When in the summer of 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, he made the same three fatal mistakes his infamous predecessor Napoleon Bonaparte had made in 1812. Firstly, he underestimated the tenacity of the Russia people; secondly, he failed to take into account the sheer size of the theatre he was entering; and thirdly, he failed to reckon with the harsh Russian winter.
At first, Barbarossa promised to be no more than a large scale training exercise for the Wehrmacht. Taken by surprise, the Russians fell back in confusion before the massed ranks of German armoured columns backed by the Luftwaffe’s umbrella of fighters and bombers. By early October the invaders were within striking distance of Moscow. On paper, the defending Russians had an overwhelming superiority in resources: they had half a million more men on the ground, their aircraft outnumbered the Luftwaffe’s by four to one and they could field eight times as many tanks. However, closer examination would reveal that the Soviet forces were hopelessly out of date. The Russians were still relying on more than a dozen cavalry divisions for mobile operations, and what tanks they had were slow and poorly armoured. The same applied to their aircraft, many being of First World War vintage and most without radio.
Reluctant as he was to engage with the western democracies, Stalin was eventually forced to turn to Britain and America for help, and on 12 August 1941 the first Arctic convoy sailed from Liverpool. Operation Dervish, as this convoy was codenamed, consisted of seven merchantmen, six British and one Dutch, all carrying guns, planes, tanks, ammunition and spares to Archangel. Thereafter, similar British convoys sailed to Russia by the northern route at the rate of one a month. When America joined the war in December 1941, the size and frequency of the convoys increased. The hazards these convoys faced, particularly in the long Arctic winter, were many and daunting. A report written by Able Seaman William Smith, who served in the sloop HMS Magpie escorting convoys to Russia, paints a vivid picture:
The sea was violent with waves of 30ft plus. When we met a gale in the Atlantic we went into it bow on and ploughed through, but in the Arctic, east of Bear Island, the sea was very narrow and we had to go east with no deviation.
This meant we were rolling as much as 30 degrees to port and starboard.
With the deck covered in ice and snow we had to use lifelines when going aft to the guns and depth charges. These lifelines were fitted very firmly and anyone going aft on deck had to fix a rope around the body with a hook on to the lifeline and gradually move aft when the ship was steady. But when she rolled your feet left the deck and at 30 degrees you were hanging over the sea. At maximum roll the ship shuddered for a few seconds and then decided to come back or turn over – some did.
The temperature in those seas got as low as 60 degrees below freezing. Your eyebrows and eyelashes froze and your eyes were very sore with the winds blowing into them. When you got down to the mess deck there was about three inches of water from condensation. The older men, who had hair in their noses, found that these froze solid and were like needles. Many men came off watch with faces covered in blood as they had rubbed their noses without thinking.
The main thing at this time was to keep the upper deck clear of ice and snow by means of axes and steam hoses or the ship would become top heavy.
The merchant ships, being bigger and higher out of the water, suffered marginally less, but they too had their problems, as related by Radio Officer David B. Craig aboard the Dover Hill in Convoy JW 53:
As we sailed north the gale developed into a hurricane and ships began to get damaged. Six of the merchant ships were damaged and had to return to Iceland. On our ship the deck cargo began to break adrift and we were not sorry to see the oil drums going over the side but when the lorries in wooden cases were smashed up and eventually went overboard things were not so good. But we managed to save the tanks and kept on battering our way northwards. I remember trying to use an Aldis lamp from our bridge to signal to a corvette and found it very difficult since one minute she would be in sight, then she would go down the trough of the wave and all I could see would be her top masts; then she would come up and our ship would go down and all that could be seen was water, but eventually we got the message through.
The Arctic convoys had been operating for two and a half years when, on 12 January 1944, the Fort Bellingham left the sheltered waters of Loch Ewe on Scotland’s western coast. Duffle-coated and muffled against the biting cold, Captain James Maley peered through the wheelhouse windows as he conned the ship out past the headlands. The sky was a thick grey overcast, the wind was keening in the rigging and the swell rising. Somewhere out in the Atlantic a monster of a storm was brewing. It was, Maley concluded, a rotten way in which to begin the first voyage of the new year.
