In 1942 British imports fell by five million tons, imposing severe strains on food and oil supplies – the latter were reduced by about 15 per cent, requiring the government to dip into its admittedly large strategic stockpiles. This was attributable less to Dönitz than to the diversion of two hundred ships from the Atlantic shuttle to open an Arctic supply line to Russia. Whatever the causes, however, Britain’s shrunken deliveries alarmed a nation with its back to the wall in many theatres and three dimensions.
Even when the US supplied Britain with a few B-24 Liberators – suitable for very-long-range conversion and thus ideal for Atlantic convoy support – initially the RAF chose to use most of them elsewhere. Sir Arthur Harris, 1942–45 C-in-C of Bomber Command, fiercely resisted the diversion of heavy aircraft to the convoy war: ‘It was a continual fight against the navy to stop them as usual pinching everything,’ said Harris, who disliked British sailors almost as much as he abhorred the Germans. ‘Half my energies were given to saving Bomber Command from the other services. The navy and army were always trying to belittle the work of the air force.’ The Atlantic ‘air gap’ – the area of ocean beyond range of land-based cover – remained the focus of U-boat activity until late 1943.
An average of just over one convoy a week each way made the North Atlantic passage. Many crossed without suffering attack, because the Germans did not locate them. Ultra intercepts of U-boat position reports, together with ‘Huff-Duff’ – High Frequency Direction Finding by warships – often made it possible to divert convoys away from enemy concentrations: one statistical calculation suggests that in the second six months of 1941 alone, Ultra saved between 1.5 and two million tons of Allied shipping from destruction. For a few months in 1941 American escorts protected convoys east of Iceland, but after Pearl Harbor these were withdrawn; Canadian corvettes took up the strain, and the Royal Navy assumed responsibility once ships entered the Western Approaches. Throughout 1941–43, the key period of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Admiralty supplied 50 per cent of all escorts, the RCN 46 per cent, and American vessels made up the balance.
Yet if the German offensive was mismanaged, especially in 1941–42 Allied merchant seamen suffered grievously from its consequences. Crews were drawn from many nationalities; though some young British men chose the merchant service in preference to conscription into the armed forces, it would be hard to argue that this represented a soft option: some seamen were obliged to abandon ship two or three times. Michael Page described one such experience, in Atlantic darkness:
One minute we had been on watch on deck or in the engine-room, or sleeping snugly in our bunks; the next we were engaged in a frenzied scramble through the dense, shrieking blackness which assailed us with squalls of freezing spray, and slipped and fell on the wet iron decks which canted faster and faster into the hungry sea with every passing second…‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ someone kept demanding in a high-pitched wailing cry, full of agonized bewilderment…We struggled with stiff reluctant ropes and the bulky gear of the boat in a kind of automatic frenzy…The boat was lowered somehow, and we scrambled down towards it. Some of us got there, some did not – misjudging the distance as they jumped. ‘Cast off!’ bawled someone when the boat seemed crowded; a cry echoed by several others, but answered at once by yells and screams above us – ‘No, no wait! Wait a second!’ A darker body hurtled through the darkness and hit the waves with a tremendous splash, reappearing to splash towards the boat and grab at her gunwale…A wave broke fully into the boat, drenching and swamping us completely; we gasped and spluttered with the icy shock…Someone immediately slipped the painter…Whether everyone who could be was in the boat, God knows; we were swirled away in an instant.
Even those fortunate enough to survive a sinking often faced terrible ordeals in open lifeboats, such as that suffered by survivors of the British coal-carrier Anglo-Saxon. The German auxiliary cruiser Widder sank the Anglo-Saxon 810 miles west of the Canaries on the night of 21 August 1940, then machine-gunned most of the survivors in the water. Only a tiny jolly-boat escaped, carrying Chief Officer C.B. Denny and six others. Taking stock at dawn, they found that the boat carried a small supply of water, some biscuits and a few tins of food. Several men had been hit by German fire. Pilcher, the radio officer, had a foot reduced to pulp. Penny, a middle-aged gunner, was nursing wounds in the hip and wrist.
