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1 THE ATLANTIC

The British Army’s part in the struggle against Nazism was vastly smaller than that of the Russians, as would also be the US Army’s contribution. Beyond Britain’s symbolic role in holding aloft the standard of resistance to Hitler, from 1940 onwards its principal strategic importance became that of a giant aircraft carrier and naval base, from which the bomber offensive and the return to the Continent were launched. It fell to the Royal Navy to conduct the critical struggles of 1940–43 to keep the British people fed, to hold open the sea lanes to the Empire and overseas battlefields, and convoy munitions to Russia. Naval might could not bring about the defeat of Germany, nor even protect Britain’s eastern empire from the Japanese. It was a fundamental problem for the two Western Allies that they were sea powers seeking to defeat a great land power, which required a predominantly Russian solution. But if German efforts to interdict shipments to Britain were successful, Churchill’s people would starve. A minimum of twenty-three million tons of supplies a year – half the pre-war import total – had to be transported across the Atlantic in the face of surface raiders and U-boats.

Protecting this commerce was a huge endeavour. The navy had suffered as severely as Britain’s other services from inter-war retrenchment. The construction of big ships required years, and even a small convoy escort took months to build. Britain’s shipyards were indifferently managed and manned by an intransigent labour force, which began to work only a little harder when the Soviet Union was obliged to change sides, and communists of all nationalities endorsed the war effort. Britain built and repaired ships more slowly, if much more cheaply, than the United States, and could never match American capacity. For the Royal Navy, shortage of escorts was a pervasive reality of the early war years.

It was also hard to concentrate superior strength against enemy capital ships which might be few in number, but posed a formidable threat and were deployed many hundreds of miles apart. In the first war years, Germany’s surface raiders imposed as many difficulties as U-boats: the need to divert convoys from their danger zones increased the strain on British merchant shipping resources. German sorties between 1939 and 1943 precipitated dramas which seized the attention of the world: the pocket battleship Graf Spee sank nine merchantmen before being scuttled after its encounter with three British cruisers off the River Plate in December 1939. The 56,000-ton Bismarck destroyed the battlecruiser Hood before being somewhat clumsily dispatched by converging British squadrons on 27 May 1941. The British public was outraged when the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau made a dash to Wilhelmshaven from Brest through the Channel Narrows on 21–22 February 1942, suffering only mine damage amid fumbling efforts by the navy and RAF to intercept them. The presence of Tirpitz in the fjords of north Norway menaced British Arctic convoys and strongly influenced Home Fleet deployments until 1944. Further afield, the Italian navy had formidable numerical strength, and when the Japanese entered the war the Royal Navy suffered severely at their hands.

Most British battleships were old, slow and could not be adapted for bulky modern fire-control equipment. The Dutch navy’s triaxially stabilised Hazemeyer system represented the most advanced AA gunnery technology in the world, to which the Royal Navy gained access in 1940. It was fragile and unreliable, however, and a British version entered general service only in 1945; anti-aircraft fire-control remained sadly ineffective meanwhile. Britain had more carriers than the US Navy until 1943, but there were never enough to go round, or rather to meet global demand, and they were too small to carry powerful air groups. Fleet Air Arm pilots displayed notable courage, but their performance was indifferent in both air combat and anti-shipping operations. The RAF, doctrinally committed to a strategic bomber offensive, resisted the diversion of resources to support operations at sea. Throughout the conflict, the Royal Navy displayed the highest standards of courage, commitment and seamanship. But until 1943, it struggled against odds to fulfil too many responsibilities with too few ships, all vulnerable to air attack.

Churchill’s decision to make a major British military effort in North Africa obliged the navy to conduct operations in the Mediterranean with negligible air cover, and in the face of strong Axis air forces operating from fields in Italy, Sicily, Libya, Rhodes, Greece and Crete. Able Seaman Charles Hutchinson described an attack on the cruiser Carlisle in May 1941:

The bombers came and attacked us wave after wave. They seemed to single a ship out and deliver a mass attack on it, diving vertically and from all angles. A huge bomb exploded in the water near our gun. Tons of water crashed down on us, tearing us away from the gun and tossing us around like straw – I was certain we would be swept over the side. One thought flashed through my mind: ‘My God, this is the end.’ After what seemed an eternity, we picked ourselves up, blew up our lifebelts and kicked away our shoes, as I for one expected to abandon ship. But in a short time we were firing again, as we were still being attacked. Huge pieces of shrapnel lay around. There was a huge column of black smoke amidships and a direct hit on number two gun. There isn’t a gun now, just a piece of charred metal…Nearly all the gun’s crew were wiped out, most of the lads trapped underneath the gun or blown against the splinter shield. It was a ghastly sight. We’ve lived and slept all as a family for a year and a half: laughed, quarrelled, joked, all gone ashore together, discussed our private lives…Poor old Bob Silvey is still under the gun – I’ve seen him, but it’s impossible to get him out.

Malta, the only offshore outpost in the central Mediterranean from which Axis supply routes to North Africa could be interdicted, faced three years of siege. Under almost continuous bombardment from nearby Sicily, at times the island became unserviceable as an offensive base for submarines and surface ships, but it remained a vital earnest of Britain’s will to fight. Hitler blundered by failing to seize Malta in 1941, and huge efforts and sacrifices were made to sustain it thereafter. Between June 1940 and early 1943, the Mediterranean was largely unusable as an Allied supply route, but Churchillian war-making emphasised assertion of the navy’s presence and engagements of opportunity, especially against the Italian fleet. Some of the fiercest naval fighting of the war, and heavy British losses, took place in those limpid waters. The Axis faced increasing pressure on its own sea link to North Africa, but the passage between southern Italy and Tripoli was short; only in mid-1942 did shipping losses and fuel shortages begin to exert an important influence on Rommel’s fortunes.

The Atlantic was the dominant naval battlefield, forever the cruel sea. Signalman Richard Butler described a typical Atlantic storm: ‘I couldn’t see anything for the swirling spray. The wind shrieked through the rigging and superstructure. It looked as though we were sailing through boiling water as the wind whipped the wave tops into horizontal spume, white and fuming, which stung my eyes and face. Now and again I caught a glimpse of one of the big merchant-ships being rolled on its beam ends by the huge swells sweeping up under rain-laden skies.’ Butler’s destroyer, Matchless, hove to near a struggling merchantman with a twelve-foot split in its upper deck. Soon afterwards, one of their own men was washed overboard. The captain took the brave, futile decision to turn in search of him. Butler thought: ‘The captain’s gone crazy, he’s going to risk the lives of two hundred men to look for some silly bastard that hadn’t the sense to keep off the upper deck.’ After a few anxious moments, the hopeless quest was abandoned. Then Butler learned that the lost man was one of his own messmates. ‘I was saddened and shocked, filled with remorse about my selfish attitude…“Snowy” was well liked and had the reputation of being a “gannet” who never stopped eating. Never again would we hear him ask cheerfully at mealtimes, “Any gash left?”’

Aboard corvettes, workhorses of convoy escort groups, conditions were much worse, ‘sheer unmitigated hell’, in the words of a seaman. ‘Even getting hot food from the galley to fo’c’sle was a tremendous job. The mess decks were usually a shambles and the wear and tear on bodies and tempers something I shall never forget. But we were young and tough and, in a sense, we gloried in our misery and made light of it all. What possible connection it had with defeating Hitler none of us bothered to ask. It was enough to find ourselves more or less afloat the next day with the hope of duff for pudding and a boiler-clean when we reached port.’

