Their Finest Hour (70 page)

From this moment the moulds had been shaped for the supreme events of 1941. We, of course, had no knowledge of the bargainings between Germany and Russia for dividing the spoils of our Empire and for our destruction; nor could we measure the as yet unformed intentions of Japan. The main troop movements of the German armies eastward had not yet become apparent to our active Intelligence Service. Only the infiltration and gradual massing in Bulgaria and Rumania could be discerned. Had we known what is set forth in this chapter, we should have been greatly relieved. The combination against us of Germany, Russia, and Japan was the worst of our fears. But who could tell? Meanwhile, “Fight on!”

Disguised Surface Raiders — Excursion of the “Scheer” — The “Jervis Bay” Saves the Convoy — Further Depredations of the “Scheer” — A Surprise for the “Hipper” — Disproportionate Strains — The U-Boat Peril Dominates — Increasing Stranglehold upon the Northwestern Approaches — Grievous Losses — A Cruel Stroke of Fortune — The Diver’s Anxieties — Need to Shift the Control from Plymouth to Liverpool — Sharp Contraction of Imports — Losses off the Bloody Foreland — Withdrawal of the Irish Subsidies — My Telegram to the President of December
13
— A Sombre Admiralty Proposal — The Dynamite Carpet — Reinforcement and Stimulation of the Air Force Coastal Command — Eventual Success of Their Counter-Offensive.

T
HE
destruction of the
Graf Spee
in the action off the Plate in December 1939, had brought to an abrupt end the first German campaign against our shipping in the wide oceans. The fighting in Norway had, as we have seen, paralysed for the time being the German Navy in home waters. What was left of it was necessarily reserved for the invasion project. Admiral Raeder, whose ideas on the conduct of the German war at sea were technically sound, had some difficulty in carrying his views in the Fuehrer’s councils. He had even at one time to resist a proposal made by the Army to disarm all his heavy ships and use their guns for long-range batteries on shore. During the summer, however, he had fitted out a number of merchant ships as disguised raiders. They were more powerfully armed, were generally faster than our armed merchant cruisers, and were provided with reconnaissance aircraft. Five ships of this type evaded our patrols and entered the Atlantic between April and June, 1940, whilst a sixth undertook the hazardous northeast passage to the Pacific along the north coasts of Russia and Siberia. Assisted by a Russian ice-breaker, she succeeded in making the passage in two months, and emerged into the Pacific through the Bering Sea in September. The object which Admiral Raeder laid down for the conduct of these ships was threefold: first, to destroy or capture enemy ships; secondly, to dislocate shipping movements; and, thirdly, to force the dispersion of British warships for escort and patrol to counter the menace. These well-conceived tactics caused us both injury and embarrassment. By the first weeks of September, these five disguised raiders were loose upon our trade routes. Two of them were working in the Atlantic, two others in the Indian Ocean, and the fifth, after laying mines off Auckland, New Zealand, was in the Pacific. Only two contacts were made with them during the whole year. On July 29,
Raider E
was engaged in the South Atlantic by the armed merchant-cruiser
Alcantara,
but escaped after an inconclusive action. In December another armed merchant cruiser, the
Carnarvon Castle,
attacked her again off the Plate River, but she escaped after some damage. Up till the end of September, 1940, these five raiders sank or captured thirty-six ships, amounting to 235,000 tons.

