From the moment the first reports of the impending battle for ONS.5 reached Belfast Castle, the Operations Room in which Christian Oldham worked became a hub of activity and interest. The teleprinter buzzed and rattled with the continuous flow of signals arriving from the various ships involved, including the Oribi. Messages passed between the Wrens at Derby House and those in Belfast Castle at frantic intervals.
‘Nobody wanted to go off duty,’ Oldham later wrote.1
The developing picture was especially distressing for the twenty-two-year-old, who could see, at a glance of the plot, the danger her fiancé faced.
‘Oribi was obviously heading for the wolfpack,’ she wrote.
In fact, Oribi was headed toward several wolfpacks. Due to Bletchley Park’s signal-blindness, caused by the changing of the Enigma codes, the wall plots at Belfast Castle and Derby House showed only a fraction of the true number of U-boats that were currently lying in wait. Even with their partial picture, the battlefield viewed as if through a smudged window, the plot became, as Oldham later put it, ‘a vivid picture of the action, with all of us taking a vicarious part in it’.
The delay between the issuing of signals from the ships at sea and their receipt at home made the progress ‘even more acute’. As the tension ratcheted, time and again Oldham’s friends tried, using various spurious excuses, to persuade her to leave the plotting room ‘so I might not know of the dangerous drama evolving–as it were–before our very eyes’.
But Oldham would not be moved. That week, she barely visited her dorm room in Belfast Castle. Her two room-mates would endlessly tease her about the mess in which she left her bed.2 Not this week, however.
‘I could not leave the scene,’ she said.
Roberts, too, watched the drama as it built on the cork plot, the horror of ship markers being swapped from white to red tokens to signal each torpedo strike. Under the title ‘Chief of the Enemy’, Roberts kept the night duty on the main plot at Derby House alongside Commodore Ian Macintyre and Lieutenant Colviller, chief of operations. The trio would try to anticipate what might happen next in the game at sea, and how best they might advise the players.
This work was reflected on the German side. Hoping to press their advantage, at 16:02 on 4th May the officers at BdU organised most of the U-boats of Woodpecker and Starling into a reconnaissance line, code-named Gruppe Fink (Finch). As these twenty-seven U-boats moved into position, several sighted Oribi and its sister destroyer Offa in the distance. At the same time, BdU directed a number of lone wolf U-boats to join Blackbird’s group, to the south of ONS.5. Still the convoy plodded on. By dusk, Tay was picking up numerous contacts on its huff-duff: suspected U-boats on every side of the ship. Tay’s captain, Sherwood, ordered Oribi and Offa to make an ASDIC sweep of the area, but neither ship managed to pinpoint the location of any U-boats.
At noon on 5th May, the Allied codebreakers cracked the latest naval Enigma codes, enabling the full horrifying scale of the challenge that faced ONS.5 to emerge. The time lag between interception and decryption was such, however, that by the time Horton knew about the massed U-boats of the monster packs Finch and Blackbird, which eventually totalled forty-one vessels, the largest concentration ever focused around a single convoy3, it was too late.
With so many U-boats assembling on the battle line, the stage had seemingly been set for an incontestable victory for Doenitz. Eager for news of a major success that he could take to Hitler, in order to justify both his recent promotion and his strategic focus on U-boat-building, Doenitz exhorted his young men:
‘I AM CERTAIN THAT YOU WILL FIGHT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT. DON’T OVERESTIMATE YOUR OPPONENT BUT STRIKE HIM DEAD.’4
U-125, captained by Ulrich Folkers, was the first to strike. His victim was the Lorient, an Allied ship named after the French port from which, ironically, its attacker had recently departed. Even before the crew could send up its distress flares, the ship, along with all forty-six crew members, disappeared.
Next U-707, commanded by Günther Gretschel, fired a fan of torpedoes at the merchant ship North Britain. One struck abaft the mast.
‘The upper deck is awash,’ Gretschel wrote in his war diary. ‘The vessel remains floating for a while, then suddenly stands itself up, the bow vertical, and descends into the sea. Time for sinking: sixty-nine seconds.’
One after another, the U-boats of Finch attacked. U-628, which had been lead shadower of the convoy, torpedoed and sank the Harbury. U-264, attacking from within the convoy columns, torpedoed the American cargo ship West Maximus and the British freighter Harperley. All three ships went down within nineteen minutes of one another. In response, and to prevent further casualties, Sherwood decided that the time had come to order a manoeuvre invented by Gilbert Roberts, named by Jean Laidlaw and drilled to perfection by Peter Gretton: Raspberry.