And then there was the enemy. While Germany’s capital ships commanded headlines and their sorties inflicted some injuries, Axis submarine and air forces represented a much graver long-term threat, and the men of both arms displayed courage and skill. U-boats achieved striking early successes, such as sinking the old battleship Royal Oak in Scapa Flow, and wreaking havoc upon vulnerable merchantmen. Churchill as First Sea Lord estimated that the introduction of convoying in 1939 was responsible for a 30 per cent fall in Britain’s imports. Merchant ships were obliged to waste weeks waiting for convoys to assemble. Once ocean-bound, they travelled painfully slowly, and were offloaded on arrival by a lethargic and sometimes obstructive British dock labour force. Many ships that carried commodities in peacetime had to be diverted to move troops and munitions across huge distances by circuitous routes, to avoid Axis air and submarine concentrations – for instance, almost all Egypt-bound cargoes travelled via the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage to Suez lengthened from 3,000 miles to 13,000, while a Bombay-bound ship made a passage of 11,000 miles against the pre-war 6,000.

Until 1943, the Royal Navy was desperately short of escorts and effective technology to hunt U-boats. The British sank twelve German submarines in 1940, and just three in the six months between September that year and March 1941; intelligence and skilful convoy routeing did more to frustrate Admiral Karl Dönitz than did anti-submarine escorts. The Royal Navy was slow to realise the vulnerability of merchantmen off the African coast, where in 1941–42 just two long-range Type IX U-boats achieved some spectacular destruction, partly because they maintained wireless silence and partly because few defensive resources were available. The British were grievously hampered by lack of air support. The RAF’s Coastal Command was short of planes; its long-range Sunderland flying boats suffered from crews’ poor navigational and depth-charging skills, together with technical problems that reduced their effort in 1941 to an average two sorties per aircraft a month. Meanwhile, until 1942 many of the Royal Navy’s destroyers remained committed to coastal defence of Britain.

In the course of the entire war, while 6.1 per cent of Allied shipping losses were inflicted by surface raiders and 6.5 per cent by mines, 13.4 per cent were caused by air attack and 70 per cent by U-boats. The British suffered their first severe blow in the autumn of 1940, when the slow eastbound Atlantic convoy SC7 lost twenty-one out of thirty ships, and twelve out of forty-nine in the fast HX79. Thereafter, the tempo of the undersea war rose steadily: during 1941, 3.6 million tons of British shipping were lost, 2.1 million of these to submarines. Churchill became deeply alarmed. His post-war assertion that the U-boats caused him greater anxiety than any other threat to Britain’s survival has powerfully influenced the historiography of the war. It is scarcely surprising that the prime minister was so troubled, when almost every week until May 1943 he received loss statistics that represented a shockingly steady, debilitating depletion of British transport capabilities.

But the submarine force commanded by Dönitz was weak. Germany’s pre-war industrial planning envisaged a fleet which achieved full war-fighting capability only in 1944. Naval construction was skewed by a focus on big ships: a hundred U-boats could have been built with the steel lavished on the Bismarck. On the eve of war, Admiral Erich Raeder, German naval C-in-C, wrote: ‘We are not in a position to play anything like an important part in the war against Britain’s commerce.’ Until June 1940, Dönitz did not anticipate waging a major campaign in the Atlantic, because he was denied means to do so; the small, short-range Type VII boats that dominated his armoury were designed to operate from German bases. Even when the strategic picture radically changed with Hitler’s seizure of Norway and of France’s Atlantic ports, the Kriegsmarine continued to build Type VIIs. Productivity in German shipyards, hampered by shortages of steel and skilled labour, and later by bombing, fell below British levels. U-boats remained technically primitive. Innovation – for instance, the 1944–45 Schnorkel underwater air-replenishment system – was not matched by reliability: the revolutionary Type XXI sailed on its first war patrol only on 30 April 1945.

Thus, Dönitz’s force lacked mass, range and quality. Just as the Luftwaffe in 1940–41 attempted to deal a knockout blow to Britain with wholly inadequate resources, so the U-boat arm lacked strength to accomplish the severance of the Atlantic link. Germany never built anything like enough submarines to make them a war-winning weapon. Dönitz calculated that he needed to sink 600,000 tons of British shipping a month to achieve a decisive victory, for which he required three hundred U-boats in commission to sustain a third of that number in operational areas. Yet only thirteen U-boats were on station in August 1940, falling to eight in January 1941, rising to twenty-one the following month. This small force inflicted impressive destruction: two million tons of British shipping were sunk between June 1940 and March 1941. But in the same period just seventy-two new U-boats were delivered, far short of the number Dönitz needed. They achieved their highest rate of productivity – measured by tonnage sunk per submarine at sea – in October 1940; thereafter, while many more boats were deployed, their pro-rata achievements diminished.

As the war developed, while the Allied navies grew apace in skill and professionalism, the quality and determination of U-boat crews declined. One by one Dönitz’s aces were killed or captured, and the men who replaced them were of lesser calibre. German torpedo technology was almost as flawed as that of the 1942–43 US Navy. Direction of the U-boat campaign was hampered by changing strategies and impulsive interventions by Hitler. German naval intelligence and grasp of Allied strategy, tactics and technology were chronically weak.

It is a remarkable and important statistic that 99 per cent of all ships which sailed from North America to Britain during the war years arrived safely. Even in the bad days of April 1941, for instance, 307 merchantmen sailed in convoy, of which only sixteen were sunk, together with a further eleven unescorted vessels. In June that year, 383 ships made the Atlantic passage, in convoys of which submarines attacked only one, sinking six ships, along with a further twenty-two unescorted merchantmen. In 1942, by far the most alarming year of the U-boat war, 609 ships were sunk in the North Atlantic, a total of some six million tons. So prodigious was American shipbuilding capacity, however, that in the same period the Allies launched 7.1 million tons of ships, increasing their available pool of thirty million tons.

Yet, as is the way of mankind, the Allies perceived most of the difficulties on their own side. While posterity knows that in 1942 the U-boats inflicted the utmost damage of which they were capable, and that thereafter the tide of the convoy war turned steadily against them, at the time Churchill and Roosevelt saw only a steeply rising graph of losses which, if it had continued, would have crippled the war effort. In 1942 British imports fell by five million tons, imposing severe strains on food and oil supplies – the latter were reduced by about 15 per cent, requiring the government to dip into its admittedly large strategic stockpiles. This was attributable less to Dönitz than to the diversion of two hundred ships from the Atlantic shuttle to open an Arctic supply line to Russia. Whatever the causes, however, Britain’s shrunken deliveries alarmed a nation with its back to the wall in many theatres and three dimensions.

Even when the US supplied Britain with a few B-24 Liberators – suitable for very-long-range conversion and thus ideal for Atlantic convoy support – initially the RAF chose to use most of them elsewhere. Sir Arthur Harris, 1942–45 C-in-C of Bomber Command, fiercely resisted the diversion of heavy aircraft to the convoy war: ‘It was a continual fight against the navy to stop them as usual pinching everything,’ said Harris, who disliked British sailors almost as much as he abhorred the Germans. ‘Half my energies were given to saving Bomber Command from the other services. The navy and army were always trying to belittle the work of the air force.’ The Atlantic ‘air gap’ – the area of ocean beyond range of land-based cover – remained the focus of U-boat activity until late 1943.

