Gains and Losses
IN MARCH 1941, five U-boats had been sunk, and the loss of the three greatest aces within a fortnight was a particularly harsh blow, which Dönitz and all his staff at BdU felt keenly. It was a blow for Goebbels too. Nazi Germany was proud of its heroes and whether they were dashing generals or panzer commanders, or fighter and U-boat aces, these men were pin-ups, famous throughout the Reich and featured regularly in magazines and newsreels. This, of course, was all very well and inspiring while they continued to shoot down Spitfires or sink ever-larger numbers of merchant vessels, but was rather humiliating – not to say tragic – when they were either killed or taken prisoner. As much as anything, it reminded Germans that the war, apparently won the previous summer, was not over at all. Rather, it was going on, and would continue to do so, plucking ever more of the Reich’s young men and heroes.
For Dönitz, men like Prien, Schepke and Kretschmer were quite simply irreplaceable. The pool of men who had long years of experience both of the sea and on U-boats before the war ever began was diminishing fast. Time and time again, Dönitz found himself rueing the fact that the U-boat arm of the Kriegsmarine had come so low in the pecking order compared with other services and even other naval requirements. Had it been larger before the war, more men of the calibre of Kretschmer et al. could have been drawn to it, and with the successes the U-boats had had in the last war, this was such an obvious policy. If Britain was its greatest enemy, as Hitler had repeatedly claimed in the build-up to war, then why had he not thought to build up his U-boat fleet as a priority for the Kriegsmarine? Even in the summer of 1940, when U-boat production was set at twenty-five per month, Göring had wilfully restricted the Kriegsmarine’s allocation of steel, which had, in turn, ensured even this number was unachievable; as it was, the Kriegsmarine received only 5 per cent of the Reich’s total steel production. As a result, new U-boats were reaching the BdU at a rate of just six per month in the second half of 1940 and had risen to only thirteen in the first few months of 1941; on one level this was a good number, but with the rule of thirds – a third at sea, a third heading back, and a third undergoing training or repairs – this meant a monthly operational increase of only four or five.
There was worse to come, however, not that Dönitz and his staff were aware of it at the time. On 9 May, Fritz-Julius Lemp, commander of U-110, who had on his previous patrol escaped from Donald Macintyre and EG5’s grasp, was caught attacking convoy OB 318. Surfacing after being heavily depth-charged, the boat was then pummelled with gunfire and Lemp killed. Rather than ram the U-boat, however, Commander Addison Joe Baker-Creswell of the destroyer Bulldog decided to board the boat and took off U-110’s codebooks and its Enigma coding machine.
Up until this point, both sides had sporadically been breaking the other’s codes. The German decryption service, the Beobachtungsdienst, or B-Dienst, had begun solving parts of the British naval codes before the war, and during the Norwegian campaign, for example, had managed to garner useful information about the movements of Allied forces at sea. The British changed their codebooks in August 1940, and it took several months again before the B-Dienst could decrypt both the Naval Cypher No. 1 and the Naval Code, and even then often too slowly to have any effect. This eventually amounted to around one third of the intercepted messages, some of which were used for directing U-boats.
By August 1940, British cryptanalysts at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park had managed to gain all eight of the rotors used in the naval Enigma M-3 machine. Five had been handed over by the Poles back in 1939, while rotors VI and VII had been captured when U-33 was sunk, and finally VIII was captured in August the previous year. Despite this, they were cracking only around 10 per cent of the Kriegsmarine’s naval traffic. A major step forward occurred with a Commando raid on German shipping in the Lofoten Islands in the north of Norway, in which the latest cipher materials were captured. Further cipher material was captured when a British navalforce boarded a German weather trawler in fog off the Dutch coast at the beginning of May. Then, just two days later, came the Aladdin’s cave of U-110. The potential intelligence breakthrough this might bring was enormous.
There was, however, another sign of Britain’s growing advantage in the Atlantic, where the reach of its naval escorts was dramatically increasing. In the opening eighteen months of the war, a lack of mid-Atlantic refuelling bases combined with a shortage of escorts had meant there was a large section in the middle of the ocean where the convoys were on their own, and, as a consequence, increasingly vulnerable. In April 1941, however, naval and air bases had finally opened in Iceland, which ensured the British from then on could escort convoys as far as 35°W, a huge improvement. Then, on 20 May, the Royal Canadian Navy agreed to close the final gap that ran from 35°W to Newfoundland.
