GONE TO SEA
Given his family’s nautical background and his own experience as a merchant seaman, it was only logical that when war broke out, Robert Ruark would join the navy. After all, his favorite grandfather, Ned Adkins, had been a sea captain and his uncle Rob the master of a cargo boat on the Cape Fear River. As a boy he had spent much of his time aboard a Coast Guard cutter, occasionally chasing rumrunners when they were not fishing, and two of his boyhood heroes were Vasco da Gama and Blackbeard the Pirate. Where else to go but the navy?
The bombing of Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, sparked a flood of volunteers to all the services, and there were lineups outside recruiting stations. As a university graduate in his late twenties, Ruark was a natural for a commission, which he duly received and, as he later put it, “we all went shopping for sailor suits.” Considering his age, marital status, and occupation, Ruark could easily have obtained either a deferment, a war correspondent’s job, or, if he insisted on wearing a uniform in the service of his country, at least a comfortable billet in Washington doing public relations for the service of his choice or working in the censor’s office. Robert Ruark, the not-so-reluctant warrior, waived all of these options in favor of full and unpreferential sea duty. He was dispatched for training and then assigned to an obscure, patched-together branch of the U.S. Navy that delighted in the name “Armed Guard.” It consisted of regular navy types whose commanders wanted to get rid of them, unskilled new recruits who fitted nowhere else and whom no other branch wanted, and of officers such as Ruark, who had no marketable military skills beyond an eagerness for duty and a life that could be sacrificed if need be.
The purpose of the Armed Guard was simple: To man the cannons and antiaircraft and antisubmarine defenses on merchant ships that were carrying supplies and war materiel in the convoys across the North Atlantic, to Murmansk for Russia and to Great Britain, which was standing alone in defiance of the Third Reich, kept alive by a tenuous lifeline of fragile ships running a gauntlet of U-boats.
THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC
The Battle of the Atlantic began on September 3, 1939, the very day Britain declared war on Germany, and it continued almost without pause for the next four years. It was a battle fought mostly between the Royal Navy and the German Navy, with its surface fleet and U-boats. The prize was the tonnage of supplies coming from America that was keeping Britain alive against all odds. For the British it was a life-and-death struggle, and the events of those early years in the war at sea have passed into myth just as the Battle of Britain, with its first and second blitz, has become a symbol of the days when Britain stood alone against Hitler. It has been said that the war produced one winner (the United States), one loser (Germany), and one hero, Britain. If the Royal Air Force, gallant and outnumbered, and London’s civilian population were the heroes of the Battle of Britain, the Royal Navy in all its traditional magnificence was the undisputed hero in the Battle of the Atlantic. The aviation fuel that went into those Spitfires in the skies over London arrived in tankers from America protected from the U-boats by ships flying His Majesty’s battle ensign.
When war broke out in 1939, the Royal Navy vastly outnumbered the German fleet in all the traditional measurements of naval might. The British had eighteen capital ships (battleships and battle cruisers) to the Germans’ four, outnumbered them in aircraft carriers ten to one, in heavy cruisers fifteen to four, light cruisers sixty-two to six, and in destroyers 205 to twenty-five. While these look like overwhelming odds, several factors favored the Germans. For one thing, the Royal Navy was stretched thin. It had the task of protecting British outposts and shipping lanes throughout the entire world, from Hong Kong to Suez, including India and the entire Mediterranean, as well as the supply convoys from America in the north and south Atlantic. What’s more, many of the British ships were old, while almost all the German ships were new and modern. And, in one vital area, the German navy outnumbered the British: It had ninety-eight U-boats in September, 1939, and an industrial capacity that could turn out new ones like cookies in a bakery.
To properly understand the Battle of the Atlantic, a little background in naval terms and definitions is necessary. The battleship, that most evocative of terms, applies to the heaviest of sea-going gun platforms. Typically, a battleship weighed 30,000 tons and was armed with at least eight large guns of fourteen to sixteen inches in bore diameter; it was heavily armored to withstand punishment, and the hull was wide in the center to make it stable enough to take the recoil from its guns when they were fired, in unison, in a broadside. The weight of the armor and the shape of the hull made the battleship, by definition, relatively slow, but it was slow only in the sense that a heavyweight boxer is slow. A battle cruiser was a different animal: It was just as big as a battleship, and often bigger, but its hull was long and slim, and its armor light. It sacrificed protection for speed on the theory that it could outgun anything faster, and outrun anything more powerful. The most famous example of this was the H.M.S. Hood, the darling of the Royal Navy in the years between the wars. The Hood was big, fast, and beautiful. She weighed more than 41,000 tons, carried eight fifteen-inch guns (each of which weighed a hundred tons), and was capable of speeds of up to thirty-two knots. She was named after an illustrious English naval family that included two rear-admirals, the most recent of whom had died commanding battle cruisers in the Battle of Jutland and had gone down with the Invincible. In theory, at least, the Hood could fight it out with any ship in the German fleet — including its two largest battleships, the Bismarck and Tirpitz. The Hood had two sister ships, the Repulse and the Renown, both smaller, slower, and more lightly armed, but still formidable opponents for anything else afloat.
Under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, restrictions were placed on how many ships each nation could build, and on how heavy they could be. This led to a number of innovations in warship design intended to get around the intent of the agreement without violating the letter of the treaty itself. For example, the British had laid the keels for two new, ultra-large battleships that were to weigh in excess of 48,000 tons and be armed with three turrets of three sixteen-inch guns each. When the treaty made these ships illegal, the British shipyards merely cut them short, relocated the superstructure, rounded off the stern, and left three, three-gun turrets forward. The result was an odd-looking hybrid which, for lack of a better term, they called simply a “capital ship.” There were two of these, H.M.S. Nelson and H.M.S. Rodney, both named, like the Hood, for famous admirals of the past. Both ships were to play pivotal roles in the naval war — the Nelson in the Mediterranean and the Rodney in the North Atlantic.
Until the H.M.S. Dreadnought, which was launched in 1906 and revolutionized naval warfare, a battleship was armed with a variety of guns in different sizes for different purposes. The Dreadnought was the first to have a large number of big guns — in her case, ten twelve-inch guns. Her appearance rendered all older battleships obsolete and sparked the pre-1914 naval arms race. The reason was the increased power and range of her guns. By 1939, even twelve-inch guns had been superseded. Battleships were armed with fourteen, fifteen or sixteen-inch guns, and their power and range were awesome. For example a sixteen-inch gun (such as the Rodney carried) was vastly more powerful than an eight-inch gun. A sixteen-inch shell weighed 2,048 pounds, had a muzzle velocity of 2,600 feet per second, and a range of almost 40,000 yards — or more than twenty-three miles. An eight-inch gun, such as those carried by heavy cruisers, fired shells that weighed only 256 pounds and had a range of 30,000 yards. A battleship with heavy guns could make mincemeat of anything smaller long before it got within range, and even then the smaller gun’s projectiles could not penetrate the heavy armor of the battleships, which was sometimes eight inches thick. These were the logistical concerns that dominated any question of facing, fighting, and ultimately sinking, any large surface ship.
For their part, the Germans met the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty by developing the “pocket battleship.” These were small but very heavily armed. In reality, at 14,000 tons they were merely small battle cruisers, but with their six eleven-inch guns they were much more powerful than a typical heavy cruiser with eight-inch guns. They were capable of twenty-six knots and had a cruising range of 20,000 miles on full tanks. With the exception of the battle cruisers Hood, Renown, and Repulse, there was no ship in the Royal Navy that the pocket battleships could not either outrun or outgun. The most famous of the pocket battleships was the Graf Spee. After Bismarck and Graf Spee, the most notorious German heavy ships were the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau. Both were battle cruisers.
As soon as war broke out, the British imposed a naval blockade intended to keep the German surface fleet bottled up in the Baltic Sea. The image of a fast, powerful surface raider loose in the sea lanes of the Atlantic was the recurring nightmare of the Admiralty from 1939 through 1943. Those sea lanes were heavily traveled by convoys of tankers and merchant ships carrying aircraft, tanks, ammunition, fuel, and food supplies. Without that lifeline, Britain would be starved out of the war in short order, and the havoc that a surface raider could create was substantial. The need to prevent this became the dominant strategic consideration and, to a great degree, dictated British naval policy during those years.