An average of just over one convoy a week each way made the North Atlantic passage. Many crossed without suffering attack, because the Germans did not locate them. Ultra intercepts of U-boat position reports, together with ‘Huff-Duff’ – High Frequency Direction Finding by warships – often made it possible to divert convoys away from enemy concentrations: one statistical calculation suggests that in the second six months of 1941 alone, Ultra saved between 1.5 and two million tons of Allied shipping from destruction. For a few months in 1941 American escorts protected convoys east of Iceland, but after Pearl Harbor these were withdrawn; Canadian corvettes took up the strain, and the Royal Navy assumed responsibility once ships entered the Western Approaches. Throughout 1941–43, the key period of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Admiralty supplied 50 per cent of all escorts, the RCN 46 per cent, and American vessels made up the balance.

Yet if the German offensive was mismanaged, especially in 1941–42 Allied merchant seamen suffered grievously from its consequences. Crews were drawn from many nationalities; though some young British men chose the merchant service in preference to conscription into the armed forces, it would be hard to argue that this represented a soft option: some seamen were obliged to abandon ship two or three times. Michael Page described one such experience, in Atlantic darkness:

One minute we had been on watch on deck or in the engine-room, or sleeping snugly in our bunks; the next we were engaged in a frenzied scramble through the dense, shrieking blackness which assailed us with squalls of freezing spray, and slipped and fell on the wet iron decks which canted faster and faster into the hungry sea with every passing second…‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ someone kept demanding in a high-pitched wailing cry, full of agonized bewilderment…We struggled with stiff reluctant ropes and the bulky gear of the boat in a kind of automatic frenzy…The boat was lowered somehow, and we scrambled down towards it. Some of us got there, some did not – misjudging the distance as they jumped. ‘Cast off!’ bawled someone when the boat seemed crowded; a cry echoed by several others, but answered at once by yells and screams above us – ‘No, no wait! Wait a second!’ A darker body hurtled through the darkness and hit the waves with a tremendous splash, reappearing to splash towards the boat and grab at her gunwale…A wave broke fully into the boat, drenching and swamping us completely; we gasped and spluttered with the icy shock…Someone immediately slipped the painter…Whether everyone who could be was in the boat, God knows; we were swirled away in an instant.

Even those fortunate enough to survive a sinking often faced terrible ordeals in open lifeboats, such as that suffered by survivors of the British coal-carrier Anglo-Saxon. The German auxiliary cruiser Widder sank the Anglo-Saxon 810 miles west of the Canaries on the night of 21 August 1940, then machine-gunned most of the survivors in the water. Only a tiny jolly-boat escaped, carrying Chief Officer C.B. Denny and six others. Taking stock at dawn, they found that the boat carried a small supply of water, some biscuits and a few tins of food. Several men had been hit by German fire. Pilcher, the radio officer, had a foot reduced to pulp. Penny, a middle-aged gunner, was nursing wounds in the hip and wrist.

For the first few days, sailing westwards, spirits in the boat were high. But by 26 August the men’s skin was burning, and they were suffering acutely from thirst. Pilcher’s foot was gangrenous – he apologised for the stench. Denny wrote in the log: ‘Trusting to make a landfall…with God’s will and British determination.’ Thereafter, however, their condition deteriorated rapidly. Pilcher died on the 27th. Denny broke down. Penny, weakened by his wounds, slipped overboard while at the helm one night. Two young seamen who disliked each other began squabbling. On their thirteenth day at sea, the rudder carried away. This proved the final straw for Denny, who said he proposed to end it all. Giving a signet ring to one of the others to pass to his mother, he and the Third Engineer dropped together into the sea, and eventually drifted away.

On the evening of 9 September, a ship’s cook named Morgan suddenly stood up and said, ‘I’ll go down the street for a drink.’ He stepped over the side, leaving behind just two young seamen. It fell to twenty-one-year-old Wilbert Widdicombe to write laconically in the log: ‘Cook goes mad; dies.’ Once during the days that followed, both young men jumped into the water. After an argument, however, they thought better of this, and clambered back inboard. Soon afterwards, a tropical rainstorm relieved them from thirst; they ate drifting seaweed, and some crabs attached to it. After surviving several spells of heavy weather and many quarrels, on 27 October they glimpsed a glittering beach. The two survivors staggered ashore on Eleuthera in the Bahamas, after a passage of 2,275 miles.

Following months of hospital treatment and convalescence, in February 1941 Widdicombe set off homewards – to die as a passenger on the cargo liner Siamese Prince, sunk by a U-Boat torpedo. His companion in adversity, nineteen-year-old Robert Tapscott, survived later service in the Canadian Army to give evidence at the post-war trial of the Widder’s captain for slaughtering survivors of the Anglo-Saxon and other ships, for which the German was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The horrors suffered by Tapscott and his companions were repeated hundreds of times in the course of the war at sea, often ending without survivors to tell the tale.

As with men in every circumstance of conflict, merchant seamen’s performance was uneven: drawn from many nations and lacking the armed forces’ discipline, they were often careless of convoy routines, courses and signal procedures. Crews sometimes panicked and abandoned ships that might have been saved. But there were many examples of heroic endeavour, such as that of the 10,350-ton diesel cargo liner Otari. On 13 December 1940, 450 miles west of the British coast homeward bound from Australia, she was hit by a torpedo, causing the sea to rush into her after-holds. Frozen sheep carcasses and cases of butter were soon bobbing in the ship’s wake. The propeller shafts were leaking, and the engine-room bulkhead threatened to collapse. But Captain Rice, her master, decided she might be saved: alone on the ocean, mercifully shrouded by mist from further enemy attentions, for three days he and his crew patiently coaxed the Otari onward, her pumps just sufficing to sustain buoyancy. The ship at last reached the mouth of the Clyde in darkness, to find its defensive boom closed. Only at dawn on 17 December was Rice finally able to bring his ship, decks almost awash, into the anchorage, where most of its precious cargo was salvaged by lighters. By such stubborn determination and courage was Britain’s Atlantic lifeline held open.

In 1941, Britain launched 1.2 million tons of new vessels, and achieved dramatic economies of transport usage. Though few U-boats were sunk by naval escorts, which were slowly being equipped with improved radar and Asdic underwater detection systems, the Germans failed to force a crisis upon Churchill’s besieged island. By late summer of that year, the British were reading German U-boat signal traffic with reasonable regularity. Some of Dönitz’s submarines were transferred to the Mediterranean, or to north Norway to screen the flank of Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union. By Christmas 1941, Hitler had already lost his best chance of starving Britain; once the United States entered the war, the consequent enormous accession of shipping and construction capability transformed the struggle.

But the U-boats enjoyed a surge of success in the months following Pearl Harbor, chiefly because the US Navy was slow to introduce effective convoy and escort procedures. In those days, before attrition diluted the quality of the Kriegsmarine’s personnel, the Freikorps Dönitz, as they proudly called themselves, was an elite. U-boat captain Erich Topp wrote: ‘Living and working in a submarine, one has to develop and intensify the ability to cooperate with other members of the crew, because you could need each other simply to survive…When you are leaving harbour, closing the hatch, diving, you and your crew are bidding farewell to a colourful world, to the sun and stars, wind and waves, the smell of the sea. All are living under constant tension, produced by living in a steel tube – a very small, cramped and confined space with congested compartments, monotony and an unhealthy lifestyle, caused by bad air, lack of normal rhythms of day and night and physical exercise.’ Topp took immense pains to nurture morale. Once, a few hours after leaving port, he found his navigator looking morose. The man revealed that he had inadvertently left behind a myrtle wreath, the German symbol of marriage which was also his operational talisman. He was convinced that U-552 was thus doomed. Topp reversed course and returned to Bergen to let the navigator fetch his wreath before sailing again, a happy man.

