Trouble at the Top
BY THE SUMMER of 1941, the Canadian contribution to Britain’s war effort was already proving quite exceptional. An entire division had reached Britain in the summer of 1940, and another had followed. Entire wings of Canadians were in Britain, serving with Fighter Command, while further Canadian squadrons were serving in Bomber Command, and pilots and aircrew were sprinkled liberally through all parts of the RAF, both in the UK and overseas. All Canadian servicemen were volunteers. Other Canadian volunteers had chosen to join the rapidly growing Royal Canadian Navy; it did not have the large core of pre-war professionals that had enabled the smooth addition of so many civilians into the Royal Navy, and in terms of its overall professionalism the RCN was definitely a work in progress, but both its command and its rapidly growing crews were all more than answering the call; certainly, what they lacked in training and equipment, they made up for in determination and dedication to the cause. The first few corvettes of what was called the Newfoundland Escort Force – or NEF – left Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 23 May in what was a significant moment. Henceforth, convoys would be escorted from one side of the Atlantic all the way to the other. ‘The Royal Canadian Navy,’ said Admiral Noble, ‘solved the problems of the Atlantic convoys.’ Their role was to escort convoys to what became known as the ‘Mid-Ocean Meeting Point’, or ‘MOMP’, to the south of Iceland. There they would hand over their charges to British Escort Groups. NEF Escort Groups, under the overall control of Western Approaches Command, would refuel in Iceland, then sail back to the MOMP to meet the next convoy headed back west.
It was into this improving situation for Britain in the Atlantic that U-564 crept out of the 1st Flotilla’s base at Lorient in Brittany on the Atlantic coast on 17 June. The U-boat’s commander, Oberleutnant Teddy Suhren, was delighted to be getting this first patrol underway and had deliberately done everything he could to make it operationally ready as quickly as possible. How long a new boat took to work up to readiness depended entirely on the experience of the commander and how well he could control both the U-boat and his crew. In Suhren’s case, there was no shortage of experience or confidence, and he was quick to demonstrate both attributes to his new crew, as well as a relaxed but no-nonsense attitude; certainly, no one on U-564 was left in any doubt as to who was boss. Suhren was clearly more than up to the challenge, but command of a U-boat required a considerable number of different skills: a mind that could quickly calculate equations of distance, speed and time; a profound understanding of the sea; an immense imperturbability; an ability to maintain the morale of fifty men of differing characteristics and ages in an intensely confined metal tin; and a sixth sense that could only be won through experience. Since the BdU had begun the war with only 3,000 men, one of the challenges facing Dönitz as U-boat losses mounted and more new vessels and crews entered service was how to maintain the necessary standard of training among officers and particularly commanders.
Once out at sea, U-boats were directed by the operations team at BdU HQ at Kernével, a small village some twenty-five miles inland from Lorient, where Dönitz had chosen to set up his command post. The oceans were mapped out and divided into squares, which were in turn subdivided into smaller squares, which served as position locators. On this first patrol, U-564 was ordered by radio signal, encoded by the Enigma machine, to head north-west in the hope of intercepting a Halifax convoy heading to Britain across the North Atlantic.
They had barely reached their station when they managed to intercept convoy HX133. In the early hours of 27 June, they sank two ships and severely damaged a third. Two nights later, they spotted and sank a third ship, an independent, which went down in just two minutes. Three confirmed sinkings within two weeks of their first patrol was an encouraging start.
Dönitz’s frustrations were mounting, however. Time and again both the military and political leadership demonstrated a complete lack of understanding as to the essential nature of submarine warfare. Repeatedly, Dönitz found himself being issued orders from on high that interfered with his command of the BdU. The operations of the Kriegsmarine’s surface vessels, for example, had been, to his mind, a useful supplement to the work of the U-boats, but it had been a complete waste of time to use his force as escorts for these much faster vessels. None the less that was what they had been ordered to do. The Luftwaffe insisted that two U-boats should be stationed as weather watchers at all times; it was only two, but if they were spending their days issuing weather reports, they couldn’t be sinking ships, and effectively that meant four U-boats because they had to rotate.
Then with the launch of BARBAROSSA, no fewer than eight U-boats were ordered, over and above Dönitz’s head, into the Baltic, although why they were there and what they were supposed to achieve was not made clear to him. Certainly, they sank nothing in that time. At the beginning of July, a further six U-boats were ordered to the Arctic, even though the Allies had not yet sent a single convoy to Murmansk or Archangel. ‘The decisive factor in the war against Britain is the attack on her imports,’ he wrote to the OKW through gritted teeth. ‘The delivery of these attacks is the U-boats’ principal task and one which no other branch of the Armed Forces can take over from them. The war with Russia will be decided on land, and in it the U-boats can play only a very minor role.’
