Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (9 page)

Interestingly, the poor weather in the north had obscured for a while the many improvements on the Allied side. The record storms of early 1943 continued unabated, so the convoys that did sail in late March suffered enormous physical damage; yet the two main ones, HX 230 and SC 123, got through with only one vessel sunk to the U-boats. The same was true of the early April convoys, HX 233 and ONS 3 and 4. The only convoy that met with serious attack at this time was HX 231, whose escorts fought off a whole group of U-boats on April 5 and 6, inflicted much damage, and brought the vast bulk of its cargoes to port. No fewer than twenty-two of the sixty-one vessels were oil tankers, while many of the others were carrying what might be termed “pre-D-Day” supplies—trucks, tanks, aircraft, landing craft, and vast amounts of ammunition.
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This, of course, was key. Just getting that one huge group of oil tankers alone to Britain staved off the island’s resource crisis of early 1943.

And there was to be even better news ahead. The powerful winds and great long rollers of the North Atlantic never abated, but the sound of conflict now did. Amazingly, only fifteen merchantmen were lost in those waters between June and mid-September 1943, and only one of them was in a convoy. As the Allies girded themselves for further advances in the Mediterranean and for a really massive buildup of men and munitions in Britain in preparation for the future invasion of France, and as the demands of the Pacific and Southeast Asia campaigns grew ever greater, their shipping crisis actually intensified. But that crisis was essentially one of supply and demand, eventually solved by further stupendous outputs of American industry, and no longer about the hemorrhaging of ships from the convoy routes between New York/Halifax and the Clyde/Merseyside. To the tens of thousands of crew members of the merchant vessels who for the first time steamed those rough seas without a single attack, this must have seemed incredible, inexplicable, even a bit eerie. More U-boats were being sunk than merchantmen.

One graph captures this dramatic change of fortunes in the Battle of the Atlantic during the months of 1943.

Before we understand the swiftest of the changes of fortune in the five major campaigns of the Second World War, it is appropriate to study the critical convoy battles of May 1943, especially the first, since it was the most important of all. It focused, unusually, around the voyage of one slow,
westward
-bound convoy, ONS 5, which sailed from its gathering place near the Clyde for North American ports between April 23 and May 11. Here was the reprise to the saga of SC 122 and HX 229. This time the Allies won—not easily, but quite decisively. The map on
this page
captures the overall situation.

Forty-three merchant ships, emerging from five separate British ports, had gathered off the Mull of Kintyre with their escorts in late April and then set off on a great-circle route to the New World. They were not holding much cargo, but the point was that if they did not get back to America’s eastern ports, there would be fewer and fewer Allied vessels left to carry oil, ores, trucks, grain, and aircraft parts to the British Isles in the future. And it was emphatically an
Allied
convoy: in addition to the twenty-eight vessels flying the Red Duster, there were five ships from the United States, three from Norway, two from the
Netherlands, two from Greece, and one each from Yugoslavia, Panama, and Denmark. Escort Group B7 consisted of two destroyers and a frigate, two rescue trawlers, and four invaluable corvettes named, deliciously,
Sunflower, Snowflake, Pink,
and
Loosestrife.
In charge of the escort was Commander Peter Gretton, whose consuming passion was the sinking of U-boats; he had recently returned from the Mediterranean, where he had received the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for ramming and demolishing an Italian submarine. Gretton had sailed and fought in the early North Sea convoys, in the Second Battle of Narvik, in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and with the North African landings. He had just caught his breath after fighting through HX 231, and after this present convoy would soon be out to fight with others. Nelson’s frigate captains would have recognized him immediately.

The convoy headed northwestward toward its welcome “cocoon” of Allied air cover from Iceland, which was available to it between April 25 and 27. After that it skirted north of the U-boat group Star toward Cape Farewell and a period of Greenland-based air cover, and then it encountered horrendous weather. So far there had been no sight of enemy submarines, and the only casualties—apart from weather damage to many ships—were the withdrawal of some of the destroyers, including Gretton’s, due to a shortage of fuel (refueling at sea during these storms was impossible). It is an indication of how bad the weather had become that the whole convoy was forced to heave to for a while and that the five destroyers of the reinforcing 3rd Support Group took more than a day to find out where it was. Ahead, Doenitz’s wolf packs had been instructed to play a waiting game. By the night of May 4–5, two long lines of them (twenty-one U-boats, in the groups Fink and Specht) were waiting as the achingly slow convoy steamed toward Newfoundland. One of the submarines had been attacked and sunk by RCAF flying boats during daylight hours, but at nightfall the U-boats’ time came.

