CHAPTER 9
Following the capture of the French Atlantic ports, the young German U-boat commanders enjoyed what they called 'the first happy time'. It was the heyday of 'aces' like Günther Prien, Joachim Schepke and the most successful of them all, Otto Kretschmer, interviewed below. Admiral Dönitz was at last able to put his 'wolf-pack' tactics to work and the effects were devastating. In October 1940 Convoy SC-7, with only four small escorts, lost twenty of thirty five ships, seven of them sunk by Kretschmer. In February 1941, the Admiralty moved the headquarters of Western Approaches Command from Plymouth to Liverpool and on 6 March Churchill proclaimed the 'Battle of the Atlantic'. Only now was RAF Coastal Command brought under the operational control of the Royal Navy. The counter to the wolf-packs were permanent escort groups, the most famous led by Captain 'Johnny' Walker, but it was the escort group led by Captain Donald MacIntyre that on 17 March 1941 killed Schepke and captured Kretschmer in the battle for Convoy HX-117. Elsewhere, the same day, Prien's U-47 was lost with all hands. The Germans were reading the British naval codes and it was not until HMS Bulldog recovered an intact German Enigma machine from U-110 on 9 May that the intelligence war began to turn in favour of the Allies. In June the rapidly expanding Royal Canadian Navy took over escort duties to the mid-Atlantic and the advent of technical innovations – high frequency direction-finding (HF/DF), short-wave radar sets and side-firing depth-charges to create a wider pattern – greatly increased escort effectiveness. Against which the Germans were equipped with increasing numbers of the reliable, long-range Type VIIC U-boat and, although most convoys were steered around their patrol lines, merchant-ship losses continued at well above replacement levels: 1,345 (4.6 million tons) against twenty-four U-boats sunk in 1940; 1,419 (4,7 million tons) against thirty-five in 1941. However, merchant-ship losses peaked between October 1940 and April 1941.
LIEUTENANT ERNST VON WITZENDORFF
U-boat officer, achieved first command (U-121) in March 1942 I must say in this time we were young naval officers and we were interested to do our duty and to be successful. When we attacked in daytime looking through our periscope, or attacking in the night being on the surface, we saw these big merchant ships like animals creeping over the sea then we were eager to sink them and we didn't think on those poor merchant seamen which were on the merchant ships. But later on when we have been successful we thought about them sometimes and we had a bad feeling. But it was our duty in the war, and what could we do?
CAPTAIN GILBERT ROBERTS
Western Approaches Staff, Liverpool
We were aware that their intelligence was for some reason good, but I myself put it down to very superior hydrophone equipment that the U-boats had, probably being able to pick up the noise of the convoys' propellers up to, oh, eighty or a hundred miles. But in addition I knew that they would place their U-boats in a line across at right angles in the expected path of the convoy and this line with, say, five U-boats could be a hundred miles from end to end and so against a good hydrophone very little disguise of the position of the convoy could be effected. It was only after the war that we knew they were breaking the codes and they knew very well the time of leaving port of the convoys and in addition how many escorts would probably be with them and how many merchant ships were in each convoy, including tankers.
LIEUTENANT DESMOND PIERS
Royal Canadian Navy, commanding sloop HMCS Restigouche
Half-hour by half-hour the size of the waves mounted until within about two hours after the gale struck we were in rather desperate straits. The huge waves rolled on board although we were bow on to them. A huge wave would come along and the bow of the destroyer would climb up the wave and as we got past the fulcrum of the ship down would come the bow into the trough with a tremendous bang, the tail of the ship would go shooting up and the officers would be thrown out of their bunks and crockery off the table and everything. This is a typical North Atlantic storm. Well, we were so pounded by this gale and one of the first things to happen was our mast came down, with just the sheer strength of the wind and the rolling and pitching and the waves, the whole of the foremast came down and the shroud, the guy wires on the mast fell across the siren wires between the funnels and caused both sirens to roar. In the midst of this howling gale in the North Atlantic just about sunset, this was a terrible sound. However losing the mast wasn't so serious except losing the wireless aerial, but this was soon replaced by a very confident petty officer. The next thing to happen was the aft funnel was swept away, which was a little more serious because it put out the fires in the aft boiler room and then of course the cargo began to shift on board and we found that the rivets were giving way under the forrard magazine and we were flooded after the Carley float [a life raft] had torn adrift and hit the quarterdeck and sheered off the top of a hatch and the aft end of the ship filled up with water. So here we were flooded forrard and flooded aft, one funnel down, lost our mast and the ship filling up with water. The only tiling we could do in circumstances like this – the pumps couldn't compete with it – was to turn out every member of the crew to bale her out with buckets.