This was already another crucial marker in Canada’s huge commitment to the war. Its Navy had effectively had to grow from scratch, and it had, by May, some eighty corvettes either in service or nearly built. Canadian crews lacked the training and experience of the Royal Navy, but this was hardly surprising considering the speed of growth. The importance of the Newfoundland Escort Force – or NEF, as it was called – was that it meant convoys could be escorted from one side of the ocean to the other for the very first time. Under operational control of Western Approaches Command and following the Western Approaches Convoy Instructions (WACIs) as issued by Admiral Noble and his staff in April, they increased the strength and scale of the Allied escort forces in the Atlantic massively.
Under this new arrangement, Canadian Escort Groups would hand over to British ones at the Mid-Ocean Meeting Point, or MOMP, then head to Iceland for refuelling and rearming, before rejoining a west-bound convoy heading back. The RAF also handed over a number of flying boats to the Royal Canadian Air Force, while its own Coastal Command had also significantly grown by the middle of the year, with more than 200 maritime patrol aircraft operating from Iceland in addition to those based in the west of the United Kingdom.
For the crews, anti-U-boat patrols were thankless: they meant long hours airborne, endlessly scanning a vast and often empty sea, and battling the capricious harshness of the Atlantic weather. But they were making a difference. Dönitz was forced to push his U-boats ever further west to the one gap that still existed in the Atlantic defences: the area in the mid-Atlantic where aircraft could not yet reach.
Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, Admiral Cunningham’s fleet had successfully evacuated almost all the British forces from Greece. Alf Parbery had left early in the morning on 27 April, the same day German troops marched into Athens, and by 4.30 a.m. they were under attack from the Luftwaffe. ‘We had miraculous escapes,’ recalled Parbery, ‘and so did other ships. The explosions would hide half of the ships at times.’ Their gunners never stopped firing and Parbery reckoned they had shot down nine aircraft. More importantly, they all managed to make it safely to Alexandria. In all, 58,364 men had been transported to Greece and 50,732 were brought out. Some were Greeks and Yugoslavians, but, in all, the British had suffered just 12,000 casualties, many of whom were sick and wounded and later returned to active service. The British also lost 8,000 trucks, 209 aircraft and two Royal Navy ships and four transports.
These were significant losses, but, all things considered, Britain had got off lightly. It had honoured its treaty pledges to the Greeks and had caused the Germans a massive logistical headache by making them divert so many men and resources to a theatre so close in time to their planned invasion of Russia, which Hitler had already been forced to delay by a month from May to June. Admittedly, this had given General Adolf von Schell the time to get more trucks coming off the production line to the forward units massing in Poland, but there was no denying it would have been best to use every possible day in the Soviet summer. By delaying BARBAROSSA until the third week of June, they had denied themselves almost two months of the campaigning season.
In London and Cairo, however, this was unknown. In fact, General John Kennedy’s appreciation had been almost perfect: Greece had ended in failure and Britain had consequently lost the initiative in North Africa. None the less, as he had consoled Dill, it had not proved disastrous in the big scheme of things, and that night Churchill, in his broadcast to the British nation, also pointed out that while the setbacks in North Africa and Greece were hard to bear, it was important to keep a sense of proportion.
In this he was surely quite right. Together Britain and the United States possessed command of the oceans, ‘and will soon obtain decisive superiority in the air’. The USA, he added, possessed more wealth and more technical resources, and made more steel, than the rest of the world put together. This was undeniable. Certainly, his speech gave heart to Gwladys Cox, who always, like the vast majority of Britons, listened to Churchill’s broadcasts. ‘Really, he is a remarkable person!’ she noted. ‘He has a great grasp of his subject, as he has of his audience.’
Nor was it all bad news for the British in any case, even though defeat in the recent battles in North Africa and in Greece had caused doom and gloom back home in Britain. By the end of the month, it looked certain that the East African war was nearing its end. Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, had been captured, Emperor Haile Selassie’s British-mentored forces had captured key Italian forts and the British 11th African Division had taken Addis Ababa along with 8,000 Italian prisoners. On 2 May, Haile Selassie returned triumphantly to his old capital, five years after he had been forced to leave. Another part of Mussolini’s short-lived empire was about to crumble for good, which meant one less problem for Britain to worry about.