Many of Dönitz’s officers were fanatical Nazis; by 1943 their average age had fallen to twenty-three, while that of their men was two years lower: they were finished products of Goebbels’ educational system. U-181’s Wolfgang Luth regularly harangued his crew about ‘race and other population policy issues…Germany, the Führer and his National Socialist movement’. The notion of holding indoctrination sessions in a stinking, sweating steel tube a hundred feet beneath the Atlantic seems surreal; not all Luth’s crew can have applauded his refusal to allow pin-up pictures anywhere near the Führer’s portrait, and his ban on ‘corrupt’ Anglo-American jazz music. ‘Whether you like it or not,’ he told his officers, ‘is not up for discussion. You quite simply are not to like it. Any more than a German man should like a Jewess. In a hard war, everyone must have learned to hate his enemy unreservedly.’ In 1944 an experienced U-boat captain ordered his officers to remove a picture of Hitler from a bulkhead, saying, ‘There will be no idolatory here.’ He was denounced, accused of undermining the crew’s fighting spirit, arrested and executed.

In May and June 1942, a million tons of shipping were sunk in United States eastern coastal waters, often by submarines firing torpedoes at vessels silhouetted against the blaze of shore lights. In the year as a whole, six million tons went to the bottom. America’s merchant fleet paid dearly for the US Navy’s refusal to join the established Canadian convoy network, and to heed British experience. The Germans began to concentrate ‘wolf packs’ of up to a dozen U-boats, to swamp convoy escort groups. Changes of Kriegsmarine ciphers caused periodic ‘blackouts’ of Allied signal interception, with severe consequences for convoys unable to avoid submarine lines. But the Allies progressively raised their game: antisubmarine warfare techniques improved and escort numbers grew; naval radar sets profited from the introduction of cavity magnetron technology; escort groups gained from TBS – Talk Between Ships – voice communication, and even more from experience.

To hunt and sink U-boats, close collaboration between two or three warships was vital: a single ship could seldom drop depth-charges with sufficient accuracy to achieve a ‘kill’. It became difficult for the Germans to operate close to the US or British coasts, within range of air patrols. U-boats could travel fast only on the surface; submerged craft struggled to intercept a convoy. Overhead aircraft forced them to dive, a more effective counter-measure than bomber attacks on the concrete-encased U-boat ‘pens’ of Brest and Lorient, which cost the RAF much wasted effort. In 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic focused increasingly on a thousand-mile width of sea beyond reach of most shore-based planes. There Dönitz concentrated his forces, and convoys ran the gauntlet for four to six days of peril.

SC104, a typical convoy of thirty-six merchantmen arrayed in six columns, sailed eastward in October 1942 at seven knots – barely eight mph of land speed – with an escort of two destroyers – Fame and Viscount – and four corvettes – Acanthus, Eglantine, Montbretia and Potentilla. The first hint of a looming threat came four days after leaving Newfoundland, at 1624 on 12 October, when ‘Huff-Duff’ detected a U-boat radio transmission to starboard; soon afterwards, a second submarine was identified. As night fell, in heavy seas the escorts took up stations ahead and on the flanks of the merchantmen. Conditions were appalling, especially aboard the corvettes, which rolled continuously. Half-drowned bridge crews struggled to keep awake and alert, knowing that even when their four-hour watches ended they were unlikely to find hot food or dry clothing in waterlogged mess decks. If engineers and stokers in machinery spaces were warmer below, they were unfailingly conscious of their diminished prospects of escape if a ship was hit – 42 per cent of such victims perished, against 25 per cent of deck ratings. For weeks on end, strain and discomfort were constants, even before the enemy struck.

That night of 12 October, visibility for convoy SC104 was four miles between snow showers. Just before midnight, a U-boat was detected four miles astern: Fame turned and raced to launch a radar-guided attack. Just before it reached the U-boat’s position, the pounding of the seas disabled the radar, blinding the destroyer. After a fruitless thirty-minute visual and Asdic search, Fame returned to its station. Soon afterwards Eglantine conducted another unsuccessful hunt for a U-boat to starboard. At 0508 the escorts heard a heavy explosion, and fired ‘Snowflake’ illuminants. Amid crashing waves which rendered both radar and Asdic almost useless, nothing was seen. An hour later, the escort commander learned that during the night three ships had been sunk without showing sight or sound of distress; a corvette was sent back to search for survivors.

Throughout the daylight hours of 13 October the convoy struggled through mountainous seas, occasionally glimpsing U-boats which submerged before they could be attacked. That night, two more merchantmen were torpedoed. At 2043 Viscount spotted a submarine on the surface at a range of eight hundred yards. Spray blinded her gunners; the enemy dived as the destroyer closed to ram, the bridge crew catching a last glimpse of the U-boat’s conning tower thirty yards distant. Again and again through the night, escorts pursued contacts without success. The senior officer’s feelings, in his own words, ‘amounted almost to despair’. At dawn he found that half the convoy had lost formation during the night’s terrible weather; nine of the stragglers were rounded up, but six ships had been sunk, and the passage was only half over.

The struggle continued through 14 October, with four U-boats identified around the convoy. At nightfall, to captains’ relief visibility worsened, making submarine attacks more difficult. The convoy changed course repeatedly to throw off its pursuers. During the following night, escorts attacked six successive radar contacts. One of these took place at 2331, when Viscount picked up a U-boat at 6,200 yards. Her captain closed to ram at twenty-six knots; the U-boat commander took evasive action, but made a disastrous misjudgement which swung his craft across Viscount’s bows. The destroyer smashed into the submarine twenty feet aft of its conning tower, then rode up onto the stricken enemy’s hull. The U-boat swung clear, under fire from every calibre of British gun, and finally received a depth-charge at point-blank range. U-619 sank stern-first at 2347. Yet success was dearly bought: the damaged Viscount was obliged to set immediate course for Liverpool, where it arrived safely two nights later, needing months of dockyard repairs.

At sunrise on 16 October came the welcome sight of a long-range Liberator, the first covering aircraft to reach the convoy: SC104 had passed through the mid-Atlantic ‘air gap’. The Norwegian navy’s Potentilla transferred a hundred survivors from her packed messdecks to a merchantman. The morning was uneventful, but at 1407 Fame’s Asdic detected a U-boat at 2,000 yards, and attacked with depth-charges five minutes later. The subsequent drama was played out in the midst of the convoy, with merchantmen steaming past on both sides. A large bubble exploded onto the surface, followed by the dramatic spectacle of a U-boat bursting forth with water cascading off its hull, to meet a hail of gunfire. Fame ran alongside, scraping her bottom, and launched a whaler as German crewmen dived over the side. A courageous British officer scrambled into the conning tower, seized an armful of documents from the submarine’s control room, then made his escape seconds before U-253 sank.