At the end of October, 1940, the pocket battleship
Scheer
was at last ready for service. When the invasion of England had been shelved, she left Germany on October 27, and broke out into the Atlantic through the Denmark Strait north of Iceland. She was followed a month later by the eight-inch gun cruiser,
Hipper.
The
Scheer
had orders to attack the North Atlantic convoys, from which the battleship escorts had been withdrawn to reinforce the Mediterranean. Captain Krancke believed that a homeward-bound convoy had left Halifax on October 27, and he hoped to intercept it about November 3. On the 5th his aircraft reported eight ships in the southeast, and he set off in pursuit. At 2.27
P.M.
he sighted a single ship, the
Mopan,
which he sank by gunfire after taking on board the crew of sixty-eight. By threats he had been able to prevent any wireless reports being made by the
Mopan.
At 4.50
P.M.
, whilst thus occupied, the masts of the convoy H.X. 84, consisting of thirty-seven ships, appeared over the horizon. In the centre of the convoy was the ocean escort, the armed merchant cruiser
Jervis Bay.
Her commanding officer, Captain Fegen, R.N., realised at once that he was faced with hopeless odds. His one thought, after reporting the presence of the enemy by wireless, was to engage the pocket battleship for as long as possible and thus gain time for the convoy to disperse. Darkness approached, and there would then be a chance of many escaping. While the convoy scattered, the
Jervis Bay
closed his overwhelming antagonist at full speed. The
Scheer
opened fire at eighteen thousand yards. The shots of the old six-inch guns of the
Jervis Bay
fell short. The one-sided fight lasted till 6
P.M.
, when the
Jervis Bay,
heavily on fire and completely out of control, was abandoned. She finally sank about eight o’clock with the loss of over two hundred officers and men. With them perished Captain Fegen, who went down with the ship. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for his heroic conduct, which takes an honoured place in the records of the Royal Navy.

Not until the end of the fight did the
Scheer
pursue the convoy, but the wintry night had now closed in. The ships had scattered and she was able to overtake and sink only five before darkness fell. She could not afford, now that her position was known, to remain in the area, on which she expected that powerful British forces would soon converge. The great majority of this valuable convoy was therefore saved by the devotion of the
Jervis Bay.
The spirit of the merchant seamen was not unequal to that of their escort. One ship, the tanker
San Demetrio,
carrying seven thousand tons of petrol, was set on fire and abandoned. But the next morning part of the crew reboarded the ship, put out the fire, and then, after gallant efforts, without compasses or navigational aids, brought the ship into a British port with her precious cargo. In all, however, 47,000 tons of shipping and 206 merchant seamen were lost.

Scheer,
determined to place as many miles as possible between herself and her pursuers, steamed south, where ten days later she met a German supply ship and replenished her fuel and stores. On November 24, she appeared in the West Indies, where she sank the
Port Hobart,
outward-bound to Curaçao, and then doubled back to the Cape Verde Islands. Her later activities were spread over the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and not till April, 1941, did she return to Kiel, after again successfully traversing the Denmark Strait. Her five months’ cruise had yielded a harvest of sixteen ships of 99,000 tons sunk or captured.

* * * * *

From June onward the troop convoys (called by the code name “W.S.”)
¹
sailed monthly under heavy escort round the Cape to the Middle East and India. At the same time the numerous troop convoys between ports in the Indian Ocean and the continuous stream of Canadian troops reaching this country from across the Atlantic threw the utmost strain on our naval resources. Thus we could not reinstitute the hunting groups which had scoured the seas for the
Graf Spee
in 1939. Our cruisers were disposed in the focal areas near the main shipping routes, and ships sailing independently had to rely on evasive routing and the vastness of the ocean.

On Christmas Day, 1940, convoy W.S. 5A, consisting of twenty troopships and supply ships for the Middle East, was approaching the Azores when it was attacked by the cruiser
Hipper,
which had followed the
Scheer
out a month later. Visibility was poor and the
Hipper
was unpleasantly surprised to find that the escort comprised the cruisers
Berwick, Bona-venture,
and
Dunedin.
There was a brief, sharp action between the
Hipper
and the
Berwick,
in which both ships were damaged. The
Hipper
made off, and in the mist succeeded in escaping to Brest, in spite of strenuous efforts by the Home Fleet and by Force “H” from Gibraltar to catch her, but only one ship of the convoy, which carried over thirty thousand men, the
Empire Trooper,
had to put into Gibraltar for repairs.

