Black May (37 page)

Two other events transpired before the plan devised by the U.S. Naval Attache’s one-man Bay research branch was formally presented.
First, the Admiralty produced its own similar plan for the Bay. Second, a trial of the two plans was flown by Coastal Command from 6 to 15 February under the code name Operation Gondola. Although authorship of the Admiralty’s plan was credited to Blackett, he suggested in a eulogy of Williams (who died in 1945) that the calculations had been done by Williams during the winter of 1942–1943, when “he worked out in great detail the best methods of conducting such an offensive by a balanced force of day and night aircraft equipped with the latest forms of 10 cm. radar.”
¹¹

Williams (or Blackett) shared the plan with Raushenbush, who drew up a one-page summary of comparisons and differences between the two sets of numbers. Both plans called for a total force of 260 heavy aircraft. Where Raushenbush estimated that the force required 160 additional aircraft, Williams estimated 190. Where Raushenbush envisioned a four-month offensive, Williams called for a full year’s endurance of effort. Both plans anticipated 150 U-boat transits a month in the Bay during spring 1943 (which proved to be too high). The average number of sorties per aircraft per month were approximately the same, as were the ratios of sightings to attacks, attacks to kills, and attacks to damaged U-boats. Where Raushenbush predicted twenty-five kills per month and thirty-four boats damaged, Williams anticipated twenty-two kills and twenty-two damaged.’
¹²

The nine-day Gondola trial did not exactly replicate either plan, since the aircraft of only three of the sixteen squadrons participating in whole or in part were equipped with 10-centimeter radar: these were United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) Liberator Squadrons Nos. 1, 2, and 224. Altogether, 136 individual aircraft, including L/L Wellingtons and L/L Catalinas, took part in standard patrols that “fanned” southward over the Inner Bay (East), where during the operational period forty U-boats traversed the area, and the Outer Bay (West), where thirty-eight boats transited. Eighteen sightings resulted (only two initiated by centimetric radar), leading to seven attacks. One U-boat was believed sunk by Liberator “T” of No. 2 Squadron, but a recent NHB/MOD reassessment finds that the U-boat attacked, U-752 (Kptlt. Karl-Ernst Schröter), escaped serious injury. Still, the numbers,
particularly those of sightings, and of the reduced flying hours required to make them, seemed provisionally to validate the Raushenbush/Admiralty Plans, taking into account the fact that most aircraft, as noted, were not equipped with centimetric radar. After the end of the operation there was a marked drop in the ratio of sightings to flying hours, back to the former low level.

In early March, to Coastal’s great regret, U.S. Admiral King requested the transfer of two USAAF Liberator squadrons from St Eval in Cornwall to Morocco. Air Marshal Slessor stated that their crews had shown “intense energy and enthusiasm” in the anti-U-boat war, and “were just getting into their stride.”
¹³
The loss of these centimetric-equipped aircraft as well as No. 405 Halifax Squadron, which had to be returned to Bomber Command, was a blow to both the Raushenbush and Admiralty Plans. Nonetheless, with the aircraft remaining, including this time the newly operational No. 172 Squadron of centimetric-equipped L/L Wellingtons, another combat trial in the Bay called Operation Enclose was laid on by Coastal for dusk 20 to dawn 28 March.

Curiously, as will be shown below, this was at just the time that Coastal was officially denigrating the Bay Offensive as an uneconomical use of Coastal assets; and indeed, it was on the 22nd that Air Marshal Slessor sent his Note to the A.U. Committee (seen in chapter 3) recommending that the Bay be consigned to the condition of a “residuary legatee.”
¹⁴
Yet Peyton Ward tells us that his naval liaison staff at Northwood made the suggestion for a new trial and that Slessor supported it.
¹⁵
(This was not the last example of Slessor’s paradoxical behavior.) In P. W.'s conception, the Gondola patrol fan (so-called because it spread out slightly to the east and west below the south England and Welsh bases) should be replaced by a single patrol “ribbon” 140 miles wide running north and south across the Bay between longitudes 7° and 10½° W. The width of the ribbon represented the probable maximum distance traveled by a U-boat in 24 hours regardless of the ratio of the time spent surfaced or submerged. The scheme called for aircraft to form a constant stream passing south into the ribbon as far as 44½° N and returning on nearly reciprocal courses. P. W. and his staff
added a fillip to the nighttime flights that was calculated to sow uncertainty and carelessness among the U-boat crews: in addition to the 10-centimeter pulses, aircraft still fitted with metric equipment should send the old familiar metric pulses.