Convoy JW56A, of which the Fort Bellingham was Commodore ship, consisted of twenty merchantmen, thirteen American, five British and one Dutch, all loaded to their marks with war materials destined for the steppes of northern Russia, where Stalin’s armies were bloodily ousting the German invader. Waiting outside the loch was the convoy’s local escort of two destroyers, four corvettes and two minesweepers, which would stand guard over JW56A as far as Iceland. With Captain Maley on the bridge of the Fort Bellingham was Commodore Ivan Whitehorn RN and his staff of six, a questionable honour for Maley, whose command would be subjugate to Whitehorn until they reached Murmansk.
The Fort Bellingham was a 7,153-ton, Canadian-built wartime replacement, only four months out of her Vancouver shipyard. She had been built on very similar lines to Henry Kaiser’s Liberty ships, having a capacious box-shaped hull that gave her a cargo-carrying capacity of up to 10,000 tons. Powered by a 628 nominal h.p. steam engine, with oil-fired boilers, she had an economical service speed of 11 knots. Although owned by the Canadian Government, she was on bareboat charter to the Ministry of War Transport, who had appointed the Hain Steamship Company of London to manage her. She sailed under the Red Ensign and was manned by a British crew of forty-five, which included DEMS gunners. Like all merchantmen sailing to Russia by the northern route, she was very heavily armed, mounting a 4-inch anti-submarine gun, a 12-pounder HA/LA, a 40mm Bofors, six 20mm Oerlikons, two twin 0.5 Colt machine guns and an assortment of rockets for use against low-flying aircraft.
Predictably, as the convoy moved north towards the Arctic Circle, the weather grew steadily worse, the wind increasing to storm force 10, gusting 11 from the west, with mountainous seas exacerbated by a huge Atlantic swell. All efforts at keeping station were abandoned, each ship being heavily engaged in fighting her own personal battle with the storm. They were beam-on to sea and swell, rolling their gunwales under and shipping seas overall. The smaller escorts, being built for speed and manoeuvrability rather than stability, suffered most, being literally thrown from crest to trough, their decks continually awash. At the same time, the thermometer was dropping like the proverbial stone. The rain turned to sleet, and then to blinding snow, while ice began to form on decks and superstructure.
Before long, many of the merchant ships were in trouble, the incessant rolling and buffeting causing their cargoes to break adrift on deck and below in the holds. Lifeboats and rafts were swept overboard and main deck accommodation flooded. After six days of this mounting chaos, the Admiralty ordered the convoy to take shelter in a fjord on the north coast of Iceland to re-secure cargo and repair damage. After three days at anchor in the fjord near the town of Akureyri, the storm finally blew itself out, but it was found that five of the American ships were so badly damaged that it was necessary for them to return to Loch Ewe. Even before meeting the real enemy, Convoy JW56A was down to fifteen ships.
The importance of JW56A, and the pressing need for its cargoes to get through to Russia, became evident when the convoy’s ocean escort arrived at Akureyri. Led by the destroyer flotilla leader HMS Hardy were the British destroyers Inconstant, Obdurate, Offa, Savage, Venus, Vigilant, and Virago, and the Norwegian Stord, plus the corvettes HMS Daniella and HMS Poppy. In addition, a distant escort comprising the three light cruisers HMS Bermuda, Berwick and Kent would follow in the wake of the convoy, ready to close up if any German heavy units should venture out of their hideouts in the Norwegian fjords. This was a formidable escort for just fifteen merchantmen, and when at 1000 on the morning of 21 January JW56A set out for Murmansk there was a justifiable mood of confidence in the convoy. They were fit to fight off any attack.
Unknown to the Admiralty, their radio signal sent on the 17th ordering JW56A to take shelter at Akureyri had been intercepted and deciphered by German Intelligence, who deduced that the convoy would sail for Russia on or about the 20th. However, for reasons unknown, U-boat Command in Norway was not informed until the 24th. Only then did it contact Group Isegrim, a pack of six U-boats on station to the east of Bear Island, and order them to set up an ambush.