Moreover, even though Rommel had rather pointlessly pressed on through Sollum and the Halfaya Pass – or ‘Hellfire Pass’, as it was now known – he had again run out of steam. Egypt was not under threat. This meant that Wavell could deal with an emerging rebellion in Iraq and start thinking about confronting Vichy-held Syria too. Securing both East Africa and the Middle East would make the British situation in Egypt much stronger, despite the loss of Greece.
There were, however, two inescapable lessons from Greece. First, the intervention of the Germans had proved beyond question that on land, at any rate, there was no army to touch them; Britain still had a very long way to go before it could compete, even though this was, in the spring of 1941, entirely understandable. Britain’s Army was growing, but it would take time to build to a strength that could compete with Germany.
The second was with regard to air power. During their advance south, Balck and the whole of 2. Panzerdivision, to which his regiment was attached, had been left virtually untouched by the RAF. Balck had been amazed. ‘Had they done so,’ he wrote, ‘they would have had plenty of targets of opportunity and we would have learned a hard lesson on how not to take panzer divisions through mountainous terrain.’
Of course, the RAF had been in such small numbers it had been all the pilots could do to watch their own backs. Roald Dahl had faced an extraordinary baptism of fire. The depleted squadron had lost Flight-Sergeant Cottingham and Flight-Sergeant Rivelon on 17 April, and Pilot Officer ‘Oofy’ Still the following day, which left them with just twelve aircraft and twelve pilots. They were the only remaining Hurricanes in Greece. On the 20th, Dahl had flown four times, and during the first sortie that day he found himself caught up in a large, swirling dogfight in which they were colossally outnumbered. Half the time he was simply trying to avoid a collision, and by the time he pulled away and dived for home, he’d fired off all his ammunition and was struggling to control a sluggish fighter plane that had obviously been hit. When he finally touched down, he remained sitting there for a minute gasping for breath and overwhelmed to discover he was still alive. One mechanic said to him, ‘Blimey mate, this kite’s got so many ’oles in it, it looks like it’s made out of chicken wire.’ The Germans had got five of their twelve Hurricanes in that particular scrap, killing two experienced pilots in the process.
On the 21st, two more Hurricanes had been destroyed, both as they were taking off, and one of the pilots killed. Finally, two days later, the last five were flown to Greece and the spare pilots, Dahl included, taken by a Lockheed Hudson back to Egypt. ‘We really had the hell of a time in Greece,’ Dahl wrote to his mother once safely back in Alexandria. ‘It wasn’t much fun taking on half the German Airforce with literally a handful of fighters.’
As the RAF had discovered in France, there was little that could be achieved in the air if there was no effective way of directing those air forces towards or away from the enemy. Trying to second-guess massed formations of enemy bombers and fighters did not work. Nor could much be achieved when massively outnumbered, because pilots then spent their time desperately trying to save themselves rather than actually achieving anything helpful in terms of what was going on below.
It was no simple matter getting aircraft all the way to the Middle East, but Admiral Cunningham, for one, was with Roald Dahl and the men of 80 Squadron in believing many, many more were needed. ABC had been demanding more aircraft ever since the Italians had entered the war; he wasn’t alone. So too had Air Marshal Arthur Longmore and Air Marshal Tedder, his successor as Air Officer Commanding Middle East. For Cunningham, the exhilaration of victory at sea at Cape Matapan had long been replaced by the gloom born of his great responsibilities and diminishing resources, primarily the lack of air support. ‘If our deficiencies in the air could not be made good, and quickly,’ he noted, ‘I foresaw we should have to face some very unpleasant alternatives in the Middle East. Why the authorities at home apparently could not see the danger of our situation in the Mediterranean without adequate air support passed my comprehension.’
There was no question that all three British services were now greatly overstretched and that a huge amount was being expected of the Mediterranean Fleet. Yet it was also ever thus that commanders in theatre needed more than they had. The build-up of the RAF in the Middle East and on Malta had actually been reasonably impressive, especially considering that Britain had a critical air battle to fight at home. Furthermore, the decision to send Hurricanes and Blenheims, which were being gradually replaced by the home commands, made perfect sense when the only opposition were the Italians. The Hurricane, for example, was more than a match for anything the Regia Aeronautica had at that time. What’s more, it was an easier aircraft to maintain than the Spitfire, and that was an important consideration out in the Middle East, where there were not the easily available repair and maintenance workshops that there were back in Britain.