The Germans, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to do exactly that — sink convoys — but they had no desire to put their big ships to sea to engage the Royal Navy in gun-to-gun combat. This was partly due to an innate inferiority complex dating back to the Battle of Jutland, in 1916, and partly due to the fact that they could not afford the losses. As well, the German admirals realized that, while they might defeat one British battleship, all they would gain would be a breathing space until the next one came along to throw down the gauntlet.
Instead, the Germans used their big ships predominantly as decoys — potential threats whose very existence kept the Royal Navy’s hands tied — and coupled this with periodic forays to keep the tension high while unleashing their U-boat fleet to attack the convoys. German naval strategy was summed up in two words: commerce destruction. Britain’s naval blockade could certainly hinder Germany’s war effort on land in Europe and later in Russia, but it was incapable of a knockout blow. Germany, on the other hand, could strangle the island nation if it could cut off the supply line from America.
These, then, were the strategic considerations on both sides that helped mold the tactical approaches they used to combat each other, move for move, in the chess game that ensued.
Ships sailing alone were obviously vulnerable to attack by U-boats lurking along the shipping lanes, and the convoy system was adopted early, immediately after a U-boat sank the Athenia, a passenger liner bound from Liverpool to Montreal with 1,400 passengers aboard. She was sunk without warning, 200 miles west of the Hebrides, and 112 people died. The action took place on September 3, the very day war was declared. For a convoy system to work, however, escort ships are needed — destroyers and destroyer escorts to provide a screen and anti-submarine defenses, with a few larger ships included to defend against powerful surface raiders like the Graf Spee, plus aircraft carriers for air cover and reconnaissance. Very quickly, the Royal Navy established convoy escort groups, families of ships and sailors and Royal Marines that lived, sailed, and as often as not, died together in the waves of the frigid North Atlantic.
The backbone of the escort group system was the destroyer, and Britain simply did not have enough of them. Winston Churchill ordered an accelerated construction program, but it could not turn out destroyers fast enough. By August, 1940, the U-boats had sunk two and a half million tons of shipping. The American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, braving criticism at home, decided that in spite of its neutrality, the United States had to help combat fascism. He sold Britain fifty old American destroyers under the “Lend-Lease” program, in return for the use of British naval bases in the western hemisphere. The process of drawing America into the war had begun. Meanwhile, the desperate engagement continued between the convoys on the sea and the U-boats beneath it.
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The early months of the war brought about some of the most famous engagements and naval battles. When war broke out, there were two German pocket battleships at sea, the Graf Spee and the Deutschland. The Graf Spee had a brief and spectacular career as a surface raider before she was sunk in the Battle of the River Plate, off South America, in December, 1939. After the Battle of Flanders, the German blitzkrieg against France, and the British evacuation from Dunkirk in May, 1940, the naval war took on even greater importance. The Royal Navy once again became the “wooden walls” behind which Britain sheltered, as it had since the days of the Spanish Armada. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe turned its attention on London and the other English cities in an attempt to pound Britain into submission without having to mount a sea-borne invasion.
The Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany was seriously hampering the flow of vital war supplies, especially steel from Sweden; to protect the supply lines down the coast, Hitler seized Norway and Denmark in the spring of 1940. Holding Norway gave Germany a springboard for aerial attacks against the blockading British ships, as well as bases from which to fly bombing missions against the British Isles.
Supply convoys from America faced a formidable array of threats between New York and Liverpool. The German submarine commander, Admiral Karl Doenitz, had countered British antisubmarine efforts with the concept of the “wolf pack,” as many as fifteen to twenty submarines operating in concert, spread across the sea lanes approaching Britain. A convoy could range far to the north and south in the mid-Atlantic, but eventually they had to come in close to the British Isles, and that was where the U-boats lay in wait. Reconnaissance subs would spot a convoy and then shadow it, giving its position and course by radio and allowing the U-boat command to assemble a wolf pack. At the same time, land-based bombers in France and Norway could attack any ships that made it past the U-boats, while still staying out of range of R.A.F. fighter planes themselves. When the British mobilized their own bombers to send out long-range patrols from Northern Ireland to attack U-boats and help protect the convoys, the U-boats simply moved farther out to sea, beyond the reach of even the high-flying, long-range bombers.
For a merchantman on the North Atlantic run, there was no shortage of dangers — from beneath the sea, from beyond the clouds, even from fearsome surface ships with guns so powerful they could open fire from almost beyond the horizon. Added to this was the prospect — a dead certainty in some months — of fierce winter gales and mountainous waves that were an enemy in themselves. Still, both the navy and the merchant seamen welcomed bad weather; it kept the submarines far below torpedo-launching depth, the long-range bombers at home, and the battleships hidden from view. It was a tough choice, all the same.
Throughout this period, the Admiralty was haunted by the prospect of a break-out into the North Atlantic of any of Germany’s big ships. In late October of 1940, the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer slipped through the blockade. In early November, she encountered a thirty-seven-ship convoy escorted only by the auxiliary cruiser Jervis Bay, armed with just four six-inch guns. After ordering the convoy to scatter, the Jervis Bay turned and deliberately took on the Admiral Scheer. It was a hopeless contest from the start, but the British ship bought enough time for thirty-two merchantmen to escape before she was sunk.
In January, 1941, the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau also made a short foray into the Atlantic under the command of Vice-Admiral Günther Lütjens and sank five unescorted merchantmen. For two months they searched for a major target — a convoy worthy of their big guns — but were not successful until the night of March 18, when they encountered a convoy just as it scattered from a submarine attack. In a two-day running battle, the pair of German raiders sank sixteen merchant ships, then made for safety at the French port of Brest as British battleships closed in. This established a pattern: break out, take targets of opportunity, then make for home and safety to refuel, resupply, and repair any damage. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was stretched to breaking point, always forced to react to German initiatives and never able to take the initiative itself.
In May, 1941, the greatest German ship of all, the huge battleship Bismarck, set sail from Gdynia on the Baltic Sea and made for Denmark, accompanied by the new heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, with the redoubtable Admiral Lütjens in command. On paper, the Bismarck was 35,000 tons, to conform with treaty requirements; in reality, she weighed 42,000 tons and was armed with eight fifteen-inch guns. The Prinz Eugen displaced 15,000 tons and was armed with eight-inch guns. They were a formidable pair.
R.A.F. reconnaissance planes spotted them off Bergenfjord, and the Royal Navy mobilized every ship and aircraft it could muster, from Gibraltar to Scapa Flow, to try to stop them. Admiral Lütjens, fox that he was, was in no hurry. He bided his time off Bergenfjord; when a heavy fog closed in, the grey colossus and her escort quietly weighed anchor and slipped out, making for the Denmark Strait. The Admiralty’s nightmare had become a reality — and there were, at that moment, eleven supply convoys scattered across the Atlantic, sitting ducks for the Bismarck if she could get out into the sea lanes. There were four possible routes into the Atlantic, the Denmark Strait being one. As the Bismarck entered the strait, she was spotted by two British cruisers, H.M.S. Norfolk and H.M.S. Suffolk, which radioed the news, and her position, to the Admiralty; then the two cruisers lay back out of range, shadowing the raiders and waiting for reinforcements. Fortunately, the Hood, the one British ship capable of handling the Bismarck on her own, was close by.
Accompanied by the new battleship Prince of Wales (so new that she was ordered to sea with some shipyard workmen still aboard, and without proper training for her crew), the Hood steamed north on an intercepting course. On the morning of May 24, 1941, they came within range and opened fire on the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen at a range of 25,000 yards. Within minutes of the first shot being fired, it was all over: a fifteen-inch shell from the Bismarck plunged through the Hood’s light deck armor, penetrated her main magazine, and blew the pride of the Royal Navy to bits. Broken in half, the Hood sank in a matter of seconds, taking all but three of her 1,500-man crew to the bottom. Bismarck then turned on the Prince of Wales and damaged her so badly she was forced to withdraw. The German ships continued westward into the Atlantic, with the Suffolk and Norfolk shadowing them like a pair of determined but helpless sheep dogs.
