Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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and his National Socialist movement’. The notion of holding indoctrination sessions in a stinking, sweating steel tube a hundred feet beneath the Atlantic seems surreal; not all Luth’s crew can have applauded his refusal to allow pin-up pictures anywhere near the Führer’s portrait, and his ban on ‘corrupt’ Anglo-American jazz music. ‘Whether you like it or not,’ he told his officers, ‘is not up for discussion. You quite simply are not to like it. Any more than a German man should like a Jewess. In a hard war, everyone must have learned to hate his enemy unreservedly.’ In 1944 an experienced U-boat captain ordered his officers to remove a picture of Hitler from a bulkhead, saying, ‘There will be no idolatory here.’ He was denounced, accused of undermining the crew’s fighting spirit, arrested and executed.
In May and June 1942, a million tons of shipping were sunk in United States eastern coastal waters, often by submarines firing torpedoes at vessels silhouetted against the blaze of shore lights. In the year as a whole, six million tons went to the bottom. America’s merchant fleet paid dearly for the US Navy’s refusal to join the established Canadian convoy network, and to heed British experience. The Germans began to concentrate ‘wolf packs’ of up to a dozen U-boats, to swamp convoy escort groups. Changes of Kriegsmarine ciphers caused periodic ‘blackouts’ of Allied signal interception, with severe consequences for convoys unable to avoid submarine lines. But the Allies progressively raised their game: antisubmarine warfare techniques improved and escort numbers grew; naval radar sets profited from the introduction of cavity magnetron technology; escort groups gained from TBS – Talk Between Ships – voice communication, and even more from experience.
To hunt and sink U-boats, close collaboration between two or three warships was vital: a single ship could seldom drop depth-charges with sufficient accuracy to achieve a ‘kill’. It became difficult for the Germans to operate close to the US or British coasts, within range of air patrols. U-boats could travel fast only on the surface; submerged craft struggled to intercept a convoy. Overhead aircraft forced them to dive, a more effective counter-measure than bomber attacks on the concrete-encased U-boat ‘pens’ of Brest and Lorient, which cost the RAF much wasted effort. In 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic focused increasingly on a thousand-mile width of sea beyond reach of most shore-based planes. There Dönitz concentrated his forces, and convoys ran the gauntlet for four to six days of peril.
SC104, a typical convoy of thirty-six merchantmen arrayed in six columns, sailed eastward in October 1942 at seven knots – barely eight mph of land speed – with an escort of two destroyers – Fame and Viscount – and four corvettes – Acanthus, Eglantine, Montbretia and Potentilla. The first hint of a looming threat came four days after leaving Newfoundland, at 1624 on 12 October, when ‘Huff-Duff’ detected a U-boat radio transmission to starboard; soon afterwards, a second submarine was identified. As night fell, in heavy seas the escorts took up stations ahead and on the flanks of the merchantmen. Conditions were appalling, especially aboard the corvettes, which rolled continuously. Half-drowned bridge crews struggled to keep awake and alert, knowing that even when their four-hour watches ended they were unlikely to find hot food or dry clothing in waterlogged mess decks. If engineers and stokers in machinery spaces were warmer below, they were unfailingly conscious of their diminished prospects of escape if a ship was hit – 42 per cent of such victims perished, against 25 per cent of deck ratings. For weeks on end, strain and discomfort were constants, even before the enemy struck.
That night of 12 October, visibility for convoy SC104 was four miles between snow showers. Just before midnight, a U-boat was detected four miles astern: Fame turned and raced to launch a radar-guided attack. Just before it reached the U-boat’s position, the pounding of the seas disabled the radar, blinding the destroyer. After a fruitless thirty-minute visual and Asdic search, Fame returned to its station. Soon afterwards Eglantine conducted another unsuccessful hunt for a U-boat to starboard. At 0508 the escorts heard a heavy explosion, and fired ‘Snowflake’ illuminants. Amid crashing waves which rendered both radar and Asdic almost useless, nothing was seen. An hour later, the escort commander learned that during the night three ships had been sunk without showing sight or sound of distress; a corvette was sent back to search for survivors.
