It was in the final weeks of December 1941 that the Atlantic battle reached a new and ferocious pitch. Dönitz coordinated his U-boats and Condors with skill. The route from Gibraltar to Britain had become especially hazardous. To escort a 32-ship convoy the Royal Navy had sixteen warships, and one of them was a new sort of vessel: the escort carrier. Cheap and hastily prepared, HMS Audacity was converted from an ex-German prize, the Hannover.
Commanding this escort group there was one of those rare breeds, an RN officer who had specialized in anti-submarine warfare in the prewar years. Commander F. J. ‘Johnny’ Walker RN had had enough differences of opinion with authority to have damaged his career. Passed over for captain he had spent the first two years of war in ‘uninspiring shore appointments’. Now he was about to become the most famous and most successful group commander of the entire Atlantic campaign. His desperate battle with the U-boats lasted six days and nights. Two of the convoy were lost, and so was the escort carrier, but four U-boats were sunk and a Condor shot down. It was a setback for Dönitz and proof that cheap little aircraft-carriers could give convoys air protection far away from land. And on the morning of 22 December 1941, the sixth day of the fight, the weary sailors looked up and saw another new and welcome sight. One of the very long-range Liberators had come 800 miles to perform escort duties. It circled the convoy and dropped depth charges upon some U-boats trailing behind. Dönitz called off his submarines. Air power had begun to turn the tide of the battle.
The US long-range Liberator, used for convoy escort duties
The ships kept coming
The Atlantic campaign was the longest and most arduous battle of the war, much of it fought in sub-arctic conditions, in gales and heavy seas. When considering the moral questions arising from the RAF ‘terror bombing’ of cities, consider too the civilians who manned the merchant ships. Casualties of the air raids upon cities usually had immediate succour; the merchant seamen, and ships’ passengers too, men, women and children, were mutilated, crippled and burned. There was no warning save the crash of a torpedo tearing the hull open. Few men from the engine room got as far as the boat deck. The attacks usually came at night and, on the northerly routes the convoys favoured, it was seldom anything but very cold. Many of the merchantmen’s crews were not young. Survivors, many of them bleeding or half-drowned, were abandoned to drift in open boats upon the storm-racked ocean where they went mad or perhaps died slowly and agonizingly of thirst or exposure.
Almost all Britain’s oil and petroleum supplies came across the Atlantic by ship.12 So did about half its food, including most of its meat, cheese, butter and wheat, as well as steel and timber, wool, cotton, zinc, lead and nitrates. British farmers could not have produced home-grown crops without imported fertilizers: neither could farmers in neutral Ireland have survived. ‘Ships carried cargoes they were never built for, in seas they were never meant to sail,’ said one official publication. During the war I remember that in London scarcely a day passed without someone in my hearing mentioning our debt to the merchant service. Anyone leaving a particle of food uneaten on a plate was risking a reprimand from any waiter or passer-by who saw it. No heroes of the war – not even the fighter pilots – excelled in valour and dogged determination the men of the merchant service and their naval escorts. The public knew it. One merchant navy officer said:
armed with free railway ticket issued by ‘Shipwrecked Mariners Society’ to my home in Colchester, Essex, I proceeded on leave. My journey across London via the Underground from Euston to Liverpool Street Station clad in a salt-stained (not to mention vomit!) uniform and still jealously clutching my orange-coloured life-jacket was more of an ordeal than the whole of the western ocean with the masses of people sheltering from the nightly blitz all wanting to crowd around me to slap my back or shake my hand.13
The Battle of the Atlantic continued until Germany surrendered. When that happened, U-boats were ordered to surface, hoist black flags, report position and proceed by fixed routes to designated ports and anchorages. I remember spotting them, one after another, from a Fleet Air Arm plane as they made that final journey up the Channel. It was a heartening sight.
Churchill, in a letter to Roosevelt dated 8 December 1940, declared that the decision for 1941 lay upon the seas. He went on to detail the threat to Britain’s lifelines, and his concern was real. ‘PM very gloomy on shipping situation,’ Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office wrote after a meeting of the war cabinet in February 1941. A few days later, on 1 March, the Australian prime minister noted that Churchill called shipping losses the supreme menace of the war. To Mackenzie King, Churchill telegraphed on 24 March: ‘The issue of the war will clearly depend on our being able to maintain the traffic across the Atlantic.’ Churchill was so concerned that he formed a special Battle of the Atlantic Committee which discussed every aspect of shipping, escorts, imports, repairs and so on. As part of this allotment of resources, 17 squadrons from Bomber Command were assigned to Coastal Command. These heavy aircraft could range out into the ocean where the U-boats were operating so freely. Howls of protest and pain came from Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal and his deputy, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris, who later became known as ‘Bomber’ Harris.
Harris insisted that patrolling the sea lanes with bombers was a complete waste of time and effort. Citing the records of the Armstrong Whitley bombers used by 502 Squadron over a six-month period, he pointed out that on 144 sorties only six submarines had been spotted: four were attacked and one, perhaps two, sunk. Harris could not resist the observation that this meant 250 flying hours per sighting. In his note to his boss Portal, he scoffed at the Admiralty and the ineffectiveness thus proved. Portal was able to prevent any of the new long-range four-engine Halifax bombers going to Coastal Command. By July 1941 Churchill had been persuaded to switch priority back to the build-up of Bomber Command. Harris and Portal refused to admit the vital difference their planes could have made to closing the ‘gap’. They would not see that success in the vital battle for the sea lanes was measured by the number of ships that arrived safely, not by U-boat sinkings.
All the Royal Navy’s requests for long-range aircraft to aid in the Atlantic battle were dismissed contemptuously by the RAF. (Three things you should never take on a yacht: a wheelbarrow, an umbrella and an RN officer, advised ‘Bomber’ Harris in one of his less caustic remarks about the senior service.) Even in 1941, when the April total of lost shipping tonnage went to almost 700,000 and Britain’s rations were reduced – ‘the moment when Great Britain came nearest to losing the war,’ said A. J. P. Taylor14 – the RAF were vehemently resisting the transfer of any aircraft away from their ineffective bombing campaign.15
The Battle of the Atlantic was never won in the sense that land battles were. Germany could win the war by cutting the sea traffic to Britain but Britain could not win by conquering the U-boat menace. In fact the submarine was never conquered, which is why the victors all built submarine fleets after the war. Far from being the weapon of minor naval powers, the nuclear submarine became the modern capital ship.
The German navy failed to win the Battle of the Atlantic despite the willingness that Dönitz showed to flout international treaty. In theory it should have worked. Obsessed by the desire to starve Britain, he directed his forces to sink the merchantmen and rewarded his captains according to tonnage sunk. During the entire war his U-boats sank only 34 destroyers and 37 other escort vessels. Strategically it was right and his tactics were sound, but the shipbuilders defeated this effort.16 And Hitler’s Third Reich