The loss of the Hood was the greatest single blow the Royal Navy endured in the entire war, partly because she was so famous and was considered invincible. Yet this very myth of invincibility contributed to her death. It had been recognized that she had a few design weaknesses, most notably insufficient deck armor to withstand plunging fire. She was scheduled for a refit, but it was postponed when war became imminent and refitting older, less battle-worthy ships was given priority. The chances of a large enough shell hitting her at exactly the right angle was considered a relatively small risk.
What followed was a running battle in fog and bad weather, with the Bismarck attempting to slip away from her followers and the British attempting to bring large ships within range. The Prinz Eugen was detached and headed for Brest, while the Bismarck shook off the two British cruisers. She was not lost for long, however: Almost immediately she was spotted by a land-based patrol plane. On May 27, planes attacking from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal inflicted some damage, slowing her down, and a flotilla of destroyers managed to seriously damage her further with torpedoes. One of them struck the Bismarck’s steering mechanism, jamming her rudder and forcing her to sail in a wide arc far to the west and north, away from Brest and safety. The Rodney and King George V then closed in and engaged the great German battleship on the morning of May 28. Finally, on fire and with all her guns out of action, the Bismarck was sunk by torpedoes from the cruiser Dorsetshire. Of her crew of almost 2,500 men, only 110 survived. Admiral Lütjens was among those who accompanied the great ship to the bottom.
The loss of the Bismarck was as great a shock to the Germans as the sinking of the Hood was to the British, the difference being that the Germans became doubly reluctant to take risks with their ships thereafter, whereas the professional sailors of the Royal Navy simply went about their appointed task of patrolling the world’s oceans with renewed confidence.
Less than four weeks after the sinking of the Bismarck, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and changed the whole complexion of the war. Most especially, for the British (and their uneasily peaceful and unofficial allies, the Americans), it transformed the war in the Atlantic.
THE NORTH ATLANTIC CONVOYS
The war on the eastern front removed any threat of a German invasion of Britain and began to drain away German manpower and air power as the three German army groups drove deep into the Soviet Union. In the opening days of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army was pounded mercilessly, losing tens of thousands killed and wounded, and hundreds of thousands captured. Barbarossa involved almost three million men, along a 2,000-mile front, and was undoubtedly the greatest invasion that has ever been, or ever will be, mounted. By comparison, the Normandy Invasion three years later was a lighthearted raid. The Red Army, outgunned and outmaneuvered, fell back toward Moscow and came within a hair’s breadth of losing the war in the first few months.
While conventional wisdom today says there was never any real doubt, that no invasion of Russia could possibly succeed because of its vast size and the inevitability of a winter campaign, the fact is that Stalin could have — and really should have — lost the war. He was saved by a fortuitous combination of circumstances, including interference by Hitler at critical moments. The German war machine ground to a halt, finally, almost in the suburbs of Leningrad in the north and Moscow in the center, and Stalin was given breathing space to recruit new armies in the east and rearm his surviving divisions. The key to keeping the Soviet Union alive and fighting — which was, at that point, the key to any hope of an eventual allied victory — was to keep Stalin supplied with war materiel. Most especially, the Russians needed aircraft, aviation fuel, and every type of military equipment from tanks to small-arms ammunition. Supplying Russia became as important as supplying Britain itself. The problem was, how to do it?
Shipping goods through Siberia from the far east was one possibility, and in fact about half of all the materiel shipped to the USSR during the war went across the Pacific, then by train from Vladivostok. This was possible as long as the Soviet Union was not at war with Japan. From the other direction, across the Atlantic, convoys could go through the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean was itself a battleground involving the British in North Africa, the Italians with their substantial navy and air force, and German involvement from France to Crete. Supplying Malta, Britain’s hard-pressed outpost in the Mediterranean, was hazardous enough; getting supplies through to Russia would be impossible, even if the German forces invading Russia were not threatening the Crimea on the south flank, which they were. The only other answer was the sea route to the north, high above the Arctic Circle and around the North Cape to the Russian port city of Murmansk and, in the summer months, Archangel. It was a relatively short route, it was direct, and it provided Winston Churchill with the symbolic gesture of helping the Russians that he desperately needed.
Although at this time the United States was still officially neutral, it was moving steadily toward war with Germany. The invasion of Russia made American entry into the war all but inevitable, and while the official declaration did not come until after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy was actively involved from April, 1941, onward. First, President Roosevelt put Greenland (a Danish possession) under American protection. He then landed American troops in Iceland, freeing the British garrison there to return to combat duty elsewhere. In August, after a meeting in which Roosevelt and Churchill pledged to preserve world freedom after the war, Roosevelt announced that henceforth American warships would escort all convoys west of Iceland. The United States became an informal belligerent in the war, and some of the pressure was taken off the Royal Navy. Germany responded by attacking the American escorts, and the first serious casualty was the destroyer U.S.S. Reuben James, sunk while on convoy duty on October 31, 1941.
By June of that year, German submarines had sunk almost six million tons of British shipping, and British shipyards were able to replace only 800,000 tons. The entry of the U.S. Navy, albeit unofficially, did allow the Royal Navy to move some of its fighting units farther into the eastern Atlantic to help combat the U-boats. But the decision to supply the Soviet Union by convoys to Murmansk and Archangel high above the Arctic Circle put renewed pressure on both the British and the Americans. As if it were not difficult enough to protect convoys between Halifax and the British Isles, now they had to protect merchant ships in the even more dangerous North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, where they were threatened not only by submarines, but by land-based aircraft from Norway and German surface raiders such as the Tirpitz, sister ship to the Bismarck, which had been based since 1942 in Norway’s Alta Fjord.
With the entry of America into the war in December, 1941, Germany concentrated its naval efforts on blocking the sea lanes by which the convoys could supply both Britain and Russia. Sixty-four U-boats were scattered across the Atlantic and posted off the American coast from New York down to the Gulf of Mexico. While the American shipyards laid on extra shifts to increase production, tankers loaded up in the Gulf and made their way up the coast to join the convoys that were assembled in New York. As they sailed north, nervously searching the sea for periscopes, they were joined by other tankers and freighters. A favorite tactic of the U-boats was to torpedo ships as they were silhouetted at night against the glow of the bright lights of America’s coastal cities and resort towns.
When it came to waging war, America was downright nonchalant. In his History of the Second World War, B.H. Liddell Hart reported:
The Americans were slow to take other precautions (in addition to adopting convoy tactics). Lighted channel markers and the unrestricted use of ship’s radio gave the U-boats all the help they wanted. Coastal resorts, such as Miami, continued to illuminate their sea-fronts at night with miles of neon-lighted beaches — against which the shipping was clearly silhouetted. The U-boats lay submerged offshore during the day, and moved in to attack, with guns or torpedoes, on the surface at night time.
The entry of America into the war removed many of the restrictions on Germany’s freedom of operation. They moved as many U-boats as they could into the westernmost reaches of the Atlantic, to prey on shipping along the American east coast, and although only a small number could be diverted to this duty, they achieved results out of all proportion to their numbers. There were never more than a dozen German U-boats operating there, but during the first four months of 1942, they sank eighty merchant ships along the American coast — half a million tons of shipping, of which more than half were tankers. That four-month period of the war became known, among the sailors of the German U-boat fleet, as “The Happy Times” — a time of good and carefree hunting along an almost undefended coast. For the merchant ships, the run up the coast, however harrowing as it must have been at the time, was but a hint of the terror and hardship that was to come.
Through the summer of 1942, more and more submarines put to sea, and more and more tons of shipping were lost. In June alone, the U-boats sent 700,000 tons to the bottom, bringing the total for the year to more than three million. Altogether, the Allies lost more than four million tons from all causes, and ninety per cent of the losses were in the North Atlantic and the Arctic.
