Not long before Christmas, 1940 Churchill unburdened his soul in a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt:
The danger of Great Britain being destroyed by a swift, overwhelming blow has for the time very greatly receded. In its place there is a long, gradually maturing danger, less sudden and less spectacular, but equally deadly. This mortal danger is the steady and increasing diminution of sea tonnage. . . . Unless we can establish our ability to feed this island . . . we may fall by the way, and the time needed by the United States to complete her defensive preparations may not be forthcoming. It is, therefore, in shipping and in the power to transport across the oceans, particularly the Atlantic Ocean, that in 1941 the crunch of the whole war will be found.
In the five weeks ending November 3, Britain’s sea losses totalled 420,000 tons, a figure comparable to the worst year of the 1914–18 war. The Churchill government estimated that it would take 43 million tons to keep Britain going in 1941, and the losses had cut the incoming tonnage to a rate of 37 million tons. Obviously this loss ratio could not be borne for a year.
What Churchill wanted was American participation in the battle of the Atlantic, plus an increase in shipbuilding and delivery. Britain had to have three million tons of shipping more than she could produce and it could come from only one place, the United States.
Churchill’s letter was long and encyclopedic in its attention to the British problems posed by the war. His call was for help. And in Churchill’s calm, deliberate way, masked by its clarity and strength, it was a desperate call, and Roosevelt recognized it as such. He also agreed with the logic that if Britain fell, then the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo axis would consider the world to be its oyster. The two great oceans could no longer protect the United States. Roosevelt’s problem was to convince an American public heavily laced with isolationist sentiment that isolationism was a thing of the past. Having made the decision that the United States must back Britain to the hilt in this war, Roosevelt set out to do the job.
Lend-lease was the first part of the answer. The United States would produce the sinews of war, and lend them to the British. At the end of the war, the ships, tanks, planes, guns, all military equipment, would be returned—in theory. Anyone who thought about it would realize that not all this equipment could be returned because most of it would be destroyed. But the theory made it possible to persuade a majority of Americans that in becoming “the great arsenal of democracy” they were not becoming “patsies.” So the theory enabled Roosevelt to go to the aid of the British in their hour of need, yet preserve an apparent air of disinterest in the struggle that raged across and on the Atlantic.
In fact, America and Americans had been increasingly involved in the war since the first days. Two dozen Americans were killed in the outrageous sinking of the liner Athenia. The Germans knew what they had done, but denied it; their denials continued and it took the Department of State an entire year to investigate and conclude that a U-boat had indeed done the job. That delay served the German propaganda purpose of confusing some Americans, but not all. And in the first week of war the U.S. freighter Wacosta was stopped by a U-boat off the Irish coast and searched for contraband. Then the American freighter City of Flint was captured by the German pocket battleship Deutschland and sent to Hamburg under a German prize crew. Americans traveling on other ships of neutral nations had been torpedoed and some had been killed. So the war was not an unknown quantity in America, and the sympathy of most Americans, as well as the administration, rested with Great Britain.
Since September 5, 1939, the United States had maintained a war stance in the Caribbean and the waters of the Atlantic off the East Coast. It was called the Neutrality Patrol. Its purpose was to prevent the belligerents from bringing their war into American waters. The British were not the target, obviously. The ploy was successful; Doenitz dared not send his U-boats across the Atlantic to prey on shipping off the American shore. Thus already the American naval forces were serving a useful purpose in the war against the U-boats simply by limiting their field of activity, out of the area bounded on the east by Halifax, to longitude 60 ° west, then south to latitude 20° north and then to a point sixty miles south of the Cape Verde islands, then parallel to the coast of South America. The German pocket battleships penetrated this area briefly, but the U-boats stayed clear.
In the spring of 1941 the Americans enforced this patrol though the creation of the Atlantic Fleet, under Admiral Ernest J. King. The fleet was based at Norfolk, Virginia, but its major activity was in the Caribbean. The neutrality zone was extended to 26° west, to include the Azores Islands. Doenitz was aghast at the temerity of the Americans to claim suzerainty over 80 percent of the Atlantic; still, for the moment they had read Hitler correctly. He was leery of provoking the United States.
