Sea Battles
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE for anyone in Britain not to be aware of the vital importance of shipping, which its existence had for centuries depended upon, but never more so than now. It is hard to see how Britain could have been brought to its knees with the naval and air forces at Germany’s disposal, but they might, possibly, have affected its ability to wage war, as Churchill was keenly aware. In recent weeks, long-range Condors had sunk a number of ships, proving their worth, including one attack that saw them sink seven ships in convoy. Furthermore, the pocket battleship Admiral Hipper had also slipped back out into the Atlantic, sinking one straggler and then catching a slow convoy from West Africa, SL(S)64, and, in a furious display of firepower, sending seven of the convoy’s nineteen ships to the bottom of the ocean. U-boats were also continuing to add to their tally. In all, sixty-four ships were sunk in January, a hundred in February and a further 139 in March.
Adding insult to British injury had been the failure of Bomber Command to attack the U-boat pens as they were being built along the Atlantic coast, and the appearance of the battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst in the Atlantic. Throughout February and into March, they harried stragglers, disrupted convoy routes and played cat-and-mouse with the British Home Fleet, repeatedly evading their British pursuers by a whisker. At the end of March, they slipped successfully into the safety of Brest and, as their British pursuers followed, the Admiral Hipper was able to pass through the British blockade and reach the Baltic for refits. These operations were a stinging blow to British naval pride.
It was with these battles in the Atlantic in mind that Churchill, at the beginning of March, formed the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, with himself as chairman. The committee would meet once a week and was designed to focus minds on how to deal with the mounting threat to British shipping trade. On 6 March, the PM distributed a directive listing thirteen crucial steps they needed to take. Key among these was the urgent transfer of more RAF Coastal Command forces to the Western Approaches. These were now to come under the direct command of Admiral Noble and his headquarters at Derby House, demonstrating an inter-service co-operation that was manifestly lacking in the Wehrmacht. Merchant ships were to be given anti-aircraft guns, all western British seaports were to be given a priority for anti-aircraft defence, and a large amount of the 2.6 million tons’ worth of merchant shipping currently idle in British ports was to be made urgently seaworthy.
A further step was to allow any ‘fast’ merchant vessel of 12 knots or more to sail independently. This went against the advice of the Admiralty but was based on Churchill’s desire to speed up the turnaround time of merchant ships, for while there was no doubting the improved safety of ships travelling in convoy, such a system did cause problems, because suddenly a mass of ships would arrive in port at once and all need unloading at the same time. Then they would head out to sea again and the ports and the stevedores would be idle once more. In other words, it was rather an inefficient way of loading and unloading. If faster ships could travel independently, then much time would be saved. On the other hand, with U-boats able to travel at 17 knots on the surface, the risks of independent sailings were high.
Finally, Churchill was determined that more U-boats should be destroyed. Only six had been confirmed as sunk since the beginning of September and not one since December. Escorts needed to be better trained, and much improved anti-shipping devices were urgently required. No stone was to be left unturned in pursuit of these goals. ‘The U-boat at sea must be hunted,’ Churchill announced, ‘the U-boat in the building-yard or dock must be bombed.’ The Focke-Wulf, he added, ‘must be attacked in the air and in their nests’. The Battle of Britain was over, he proclaimed, but the Battle of the Atlantic had begun.
In this battle, the Prime Minister was about to get some much better news, and sooner than he could have dared to hope.
At the War Office in Whitehall, London, General John Kennedy was as busy as ever with the myriad amounts of planning that were needed and the constant juggling of resources. He still found time to dine most evenings at his club or elsewhere about town, however, and an increasingly good friend and dinner partner was Colonel Raymond Lee, the US Military Attaché. Lee had been in Britain since the summer and, unlike Joe Kennedy, the American Ambassador throughout the first year of war, was both an ardent Anglophile and a believer in Britain’s ability to fight back. Urbane and charming, Lee had quickly won friends in Britain, and while Kennedy had since been recalled to the US and replaced by John Winant, Lee was still very much a fixture at the US Embassy.
