All at Sea
JAMES GOODSON WAS RESCUED along with all those in his lifeboat at around 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 4 September by an empty Norwegian tanker called the Knute Nelson. Recovering soon after below deck, rough blanket around him, Goodson fell into a deep sleep. By the time he awoke, they were slipping into Galway Bay in the neutral Republic of Ireland. Huge crowds were there to greet them, and as Goodson stepped on to dry land once more, other survivors, picked up by British destroyers, rushed towards him and the others from the tanker asking about missing friends and relations. A brother and sister, both about twelve, asked him whether he had seen their parents.
At this, Goodson felt an overwhelming fury sweep over him. No one, he thought, had the right to cause such suffering to innocent people. There and then, Goodson decided he would do something about it; he knew what he had to do. He would get back to the United States, then head to Canada and join the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Winston Churchill had chaired his first meeting of the Admiralty Board on the evening of Sunday, 3 September, just a few hours before the Athenia had been struck. These rooms at the Admiralty were rich in history. It was here that the naval campaign to defeat Napoleon had been plotted; it was here that Wellington and Nelson had met one another for the only time, albeit briefly. And it was here that Churchill and Lord Fisher had quarrelled back in 1915 over the Dardanelles campaign; it had ended badly for both men.
Now he was back, sitting at the same desk and with the same familiar high-backed dark leather and mahogany chair. Watching him was a portrait of Nelson, Britain’s great naval hero. The last time he had been in that room, Churchill reflected, Britain had been fighting Germany. A quarter of a century later, they were doing so again. ‘Once again we must fight for life and honour,’ he noted. ‘Once again. So be it!’
On his first night back, Churchill worked late, brimming with energy and excitement at the prospect of being at the heart of Britain’s war strategy. The First Sea Lord, the most senior naval officer in the land, was Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, a straightforward and uncomplicated fellow who lacked imagination and flair but who was a good foil to Churchill and happy to play second fiddle.
The Royal Navy was known as Britain’s Senior Service for a reason. It was comfortably the world’s largest, with 15 battleships, 7 aircraft carriers, 15 heavy cruisers, 49 light cruisers, 192 destroyers, 73 escort vessels, 9 patrol vessels, 52 minesweepers, 2 gun monitors and 62 submarines. Only the USA, which was not in the war, had anything like this number of vessels. And there was a lot more shipping on the way; in shipyards from Belfast to Glasgow to Tyneside, more ships were already being built as Britain entered the war: 19 more cruisers, 52 destroyers, 6 battleships, 6 aircraft carriers and 11 more submarines, to list just some of this building programme. There has been considerable criticism thrown at the Royal Navy of 1939, not least by those who argue it was ageing and stuck in the past. It is true that its two newest battleships, the Nelson and Rodney, were completed back in 1927, but battleships were meant to last. They took four years to build from scratch and were unbelievably complex pieces of engineering, and fantastically expensive. Even so, each of Britain’s fifteen battleships had either undergone a major refit or been largely reconstructed, especially with regard to firepower and fire control gear. During the inter-war years, Britain had out-built all the other navies of the world in almost all classes except for submarines.
It also made sense to build up this large fleet of capital ships – battleships, aircraft carriers and cruisers – during peacetime. Such vessels took years to build and were not something that could be brought to being in a hurry. The Navy was well aware of the battleships and cruisers entering the service of the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy; the response was to have an even greater force to check any thoughts of German naval dominance. Once war came, it was much easier and quicker to build destroyers, armed merchant vessels and smaller escorts like corvettes and sloops.
There were, however, other reasons why Britain had maintained such a large navy. It was an island nation with the largest empire the world had ever known. This kind of vast global reach meant, even in this emerging age of aviation, linking the sea lanes around the world. The Navy was needed to protect not only its foreign territories but also the country’s trade. Nor was Britain’s reach around the world purely linked to its empire – rather, most of its trade was extra-imperial: with Europe, and especially Scandinavia, and with countries in both North and South America, where British companies had huge interests. Entire railways in Argentina, for example, had been built with British money and were run by British companies, even though the country was not within the Empire.
Britain was also a major exporter: the leading supplier of armaments in the 1930s and also of coal, to name but two trades. And for all this she needed a sizeable number of merchant vessels; so as well as having the world’s largest Navy, she also had the world’s largest merchant fleet, amounting to some 33 per cent of global merchant shipping. On top of that, Britain had access to around another 50 per cent of the rest of the world’s merchant navies, such as those of Norway, Greece, Holland and other major players in world maritime shipping.