Isegrim consisted of U-278 (Joachim Franze), U-360 (Klaus-Helmuth Becker), U-425 (Heinz Bentzien), U-601 (Otto Hansen), U-739 (Ernst Mangold) and U-965 (Klaus Ohling). Another boat, U-737 (Paul Brasack), was on its way to join Isegrim, while five others, U-312 (Kurt-Heinz Nicolay), U-314 (Georg-Wilhelm Basse), U-472 (Wolfgang-Friedrich Freiherr von Forstner), U-716 (Hans Dunkelberg) and U-956 (Hans-Dieter Mohs), were ordered to sail from various Norwegian bases and head towards the area. At the same time, long-range Focke-Wulf Kondor reconnaissance aircraft were scrambled and ordered to locate and shadow the convoy.
While U-boat Command gathered its resources for the reception of JW56A, the convoy was making its way through the polar twilight towards Murmansk in blissful ignorance of the approaching threat. The merchant ships were steaming in three columns abreast, two of six ships and one of three, with the escorts arranged in a tight defensive screen around them. Convoy speed was 10 knots and course was set to pass south of Bear Island. The weather was fine and clear, and so far no reports of enemy activity in the area had been received. It seemed safe to assume that the Germans were unaware of the convoy’s existence.
This assumption was of course not true, but Isegrim had set up its patrol line too far to the south of Bear Island, and JW56A would have sailed past unseen had it not been for the vigilance of the lookouts in the conning tower of U-739. Under the command of Oberleutnant Ernst Mangold, U-739 had sailed from Bergen on her first war patrol just seventeen days earlier and was the northernmost boat of Isegrim’s patrol line. Mangold immediately reported the sighting and settled down to shadow the convoy. The other boats homed in on U-739’s signals, and at 1015 on the 25th U-965 signalled ‘Enemy in sight’. JW56A was then passing some 150 miles south of Bear Island.
The ether was now alive with radio messages as the rest of the pack contacted each other and moved in on their prey. At 1122 U-425 reported sighting smoke on the horizon, followed an hour later by a similar report from U-601. At 1455 U-360 signalled that she had two destroyers in sight. By late afternoon, JW56A was surrounded by ten U-boats, all at periscope depth and keeping out of Asdic range. They were waiting until the polar twilight turned to night.
Despite all the radio activity, the convoy appeared to have no inkling of the danger it faced and sailed serenely on. Then, at 1635, Otto Hansen in U-601 lost patience and fired a torpedo at one of the escorts. The torpedo missed, but when it exploded at the end of its run, the game was up. Ten minutes later, Klaus Ohling in U-965 reported that he had been depth-charged by two destroyers. He also tried a snap shot at one of his attackers, but again the torpedo missed its target.
It was not until 1835, when complete darkness had descended, that Isegrim scored its first hit. U-360, with Klaus-Helmuth Becker in the conning tower, approached the convoy on the surface and fired an acoustic torpedo aimed at the destroyer HMS Obdurate. Fortunately for Obdurate, the torpedo detonated short, and the damage sustained by the destroyer was confined to her starboard propeller, which was knocked out and its shaft flooded. She was able to carry on with one engine.
The Arctic night had brought with it snow squalls, making it even more difficult for the U-boats to attack, but at 2012 Joachim Franze in U-278 broke through the escort screen on the starboard side and fired a spread of three torpedoes into the heart of the convoy. He heard two detonations as he withdrew and claimed two ships sunk. In fact, his torpedoes had passed through the columns of the convoy until they found a home in the hull of the US Liberty ship Penelope Barker, second ship of the outer port column.
The Penelope Barker was completely wrecked, one torpedo hitting in her after cargo hold, the other in her engine room. She sank within ten minutes, taking with her fifteen of her crew and one passenger. The passenger was Surgeon Lieutenant Maurice Hood RNVR, who earlier in the day had boarded from HMS Obdurate to treat one of the Penelope Barker’s crew suffering from an inflamed appendix.
With the torpedoing of the Penelope Barker the night sky was rent by a spectacular display of distress rockets and snowflakes, and the convoy escorts raced to the aid of the stricken ship. The destroyer HMS Savage began picking up survivors, while others tracked down the U-boat and attacked with depth charges. So intense was the bombardment received by U-278 that she dived deep and left the scene as fast as her electric motors would take her. It was not until the early hours of the following morning that Franze felt it safe to surface and report his success to U-boat Command.