Of course, it was a different kettle of fish when coming up against the latest Messerschmitt 109s and the overwhelming numbers of the Luftwaffe. It was also much easier for the Luftwaffe to move between theatres than it was for the RAF, as all it had to do was fly down from existing bases in the Greater Reich and occupy pre-existing airfields in Italy or other parts of the Balkans. It was always a logistical headache to move a Staffel or Gruppe, but this was as nothing compared with the problems facing the British in getting air forces across seas and continents to the Middle East.
And, in any case, the Air Ministry had reacted swiftly to the arrival of the Germans, and from March more significant numbers of aircraft were sent to the Middle East – 109 Hurricanes in March and April, 72 Blenheims, and 27 Curtiss Tomahawks from the USA, ordered the previous summer and now being shipped directly to the Middle East. Again, by sending these new American single-engine fighters direct and only to the Middle East made good sense; there was no sense in splitting shipments, spare parts and even mechanical knowledge. These figures would increase dramatically in the coming months as Britain’s war leaders accepted the need to regain the initiative in North Africa and the Middle East.
Meanwhile, back in Britain, RAF Fighter Command continued to grow in strength as production of Spitfires increased. Most of the day squadrons of Fighter Command were equipped with Spitfires by the spring of 1941, and that included 145 Squadron. They had been sent south to Tangmere, near Chichester in Sussex, on 10 October and had seen plenty of action right up to the end of the year; the Luftwaffe had continued to make daylight raids both with bombers and with fighters in what the German pilots called Freijagd – free hunts. Jean Offenberg now had four confirmed kills to his name plus several probables and damaged claims as well. He was now completely fluent in English and accepted by his peers, but these had nevertheless been long, lonely months, especially since his great friend, Alexis Jottard, had been killed at the end of October. ‘It was one of the saddest moments of my life,’ Offenberg wrote in a letter to Jottard’s family. ‘We were very close and we were like brothers.’
Since then, there had been many changes for Offenberg and 145 Squadron. In early January came the news that they would be handing over their Hurricanes and converting to Spitfires. They were also told they would be going on the offensive, although much to Offenberg’s frustration he was not allowed to fly over the Continent; in part this was because it was considered too risky for foreign nationals in the RAF to do so, and in part it was because the Secret Intelligence Service feared some of these men might be spies and would take their machines and knowledge and go over to the other side. There was, however, little evidence to support this. Nearly all, like Offenberg, were flying in the hope that they would be helping to liberate their countries.
This restriction had not lasted long. On 21 February, it was lifted, and Offenberg was able to join his fellows in the squadron in carrying out sweeps across the Channel. A policy of ‘leaning forward into France’ had been proposed by Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas soon after he had taken over as C-in-C Fighter Command, approved by the Air Staff and embraced by Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory, now commanding 11 Group. The aim of this strategy was to give the Luftwaffe no rest and to wear it down: British fighters were to destroy enemy aircraft in the air and on the ground, to shoot up and even bomb airfields, and, most importantly, to keep plenty of Luftwaffe formations in France and the Low Countries at the expense of the Mediterranean and North Africa. It was also felt important to take the offensive and to imbue the men of Fighter Command with a sense of superiority in the air. For so long, the Luftwaffe had seemed to be the top dogs; it was felt important to show the Germans and those in occupied France that Britain’s air forces still had plenty of fight and, moreover, were growing all the time.
For Offenberg, who had been restless and bored during the long winter, this more offensive policy was welcome news, and particularly so once he was allowed to join in. Even so, Fighter Command’s efforts to lean forward into France were fairly lukewarm to start with as short days and bad weather hampered efforts. It wasn’t until 13 March that Offenberg flew his first sortie back over France; bad weather and convoy protection had prevented them heading over sooner. Crossing the Channel at 30,000 feet, they had flown towards Arras and then spotted twenty or so Me109s away and below them, but the enemy fighters had scuttled off as soon as they saw the Spitfires. In between had been a mixture of patrols and coastal-convoy protection.