Strategically, then, Churchill had inherited a fairly comfortable position. In terms of threats to Britain, it was only really Germany in that September of 1939. Imperial Japan had been increasingly threatening over the past decade and with Britain’s large interests in the Far East, this was a worry. However, at present, Japan was more than busy in China and with fighting the Soviet Union, so it posed no immediate threat. Italy, too, had shown that it was not ready to fight just yet if at all. Italy’s Navy was perhaps the most up to date of its armed services, but while it had the most submarines in the world (106), it had no aircraft carriers and only four battleships. Britain and France together would have made short work of it.
What this meant was that Britain could keep the Mediterranean Fleet firmly in the Mediterranean, maintain a significant presence on the China Station, and have the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys north of Scotland, as well as deploying further forces all around the United Kingdom. It also meant that they could immediately implement an economic blockade of Germany. Britain’s naval power should not be underestimated.
The news of the sinking of the Athenia, however, had still been a terrific shock, not least because it was a civilian liner and thus supposed to be exempt from attack under the Prize Rules conditions of the Hague Convention, to which Germany had signed up. These not only forbade the sinking of passenger ships but decreed that merchant vessels could only be sunk once their crews had been safely rescued. Churchill had barely finished meeting his new team when the news reached them. The very next day, he sent his first minute on his return as First Lord, to the Director of Naval Intelligence, demanding a statement on the German U-boat force, both ‘actual and prospective’. The answer was sixty now and ninety-nine expected by early 1940. This wasn’t far off the mark. In fact, the Kriegsmarine had fifty-seven submarines available, although for those in the U-boat service this didn’t seem like very much.
Commanding Germany’s U-boat force was Admiral Karl Dönitz, a post he had held since 1935. The previous four years had been frustrating for him, because he strongly believed that the U-boats had come very close to winning the last war and felt certain they held the key to this renewed conflict, and particularly in the war against Britain. Submarines had come a long way since 1918. They were more rugged, could dive quicker, were faster and larger, with more numerous and more powerful torpedoes, which were battery-powered and wakeless (making them harder to detect), and had greater range. Radio and radar equipment had also advanced considerably, so that now U-boats could communicate not only with their base, but also with each other. In fact, U-boats, traditionally lone hunters, could now operate in packs. Conversely, anti-submarine weapons had also improved, but not, Dönitz believed, enough to pose a significant threat.
Britain was utterly dependent on seaborne trade, so clearly it was the task of the Kriegsmarine to sever those sea lanes. Frustratingly for Dönitz, however, it seemed that no one else in Germany believed as he did that U-boats were the weapon to deliver that victory. Rather, Admiral Raeder, who as Commander-in-Chief at the Oberkommando der Marine (OKM), or Naval High Command, was commander of the Kriegsmarine, preferred to build a predominantly surface fleet. After Munich, Göring had begun a renewed rearmament programme in Germany that was to dwarf the earlier, yet still considerable, military growth. The Luftwaffe, for example, was to increase fivefold to some 21,750 aircraft, while the Kriegsmarine was to begin a major fleet-building programme, called the ‘Z Plan’, which had been prepared over the summer of 1938, principally by Commander Heye of the operations department of the Naval War Staff under Raeder’s instructions. Heye made the entirely valid assumption that should Germany go to war with Britain, the latter would not be able to overcome an economic blockade for any significant length of time, so disrupting British overseas trade had to be the prime objective. Heye believed that primarily this should be achieved by a cruiser war – that is, long-range, powerfully armed cruisers and ‘pocket’ battleships; submarines had an important part to play but not the lead role. This appealed to Hitler, who had already enthusiastically backed an earlier battleship programme, not because of any particular military logic, but because battleships were enormous and gave a fabulous physical impression of power.
The flaw in Heye’s plan was how to support this cruiser force in far-off seas without a series of strategically based foreign ports and bases, as were available to the British, and also to the French for that matter; Germany’s access to the world’s oceans via the narrow Baltic Sea wasn’t really going to cut it. Realistically, German ships could not safely pass through the English Channel because of mines, proximity to Britain and its defences, which meant going around the north of Scotland to reach the wide oceans – and this could be easily hampered by the Royal Navy’s blockade. Admiral Carls, the Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, made this exact point, arguing that the only way to get these overseas colonies and secure sea routes was by conquest. ‘A war against Britain,’ he commented, ‘means a war against the Empire, against France, probably also against Russia and a number of countries overseas, in other words against one half or two-thirds of the whole world.’ He was absolutely spot on, although far from baulking at this apocalyptic vision, Carls instead called for large-scale land conquests and the rapid development of a huge fleet that would be able to achieve his dream of global naval domination. Coming from a senior military commander, it betrayed a level of self-delusion that was astonishing.