All went quiet after Otto Franze’s audacious strike, the Isegrim boats withdrawing in the face of the massive retaliation by JW56A’s escorts. They did not return until midnight, by which time the merchantmen, after much badgering by Commodore Whitehorn, had found those extra few engine revolutions, and the escort ring had tightened. The safety of the Kola Inlet was now only seventy-two hours away. Could they outrun their enemy? The answer was not long in coming.
Hans Dunkelberg in U-716 was first to return to the fight. At 0010 on the 26th Dunkelberg approached the starboard wing of the convoy undetected and fired a spread of three torpedoes into the massed ranks of ships. Two of the three ran through the columns without finding a target, the third slammed into another American Liberty, the Andrew G. Curtin. She was carrying 9,000 tons of general cargo in her holds, much of it steel, while on deck she had two locomotives and two PT boats, a cargo certainly worth its weight in gold to the Russians. Hit squarely amidships, the allwelded ship broke her back and began to sink. Three of her crew of seventy-one died, the others were rescued by the destroyer HMS Inconstant.
Captain James Maley had been in the chartroom of the Fort Bellingham when he heard the unmistakeable muffled thump as the Andrew G. Curtin was hit. He returned to the darkened wheel-house, but before his eyes had adjusted to the night, the Fort
Bellingham staggered as U-360 put a torpedo into her. Captain Maley described events in his report to the Admiralty:
No one saw the track of the torpedo, which struck on the port side, in the after end of No. 3 hold forward of the engine room. There was a dull explosion and a fair amount of water thrown up on the port side. No flash was seen. The ship rolled to starboard, then to port, but quickly righted herself, settling bodily. The engine room bulkhead was pierced, both boilers collapsed and the main steam pipe was fractured. A spray of oil and steam was thrown high into the air, which obscured the view from the bridge. The engines and dynamos stopped immediately and all lights went out. Ventilators were blown off, some of which landed on the after deck. Nos 2 and 4 lifeboats were destroyed. The deck did not appear to be torn or buckled. Although the ship settled several feet, she seemed to be in no immediate danger of sinking.
After the signal for emergency stations was rung, the Third Officer went to the upper bridge to fire the rockets, but the portfire failed, the cap being lost in the darkness, so I switched on the red light. I collected the confidential books, etc., and sent the Chief and Second Officers to the boat deck to clear away the boats.
At no time did Captain Maley give the order to abandon ship. It was his intention to wait until the ship had stopped and then consider whether it was necessary to take to the boats. However, there were others on board who viewed the situation in a different light, and what had been a tightly controlled emergency turned into blind panic. It later came to light that when the Fort Bellingham was hit a rumour went round the ship that her cargo contained a large quantity of ammunition, sufficient to blow her and her crew into eternity. In fact, the only explosives in the holds were 5 tons of cordite, which without detonators was inert. DEMS gunners rushed to the boat deck, where they were joined by a number of the Fort Bellingham’s ratings and a few engineer officers. In the mistaken belief that they had only minutes to live, this confused throng, numbering around twenty in all, set about launching the lifeboats and rafts. As the ship was still making way through the water at some 4 knots, inevitable disaster followed. One lifeboat was lost, the other went away half-filled, and when Chief Officer Gourlay searched the main deck he found that all the life-rafts except two had been slipped and were floating astern.
Thirty-five men, including Captain Maley, his deck officers and Commodore Whitehorn and two of his staff, were still aboard the crippled ship. As there was no way of knowing how long the Fort Bellingham would stay afloat, Chief Officer Gourlay and a party of seamen attempted to put the two remaining life-rafts in the water, but both appeared to be jammed in the their cradles. Captain Maley’s report explains the situation:
The Chief Officer went round the decks and reported that all rafts, except one on the port side of the lower bridge and the one in the after rigging, had been slipped and were floating astern. One raft with a few men on it was seen near the lifeboat, whilst two others appeared to be empty. I gathered the remaining men together and finally freed the raft from the lower bridge, giving instructions that it was to remain alongside, but as it became waterborne, about eighteen men jumped on to it, cut the painter and it quickly drifted from the ship’s side.
The Chief Officer then took a party of men and endeavoured to release the raft from the after rigging. Meanwhile, with the First Officer and Fourth Engineer, I searched the accommodation, we found the Cabin Boy and turned him out. We then tried to enter the engine room, but found it completely flooded and filled with smoke and steam.
