), or in Liverpool, passing through the Irish Sea (OB convoys). The convoys were given A/S escort to a position some 300 miles west of Ireland (between 12 and 15 degrees west), after which one or a few armed merchant cruisers (AMCs), E-class cruisers or R-class battleships remained as protection against surface raiders. Within a day or two, most ships dispersed, steering independently for their destinations.
The inbound convoys from North America (HX convoys) usually assembled in Halifax, Nova Scotia – on average around thirty-five ships at a time. These were brought across the Atlantic by the returning surface protection before being met by the A/S escort, between 12 and 15 degrees west, usually having left an outbound convoy. Off Land’s End, the convoys split, one part proceeding up the Channel for the Thames Estuary, the other part through the Irish Sea to Liverpool. Ships for intermediate ports were dispatched en route. Occasionally, Coastal Command aircraft turned up as added protection, at first at around 8° W, but later upgraded aircraft types extended this to about 10° W.
Destroyer Inglefield shepherding a convoy. The photo is taken during the summer of 1940. (IWM A.1830)
Ships heading for the South Atlantic, the Mediterranean or West Africa were grouped in the OG convoys in the western end of the Channel, usually every eighth day. Inbound convoys from Gibraltar were prefixed HG, while those sailing directly from Sierra Leone with ships from the South Atlantic and Africa were known as SL convoys. Beyond Sierra Leone, most ships sailed independently.
Prior to departure, the masters, chief engineers and senior W/T operators of the merchantmen were called to a conference. Here, the position of each ship in the convoy was given as well as speed, signal codes, zigzag patterns and how to act in case of attack. The masters were issued with a booklet termed ‘Conduct in Convoy’, which gave instructions regarding anything from how to leave harbour to how to act during ‘man overboard’ or fog.3 Commander Jack Broome of the destroyer Veteran, who was to become an expert on convoy escort, wrote:
What a lot we had to learn the hard – and only – way. Every trip provided something new in convoy technique. For the escorted there was the disturbing feeling of having ships all round them all day and, worse still, all the blacked-out night. It was one thing for experienced naval officers to explain to inexperienced merchant skippers in a nice warm lecture room that, in convoy, if you held your course and speed you had nothing to worry about. On a dark night