How much Carls’s views were taken into account is not clear, but the Z Plan, announced in mid-October 1938, called for 10 battleships, 15 pocket battleships, 5 heavy, 24 light and 36 small cruisers, 8 aircraft carriers and 249 U-boats. It was nothing more than pure fantasy; realizable perhaps on some far-off day once the rest of the world had been taken over, but not in the medium to short term. Germany did not have the industrial capacity or the raw materials required, nor the cash. And even if a fraction of this force had been built, the country would not have had the fuel to power it.
A far more sensible approach would have been to have done precisely what Dönitz was urging and concentrate largely on submarines. These were quite expensive enough, but would have been easier and cheaper to build than large numbers of surface vessels – and they used less fuel. During the summer, he had again pressed his point, more convinced than ever that war with Britain was looming now rather than to be expected in 1942, when the planned 249 U-boats in the Z Plan were due to be completed. In July, he had urged Raeder to tell Hitler his continuing concerns about the paltry size of the U-boat fleet – at the time he had just twenty-seven ocean-going submarines, of which only nineteen were ready for war. In his memo to Hitler he made it clear that to make a substantial contribution against Allied Atlantic shipping, at least one hundred boats always needed to be operational. This was based on the ‘third’ principle: a third on active duty, a third heading to or returning from active duty, and a third undergoing repair, re-equipping and refitting. Soon after, Raeder conveyed the Führer’s reply. ‘He would ensure that in no circumstances would war with Britain come about,’ noted Dönitz. ‘For that would mean finis Germaniae.’
Well, now they were at war, and Hitler immediately tore up the Z Plan and promised to make U-boat building the priority for the Kriegsmarine – and so much so that it took precedence over even key projects such as the new Junkers 88 long-range bomber. It was, Dönitz believed, too little too late. ‘Seldom indeed,’ he noted, ‘has any branch of the armed forces of any country gone to war so poorly equipped.’
For the time being, the U-boat arm would have to do what it could with the few submarines it did have. Most seaworthy U-boats had actually been sent out to the Atlantic at the end of August, which was why U-30 had been able to intercept the Athenia on the first day of war against Britain. The commander, Oberleutnant Lemp, had spotted her zig-zagging and off the normal shipping course and so had assumed it was a troopship and therefore fair game. It was a mistake, and the Germans tried to hush it up, but it still prompted huge outrage on both sides of the Atlantic – the sinking brought back memories of the torpedoed Lusitania in 1915.
One U-boat playing more closely by the rules was U-48, under the command of Kapitänleutnant ‘Vati’ Schultze. The U-48 had left Kiel and slowly made its way around the north of Scotland, just as the crew had done on numerous practice patrols over the past year. First Watch Officer was the 23-year-old Reinhard ‘Teddy’ Suhren, who despite joining the Navy back in 1935 had moved to the U-boat arm just the previous year.
Suhren had always loved the sea and as a boy had become hooked on sailing, first with the Hanseatic Yachting School and then on school trips to the Frisian Islands. His time under training had seen him repeatedly in trouble; even his nickname, ‘Teddy’, had come about when one of his comrades had suggested he marched so badly he looked like a teddy bear. The name stuck.
After time as a midshipman on destroyers, and believing he would never make Leutnant, Suhren thought of resigning from the Kriegsmarine altogether. It was his brother, Gerd, already a Leutnant himself, who talked him into staying put and simply changing his attitude. From then on, Teddy was determined to try harder, play by the rules, and keep his sheet clean. It very quickly paid off. Within a few months, in April 1938, he was promoted to Leutnant and soon after transferred to submarines, and to U-48. So far, Suhren had had no cause to regret the transfer. He particularly liked the camaraderie and the understanding and even warmth of his fellow crew. They were a band of brothers, and no longer did Suhren feel like the junior, constantly pushed around. ‘Now I came back to life,’ he noted, ‘and felt myself more at home in the Navy by the day.’
On 4 September, they spotted a lone Swedish freighter and, surfacing, flashed the signal for the merchantman to stop at once and not use its radio. The Swedish ship ignored them, so, to show they meant business, Schultze ordered men on to the 88mm gun on the foredeck. Climbing up on to the bridge was Suhren, but to his horror he saw there was no one manning the gun – the men had been swept overboard in the swell. Fortunately, they had remembered to clip on the safety harnesses and so were hauled back on board, and before they had need to open fire, the freighter hove to.
They let the Swedish captain continue on his way, but the following day they spotted another freighter on the horizon. Diving swiftly they then emerged just in front of what they now saw was a British 5,000-ton merchantman, Royal Sceptre. ‘Stop at once and show papers!’ they signalled. Schultze gave the British crew ten minutes to get into the safety of their lifeboats. ‘We couldn’t hang around for long in this area,’ noted Suhren, ‘without getting ants in our pants.’ They were still nerve-wrackingly close to Scotland.
They watched the men clambering into the boats, then from 600 metres fired a pair of torpedoes that hit square amidships. When they heard radio signals being sent off, they fired a few shots with the gun and watched the Royal Sceptre sink beneath the waves.
