Black May (26 page)
Authors: Michael Gannon
This time the sinking was observed by the armed trawler H.M.T.
Northern Spray,
commanded by Lieutenant F. A. J. Downer, R.N.R. The victim was not the type of passenger steamer Gretschel identified, but a 4,635-GRT freighter of the North Shipping Company in Newcastle. Named
North Britain,
she had straggled from the convoy in bad weather on Saturday, 1 May, had rejoined on the 4th, but then had straggled six miles astern again with boiler trouble. The record does not state how many of Gretschel’s torpedoes hit home, but is clear that his victim, which was in ballast, sank very quickly, stern first, inside two minutes.
35
The time was 0027 on 5 May.
Northern Spray,
which was nearby, carried out an “Observant” around the spot of sinking but failed to make asdic contact. No boats or life jacket lights could be seen, and the trawler reported to
Tay
that there were no survivors of the crew of over forty. Then, at 0055, some lights were sighted, and ten minutes later the trawler discovered a waterlogged lifeboat and a raft. Repeatedly the lifeboat was brought alongside, but the ten exhausted crewmen inside it made only lethargic efforts to get out. Finally, they and an eleventh survivor on the raft were taken on board, and
Northern Spray
proceeded to the positions of other sinkings.
36
Hasenschar, the contact-keeper in U
—628,
was next to open a fighting account. With seven other boats of his knowledge in contact with the convoy by dusk (U-707, U-202,
U-264,
U
-265, U-168, U-732,
and
U-378),
he thought himself free to shed his shadower’s role—
Somit ist für mich Angriff freigegeben:
37
I move toward the convoy columns [on the surface] so I can attack just at the beginning of night. The sea state is 3–4, moderating with
a light swell. Visibility is good. As it gets darker the starboard bow escort steams far off to the west and a second destroyer heads south. I’m successful in getting through the hole between them, and now, at first darkness, I’m in contact with the main body of the convoy. Positioned west of the convoy, I start my attack.… I don’t think it’s advisable to proceed any closer because escorts on the beam can approach me at short range. In spite of the great distance to target I decide to launch exactly aimed individual shots, because I have precisely calculated target data. All Etos are hot and ready.… At 0043–0046 I launch from Tubes I through IV at five
[sic]
different freighters in a row, range 4000 to 5000 meters, torpedo depth set to three meters.… Then I turn to starboard and make a [single] stern launch, after which I take off on the surface, full speed, toward the northeast because the starboard escorts have moved in my direction again. Calculating from the time of the first torpedo launch, there were four hits, the first after a run of 7 minutes, 58 seconds, the last after 9 minutes, 30 seconds. There was a 3-minute interval between the launch from [bow] Tube I and the launch from [stern] Tube V. We could only observe three hits. The first, which had a high detonation column, was on a large freighter. The others were on two medium-sized freighters. One explosion was very large, so one could assume a sinking. The third freighter hit shoots two white rockets and begins to burn. As we back off from the scene, a muffled explosion is heard at 0105 from the first, large freighter, possibly a boiler explosion. A large black cloud of smoke hangs over the ship for a long time. Then there is nothing more that can be seen of the ship. In the boat we can hear the noises of a sinking ship. The ship sinks. As we continue our withdrawal the rear echelons of the convoy send up illumination flares continuously. Some of the flares are very close, but we are not spotted.… Because I have one eel left I decide to return to the scene in order to sink a ship that might be damaged.… At 0225 I observe a shadow with a weak red masthead light. At first it shows little aim-off bearing. For a short while I pursue it with diesels at slow ahead. Now we recognize it to be a corvette, hove-to, bearing 110°. I approach to a range of 800 meters and at 0302 launch a single eel, set at 4 meters depth, from Tube III. After 28 seconds running time there is a huge tongue of flame, followed by spark showers, then nothing more to be seen. A strong shockwave followed. I guess that the entire D/C stowage exploded. The corvette had literally gone up in thin air.
38
Later, in reporting these attacks to BdU, Hasenschar stated that he had sunk one large freighter, probably had sunk a medium-size freighter, had left a third freighter burning, and had blown a corvette to pieces—”
Atomisiert.”