The operation, which had convinced Sir Percy Noble of the value of WATU, required various triangular search patterns to be performed at precise sweep speeds and time durations, and was designed to flush out any U-boats sitting within the convoy lanes. That night, Sherwood performed a half-Raspberry, a slightly modified version of the manoeuvre that held a few escorts in place to survey the sea for any signs of U-boats illuminated by the star shells fired into the sky by the participating ships. The ploy worked magnificently. Various U-boats were located, enabling a barrage of depth charges to fend off the attackers.
During the next few hours, the 150-foot trawler Northern Spray began to pluck survivors from the water: thirty-eight from Harperley, fifty-one from West Maximus, forty-three from Harbury and two from North Britain. Under the combined weight of its grateful men, who took up every nook of space, the vessel sat low in the sea.* Still, by first light, five of ONS.5’s ships had been sunk, without a single U-boat casualty. Emboldened by the night’s success, and with the feverish hubris that can come with the feeling of being a member of a superior force, the U-boats sustained their attacks into the following day. U-266 hit three ships, including the Gharinda, an old liner of the British India Fleet. Life expectancy in the freezing water was just a few minutes. Nevertheless, HMS Tay, leader of the escort ships in Duncan’s absence, successfully picked up the Gharinda’s captain, R. R. Stone, and his crew. Stone asked to be returned to his ship, which was wounded but not yet sunk, believing that she might still be salvaged.
Sherwood forcefully declined for the simple reason that, via the ship’s huff-duff, he was currently tracking no fewer than seven U-boats in the vicinity. By evening, the Allies had managed to score one U-boat kill, but the tally of sunken merchant ships had grown from five to twelve, with hundreds of miles to go before the convoy reached its destination.
As dusk blackened to night on 5th May 1943, the weather stilled, and the rain turned to mist. Lamb, who was keeping the Oribi’s last four-hour watch of the day from 20:00, was expecting mayhem. But by midnight things seemed to have quietened. In the relative calm, Oribi’s new captain, John Ingram, who had taken command of the ship in February, issued the order of ‘defence stations’, so that only half of the ship’s armament was manned and the remaining crew could take some much-needed rest.
To avoid the long and potentially dangerous trip along the exposed upper deck to his cabin, Lamb walked to the sickbay below the bridge, which he would often use if there was a vacant bed. He climbed beneath the sheets fully clothed, just in case.5
Three hours later, at 02:52, the Oribi’s ASDIC operator reported an echo from an object close by. Ingram, not knowing whether the contact was a U-boat or fellow escort, was forced, in that instant, to gamble on a course of action. He chose to attack, swinging the Oribi toward the contact position. Moments later, he sighted not a corvette, but a U-boat, U-125, 600 feet away and sliding through the mist, as ominous as a sea monster.
The Oribi had the perfect angle to ram.
‘Ramming is a splendid method of sinking submarines,’ Gretton wrote later. ‘But the rammer is left in a shaky state.’6 Still, the chance to knock a U-boat out of the battle was worth the risk, and Ingram took it. At around twenty knots, the Oribi bore down on the German vessel while Ingram and the skeletal crew braced for impact. They watched the U-boat’s conning tower disappear behind the Oribi’s streaking bow, and, after a moment’s pause, the ship struck U-125 square on, a little behind the tower. Lamb was abruptly awakened by the terrible noise of tear and crunch.
‘My first thought was that we had been torpedoed,’ Lamb wrote in his diary. Then, as he felt the ship ride up and over something and in the fug of a rude awakening, he implausibly assumed that the ship had gone aground.
‘I scrambled out of the cot,’ he recalled, ‘but was unable to find the deck.’
Instead, Lamb felt glass bottles underfoot. These were the medicines and sickbay utensils racked up on the side of the room, which, as the Oribi keeled over with the force of the collision, had momentarily become the ship’s floor. By the time the alarm gongs began clanging, Lamb had successfully scaled the two flights of ladders to the bridge. There he followed the eyes of the watchkeepers and saw a U-boat’s conning tower close alongside and below, to port.
The impact had knocked out the light that illuminated the Oribi’s wall clock in the bridge, but this was as nothing to the damage sustained by U-125. The submarine’s tower was crumpled, its periscope warped, its flak guns bent and the hatch blown off. The U-boat was also down by the stern, although by the time order had been restored on the Oribi, sight of the German vessel had been lost.
‘I have no doubt whatsoever that this submarine was sunk,’ Ingram wrote in his report of the action.