For the first few days, sailing westwards, spirits in the boat were high. But by 26 August the men’s skin was burning, and they were suffering acutely from thirst. Pilcher’s foot was gangrenous – he apologised for the stench. Denny wrote in the log: ‘Trusting to make a landfall…with God’s will and British determination.’ Thereafter, however, their condition deteriorated rapidly. Pilcher died on the 27th. Denny broke down. Penny, weakened by his wounds, slipped overboard while at the helm one night. Two young seamen who disliked each other began squabbling. On their thirteenth day at sea, the rudder carried away. This proved the final straw for Denny, who said he proposed to end it all. Giving a signet ring to one of the others to pass to his mother, he and the Third Engineer dropped together into the sea, and eventually drifted away.
On the evening of 9 September, a ship’s cook named Morgan suddenly stood up and said, ‘I’ll go down the street for a drink.’ He stepped over the side, leaving behind just two young seamen. It fell to twenty-one-year-old Wilbert Widdicombe to write laconically in the log: ‘Cook goes mad; dies.’ Once during the days that followed, both young men jumped into the water. After an argument, however, they thought better of this, and clambered back inboard. Soon afterwards, a tropical rainstorm relieved them from thirst; they ate drifting seaweed, and some crabs attached to it. After surviving several spells of heavy weather and many quarrels, on 27 October they glimpsed a glittering beach. The two survivors staggered ashore on Eleuthera in the Bahamas, after a passage of 2,275 miles.
Following months of hospital treatment and convalescence, in February 1941 Widdicombe set off homewards – to die as a passenger on the cargo liner Siamese Prince, sunk by a U-Boat torpedo. His companion in adversity, nineteen-year-old Robert Tapscott, survived later service in the Canadian Army to give evidence at the post-war trial of the Widder’s captain for slaughtering survivors of the Anglo-Saxon and other ships, for which the German was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The horrors suffered by Tapscott and his companions were repeated hundreds of times in the course of the war at sea, often ending without survivors to tell the tale.
As with men in every circumstance of conflict, merchant seamen’s performance was uneven: drawn from many nations and lacking the armed forces’ discipline, they were often careless of convoy routines, courses and signal procedures. Crews sometimes panicked and abandoned ships that might have been saved. But there were many examples of heroic endeavour, such as that of the 10,350-ton diesel cargo liner Otari. On 13 December 1940, 450 miles west of the British coast homeward bound from Australia, she was hit by a torpedo, causing the sea to rush into her after-holds. Frozen sheep carcasses and cases of butter were soon bobbing in the ship’s wake. The propeller shafts were leaking, and the engine-room bulkhead threatened to collapse. But Captain Rice, her master, decided she might be saved: alone on the ocean, mercifully shrouded by mist from further enemy attentions, for three days he and his crew patiently coaxed the Otari onward, her pumps just sufficing to sustain buoyancy. The ship at last reached the mouth of the Clyde in darkness, to find its defensive boom closed. Only at dawn on 17 December was Rice finally able to bring his ship, decks almost awash, into the anchorage, where most of its precious cargo was salvaged by lighters. By such stubborn determination and courage was Britain’s Atlantic lifeline held open.
In 1941, Britain launched 1.2 million tons of new vessels, and achieved dramatic economies of transport usage. Though few U-boats were sunk by naval escorts, which were slowly being equipped with improved radar and Asdic underwater detection systems, the Germans failed to force a crisis upon Churchill’s besieged island. By late summer of that year, the British were reading German U-boat signal traffic with reasonable regularity. Some of Dönitz’s submarines were transferred to the Mediterranean, or to north Norway to screen the flank of Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union. By Christmas 1941, Hitler had already lost his best chance of starving Britain; once the United States entered