What followed was two nights and one day of extraordinary fighting at sea. Attack after attack was launched by the U-boats at the now weakened escort screen; beset by so many predators, the destroyers, frigates, and corvettes could do nothing but race toward a U-boat, drive it away, drop some depth charges, then race back to the convoy. Four ships in the convoy and one straggler were sunk that night. Twenty-six
merchantmen were left together, and as dawn came they were once again in an aerial gap between Greenland and Newfoundland. Another four merchantmen were sunk during the day. The second and even larger line of U-boats was waiting its turn. The only bright spot was provided by the little corvette HMS
Pink
and its intrepid lieutenant, Robert Atkinson, who had just returned to the service after eight months of battling severe seasickness. Detached by the escort commander to pick up stragglers, Atkinson soon found himself with a mini-convoy all his own, a mixed bag of three British, one Norwegian, one Greek, and one American merchantmen.
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Short on fuel,
Pink
steamed on only one boiler, shut down one dynamo, and rationed water—until Atkinson’s group was repeatedly attacked by an equally determined U 192 under Oberleutnant Happe and the corvette had to go to full power again. For hours the two vessels fought, losing and regaining contact on numerous occasions, with Atkinson almost running out of depth charges and his new Hedgehog grenades simply not working. After
Pink
’s last depth-charge volley, Atkinson decided that his ship must rejoin the straggler convoy, now at least 10 miles ahead. As the corvette turned, its crew heard a vast explosion in the water behind: U 192 had blown up. It was Happe’s first Atlantic command, and his last.

As HMS
Pink
rejoined its mini-convoy, the American merchantman
West Madaket
was fatally hit by a torpedo and started to break up. After driving away any possible further U-boats, the corvette’s next task was to pick up survivors—she now had sixty-one extra people on board. By this time Western Approaches Command had actually recognized Atkinson’s group as a separate subconvoy and reinforced it with HMS
Sennen,
a valuable former American Coast Guard cutter that drove off further U-boat probings until the Allied ships were rescued by dense fog. On May 9
Pink
finally escorted her charges into St. John’s Harbor, Newfoundland, and Atkinson sat down to write his report.

The greater bulk of Convoy ONS 5 spent the night of May 5–6 in an epic battle, with the U-boats attacking no fewer than twenty-four times and the escorts giving no ground. HMS
Loosestrife
found itself fending off submarine probes throughout the night along the convoy’s starboard flank. At two-thirty in the morning it encountered U 638, which from only 500 yards away shot off torpedoes down the warship’s
side before it submerged. As the
Loosestrife
raced across the submarine’s wake, it dropped a salvo of ten depth charges. The explosion was so near and so violent that the men in the corvette’s engine room thought their own stern had been blown off. But it hadn’t. The greatest cheers came from the seventy-one merchant sailors on board the
Loosestrife
who had just been rescued when their own vessels went down. As Ronald Seth slyly notes, “For the victims of the U-boats, the hunting and killing of one of the enemy had a special relish … and if moral encouragement played any part in the sinking of the U-638, then the merchant seamen aboard could claim to have had a hand in it.”
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A day and a half earlier, Horton had played his next trump card and ordered the 1st Escort Group to join the convoy. Its lead warship, the sloop HMS
Pelican,
soon pounced on U 438, but even before then the destroyer HMS
Oribi,
one of the last of the 3rd Escort Group, rammed and sank U 531. At virtually the same time the destroyer HMS
Vidette
attacked U 125 with her Hedgehog; this time the forward-launched grenades worked perfectly and the submarine was lost. This was deeply satisfying to the escort’s crew; like the
Pink
and the
Loosestrife,
the
Vidette
had been in close escort of the convoy from one side of the Atlantic to the other, suffering all the strains, storms, and hazards—and, now, successes. After that dramatic night, the next days saw the sky filled with patrolling aircraft, the local Canadian escorts coming in, the U-boats pulling back, and the damaged and exhausted warships sent ahead to port. The
Oribi
limped into St. John’s with its nose battered by the ramming action; the indomitable
Pink
had steamed in with a mere 18 tons of fuel in her tanks. They had won this convoy battle.

In the final tally, thirty-nine U-boats had managed to find and attack ONS 5, and together they sank twelve merchantmen. But the Allies had sunk seven U-boats, two more were lost due to a collision in the fog, and another five were badly damaged in action. What was more, the submarines were not just being sunk in close-battle encounters (the U 638 had little chance when it found itself only 500 yards from the charging HMS
Loosestrife
) but being picked off on the surface by American, British, and Canadian air patrols as much as 50 miles from the convoy. This bruising shambles of a contest marked the turn of the tide, although the grinding nature of the convoy war made it difficult to see that at the time.

In any case, if Doenitz was disturbed by these losses, he wasn’t showing it. By the middle of May, reinforced by a stream of new boats, his wolf packs had assembled in the North Atlantic again. Unfortunately for the Germans, they were pushed aside by the ranks of escorting warships and aircraft attending Convoy SC 129. Then, renewing their attacks, they sought to destroy Convoy SC 130, but their opponents were far too powerful. The convoy (thirty-seven merchantmen, with eight close escorts and a nearby support group) left Halifax for the Clyde under the command of Peter Gretton, who was furious at himself for having had to pull out to refuel during the height of the ONS 5 battles. It will be noted that among the escorts was not only his own destroyer, HMS
Duncan,
but also the cutter
Sennen,
which had come to the support of the
Pink
’s mini-convoy, the destroyer
Vidette
, and the corvettes
Sunflower, Snowflake, Pink,
and
Loosestrife
—the north Atlantic’s equivalent of the Magnificent Seven.
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And by now there was continuous daytime aerial support.