The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (267 page)

On the evening of September 15 he boarded a London train with Bracken, Sinclair, and Lieutenant Commander C. R. (“Tommy”) Thompson, the first lord’s flag commander. Their destination was Scotland and the sea anchorage of England’s Home Fleet—the sea basin of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. There, if anywhere, the Royal Navy should be buttoned up. Later he recalled how “on two or three occasions” in the autumn of 1914, most memorably on October 17, “the alarm was given that there was a U-boat inside the anchorage. Guns were fired, destroyers thrashed the waters, and the whole gigantic armada put out to sea in haste and dudgeon.” Scapa was that important.
³²

Anxiety over the sea basin had returned, and this time the threat was real. In his lap lay a locked box of secret documents, among them a shocking report from the Chiefs of Staff Committee revealing that Scapa’s defenses would not be ready until the spring of 1940. Arriving, he called on Sir Charles Forbes, the commander in chief, aboard H.M.S.
Nelson
, the admiral’s flagship. Sir Charles confirmed that the basin’s entrance channels were “not properly netted.” The old steel webs had rusted, rotted, broken up, and drifted away. Winston immediately issued an order, stamped “urgent,” calling for nets, booms, blockships (sunken ships barring entrance channels), antiaircraft guns, patrol craft, balloons, and searchlights. Until they were in place Scapa was insecure, an inviting target for daring German submarine commanders.
³³

And U-boat
Kapitäns
, so successful in sinking merchantmen, were now turning their periscopes toward Britain’s ships of war. The enemy had actually laid a minefield across the mouth of the Thames, disabling one warship. After a second RN ship was sunk, the government, worried about civilian morale, had suppressed news of the loss. Two days before Churchill entrained for Scotland a U-boat had fired a salvo of torpedoes at H.M.S.
Ark Royal
, an aircraft carrier; they missed, and the carrier’s destroyer escort sank the sub, but it was disquieting to know that Dönitz’s vessels were lurking in British waters, capable of striking one of His Majesty’s capital ships at any hour.

Indeed, it happened while Churchill was slumbering aboard H.M.S.
Nelson
, as he learned the next day. He and his party returned from Inverness to London aboard an overnight sleeper, and “as we got out at Euston,” Winston wrote, “I was surprised to see the First Sea Lord on the platform. Admiral Pound’s look was grave. ‘I have some bad news for you, First Lord. The
Courageous
was sunk yesterday in the Bristol Channel.’ ” The ship had been an aircraft carrier, “a very necessary ship at this time,” as Churchill wrote, and Bristol Channel, lying between South Wales and Somerset, was very close to home. Churchill told Pound, “We can’t expect to carry on a war like this without these sorts of things happening from time to time. I have seen lots of this before.” But within he was seething. He knew there would be questions in the House of Commons. To bring unconvoyed merchantmen into port he had been using carriers as escorts.
Courageous
had been attended by four destroyers, but two of them had been detached to hunt a Nazi submarine elsewhere. As the carrier turned into the wind to receive her aircraft, another U-boat
Kapitän
ran up his periscope and saw her naked flank in his cross hairs. He emptied his torpedo tubes and 518 Englishmen drowned, including the captain, who chose, as captains in those days did, to go down with his ship.
³⁴

Churchill’s anxiety over Scapa Flow continued and mounted after His Majesty’s Government spurned a peace feeler from Hitler. The offer had reached London via Birger Dahlerus. In Göring’s presence, the Führer had proposed that a British representative—Ironside’s name was mentioned—meet Göring “in some neutral country.” Halifax on October 5 told the War Cabinet that “We should not absolutely shut the door”; Hoare suggested that Britain “damp down” her “anti-Göring propaganda”; Kingsley Wood also thought Göring the man to back, because “he would be glad to secure the removal of Herr Hitler.” They had learned nothing, could not grasp the strength of the Führer’s hold on his people, did not realize that the life expectancy of any German who moved against him would be measured in minutes. Churchill swiftly disposed of their arguments. If the overture was insincere its “real object might be to spread division and doubt amongst us”; if sincere, it had been inspired “not from any sense of magnanimity, but from weakness.” The war, he suggested, might not be so popular in Germany as Goebbels insisted. On October 12 Chamberlain rejected the Nazi approach in the House. Winston had written the firmer parts of his speech, and afterward he told Pound that “one must expect a violent reaction from Herr Hitler. Perhaps quite soon.” He ordered “special vigilance,” suggested that “the Fleet at Scapa should be loose and easy in its movements,” and concluded: “Pray let me know anything else you think we can do, and how best to have everything toned up to concert pitch. The next few days are full of danger.”
³⁵