39
But the twenty-six-year-old Commander was peering through rose-colored binoculars. Only one ship was hit by his torpedo barrage: the 5,081-GRT freighter
Harbury,
with a cargo of 6,820 tons of anthracite coal. As for the vaporized corvette,
Snowflake, Sunflower,
and
Loosestrife—Pink
was on another course—continued rolling and pitching on their assigned stations, unscathed by anything but weather. Some of the explosions reported by Hasenschar may have originated with torpedo hits scored in the same time period by U—
264
(see below). Or they may have been end-of-run detonations.
With a loud explosion, but no flash, one of Hasenschar’s wakeless torpedoes struck
Harbury
on the starboard side in No. 5 hold, blowing off its hatches and flooding it. The time was 0046 on 5 May. A fracture in the tunnel door allowed water into the engine room, which began to fill with sea water. The Master, Captain W. E. Cook, made his way to the bridge wings, where he saw that the ship was settling by the stern. Third Officer W. Skinner fired the required white rockets. Only twenty-one or twenty-two years old, Skinner had previously gone down once with a mined ship, a second time with a ship sunk by Japanese aircraft off Ceylon, and, after the latter sinking, he had been sunk yet a third time by a Japanese cruiser that shelled the ship that rescued him. Said Cook later about Skinner’s fourth experience, he was “most reliable and cool.”
As the well deck went under water, Cook switched on the red lights to mark his position, stopped engines, threw overside the weighted Confidential Books, directed a distress W/T message to be transmitted, placed a W/T set in one of the main lifeboats, and ordered Abandon Ship. The crew succeeded in lowering the two main lifeboats amidships, but the starboard quarter small lifeboat had been rendered useless by the explosion, and the port quarter boat capsized on becoming waterborne. Several lives were lost when a knot of crewmen stranded aft were forced to jump into the sea. Cook remained on board with two crewmen and searched the ‘midship accommodation to make sure that all fifty-one crewmen, including seven Navy and two Army
gunners, had gotten off. Near midnight the ship gave a “grinding and wrenching” sound from aft, leading Cook and the two ratings to think that
Harbury
was sinking. They hurriedly boarded the forward starboard raft, cast off the painter, and drifted away into a heavy swell and dark night. In the distance they sighted two white lights, which they assumed belonged to the lifeboats.
Around
0320
they observed a shower of sparks and heard a loud explosion, which they interpreted to be an end-of-run torpedo detonation, and an hour and ten minutes later they sighted
Northern Spray.
Cook attracted the trawler’s attention using a newly issued handheld rocket that threw up five flares. With some difficulty because of the rough sea and the lack of ring bolts or cleats on merchant ship rafts to which lines might have been made fast, the trawler hauled on board the raft’s occupants and, a short time later, those also from the lifeboats, making a total of forty-four men rescued, six of whom were slightly injured. Seven were missing.
In the morning
(0900),
Cook, with his Chief Officer and the First Lieutenant of the trawler, took a boat to inspect
Harbury
and to secure flour and potatoes from her pantry to replenish the trawler’s dwindling stock. They found water ten feet high in the engine room, above the dynamos, and saw that the sea was pouring into No.
4
main hold. All indications were that
Harbury
would sink. At
1000
the boat party returned to
Northern Spray.
A month and a half later, Cook would say: “I did not see my ship again, but in view of her condition I am certain that she eventually sank. Aircraft were sent out the following day to the scene
[55°oi’N
,
42°59
‘W] but no sign of the ship could be found.”
40
Hasenschar’s KTB, which has not always been reliable, proved to be correct about the fate of the
Harbury
wreck. At
1230
on the afternoon of
5
May, while proceeding underwater near the position 55°14'N,
43°02W,
Hasenschar sighted a stopped, presumably damaged, freighter in his periscope lens. He surfaced, decks awash, long enough to make an observation from the bridge, then submerged again:
I approach the freighter with full speed underwater. With the periscope I can see that the steamer has been abandoned. It has a slight list to starboard and it’s down by the stern. Lifeboats hang out
of their davit arms. Stairs and lines hang outboard. At 14511 surface and clear the guns at a distance of 300–400 meters. With 40 rounds of 8.8 fire from the forward deck gun and 100 2cm armor-piercing shells we get the freighter to sink.… It lists to starboard and then capsizes.… The vessel displays a repainted shipping company insignia of the “Harrison Line” on the funnel. A drifting cutter with sail nearby carries the name “Harbury”. The freighter fits the silhouette of that type. I assume that this is the damaged ship that we torpedoed the night before.