Even more frustrating was the priority the surface fleet continued to take over the U-boat arm. At this crucial moment in the war, the High Command insisted on withdrawing some 800 U-boat maintenance workers and posting them to Brest to work on the damaged Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. This made absolutely no sense whatsoever and led to long delays in the refitting and repair of U-boats, which in turn had an adverse effect on Dönitz’s under-resourced force. Dönitz was incensed but powerless. He could fire off one outraged memorandum after another, each clearly laying out watertight reasoning for greater focus on the BdU, but he had no direct line to the Führer and was constrained by the overwhelmingly continentalist approach to warfare that was such a feature not only of Hitler’s mindset but also of almost all the senior Nazi leadership.
And this was not about to change any time soon.
On 21 June, Churchill finally wielded the axe on Wavell, demanding that he swap commands with General Claude Auchinleck and move to India and Auchinleck take on the mantel of the giant Middle East theatre. Moving Wavell was unquestionably the right decision. Churchill had never had much faith in him, and, regardless of whether that was fair or not, it meant Wavell was always battling uphill to get his perspective across; this was important, because on those few really crucial matters he needed to make his point and for Churchill both to trust his judgement and to accept it. That never happened. ‘He sounds a tired and disheartened man,’ Churchill had told Jock Colville at the end of May, and so he was, as he admitted to Dill when he was fired.
Yet so too was Dill. As CIGS, he had also found it hard to deal with Churchill, but there was also a creeping pessimism that was affecting his judgement. Exhaustion usually feeds negative thinking. On the same day that Wavell was axed, Kennedy had gone to see Dill after a week’s leave. ‘I suppose you realize we shall lose the Middle East?’ he told Kennedy. Despite the losses in Greece and Crete, and despite the check on BATTLEAXE, there was no real reason for such a gloomy prediction. They were aware of the German withdrawal of troops from the Balkans and the build-up in the East; the Germans – and Italians – had almost nothing like the naval forces and shipping with which to conduct a war across the Mediterranean on any significant scale, and, as British intelligence was well aware, Germany was already increasingly stretched. Meanwhile, supplies were continuing to pour into Britain and out again across the world’s oceans – between April and June that amounted to 3,294 ships. Ever more factories were now in operation in Britain; the UK was out-producing Germany in terms of tanks and aircraft. More pilots were being trained in Canada, the USA and Southern Africa than Germany could ever hope to process. Farmers across Britain, A. G. Street included, had begun an agricultural revolution that was producing food to a level of efficiency that Germany could not match. Of course, transferring this to the battlefield took time; Britain’s Army had been tiny when compared with that of Germany and remained very small a year after the fall of France. The responsibility bearing down on the shoulders of men like Dill was immense, but there was much that should have given him reassurance. The Middle East was not in imminent danger of being lost; and nor, more importantly, was the Battle of the Atlantic. In the West, at any rate, a wider perspective was needed when assessing Britain’s situation in the war.
And there was good news in the Middle East as well. On that same day, Damascus had fallen; after stiff resistance, the battle for Syria was going the Allies’ way, particularly now that BATTLEAXE was over and more forces could be released to support this second campaign. Further hard fighting followed, but on 11 July the Vichy commander, Général Dentz, asked for an end to hostilities. The formal surrender was signed three days later. To a large extent, the occupation of Syria – and airfields there – was a counterweight against the loss of Crete.
The RAF had contributed two and a half fighter squadrons and two of bombers, as well as two Fleet Air Arm squadrons. These had operated particularly successfully, destroying a number of Vichy air forces in the air and even more in a concentrated series of attacks on Syrian airfields. German bombers operating from the Dodecanese Islands had also been attacked and destroyed, and all at a remarkably small cost. It was a reminder, as if any were needed following the German victories, of the enormous benefits of plentiful air support for any ground operations.
Back on 6 June, General John Kennedy had produced a highly perspicacious appreciation, in which he called for far greater air forces to be diverted to the Middle East theatre. ‘When we operate our air cover is never sufficient,’ he noted, echoing the words of ABC. ‘The necessity for adequate air support has been rubbed in time and time again. Without such support neither the Navy nor the Army can operate with full effect.’ He also speculated that the next phase of the war would see great efforts on each side to produce the heaviest scale of bombardment on the other. Certainly, he was thinking in terms of the mass bombing of German cities. ‘The execution of this policy,’ he added, ‘demands the building up of a very large force of bomber aircraft, but the numbers required are all well within the capacity of British and American production.’