Just as the war in Russia claimed most of Germany’s military attention on land, halting the convoys to Murmansk that supplied the Russians became a priority for the German navy. Major surface ships were concentrated along the Norwegian coast, including the Tirpitz, the Scharnhorst the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, and the heavy cruiser Hipper. The major ship-sinking duties were left to the screen of submarines and land-based bombers that could fly from Norwegian bases, but the constant threat of a sortie by the big ships forced the Royal Navy to keep comparable forces nearby, and a heavy squadron that included both battleships and an aircraft carrier was posted permanently near Bear Island, 400 miles above the Arctic Circle. Supplying Murmansk became a game of cat and mouse, in which some of the convoys were used by the Admiralty as bait in an attempt to lure the Tirpitz, especially, out of her safe harbor to, they hoped and prayed, her doom. That exact scenario never came to pass, but the mere presence of the Tirpitz at Alta Fjord dominated British naval strategy in the North Atlantic for more than two years.
The Murmansk convoys typically assembled in New York or Halifax and moved northeast to Iceland, protected by a screen of American and Canadian destroyers, destroyer escorts, corvettes, and similar small anti-submarine warships. Off Iceland, they would be taken over by one of the escort groups of the Royal Navy, which would shepherd them the remaining hazardous 1,500 miles north into the Arctic. An escort group typically consisted of a cruiser or two, a half-dozen destroyer escorts and frigates, and (if they were lucky) a few escort carriers. The escort carrier was developed in 1940 to counter the threat of both submarines and bombers by providing fighter air cover. An escort carrier was a converted merchant ship with a fitted flight deck that would carry a half-dozen aircraft. The carriers were small, vulnerable, usually slow, and hazardous in the extreme for the pilots flying off their makeshift flight decks, but they played an invaluable role in protecting convoys through the worst years, 1942 and 1943, when the U-boat menace was at its height.
The convoy system was an evolving military technique, first developed during the First World War to counter threats from early U-boats and surface raiders. From 1939 onward, it was developed and refined both to counter new German techniques and to make use of technological innovations such as Asdic and radar. A convoy could be as many as a hundred merchant ships and cover hundreds of square miles of ocean. There were slow convoys (those that traveled at less than eleven knots) and fast convoys (eleven knots and up). Each convoy had a close escort, whose job was to provide both anti-aircraft fire and a screen against U-boats. A covering, or shadow, force was there to pursue and destroy any U-boats that were found, while the convoy and its close escort continued on. Air power was found to be a particularly effective anti-submarine tool, and land-based aircraft from North America and the British Isles helped cover the convoys across the Atlantic; there was one stretch of ocean that was out of range of either side, however, which became know as “The Gap.” Needless to say, the Gap was a favorite hunting ground of the German wolf packs.
In 1955, Alistair Maclean wrote a novel of the Murmansk convoys called H.M.S. Ulysses. It is one of the great sea stories of all time. It tells of the voyage of one fictional convoy, FR77, and her escorts led by the Ulysses, a modern, fast, light cruiser. FR77’s role in life was to be the irresistibly tempting bait that would draw out the Tirpitz. That the scheme fails, and the convoy is destroyed, and the Ulysses herself is sunk by the Hipper, does not take away from the novel itself, which is perhaps the finest account ever written of the naval war in the high Arctic.
First of all, there were the normal hazards of convoy duty: Long hours at action stations, and days upon days without sleep or proper nourishment (because the cook was also at action stations). But the Arctic convoys added new dangers: cold, frostbite, and exhaustion; nerve-stretching tension and the certain knowledge that if your ship was sunk, your chances of survival in the freezing water were measured in minutes; and the other ships were under orders not to try to pick up survivors since a stationary ship was a sitting duck for a submarine.
Winter in the Arctic brought freezing gales and mountainous waves that could kill a ship as effectively as any torpedo. There were stories of gunners found dead and frozen solid, still at their action stations; stories of ice building up on the superstructure of a ship, making her top-heavy enough to capsize (the escort carriers, with their flat flight decks, were especially vulnerable to this); and there was even one instance of a freak wave so high that an escort carrier climbed up one side, plunged down the other, and bent her flight deck into an “L.” In another case, a destroyer climbed a similar wave, teetered, plunged down the other side, ruptured her plates and just kept on going, straight to the bottom. Keeping the decks, rigging, and guns free of ice was a never-ending struggle — and on top of all this there was the constant threat of submarines below, and bombers above, and the vision of the Scharnhorst looming out of the fog.
In summer, the Arctic convoys faced a different and, in some ways, far worse situation. They were at their most vulnerable when they rounded the North Cape, and in the months of June and July, there was good weather and almost constant daylight. With excellent visibility and no blanket of darkness, the convoys were easy to spot and could be attacked twenty-four hours a day.
The most famous of all the Murmansk convoys was PQ17, which consisted of thirty-six merchantmen and tankers escorted by a dozen destroyers and smaller craft. The covering force consisted of several cruisers and a destroyer squadron, shadowing the convoy at a distance. To the north, lying in wait, was an Anglo-American battle group of two battleships, one aircraft carrier, three cruisers, and a flotilla of destroyers. PQ17 put to sea in June, 1942; on July 4, off Norway, the convoy was heavily attacked by submarines and aircraft. That same day, the escorts received a signal from the Admiralty that the Tirpitz had put to sea. They were ordered to withdraw, which they did at high speed, leaving the ships of PQ17 to scatter and make their way to Russia as best they could.
As it turned out, the Tirpitz never came, but the submarines and aircraft flocked to the scene like vultures. Slow and unprotected, the dispersed ships were easy pickings: Twenty-three ships out of thirty-six were sunk, taking to the bottom 430 tanks, 210 aircraft, 3,350 other vehicles, and almost 100,000 tons of supplies. PQ17 was the lowest ebb of the Arctic convoys — and the lowest ebb of the Royal Navy’s reputation, although in retrospect it is hard to place blame on anyone. The next convoy did not sail until September; PQ18 had forty ships and a much stronger escort, and twenty-seven of them made it to Archangel A few smaller convoys were sent the following winter, but after March, 1943, the Admiralty was unwilling to risk further losses in the lengthening Arctic days. The situation in the Atlantic was critical at that point anyway, and some convoys intended for Murmansk were diverted to Great Britain.
The spring of 1943 was the most critical phase of the war in the Atlantic and resulted in a decisive defeat for the U-boats. When the Arctic convoys were resumed late that year, they were bigger and much better armed, and the U-boats and the Luftwaffe were weaker. The final tally for the Murmansk run was forty convoys from 1941 onward; out of 811 ships that sailed, 720 got through, delivering almost four million tons of supplies to the Russians. This included 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft. On the debit side, the Royal Navy lost eighteen warships. When the Mediterranean was finally opened to convoys, the Murmansk run was suspended and supplies to Russia went through the Black Sea and then overland from there.
The last act of the Arctic drama took place in December, 1943. The Scharnhorst left Alta Fjord with five destroyers to attack an Allied convoy 400 miles northwest of Trondheim. Instead of the easy victims they expected, however, they encountered two British task forces that included the battleship Duke of York, sister ship to the Prince of Wales and King George V, which had fought the Bismarck. The Battle of the North Cape, as it is known, was one of the most thrilling naval engagements of the war, taking place as it did high above the Arctic circle in continuous darkness, with the sky illuminated by star shells as the two great ships exchanged fire during the long chase. In the end, the Scharnhorst went to the bottom fighting and took all but thirty-six of her 1,900-man complement with her.
The fate of the Tirpitz, on the other hand, was anticlimax. To the British, she was too powerful for any one ship to fight alone; to the Germans, she was too important to risk losing, and after the sinking of the Bismarck, the German Navy’s inferiority complex was redoubled. As a result, the Tirpitz never participated in a major naval battle; she was damaged by torpedoes from a midget submarine at her berth in Alta Fjord, then by bombs from carrier-borne aircraft, and was moved south to Tromso in late 1944 for repairs. There she was within reach of the British Isles and was finally sunk by Lancaster bombers flying from airfields in Scotland.