It was a reasonable but incorrect conclusion. Battered, broken and now unfit to dive, U-125 had managed to limp away on the surface. Ninety minutes later, at 03:31, Kapitänleutnant Folkers reported the situation to BdU: ‘Have been rammed–unable to dive. Request assistance.’ Six nearby U-boats responded, one after the other, to say that they were headed to provide assistance to Folkers and his dazed crew.
Before any of the U-boats could find U-125, at 03:54 Chesterman, survivor of the sinking of HMS Zinnia and now captain of HMS Snowflake, picked up the stricken U-boat on his ship’s radar. He made toward its location. In the dense mist Snowflake was just a hundred yards away when the lookouts finally sighted Folkers’ U-boat. Chesterman ordered the wheel to be put hard-to-starboard, hoping to ram the vessel, for what would be its second battering that night.
The U-boat evaded ramming, but Snowflake managed to pull alongside, so that only a few feet separated each boat, too close even for the ship’s guns to depress at a sufficiently deep angle in order to take aim. The ship’s port searchlight clacked on, and, in the eerie quiet, Chesterman surveyed the damaged U-boat, while slowly withdrawing in order to take a shot.
The U-boat sagged in the water, a wounded animal, bubbling from the hatch. Illuminated by Snowflake’s beam, some of U-125’s crew jumped into the water, others lined the deck hoping to be rescued and still more made for the forward deck gun. To discourage them, Snowflake opened up with its forty-millimetre pom-pom guns, and the remaining U-boat crew members jumped, terrified, into the sea. The muffled noise of five scuttling charges sounded out and U-125 disappeared under the water.
Chesterman reviewed the chaotic scene. Some Germans were haphazardly paddling in a dinghy; others trod water in the freezing, misty sea. At 04:07, the captain, no doubt recalling his own time in the water nearly two years earlier, when he almost gave up hope and yielded to the sea, issued a signal to Sherwood in Tay.
‘Shall I pick up survivors?’
Chesterman and his men waited, listening to the cries of the Germans for five minutes before Sherwood’s reply arrived at last.
‘Not approved to pick up survivors,’ it read.
On 6th May 1946, three years later almost to the day, Doenitz stood in the wooden dock at the Nuremberg trials and was asked whether or not a sailor has a duty to attempt to rescue survivors of a sea battle in all circumstances. The question was pointed. The prosecutor believed that Doenitz had, in the latter stages of the war, ordered his U-boat crews to ignore anyone in the water*, where captains like Kretschmer had at one point rescued, fed and even nursed enemy survivors. It is, Doenitz answered carefully, a question of military possibility.
‘During a war the necessity of refraining from rescue may well arise,’ he said. ‘For example, if your own ship is endangered thereby, it would be wrong from a military viewpoint and, besides, would not be of value for the one to be rescued; and no commander of any nation is expected to rescue if his own ship is thereby endangered.’7
Sherwood clearly reached the same conclusion that night, as Folkers and his surviving crew members sat in Atlantic oblivion, wondering why the British weren’t coming to their aid. So it was that Snowflake pulled away from the scene. As the British vessel disappeared into the mist from which it had emerged, the fifty-four Germans in the water watched their hopes of survival with it depart. No other U-boat risked coming to their aid. One by one by one, the men perished.
The hours that followed were, for Lamb, a disorientating blur: a melee with corvettes and U-boats ‘all mixed up’ and ‘momentarily illuminated’ by star shells. He would hear the occasional explosion or patter of gunfire in the mist while, in the background, ‘like theme music in a nightmare film’, he heard the ever-present hypnotic ‘ping, ping, ping’ of the Oribi’s ASDIC, which against all odds had survived the impact with U-125.
Major damage had, however, been caused to the ship’s bow, and one of its propellers was broken.8 Oribi’s forepeak and lower central store were flooded, but the ship remained watertight and, manoeuvring with care, able to resume station. By first light, the score card looked quite different to twelve hours before. In the final tally, one U-boat had been lost for every 2.6 merchant ships.9 Doenitz ordered the remnants of the wolfpacks to retreat. He later stated that he ‘regarded this convoy battle as a defeat’. This was an understatement. The Battle of Birds and Wolves would come to be known by the Germans as Die Katastrophe am ONS.5.
Its work complete, HMS Oribi detached from the convoy, and at a steady speed of twelve knots headed for St John’s, Newfoundland, and safety. At the plot in Belfast Castle, Oldham read the message that her fiancé’s ship was en route to the North American coastline, and collapsed with relief.10
That day a cypher message was sent from the Admiralty to HMS Tay via the wireless operators at Derby House. It read: ‘My compliments to you on your unceasing fight against the U-boats. Please pass to Commander of Convoy my admiration for steadfastness of his ships.’11 Then on 9th May, the Oribi, along with all of the other escort ships involved in the battle, received a congratulatory message from Churchill, who was in Washington DC at the time. It read, with unadorned straightforwardness, ‘My compliments to you on your fight against the U-boats.’