But in the last months of 1940 and the early months of 1941 the British problem did not lie primarily in the Western Hemisphere. The U-boats had not ventured into the Atlantic farther west than in the area of Iceland. Using the German world grid system which divided every ocean into blocks, the action was mostly in the AL, AM and BE sectors.
There the U-boats continued to take a heavy toll, although the size of the effective U-boat fleet was falling steadily. That fact is an enormous tribute to the tenacity and resilience of Doenitz’s men.
In December, 1940, the U-boats were hampered in their operations by some of the roughest weather that had ever hit the Atlantic. That did not keep them from operating successfully. One of the great dramas of the war at sea was played out in the first three days of December southwest of Iceland.
Convoy HX 90 had set out from Canada late in November bound for Liverpool. As was customary in these days following the occupation of France and the refusal of Ireland to grant Britain bases on her soil, the convoys had to steam far north of the Irish isles and down through the Northern Approaches. The advantage was that the weather was usually bad in this area, which was helpful in forestalling air attack and to some extent U-boat attack. The disadvantage was that the convoys and ships clustered in a relatively small section of sea, and were thus more vulnerable to attack than before.
HX 90 had set out with forty-one ships. Two had suffered mechanical failures early out and had returned to North American ports. Nine ships had been separated from the pack by a gale that blew from November 24 to November 26. These included the vice commodore’s ship, Victoria City. The convoy was then reorganized into nine columns comprising thirty ships in all.
Back in England the Admiralty radio watch intercepted messages between Doenitz and a U-boat in the vicinity of 55° north, 23′ west and warned the warships in the vicinity. This U-boat was Lieutenant Ernst Mengerson’s U-101. He was out on his first patrol as captain.
On December 1 the convoy picked up one of the old four-stack destroyers, now renamed the H.M.S. Laconia, as an ocean escort. That afternoon Mengerson came across the steamer Ville D’Arlon. She was a part of HX 90, but she had suffered some mechanical difficulties and had fallen behind. Now she caught up with the convoy. What her captain did not know is that she had a companion; U-101 was trailing her.
The Laconia left the convoy at 5 P.M. that same day. The ships were supposed to have three local escorts to take them into the Western Approaches, but the escorts had not shown up by dark. The storm had put the convoy behind schedule and it had not reached the rendezvous point.
The convoy had reached the position 54° 25′ north, 20° 25′ west and was steering a course of 60° at eight knots at 8:14 P.M. on December 1.
The convoy commodore, riding in the steamer Botavon, did not know it but Mengerson was right there and had informed Doenitz, who called in his wolf pack: Commander Prien’s U-47, Commander Kretschmer’s U-99, and Lieutenant Otto Salman’s U-52.
Lieutenant Mengerson was the first to hit the convoy. At 8:14 P.M. he torpedoed the tanker Appalachee, leader of the starboard outside column, and immediately afterward put another torpedo into the steamer Loch Ranza. He fired a third torpedo that missed another ship.
The Appalachee sank immediately, but the Loch Ranza was only damaged, and after picking up the survivors of the tanker, the Loch Ranza got under way again. But in the interim, three hours had passed and the convoy was long gone.
Two explosions were reported to the convoy commander but when he reached his bridge, he saw only some lights to starboard—not signals. So he concluded that one or two ships had somehow “got tangled up” and went back to his dinner. The convoy proceeded as though nothing had happened.
At 1 A.M. on December 2, the convoy altered course to make the rendezvous point. So did the U-boats.
Half an hour later the Ville d’Arlon dropped back, again, hoisting lights to indicate that she was having difficulties. She fell behind the convoy and at 2:10 A.M. Prien found her and put a torpedo into her.
Mengerson was shadowing the convoy closely. He moved around to the port side, and at 3:20 A.M. torpedoed the Lady Glanely, the leading ship in the outside column. Meanwhile, Prien had come up to the convoy, moved in close on the surface and approached the tanker Conch. The U-47 was clearly visible to the crew of the tanker as Prien fired his torpedo. The captain tried to maneuver to miss, but failed, and the Conch was damaged and fell out of line.