‘Pity about the nice ship,’ said Suhren.
‘Well, this war is none of my choosing,’ Schultze replied.
The Royal Sceptre had barely slipped out of sight when a further freighter was spotted. Once again, they intercepted the vessel; it too was British, the Browning, and this time the ship sent boats to meet them. Suhren, once more up on the bridge, was astonished to see the boats full of black women and children. As they drew alongside the German U-boat with tears running down their faces, they held up their screaming babies and pleaded with their captors to save them. Suhren saw Schultze look at him helplessly. ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘what do we do now?’
‘No way am I prepared to torpedo it,’ declared Suhren.
‘No more am I,’ his captain replied.
There was a pause while Schultze thought for a moment, then he said, ‘We’ll send them back to their ship. They can pick up the survivors from the Royal Sceptre and carry on with their voyage.’
Communicating this, however, was no easy matter. The women were in a state of shock and needed some convincing that they would be safe if they returned to the Browning. Eventually, though, having warned them not to use their radio, Schultze ordered U-48 to draw away from the boats. Seeing them leave, the women and crew hurried back to the ship as instructed. ‘It all went according to plan,’ noted Suhren. ‘They didn’t radio, continued on their course, and made it into port three weeks later in South America.’
On 8 September, they sank another British freighter, the Winkleigh, then a further ship, the Firby, both after following the Prize Rules and sparing the crews. The captain of the Firby had been distraught and close to tears. It appeared he had taken his son with him on the trip and now pleaded with Schultze to take the boy. That, however, was not possible, so instead Schultze ordered a plain text signal to be sent: ‘To Mr Churchill – We just sank the British steamer Firby. Please save the crew! Posit 59°40’N 13°50’W.’ Schultze’s action meant that the Firby’s captain and all thirty-three crew were soon rescued by a British destroyer. The U-boat was then ordered home, its first wartime patrol drawing to an end. With three ships to their name and some 15,000 tons of Allied shipping now at the bottom of the ocean, it had been a good start.
U-48 had been ordered home along with nine others of the eighteen U-boats that had been in the Atlantic during the opening week of the war. Dönitz wanted a good number of ocean-going U-boats back for rest and refitting ready for a renewed hunt in October – and a hunt in which his flotillas would not be operating singly, but together. This was a new idea Dönitz was keen to test. This new group of U-boats, he had decided, would be called a wolfpack.
Despite Churchill’s urgent demand to know the true strength of the U-boat force, the Admiralty was certainly not particularly worried by the threat as hostilities began. Perhaps some of the Royal Navy’s ships were a little old and creaking, but their giant fleet was certainly well served by a first-class infrastructure. During the last war, the British had created a global organization called Naval Control of Shipping (NCS) and intricate naval intelligence systems. Since the end of the war, it had been repeatedly improved and upgraded, and had been further enhanced by the setting up of an Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) at the Admiralty just two years before in 1937.
Naval intelligence was not only served by the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where civilian mathematicians and scientists had been recruited in an attempt to break enemy signal codes, but also by a network of Radio Intercept Stations and reports from ports around the world sent via secure underwater telegraph cables – an intelligence exchange known as the VESCA system – and, of course, aerial reconnaissance carried out by both RAF Coastal Command and the Navy’s own Fleet Air Arm. All merchant shipping was brought under the control of NCS, which tracked the movements, cargoes and destinations of almost all Allied shipping. This meant that, in theory at any rate, it was possible to know exactly where any ship was at any moment of any given day. The key objective was, as far as was possible, to keep Allied shipping away from danger.
Another means of securing the safe passage of ships was by putting them into convoy, and no sooner had the Athenia been sunk than the Admiralty ordered NCS to reintroduce the convoy system. This was nothing new and had operated well in the final year of the last war, working on the principle that a tight formation escorted by armed vessels was considerably less vulnerable than a lone and unescorted freighter. A mass of ships with the protection of destroyers, corvettes and other escorts was no easy proposition for a lone U-boat.
In any case, although U-boats like the U-48 had picked off several lone freighters in the opening days of the war, the Royal Navy was pretty well placed to deal with the threat the Kriegsmarine posed. The Home Fleet alone was considerably larger than anything the Germans could put to sea, while the U-boat force was simply not large enough to do more than inconvenience Allied shipping. Of course, it was to be expected that Germany would build more submarines, but there was every sign that British shipyards were building more escorts than German shipyards were building U-boats. There was, then, quiet reason for confidence as far as the war at sea was concerned. And since war was as much about logistics and supply of materials as anything, it seemed that Britain and its ally France were, for the time being at any rate, well placed.
Before the year was out, there would, however, be some shocks in store.