LIEUTENANT RUARK, R.C. JR., USN
On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, Robert Ruark was a sports reporter for the Washington Daily News covering a Washington Redskins football game at Griffith Stadium. When word of the Japanese air attack was flashed to the press box, the reporters immediately lost any interest in the game, but Ruark did not immediately rush out to enlist. History records that the Redskins won the game, but the news stories that were filed that day dwelt more on the reaction of the crowd than on the play on the field. With a reporter’s impatience at being where the news is not, Ruark wrapped up his story and left Griffith Stadium for the White House, where he hung around looking for angles and stories the beat man was too busy to go after. A couple of weeks later, he was transferred off the sports desk and through the early months of the war wrote features on topics such as the effects of blackouts. From there he left the News altogether to work directly as a syndicated feature writer for the NEA Service, a Scripps-Howard subsidiary.
Nineteen forty-one became 1942, and winter turned to spring before Ruark’s commission papers in the Navy came through. He was posted to Dartmouth for eight weeks’ training. By his own account, Ruark possessed no mechanical aptitude whatsoever; he could, he said, barely change a typewriter ribbon, and he was “frightened out of his skin” at the prospect of indoctrination school and the complex subjects naval officers are expected to master. Mechanical aptitude he may not have had, but Ruark was a natural student and a quick study. He “memorized his way through navigation and gunnery and seamanship,” as he put it, and graduated with no difficulty. Early in the process, officers were assigned their future duties, then sent for specialized training. Ensign Robert C. Ruark Jr. volunteered for duty in the Armed Guard, a branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve that filled an unglamorous but decidedly hazardous duty: manning the guns on armed merchantmen on the Atlantic and Murmansk convoys. Dangerous and essential it may have been, but it was a job that was unlikely to make the cover of Life.
“‘Fish food’ was what they called the Armed Guard in the early days of the war, when the Luftwaffe owned the skies and the Nazi submarine wolfpacks were bold enough to hang around American river mouths to blast Allied shipping before the ships actually put out to sea,” Ruark wrote in The Honey Badger, describing its hero, Alec Barr, and his wartime naval career. Barr’s fictional experiences roughly paralleled Ruark’s own and are the closest he ever came to writing a novel about the war. One difference is that Barr makes it to Murmansk on one run, whereas Ruark never did. But in other ways his description of Barr’s war at sea is, in reality, his own.
Although technically a naval officer and no longer a reporter, during his months of training Ruark managed to get permission to write about the service in several magazine articles. Since all branches of the military were hungry for publicity, partly for recruiting purposes and partly for the greater glory of their commanders, and since Ruark was known even at that stage of his career, he had no difficulty with censors or reluctant superiors. Given what he wrote, it is unlikely the censors would have done anything except tone it down, out of deference to truth in advertising. To read any of Ruark’s half-dozen published pieces, the Navy, and the Armed Guard in particular, was a great way to see the world free of charge.
Ensign Ruark’s training took him down the Mississippi, and at one point ensconced him in a whorehouse in Gulfport — temporarily requisitioned as an officers’ quarters — where, he said, “the whores babysat for the officers’ wives, lent them money when the eagle forgot to scream, and never, ever, made a pass at the boys in blue.” His training ended at the United States naval station in New Orleans, from where, in the early months of 1943, Ruark was posted as officer commanding the Armed Guard on the S.S. Eli Whitney, a 7,100-ton freighter with a top speed of eleven knots. The ship made her way up the East Coast, loading cargo at Charleston and other points in the Carolinas and Virginia before joining her convoy off Delaware. Ruark, busy training his green crew, practiced gunnery with a five-inch naval gun using the masts of sunken ships along the coast as targets. He credited his skill with a shotgun, honed since childhood, with giving him at least the rudimentary theories of lead required to hit a moving target, a concept that was lost on his unsophisticated crew of “Iowa farmboys, street fighters from Brooklyn, and bully boys from New Jersey.”
On board the Eli Whitney, Ensign Ruark coped with one problem after another. One was an episode involving a rating from New Jersey named Zabinski, a slouching, thick-headed, sullen insubordinate. Ruark wrote about the situation twice, most eloquently in The Honey Badger. There, Zabinski was Alec Barr’s cross. If anyone was drunk on duty, smoking in the powder magazine, or overdue from leave, it was Zabinski. Barr tries reason, he tries punishment, he tries confining him to the ship, but nothing works. Finally, with his men losing respect and discipline going to hell, Barr tries a desperate move. He challenges Zabinski to a boxing match “for recreation,” and they stage the contest on number-three hatch with the rest of the Armed Guard and the merchant crew as an audience. With a sinking heart, Barr (who, as a former sports reporter, knew a thing or two about boxing) watches Zabinski shuffle and weave and throw shadow punches, and realizes he is “in an unroped ring with a semiprofessional.” Zabinski, it turns out, had been runner-up middleweight in the New Jersey Golden Gloves. Although he could have dispatched Barr at any time, he toys with his commanding officer, landing punches at will and opening cuts. Occasionally, to show his contempt for Barr’s punching power, he allows him to land a blow, which he laughs off. Barr calls time out to repair some cuts, goes to the safe in his cabin (he is also paymaster for the freighters naval contingent) and inserts a heavy roll of coins into his right fist, then ties his glove back on and returns to the boxing match. The next time Zabinski contemptuously gives him an opening, he swings a punch from the ground up and breaks Zabinski’s jaw with a crack that could be heard “from Norfolk, Virginia to Archangel, Russia.” The episode ends all disciplinary problems with his gun crew, and the men “chipped seconds from the time it took to get the guns manned when the horn blew General Quarters.” The Zabinski affair from The Honey Badger exactly parallels Ruark’s account of his actual problems with the actual Zabinski, taken from newspaper articles he wrote after the war.
Gradually, Ensign Ruark learned his job and his gun crew learned theirs. The Eli Whitney took on a cargo of ammunition, and on March 25, 1943, Ruark, the Whitney, and the rest of the convoy weighed anchor in New York and sailed out into the wintry Atlantic, bound for England.
MARCH, 1943
By 1943, convoy planning had evolved into an art. There were troop convoys, individual ships carrying troops, and the supply convoys carrying food, fuel, and equipment. The individual troop ships were the fastest passenger liners available, able to outrun the U-boats easily. Next came troop convoys, which were assigned extra antisubmarine escorts. This left the supply convoys on the short end in terms of protection. A typical convoy of forty-five ships had a perimeter of more than thirty miles to protect. An escort ship equipped with Asdic, the forerunner of radar that was used to detect submarines, could sweep an arc of one mile. Simple arithmetic indicates such a convoy would need an absolute minimum of fifteen escorts, yet in 1941 convoys left with an average of only five. Obviously, large gaps were left through which U-boats could penetrate the defences, and many a U-boat surfaced in the middle of a convoy to open fire with its deck gun, causing havoc as ships scattered, fired upon each other by mistake, or collided. As well, a supply convoy was only as fast as its slowest ship, and a shortage of merchant tonnage forced the Allies to use any ship they could find, regardless of speed. Although the specially built Liberty ships were fast, averaging eleven knots, many pre-war freighters and tankers were not. Creeping across the Atlantic at a speed of seven or eight knots, and stripped of escorts, the supply convoys were a juicy target. Finding the troop convoys too heavily protected, the U-boats concentrated their attention on the freighters and tankers, and the toll was frightening.
The first months of 1943 were a critical stage in the Battle of the Atlantic. Britain and Germany had now been at war for three and a half years, and in many ways the situation in the Atlantic resembled a heavyweight boxing match in the late rounds, when the two sluggers are evenly matched but nearing exhaustion, desperate but determined, knowing that sooner or later one will go down. Although Germany’s U-boat fleet was still formidable, and, in fact, had more boats at sea on any given day than in 1939, many U-boats had been sunk and taken their experienced crews with them. Since there was insufficient time for training, many of the U-boat crews were relatively raw.