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER OTTO KRETSCHMER
Sank forty-six ships (273,000 tons) all except two in U-99 between April 1940 and March 1941.
I think it was November 1940; it was the first time that there were enough submarines in the North Atlantic to practise doing the tactics of the wolf-pack. A few months earlier I was the only submarine in the North Atlantic and now there were about seven or eight. I remember there was a signal that a convoy was coming in from America to England and that its position was not known and Dönitz ordered all the submarines there, on the west of Ireland, to form a sort of recce line. This was a stationary recce line, and when the first submarine to sight the convoy made its contact signal the recce line would dissolve automatically and every boat was free to go in to the attack. Well, I was the southernmost boat of the line and Convoy SC-7 passed through the middle of it. I tried to get in and attack as darkness came, tried to get though the escorts into the convoy – which was my own peculiarity of attacking – and failed the first time because they saw me and shot star shells and I go away again. But for the second time I succeeded and was inside the convoy going up and down the lanes, looking for the most important, valuable ships and had the opportunity to expend all torpedoes – I had twelve in all – during the night. Not all of them hit, some of them failed, I don't know why in every case. You know, we had some bad experiences with our torpedoes and they should have hit, all of them, because the distance was very close. This was really the first time that these tactics could be experienced by all of us and also by Dönitz himself, who of course only knew it from peacetime training. The whole night was successful and was called the 'Night of the Long Knives' because so many ships were sunk.
LIEUTENANT ROBERT SHERWOOD
Royal Navy, commanding corvette HMS Bluebell
The attack on SC–7 commenced in the same way as previous attacks. It started with one ship being torpedoed but very shortly after that it became clear that we were in for something different because other ships were torpedoed and I suppose roughly by midnight the whole area was in a state almost of daylight by the ships burning. There was at this stage no coordination; we hadn't arrived at that position in escort duty where group formations would give us set patterns of anti-submarine attack and we were left to our own devices to assume whatever tactics we considered suitable for the occasion. I could see ships in various stages of sinking, some on fire, some not, and other ships being silhouetted by the light of the ships that were on fire. I did actually go at one stage into the convoy with a view to attempting to find submarines if they were there. I never did find any but one of the merchant ships had a shot at me so I decided it was probably as well to get out of there again. I have a recollection of a Dutch ship, the funnel painted in the Dutch colours – the Holland–America Line – and I can see that ship now, silhouetted against the light of another ship burning close by, and I think that ship actually did stop to pick up survivors from the other ship and was sunk herself. It was certainly a new form of attack and obviously we realised very quickly that there was more than one submarine involved and this was a new departure for us, a completely new departure. I think we envisaged simply single submarine attack and we thought that these chaps working on the surface – which we knew they were doing of course – would never attack in more than single units because they would get in each other's way and might even torpedo each other.
CAPTAIN W EYTON-JONES
Merchant Navy, SS Ben Vrachie, sunk 13 May 1941
Actually I thought we saw a glimpse of the flashes in the distance during the night and I thought it could be a submarine so we took evasion tactics and at daylight we saw it no more. So I went to sleep on the settee and just after daybreak I was hurled off by a terrific bang. I looked out aft from the bridge and saw the gun platform going under, so I realised we were practically half-blown to pieces. I went back and I got the naval box with all the naval secrets in, shut them and threw them over the side, made sure they sank right. I went back to try and get in the chart room but the door had jammed – I lost my coat and all my papers. I looked out from the bridge again and I saw the port boats were blown to pieces. The starboard boats, the men were there trying to cut one adrift. The forward boat was lowering away but unfortunately it overturned and then I thought there was nothing else for it. I saw the ship going up, the stern going under the water and I got as far as the fore rigging, trying to let go a raft and she went up on end and went backwards and I went down with her. I had a life jacket on one arm, which I didn't have time to get on, so I went down with the ship. A lot of people say you had a tremendous amount of suction but I wasn't aware of it. After a bit I came to the surface, I saw a lady passenger's face coming up and I tried my best, but every time I got her face above water she shouted, 'Save me!' and went back under. After twenty minutes of hard swimming I got her on to some wreckage, then I looked around and saw the one boat that had got away with about a dozen men in it, and after a bit they came along and picked us up and we went through the wreckage, which was scattered all over a good square mile.