Even at the beginning of 1941, part of General Kennedy’s job was to look ahead and begin to shape a long-term strategy, which included a return to France. Yet while he was certain Britain could plan for not losing the war, how to win it was another matter. Like Churchill, he was convinced that American help was essential. Over dinners with Lee, the two would often discuss America’s own strategy and what the chances were of the US eventually joining the fight more emphatically. On one occasion, Lee asked Kennedy whether he had read Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, with its vivid descriptions of bullfighting. The principle of bullfighting, Lee told him, was to wear the bull out gradually. Every move was planned for the eventual killing of the beast by getting him to exhaust himself. It was considered a bad mistake to attempt to deliver the coup de grâce too soon. The Germans, Lee suggested, were rather like the bull, and the following day sent Kennedy a copy of Hemingway’s novel, which he duly read.
The analogy, Kennedy thought, was a good one, but he also thought it worth pointing out it only applied up to a point. Wearing down the enemy was one thing, but, as far as he was concerned, there was no benefit to dragging out the fight longer than necessary. ‘If you regard Hitler as a bull, and this war as a bullfight,’ Kennedy wrote, ‘then I regard you as a man in the front row of the stalls with a machine gun. I want you to press the button now and shoot the bull.’
At the forefront of his mind in the opening months of 1941 was the rapidly escalating situation in the Mediterranean and Middle East, where Germany was now making its presence increasingly felt. It was certainly the case that this was leading Hitler to spread his forces further and was even more of a critical diversion of resources for the Germans than it was for the British; but neither Kennedy nor any of Britain’s war leaders knew then about German plans for the Soviet Union, so the situation seemed more fraught as a result. It was no wonder Kennedy was wishing the USA would declare war right away.
British forces were slowly but surely being built up, and there were now as many as 300 ships at any one time ploughing their way back and forth to the Middle East. This still wasn’t enough for a theatre of truly enormous scale. In this massive expanse of scrub, desert and sea, the British needed to force a rapid end to Axis resistance in North and East Africa, prevent German forces sweeping down into Greece, make sure Malta survived, and help ensure that the Mediterranean Fleet was kept strong and that further trouble did not erupt in Iraq and elsewhere at the extremities of the theatre. Part, or even most, of those commitments could be achieved – but not all, and certainly not all at once. And it was the potential commitment to Greece that was causing Kennedy his biggest headache.
Back in January, when General Wavell had flown to Athens for talks with the Greeks, the Prime Minister, General Metaxas, had declined the British offer of troops. The artillery and tank regiments on offer were not, he felt, enough to be decisive, while they might easily merely provoke an attack by Germany and even Bulgaria. He would, he told Wavell, welcome the help of British troops should the Germans cross the River Danube and move into Bulgaria, the obvious route through which they might advance.
This gave the British command a welcome breathing space, but, in Kennedy’s view, Britain stood far more to gain by pushing the Italians out of North Africa altogether than by denying Greece to the Germans. He also reckoned – and Dill agreed – that it would mean a commitment of at least twenty divisions to give them even a chance of making a difference. Twenty divisions was an amount they simply did not have, so to his mind the Greece venture was a non-starter.
However, a month later, the Greeks decided that maybe the time for British intervention was drawing near after all. Any German attack would be resisted to the utmost, they insisted, but they felt that, depending on the size of force the British could send, Yugoslavia and Turkey might also be encouraged to join their struggle against Nazi aggression. Churchill then sent a telegram to Wavell suggesting that four divisions be made available to Greece. When Dill told him all troops were already fully employed in the Middle East, the Prime Minister exploded. Once again, Churchill was looking at paper statistics, not making a realistic appreciation of his forces’ capability. The two were quite different, something he stubbornly refused to accept.