But Fame, like Viscount, suffered heavily in the collision. Her captain repented his decision to ram, as crewmen struggled for hours to close great gashes in the ship’s hull with collision mats and baulks of timber. With pumps straining to keep ahead of sea water gushing into the engine room, Fame followed Viscount towards Liverpool, and thence into dockyard hands. Four slow corvettes now remained to escort twenty-eight ships. At 2140 that night of 16 October, yet another U-boat was detected by Potentilla. The two approached each other at full speed before Potentilla’s captain swerved at the last moment, to avoid a thirty-two-knot collision which must have been fatal to his own small vessel. The corvette’s four-inch gun, pom-poms and Oerlikons blazed at the submarine, but it escaped almost unscathed. This was SC104’s last serious action: despite some false alarms, 17 October passed in thick fog without significant incident. Two days later, the merchantmen entered the Mersey, cheered by news that a VLR Liberator had sunk a third submarine, U-661, close to their track.

This convoy’s experiences, each one sufficiently harrowing to represent the drama of a lifetime save in the circumstances of a world at war, were repeated again and again by merchantmen and escorts on the Atlantic run. Moreover, such losses were relatively light for the period. Later that October fifteen ships of SC107 were sunk, while SC125 lost thirteen in a seven-day battle, without destroying a single U-boat. In 1942 as a whole, 1,160 Allied merchantmen were sunk by submarines. Just as the tide of the war was turning dramatically against the Axis, Britain was confronted with its most serious import shortfall. In the winter of 1942 Dönitz’s wolf packs reached their greatest strength, with over a hundred U-boats at sea. The North African campaign, and especially the November Torch landings, obliged the Royal Navy to divert substantial resources to the Mediterranean.

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. Men moved sluggishly in heavy layers of clothing which never sufficed to exclude the cold. Alec Dennis, first lieutenant of a destroyer, tried to nap on deck because he knew that if he took to his bunk he would be pitched out: ‘While one could keep one’s body reasonably warm, I found it impossible to keep my feet warm in spite of fur-lined boots.’ He spent the first hour of every four off-watch thawing his frozen feet sufficiently to be able to sleep. Crews subsisted on a diet of ‘kye’ – cocoa – and corned-beef sandwiches served at action stations, snatching sleep during brief intervals between German attacks. They hated the darkness of Arctic winter, but unbroken summer daylight was worse. The beauty of the Northern Lights mocked the terrible vulnerability of ships beneath their glow. The unlucky Harmatis experienced another drama on 17 January 1942: she was struck by two U-boat torpedoes, one of which blasted open a hatch, strewing the rigging with clothing blown loose from the cargo. As sea water flooded into her gashed hull, the captain stopped the ship to prevent her from driving under. Somehow the damage was contained. Harmatis was towed into Murmansk by tugs, amid further attacks by Luftwaffe Heinkels.

Others were less fortunate: when a torpedo detonated in the magazine of the destroyer Matabele, only two survivors were rescued. The sea was dotted with corpses in lifejackets, men who froze to death before help could reach them, for the cold killed within minutes. George Charlton, serving in a destroyer sunk by gunfire when the heavy cruiser Hipper attacked a convoy in the last days of December 1942, described the horror of attempting to climb the scrambling net of a rescuing trawler: ‘I waited for the swell to take me up to the net and then I just [pushed] my arms and legs through the mesh and I was left hanging there until two ratings came down over the side and pulled me aboard, with a third helping me up by the hair. I flopped on the deck…and then the numbness started wearing off and the cold hit me. I have never before or since felt anything like the pain that wracked my body.’

PQ11 in February 1942 was the last convoy to enjoy a relatively easy passage. Its successor encountered severe early difficulties in pack ice. Thereafter, PQ12 played blind man’s buff with the Tirpitz, which intelligence reported at sea. Ships’ masters vented their rage when a BBC news bulletin announced that ‘a valuable cargo is on its way to Russia’. As so often in the war, the demands of propaganda clashed with those of operational secrecy. In March, the Royal Navy had its best chance of the year to sink the German battleship, when Albacore torpedo-bombers intercepted and attacked it at sea; two planes were lost, but no hits scored. Churchill angrily contrasted the Fleet Air Arm’s failure with the achievement of Japanese aircraft three months earlier in sinking two British capital ships. The most plausible explanation was that the Japanese off Malaya were highly trained and experienced fliers, while most of the Albacore crews were relative novices.

A quarter of PQ13’s twenty-one merchantmen, 30,000 tons of shipping, were lost to U-boats and bomber attacks after the convoy became badly scattered in a storm. A torpedo malfunction caused the cruiser Trinidad to inflict crippling damage on itself while attempting to sink a damaged German destroyer. As for merchant ship survivors, the experience of those from the Induna, sunk by a U-boat on 30 March, was not untypical. Two lifeboats got away in the darkness, carrying many badly burned or scalded men. Hypothermia quickly killed the injured – seven died on the first night. The boats’ fresh water froze solid. A lifeboat was eventually found occupied by nine men of whom only one, a Canadian fireman, remained alive. Of Induna’s crew of sixty-four, twenty-four were rescued, among whom all but six lost limbs to frostbite.

Because of the Tirpitz threat, each convoy required the protection of almost as many warships as there were merchantmen. Destroyers provided close protection against U-boats. Merchantmen were fitted with AA guns, and the assembled ships could mount a formidable barrage against attacking Heinkels. Cruisers offered cover against German destroyers as far east as Bear Island, to the north of Norway – Edinburgh fought off such an assault on PQ14. Over the horizon lurked big ships of the Home Fleet, hoping to intervene if German capital units sortied.

Two days east of the Icelandic assembly point, a German long-range aircraft – usually a Focke-Wulfe Condor – approached the convoy and thereafter circled just out of gun range, transmitting position signals to the Luftwaffe in Norway. Sailors hated the taunting menace of ‘Snoopy Joe’, harbinger of almost continuous air and U-boat attacks for days thereafter. The slow stammer of ships’ automatic weapons, the black puffs of exploding shells filling the sky, pillars of water from near-misses and detonating torpedoes, the roar of low-flying aircraft and dull explosions of bombs bursting below decks imposed themselves on a seascape made by waves, ice and ‘Arctic smoke’ – a layer of mist that often overlay the freezing water.

Primitive air cover was introduced in April 1942 with the first CAM ship – a merchantman fitted with a catapult Hurricane, whose pilot was expected to parachute into the sea after completing his only sortie. The CAM ships’ planes seldom achieved success – they were usually launched too late – and demanded suicidal courage from aircrew, who had at best an even chance of being snatched from the sea before they froze. Each convoy experienced its own variation of tragedy. Six homeward-bound ships of QP13 were lost after straying into a British minefield off Iceland. When PQ 14’s commodore’s ship was torpedoed, the engine-room staff were immediately blown to fragments as its cargo of ammunition exploded. Forty others survived to jump into the sea, where all but nine died from blast injuries inflicted when a trawler attempted to depth-charge the attacking U-boat. Far to westward, a destroyer was cut in half when it crossed the bows of the battleship King George V, which itself became a dockyard case as a result of damage inflicted by detonation of the stricken destroyer’s depth-charges. The cruisers Trinidad and Edinburgh were sunk after bitter engagements and noble damage-control efforts. An engineer officer of the mortally injured Trinidad refused to abandon his stokers, almost invariably doomed men when ships sank. Though concussed by bomb blast, he was last seen crawling to try to free them from beneath jammed hatches, even as the cruiser foundered. His name should be known to posterity: Lt. John Boddy.

