Canadian corvettes, which had assumed much of the burden of western Atlantic escort duties, proved to lack both equipment and expertise to match Dönitz’s wolf packs: some 80 per cent of mid-Atlantic losses between July and September were suffered by Canadian-escorted convoys. Contemporary reports highlighted a critical shortage of competent captains with adequate training, and of skills in using Asdic. The Royal Canadian Navy had expanded much faster than its small nucleus of professional seamen could handle – 3½ times more than the Royal Navy or the USN. Of one RCN warship arriving in Britain, a reporting officer concluded: ‘This low state of efficiency appears to be evident generally in all Canadian-manned corvettes.’ A historian has noted: ‘These problems often resulted in poor performance against U-boat packs.’ The Canadians had to be relieved of mid-ocean responsibilities for some months early in 1943, as soon as the Royal Navy could spare its own ships to replace them.
In March that year there was another breakdown of U-boat radio traffic decryption at Bletchley. In consequence, for two months half of all Atlantic convoys suffered attack, and one in five of their merchantmen were sunk. Yet this proved the final crisis of the campaign. That spring, at last the Western Allies committed resources which overwhelmed the U-boats. Escort groups equipped with 10cm radar, VLR aircraft with improved depth-charges, small carriers and renewed penetration of Dönitz’s ciphers combined to transform the struggle. Admiral Sir Max Horton, who became C-in-C Western Approaches in November 1942, was a former World War I submariner of the highest gifts, who made a critical contribution to victory, directing the Atlantic campaign from his headquarters in Liverpool.
In May 1943 forty-seven U-boats were sunk, and almost a hundred in the year as a whole. Sinkings of German submarines by aircraft alone rose from five between October 1941 and March 1942, to fifteen between April and September 1942, to thirty-eight between October 1942 and March 1943. Dönitz found himself losing a U-boat a day, 20 per cent of his submarine strength gone in a month. He was obliged drastically to curtail operations. There was a steep fall in merchant ship sinkings, so that by the last quarter of 1943 only 6 per cent of British imports were lost to enemy action. The wartime Atlantic passage was seldom less than a gruelling experience, but for the rest of the war British and American forces dominated the ocean, challenged by a shrinking U-boat force, and German crews whose inexperience and waning morale were often manifest.
Britain’s merchant fleet was devastated to a degree which contributed to the nation’s post-war economic woes: almost all the fourteen million tons of new Allied shipping launched in 1943 were American. But the immediate reality was that Germany had lost its war against Atlantic commerce. In the last seven months of 1943 sinkings of Allied shipping fell to 200,000 tons, around a quarter of this total by submarines. Though shortage of tonnage never ceased to be a constraint on strategy, no important Allied interest was thereafter imperilled by enemy naval action. Before the war, Britain’s annual imports totalled sixty-eight million tons. While this figure fell to 24.48 million tons in 1943, in 1944 it rose again to 56.9 million tons.
Perhaps the most vivid statistic of the Battle of the Atlantic is that between 1939 and 1943 only 8 per cent of slow and 4 per cent of fast convoys suffered attack. Much has been written about the inadequacy of Allied means to respond to the U-boat threat in the early war years. This was real enough, but German resource problems were much greater. Hitler never understood the sea. In the early war period, he dispersed industrial effort and steel allocations among a range of weapons systems. He did not recognise a strategic opportunity to wage a major campaign against British Atlantic commerce until the fall of France in June 1940. U-boat construction was prioritised only in 1942–43, when Allied naval strength was growing fast and the tide of the war had already turned. Germany never gained the capability to sever Britain’s Atlantic lifeline, though amid grievous shipping losses it was hard to recognise this at the time.
