Christian Oldham entered HMS Oribi’s wardroom to a scene of juxtapositions: the gunmetal grey of the walls, with their protruding pipes and wheels, was offset by deep leather armchairs and a raft of officers, some of whom were in black tie. John Lamb took an immediate interest in Oldham. He handed her a drink and the pair holed up in a corner of the room and talked, in increasingly conspiratorial proximity, about their wars to date, and all the excitement and cruelty they had encountered along the way.1 Time, distance and the pressing uncertainties of war had cooled Lamb’s feelings for the New Yorker Jeanette Watson. Not knowing how long they had together, he began to pursue Oldham.
Oldham, however, left the party in a state of some confusion; here was an eligible officer who was clearly interested in her; yet, for the past months, she had been missing Lennox Napier, inscrutable captain of the submarine HMS Rorqual.
Lamb’s pressured chase was typical of young men his age at the time. Shore leave compressed the business of living into a few short days. As Monsarrat later put it, living with the unshakeable fear of death at sea meant that as soon as you docked, there was an irresistible urge ‘to tell people about it before you went out on convoy again; we all thought we were going to be killed’. Romance was just another way to feel yoked, not only to the land, but also to the business of existence. Whiplash engagements were commonplace.
During the next few days and evenings, while Oribi’s repairs were carried out, the pair began seeing each other, and within ten days, were engaged to be married.
‘No time was wasted,’ Lamb wrote in his diary, a dictum to which so many young men and women cleaved during the war, where time was so short, so threatened.2
Oldham felt ‘a bit mean’ toward Napier, of whom she remained ‘extremely fond’, but, as she reasoned, ‘these things happen’.
‘I didn’t feel pressured to get engaged,’ she later wrote. ‘It just happened.’
The other Wrens at Belfast Castle delighted in the news of their friend’s engagement, a happy distraction from the rigours of the plot where, as Oldham put it, they were nightly ‘plunged’ into ‘frightful arenas’, where the battles were viewed from a distance, but ‘in which we felt an intimate part’.3
Three of Christian’s closest friends, who dubbed themselves ‘the Hags’ Watch’, sent her fiancé a letter of reference. Stamped ‘SECRET’, it read:
We have known her for five months, and find her honest, sober, kind and cheerful at all times. In fact, she has never been seen in a temper or known to be bossy. She is quite approachable in the mornings though rather dopey for the first few minutes after waking. There has been a slight tendency to madness during the past fortnight, but otherwise she is considered normal, healthy and cleanly.
Not knowing how long they had till the Oribi was fit to sail again and when Lamb would return to the Atlantic, the pair decided to throw a black-tie engagement party, one of end-of-the-world proportions.
In Germany, things were changing at the top, and Karl Doenitz was positioned to benefit. On 30th December 1942, a U-boat in the Arctic detected a convoy travelling from Loch Ewe in the Highlands of Scotland to Murmansk in the Soviet Union. Admiral Raeder, commander of the German navy, informed Hitler that he intended to intercept and attack the Allied ships. It was a plan of which the Führer enthusiastically approved, hoping that it might deprive the Russian army, which was currently surrounding the German 6th Army in Stalingrad, of supplies.
But Operation Rainbow, as the scheme was code-named, was bungled when, just as two of the German heavy cruisers were about to attack, a pair of escort destroyers protecting the convoy emerged from the gloom. The admiral in charge of the operation, Oskar Kummitz, had been repeatedly warned by his superiors not to place the Kriegsmarine’s most valuable surface vessels in danger, and even before a single shot was fired, he immediately ordered all of his ships to retreat. To worsen matters, Kummitz’s report to Berlin of his retreat was misunderstood by Raeder to be news of a conquest. When Hitler received the message, he erroneously announced to his New Year guests a great naval victory.
When the embarrassing truth emerged, Hitler summoned Raeder and subjected the grand admiral to a ninety-minute tirade, threatening to scrap the Kriegsmarine’s battleships and redeploy their long-range guns as coastal defences. Raeder stood and took the verbal beating, which he later described as ‘vicious and impertinent’. Then he tendered his resignation. Despite the animosity between Raeder and Doenitz, whom the grand admiral considered to be both stubborn and insubordinate, Raeder recommended his rival to Hitler as his replacement.