Not all those engaged in the Arctic battles displayed such heroism. On the Allied side, while some merchant navy personnel showed remarkable spirit, others too readily fled damaged vessels, like the American crew of the Christopher Newport, who boarded a rescue ship jauntily dressed in their best suits and carrying baggage, abandoning 10,000 tons of munitions. Panic-stricken British sailors on several occasions lowered lifeboats so clumsily that their occupants were tipped into the sea. As for the Germans, convoy crews were surprised by the irresolution of some Luftwaffe pilots, who failed to press attacks through heavy barrages. The German navy, meanwhile, was hamstrung by Berlin’s insistence on making all decisions about when and whether to deploy capital ships. Again and again, disgusted Kriegsmarine officers were ordered to break off action and scuttle for the safety of Norwegian fjords.

As the convoy battles of 1942 became progressively harder and more costly, merchant service officers voiced dismay about their treatment by the navy. They resented the fact that its big cruisers turned back at Bear Island because the air threat further east was deemed unacceptable. They complained that escorts often abandoned their charges to hunt U-boats. They found it incomprehensible that, when cargoes were thought so precious, little air cover was provided. Above all, they protested about the fact that they were expected to sail day after day through the most perilous waters in the world, knowing nothing of what was happening save what they could see from their ice-encrusted upper decks. ‘One of the things about being in the Merchant Navy was that you were treated like children,’ said one ship’s master later. ‘We were kept in the dark. It was most unsettling.’

Merchantmen crawled across the chill sea more slowly than a running man, exposed to bomb and torpedo assaults more deadly than those of the Atlantic campaign. A cruiser senior officer warned the Admiralty in May: ‘We in the navy are paid to do this sort of job. But it is beginning to ask too much of the men of the Merchant Navy. We may be able to avoid bombs and torpedoes with our speed – a six-or eight-knot ship has not this advantage.’ Some Americans recoiled from the hazards of the Russian voyage: there was a mutiny aboard the aged tramp steamer Troubadour when twenty men refused to sail, suppressed by the ship’s Norwegian captain with the aid of a US Navy armed guard. Those responsible, ‘an unhappy, polyglot mixture of sea-going drifters and extravagantly paid American seamen earning danger money on top of their wages’, were committed to a Russian jail on arrival at Murmansk.

Yet Churchill angrily rejected the Royal Navy’s urgings to suspend convoy operations during the perpetual daylight of Arctic summer. ‘The Russians are in heavy action and will expect us to run the risk and pay the price entailed by our contribution,’ he wrote. ‘The operation is justified if half gets through. Failure on our part to make the attempt would weaken our influence with both our major allies.’ The experience of PQ16 seemed to vindicate his determination. Thirty-six ships sailed from Iceland on 21 May; Luftwaffe attacks were frequent but often half-hearted. Despite many U-boat alarms, on the 26th only one ship was sunk. A destroyer dropped its doctor in a small boat to board a damaged Russian ship and take off three badly wounded men, on whom he later operated. The Ocean Voice was hit by a bomb which blew a huge hole in her side. Yet in calm seas, she was able to keep station and at last reached Russia ‘with God’s help’, in the words of a sailor.

Some ships ran out of anti-aircraft gun ammunition, but many attacks were beaten off. Men on the upper decks of the Polish destroyer Garland suffered shocking casualties from bomb near-misses. At Murmansk, the words ‘LONG LIVE POLAND’ were found scrawled on the ship’s upperworks in its crew’s blood; ‘They were hard men,’ a Merchant Navy officer said respectfully. All but seven ships of the convoy got through, and some 371 crewmen and gunners from lost vessels were rescued by extraordinary feats of courage and skill. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C of the Home Fleet, whose caution Churchill deplored, asserted that ‘the strategical situation was wholly favourable to the enemy’, but acknowledged that PQ16’s success was ‘beyond expectations’.

Yet the following month witnessed the most discreditable episode of the Royal Navy’s war. PQ17, comprising thirty-six ships, most of which were American, sailed from Iceland on 27 June, carrying 594 tanks, 4,246 vehicles, 297 aircraft and over 150,000 tons of military and general stores. The British knew from Ultra that the Germans planned a major effort against the convoy, including a sortie by capital ships codenamed Rosselsprung – ‘Knight’s Move’. Hitler had declared that ‘Anglo-American intentions…depend on sustaining Russia’s ability to hold out by maximum deliveries of war materials.’ At last, he recognised the importance of the Arctic convoys. The Admiralty assumed operational direction of PQ17 and its supporting units, because it had access to the latest Ultra intelligence, and experience showed that Tovey, at sea in his flagship, could not effectively control a large and widely dispersed force maintaining wireless silence.

Early skirmishes were of a familiar character. A Luftwaffe Condor took up station off Jan Mayen island on 1 July. He115 torpedo-carrying seaplanes made an unconvincing and unsuccessful attack, during which the US destroyer Wainwright charged headlong towards the attacking aircraft, firing everything it had. Yet on 3 July, the Admiralty ordered the convoy’s cruiser screen to turn away west, towards the German capital ships which it now believed were at sea. Next day three merchantmen were sunk. That evening, a disbelieving Captain ‘Jackie’ Broome, commanding the close escort, received a signal from London: ‘Secret and immediate. Owing to threat from surface ships convoy is to disperse and proceed to Russian ports.’ Thirteen minutes later, a further brief signal confirmed: ‘Convoy is to scatter.’ After reluctantly passing the order to his charges, Broome closed a merchantman and addressed its master through a loud-hailer: ‘Sorry to leave you like this, goodbye and good luck. It looks like a bloody business.’

Tirpitz indeed sortied briefly on 6 July, only to be ordered to return to Norway, to the disgust of its crew and escorts. A German destroyer captain wrote that day: ‘The mood is bitter enough. Soon one will feel ashamed to be on the active list…watching other parts of the armed forces fighting while we, “the core of the fleet” just sit in harbour.’ But the Germans had no need to risk their big ships: the Luftwaffe and U-boats sank twenty-four of PQ17’s merchantmen, struggling unprotected on lonely courses to Russia. Among their civilian crews, 153 men perished while British warships lost none. The shame of the Royal Navy was plain to behold, as were the disgust of the Americans and contempt of the Russians. It is indeed possible that PQ17 would have been destroyed by Tirpitz. But the navy’s response of ‘every man for himself’, the abandonment of the convoy by its escort, breached the tradition of centuries and inspired lasting mistrust within the merchant service, at a time when its morale was anyway precarious.

The decision resulted from a personal intervention by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. Pound already commanded scant confidence among his peers, and was in failing health. It is extraordinary that he was not sacked, but Churchill found him sympathetic, and thus he retained his post until shortly before his death in October 1943. A government minister, Philip Noel-Baker, was sent to Glasgow to address returning PQ17 survivors at St Andrew’s Hall. ‘We know what the convoy cost us,’ he told them. ‘But I want to tell you that whatever the cost, it was well worth it.’ He was howled down by embittered men. The government threw a censorship blanket over the entire episode, suppressing an eyewitness account by correspondent Godfrey Winn, who had sailed with the convoy. Only after the war was the magnitude of the Admiralty’s blunder revealed to the public.

PQ18 did not sail until September 1942, when it lost thirteen ships out of forty, ten of them to air attack. Among naval ratings and merchant seamen alike, it was now agreed that the Arctic passage represented the worst ordeal of the war at sea. Winn questioned Commander Robert Sherbrooke, recovering from severe wounds received when he won a VC for his part in one of the battles, about the loss of Bramble, in which the correspondent had sailed with PQ17. Sherbrooke said: ‘There was just a sudden flash of light on the horizon and that was all.’ Thus did nemesis strike many ships. A seaman described meeting survivors of the cruiser Edinburgh and finding them ‘rather sad and twitchy chaps’. Some men who served on the convoys remained afterwards traumatised by their experiences.