At any rate, it was thought sensible to go and talk face to face with the Greeks, and with this in mind Churchill sent Anthony Eden and Dill to Athens for talks, along with Tedder and Cunningham, the service chiefs in the Middle East. With Eden and Dill on their way, Churchill invited Kennedy to stay with him for the weekend of 15–16 February at Ditchley, a country house that belonged to a friend and was considered safer than Chequers. On the Sunday morning, with the PM still in bed and wearing an elaborate silk dressing-gown, Kennedy was summoned to give him his current appreciation of the situation. Their talk lasted three hours and, when he left him, Kennedy felt confident the Prime Minister had both listened to and accepted his tour d’horizon.
Back in London, he followed it up with a memo, summarizing in writing all that he had said to him. ‘Hitler has in fact made many mistakes,’ he wrote, ‘and doubtless he will make more. His biggest mistake, of course, was in starting the war without a navy.’ In this, Kennedy was, of course, absolutely right. He then went on to discuss each commitment in turn, but gave especial warning about Greece. ‘Nothing we can do can make the Greek business a sound military proposition,’ he wrote. The Greeks did not have enough reserves and were, he believed, too far forward in Albania. In any case, in the build-up of supplies – the key to fighting any campaign – the Germans would always win in Greece. ‘The locomotive and the petrol engine will always beat the ship,’ he pointed out, ‘especially when the ship has to go round the Cape.’ He also pointed out that anything they put into Greece they should be prepared to lose, because, really, there was almost no chance of victory with the addition of four divisions sent in piecemeal. ‘But the point is that if we use up four divisions and a large quantity of reserves in Greece,’ he told him, ‘our power of offensive action is gone until we can replace them.’ The loss of Greece, he added, would be an embarrassment but not a strategic disaster. What was a strategic imperative was safeguarding sea communications, something that would be improved with the capture of Tripoli. ‘It is essential,’ he concluded, ‘to cling to the things that matter and not waste our strength on things that are not vital to our strategy.’
Churchill seemed to have listened, because he now sent Eden a signal. ‘Do not consider yourselves obligated to a Greek enterprise,’ he warned them, ‘if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco.’
Despite this, both Dill and Wavell now began to change their minds. Instead of using the PM’s message as the much-needed excuse to extricate themselves from Greece, they instead told the Greeks they would send four divisions so long as it happened right away. There were two further provisos: first, that four full-strength divisions be sent; second, that the Greeks abandon Thrace and Eastern Macedonia and fall back to what was called the ‘Aliákmon Line’, a narrow strip of about fifty miles between the Yugoslav border and the northern Aegean. It meant sacrificing Thrace and Eastern Macedonia, but, they believed, it was a feasible place from which to defend the rest of the country. Suddenly, the Greek venture was back on.
It was already considered too late to move troops from East Africa, which was a shame because the two Indian divisions now there were suited to mountain warfare; in fact, the topography in Abyssinia and Eritrea was not very different to that of northern Greece. So that left taking troops already in the Middle East and those newly arriving into the theatre, such as the New Zealand Division.
The demands of potentially fighting in Greece as well as in East Africa and Libya forced Wavell to radically rejig his forces and caused him and his staff at GHQ a massive logistical headache. The Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, for example, had arrived in Palestine in early 1940 complete with their chargers for what was essentially pre-war colonial policing duties. After a cavalry charge with sabres drawn and then two embarrassing stampedes, they had been ordered to send their horses home and, much to their general disgust, had been trained up as artillery; it was not intended, however, to keep them in that role for ever. The obvious course for a cavalry regiment was to mechanize them and put them into tanks, but there simply weren’t enough to go round – not yet, at any rate.
They were, however, keen to learn and anxious to play their part, and had trained hard since sending their steeds home. Officers like Stanley Christopherson had been packed off on one course after another, learning various new skills, which he was then expected to impart to the men; few of these training courses had much to do with artillery, however.