2 ARCTIC CONVOYS
When Hitler invaded Russia, the British and American chiefs of staff alike opposed the dispatch of military aid, on the grounds that their own nations’ resources were too straitened to spare arms for others. The Royal Navy saw a further strategic objection: any materiel shipped to the Soviets must be transported through their Arctic ports, Murmansk and Archangel, the latter accessible only in the ice-free summer months. This would require convoys travelling at a speed of eight or nine knots to endure at least a week-long passage under threat or attack from German U-boats, surface warships and aircraft based in nearby north Norway. Britain’s prime minister and America’s president overruled these objections, asserting – surely rightly – that support for the Soviet war effort was an absolute priority. Hitler at first took little heed of the significance of the Arctic link to Russia, despite the fact that his obsession with a possible British landing in Norway caused him to fortify its coastline. Churchill remained a strong advocate of such an assault until as late as 1944, though he was thwarted by the implacable opposition of his service chiefs. What mattered in 1942, however, was the strong German naval and air presence in the far north, which threatened Arctic convoys.
The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, deplored the diversion of resources from the Battle of the Atlantic to open a hazardous new front merely to aid the repugnant Soviets, who seemed likely soon to succumb to the Germans. Pound was especially uneasy about the prospect of outgunned elements of the Home Fleet meeting one of Hitler’s capital ships, most likely the Tirpitz: the navy was scarred by memories of its difficulties and losses before the Bismarck succumbed. Apprehension was heightened by an unsuccessful carrier air strike against German coastal shipping off north Norway on 30 July 1941, which cost eleven of twenty Swordfish torpedo-bombers dispatched – one of the Royal Navy’s notable strategic failures was interdiction of the vital German iron-ore traffic.
Churchill remained implacable: he insisted that the navy must brave the passage, whatever its perils, carrying to Russia such weapons and supplies as Britain and America could spare. He was undeterred by the prospect of battle. In 1941–42 one of his foremost objectives was to exploit opportunities to engage German forces; he thus demanded the establishment of a continuous cycle of Arctic convoys. The few merchantmen which Britain sent to Russia in late 1941 arrived unscathed, carrying small quantities of tanks, aircraft and rubber. The Germans barely noticed their passage.
In 1942, however, as the British began to transport substantial shipments eastwards, Hitler’s forces intervened with mounting vigour. The experiences of the ‘PQ’ convoys, as they were designated, and of the return ‘QP’ series, became one of the war’s naval epics. Even before the Germans entered the story, Arctic weather was a terrible foe. Ships often found themselves ploughing through mountainous seas, forty feet from trough to wave crest, while laden with a topweight of hundreds of tons of ice. More than a few men were lost overboard, and a monstrous wave once stripped the armoured roof from the cruiser Sheffield’s forward turret. The merchantman J.L.M. Curry sprang its plates and foundered in a storm. On the Murmansk passage, almost every ship suffered weather damage, to which even the greatest ships were vulnerable. Midshipman Charles Friend served aboard a carrier: ‘I remember looking out from a furiously rolling and pitching Victorious to see King George V, nearly eight hundred feet long, climbing up the slope of a wave…These waves were moving mountains…the billows a thousand feet from crest to trough…even Victorious’s high freeboard did not always prevent her from taking it green, the bow driving through the crest of a wave which crashed down on her flight deck…One banged down so hard the forward aircraft lift was put out of action…The sea had bent the four-inch armour.’
British dockers, especially in Glasgow, gained a deplorable reputation for carelessness in cargo stowage which contrasted with painstaking American practice. Not only did much materiel arrive damaged at Murmansk, but ships’ very survival was threatened by loads breaking loose. On 10 December 1941, for instance, crewmen on the 5,395-ton tramp steamer Harmatis opened a hatch after noticing smoke rising, to discover a flaming lorry careering about the hold, smashing crates and igniting bales. A mate wearing the ship’s only smoke hood descended into the fiery shambles, playing a hose until he was overcome. The captain relieved him, and eventually suppressed the flames so that the ship could limp back to the Clyde.
Crews were obliged to labour relentlessly, hacking dangerous weights of ice from upperworks and guns, testing weapons on which lubricants froze.