The terrible strain of the war was also showing on the British and their allies. Morale had become a serious problem on the merchant ships, and such was the carnage that some officers in the Admiralty were questioning whether the convoy system should even be continued. Unfortunately, there was simply no alternative. And so the merchantmen kept putting to sea, in spite of the fact that, at times, their crews were bordering on mutinous. The month of March, 1943, was the worst of all. In fact, the first twenty days are singled out in Admiralty records: “The Germans never came so near to disrupting communications between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of March, 1943.”
In January, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had been replaced as German naval commander by the U-boat specialist, Karl Doenitz. The wolfpack campaign, already in high gear, was given even greater priority. Through this period, there was an average of 116 operating U-boats on any given day, spread out along the East Coast of America from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland, right across the Atlantic, and up into the frigid waters off Norway. They crisscrossed the shipping lanes, taking their toll of every convoy in what amounted to one continuous battle. In January, the U-boats sank 200,000 tons of shipping, and in February, they doubled that. During the first twenty days of March, it reached a peak of 108 ships totaling 627,000 tons. Mid-month, two homeward-bound convoys that happened to be close together were attacked by thirty-eight U-boats, and twenty-one ships were lost. By the end of March that year, the United Kingdom was down to a “hand-to-mouth” three-month supply of food and fuel. To make matters worse, the winter of 1942-43 brought with it the worst winter storms in living memory. Gales lashed the seas into rolling mountains of liquid ice, while windblown spray coated decks and rigging and froze guns solid.
This was the overall situation on March 12, when three convoys assembled and prepared to make the passage east from America. They were SC 122, HX 229, and HX 229A — approximately 125 ships in all, plus their escort groups. Their voyage across the Atlantic in March, 1943, was such an epic that two books were devoted entirely to their crossing — Convoy: The Battle for Convoys SC 122 and HX 229, by British historian Martin Middlebrook, and The Critical Convoy Battles of March 1943, by Jürgen Rohwer. Historian John Terraine, in his work Business in Great Waters, The U-boat Wars 1916-1945, describes the departure of the three convoys as part of a relentless cycle which, by that time, had been continuing for three and a half long years:
The cycle was inexorable; no sooner had a convoy passed, some on their way into history but the majority unnoticed, than another followed. After SC 121 came SC 122; after HX 228, HX 229; and with 100 U-boats at sea, these east-bound ships, laden with war-material and essential supplies, could depend on a reception committee. SC 122 and HX 229 were destined to provide the whole Atlantic battle with what has gone down as its ultimate climax, and is commonly regarded as a high peak of U-boat warfare never before or afterwards matched.
Convoy SC 122 left New York on March 5 and immediately ran into a violent storm that scattered the ships, damaging several so severely they were forced to return to port. Sailors are great ones for omens, and the British ore freighter Clarissa Radcliffe provided it. She was one of eleven ships missing after the storm, but was sighted two days later by a Canadian corvette searching for stragglers and given a course to catch up to the convoy. The corvette continued on its way, and neither the Clarissa Radcliffe nor any of her fifty-five crew members was ever seen again. To this day, her fate remains a mystery.
Convoy SC 122 left St. John’s on March 12, followed two days later by HX 229, and HX 229A the day after that, each traveling at its own speed and on its own course. Almost immediately the two lead convoys were caught in a terrible storm blowing from the west. The winds were Force 9-10 (gale and strong storm), and the seas were described as “very high and precipitous.” “The great seas were pounding up astern of the ships with the effect of ‘pooping’,” wrote Terraine, “which is something that sailors prefer not to experience: waves breaking on the ship’s stern with tons of water tearing along the decks.” Such was the force of the storm that several ships, both merchantmen and escorts, were damaged and forced to return to port. To add to their problems, the ice floes were farther south that year than usual, and as the convoys moved north toward Iceland they encountered icebergs and banks of fog.
As bad as the storm of March 15 was, it was preferable to what happened next. The German U-boat command, anticipating the convoys’ crossing, had assembled two wolf packs, the Stürmer group and the Dranger group. On March 16, the main action began when thirty-eight U-boats “threw themselves like wolves,” as Admiral Doenitz quaintly put it, upon the convoys. That night, HX 229 lost five ships to torpedoes; the next day, SC 122 also lost five, and HX 229 another two. By the 18th, the two convoys had lost a total of eighteen ships, and another full gale was blowing from the north-northwest. There was no end to the misery.
Morale aboard the merchantmen was quickly becoming a major factor in the North Atlantic convoys. The relentless combination of storms, high seas, and attacking U-boats was having a devastating effect. As well, there was the problem of picking up survivors. Some convoys had rescue ships, but these were a mixed blessing: A rescue ship, by definition, would become a sitting duck every time it hove-to to pick up survivors, and the casualty rate among such ships was high. By 1943 the custom had evolved that the last ship in line had the responsibility of trying to pick up survivors, but this order was impossible to enforce and, as often as not, was ignored by the merchant captains, who made the difficult decision that the safety of their own ship and crew was more important than a handful of men in the icy Atlantic. John Terraine described the problem:
The only ones left for rescue work were the escorts. An escort hove-to, perhaps with boats out, or hauling in drowning men and pitching rafts, probably silhouetted against the glare of a raging tanker fire, was an escort both extremely vulnerable herself and also lost to the convoy’s protective screen until the work was done (which might be a matter of hours).
HX 229 had no rescue ship, but its escort group, B4, was known for its tenacity in hunting subs and also for its diligence in trying to rescue survivors. The ships of B4 were even more willing than usual to put themselves at risk in this way, not out of compassion for the drowning men, but because, as an officer later told it, “Our conclusion was that rescue was very important at a time when the worst disaster in the Atlantic battle would be a failure of morale in the merchant ships. In the absence of a rescue ship and with the failure of the last ships in the column to stop and pick up survivors, the Escort Group Commander had an almost impossible decision to make.” (Middlebrook).
Exactly how close they were to such a failure of morale is illustrated by the actions of one merchant captain in HX 229 and his ship, the Mathew Luckenbach. She was a light, fast freighter, capable of doing fifteen knots. During a lull in the action, the captain called a meeting of the crew. He told them the ship was better off on its own, steaming at full speed, than limping along in a nine-knot convoy whose escorts were ineffective. After a show of hands, the ship slipped out of the convoy under cover of darkness. The escort commander tried to persuade him to change his mind, but he was determined to proceed on his own. By the next morning, the Mathew Luckenbach was forty miles ahead of HX 229 — and right in the middle of the wolf pack that had been attacking SC 122. She was torpedoed and sunk, becoming, ironically, the last casualty of convoy HX 229.
In March, 1943, eighty-two ships were lost in the North Atlantic, bringing the total of ships lost in the forty-three months of war to 4,486. Of these, 2,385 were sunk by submarines. The SC 122/HX 229 convoy battle cost the lives of 292 officers and men. Both figures were, to quote John Terraine, “appalling.” That was the situation on March 25, when convoys HX 230 and SC 123 left New York. They included the Eli Whitney, with Ensign Robert Ruark, riding shotgun.
Ruark described life aboard the convoys:
Flares lit the night into ghoulish noon. Depth charges thumped shockingly against the fragile bottoms of the eight-knot merchantmen that plowed through dense fog, scraping bows against sterns and butting into one another like milling cattle. It was cold beyond belief; the machine guns and Oerlikons were thawed with blowtorches. Beards clotted into icicles — everyone was bearded, because the touch of steel on skin stripped patches in its path.
No night or day passed that failed to record the massive display of exploding ammunition ships or the flaming, greasy-smoking destruction of tankers. Slightly hit ships and vessels two-blocking the blackball for engine trouble drifted back and out of convoy and were left sorrowfully to be picked off at leisure by the submarines. There was no attempt to rescue the survivors of stricken ships. In that ice-floed water, life expectancy was something under five minutes.