At the end of January, with the new demands facing Wavell’s command, the Sherwood Rangers were finally needed at the front. Their old squadrons were now batteries, and while two batteries were being sent to Crete as part of the island’s new defences, two others were posted to the recently captured port of Tobruk, where they were told they would be operating 2-pounder anti-tank guns on the coast, ready to intercept any Italian torpedo boats or other vessels that might appear.
‘Y’ Battery, to which Stanley Christopherson had been attached, reached the tiny port, which was tucked in behind a long, narrow inlet already strewn with the wrecks of half-submerged Italian ships, on Saturday, 1 February. On the quayside, no one seemed to know anything about them. Eventually, they were taken to see the captain of HMS Terror, a small gun monitor, who explained that their task was to defend Tobruk with their 15-inch guns, but that they needed men on the coast to operate an OP, or observation post, and fire the guns there if it came to it. ‘We then explained,’ noted Christopherson, ‘that our gunnery experience consisted of a three-week course six months ago, and we did not remember much about it!’
The Sherwood Rangers were precisely the type of unit Churchill was looking at on his paper list and thinking should be more readily employed, but Wavell was quite right: they were simply not ready to be thrown headlong into battle. It was only due to the extreme demands now being placed upon his command that they had been sent to Crete and Tobruk. It was hoped they would not be required to do much for some time yet, even though by the time the first troops were being shipped to Greece they were aware that German troops had landed in Tripoli. Wavell was working on the assumption that the German lines of supply were far too great for them to make any counter-attack for some time yet. ‘Tripoli to Agheila is 471 miles and to Benghazi 646 miles,’ Wavell signalled Churchill on 27 February. ‘There is only one road, and water is inadequate over 410 miles of the distance; these factors, together with the lack of transport, limit the present enemy threat.’ It was not an unreasonable assumption, and, as it happened, mirrored both the German view and Rommel’s corresponding orders to establish a blocking force east of Tripoli, not east of Sirte.
By this time, O’Connor’s advance had run out of steam. There was a good case for pushing on to Tripoli and smashing the Axis in North Africa for good, but what was true for German and Italian forces heading eastwards was doubly true for British forces trying to push west. Had Wavell not been fighting a full campaign in East Africa, and had he not agreed to send troops to Greece, attempting the drive to Tripoli would have been worth the risk. In the suddenly altered circumstances, however, it simply was not. Rather, their advance ended at El Agheila, to the west of Cyrenaica.
On 8 March, Alf Parbery and J Section Signals left Tobruk as the entire Aussie 6th Division was being shipped to Greece. First, though, they had to drive all the way back along the coast, a distance of some 600 miles, which took longer than it might due to accidents on the single road, sand-storms and mechanical problems. They reached Alexandria on the 14th, spent the next couple of days preparing the trucks and kit for shipping, and finally sailed on 17 March, reaching Piraeus four days later after an uninterrupted journey. Alf took all this moving about in his stride. After a day of unloading, he and his mates in J Section Signals set off for the 16th Brigade camp on the evening of 22 March. ‘Going through the streets,’ he noted, ‘the people gave us a great welcome – cheered and shouted as we went through.’ Naturally inquisitive, he enjoyed the chance to visit the Parthenon, but was slightly taken aback to see a long column of Greek troops just back from the front marching through the city. ‘Many had frost-bitten feet,’ he noted, ‘and were crippled with it.’
While such scenes demonstrated the hazards of fighting in the mountains in winter with insufficient supplies, there was further trouble brewing to the north. As Parbery and his mates began the slow journey up through Greece he thought the scenery was some of the best he had ever seen. He was, however, completely unaware that the British plan agreed with the Greeks was already unravelling – just as John Kennedy had feared.
In fact, even before he had left Tobruk, Bulgaria announced that it was joining the Axis. The next day, 2 March, German troops crossed the Danube and immediately began their approach march towards the Greek border. At the same time, Anthony Eden was flying back to Athens from Ankara, where he and General Dill had been talking to the Turks, who approved of the plan to defend Greece and promised they, too, would fight, should Germany turn on it next.