Sixty hours later Lamb and his fellow shipmates pulled into St John’s, a ‘peaceful paradise’ after the last few days of torment, a ‘drawn out, exhausting and rather confusing affair’.12 At 13:00 on 12th May, as the main body of ONS.5 approached Halifax, Commodore Brook issued his final report of the journey: ‘Approaching Pilot Station. Convoy completed.’
The Oribi’s bow was reinforced by concrete in dry dock, and then the ship proceeded south to Boston for permanent repairs. Lieutenant Lamb did not record whether he met up with his former girlfriend Jeanette Watson during his stay on the east coast, to explain the change in his circumstances. Of the matter he only wrote, simply: ‘My return to the States… could have been taken as untimely and careless but for the understanding of my erstwhile New York girlfriend and the tolerance and relief of my Wren fiancé who had been fighting the great battle vicariously from her Atlantic plot.’
Lamb was safe, for now, but it would be months before he saw Oldham again, who cut out and kept, for the rest of her life, a clipping from the Daily Express describing the events of the battle. The article, based on the information available at the time and headlined ‘War’s Biggest U-battle: Navy beats off 25’, concluded with the assessment that this was ‘probably the greatest U-boat battle of the war’.13
Otherwise, relatively little was made of the Battle of Birds and Wolves. On 11th May, toward the end of the nine o’clock news the BBC newsreader Stuart Hibberd reported the sinking of five German submarines in the Atlantic the preceding Thursday.
‘Others were probably sunk or heavily damaged,’ he added. ‘Two were rammed.’14
The story was picked up by only a handful of newspapers and, when writing the official history of Royal Navy operations during the war, Captain Stephen Roskill made only a glancing reference to the battle. Both Doenitz and Horton, meanwhile, recognised the decisive quality of what had happened. Both men separately suggested that the battle for ONS.5 was a pivotal moment in the war against the U-boats. Horton first commended the escort ships for ‘a classic embodying [of] nearly every method and form of tactics current at the time.’ Then he added, ‘It may well be that the heavy casualties inflicted on the enemy have gravely affected his morale and will prove to have been a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic.’15
Rodger Winn, who ran the U-boat tracking room in London, concurred, writing that the battle was the ‘most decisive’ of all convoy engagements, and represented ‘the extreme and… last example of coordinated pack attacks’.*
In a 1959 review of Doenitz’s memoir for the Sunday Times, Roskill, apparently emboldened by Doenitz’s appraisal, wrote: ‘The seven-day battle fought against thirty U-boats is marked only by latitude and longitude and has no name by which it will be remembered: but it was, in its own way, as decisive as Quiberon Bay or the Nile.’
His ship refuelled and in dock at St John’s, a continent away from his beckoning appointment at the altar, Peter Gretton learned of what had happened after he left the battle for ONS.5 with dismay.
‘I shall never cease to regret that I did not risk the weather and stay with them till the end,’ he later wrote.16 In Gretton’s estimation, he had missed ‘the golden moment of a lifetime’.17 Despite recognising that his choice to break away and pass command to the able Sherwood was ‘entirely correct’ and ‘based on common sense’, the decision ‘haunted’ Gretton.
Over the next few days, the Duncan was resupplied and brutally modified. After experiencing pronounced rolling in the journey with ONS.5, Gretton ordered all unnecessary weight removed from the upper decks, including thick layers of accumulated paint, which were chipped from the bodywork. When Duncan departed St John’s the jetty was a jumble of discarded lockers, cables and piping.
On 11th May, Gretton left for Liverpool. After exchanging official documents with the convoy’s commodore, Gretton passed a private note urging him to keep the merchantmen in line so that the convoy SC.130 might make it to port on schedule, for 25th May, four days before his wedding. The commodore, J. Forsythe, replied pledging his best efforts. Besides, Forsythe added, he too had an engagement to keep for that same day: a golf match.18
On 14th May, as Gretton crossed the Atlantic, Doenitz met Hitler at the Führer’s Wolfschanze, or ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in Poland, to discuss the future of the wolfpacks. Not wanting to suggest that his U-boat captains were losing to superior tactics, Doenitz attempted to pin the Allied victory on their technological advancements. ‘The enemy’s new location devices are, for the first time, making U-boat warfare impossible and causing heavy losses–fifteen to seventeen boats a month,’ Doenitz ventured when the conversation turned to the ocean front.