Bomber production was certainly on the increase, including new four-engine heavy bombers, of which Britain was currently producing two: the Short Stirling and the Handley Page Halifax. By the end of June, 179 had been built in Britain so far that year, along with 1,276 medium bombers and 4,049 fighters of all kinds; more and more Spitfires were being built, and the new, much-improved and cannon-firing Mk V was entering service too, but Hurricanes had still been built in large numbers early in the year.
Among the first squadrons to receive the new four-engine Halifax was 76 Squadron, newly formed in April at Linton-on-Ouse in Yorkshire, under the command of Wing Commander Sydney Bufton. The Halifax had some teething issues – they were grounded at Linton for a while because of frequent hydraulics failures, for example – but Bufton was delighted with them: the increase in size and payload was a big leap from the Whitleys they had been flying.
Bufton may have been pleased with his new bombers, but the Command as a whole was struggling. Bombing Germany had been an important part of Britain’s war strategy, and in his first signal to Marshal Stalin on 7 July 1941 Churchill promised the Soviet leader that Britain would help Russia by bombing German industry. Germany would thus be fighting on two fronts, even though Britain could not invade Nazi-occupied Europe on the ground. There was also a sense of increased urgency on the part of Churchill and Britain’s war leaders in their desire to start making Germany hurt. The Luftwaffe’s Blitz on Britain had only just ended, but there was no telling when it might start again. If Hitler won his quick victory, the Germans might return with all the fury of a mighty Luftwaffe reinvigorated and grown with the riches of the East.
The trouble was, Bomber Command was not really growing, much to the frustration of Churchill and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, who had been promoted to Chief of the Air Staff in October 1940. Britain’s bombers were supposed to be in the vanguard of its fight-back, and yet high losses combined with the slow build-up of bomber production and the arrival into service of new, bigger bombers had ensured it was hardly any larger in the summer of 1941 than it had been in the summer of 1940.
Even more serious, however, were the ongoing problems of successfully navigating at night, often in cloud, to the right target and the subsequent inaccuracy of bombing. In July, Churchill’s friend and chief scientific advisor, Professor Frederick Lindemann, asked Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, the C-in-C Bomber Command, whether he might undertake analysis of bombing accuracy using photographs taken during operations. This was agreed, so Lindemann charged one of his staff at the Statistical Section, David Bensusan-Butt, to analyse 650 photographs taken from one hundred bomber raids between 2 June and 25 July. That Bomber Command had conducted so many raids in less than two months demonstrated the effort and commitment that were going into bomber operations. The subsequent Butt Report, however, demonstrated that in terms of accuracy Bomber Command had a long, long way to go. The statistics were terrible: just one in five aircraft managed to get within five miles of the target. On cloudy nights that dropped to one in fifteen. ‘It is an awful thought,’ Churchill wrote to Portal, ‘that perhaps three-quarters of our bombs go astray.’
The revelations of the Butt Report were a severe jolt and a blow to both pride and British hopes. The answer was more bombers and bigger bombers capable of carrying much larger payloads, but the heavy-bomber programme had been set back by Beaverbrook’s entirely justifiable decision to limit the number of aircraft models the previous year. That restriction had long since been lifted but it took time to build up strength, not least because the bigger the piece of machinery, the more parts there were and the longer it took to make. As German defences increased, so bombing became harder and casualties, both to crews and to aircraft, steadily rose.
And the demands for ever-more numbers of aircraft never stopped, not least from the Middle East. Wavell – before he was fired – Admiral Cunningham and the new AOC Middle East, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, were all calling for more aircraft. Of the three, Tedder was the only one urging far closer tri-service co-operation, and these cries for aircraft reinforcements tended to reach London separately. It would have been better if, instead, they had got their heads together and made a joint plea, with a united and agreed strategy for their application as Tedder had suggested. Different pleas and different suggestions for the use of air power did not help. Wavell, for example, had sent recommendations to the War Office demanding the creation of an army air component. To those commanders on the ground, it seemed only right that the RAF should be at their beck and call, providing a constant air umbrella and being on hand to provide aerial artillery any time a suitable target appeared. This was unrealistic on a number of levels but was certainly a very ineffective and inefficient use of air power, and Tedder, quite rightly, severely criticized Wavell’s suggestions, as did the Air Ministry.