‘The only disadvantage,’ he wrote in a letter laden with subtext, ‘is the fact that Admiral Doenitz… would not be able to dedicate himself to the immediate conduct of the U-boat war to the same extent as formerly.’4
Raeder was correct. To cede control of the U-boat arm was unthinkable for Doenitz, whose paternal instincts toward the young men in the division he founded had been further deepened when three members of his immediate family joined the service. Doenitz’s eldest son Klaus joined the staff of the 5th U-flotilla at Kiel, his younger son Peter became second watch-keeping officer in U-954, and his son-in-law Günther Hessler was first staff officer under Doenitz’s U-boat department chief, Eberhard Godt. To abandon the U-boat arm at such a time would be, for Doenitz, to abandon his family.
Frank Birch, head of the German Naval Section at Bletchley Park, once described Doenitz’s psychological ties to the U-boats, and the manner in which he directed his vessels, in terms that invoked both the sports arena and the board game: ‘He places [the U-boats]; he moves them… his interest in the game is, therefore, a very personal one. It engenders in him the enthusiasm of a crowd at a football match.’5
Despite, or perhaps because of, his near-blinkered loyalty to the U-boat arm, on 30th January 1943 Hitler named Doenitz as Raeder’s successor as grand admiral. He was given a massive new residence in a Berlin suburb, close to where other senior Nazis had their homes, and a permanent armed SS guard. As well as a Mercedes staff car, Doenitz had use of a private aeroplane and, unthinkably, a private train, Auerhahn, named after the wood grouse, complete with beds, a restaurant and conference chamber. He received a grant of 300,000 marks, around $120,000.
The extension of the fifty-one-year-old’s comforts did not affect his work ethic. Nor did the expansion of his responsibilities lead Doenitz to relinquish control of the U-boats. He continued to view himself as both father and team-coach to the U-boat crews, a fact that made it inevitable that he would maintain careful control of the division. Moreover, with the Reich now on the defensive on all other fronts, Doenitz was convinced that the U-boats represented the sole path to victory.6 Diligent control of the U-boats was, if anything, now his greatest responsibility of all. Doenitz’s unshakeable belief in the primacy of the U-boats in Germany’s war effort was made clear a few days later when, in his first directive issued to staff in his new role, he wrote: ‘The sea war is the U-boat war. All has to be subordinated to this main goal.’7
Two pink gins down and even the most unseaworthy landlubber would have been unable to detect the floor’s gentle dips and rises on the refurbished Oribi.
For the Guest Night Dinner, held in honour of the engaged first lieutenant and his third-officer Wren fiancée, the wardroom mess had the ambience, if not the furnishings, of a gala-night dinner. Aided by the relatively abundant food stocks of Northern Ireland–at least by comparison to those of Liverpool–the wardroom stewards had managed to assemble a stately menu: steak and kidney pie, plum duff pudding; the extravagance of the food was heightened by the smell of cocktails: White Ladies, gimlets, dry martinis and all the rest.
After the plates had been cleared, the port passed around and a litany of toasts delivered–to the first lieutenant and his fiancée, absent wives and girlfriends, the nearest admiral and so on–it was time, in an atmosphere of abandon, for the games to begin. Shy guests retired to the sides of the room to spectate, while Lamb and Oldham led their friends and colleagues in a match of Wardroom Polo, each player using a chair for a horse, spoons for sticks and a boiled potato for the ball.
After the whoops and laughter died down, a cry went up of the sighting of an imaginary U-boat. A volunteer was selected to play the role of a torpedo and, as the ship’s gunner recited the drill, the men sombrely laid him on the long dining-room table and, when the cry of ‘Fire!’ went up, threw him forcefully forward. With arms nobly clutched to his sides, the human torpedo shot along the polished table, before tumbling off the far end onto a sofa. While the atmosphere in the Oribi’s wardroom was one of drunken celebration, the torpedo game was born of a desire to bring the reality of war into a fictional context, where it could be experienced and confronted–the elemental root of so much of human play.
While the men and women on the Oribi collapsed laughing and the torpedo man straightened his clothes, the final game of the night was laid out: an obstacle race, whereby every participant had to circumnavigate the wardroom without touching the deck, as if the chairs and tables were islands of wreckage in a flaming sea. The evening at an end, Oldham and the other Wrens left the ship and headed into the cool night, under a sky of buckshot stars. She did not know when she would see her fiancée again, or when they might be married, but in this brief moment, her heart was full.
In Germany, Grand Admiral Doenitz was finalising plans for what would be the greatest push of the Battle of the Atlantic to date, an offensive that he hoped would match the so-called Die Glückliche Zeit, or ‘happy time’, of the early months of the war when the U-boats sailed and fought with near impunity.
Doenitz believed that a concentration of U-boats dispatched to the mid-Atlantic Gap, a kind of über-wolfpack far larger than any seen before, might overwhelm the convoys and decisively cut Britain’s supply lines, even with recent and ongoing improvements in Allied tactics and technology. This was the quickest route to victory, a credence to which Doenitz had cleaved ever since the wargames of 1937.