He was right.
S.S. Harbury
was owned by J. & C. Harrison Ltd., of Mark Lane, London. Hasenschar also identified this derelict as
Harbury
in his
Schussmeldungen,
unfortunately the only shooting reports to survive in German archives from any U-boat operating in May 1943.
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The young Commander would go down with his boat on 3 July 1943 northwest of Cape Ortegal, Spain.
Hard on the heels of
Harbury
s torpedo, two more ships took hits, the work of Kptlt. Hartwig Looks in
U—264.
At 0014, Looks placed his Type VIIC boat ahead of the convoy, on the surface, with the intention of attacking inside the port bow and port beam escorts (
Sunflower
and
Snowflake
). A “destroyer”
(Tay)
visible to the north did not see him in the overcast weather, visibility good but very dark, rough sea with heavy swell, wind from the southwest Force 5. At 0100,14 minutes after
Harbury
was struck, Looks made his move:
I have a group of five steamers ahead of me, three at approximately 1500 meters and two behind them at about 2500 meters.… At 0102 I launch two fan shots at the larger two of the three nearest ships, one launch of two eels from Tubes II and III at a 6000-tonner and another launch of two from Tubes II and IV at a 5000-tonner. Range 1500 meters, angle on the bow 3.8° and 3.9°, respectively. Torpedo depth set to 3 meters. I then turn hard-a-starboard and launch a fifth eel from the stern tube at a 4500 GRT freighter. All five eels hit home. The first fan launch at the 6000-tonner detonates after runs of one minute, 22 seconds and one minute, 26 seconds, one hitting amidships and the other 20 meters from the stern. Two high smoke columns can be seen. The second fan launch hits the 5000-tonner at the same locations on the hull after runs of one
minute, 47 seconds and one minute, 51 seconds. Again there are two high detonation columns. The single launch from Tube V hit the 4500-tonner amidships under the funnel. There is a very high detonation column topped by a large mushroom cloud. I suspect that all three steamers will sink because of the good positioning of the hits. I take off as fast as I can. A destroyer heads toward me from the north at high speed. The steamers I hit shoot up white rockets.
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Looks’s observations were in the main correct. The larger two steamers were each hit by two torpedoes. But the stern launch at the “4500-tonner” missed, and since no other ship in the convoy was struck within the previous 19 minutes or during the one hour and 17 minutes that followed, there is no accounting for the third explosive scene described by Looks and reported by him to BdU at 0234. The first vessel hit was
West Maximus,
a 5,561-GRT American Hog Islander general cargo vessel in ballast, with 745 tons of slag, ship No. 22 in column 2 on the port side of the convoy. Twenty-five seconds later, a British freighter, the 4,586-GRT
Harperley,
No. 13 on the outside port column I, took the first of two torpedoes that would puncture her hull.
Neither of the two merchant seamen lookouts on the bridge nor any of the nineteen U.S. Navy gunners at their stations, sighted a wake from the first torpedo absorbed by
West Maximus
The explosion, which caused the entire ship to shudder, blew open the port side in the after peak tank and took away part of the stern section. The second torpedo, entering No. 3 hold on the port side, demolished No. 3 aft bulkhead, flooded the fire room, showered the vessel with fuel oil, and buckled the deck plates so badly, said the Naval Armed Guard commander, Lieutenant (jg) J. C. Dea, U.S.N.R., that “it was virtually impossible to walk on the deck.” The Master, Captain Earl E. Brooks, immediately ordered Abandon Ship. Of the sixty men on board—thirty-nine merchant crew, nineteen gunners, and two U.S. Army passengers—all but four made it safely down the nets and ladders into four lifeboats, from which, eventually, they were delivered by
Northern Spray.
The freighter went down by the bow at 0135, taking with her the Confidential Books, which Captain Brooks had, for one reason or another, neglected to deep-six. Neither had he gotten off a W/T distress signal nor fired
white rockets—though, in Lt. Dea’s opinion, “torpedoed ships should not throw out white flares, as they illuminate the area and create visible targets.”