Читать книгу Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II - Len Deighton - Страница 20

Article 22 of the 1930 London naval treaty, which Germany signed, held that merchant vessels might not be sunk until the passengers, crew and ship’s papers were in a place of safety, adding that the ship’s boats were not regarded as a place of safety unless land or another vessel was nearby in safe sea and weather conditions. Anyone who hoped that the Germans might observe their treaty obligations had only twelve hours to wait after the declaration of war. The U-30, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, sighted the unescorted passenger ship Athenia while it was 200 miles off the coast of Donegal. It had left Liverpool at 4 o’clock on the afternoon before war began. Its passenger accommodation was fully booked and included 316 Americans heading home before war engulfed them.

Lemp saw the 16-year-old liner at 7.30 pm. It was getting dark and he made little or no attempt to distinguish whether she was a passenger ship or an auxiliary cruiser which would have been a legitimate target. He fired a salvo of torpedoes, one of which wrecked the bulkhead between the boiler rooms. In the words of one ship’s passenger:

I was standing on the upper deck when suddenly there was a terrific explosion. I reckon I must be a very lucky woman because when I recovered from the shock I saw several men lying dead on the deck.³

The passengers in the tourist and third-class dining rooms were trapped when the explosion wrecked the stairways. Athenia listed and settled down. About half an hour later Lemp’s submarine surfaced and fired at his victim with the deck gun. Now it must have been clear that she was a passenger liner, the torpedoing of which was explicitly forbidden by the prize laws of the Hague Convention. Without making contact, or offering directions or assistance of any kind, Lemp submerged and went away.

The Athenia sank: 112 people died, including many women and children. The German Admiralty instantly denied the sinking and ordered Lemp to remove the page from his boat’s war diary and substitute false entries.⁴ Those officers and men of the German navy who knew the truth were sworn to secrecy and the Reich propaganda ministry issued a statement that a bomb had been placed aboard the Athenia on the instructions of Winston Churchill.

The Athenia sinking came just as President Roosevelt asked Congress to pass Neutrality Act amendments, allowing Britain and France to buy war material. Seeing that the unlawful sinking of Athenia would persuade Congress to say yes, the German propaganda machine employed its formidable resources. An American survivor was persuaded to say that the ship was carrying coastal defence guns, destined for Canada. The allegation that Churchill put a bomb aboard the liner, in order to drag America into his war, was repeated time and time again in radio broadcasts, newspaper items and in letters mailed to prominent Americans. The German navy in Berlin issued a series of warnings about Churchill’s bombs on other American ships. This bombardment of lies scored many hits. A Gallup poll revealed that 40 per cent of Americans believed the Germans. The Senate voting reflected a similar feeling when Roosevelt’s amendments passed by 63 votes to 31. The House of Representatives also voted in favour of the French and British, by a majority of 61.

By Christmas 1939 Berlin’s orders decreed that all ships except fully lit ones identified as Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish or Portuguese (United States shipping was excluded from the ‘war zone’ by American neutrality laws) must be sunk without warning. U-boat captains were told to falsify their logs and describe unlit target ships as warships or auxiliary cruisers.

Just in case there was any misunderstanding, Dönitz’s Standing Order No. 154 told his commanders: ‘Rescue no one and take no one aboard. Do not concern yourselves with the ship’s boats. Weather conditions and the proximity of land are of no account.’

However there was another more heroic aspect of the U-boat war. On 14 October 1939 there came a dashing action that was planned and briefed by Dönitz himself. Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, commander of the U-47, is said by one historian to have been to Scapa Flow and studied the Royal Navy anchorage as a tourist before war began. Whether this is true or not, Prien showed amazing skill as he threaded his boat through the defences and into the British main fleet anchorage there. Two of his torpedoes hit HMS Royal Oak. There were explosions and the battleship turned over. Kirk Sound, through which Prien navigated, was 170 metres wide and only seven metres deep. It was such a notable achievement that even after an Admiralty inquiry had identified fragments of the German torpedoes, many people in Britain insisted that the sinking was due to sabotage. Another, completely unfounded, story told of a German spy who shone lights to guide the U-boat through Kirk Sound. In fact the sinking of the Royal Oak was one more indication of the Royal Navy’s failure to prepare for war.

Britain’s loss was an ancient battleship, but at this time unrestricted U-boat warfare was being criticized, and the German propaganda ministry saw its opportunity. The U-47 crew were heroes and gained headlines across the world. In Berlin they were congratulated by Adolf Hitler. Prien was awarded the Knight’s Cross⁵ and Dönitz was promoted to admiral and appointed BdU, Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (C-in-C of U-boats). The whole German U-boat arm rightly rejoiced in this proof that the Royal Navy were unable to protect their battleships even in their fleet anchorage.

Benefiting from their First World War experience, the British started convoys as soon as war began. It paid off: between September 1939 and the following May, 229 ships were sunk by U-boats but only twelve of these were sailing in convoy. The organization of the convoys was managed, despite the difficulties of making the civilian ships’ captains do things the Royal Navy way, and there were fast and slow convoys to accommodate ships of varying performance. The layman usually supposes that it was the protection given by escort vessels that made it safer to go in convoy, but this was not so. Churchill provided the true reason:

The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance. There was in fact very nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one.⁶

The basic Dönitz tactic was to have surfaced submarines patrol across known shipping routes until one of the lookouts spotted a convoy. The radio monitoring service in Germany, with its ability to read the secret British merchant ship code, helped Dönitz to position his ‘rake’ of boats. The first submarine to sight a convoy sent high-frequency radio signals to a master control room ashore, and made medium-frequency signals to nearby submarines to bring them to the convoy.

At night on the surface the U-boats engaged the merchant ships independently, and often at point-blank range. Before daylight came, they ran ahead to concentrate for another attack on the following night, the submarine’s surface speed being faster than its speed underwater.