The next ship in the column, the Dunsley, turned to starboard to avoid the submarine, and then stopped to rescue the crew. At 4:10 A.M. she was so engaged when Prien’s U-47 came alongside, close by the port beam, and opened fire. The first shell hit the Dunsley. Then her deck gun got into action and she began peppering the water around the U-boat. Prien fired ten more rounds of eighty-eight millimeter and a star shell—a group of flares fired simultaneously—to call on any other boat for assistance, and then the Dunsley zigzagged away. The U-boat did not follow. Why should a member of the wolf pack go after an armed and vigorous enemy, when there were so many more?
The convoy had made an emergency turn after the last torpedoing, and at 4:15 A.M. resumed its base course of seventy-three degrees. It lost another ship, the Rajahstan, which had to drop out because of engine trouble. (She was lucky enough to reach port alone.)
But the U-boats were still out there, right with the convoy.
At 5:15 A.M. Mengerson moved around again and torpedoed the Kavak, the last remaining ship in the starboard column. This 2,700-ton ammunition ship then blew up with an enormous roar and flash of light.
By this time Lieutenant Salman was catching up to the convoy. The steamer Tasso had lagged back, and was zigzagging independently behind the convoy. Salman torpedoed her and moved up to the convoy. He then torpedoed the steamer Good-leigh. So did at least one of the other U-boats, for she was struck by three torpedoes.
At 5:38 A.M. the steamer Penrose sighted a U-boat on the surface close on her port beam. The convoy then made an emergency turn to starboard, and a few minutes later, returned to the base course. There were no more U-boat attacks that morning not, as the commodore believed, because of the growing light of day, but because Prien had exhausted his torpedoes. Mengerson had suffered a diesel engine breakdown. Kretschmer had turned to follow Forfar, a 16,000-ton armed merchant cruiser. At this point Convoy HX 90 was coming into the Western Approaches, and many ships were to be found. This was particularly true because Convoy OB 251 had just dispersed here.
OB 251 was an outward bound convoy, and the point 56° north, 17° west was the place where the escorts left her. The convoy continued on course until 11 P.M. on the night of December 1 and then the ships broke off to go their own ways. The Admiralty did not yet have the wherewithal to give them proper protection. The three escorts, Viscount, Vanquisher, and Gentian, had brought OB 251 this far; now they were to pick up HX 90 and take it safely back to Britain. They had left OB 251 at 7 P.M. on the previous night and were now looking for their new charges.
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Lieutenant Commander Wolfgang Lueth’s U-43 was not a part of the Prien wolf pack which hit HX 90 the night before, but had just entered the area in response to Doenitz’s messages, along with the U-95, U-94, and U-140.
Lueth’s first victim was Pacific President, followed almost immediately by Victor Ross, a 12,000-ton tanker.
Into that same area came the straggler Victoria City from Convoy HX 90, which was sunk that day by the U-140.
A real saga was occurring not far away. The tanker Conch, having been torpedoed by Prien on the night before, was still afloat and still limping toward Britain. She was found again on December 2 by U-95, which put three more torpedoes into her. Still she did not sink, and kept moving very slowly homeward.
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The commander of the escort group recognized on the night of December 1 the dangers to both Convoy OB 251 and HX 90 from the number of submarines in the area. His hope was that by steering to a position astern of the HX 90 rendezvous point, he could cover both convoys. In fact, he managed to cover neither. At 4 A.M. on December 2 came word that the U-99 had attacked the Forfar, and all three escorts turned south to that area. They came across several ships but did not find the Forfar, the Victor Ross, the Lady Glanely or the Loch Ranza, all of which had sent out distress messages. They did not find them because the three ships were no longer afloat.
This search was particularly fruitless; it caused the Vanquisher to run short of fuel and she had to return to Londonderry to replenish; she did not join up with Convoy HX 90 until 7 P.M. on December 4. By that time Doenitz’s wolf packs were long gone.
The Viscount and the Gentian tried to catch up with Convoy HX 90. The Viscount was diverted by the distress signal from Goodleigh, and arrived on the scene in time to hear the last torpedo fired by Lieutenant Salman strike the ship. From 7:30 until 9:20 P.M. the Viscount was picking up survivors from Tasso, Kavak, and Goodleigh.
The escort St. Laurent had been traveling in company with the Forfar but left her in the night to go to the assistance of another torpedoed ship. She finally came up on the Conch, which had been torpedoed one more time, this time by Kretschmer’s U-99. She spent twenty minutes picking up survivors.