PILOT OFFICER WILFRID OULTON
RAF Coastal Command
With the exception of the Sunderland flying boats, a very small number, all the other aircraft except the Anson were lash-ups, they were borrowed from entirely dissimilar functions in order to do this job in Coastal Command. I even had a flight of biplane Tiger Moths doing convoy escort, if you can imagine anything more ridiculous. Secondly the navigation aids were not there; it was entirely dead-reckoning navigation and whereas an experienced navigator can look at the sea and estimate the wind and where he's likely to be in an hour's time, this is very difficult for a new boy. So without navigation aids, with inadequate experience and with training which was not specifically adapted to the job, navigation was a very serious problem. And since the point to be navigated to, the convoy, was often equally at error, it was no wonder that we failed to meet many convoys. And on return it was no wonder that aircraft would wind up perhaps twenty or thirty miles from their airfield and very often fly into a hill instead of getting back home safely. So lack of equipment, lack of training and unsuitable aircraft were certainly a handicap at the beginning of the war, and indeed throughout the war.
CAPTAIN EYTON-JONES
We picked up what people we could and then I saw the submarine surface. He went round picking up cases out of the water – general cargo, possibly spirits, food and so forth. And after a bit he backed down through the wreckage towards us. A man came on the conning-tower, the man I took as a commander, a squat little bloke and he looked down on us and then he shouted, 'What ship?' One of my crew, unfortunately to my mind, shouted back, 'Queen Elizabeth.' I though this is probably where we get shot or in trouble, but somebody gave the true name of the ship, the Ben Vrachie. They looked at us, circled round for a bit, they laughed at us and went away to the north-east. And we were just left there floating among the wreckage. We went round to get what gallons of water we could, a few tins of biscuits, then after having a good look round we said there's only one thing for it, to try and get out of this if we can. Halfway between Brazil and North Africa. The only thing I could think about was to try and get to land as near as possible so I set the course to the northeast. All we had was the one lifeboat, which was made for forty-eight people; we picked up fifty-eight. There wasn't really enough room for people to sit down, the boat was leaking badly, it had been on the chocks for some time. You had quite a bit of trouble getting the crew to move so you could bail, and you bailed for nearly two days until the wood of the boat started to swell and tighten up. After that it wasn't so bad.
CAPTAIN ROBERTS
I was visited by a Squadron Leader Selby, who was later killed, who told me a great deal about their difficulties and I told him about ours and we resolved together that this lack of liaison should stop. And it was only a day or two of my time and his that we devised, with the help of my own technical-school staff, a set of very simple searches which could be executed by a single word given to an aircraft which would be sent to succour a convoy, even for an hour or two in the Atlantic. And this word sent to the aircraft would get the aircraft to do exactly what the escort commander wanted. He, the escort commander, being in full possession of all the local intelligence, which an aircraft above and perhaps just having arrived certainly wouldn't know.
CAPTAIN EYTON-JONES
The worst days were when there was no wind: the sun was terrific. We cut up a lifeboat cover which was in the boat for the men to put over their heads with their life jackets to keep the rays of the sun off them. We started off by giving four ounces of water, two ounces in the morning and two at night, and one biscuit. That went on for some time and then we got a couple of squalls at night-time but we were only able to save a little bit of water, and that was only by spreading the mainsail out flat and you could hear the men underneath it sucking it with their dry lips trying to get them a bit more moist. But they behaved remarkably well, they were damned fine men. The second day we saw a ship in the distance; they didn't see us.
PILOT OFFICER OULTON
You'd be called from your bed typically at three o'clock in the morning, raining and cold and walking through mud to get some food, to get briefed, to go out in a dinghy to your flying boat, get the covers off and get started up, taxi away down a flare path and perhaps hazards in the flare path, an odd boat that shouldn't be there or a box, then to fumble your way out through perhaps Milford Haven Head and out into the Atlantic. This in itself was no mean task and even today many aviators would take it pretty seriously. Then came the problem of delicate navigation to locate the convoy or to establish a patrol line in the right area and then would come perhaps eight hours of dreary ploughing up and down constantly looking for something for which you looked yesterday and the day before and which wasn't there today either. And at the end of that time, with perhaps a break if you had a convoy and had some communication with the convoy, then you'd have to come back again in the dark, often in bad weather, perhaps at two hundred feet under low cloud, raining like hell, and find your way back into your own flophouse again. Tie up the boat, into a dinghy to shore, a debriefing by a lot of querulous intelligence officers who wanted to know why you hadn't done something quite different and then to bed perhaps twenty hours after getting out of bed in the first place. And then twenty-four hours' rest and do it all over again, and so carry on year after year.