On board a Royal Australian Air Force Sunderland flying boat, Eden was up front next to the pilot and had been given permission by the Turks to fly over the Dardanelles, the scene of such bitter fighting in the last war. Taking control, Eden had flown low to take a good look.
Having flown on to Athens, they found bad news awaiting them. The Greeks had not, as planned, been given orders to fall back to the Aliákmon Line. Rather, General Papagos, the Greek C-in-C, told them it was now too late because of the risk to his troops of being caught on the move. What followed was what Eden reckoned resembled the most painful haggling at an oriental bazaar, and ended with a compromise fudge. Papagos would keep his forces at the front in Macedonia but would send three of his divisions to the Aliákmon Line, which was about a third less than the British had been originally expecting.
A braver decision would have been to turn around and head straight back to the Middle East, but Eden, Dill and the Middle East C-in-Cs all believed that to abandon Greece would not only lead to its certain and rapid defeat, but would also have a disastrous effect throughout the Near and Middle East, as well as throughout the Empire and the United States. More than that, nine RAF squadrons were already in Greece, and troops were embarking. The decision made, while recognized to be far from ideal, was considered the least dangerous, overall, of the options available. ‘By this time,’ wrote Eden, ‘Dill and I felt that the die was cast.’ None the less, they had made a political decision, not a military one, and, on his return to London, Dill confessed to Kennedy that he thought they had made a bad mistake. ‘I tried to console him,’ noted Kennedy, ‘by saying that, even if things went wrong, it would only be an incident – we must regard this as a defensive phase, and hang on until we were stronger.’
There was, however, better news for Britain coming from the Atlantic. On 7 March, U-47, commanded by the ace Günther Prien, was lost during an attack on an outbound convoy, OB 293. Officially, the claim went to the destroyer Wolverine, but some debate remains about precisely how and when U-47 went to the bottom. It may well be that a depth-charge attack did bring about the fatal blow that same day, or the following morning as claimed. What is certain is that Prien’s last signal came on the morning of 7 March and that nothing more was ever heard of the U-47, her brilliant commander or any of the crew.
Also involved in that engagement had been Otto Kretschmer’s U-99, but a week later his boat, that of another ace, Joachim Schepke’s U-100, and the U-30 were converging on another convoy, this time HX112 from Halifax to the UK.
Escorting HX112 on their first homeward leg were Commander Donald Macintyre and his Escort Group, EG5. Just before midnight on 15 March, Macintyre was on the bridge when the night was ripped apart by a blinding flash of flame, followed moments later by the sound of an explosion. This was the 10,000-ton tanker Erdona, and it was the first time Macintyre and his men had seen a ship like this erupt. They were shocked into silence by the spectacle and assumed no one could possibly have survived. Immediately, alarm bells clanged through the ship and men ran to their action stations. In the glare of the burning ship, Macintyre strained through his binoculars for the sign of a U-boat as the destroyer zig-zagged widely in an effort to cover as much sea as possible. The only real instrument to help them was their ASDIC, effectively sonar, which transmitted impulses that could be heard as a ‘ping’. If these impulses hit an object, they would be reflected back with a further ping, the response time being shorter the closer the object was.
The problem with ASDIC was that the version used at the time, the 120 series, had a range of only 2,500 yards in perfect conditions, and conditions were rarely that, making the range usually more like 1,500 yards. Compounding the problem was the fact that it was effective in a cone of just 16 degrees below the horizontal of the surface, which meant it could not detect to any great depth. Usually, by the time an escort was in a position to drop depth charges, it was doing so on a hunch rather than from any help from the ASDIC. As it was, depth charges had been set on pre-war assumptions that submarines would not be able to dive very deep; in fact, U-boats could dive much further than the British had expected, so could generally get beneath any depth-charge explosion.