No. 19 Group stood down for a week beforehand in order to conserve energy for a seven-and-a-half day intensive effort. Then, at dusk on the 20th, 115 individual aircraft—10 cm.-equipped Liberators of USAAF No. 224 Squadron, 10cm. L/L Wellingtons, other Wellingtons, Halifaxes, Fortresses, Sunderlands, Whitleys, and one Catalina—began patrolling the ribbon. A week and twelve hours later, their expenditure of 1,300 flying hours had produced twenty-six sightings and fifteen attacks leading to the sinking of
U-663
(Oblt.z.S. Hans-Jürgen Haupt) by Whitley “Q” of No. 10 Squadron Operational Training Unit (O.T.U.), and damage to U
-332
(Oblt.z.S. Eberhard Hüttemann) by Wellington XII “T” of No. 172 Squadron. Since forty-one U-boats crossed the ribbon—the estimate having been forty-two—the significant numbers were one-half the Gondola hours per sighting and twice the ratio of sightings to U-boats on passage. Though those results were still not up to the Raushenbush/Admiralty projections, they were sufficiently promising that Coastal planners began scheduling Enclose II for April—at just the moment, it bears repeating, that AOC-in-C Slessor was proposing to concentrate his air resources on close cover of threatened convoys “at,” he said, “the expense of the Bay patrols.”
¹⁶

When sitting for its twelfth meeting at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday 24 March in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, S.W.I, the A.U. Committee, with Churchill in the chair, found three Papers on their agenda. The first was a Note proposing the Raushenbush Plan, to which Admiral Stark, who since the previous meeting had been made a member of the Committee, was prepared to speak. The second was the Note by Marshal Slessor proposing emphasis of air cover for threatened convoys in preference to Bay patrols. And the third was a Memorandum by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. A. V. Alexander, M.P., and First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, urging that Bomber Command launch new heavy raids
on the Biscay bases.
¹⁷
Because both the U.S. proposal, which the Committee called the Stark Plan, and the Admiralty’s called for the diversion of bombers to the Bay or its bases, and the sense of the Committee was that for the moment those aircraft could only come from Bomber Command’s operations over Germany, it was decided to defer discussion of the three Papers until the next meeting and to invite the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, to present a Paper, if he wished, and to attend the meeting.
¹⁸
Two days before that meeting, the Secretary of the War Cabinet, Sir Edward Bridges, circulated a Note specifying that only thirteen members directly concerned with the agenda Papers should attend. By the meeting date there were three additional Papers on the agenda: the invited response from Air Chief Marshal Harris; Cherwell’s comments on the Raushenbush document; and a new position paper from the Admiralty proposing the Blackett/Williams Plan while supporting the Stark Plan “for its striking and independent support of the Admiralty view.… ”
¹⁹

Not surprisingly, in the meeting of 31 March as in his Memorandum to the Committee (dated 29 March), Marshal Harris took aim at that section of the Admiralty’s latest document that called for the transfer of 190 long-range bombers from the bombing campaign over Germany to the Bay Offensive. The loss of so many aircraft, Harris contended, would mean calling off bomber operations against Germany for the next four months and throwing the whole brunt of fighting Germany upon the Soviet Union—points his Naval opposites no doubt thought exaggerations. The Minutes read: “He did not think it was fully realized what great damage was done by the attacks on U-boat construction yards and accessory factories. There was continuous confirmation that the U-boat construction programme was being considerably interfered with by these attacks and if they were stopped he was certain that the output of U-boats per month would increase.”

As for new attacks on the Biscay bases, which the Admiralty’s earlier Memorandum advocated, the U-boats and their essential services were sheltered under impenetrable concrete, Harris reminded the Committee, and the 10,000 tons dropped recently on the bases at Lorient and
St.-Nazaire had, as the Admiralty themselves conceded, no appreciable effect on U-boat operations.
²⁰
(Slessor, too, was critical of the bombing, at this stage, of the Biscay bases, “which was actually quite useless and resulted merely in spoiling several nice old French towns.”
²¹
) Chief of the Air Staff Portal spoke up in support of “Bomber” Harris, as he was known in the Force, saying of the U.S. Navy and Admiralty proposals that he deprecated the transfer of any of Harris’s bombers to Bay patrols on the strength of “a theoretical calculation.”

