Читать книгу Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II - Len Deighton - Страница 34

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 never put its full strength behind the submarine campaign. Hitler was a soldier and he was determined upon a land victory over the Bolsheviks he detested. Unlike his predecessors, a naval victory over Britain was not something of which he dreamed. Partly for this reason the German navy did not improve their submarines and torpedoes in the fundamental ways that the army’s tanks and guns were endlessly modified. Submarine technology did change of course, but the German U-boat fleet did not improve well enough or fast enough. Most of the changes were defensive. By the end of the war German submariners were neither expert nor determined.

Their opponents, on the other hand, learned quickly, and invented tactics and weapons that countered the U-boats, most of which were little different to those in service in 1939. High-frequency direction-finding sets were made small enough to go into ships, and these gave a more exact position for immediate tactical response. Radar improved and it was used more skilfully from ships and from aircraft. Land-based aircraft flew from Newfoundland, Iceland and Britain to provide better and more effective air cover. Escort carriers – their decks built upon merchant ship hulls – brought aircraft to eliminate any last ‘gaps’ in the ocean.

Technical developments contributed to the Allied success but (senior officers on both sides say) the German U-boat arm liked to declare that Enigma intercepts, radar or HF/DF decided the war because these allowed them an excuse for losing. For many postwar years the British over-emphasized the role that HF/DF had played. This was a way of keeping their Enigma work secret. Once the Enigma secret was out, the contribution of Bletchley Park was in turn exaggerated.

In the final year of war, the U-boat arm became worn out and demoralized. These men, more than any other Germans, were provided with evidence that Germany could never win. On every operational mission they encountered bigger and better convoys of new ships stacked high with shiny new tanks and planes. They faced tired but highly motivated and ever more expert Allied seamen who knew they were winning. The German sailors, at sea for many weeks, became concerned about what was happening to their friends and families in the cities under Allied air attack by night, and later by day too. As the Russians started their remorseless advance the U-boat men had new worries about what was happening to their families in cities overrun by the vengeful Red Army.

It was German policy to send conscripts (draftees) into the submarines. This was a mistake. The policy in most other navies was to use only tested volunteers in this specialized warfare. And while RN training improved and became more practical as time went on, the U-boat training schools in the Baltic remained out of touch with the latest anti-submarine techniques, and even the sea conditions of the Atlantic. Shortages of men caused U-boat trainees to be posted to operational duties even when instructors had doubts about their ability. Half-trained men made less expert and less resolute adversaries; they also were crippled and killed by the remorseless ocean. Some fell down companionways, others lost their fingers in machinery and still more were swept overboard and never seen again. Towards the end U-boat crews were no longer singing old songs like ‘Denn wir fahren gegen Engeland’ but cynical ditties about the failings of the mechanisms they operated and about the radar that hunted them. A German historian acknowledges: ‘The men knew that they were beaten and that their end was inevitable …’¹⁷

Yet the U-boat as a weapon was certainly not defeated. The schnorchel (anglicized as snorkel) enabled the diesel engines to breathe air while the submarine remained just below the surface. Postwar trials showed that 94 per cent of U-boats using the snorkel went undetected by airborne radar. The German Type XXI U-boats could go 300 miles on electric motors while remaining totally submerged. Added to this there were some remarkable target-seeking torpedoes: ones that homed on engine noise and others that turned and (programmed for the forward speed of the target) made run after run until they hit something or exhausted their propellant. But such devices were gimmicks rather than innovations.

FIGURE 12

Comparative ship sizes

The Allied sea lanes were kept open because in the long run there were enough ships built, and enough brave men to man them. Britain’s merchant service had gone through bad interwar years but during the war seamen were formed into a ‘pool’ by means of the ‘Essential Work Order’ of May 1941. This brought permanent engagement and regular pay. Crew accommodation in many ships was squalid, dirty, unhealthy and cramped, and would have horrified any factory-inspector. Yet during the war Britain’s Shipping Federation was receiving a hundred letters a day from boys (16 was the minimum recruiting age) asking for a job afloat.

When war began Britain’s merchant service included 45,000 men from the Indian sub-continent (including Pakistan) and over 6,000 Chinese, as well as many Arabs. When it ended, the Official History says, 37,651 men had died as a direct result of enemy action, and the true total, including deaths indirectly due to war, was 50,525.

The U-boat war was no doubt difficult and dangerous, and the German navy lost 27,491 men out of approximately 55,000.¹⁸ Perhaps the most important figure – and the most surprising – is that less than 50 per cent of all U-boats built got within torpedo range of a convoy. Of the 870 U-boats that left port on operational trips, 550 of them sank nothing.

The sea has always attracted men from far and wide. On the escorts there were Dutchmen, Free French, Poles, Norwegians, Americans and many Canadians. The Atlantic convoys were not the worst perils the sailors faced: those convoys to Murmansk saw ships labouring under tons of ice and attacked constantly from German bases in Norway. Convoys through the Mediterranean to Malta were equally hazardous.

Ultimately it was the vast resources of the United States of America which decided the outcome. Using the techniques of mass-production, American shipyards proved able to build a freighter in five days! Despite the war in the Pacific, the US spared carriers, escorts and aircraft to supplement British and ever-growing Canadian naval forces in the Atlantic. Soon there would be US armies to be supplied in Europe and North Africa. During a war of unprecedented supply lines and unprecedented amphibious operations, a war in which every front demanded more and more seagoing vessels, the ships kept coming.