Life was an endless succession of rolling waves and action stations, of blowing snow and drifting icebergs. At one point Ruark went seven days and seven nights without sleeping, catching five-minute catnaps in the wheelhouse as the sky was lit with flares, the terror punctuated by the explosion as a sister ship went up. “I had not washed for days. I had not slept for days. The convoy was under semi-constant attack by submarines,” he wrote. “I stank — chiefly from fear. The smell of fear was separate from the smell of dirty body. The fear smelled worse.” On that day, he and his crew had been at General Quarters for several hours without any action, and he decided to grab a fast shower. Stripping off his Arctic parka and long underwear, he lurched into the shower cubicle; the hot water rolled over him and lulled him into a great sense of peace and tranquillity, and he stood there in the steam for many minutes. “And then there was a crash and a boom and a hoarse screaming of the ship’s general alarm.”
Ensign Ruark jumped out of the shower, grabbed his pistol and helmet, and scrambled up to his gun station on the flying bridge. A ship, hit by a torpedo, was losing station and drifting slowly astern, smoke pouring out of her. Ruark, clad only in a helmet with the battle phones attached, was reflecting on the fact that he was on the bridge in the middle of an action, naked, with 7,000 tons of high explosive underneath him, when a submarine surfaced in the middle of the convoy. Every gun turned on the sub and blew her out of the water. Escorts raced about, dropping depth charges, and Ruark felt the hardening frost in his beard and reflected that it was cold up on the bridge with no clothes on. “What, I said to myself, in the name of Holy Christ am I doing out here?”
Scraped, battered, and bruised, the Eli Whitney and the other survivors of Ruark’s first convoy limped up the Thames Estuary and docked in London on April 14, 1943. They had fought their way through the absolute height of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Two weeks later another convoy left New York. Under Commander Peter Gretton of the Royal Navy, Convoy ONS-2, consisting of forty-two slow and heavily laden merchantmen, fought a running battle across the Atlantic with fifty-one U-boats. Thirteen ships of the convoy were lost, but Gretton’s escort ships sank five submarines, and two more were destroyed by aircraft. The voyage of Gretton’s convoy, within a few weeks of Ruark’s, was the high-water mark for the U-boats and the turning of the tide in the Atlantic. Never again would they be able to mount such a threat, and never again would the convoys suffer such hideous losses. In fact, between May and September that year, history records that 3,546 tankers and freighters crossed the Atlantic, in sixty-two convoys, without the loss of a single ship; Allied merchant construction hit full stride and exceeded all enemy destruction by six million tons. The food crisis in the British Isles was averted. Ensign Ruark, the men of his Armed Guard unit, the Eli Whitney and her crew, and all the other ships of Ruark’s first convoy were part of that epic action. Winston Churchill:
The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome, and amid all other cares we viewed its changing fortunes day by day with hope or apprehension.
***
Military service, especially in a hazardous duty involving real gunfire, real danger, and real fear, affects individuals in different ways. For those who live through a terrifying time, where the mere act of waking up every day constitutes a feat of bravery and heroism becomes routine, the experience often leads to introspection and reluctance to talk about it, partly because it is so intensely personal and partly because no one who has not been through it could possibly appreciate it. After the Battle of Gettysburg, a Confederate captain, Praxiteles Swan, described what happened: “We all went up to Gettysburg, the summer of ‘63. Some of us came back from there. And that’s all, except for the details.” The Atlantic convoys had much the same effect on the sailors and merchant seaman who survived them: Most did not want to defile the memory by talking about it. Discussing it in terms of personal heroism, when so many of their friends had died in the icy waters of the Atlantic, was sacrilege; conversely, men who came back from war bragging about their exploits, by and large, were the ones who saw little action and less real danger.
Robert Ruark was one of the former: He never based a novel on his experiences in the navy, although he certainly could have. After 1945, war novels were de rigueur, and both Ruark and his fictional hero, Alec Barr, professed openly that they went to war as warriors, not as war correspondents, because they wanted to see the conflict from the inside as participants and not cheat the postwar literary public of the benefit of their own observations and experiences. In The Honey Badger, a young Alec Barr is advised by his former university professors about the value of war to a writer; one calls it too big an experience to be seen from the outside, that it must be seen from within and is not a spectacle for casual strangers to view from a distance. Another adds that no writer can afford to miss a war, especially if he intends to write books; it is “the most basic research.” All agree that “war is more intimate than marriage.”
Intimate and intense as it was, and for once participating and not just observing and reporting, Ruark found later that the memory was something to keep to himself and share only with those who knew what he was talking about. He never took his experiences and turned them into literature, except as background in The Honey Badger and for a few brief reflections in Horn of the Hunter. Alec Barr experiences some “early and rather frightening” activity, after which he becomes a staff officer in the Pacific. He never makes himself out to be a hero; he is self-deprecating about his own role in the war and is tolerantly amused at the attitudes he sees in others — the “ring-tailed wunderkind” who actively hated the enemy.
Ruark’s silence may also be explained by the fact that his closest friend from college and the early days in Washington, Jim Queen (in The Honey Badger, Jim James) is killed in the war. In Horn of the Hunter, Ruark is sitting in a cathedral-like grove of trees somewhere in an untraveled, untrammeled part of unspoiled Tanganyika. “I was very grateful to be here, all by myself with a bottle of cool beer and some peaceful thoughts,” he wrote. “I was especially glad that ship didn’t blow up that day in the Mediterranean. I felt very sad for my best and oldest friend, Jim Queen, who loved this sort of stuff as much as I did but who was never going to be able to do it with me because a JU-88 came over a hill at Salerno one day and laid one into Jimmy’s stack and that was all there was of Jim, then and forevermore. I was grateful that it hadn’t worked that way with me, because the opportunity was equal” For his part, in a moment of savage introspection, Alec Barr thinks to himself, “Maybe you should have got your dear little self killed in line of duty. All the better ones did. Jim James gets killed, and you just get richer, so you can work in a rich room writing rich pieces for rich readers. Personally, I think you stink, Mister Barr.” Under the circumstances, any suggestion of personal gallantry would be unseemly in the extreme — for fictional hero or real-life naval officer.
***
The Eli Whitney left London and put back to sea in late April, made New York a month later, and on May 28th set sail again, this time in convoy to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. By then, America and her allies had split up the responsibilities for convoy escort: Canada and Great Britain took sole control of the northern routes to Murmansk and the United Kingdom, while the U.S. covered convoys on the southern routes to the Mediterranean and North Africa.
The Mediterranean Sea had been a major battleground from the beginning, pitting the Royal Navy against the Italians, who had a formidable navy at every level — from submarines to battleships. When war broke out, the Italian fleet had six battleships and battle cruisers and 115 submarines — more than Britain, France, or Germany. In the close confines of the Med, the Italian undersea fleet was a considerable menace. While Italy had no aircraft carriers, she really did not need them: With the Italian boot extending out into the Mediterranean, and with Sicily and her colonies in North Africa serving as bases, Italian land-based aircraft were a threat from Gibraltar to the Holy Land, and high-level bombing became a specialty of her pilots and a constant nightmare for the British.
For its part the Royal Navy had the responsibility of keeping the convoy routes in the Mediterranean passable, if not exactly safe. She had to maintain access to the Suez Canal, which meant protecting Britain’s hold on Egypt, and there was the island of Malta, a British colony that served as a base for British aircraft and warships. The siege of Malta and the need to keep her supplied with food and ammunition was the focus of British military activity in the Mediterranean, as was the need to disrupt German ships supplying Rommel’s Afrika Korps with ammunition and reinforcements, British ships had two main bases, Gibraltar and Alexandria, and fought a continuous war with Italy. There were triumphs on both sides, and losses were heavy.
By the time Robert Ruark first ventured into the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy had the upper hand. Rommel had left North Africa, and his Afrika Korps was finally defeated by British and American forces in early May in the Battle of Tunisia. Plans were underway for the invasion of Sicily, which began in July, 1943.
The Eli Whitney sailed into the thick of the invasion plans, reaching the Mediterranean in early June and off-loading her cargo, which again consisted largely of ammunition and explosives, in Casablanca, Gibraltar, and Tunisia. The voyage was no more hazardous than usual and considerably warmer than the North Atlantic run. By August, the ship was back across the Atlantic, and Ruark and his crew were given a couple of weeks leave in Baltimore. After seven months of convoy duty, mostly ferrying ammunition “to tough places,” they were overdue to be relieved. Rotation supposedly came after six months, but no replacements appeared, and they re-embarked for one more run to the Mediterranean.