In the winter of 1942 another reckless Admiralty decision was made: to run some single merchantmen to Russia unescorted, manned by volunteer crews lured by cash bonuses of £100 an officer, £50 a man. Five out of thirteen such ships arrived. Of the remainder, one ran aground on Spitzbergen where its survivors suffered weeks of appalling privation – most died of gangrene following frostbite, before a handful were rescued by a passing Norwegian ski patrol. On another ship, the Empire Archer, there was a riot among firemen – the sweepings of Scotland’s notorious Barlinnie jail – who gained access to rum intended for Archangel. Two sailors were stabbed before discipline was restored.

Even when ships reached Russia, they found little to cheer them. ‘The arrival in Kola Inlet was eerie,’ wrote one sailor. ‘It was December and pretty dark. There were great swirls of fog, black water and white snow-covered ice. The bare rocks on either side of the inlet were menacing and silence was broken only by constant sounding of mournful fog-horns of various pitches…I felt that if Hell were to be cold, this would be a foretaste of it.’ At Murmansk they remained subject to almost daily Luftwaffe attack. A bomb fell into the bunker of the freighter Dover Hill, where it lodged unexploded beneath twenty feet of coal. Her captain and crew laboured for two days and nights, removing coal in buckets, before with infinite caution they were able to hoist the bomb to the deck for defusing. Ashore, Russian hospitality was frigid, facilities negligible. Some British seamen arrived proclaiming an enthusiasm for their Soviet comrades-in-arms, which vanished amid the bleak reception. American sailors, denied every comfort to which they were accustomed, recoiled in disgust. The Allies were permitted to harbour no delusions that Western assistance merited Soviet gratitude. In the words of a Russian after the war, ‘God knows we paid them back in full – in Russian lives.’ Which was true.

The turn of the year proved the critical landmark of the campaign. Weather and the enemy – especially U-boats armed with acoustic homing torpedoes – ensured that service on Arctic convoys never became less than a miserable and alarming experience, but losses fell dramatically. In 1943 the Royal Navy was at last able to deploy escort carriers and powerful antisubmarine and anti-aircraft defences. The Germans, hard-pressed in Russia and the Mediterranean, were obliged to divert much of their air and U-boat strength from Norway. Hitler refused to sanction major warship attacks on convoys until an ill-judged sortie was attempted by Scharnhorst in December 1943, which resulted in its sinking off the North Cape by a British fleet led by the battleship Duke of York.

The US began to move massive supplies by other routes: half of all wartime American shipments reached Russia through its Pacific ports, a quarter through Persia, and only a quarter – 4.43 million tons – via Archangel and Murmansk. The human cost of the PQs was astonishingly small by the standards of other battlefields: though eighteen warships and eighty-seven merchantmen were lost, only 1,944 naval personnel and 829 merchant seamen died serving on Arctic convoys between 1941 and 1945. The Germans lost a battleship, three destroyers, thirty-two U-boats and unnumbered aircraft. Given their extraordinary opportunities for strategic dominance of the Arctic in 1942, what is remarkable is not how many Allied ships they sank, but how few.

The Royal Navy accounted the Russian convoys among its most formidable wartime challenges. It was the service’s misfortune that the professionalism and courage which characterised its performance were tarnished by the memory of PQ17. The Fleet Air Arm never distinguished itself in the north, partly for lack of good aircraft. Some of the navy’s most senior officers failed to display imagination to match the courage and seamanship of their subordinates. They refused to acknowledge, as Churchill and Roosevelt always acknowledged, that at any cost aid must be seen to be sent to Russia. If the supplies shipped in 1941–42 were of greater symbolic than material importance to the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front, they were a vital earnest of Western Allied support for the decisive campaign to destroy Hitler.

3 THE ORDEAL OF PEDESTAL

Between 1940 and 1943, the Mediterranean witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the Royal Navy’s war. British submarines, based on Malta when conditions there allowed, attacked Axis supply lines to North Africa with some success. Battle squadrons sought to assert themselves in the face of the Italian navy, U-boats and the Luftwaffe. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham inflicted severe damage on the Italian fleet in his November 1940 carrier air strike against Taranto, and in the surface action off Cape Matapan on 28–29 March 1941. But every capital ship sortie into open waters within range of the enemy was a perilous venture, which took a harrowing toll. The carrier Illustrious was badly damaged by German bombing in January 1941. On 25 November that year, the battleship Barham blew up, with the loss of most of its crew, after being torpedoed by a German submarine. The battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant rested for seven months on the floor of Alexandria harbour after falling victim to an attack by courageous Italian human-torpedo crews on 19 December 1941. The Royal Navy, having lost five capital ships in a month, was for a time obliged to cede the central Mediterranean to the Axis. There was a steady drain of British cruiser and destroyer losses to mines, bombs and torpedoes. For some months in 1941, the navy suffered severely while holding open a sea link to besieged Tobruk, which was deemed symbolically if not militarily important.

The pervasive strategic reality was that the Royal Navy remained vulnerable in the Mediterranean until the British Army could gain control of the North African littoral, providing the RAF with bases. In 1942, the hazards were increased by German deployment of U-boat reinforcements. But Winston Churchill conducted the war effort on the basis that Britain must be seen to challenge the enemy at every opportunity, especially when the army accomplished so little for so long. Malta, within easy range of Axis Sicilian air bases, suffered almost three years of intermittent bombardment. In March and April 1942 the little island received twice the bomb tonnage dropped on London during the entire blitz; its people almost starved, and its resident submarine flotilla had to be withdrawn. The requirement to sustain Malta became a priority for the Royal Navy, and every supply ship had to be fought through in the face of air, U-boat and surface attack. Each convoy demanded a supporting fleet operation: there must be battleships in case Italian heavy units sortied, carriers to provide air cover, and cruiser and destroyer escorts. Each venture precipitated an epic battle. The most famous, or notorious, took place in August 1942, when Malta’s shortages of oil, aircraft and food attained desperate proportions: Operation Pedestal was launched to bring succour.

Vice-Admiral Edward Syfret took command of the battlefleet that sailed from the Clyde on 3 August, escorting fourteen merchantmen. Several of these were chartered American ships, notably the tanker Ohio, provided with British crews. All had been fitted with anti-aircraft armament manned by soldiers, and on the passage to Gibraltar the convoy intensively exercised both gunnery and manoeuvre. The ships that set forth on 10 August to make the Malta passage formed a mighty array: the battleships Nelson and Rodney; fleet carriers Victorious, Indomitable and Eagle; the old carrier Furious, ferrying Spitfires to reinforce the island as soon as the range narrowed sufficiently to fly them off; six cruisers; twenty-four destroyers and a flotilla of smaller craft. To one cadet aboard a merchantman it was ‘a fantastically wonderful sight’.

Only weeks had elapsed since the Royal Navy’s Arctic humiliation, and the service felt on its mettle: a destroyer captain, Lt. Cmdr. David Hill, said: ‘There was a strong touch of desperation and bloody-mindedness following PQ17.’ One of the Pedestal destroyer flotillas, led by ‘Jackie’ Broome, had endured that ghastly experience. A host of German and Italian eyes, watching Gibraltar from Spain and North Africa, saw the fleet sail. Axis commanders were undeceived by a feint convoy which sailed simultaneously from Alexandria, trailing its coat in the eastern Mediterranean. ‘I felt indeed that some of our party were entering the narrow seas on a desperate venture,’ wrote George Blundell of the battleship Nelson, ‘and prayed to the Ruler of Destiny for his favour.’

