World War II Behind Closed Doors (22 page)

The next day, 27 May, the attacks increased. ‘We were acting in cooperation with the German air force’, says Jürgen Oesten,
⁸¹
a decorated U-boat captain who was coordinating the operation from his base in northern Norway. ‘The information we would get from the air force – about change of course and so on – meant we could
place our boats in the relevant position’. And paradoxically, given the danger that the convoy crews faced, for these U-boat crews the Arctic was one of the safest places to fight: ‘We lost more boats, relatively speaking, in the Atlantic than in the ice [the Arctic]’.

As a general rule, U-boats did not attack British convoys in the manner of popular myth – attempting to sink the ships by launching torpedoes while submerged. ‘The submarines then’, says Jürgen Oesten, ‘were not actually what you would call submarines nowadays. They were surface vessels that could dive. But the problem was that when they went under the surface they were practically stationary – they could only manage very slow speeds’. As a result, the preferred method of attack was at night, on the surface. ‘For instance’, says Oesten, ‘with the three U-boats I had during the war, I sank twenty ships. But nineteen I sank at night on the surface’.

Pounded by German air attacks during the day, and subjected to the torpedoes of the U-boats at night, the ships of PQ16 ploughed their way towards the Soviet Union and the Barents Sea. The sailors aboard those ships wondered how many of them would make the journey alive, as each mile they steamed north seemed more perilous than the last. On the morning of 27 May Eddie Grenfell saw a whole ship on fire, lying dead in the water, and standing on the deck amidst the flames was an elderly man: ‘We were close to it, and we yelled at him to jump into the sea because the whole ship was ablaze, and he wouldn't. And all we could see was this ship disappearing behind us, with this chap absolutely resigned to his fate – this look of resignation, staring into the sky. We never saw him again. That was it’.

Then, at around quarter to two that afternoon, Grenfell and the rest of the crew of the
Empire Lawrence
saw a group of Junkers 88 bombers circling overhead. They appeared to be checking whether this was the ship that had launched a fighter plane into the sky the previous day. And, once they saw the catapult on the forward deck and confirmed their suspicion, they launched an attack. The
Empire Lawrence
was hit by the first bomber, and slowly began to sink. Captain Darkin gave the order to abandon ship and the lifeboats were lowered.

Then, just as Eddie Grenfell reached the upper deck, the dive bombers attacked en masse, dropping high explosive and firing machine guns. ‘And the funny thing is’, he says, ‘you don't hear the explosion. The ship heaves. There's a bit of a thump. But you expect when a bomb hits to get an explosion – you don't. You just feel the thump and then the ship rises out of the water’.

Grenfell dived to the floor, and when the planes had finished the bombing run he discovered he was covered with bodies. He had to push and squeeze to escape the mound of badly wounded or dead crewmen on top of him. ‘Then there was another attack – we were hit by four bombers altogether, and the last bomb obviously went into the ammunition dump and the whole ship just exploded. I shall never forget it. I flew through the air. I must have been on my back because when I was looking upwards I could see pieces of steel going through the air with me. It was like slow motion. And one of the pieces looked like the ship's funnel. And the next thing I knew I was deep down [in the sea] – I can't remember hitting the water. All I remember was being deep down in the sea’.

The ship exploded just as Neil Hulse was about to get into the lifeboat. ‘I can remember being blown up into the air with ventilators, derricks, hatch-boards coming up into the air with me – and some other seamen like me were blown up. We hit the water. One of our lifeboats was upside-down, and quite a few brave seamen were hanging on to it in these icy conditions’.

Meantime, Eddie Grenfell had been pushed to the surface by the explosion of the
Empire Lawrence's
boiler. But his troubles were not over. ‘I got to the surface and I started to sink again. And I was panic-stricken. I thought: “Well, I survived that [and] here I am going down again”. So I pulled…and there was something on my arm…. A head appeared with a piece of shrapnel right down the middle – there was grey matter oozing from it, obviously his brains’.

Eddie's shipmate had grabbed on to his pullover before he died and was now acting as a weight, dragging him under water. ‘So I pulled him up, loosened his grip, and he just floated away’.