At any rate, Macintyre and his escorts were picking up nothing on their ASDIC sets and nor was there any way of telling from which direction the torpedo had been fired. In the wide, dark Atlantic, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Despite this, the destroyer Scimitar had spotted the U-boat, which was U-110, a new Type IXB commanded by Fritz-Julius Lemp, who had sunk the Athenia on the first day of the war, and tried to ram it. Before it could do so, U-110 dived to safety.
After a fruitless search, no further attack developed that night. Dawn broke and with it came a respite, yet Macintyre couldn’t help worrying about what might happen when night fell once more. That one U-boat had clearly escaped, now knew the location of the convoy, and would most likely not only attack again but very possibly have drawn in others. He was well aware that U-boats now tended to operate in packs.
Then, shortly before dusk, Scimitar flashed a signal that a U-boat had been spotted some six miles ahead. This was not Lemp in U-110, which had now headed in the wrong direction, but Joachim Schepke in U-100. Ordering full-speed ahead, Macintyre was joined in the pursuit by both Vanoc and Scimitar. As they closed, however, the U-boat dived. Still, Macintyre hoped they now had a good chance of catching the boat, so in a line a mile and a half apart they swept the area. To his disappointment, they detected nothing and, leaving the other two destroyers to continue the hunt, Macintyre ordered Walker to rejoin the convoy, confident that with the U-boat submerged and therefore unable to travel at more than 7 knots, and with the convoy making a dramatic change of course, there was now little chance of the German boat attacking that night.
Unbeknown to Macintyre, however, there were now other U-boats trailing the convoy, including U-99 and U-37. Earlier, Lemp in U-110 had reported seeing only two destroyers, so it was a surprise to the new arrivals, Schepke included, to discover the convoy had an escort of no fewer than seven destroyers and corvettes.
It was Kretschmer in U-99 who began the attack that night, sailing right into the middle of the convoy, as was his way, and firing torpedoes from his eight tubes. One missed but seven others hit six merchantmen, the first shortly after Walker had rejoined the convoy. ‘I was near to despair,’ noted Macintyre, ‘and I wracked my brains to find some way to stop the holocaust.’ His one real hope was to sight the tell-tale white wake of a U-boat, then give chase and hopefully pick it up on the ASDIC and then pummel it with depth charges. Putting Walker into a curving course and with his binoculars glued to his eyes, he prayed he would spot their elusive attacker.
Suddenly, he spotted the wake of what could only be a U-boat and, urgently ordering an increase of speed to 30 knots, bolted towards the sighting. Spotting them almost too late, the U-boat crash-dived, but Walker was over her moments later and could still see the swirl of phosphorescence and sent a pattern of ten depth charges. Macintyre was certain they could hardly have missed, and soon after the charges exploded they heard a further explosion from below and an orange flash briefly spread across the water. Was this their first U-boat kill? Macintyre hoped so, especially since there was no further ping on the ASDIC.
It was not, however; the U-boat in question, U-37, was badly damaged but not destroyed. In the ensuing confusion, it was able to quietly slip away and head back to Germany for repairs. Meanwhile, as U-37 was limping away, U-110 and a fifth boat, U-74, had seen the explosions on the horizon and had turned back in the right direction. Approaching the convoy, they could see the full number of escorts weaving back and forth, letting off depth charges and firing star shells into the sky to illuminate any U-boat on the surface.
Forty minutes after the attack on U-37, Walker finally picked up U-boat contact on the ASDIC once more and assumed it must be the original boat he had already thought killed. In fact, it was U-100, which had still not managed to fire any of her torpedoes. Calling Vanoc to help, Macintyre then ordered both ships to make repeated sweeps over where he thought the U-boat had dived, and to set salvoes at a variety of ranges from 150 to 500 feet. The trouble was, the depth-charge explosions affected the ASDIC readings so, with no apparent sign of success, Macintyre swept Walker around to pick up survivors of the SS J. B. White.