We could not regard the state of the outer oceans without uneasiness. We knew that disguised merchant ships in unknown numbers were preying in all the southern waters. The pocket battleship
Scheer
was loose and hidden. The
Hipper
might break out at any moment from Brest, and the two German battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
must also soon be expected to play their part.

The enormous disproportion between the numbers of the raiders and the forces the Admiralty had to employ to counter them and guard the immense traffic has been explained in Volume I. The Admiralty had to be ready at many points and give protection to thousands of merchant vessels, and could give no guarantee except for troop convoys against occasional lamentable disasters.

* * * * *

A far graver danger was added to these problems. The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. Invasion, I thought, even before the air battle, would fail. After the air victory it was a good battle for us. We could drown and kill this horrible foe in circumstances favourable to us, and, as he evidently realised, bad for him. It was the kind of battle which, in the cruel conditions of war, one ought to be content to fight. But now our life-line, even across the broad oceans and especially in the entrances to the island, was endangered. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.

The Admiralty, with whom I lived in the closest amity and contact, shared these fears, all the more because it was their prime responsibility to guard our shores from invasion and to keep the life-lines open to the outer world. This had always been accepted by the Navy as their ultimate, sacred, inescapable duty. So we poised and pondered together on this problem. It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achieve ments. It manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.

How much would the U-boat warfare reduce our imports and shipping? Would it ever reach the point where our life would be destroyed? Here was no field for gestures or sensations; only the slow, cold drawing of lines on charts, which showed potential strangulation. Compared with this there was no value in brave armies ready to leap upon the invader, or in a good plan for desert warfare. The high and faithful spirit of the people counted for nought in this bleak domain. Either the food, supplies, and arms from the New World and from the British Empire arrived across the oceans, or they failed. With the whole French seaboard from Dunkirk to Bordeaux in their hands, the Germans lost no time in making bases for their U-boats and co-operating aircraft in the captured territory. From July onward we were compelled to divert our shipping from the approaches south of Ireland, where of course we were not allowed to station fighter aircraft. All had to come in around Northern Ireland. Here, by the grace of God, Ulster stood a faithful sentinel. The Mersey, the Clyde were the lungs through which we breathed. On the east coast and in the English Channel small vessels continued to ply under an ever-increasing attack by air, by E-boat
²
and by mines. As it was impossible to vary the east coast route, the passage of each convoy between the Forth and London became almost every day an action in itself. Few large ships were risked on the east coast and none at all in the Channel.

The losses inflicted on our merchant shipping became most grave during the twelve months from July ‘40 to July ‘41, when we could claim that the British Battle of the Atlantic was won. Far heavier losses occurred when the United States entered the war before any convoy system was set up along their eastern coast. But then we were no longer alone. The last six months of 1940 showed extremely heavy losses, modified only by the winter gales, and no great slaughter of U-boats. We gained some advantage by larger patterning of depth-charges and by evasive routing; but the invasion threat required strong concentrations in the Narrow Seas and our great volume of anti-U-boat new construction only arrived gradually. This shadow hung over the Admiralty and those who shared their knowledge. The week ending September 22 showed the highest rate of loss since the beginning of the war, and was in fact greater than any we had suffered in a similar period in 1917. Twenty-seven ships of nearly 160,000 tons were sunk, many of them in a Halifax convoy. In October, while the
Scheer
was also active, another Atlantic convoy was massacred by U-boats, twenty ships being sunk out of thirty-four.

As November and December drew on, the entrances and estuaries of the Mersey and the Clyde far surpassed in mortal significance all other factors in the war. We could of course at this time have descended upon de Valera’s Ireland and regained the southern ports by force of modern arms. I had always declared that nothing but self-preservation would lead me to this. But perhaps the case of self-preservation might come. Then so be it. Even this hard measure would only have given a mitigation. The only sure remedy was to secure free exit and entrance in the Mersey and the Clyde.