Danger appeared outside Scapa Flow at seven o’clock the following evening in the form of
U-47
, commanded by a thirty-one-year-old Dönitz protégé, Lieutenant Commander Günther Prien. In the first war, Dönitz knew, two U-boats had attempted to penetrate the deep, almost landlocked basin, and neither had returned. But studying aerial photographs of the anchorage, Dönitz reached the conclusion that an adroit navigator could thread his way past the three sunken ships meant to block Holm Sound.

Prien was his best U-boat
Kapitän
, and he almost failed. It took him nearly six hours to do it—at one point he seemed hopelessly ensnarled in a cable from one of the blockships—but at 12:30 on the morning of October 14 he was inside the basin. Dead ahead, at four thousand yards, lay the battleship
Royal Oak
. His first salvo missed, but the second time his spread of four torpedoes exploded in concert, mortally wounding the capital ship. In his log Prien wrote: “There is a loud explosion, roar and rumbling. Then come columns of water, followed by columns of fire, and splinters fly through the air.” Thirteen minutes later
Royal Oak
rolled on her side and sank, carrying with her 833 officers and men, among them their captain and the rear admiral commanding the Second Battle Squadron.
³⁶

“Poor fellows, poor fellows,” Churchill said when told, “trapped in those black depths.” He wept, then thought of the unknown submariner’s achievement and murmured: “What a wonderful feat of arms.” It was not so wonderful for him, however. He “understood,” he wrote, “how First Lords of the Admiralty are treated when great ships are sunk and things go wrong. If we were in fact going over the same cycle a second time, should I have once again to endure the pangs of dismissal? Fisher, Wilson, Battenberg, Jellicoe, Beatty, Pakenham, Sturdee, all gone!” He set down some lines of the nineteenth-century Irish poet Thomas Moore:

Hoare wrote His Majesty’s ambassador in Washington: “Winston has been through some rough moments over the Scapa incidents. Being for the moment the war hero, he has come through it fairly well. I shudder to think what would have happened had there been another First Lord and he had been in Opposition.” Exactly. Chamberlain could hardly dismiss the chief critic of the prewar governments which had been responsible for Scapa’s vulnerability; the whole country knew that Winston bore no responsibility for the peacetime Royal Navy. Nevertheless, he took the setback personally, and took it hard. In the House he tried to balance the loss against the number of U-boats the navy had destroyed, but the books wouldn’t balance. Germany’s submarines were expendable; British warships were her lifeline. After informing the War Cabinet that the Home Fleet was being moved to the Clyde estuary in southwest Scotland as a “temporary disposition” prior to a move into an east coast base, Rosyth, he declared that the loss of the
Royal Oak
, “though an extremely regrettable disaster, does not materially affect the general naval position.”
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It did, though. Germany was jubilant, Hitler ecstatic, Lieutenant Commander Prien a national hero. Even William L. Shirer was impressed, writing in his diary that the British battleship had been sunk in “the middle of Scapa Flow, Britain’s greatest naval base!” Dönitz had scored a coup for
U-boote
. At the outset of hostilities the Führer had instructed U-boats to conform to the Hague Convention, which prohibited attacks without warning on enemy passenger and merchant ships. Prien’s achievement opened Hitler’s eyes to the possibilities of submarines and their lethal torpedoes. On October 16 Grossadmiral Raeder, speaking in Hitler’s name, formally announced that “All merchant ships definitely recognized as enemy can be torpedoed without warning.” So, it developed, could those flying neutral flags—except those of the United States—if their destinations were English ports. Neutral shipping had been sunk before, inadvertently or by reckless commanders. Now it was Kriegsmarine policy.
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All the billboards urging Englishmen to “Talk Victory” seemed to mock the Admiralty, and Clementine Churchill wrote her sister Nellie at Chartwell: “The war news is grim beyond words. One must fortify oneself by remembering that whereas the Germans are (we
hope
) at their peak, we have only just begun. Winston works night & day—He is well Thank God & gets tired only when he does not get 8 hours sleep—He does not need it at a stretch but if he does not get that amount in the 24 then he gets weary.”
⁴⁰