Tedder turned fifty-one in the second week of July, and was tall, lean and rarely without a straight-stemmed pipe sticking out of the corner of his mouth, which gave the impression that his entire face was somewhat skewed to whichever side of his mouth his pipe was jammed. A Scot by birth, he had originally planned to become a diplomat but with the start of the First World War joined the Dorset Regiment and after service in France returned to Dorset where he badly damaged his knee. This put an end to his career as an infantryman and instead he applied for and was granted a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. Gaining his wings, he returned to France and went on to command 70 Squadron over the Western Front before ending the war helping to develop bomb-dropping techniques in Egypt. After the war, he remained with the RAF and steadily climbed the ladder. A stint as AOC Far East was followed by a return to Britain to be Director-General of Research and Development, a role in which he was a dynamic and forward-thinking influence; it was on his watch that the Air Ministry approved the development of four-engine bombers and new fighter aircraft such as the Spitfire came into service. By the autumn of 1940, he was working with Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, although the two did not get on. He managed to escape by being posted to the Middle East to serve as Deputy AOC. When Longmore was recalled at the beginning of June, Tedder took over.
The RAF had not only done well in Syria but had also performed valiantly during BATTLEAXE, protecting the advance of the ground troops to the front and harrying the enemy on the ground. Tedder, however, was realistic about the inevitable recriminations. ‘One thing is clear,’ he noted in his journal about BATTLEAXE, ‘and that is the whole thing is a complete flop. The only bright spot is that our chaps have been simply grand and have done more than even the Army could have called for. There’ll certainly be a witch hunt for scapegoats after this and I know we were marked down as the prospective sacrifice – but I don’t think that will come off this time!’
And nor did it, as it was Wavell who was sacked. ‘Well, it’s probably a good thing to have a change of bowling,’ Wavell told Tedder. ‘And I have had one or two sixes knocked off me lately.’ Tedder had liked him well enough, but as far as he was concerned, in the future, the RAF and Army needed much closer co-operation and communication. Proper training, especially in signals communications, was what was needed for the Army, and more combined-operations training for his air forces. With Auchinleck newly installed as C-in-C, there was an opportunity to overhaul this increasingly important partnership. Most of all, however, there was a need for more aircraft. Reinforcements were arriving – not least a further 394 aircraft of all kinds, including 204 Hurricanes in June alone, which showed what could be done. Hurricanes were all very well, but they had been outclassed in 1940 and were even more so in 1941. Still, the June deliveries were an important step in the right direction. In the Middle East, at any rate, both Tedder and now Auchinleck understood that the RAF had a key role to play, both as a strategic bomber force and in providing tactical close air support to the troops on the ground. Land operations such as those in Greece and Crete, where air support had been virtually non-existent, would never happen again.
Jock Colville was staying at Chequers for the weekend when, on the morning of Sunday, 22 June, he was woken by a telephone call announcing that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. He hurriedly went around the bedrooms breaking the news, including to the PM, who greeted the revelation with a smile of satisfaction. Also staying was John Winant, the US Ambassador, who wondered whether it was a put-up job by Hitler and Stalin. As the day unfolded, it became clear that was not the case. Over dinner, the PM said that Russian peasants were now being slaughtered; Britain should forget about Communism and extend its hand to fellow human beings in distress. Later that night, as Churchill went to bed, he repeated how wonderful it was that Russia had come in against Germany. Within a few weeks, Britain and the Soviet Union would sign, on 12 July, a mutual-assistance pact; if only they had been able to do so two years earlier, how differently matters might have turned out.
In the United States, Harry Hopkins had heard the news late on the night of the 21st. His first reaction was one of elation, but then he immediately began worrying about the inevitable demands for Russian aid. Meanwhile, Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, decided to mull over this highly significant news and then consult with General Marshall and the War Plans Division. He was delighted to discover his and their views chimed perfectly. In a nutshell, they recognized that over the next few weeks and even months Germany would have its hands full in the Soviet Union and that gave the US the ideal opportunity to really start pushing aid across the Atlantic to Britain. ‘By this final demonstration of Nazi ambition and perfidy,’ he wrote to Roosevelt, ‘the door is wide open for you to lead directly towards the winning of the battle of the North Atlantic.’
While Roosevelt did not disagree, most in Washington seemed to think that Russia would be swept aside. Nevertheless, while the initial German advances certainly appeared to be impressive, Roosevelt was not convinced the Soviet Union would crumble and preferred to take a more measured approach; before rushing into anything, he wanted to know exactly what aid Russia needed and how that might be delivered. At any rate, by this second week of July, it seemed to Roosevelt that there was much else to consider too; there was, for example, also the imminent involvement of the US Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic, agreed at the ABC-1 talks but still to be put into practice. During a long discussion with Hopkins in the White House study on the evening of 11 July, he told his friend he wanted him to cross the Atlantic once again to visit the British. What’s more, Roosevelt had decided it was, at long last, time for him to meet Churchill face to face. In London, Hopkins was to fix up such a meeting, preferably on a ship some place.
The United States had still not declared war; nor was there any move towards creating a formal alliance with Britain. But a partnership was unquestionably being forged, and one that shared the same aim: the defeat of Nazi Germany.