And so it continued: patrols and frustrating sweeps over France in which the enemy was spotted but rarely engaged. The large sweeps, with entire wings of squadrons heading over en masse in formations of over a hundred fighters, were known as ‘circuses’. Smaller, lower-level raids were called ‘rhubarbs’. For Offenberg, life was made more difficult by the arrival of a new flight commander called Stevens, whom he had not taken to and who kept trying to stop him flying more than the rest of the flight. ‘I get more and more browned off with life in this squadron,’ he recorded on 4 May.
Offenberg was not the only foreign pilot getting fed up. So too was Red Tobin, who just four days after the big air battles of 15 September 1940 had been posted with Keogh and Mamedoff to 71 ‘Eagle’ Squadron, an all-American unit; such was the number of US volunteers now in Britain. A radio reporter had visited the Eagles a few weeks after they had been formed and had asked Tobin why he was flying for Britain. ‘Well,’ Tobin had told him, ‘at first I just felt I wanted to fly some of these powerful machines, so I just came over . . . I guess one’s views change a little once one is over here. The British are a swell people. This is a nice little country and I don’t mind fighting for it one little bit.’ The trouble was, he wasn’t doing much fighting any more. Posted to Church Fenton in Yorkshire, Tobin and his fellows from 609 had soon come to resent being palmed off to a quiet backwater and missed their old pals. Tobin had come over to fly for the RAF, not sit on his backside all day.
Morale wasn’t much better among the Luftwaffe units still in northern France. Siegfried Bethke had, like most fighter pilots, found the ongoing air battles of the autumn of 1940 a difficult time. So much had been expected of them and yet so many had been lost. A massive blow had been the death of Helmut Wick, one of the most highly regarded aces not only of JG2, but of the entire Luftwaffe. Wick had been shot down into the Channel on 28 November by John Dundas of 609 Squadron.
In February, Bethke had finally been given some leave and had become engaged to his girlfriend, Hedi; they planned to marry in June. All too soon, however, he was back at the front, carrying out fighter-bomber missions over England, a task he disliked intensely; flying over the Channel had not got any easier on his nerves, while such missions meant flying in and out at low altitude. This was also more dangerous: the lower the aircraft, the less room there was for manoeuvre should anything go wrong.
By the beginning of May, his Staffel were based at Théville at the tip of the Cherbourg peninsula. On the 12th, Bethke carried out another fighter-bomber mission to attack a British airfield. Flying low over the Channel once more they reached England but were unable to find the airfield. Instead, they attacked some British shipping. Bethke couldn’t really see whether they had been successful or not but hoped they had caused some damage. The rest of the time they sat around the airfield at readiness, waiting to be scrambled to meet the British fighters. Losses were mounting and yet he had survived. For how much longer, though, he was unsure. ‘One always thinks about what will come, concerning the flying,’ he noted. ‘I think about the future with Hedi.’ He hoped they had one.
Meanwhile, on 5 May, Jean Offenberg was given permission for a brief solo flight. However, instead of flying calmly around Tangmere, Offenberg flew across the Channel towards the Cherbourg peninsula. Avoiding the flak around the port, he dived to around 1,000 feet and was off the coast near Barfleur when he spotted two Heinkel 60s, small biplane seaplanes. Opening fire, he hurtled past and banked and climbed to see the first crash into the water. He had barely time to think about the second Heinkel when two 109s appeared. Offenberg turned north and realized he and the first Messerschmitt were converging almost head-on. Firing first, he pulled up at the last moment and avoided a collision, then climbed on a right-hand turn, and as one of the Messerschmitts crossed his gunsight opened fire. From the corner of his eye, he could see it in shallow dive trailing white smoke. ‘I thought it best to get away as quickly as possible from these waters and make for home,’ he remembered. ‘I skimmed over the water beneath a cloudless sky.’ He knew he was going to be in big trouble, but despite Stevens’s wrath, Group Captain ‘Woody’ Woodhall, the Station Commander at Tangmere, gave him little more than a slight rap on the knuckles, made him promise not to do it again, and told him he had been recommended for a Distinguished Flying Cross, a DFC.