England needed, not talk of victory, but the real thing. Any bright news would almost have to come from the high seas; there was no fighting, nor the prospect of any, on land or in the air. So out of this nettle, frustration, the navy must pluck this flower, triumph. The issue was not merely civilian morale. Captain Pim’s maps told a sad tale, growing gloomier as autumn waned. Britain’s loss of shipping would approach 745,000 tons by spring—over two hundred vessels. On November 21 H.M.S.
Belfast
, a new cruiser just launched, was gravely damaged by a mine in the Firth of Forth; two days later the British merchant cruiser
Rawalpindi
, armed with only four six-inch guns, was destroyed by the
Scharnhorst
, which then returned safely home with her sister ship,
Gneisenau
. But the Admiralty’s greatest worry lay in the South Atlantic, where the pocket battleship
Graf Spee
was running amok. There, on the hundredth day of the war, an England famished for glory was about to be fed.

During the first weeks of the war Hitler had held back his fast, lethal
Panzerschiffe
, hoping to impose his peace terms upon a dispirited England. Once it became clear that His Majesty’s Government meant to stay the course, he unleashed them as surface raiders. Of his two pocket battleships,
Deutschland
proved a disappointment. She was recalled after sinking only two merchantmen, one a neutral, and capturing a third, the U.S. freighter
City of Flint
, a prize Hitler did not need.
Flint
became the eye of a diplomatic storm which ended only after a Norwegian vessel intercepted her and returned her to her American crew. The tale of
Graf Spee
was very different, however. Commanded by Hans Langsdorff, a gallant, Wilhelmine anachronism,
Spee
had sent nine British cargo ships to the bottom without the loss of a single German life.

His adversary now was Commodore Henry Harwood, RN, and His Majesty’s South Atlantic Fleet. Finding a single ship in so broad a vastness was almost impossible, but it was also crucial;
Graf Spee
was not only terrorizing merchant captains; the hunt for her was tying down over twenty Allied warships badly needed elsewhere, among them the carrier
Ark Royal
, the battle cruiser
Renown
, and the French battleship
Strasbourg
. Harwood believed that sooner or later Langsdorff would be irresistibly drawn to the fat, rich merchantmen emerging from the broad estuary of the River Plate, bound for England. He was right. Unfortunately, when the
Spee
hove into view at 5:52 on the morning of December 13, Harwood’s force was no match for her. His heavyweights were elsewhere, too far to be recalled in time. He commanded three vessels: the British heavy cruiser
Exeter
, with six eight-inch guns; and two light cruisers,
Ajax
(his flagship) and the New Zealand
Achilles
, with six-inchers. The range of the German battleship’s eleven-inchers was fifteen miles.

The commodore had issued a standing order to all RN vessels in the South Atlantic; should they find a Nazi battleship they were to “attack at once by day or night.” Now, after scattering his small command so that Langsdorff would confront warships from three different directions, he sent
Exeter
racing toward Langsdorff at flank speed, 33 knots. Because the enemy was lunging forward at 28 knots, the two vessels were approaching one another at 50 miles an hour.
Ajax
and
Achilles
were also pouring it on, but
Exeter
was the first to come within range of Langsdorff’s guns, and moments after she did, a 670-pound shell killed the crew manning the starboard torpedo tubes and crippled both communications and the ship’s gun control.

But
Exeter
kept closing. Her gunners had just straddled the German ship when another huge shell demolished the wheelhouse and tore away one of the British gun turrets. Still she continued to close. The captain, though wounded, took a compass from one of the lifeboats and organized a line of tars to relay his orders to the helmsman abaft, where the strongest men in the crew, straining aching muscles, turned the cruiser’s rudder by hand. They did it, to no avail; two more German shells hit the
Exeter
, one tearing up the deck and gouging out a huge gash on a flank, just above the waterline, while the other left a gaping wound in her port flank. Several fires had broken out in the ship; she was enveloped in smoke; fifty-one seamen lay dead. But
Exeter
had done her job, for
Ajax
and
Achilles
now had the
Panzerschiffe
. They were within range, their gunners were skilled veterans, and their six-inch shells were riddling the
Graf Spee
. After ninety minutes of continuous combat, with the pocket battleship swinging about, trying to decide which of the three attackers threatened her most, Harwood ordered his captains to make smoke and break off action.