Ruark’s third and last Atlantic convoy weighed anchor in September and was, for him personally, the most hair-raising. Not counting the escorts, Convoy UGS 42 was ninety ships strong — ninety ships loaded with ammunition, high explosives and aviation fuel. A little east of Oran, they were attacked by the Germans with submarines, low-level aircraft and torpedo bombers (“long, sharky-looking Heinkels”), which came up from German bases in occupied France. On the bridge of the Eli Whitney, directing the efforts of his gun crews, Ruark felt naked: “There were about seven thousand tons of bombs under me, and tetryl detonators, and another two thousand tons of aviation gas in one hold of my ship, and if we got hit that was all she wrote.” Almost immediately, a ship in the column just to the left of the Eli Whitney was hit by a bomb square amidships and she “blew like a firecracker.” A gun crew on another ship, panicking, lost control of their gun and raked the bridge of a sister ship. “The air was suddenly full of iron and fire, and the shrapnel was rattling down like hailstones,” Ruark said. Destroyer escorts were racing about dropping depth charges, and occasionally a plane, hard hit, would fall lazily into the sea and explode in a column of water.
The attack was almost over, and British Spitfires from their African bases were chasing off the last of the torpedo bombers, when one Heinkel made a final run and unleashed its torpedo. Ruark’s starboard gun crew yelled up that there was a torpedo off the starboard bow. Ruark shouted to the captain to turn hard to starboard, into the oncoming torpedo, and allow it to slip past the fantail, but the Eli Whitney was fullyladen and sluggish, and had barely started to answer the wheel when the torpedo struck her right under the number two hatch. There was a “great crash” when it struck, the deck plates popped and flames appeared — but there was no explosion.
“I had seen so many ammunition ships catch the big horn and I knew what happened to them,” Ruark wrote. “Pinwheels and skyrockets and one big boom. But the ship did not blow. She listed, moaned, and some fires flickered and went out, but she did not blow. Nobody knows why. For the longest thirty seconds of any man’s life she was potential explosion and she didn’t explode. I was an older man when I went round to the ladder and yelled down at the Old Man...”
The Old Man, in this case, was the quiet-spoken Dane who commanded the Eli Whitney. In response to Ruark’s query as to whether they should get off and walk, he replied that the ship was still answering the wheel, and she was still underway, and she was not blowing up. So they would stay aboard and see what happened. In a newspaper column six years later, Ruark described Captain Karl Peder Olsen as “about the calmest old gentleman I ever saw, and certainly one of the bravest. As long as she answered the wheel, he would have driven the ship to hell and back again. He regarded bombs and mines and torpedoes as minor hindrances to navigation.”
They continued on to Malta, getting bombed along the way, then from there through the Adriatic Sea to the port of Bari, dodging mines and getting bombed. This was one of the first Allied convoys into Bari, which became the major supply port for the British and American armies fighting up through Italy. From there Ruark’s ship returned to Bizerte, where she survived another encounter with a submarine and got hit by lightning. Off Oran, the Germans sank another ship as she sailed out to join the homebound convoy, and the Eli Whitney finally reached Philadelphia on Thanksgiving Day, 1943. Because it was Thanksgiving Day, no one in the United States was working, and so the bruised and battered old ship, with her bruised and battered crew, was forced to heave to and wait offshore, fuming at the delay after two months of convoy duty in a very hot war zone.
When Ruark finally disembarked, he reports, he was “a little mad” for a while. He drank too much and slept too little; he had “noisy trouble with waiters” and hit a Pullman conductor for some offense, real or imagined. “It was going to be a long time before I could hear an airplane in the night without coming full awake and reaching blindly for tin hat and pistol,” he wrote. One afternoon he was at his mother-in-law’s house taking a nap, while she held a bridge party for her friends downstairs. A commercial plane came in low over the house, and Ruark “hit the stairs, running. That I was entirely naked seemed to disconcert the female guests.”
A few weeks after the Eli Whitney unloaded her cargo and departed from Bari, the Germans mounted a major air attack on the town. On the night of December 2, the JU-88s came over and attacked the ships anchored in the harbor. A single bomb hit the ammunition ship John Harvey. There was a moment’s hesitation and then a momentous explosion that destroyed the John Harvey, sank sixteen other merchantmen, and damaged half a dozen more. Some of the ships were carrying bombs charged with mustard gas; these detonated and sent a wave of mustard gas rolling across the harbor. More than a thousand Allied servicemen were killed, and another thousand Italian civilians. The harbor was unusable for months.
“Researching the convoys that Ruark was on in the Atlantic, you come to the conclusion that he was immensely lucky. All around him ships were sinking, people were dying, ammunition ships were exploding, and he came through it all without a scratch,” said military historian Derek Nelson. Ruark himself agreed.
***
Ruark and his crew were finally relieved. A month later, he was promoted to lieutenant (j.g.). While he waited for his next posting, he and Virginia moved to New Orleans. She returned to Washington in March, 1944, and Lt. Ruark assumed command of the Armed Guard crew of a new ship, the S.S. Afoundria. The Afoundria was 6,000 tons, a fast troopship capable of doing fifteen knots, and with considerably more serious armament than the Eli Whitney. Her assignment was ferrying troops to Guadalcanal in preparation for the final Allied assault on Japan. The war in the Pacific was not at that stage nearly so concentrated as the U-boat peak in either the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, and the voyage was uneventful.
While the Afoundria was refitted for the return voyage, Ruark and some fellow officers went on a tour of the nearby Russell Islands. Their jeep overturned on a muddy road, and Ruark suffered a severe shoulder injury. A naval surgeon repaired it as best he could, and Ruark returned with the Afoundria to Treasure Island Naval Station near San Francisco. There he was relieved of his command and underwent several months of therapy in Oakland before being transferred back to Washington where he could be treated at Bethesda Naval Hospital. As he recovered from the injury, he passed the time doing some reporting. Summer came and went. He applied for, and was granted, war-correspondent status, but the Navy was not about to let him go. Instead of discharging him or giving him inactive status, he was ordered instead to Hawaii. Lt. Robert Ruark’s next assignment was in the U.S. Navy’s public-relations office. His career as an active naval officer in the thick of battle was over.
***
For his part, Alec Barr later reflected that the war had been “the greatest single boon of a short and very lucky professional life.”
Through no real aim of his own, quite a lot of exciting things had happened to Alec Barr in the war, and he was seldom able to bring himself to speak of them. Somebody had asked him once: ‘But what did you do in those four years?’ and he had answered, not meaning to be rude: ‘Nothing very much.’
‘But where did you go?’ if the questioner was determined to persist.
‘Oh, places,’ Alec Barr would say. ‘North Atlantic. Mediterranean. South Pacific. Islands. England. Australia. Hawaii. Just places. Sometimes scared out of my wits when I wasn’t being bored to death.’
And dismissed it all with a short, entirely insincere laugh.
Like his creator, however, Alec Barr found something in the Navy that he had been looking for all his life. It can be described in many ways: a sense of security, of belonging, of knowing what would happen tomorrow without having to make decisions, of moving from day to day without the need for ambition or to out-do rivals and competitors, of having people around doing their jobs just as you are doing yours — them helping to keep you alive, you doing your best for them, and knowing that you can all depend on each other, regardless of what happens. The closeness and the intimacy of a military unit is rarely appreciated by those who have not experienced it, and there is really nothing like it in civilian life.
For a man like Robert Ruark, who had an unsettled childhood, had been a loner, and had been on his own more or less since he left home, at fifteen, to go to university, such a feeling of belonging was immensely gratifying. In many ways, Ruark found a home in the Navy. It may not have been fashionable to feel affection for the Navy (or the Air Force, Army, or Marines) but Ruark did, nonetheless, and this affection stayed with him for the rest of his life.
In later years he would tell himself that, if all else failed, “I can always go back to sea.”