Once he was free of the body of his comrade, he clambered on to the top of an upturned lifeboat by pushing his fingers into the joints in the clinker-built hull and hauling himself up. But it was, he believed, only a temporary postponement of death: ‘When I first got on to the lifeboat, and I couldn't see any other ships, I thought we were gone. I thought we were going to be left there, as did happen on some occasions in the Arctic…. [I was] a bit panic-stricken, thinking: “Oh, God!” I'd only just got married a couple of months before’.

Neil Hulse too had managed to get out of the water – by climbing on to a small raft. The young aircraftsman who shared his refuge said to him: ‘You've got your leg off, sir. I think your leg's off’. Hulse felt down his back, and at the base of his spine ‘could feel what I thought was bone… I mean, I really thought I'd lost my leg’. Summoning up his courage, he looked behind to inspect the damage. It turned out that his leg was intact, but sticking into his ‘starboard buttock’ was ‘a small plank of wood with six-inch nails’. Then, as the minutes went by with no sign of rescue, his thoughts turned to how death in the Arctic Sea would be such a ‘lonely’ way to leave this world. ‘I was going through the fact of having loved the sea…but I thought I would never ever have any more life’.

Eddie Grenfell and the other men clinging on to the upturned lifeboat were lucky – they were picked up by one of the Royal Navy escort vessels, a corvette: ‘When we got on board we couldn't walk or anything. We were carried because we'd lost the use of our legs’. The same corvette then moved towards Neil Hulse and his companion. But the ship was under attack from Junkers 88 bombers, so the sailors on board shouted over by loud hailer that they planned to sail straight past, and the two men would get just one chance to jump and catch hold of the scrambling nets that hung down the side of the moving ship.

Are you fit enough to jump if we come near you?' they shouted.

‘I'll jump over the bloody moon if you come close – don't worry about that!’ replied Neil Hulse.

But his legs were frozen, so when the ship came close some of the sailors had to lean over and help drag him, and then his companion, off the raft. Once on board, Neil's clothes were cut from him and he was wrapped in blankets and taken down to the engine room to thaw out. There he was offered several glasses of ‘Nelson's Blood’ (rum), and an hour later, was singing ‘Nellie Dean’. Later, when he had sobered up and regained feeling in his legs, he was asked to report to the captain on the bridge: ‘He said, “Well, I'm very sorry to say that you are the only surviving officer from your ship – they are all lost, including your captain who was killed in the explosion”’.

Out of the thirty-six ships that sailed on PQ16, a total of six were sunk by German attack in the Arctic Sea and another ship was destroyed by air attack shortly after arrival in Murmansk. But, horrendous as the suffering on PQ16 had been, the convoy was – by Churchill's definition – a success since 'more than a half of the ships had survived. And politically it had succeeded in demonstrating to Stalin that the British and Americans were prepared to endure hardship in order to help the Soviet war effort.

THE CRISIS GROWS

The Soviets certainly needed help because for the Red Army the next few weeks and months were to be amongst the toughest of the war. After the Soviet defeat at Kharkov, on 28 June 1942 the Germans launched Operation Blue – a massive thrust through the Soviet southern front.

The German advance prospered. It was almost a return to the glory days of the summer of the previous year. The Soviet failure at Kharkov had left a gap in the Red Army's defensive line through which the 1st and 4th German Panzer armies now charged. By the end of July, with German units having advanced as far as the river Don, Hitler decided to divide his forces. Army Group A would head south for the oilfields of the Caucasus, while
Army Group B would advance directly east in the direction of Stalingrad on the river Volga.

Anatoly Mereshko,
⁸²
a Red Army officer, was one of those who tried – and failed – to halt the German advance that summer: ‘The Germans were so confident, which was natural because they moved from Kharkov to the Don’. He recalls that they moved forward ‘having rolled up their sleeves, wearing shorts and singing songs. As for our retreating units, they were really completely demoralised people. They didn't know where they were going and they didn't know where to look for their units’.