The Viscount found one U-boat on the surface, chased her down and put out a pattern of depth charges. No U-boat was sunk.
The Viscount then went to the assistance of the S.S. Dunsely which had been set afire by Focke-Wulff bombers that day. She was carrying survivors from the Forfar and told the Viscount captain there were more in the water. The Viscount went to the scene and began picking up men. Said her captain: “Condition of survivors was terrible owing to oil fuel and exposure and recovery was difficult. Every live man was picked up. Fourteen hours medical attention was necessary on one man who finally pulled through. The conduct of Forfar’s survivors in the face of great danger and discomfort was exemplary.”
So by mid-afternoon on December 2, HX 90 still did not have any real protection. At 4 P.M. the destroyer Folkestone made contact, and almost immediately found a U-boat trailing the convoy. The convoy made an emergency turn, and the Folkestone went after the U-boat with depth charges. But at 4:25 P.M. the Stirlingshire was torpedoed in the convoy by Lieutenant Kuppisch’s U-94. The boat dived and got away from two escorts, the Folkestone and the Gentian, which had just joined up.
The two escorts took stations at the front and on the side of the convoy, but at 8:20 P.M. the Wilhelmina, now the outside ship in the starboard column, was torpedoed by Kuppisch, and she went up with such a bang that the W. Hendrik, immediately to her port side, thought she had also been torpedoed.
The W. Hendrick dropped out of line. Almost immediately a Focke-Wulff condor swooped down out of the cloud cover and attacked the convoy. At this moment the Viscount was finally coming up and her captain began firing on the plane with his four-inch guns. The condor then veered off and attacked the W. Hendrik, which had fallen back about five miles. The Viscount put on speed, dashed through the convoy and attacked the plane, which then veered away and was gone.
The convoy then made another emergency turn and managed to throw off the submarine pursuers, which had been forced down by the presence of the three escorts. The enthusiasm of the pack for the chase was gone, and that was the end of the assault on HX 90. The Germans had sunk ten of the thirty ships.
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The fate of Convoy HX 90 received more than usual attention at the Admiralty, and out of it came some more conclusions about the best means of increasing the protection of merchant ships. There were still some who believed in the antisubmarine patrol, but the pulling and hauling of the available escorts in the area around 54° north and 18° west in this case had evidently played into the hands of the enemy. The director of the Admiralty trade division called for extended escort to take the ships farther west on their way to North America, and to pick up the homeward bound convoys sooner. The argument could be made, and was, that all this accomplished was to push the U-boat operating area farther west; but it also extended the distance the U-boats would have to travel and made it harder for the growing force of condor bombers.
The RAF began giving more attention to the submarine base at Lorient. New evasive routing measures were put into effect, changing all the old patterns. At the end of December the anti–U-boat forces added up the figures of losses for December, and found that although the figure of tonnage was high, it was almost entirely because of the assault on convoy HX 90. After that, losses to U-boats had fallen quite low. The admirals were not quite sure to which factor they should attribute the change.
The fact was that the losses were low because of weather, the changes in routing and changes in the merchant shipping codes. Admiral Doenitz was the first to admit that his problem continued to be to find the convoys, and the Royal Navy was making this ever more difficult. Only two convoys were found by the U-boats in January, 1941.
The number of ships sunk by the U-boats had averaged eight per boat in the fall of 1940. In January and February it fell to an average of two per boat, twenty-one ships, 127,000 tons. It was an enormous improvement. Another new ingredient had been added to the anti–U-boat mix: radar. The asdic system was useful only against submerged submarines. But submarines on top of the water could be detected by radar, and by January, ships and planes were being fitted out with this apparatus. Also RAF Squadron Commander H. de V. Leigh devised a searchlight for use with aircraft on convoy escort duty. The Leigh light was like a tank’s battle light: it could be turned on suddenly to blind the deck crew of a surfaced U-boat and to illuminate it thoroughly for attack. The RAF Coastal Command was coming along in its appreciation of the U-boat menace and in its development of devices to defeat the U-boats. The major problem existing in the winter of 1941 was no longer attitude, but aircraft. It would be months more before the United States could deliver a supply of the proper kind of aircraft, Catalina flying boats, to undertake this work.