In Churchill’s speech of 27 April, he had also pointed out that it was the Battle of the Atlantic that should hold the first place in their thoughts. It was here, he said, and in the men sailing the world’s sea lanes, that the responsibility for victory lay. Again, he was quite right. He also reminded his listeners – and it was not just the British who tuned in but people from all around the world – that Britain never had fewer than 2,000 merchant ships afloat at any one time. This was a truly impressive number and was why so much materiel was still pouring into Britain and elsewhere despite the threats lurking above and below the waves.
The point was this: the Middle East and Mediterranean were a theatre of strategic opportunity for Britain; but the Atlantic was one of strategic necessity. If Greece or even Egypt fell, Britain would survive; if it lost the war in the Atlantic, it would not.
Conversely, it was all very well Germany demonstrating its strength against weaker opponents on land, but these victories should not have been masking the setbacks at sea. These were mounting, for if the loss of the aces in March had signalled a change in German fortunes in the Battle of the Atlantic, the loss of U-110’s codebooks and Enigma really marked the end of an era. For all the disappointments Britain would face in 1941 – and there were many – at least its all-important sea lanes remained open. Just so long as more and more supplies continued to come its way, Britain could continue to fight. As such, first the failure of the Luftwaffe the previous summer and now the U-boat arm’s setback in the Atlantic marked major turning points in the war in the West.
As the second summer of war arrived, the critical factor for Britain, however, was whether enough supplies would reach it. Uncertainty about the United States and its ability to send supplies in time to make a significant contribution constantly played on the minds of Britain’s war leaders, and not least Churchill himself. ‘Battles might be won or lost,’ wrote the PM, ‘enterprises might succeed or miscarry, territories might be gained or quitted, but dominating all our power to carry on the war, or even keep ourselves alive, lay our mastery of the ocean routes and the free approach and entry to our ports.’
It was not U-boats but German surface vessels that were at the forefront of both the Kriegsmarine’s and Churchill’s thoughts that May, however. On the night of the 19th, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the monster battleship and pride of the German fleet, the Bismarck, burst through the British naval blockade and out into the Atlantic. After the humiliations of the Admiral Hipper and Admiral Scheer, and the raids made by the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the Royal Navy had vowed to not let these pesky German capital ships make fools of them again. The RAF had since then been bombing Brest regularly and had managed to hit Gneisenau in dock, but the Bismarck now promised to be an unbeatable prize.
Needless to say, the Home Fleet sent HMS Hood and the fast battleship the Prince of Wales to join the cruiser force already in the Atlantic in an effort to track down the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. Early on 24 May, the two big British ships sighted their German adversaries and opened fire, even though together they had half the large 15-inch guns of the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. All four ships opened fire just before six in the morning. A few minutes later, one particularly lucky shot from the Bismarck did for Hood. Although she was a heavy battle cruiser rather than a battleship, Hood was none the less one of the oldest and best-known capital ships in the entire Royal Navy. She had been due a major refit in 1939, but war arrived too early, so that by 1941 standards neither her guns nor her armour were quite sufficient for the role she was expected to play. Hit probably in her magazine, she exploded and sank, killing all but three of her 1,418-strong crew.
However, Bismarck had been hit as well, although not fatally. But the damage to her fuel tanks was serious enough for her to have to immediately turn and make for Brest, a voyage that was dogged all the way by radar-equipped British vessels and aircraft. It was a Fairey Swordfish, the same ageing naval aircraft that had struck such a blow to the Italian fleet at Taranto, that produced the fatal hit in the end. A torpedo dropped by one of these biplanes hit her stern and jammed her rudder, leaving the giant battleship circling like a wounded whale. Other British battleships and cruisers closed in for the kill, including Rodney and George V, repeatedly hitting the stricken vessel. Admiral Lütjens, who had orchestrated the series of raids by his surface fleet, was killed, and with most of her guns out of action, her decks aflame, she was abandoned. The coup de grâce came from a torpedo fired by the heavy cruiser Dorsetshire.
While it was the end for the Bismarck, her consort, however, the Prinz Eugen, had managed to scurry back to Brest. The British, milking the propaganda value of this victory at sea for all it was worth, felt the loss of Hood had been avenged. More importantly, it marked the end of the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet as a fighting force in the Battle of the Atlantic. Not one capital ship ever dipped into those grey, bitter seas ever again.