In the summer of 1941 the Mediterranean was to Hitler what the North Atlantic was to Churchill. Hitler was engaged in a bitter struggle to control the North African shores of the Mediterranean; he and Mussolini already controlled the European shores. He had invaded the USSR and in his wildest dreams could look forward to the day when the Middle East would be within the reach of his Nazi legions. But none of this could be accomplished so long as the British controlled Egypt and Gibraltar and maintained the naval and air base at Malta from which they could sting the Axis.
That summer the German and Italian campaign was going badly, not so much on land, where Rommel was in fine fettle, but on the sea. The British in four months of summer had sunk a quarter of a million tons of Italian shipping that was bearing supplies, mostly for Rommel. The British fleet in the Mediterranean posed a constant threat to the air and land power of the Axis. Thus, in August Hitler decided that more power must be exerted in the Mediterranean, and he ordered air and U-boat reinforcement of the area. Doenitz was ordered to send six boats down to the Mediterranean. At the same time Hitler prepared to strengthen the air forces there by bringing in Marshal Kesselring’s Air Fleet Two. Doenitz did not like the idea of sacrificing his submarines; he was still certain that the key battlefield was the North Atlantic and that here Britain would stand or fall. The withdrawal of six boats from the North Atlantic perturbed the German admiral.
The six U-boats appeared in the Mediterranean early in October, having passed through the straits of Gibraltar under the noses of the British. But they did not accomplish much. On October 10 Freiherr von Tiesenhausen’s U-331 made the first attack, on a 500-ton freighter, and thought he sank it. He did not even hit it. One reason for the inaccurate reporting was the fact that the Mediterranean was so strictly patrolled by British air and naval forces that once a U-boat captain fired a torpedo his only sensible course of action was to dive down and run. That way he did not have time to observe the results of his shooting.
That was the way it went all month for the six U-boats. The result at the end of the month: six boats, two ships sunk, one patrol boat damaged. Even in the worst of times in the North Atlantic Doenitz’s U-boats had been averaging two ships sunk per patrol, and a patrol might last only three weeks; a minimum of ten British merchant ships on the North Atlantic run had been sacrificed in October to cover Hitler’s demands.
At the end of October, Hitler ordered Kesselring down to the south, and Doenitz was to send more U-boats. Doenitz took six more boats from bases at Lorient and elsewhere on the Bay of Biscay and sent them through the straits. Two did not make it, and one, the U-433, was sunk by the British corvette Marigold almost as soon as she completed the passage. In November, then, there were ten U-boats in the Mediterranean. How did they fare?
Their task primarily was to sink British warships, to reduce the British power in the Mediterranean and thus let Kesselring’s air forces regain air superiority if Rommel’s supply train was to be properly reestablished.
In the first twelve days of November, the ten U-boats did nothing at all. On November 13 Lieutenant Franz-Georg Reschke’s U-205 trailed the British Task Force H and at about 5 A.M. came up to periscope depth, fired a spread of three torpedoes at the carrier Ark Royal and a destroyer, put periscope down and hauled out of the area. As they went, Lieutenant Reschke heard explosions and assumed that he had put two torpedoes into the Ark Royal and sunk a destroyer. In fact he had hit nothing.
The Ark Royal was returning to Gibraltar that day, together with the Malaya, the cruisers Argus and Hermione and seven destroyers. The sea was smooth, with a little ripple brought by the ten-knot wind from the southwest. The day was cloudy with occasional rainsqualls but visibility was good enough for flying. The Ark Royal was landing and sending out aircraft all day long.
Lieutenant Friedrich Guggenberger’s U-81 had been stalking the task force all afternoon. At 3:40 P.M. he fired a spread of electric torpedoes; one of them struck the Ark Royal on the starboard beam, abreast the island. A column of water rose fifty-five feet to the flight deck.
There had been one small warning. A destroyer had reported a contact fifteen minutes earlier, but it had come to nothing. There was no torpedo wake (electric torpedoes) and no sign of a submarine. But at 3:53 P.M. the destroyer Argus reported a periscope. Even so, many aboard felt that the ship had been damaged by an internal explosion. In fact the damage did not seem too great. Nothing much could be observed over the side, and the crockery was intact, the aircraft were intact, and not a man was even thrown off his feet.
But flooding began immediately. The ship took a ten-degree starboard list, and the main switchboard flooded out and communication throughout the ship was lost.