On the 11th, amid a still, azure sea Furious began flying off its Spitfires, which set course for Malta, 550 miles distant, where most arrived safely. But now the first disaster struck. In the western Mediterranean, Asdic was confused by freak underwater conditions created by the confluence of warm seas with colder Atlantic currents: ships were thus acutely vulnerable to submarine attack. Even as the fighters were being launched, a salvo of torpedoes fired by U-73 struck Eagle, which sank in eight minutes with the loss of 260 of her complement of 1,160 men. ‘She presented a terrible sight as she heeled over, turned bottom up and sank with horrible speed,’ wrote an awestruck witness. ‘Men and aircraft could be seen falling off her flight deck as she capsized…It makes one tremble. If anyone took a good film of it, it should be shown throughout the country…I remember thinking of the trapped men.’ That evening Furious, its flight deck now empty, turned for home and safety. One of her escorts, the destroyer Wolverine, spotted an Italian submarine and raced in to ram; the Axis boat sank, but Wolverine suffered severe damage.

At 2045 the first enemy air attack was launched against Pedestal, by thirty-six Heinkel 111s and Ju88s flying from Sicily. These achieved no hits, and four German aircraft fell to the intense AA barrage. Next day at noon, a much more serious strike took place, by seventy bombers and torpedo-carriers with fighter escort. The ensuing battle lasted two hours. The freighter Deucalion was damaged and later sunk off the Tunisian coast by a torpedo-bomber, despite gallant efforts to save the ship by her master, Captain Ramsay Brown. During the afternoon, the convoy survived a submarine ambush unscathed. The destroyer Ithuriel rammed and sank another Italian boat, at the cost of crippling herself.

That evening of the 12th, the Luftwaffe and Italian air force came again. A hundred bombers and torpedo-carriers launched attacks from every direction and altitude, designed to swamp the defence. Ships’ AA crews fired almost continuously; empty cases massed in heaps beside gun mountings; the brilliant sky became pockmarked with thousands of black puffs; the noise of screaming aircraft engines competed with the stammer and thud of every calibre of armament. The destroyer Foresight was sunk, the carrier Indomitable badly damaged by three armour-piercing bombs. Still short of the Sicilian Narrows, Syfret withdrew his capital ships westwards, leaving a close escort headed by six cruisers, commanded by Rear-Admiral Harold Burrough, to fight the convoy through to Malta.

Pedestal’s agony now began in earnest. Within an hour of Syfret parting company, the Italian submarine Axum achieved a brilliant triple success: in a single attack, it sank Burrough’s flagship Nigeria and the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo, also hitting the tanker Ohio. These losses wiped out the convoy’s Fighter Direction capability, for the two cruisers carried the only radio sets capable of voice communication with Malta-based planes. Then, as the light began to fade, with British ships losing formation and huddling into a scrum, the Luftwaffe came again. Ju88s sank the merchant ships Empire Hope and Clan Ferguson and crippled Brisbane Star. Soon afterwards, a submarine torpedo damaged the cruiser Kenya. In darkness in the early hours of 13 August, German and Italian motor torpedo boats launched a series of attacks which persisted for hours. The defence was feeble, because Burrough decided that to illuminate the battlefield with starshell would help the enemy more than his own gunners. The cruiser Manchester was fatally damaged, four more merchantmen sunk and a fifth hit. The only compensation for suffering such losses in the Mediterranean’s warm summer waters was that far more survivors could be rescued than in the Arctic or even the Atlantic.

At daybreak the Luftwaffe returned, sinking another merchantman. Ohio suffered further damage, but limped onward until renewed attacks later in the morning stopped her engines. Two more merchantmen were crippled, and had to be left behind with a destroyer escort. At 1600, in accordance with orders Burrough’s three surviving cruisers turned back for Gibraltar. Three merchantmen – Port Chalmers, Melbourne Star and Rochester Castle, the last with its deck almost awash – struggled to cover the final miles into Malta shepherded by small craft from the island. At 1800 on 13 August, as cheering crowds lined the old fortifications, they steamed into Grand Harbour. The Germans set about demolishing the stragglers, sinking the damaged Dorset and hitting Ohio yet again. By a miracle attributable partly to its rugged American construction, the tanker maintained way, towed by a destroyer and two minesweepers. On the morning of 15 August, the Catholic Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, Ohio reached safety and began to offload. Her master, Captain Dudley Mason, was awarded the George Cross; Brisbane Star also completed the passage.

The Pedestal convoy delivered 32,000 tons of stores, 12,000 tons of coal and two months’ supply of oil; five merchantmen survived out of fourteen. The navy’s aggressive posturing dissuaded the Italian fleet from joining the battle. Mussolini’s battleships were anyway immobilised by lack of fuel, and RAF aircraft dropped flares over five cruisers which put to sea, convincing them that they faced unacceptable risk if they persevered. Lieutenant Alastair Mars, commanding the submarine Unbroken, extracted some revenge for British warship losses by torpedoing the Bolzano and Muzio Attendolo. But after the Pedestal battle was over, Commander George Blundell of the battleship Nelson looked back in deep gloom: ‘Most of us felt depressed by the party. Operation “M” for Murder we call it. “The navy thrives on impossibilities,” said the BBC. Yes, but how long can it go on doing so?’

The three-day drama of Pedestal was almost matched by the experiences and sufferings of other Malta convoys and their escorts. Not all those who sailed distinguished themselves: there were shameful cases of merchant ship crews abandoning their ships unnecessarily, of seamen scuttling for lifeboats while their vessels were still steaming. A disgusted Captain Brown of Deucalion, some of whose men quit their posts prematurely, said later, ‘I could never have imagined that any Britishers could have shown up in such poor colours.’ But the overall story is one of a fine endeavour. By the winter of 1942, the worst of Britain’s Mediterranean travails were over. Ultra decrypts enabled Allied warships and aircraft to wreak increasing havoc on Rommel’s supply line: Axis shipping losses in the Mediterranean rose from 15,386 tons in July to 33,791 in September, 56,303 in October, and 170,000 in the two months that followed. In November, Montgomery was victorious at El Alamein and the Americans landed in North Africa. The siege of Malta was relieved soon afterwards.

Holding the island since 1940 had cost the Royal Navy one battleship, two carriers, four cruisers, one minelayer, twenty destroyers and minesweepers and forty submarines. The RAF lost 547 aircraft in the air and another 160 destroyed on the ground. Ashore, Malta’s defence forfeited the lives of 1,600 civilians, seven hundred soldiers and nine hundred RAF personnel. Afloat, 2,200 warship crewmen, 1,700 submariners and two hundred merchant seamen perished. Thereafter, in 1943 and 1944, Allied dominance of the Mediterranean remained contested and imposed continuing losses, but strategic advantage tilted relentlessly away from the Axis. The Royal Navy’s critical responsibilities in the last two years of the war became those of escorting Allied armies to new battlefields, organising and protecting a succession of massive amphibious landings. If the threat from Germany’s submarines and aircraft persisted to the end – British warships suffered severely in the ill-fated autumn 1943 Dodecanese campaign – the Royal Navy had won the decisive battles of the European war at sea; not in actions between fleets, but by sustaining Britain’s global rights of passage in the face of air power and U-boats. In fulfilment of this responsibility, most of its captains and crews upheld the service’s highest traditions.