Under the sea, however, U-100 was in trouble as the depth charges had caused flooding and smashed a number of instruments, so that by 3 a.m. Schepke had no choice but to surface. This was picked up almost immediately by Vanoc using her new Type 286M radar – the first confirmed radar contact with a U-boat of the war. Seeing both Vanoc and Walker now hurrying towards them, Schepke ordered the boat into a firing position, but the engines wouldn’t start and by the time they finally did it was too late. Believing Vanoc would miss them, Schepke was manning the bridge, but this was to prove a fatal miscalculation. Vanoc was steaming directly towards the stricken U-boat.
‘Abandon ship!’ Schepke yelled, and a moment later he was crushed to death as Vanoc’s bow smashed into the conning tower. U-100 sank moments later. ‘Have rammed and sunk U-boat,’ signalled Vanoc, then managed to scoop up just six survivors.
‘What a blissful moment that was,’ noted Macintyre, ‘the successful culmination of a long and arduous fight.’
But it was only the culmination of one particular fight, for soon after 3.30 a.m. Walker’s ASDIC picked up the ping-ping of a contact.
‘Contact, contact!’ called out Backhouse, the ASDIC operator.
At first, Macintyre dared hardly believe it, but Backhouse was insistent. ‘Contact definitely submarine,’ he told his skipper.
This was Otto Kretschmer’s U-99, which had surfaced and suddenly found itself within yards of Walker. The watch officer on the bridge, assuming they must have been seen, ordered a crash-dive. In fact, they had not been, but now, by diving, they had been picked up on Walker’s ASDIC; had they held their nerve, they may well have got away.
As the destroyer swept over the U-boat, Macintyre ordered another salvo of depth charges, which smashed air, fuel and ballast tanks. Water was pouring in and, realizing they had no chance of surviving under water, Kretschmer ordered them to surface, still hoping they might escape in the darkness. It was not to be. Picked up by Vanoc, which signalled the sighting to Walker, the stricken U-boat was hit with a searchlight and fired on with their 4-inch guns. The firing was pretty wild, but, soon after, the U-boat signalled in poor English, ‘We are sunking.’ Kretschmer had ordered U-99, the most successful U-boat of all, to be scuttled and for the men to abandon her.
Walker pulled up to her, lowered nets and helped pull the men aboard. ‘Some of them,’ noted Macintyre, ‘were in the last stages of exhaustion from the cold of those icy northern waters by the time we got them aboard.’ The last man to come aboard was the U-boat’s captain, Otto Kretschmer, still wearing his prized Zeiss binoculars, one of only a few made on Dönitz’s orders for his greatest aces. At the last moment, Kretschmer tried to throw them into the sea, but he was not quick enough and they were taken from him and handed over to Macintyre – a prize he would cherish.
The next day, Kretschmer was spotted looking at the ship’s crest, a horseshoe. ‘This is a strange coincidence,’ he said in perfect English. ‘My ship also sailed under the sign of the horseshoe.’ His though, he said, was shown pointing down not up.
‘Well, Captain,’ replied Osbourne, Walker’s Chief Engineer, ‘in our belief a horseshoe that way up allows the luck to run out.’ Kretschmer laughed ruefully.
On a small vessel like a destroyer, it was impossible to keep prisoners and survivors of the J. B. White apart, and Macintyre had his work cut out preventing fights. Despite this, it was not long before Osbourne had organized a bridge four between himself, two of the J. B. White’s officers and Kretschmer, an extraordinary occurrence in the circumstances. Apart from showing his skill at cards, Kretschmer revealed little except that he’d studied at Exeter University before the war, appeared largely apolitical, and was resentful that conflict had ever broken out between the two countries.
A few days later, they reached Liverpool, where they were met by Admiral Noble and many of the Western Approaches staff, all anxious to congratulate Macintyre and his EG5, and to see the great U-boat ace. Kretschmer, wearing his own clothes and Captain’s white-covered cap, strode down the gangway. There was silence as he stepped ashore, and for a brief moment he paused and looked at Macintyre and the group of officers standing around Admiral Noble, then gave a slight nod to his adversary and stepped towards the waiting car, with a soldier now at each elbow.