And yet another factor was coming into play. At last the Flower class corvettes were becoming available to add to the escort forces of Britain. The ninety trawlers had been delivered, and during the winter the Western Approaches command had the wherewithal to form escort groups. This change meant that a number of ships could work together over a period of time, so that the officers and men knew how to cooperate to the best advantage of their convoy charges.
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Just as the British were beginning to congratulate themselves, however, the sinkings in February jumped: thirty-nine ships, nearly 200,000 tons. What the U-boats failed to do, the Luftwaffe succeeded in doing: they sank twenty-seven ships, 90,000 more tons. The rate of sinking was then back to the near disastrous level that could not be allowed if Britain was to survive.
These February figures were all the more worrisome because Churchill and Admiral Pound fully expected a renewed U-boat onslaught on the Western Approaches with the arrival of better weather in the spring. They knew that Doenitz at last was beginning to get new boats, although they were not fooled by the German change in the numbering system. Originally the U-boats had been numbered consecutively; in the early days of the war their numbers were painted. But when the numbers hit the one hundred mark, suddenly they began to increase in numerical power in an unmethodical manner. By September, 1940, U-138 was at sea, but there were nothing like even a hundred U-boats in existence. In the winter of 1941 U-boats began to emerge with numbers like U-552; it was a part of Doenitz’s psychological warfare to convince the world that Germany’s undersea fleet was unbeatable. Another weapon was the accomplishments of the U-boat captains. By the winter of 1941, Germany boasted sixteen U-boat commanders who had sunk over 100,000 tons of shipping, and had been awarded the Knight insignia of the Iron Cross. Leading them all was Lieutenant Guenther Prien, who was also awarded the Oak Leaves in October, 1940, although his actual sinkings were a long way behind those of Lieutenant Kretschmer, who claimed more than 200,000 tons by then. Another comer was Joachim Schepke, who was favored by Doenitz even above the other two.
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The Admiralty was particularly upset in reviewing the results of the U-boat offensive for February, because of the evident increased cooperation between Doenitz’s U-boats and Goering’s Luftwaffe. A study of attacks on Convoy HG 53 from Gibraltar indicated that this cooperation could be fatal.
HG 53 sailed from Gibraltar on January 6 escorted by one sloop and one destroyer. It was attacked by a U-boat on January 9 and two ships were sunk. But the U-boat then shadowed the convoy, and homed six Focke-Wulff condors in on the convoy that day. Five ships were sunk by bombs.
The U-boat continued to shadow and attacked again on January 10, sinking one ship. She then continued to transmit information apparently intended for the Hipper, a German cruiser, but the Hipper was attacking another convoy.
Identical tales were repeated several times during February. As March began, Churchill and Admiral Pound fully expected the renewed U-boat attack to begin. They could have been reading Admiral Doenitz’s mind. He transferred his main area of operation to the AL and AK grid areas farther west, south of Iceland. The admiral expected his U-boats to show an excellent catch for the month of March.
Churchill was ever watchful of the U-boats, ever conscious that they were his greatest enemy. At the end of February he announced that the battle of the Atlantic was vital, and that it must be won by any and every means. Ships and planes were to be transferred from other duty to this work. To show his concern, the prime minister formed a new Battle of the Atlantic Committee in the cabinet and took personal charge of it. The Admiralty called for more vigilance, and increased the availability of escorts.
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The U-boats began to go out—Prien, Hardegen, Kretschmer, Clausen, Lemp, Schepke. Lieutenant Prien had one quality that endeared him above all others to Admiral Doenitz: he loved to be at sea, stalking and sinking enemy vessels. Because of this, one Prien patrol followed on the heels of the last with little time off between, and the Prien practice became the practice of the U-boat fleet. Without a real leave, Prien had been on active duty since the summer of 1939, eighteen months of grinding activity and constant tension. His thin face and black-ringed eyes attested to it in February, as he got ready at Lorient to go out on patrol again.
Out he went. On February 26 he sank four merchant ships and the next day another, all from Convoy OB 290. But then came more than a week of failure; no convoys seemed to be on the horizon in Prien’s area. Admiral Doenitz grew concerned, and redoubled his demands that the boats search, search, search, until they found the convoys. The spring offensive had to begin with a bang.