With full control of both the U-boats and the wider Kriegsmarine, Doenitz believed he was finally in a position to realise his career-long vision of building a U-boat division of sufficient size to fully blockade Britain and throttle its supplies. The timing was opportune. America’s entry to the war had exerted significant additional pressure on British shipping. Each American infantry division dispatched to Europe required 32,000 tons of shipping to cross the Atlantic.8 This used up space that might otherwise be used for civilian food supplies, refrigerated goods, oil and raw materials. As such, more than 150,000 cubic metres of frozen food destined for Britain was left rotting in American ports.9 The competing demands of troops, food, armaments and resources had ratcheted tension in the supply chain to an unprecedented degree.*
‘We are trying with the equivalent of about one third of normal fleet to feed this country and maintain it in full war production,’ wrote Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser. ‘With all the extra military demands that have emerged… it is not surprising that our imports… have suffered severely. But this cannot go on.’10
The Ministry of Food issued a reminder to the Cabinet that without sufficient imports of flour, meat and other key foodstuffs, Britain could survive only for between four and six months.11 In fact, by March 1943 Britain was consuming at least 750,000 tons more goods than it was importing. The country’s reserves would last for just eight weeks.
Seven hundred thousand tons of shipping had been lost to U-boats in November 1942. It was time for Doenitz to press the advantage. In his first conference with the Führer as grand admiral, Doenitz convinced Hitler that no skilled workers involved in the construction or repair of U-boats should be called up to join the army and thereby slow the rate of production.12 The number of operational vessels was now 222, tantalisingly close to 300, the magical figure that Doenitz had settled upon via his wargames prior to the war. Only seventy-eight more were needed to pass the threshold that Doenitz believed would deliver certain victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.
To build them, Doenitz needed steel, by now a scarce resource in Germany. To this end he ceded control of naval construction to Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production. Speer had long campaigned to assume administrative responsibility for naval construction, in order to have total control over the allocation of steel, but had been denied this power by Raeder, Doenitz’s predecessor. By relinquishing control of naval construction in exchange for guarantees of U-boats and other assets, Doenitz could be certain of receiving the raw materials he needed. Finally, Doenitz would have his 300 U-boats. He would be able to destroy sufficient numbers of Allied merchant ships to remove food from British tables, fuel from British cars and heat from British homes.
‘It is,’ he wrote to his staff on 5th February 1943, ‘a question of winning the war.’13
Germany’s struggles on the Eastern Front, and the foreboding entry into the war of the United States, with all of its economic and industrial power, had left Hitler sleeplessly contemplating defeat. On 7th February 1943, the Führer delivered a speech in which he claimed that losing the war would mean the German people deserved to lose the struggle between the races. It was one of the first times Hitler publicly flirted with an ideology of defeat. The ascent of the optimistic Doenitz was well timed; his positivity and unflappable belief in the U-boats gave Hitler a foothold for hope. The grand admiral became not only Hitler’s confidant and adviser, but, thanks to Doenitz’s ambition, a source of fresh inspiration for the jaded leader.
In turn, this gave Doenitz the support he needed to ramp up U-boat production, diverting the majority of the navy’s allocation of steel, which had diminished following the fall of Stalingrad, into Kiel’s shipyards. Hitler’s belief in Doenitz also gave the grand admiral a mandate to pursue his plan to assemble monstrous wolfpacks in the mid-Atlantic Gap.
Unknown to both Doenitz and Horton, the next few weeks would represent the climax of the Atlantic war, as the Germans made their final push for U-boat supremacy, and the Allies sought to counter them. The stage was set for a grand sea battle, the results of which would be settled before the last swifts and swallows arrived in Britain to signal summer’s arrival.
On 17th April, a little more than two weeks after she arrived in Belfast for repairs, HMS Oribi was dispatched to the Atlantic, following reports of a U-boat attack on a convoy. Lamb and the rest of the crew were to make for the site of the attack at full speed, to provide assistance. Christian Oldham waved from the ramparts of Belfast Castle, not knowing if or when she might see her fiancé again.
‘It was very distressing,’ she recalled. ‘But there it was. Off he went.’14
The Oribi, its emblem a young deer, its motto Nulli secundus (‘Second to none’), entered an ocean bubbling with U-boats: 207 were currently detailed for the North Atlantic, of which an average of 111 were at sea each day. In the plotting room at Belfast Castle, the young Wren watched as the Oribi was added to the plot with a marker just like any other, and yet also, quite unlike them at all.