But the Bay Offensive had its own determined champions, including First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander, who pointed out that “without the Bay Offensive we cannot hope to kill sufficient U-boats to get the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic, whilst on the other hand it is believed that we can with an adequately equipped Bay offensive sink sufficient U-boats to destroy their morale.” Alexander announced that the Admiralty had revised downward their estimate of the number of additional long-range bombers required: from 190 to 175 if the U-boats possessed new 10cm detection gear, to 55 if they did not. The First Lord reminded the Committee that the enemy could run but he could not hide: “He cannot withdraw from the Bay.” First Sea Lord Pound expressed his conviction that “the provision of additional aircraft in the Bay of Biscay [was] an absolute necessity and not a luxury in the anti-U-boat campaign.” And U.S. Admiral Stark said that unless the Allies got the better of the U-boat, “we should be in a bad way.” By increasing the Bay patrols, he submitted, “we should be able, for the first time, to carry out an all-out offensive against the U-boats.”
²²

Of course, the Prime Minister had the last word, and it was not favorable to the Bay proponents. With only limited forces, he said, it was not possible to devote the maximum number of aircraft to every theater. The distribution must be commensurate with the results obtained, and so far air cover over menaced convoys, as argued by Slessor, and the bombing campaign against Germany, as argued by Harris, were the most productive theaters for the effort and resources invested. Granting that “even if the Bay of Biscay patrols resulted in sinking only three or four U-boats a month and did not reach the higher figures mentioned in some of the Papers, this must be regarded
as a very important object,” Churchill decided that aircraft for that purpose could not be supplied by denuding the essential missions of Coastal and Bomber Commands. Taking a cue from Averell Harriman’s suggestion that the Chiefs of Staff in Washington might find it possible to divert aircraft from other allocations to the Bay, the Prime Minister charged the Air Ministry and the Admiralty with the responsibility for consulting on an estimate of the balance of requirements that might be communicated to the U.S. Government.
²³
Oddly, the only Committee member to have his nose put out of joint by these proceedings was Slessor, one of the winners in the debate. Displaying what had all the earmarks of a fit of pique, he railed at the Admiralty for blindsiding him with the Williams Plan and its request for 190 additional first-line heavies, “without discussing it first with the man most directly concerned, namely myself.” Thirteen years later, he was still annoyed, writing in his autobiography: “I only received my copy of the paper the day before it was down for discussion, and went immediately to the First Sea Lord to tell him that I strongly disagreed with this method of tackling the problem, which I described as slide-rule strategy of the worst kind.… ” Slessor took satisfaction from recording that, “The Admiralty paper met with very little luck in the U-boat Committee the next day, where I remember one light-hearted Minister saying,
‘C’est magnifique, mats ce n’est pas la guerre!”

On 4 April he submitted to the A.U. Committee a set of counterarguments to the Williams Plan, explaining in his memoirs that “nothing could be more dangerously misleading than to imagine that you can forecast the result of a battle or decide the weapons necessary to use in it, by doing sums.” He went on to aver that, “The most important factors in any battle are the human factors of leadership, morale, courage and skill, which cannot be reduced to any mathematical formula”; which human factors, the reader will remember, Captain Gilbert Roberts had insisted to Commander Gretton were no longer enough in the Battle of the Atlantic. Taking on Williams’s operations research directly, Slessor wrote: “Summarizing my objections to the principle of strategy by slide rule, I urged that the problem should be tackled from a less scientific but more practical angle.”
²⁴

It is hard to imagine a more tortured position for Slessor to have taken. It was the very science of O.R.S. that had made his angles practical, a fact that he himself recognized by the close working relationship to O.R.S. that he forged straightaway upon becoming AOC-in-C in the preceding month, and by the very science (and “sums”) he employed at length in his own Paper before the A.U. Committee on the threatened convoy-Bay patrol option.