Throughout the daylight hours of 13 October the convoy struggled through mountainous seas, occasionally glimpsing U-boats which submerged before they could be attacked. That night, two more merchantmen were torpedoed. At 2043 Viscount spotted a submarine on the surface at a range of eight hundred yards. Spray blinded her gunners; the enemy dived as the destroyer closed to ram, the bridge crew catching a last glimpse of the U-boat’s conning tower thirty yards distant. Again and again through the night, escorts pursued contacts without success. The senior officer’s feelings, in his own words, ‘amounted almost to despair’. At dawn he found that half the convoy had lost formation during the night’s terrible weather; nine of the stragglers were rounded up, but six ships had been sunk, and the passage was only half over.
The struggle continued through 14 October, with four U-boats identified around the convoy. At nightfall, to captains’ relief visibility worsened, making submarine attacks more difficult. The convoy changed course repeatedly to throw off its pursuers. During the following night, escorts attacked six successive radar contacts. One of these took place at 2331, when Viscount picked up a U-boat at 6,200 yards. Her captain closed to ram at twenty-six knots; the U-boat commander took evasive action, but made a disastrous misjudgement which swung his craft across Viscount’s bows. The destroyer smashed into the submarine twenty feet aft of its conning tower, then rode up onto the stricken enemy’s hull. The U-boat swung clear, under fire from every calibre of British gun, and finally received a depth-charge at point-blank range. U-619 sank stern-first at 2347. Yet success was dearly bought: the damaged Viscount was obliged to set immediate course for Liverpool, where it arrived safely two nights later, needing months of dockyard repairs.
At sunrise on 16 October came the welcome sight of a long-range Liberator, the first covering aircraft to reach the convoy: SC104 had passed through the mid-Atlantic ‘air gap’. The Norwegian navy’s Potentilla transferred a hundred survivors from her packed messdecks to a merchantman. The morning was uneventful, but at 1407 Fame’s Asdic detected a U-boat at 2,000 yards, and attacked with depth-charges five minutes later. The subsequent drama was played out in the midst of the convoy, with merchantmen steaming past on both sides. A large bubble exploded onto the surface, followed by the dramatic spectacle of a U-boat bursting forth with water cascading off its hull, to meet a hail of gunfire. Fame ran alongside, scraping her bottom, and launched a whaler as German crewmen dived over the side. A courageous British officer scrambled into the conning tower, seized an armful of documents from the submarine’s control room, then made his escape seconds before U-253 sank.
But Fame, like Viscount, suffered heavily in the collision. Her captain repented his decision to ram, as crewmen struggled for hours to close great gashes in the ship’s hull with collision mats and baulks of timber. With pumps straining to keep ahead of sea water gushing into the engine room, Fame followed Viscount towards Liverpool, and thence into dockyard hands. Four slow corvettes now remained to escort twenty-eight ships. At 2140 that night of 16 October, yet another U-boat was detected by Potentilla. The two approached each other at full speed before Potentilla’s captain swerved at the last moment, to avoid a thirty-two-knot collision which must have been fatal to his own small vessel. The corvette’s four-inch gun, pom-poms and Oerlikons blazed at the submarine, but it escaped almost unscathed. This was SC104’s last serious action: despite some false alarms, 17 October passed in thick fog without significant incident. Two days later, the merchantmen entered the Mersey, cheered by news that a VLR Liberator had sunk a third submarine, U-661, close to their track.
This convoy’s experiences, each one sufficiently harrowing to represent the drama of a lifetime save in the circumstances of a world at war, were repeated again and again by merchantmen and escorts on the Atlantic run. Moreover, such losses were relatively light for the period. Later that October fifteen ships of SC107 were sunk, while SC125 lost thirteen in a seven-day battle, without destroying a single U-boat. In 1942 as a whole, 1,160 Allied merchantmen were sunk by submarines. Just as the tide of the war was turning dramatically against the Axis, Britain was confronted with its most serious import shortfall. In the winter of 1942 Dönitz’s wolf packs reached their greatest strength, with over a hundred U-boats at sea. The North African campaign, and especially