CAPTAIN EYTON-JONES
At one time there was a lot of noise on the boat. They were Chinese and I said, 'What's all the bothery?' They said, 'Number-one cook go crazy.' Eventually he jumped over the side with a life jacket on and after a wee while, we got him back again. And later that night in the dark he jumped again; we didn't get him back because the sharks got him. We saw the splashes and the crashes. And then a Chinese steward, he died. We had to throw him over the side, that was all we could do and the sharks tore him to pieces too. It's one thing I remembered in my dreams for many months seeing those dreaded sharks following us at the back, day in day out, about ten or twenty feet away.
CAPTAIN PETER GRETTON
Royal Navy Escort Group Commander
Again, the lessons of the First World War were that the right place for aircraft was around the convoy in escort. But the airmen much preferred to go out on long sweeps looking for U-boats: it gave them the feeling of the offensive, somehow. But in fact it was quite useless. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack and eventually this was appreciated and the aircraft used to escort the convoys instead.
CAPTAIN EYTON-JONES
About the tenth day we saw an aeroplane – still didn't see us though we had our sails up. On the morning of the 13th somebody shook me and said, 'Hey, Captain, we see lights,' and I looked round and I saw some green lights which looked to me like Brighton Pier. So I said, 'We'll burn a flare.' A few minutes later they burnt another flare and after a bit I saw the green lights getting closer, more visible. After a bit I saw a red light above the green and then it dawned on me that it was a hospital ship. They got alongside and we boarded that ship, which we found out afterwards was the Oxfordshire. They put a rope ladder over and the crew tumbled up; they nearly went mad with excitement. Eventually I was left in the boat with only the lady passenger. I said, 'Would you send something down that we can send the lady up with,' because the lady was very weak and so they put a sling down and two men came down and we hauled the lady on board. Then they sent a sling down hooked on to the boat and hauled it on board. After thirteen days when you couldn't lay out or even sleep decently I thought it the most wonderful thing to lie down in the scupper under the bulwark. Then all of a sudden, 'Hey, there's another bastard down here,' and two students picked me up and asked, 'What are you doing down there?' They hustled me along to the canteen down into the hospital bay and they put all our men, fifty-six at that time, into bunks and they were all whistling and shouting, almost hysteria, and then some of the sisters from the hospital came round with cans of tea, buns, it was the most wonderful drink we'd ever had, because we were practically dehydrated. In the thirteen days you didn't perspire, nature completely stopped, and the average loss of a man per weight per day was about two and a half pounds. How long one could have survived I don't know, but we'd sailed five hundred and thirty miles in those horrible conditions and survived within a hundred miles of Sierra Leone, and all I had to go by was the pole-star, using my finger to think how high it was above the horizon.
CAPTAIN ROBERTS
When I first went to Liverpool I got hold of a number of escort commanders and I asked them what they did when a U-boat attacked by night. The answer in most cases was, 'Well, what can you do? It's a very difficult thing and we can't see them.' The radar of course in those days was very elementary and we had very few sets, but in fact there was one escort commander who had the idea, which is still absolutely relevant, that when an attack of which there is no warning takes place all the escorts should do the same sort of thing on a planned schedule at exactly the same time, so that it had the maximum effect over the broad ocean around that convoy. This of course was then Commander Frederick 'Johnny' Walker in the little corvette Stork. His escorts, on the word 'Buttercup', went away from the convoy, thinking that the U-boat would then be chasing away from the convoy having fired a torpedo, but I thought it cannot be they are outside, they must have been among them. I talked to C-in-C Western Approaches Admiral Noble about this and he agreed. I said I will set up an operation which will be based on the fact that when they fire they are inside the convoy. This was called 'Raspberry' and for some time it was quite successful.
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER KRETSCHMER
When I was depth-charged I had to go to the surface because water was coming into the boat and everything was over. I couldn't move and was lying in a large patch of oil listing to starboard and being fired at by two destroyers from the port side – without success, I must say – so there were waterspouts all around the boat. Their forty-millimetre pom-poms had fuses against aircraft so they didn't harm the boat very much, only the paint was off, but still the aft part of my boat went under and that part of my crew which was on the aft deck was thrown into the water and I couldn't do anything about them. I wanted to give them every chance to be picked up and go into captivity and this I could only do by asking one of the destroyers, which was my friend Donald MacIntyre, about four o'clock in the morning, my Morse lamp sending the signal that part of my crew was floating in the water, and I asked him to pick them up. He drew alongside these people and lighted his searchlights so I could see through my glasses their heads and how they went aboard.