As the raft on the port side aft was proving very difficult to free, the Chief and Second Officers went over the side to the waterlogged lifeboat in an attempt to make it serviceable. They were soon soaked in cold water and covered with oil fuel.
At about 0130, about an hour and a half after the explosion, HMS Offa tried to come alongside, but owing to the heavy swell, her bows crashed against my ship. At this moment, the Commodore jumped on board the Offa, followed by his Yeoman of Signals and Telegraphist. All got aboard successfully. The Commodore had not told me that he intended to make the attempt, but went off without saying a word. The destroyer then stood off and picked up survivors from the raft, also the Chief and Second Officers from the waterlogged lifeboat, which was still alongside. The Second Officer was immediately taken to the sick bay suffering from the effects of fuel oil.
Captain Maley and fourteen men remained on board with no means of abandoning the ship, until at 0230 HMS Offa lowered her whaler, which came alongside and took them off. In consultation with Captain Maley, Offa’s commander, Lieutenant Commander R. F. Leonard, decided that there was no hope of saving the Fort Bellingham. Although she was not sinking noticeably lower in the water, her engine room was flooded and there was little possibility of towing her to Murmansk, so it was decided to sink her.
The British ship was reluctant to succumb to her wounds, and even though Offa used two torpedoes and eighteen 4-inch shells in an attempt to put her beyond reach of the enemy, she refused to sink. Lieutenant Commander Leonard could not waste any more time and ammunition on her, so left her to drift forlornly astern into the night. At about 0653 that morning Gerd Schaar in U-967 came across her and ended her agony with a single torpedo.
The Fort Bellingham was just five months old when she went to her lonely grave off Norway’s North Cape. She took with her 4,900 tons of military equipment worth a king’s ransom to the hard-pressed Russians. Of her crew, two men were believed to have been killed in the engine room when the German torpedo exploded in her bowels and two others jumped into the sea and were presumed lost, while thirty-five men were said to have abandoned their ship without orders. Captain Maley and the fifteen men who stayed aboard with him were rescued by HMS Offa, which also picked up another eighteen survivors from a life-raft. Commodore Whitehorn and two of his signals staff escaped by jumping aboard Offa when she was briefly laid alongside the Fort Bellingham.
The thirty-five men who prematurely abandoned the ship, eighteen of her crew, fifteen DEMS gunners and two of the Commodore’s staff, were primarily responsible for the chaos that reigned when the Fort Bellingham was torpedoed. However, it must be borne in mind that the majority of them were very young and inexperienced. This was at a time when the heavy losses of British ships and men were beginning to take their toll. There was a serious shortage of trained seamen and gunners to man the ships, and men who had neither the aptitude nor the self-discipline to face up to the horrors of war were being sent to sea.
After he was rescued, Commodore Whitehorn said, ‘Discipline in the ship was very lax and no attempt was made by the officers to take charge.’ Examination of Captain Maley’s account will show that this accusation against the Fort Bellingham’s officers was unfounded. Furthermore, Whitehorn’s statement regarding discipline in the ship reveals how little he understood about how a merchant ship functioned. Unlike a Royal Navy captain, the commander of a merchant ship had no powers to hand out draconian punishments as per the King’s Regulations; his only means of imposing discipline lay with the Log Book and the few totally inadequate fines it allowed him to levy for misdemeanours. He had a very thin tightrope to walk to keep an efficient and happy ship. It must also be remembered that, even in times of war, a merchant ship is still a commercial enterprise manned by civilians.
At the height of the attack on Convoy JW56A, the Isegrim pack grew to at least twelve U-boats, but in spite of the generally good weather prevailing, their success was not great. Only three ships were lost and the destroyer Obdurate was damaged. Equally, the convoy escorts did no better, for they failed to sink or damage a single U-boat. In fact, the only setback Isegrim suffered came late on the night of the 26th, when U-360 and U-601 were in collision and U-360 was forced to return to Narvik for repairs.
In the late morning of the 27th, with JW56A nearing Murmansk, its escort reinforced by three Soviet destroyers, U-boat Command in Norway decided to abandon the action and ordered the Isegrim boats to withdraw.