But it wasn't just the Red Army that faced defeat in the summer of 1942. The Allied force in North Africa was engaged in a fierce struggle to hold back the German Afrika Korps under Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, with Tobruk eventually falling to the Germans on 21 June. Rolf Mummiger
⁸³
served with Rommel, and recalls seeing piles and piles of bodies of Allied soldiers: ‘They must have been lying there for days. I've never forgotten this, and it affected me emotionally very much’. Altogether some seventy thousand British and other Allied troops were killed or captured at Tobruk. It was the lowest point in the campaign in the Western Desert, which had begun nearly two years before with an Italian attack on the British in Egypt.

Churchill was in the White House when he heard the news of the defeat. This was his second wartime visit to America. He had travelled there first in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, arriving on 22 December 1941 and installing himself on the second floor of the White House. The British had been astonished at the lack of clarity in the top echelons of the American command structure. Sir John Dill, Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, wrote to General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff: ‘There are no regular meetings of their Chiefs of Staff, and if they do meet there is no secretariat to record their proceedings. There is no such thing as a Cabinet meeting…. The whole organization belongs to the days of George Washington…’.
⁸⁴

Now, in the summer of 1942, Churchill was trying once again
to keep in touch with military developments amidst Roosevelt's intentionally disorganized White House. And White House staffer George Elsey's first sight of him coincided with the news from Tobruk reaching the Prime Minister. ‘I had to go to the second floor [of the private wing of the White House] to take some papers to Harry Hopkins. And as I went in with papers, trudging across the hall in his bathrobe came the Prime Minister, calling: “Harry! Harry!” Well, Hopkins wasn't there. [So] I stood very erect. I didn't have my cap on so I couldn't salute, but I said: “Good morning, Prime Minister”. And all I got in return was “Harumph!!” and he turned and walked out because Hopkins was not there…. Churchill was in a foul mood that day because he'd had very, very bad news from a defeat in North Africa by Rommel’.

Despite the inauspicious circumstances of Elsey's first encounter with Churchill, ‘none of this was negative: all I had was this positive feeling for this guy – here was a truly great man and I'm honoured and privileged just to be in his presence…. Churchill surprised me by being shorter than I expected – stooped and short and round-shouldered…. But all I knew was here is this God-like figure, saving the West’.

Elsey's blind faith in Churchill was touching, and it illustrated a broader point. For in the summer of 1942 it seemed as if supernatural powers might well be needed to ensure an Allied victory. For shortly after the defeat at Tobruk, the British suffered one of the greatest naval disasters in their history as convoy PQ17 was torn apart.

PQ17 was the largest convoy to set sail for the Soviet Union so far. And it received strong protection in the shape of four destroyers and ten corvettes as immediate support, with the battleships
Duke of York
and USS
Washington
, plus two cruisers and eight destroyers, sailing nearby. During the night of 4 July, the Admiralty in London received intelligence suggesting that the German warship
Tirpitz
, together with the
Admiral Scheer
and
Admiral Hipper
, had left their moorings in Trondheim in Norway and intended to attack the convoy. As a result, the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, sent a signal to Admiral Tovey, the commander of PQ17, reading: ‘Secret
and most immediate: Cruiser force withdraw to westward at high speed’. Another signal was sent to the convoy twelve minutes later: ‘Secret and most immediate: Owing to threat from surface ships, convoy is to disperse and proceed to Russian ports’.
⁸⁵
But having sent this last signal, Pound was anxious lest the simple word ‘disperse’ might cause only a gradual breaking up of the convoy, so less than a quarter of an hour later he sent yet another signal: ‘Secret. Most Immediate: Convoy is to scatter’. What this combination of signals caused was the sense of an imminent attack upon the convoy – something that was far from the case. Indeed, it turned out that the original intelligence was incorrect – the
Tirpitz
and the other German capital ships were not planning on attacking PQ17 at all.

PQ17 had already been under attack from German bombers and U-boats from 2 July, and on the 4th – the day Sir Dudley Pound sent his fateful signals – two ships had been sunk. So it was patently clear that the Germans knew exactly where the convoy was, and the direction in which it was steaming.