Three minutes after the torpedoing, the list had increased to twelve degrees, and the boilers had flooded. Eighteen minutes later the list had gone to eighteen degrees, and the decision was made to move most of the crew off the ship. The destroyer Legion came alongside and began taking men off.
At 4:30 P.M. it seemed that the damage had stabilized, and the captain decided to try to get the Ark Royal going again. The tug Thames came up and took the carrier under tow at two knots. There seemed to be every hope that she could get to Gibraltar safely.
But with the order to abandon ship earlier, many key men had already gone, and they had not bothered to close up the watertight doors between compartments. So the flooding continued to increase until at 5 P.M. all steam failed. The destroyer Laforey came alongside and ran supply cables across the deck, and an electrical repair party from the Hermione came aboard with portable pumps. The captain had ordered counterflooding, so the list was now down to about fourteen degrees. After much hard work, steam was restored to one boiler at 9 P.M., but by this time the list had increased again to eighteen degrees.
By 10 P.M. partial electric power had been restored, and by 10:30 the situation seemed so generally improved that the Laforey moved away. But the ship continued to fill with water. What the British did not know then was that the Ark Royal had been hit by one of the magnetic torpedoes, which had blown a hole in the bottom, a hole that was not readily visible, but which kept bringing in a steady supply of sea water. Even as things looked better up top, the water had started to come in over the elbow of the uptake in the port boiler room and increased steadily. This reduced the area for the escape of gases, and the boiler casings became red hot and fires broke out in the boiler room. Eventually they got so bad that the boiler room had to be abandoned and then all steam was again lost and the power system shut down.
At 3:40 A.M. on November 14, the salvage crew was again ordered to abandon ship. The list was then twenty-seven degrees. She was abandoned by 4:30 A.M., and at 6:13 A.M. the Ark Royal turned turtle and sank.
Score one for Admiral Doenitz’s submarines, for the Ark Royal had been an enormous thorn in the side of German air power and Italian shipping.
But that was all the nine U-boats accomplished until November 25. On that day the battleship Barham was traveling in company with the First Battle Squadron flagship Queen Elizabeth and a number of lesser ships 100 miles northeast of Sollum. Again it was a fine day and the sea was calm. They were moving along at seventeen knots, zigzagging, when the destroyer Jervis made an asdic contact on her port side, 1,100 yards off.
At 4:21 P.M. the fleet altered course, and moved into perfect position for Lieutenant von Tiesenhausen’s U-331, which was lurking around the edges of the force, waiting for a chance to attack. Tiesenhausen fired a spread of torpedoes. At 4:25 P.M. the Barham was hit by all three. She listed ten degrees to port, and in a minute, heeled over and lay on her beam ends. In six minutes she sank.
Von Tiesenhausen was a brave man. He surfaced in the middle of the British fleet to see what he had done; the cruiser Valiant saw him and tried to ram. But the U-boat was so close that the ship could not turn in time, and so the U-331 ran right through the British fleet on the surface. Several destroyers saw her and were preparing to attack, but they were all called off to pick up the Barham’s survivors. The submarine hunt did not get going for an hour, and by then von Tiesenhausen was clean away.
Score two for Doenitz. The Barham, a 31,000-ton ship, was an important part of the British Mediterranean fleet. Her loss was a terrible shock, particularly since she took down Captain G. C. Cooke and 861 officers and men. And score three: on November 27 the U-559 sank the Australian corvette Paramatta off Bardia.
But that was all. Nine of Doenitz’s best submarines in the Mediterranean could only manage a score of three warships for a month’s work.
Meanwhile, on the North Atlantic run, Doenitz’s decimated force of U-boats sank only thirteen merchant ships and the cruiser Dunedin. In contrast with the carnage of September and the hard days of October it was almost as though death had declared a holiday in the North Atlantic. And December was even better for the Allies; the U-boats took only four ships out of the North Atlantic’s convoys.
So Hitler’s diversion of all the available submarines from the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean had been a costly venture, one that had turned the war around for a British government that in the summer had grown ever more worried about its ability to feed its people and keep the military supplied with the materials of war. After a steadily rising level of merchant ship sinkings, it was an enormous relief to have two months of almost uninterrupted, successful sailings. The surcease of sinkings made an enormous difference in Britain’s level of supplies. As the year 1941 ended, the picture in the North Atlantic looked brighter than it had for more than a year.