‘These losses are too high,’ Hitler interjected. ‘It can’t go on.’
Still Doenitz persisted in his belief that the tide might again be turned, issuing a message the following day to all U-boats promising ‘better weapons for this hard struggle of yours’. Even if the arrival of such weapons–which included, Doenitz believed, technology to somehow render the Allied huff-duff sets impotent, was imminent (and it was not), it would have been too late for one young U-boat officer.
Four days later, on 19th May, Gretton and his convoy were at the midway point of their return journey across the Atlantic when they were joined by a sloop and three frigates from Horton’s first support group. Shortly thereafter, HMS Jed, which had been a participant in the battle for ONS.5, spotted U-954. Together with the cutter Sennen, the two ships executed the WATU-coined manoeuvre Observant. Sennen dropped a pattern of ten depth charges, at least one of which punctured the hull of U-954, whose crew included Lieutenant Peter Doenitz, the grand admiral’s youngest son. There were no survivors.
On learning the news of his son’s death, Doenitz reportedly showed little emotion. His wife was less accepting; in 1945 she searched lists of prisoners of war held in Canada and North America, hoping against hope that her son had somehow been rescued. Peter’s death only strengthened Doenitz’s resolve.* The following day, when U-boat HQ supplied him with details of another eastbound British convoy, Doenitz sent survivors of the battle in which his son had died to intercept them, alongside fresh U-boats.
‘If there is anyone who thinks that fighting convoys is no longer possible,’ he wrote, in a message broadcast to the U-boat commanders involved, ‘he is a weakling, and no real U-boat commander.’
Gretton, meanwhile, made Liverpool in time. He and the former WATU Wren Du Vivier were married on 29th May 1943 at St Mary’s, Cadogan Square by the RC naval chaplain at Derry. The pair spent the weekend at the Savoy hotel (‘comfortable, and there were no air raids’19), visiting the theatre before travelling by boat to Donegal for a three-day honeymoon. On the fourth day, Gretton returned to the Atlantic.20
On 30th June 1943 in the Guildhall, London, the prime minister announced to the assembled crowd of dignitaries the turnaround in the Battle of the Atlantic. ‘Everyone has heard of the Battle in Tunisia when 350,000 Germans or Italians were made captive or slain,’ he said.
There was another, a no less notable battle which was fought in May in the Atlantic against U-boats. For obvious reasons, much less has been said about that… In May the German Admiralty made extreme exertions to prevent the movement to Great Britain of the enormous convoys of food and materials… which we must bring in safely and punctually if our war-making capacity is to be maintained. Long lines of U-boats were spread to intercept these convoys and packs of fifteen or twenty U-boats were then concentrated in each attack… The fighting took place mainly around the convoys, but also over a wide expanse of ocean. It ended in the total defeat of the U-boat attack. More than thirty U-boats were certainly destroyed in the month of May, floundering in many cases with their crews in the dark depths of the sea.
Then, grasping his lapels for dramatic effect, Churchill continued.
Staggered by these deadly losses the U-boats have recoiled to lick their wounds and mourn their dead. Now as a result of the May victory and massacre of U-boats, we have had in June the best month we have ever known in the whole forty-six of the war.
As Churchill took a moment to clear his throat, the cheers and applause rattled around the hall.21
Two months later, in July 1943, the tonnage of Allied ships launched, principally from American shipyards, finally overtook the figures of tonnage sunk. Doenitz, whose stated aim had always been to sink more ships than the enemy could build (‘a continual bloodletting which must cause even the strongest body to bleed to death’,22 as he described it), and who avidly studied the monthly statistics kept by his staff,23 had lost. The combination of WATU-developed tactics, the newly minted support groups and the closing of the air gap combined to make May 1943 the month in which the U-boats lost the Battle of the Atlantic, the war within a war.
That month, which the Germans subsequently dubbed ‘Black May’, Doenitz lost forty-one U-boats. It was a decisive tally on this, the impersonal scoresheet of war. The grand admiral of the German navy, who never lost his first love for U-boats or the young men who crewed them, ordered the withdrawal of wolfpacks from the Atlantic battlefield. It was, he urged, merely a temporary and ‘partial’ change of operations area. Four months later the US admiral Ernest King downgraded the U-boats to the category of ‘problem’ rather than ‘menace’.24
The so-called tonnage war was finished, and with it, in most ways that mattered, the Battle of the Atlantic.