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Prologue
WINTER, NORTH ATLANTIC
Out here only weather exists, and the immense field of the sea, wide as a wilderness all its own, white-flecked, deep blue, marked by the endless waves that march away in perfect, receding uniformity. The spot at latitude 42° 80' north, longitude 37° 20' west on the Atlantic Ocean is vacant, blank, chilly, grooved by the layers and furrows of the mid-ocean currents, precisely identical to every other mile around it. Beneath these waters lie the countless graves of navy sailors and merchant seamen who perished at the hands of German U-boats to keep the supplies flowing to feed World War II. There are no headstones out here, no markers, no monuments. For sailors lost at sea, there are no tablets. There is only this place, the wind-whipped, empty, anonymous ocean. A modern containership passing by in 2002 hustles past the froth, and the waves turn to marbled swirls of aqua, blue, white, mingling and turning and folding into frigid pinwheels of color.
More than 36,200 Allied sailors, airmen, and servicemen and women went to their death on this ocean, or in the contest centered around it, between 1939 and 1945, in Lightning Class destroyers, tiny corvettes, and B-24 Liberator aircraft, or at land installations ashore.
Alongside these, some 36,000 merchant ship sailors were lost, many dying terrible deaths, plunging to the bottom of the Atlantic in ships which disappeared from the surface with all hands in less than twenty seconds, many others succumbing to isolation, exposure, or starvation in open lifeboats or on rafts.
The Germans paid a high price, too. One thousand one hundred seventy-one U-boats went to war between 1939 and 1945. Six hundred sixty, almost 57 percent, were lost. The loss in men was far greater; the casualty rate for the German U-boat service is the highest for any military unit since the time of the Romans. Forty thousand German officers and men went to war in U-boats. Only 7,000 came home.
The Battle of the Atlantic was fought all across the 32 million square miles of the pitching, heaving Atlantic Ocean, in the frigid, green wastes up by Iceland, in the empty waters off the Azores, in the gray, quick approaches to the English coast. It saw lone, knifelike U-boats surface in the pit of night on heaving seas to set, aim, and slam torpedoes into aging merchant ships; it saw wolfpacks of ten or more U-boats gather to maul convoys of forty or fifty merchant ships in battles that stretched over three or four days; it saw the development of advanced, futuristic Type XXI U-boats which could race along underwater at phenomenal speeds. The conflict was Hitler's ambitious bid to win the war on the Atlantic with his U-boats, long, tapered, bristling with guns.
The battle — it was not really a battle but a struggle that lasted the entire war — was a six-year effort of fundamental importance to every other engagement of World War II. On this battle hinged the effort to bring massive convoys of merchant ships across the Atlantic, carrying the provisions, food, raw materials, and oil to keep solitary England alive during the years she stood alone against the Germans until 1941, and later every tank, gun, tent, helmet, bomb, all the troops, gasoline, coffee, wheat, rations to feed, fuel to supply the Allied armies sprawled across Europe. Without the men and ordnance on the ships, no battle, on any front, in any country overseas could be fought. The Battle of the Atlantic was the confrontation upon which the rest of World War II depended.
The convoys — eastbound formations were designated HX, for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and SC for Slow Convoy; westbound formations were dubbed ON, for Outward Bound North, and ONS for Outward Bound North Slow — originated in the East Coast ports of Canada and America, formed up in Nova Scotia, and then followed the great circle route, up across the top of the globe, then came into the North Channel above Ireland after a crossing of about two weeks.
On the side of the Nazis, Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the German submarine service, meticulous, possessed of a punctilious memory, presided over the flotillas of low, dark subs which hurried everywhere across the Atlantic. An accomplished submariner himself in World War I, Dönitz had been given the task of rebuilding Germany's submarine arm in the aftermath of the crippling terms of the Versailles Treaty. Above Dönitz was Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the entire German navy. Raeder had come up through the ranks in heavy surface ships. These two men spearheaded the German submarine war.
From the catacombs of his headquarters, secreted in a bunker in a villa in Lorient, Occupied France, Admiral Dönitz oversaw his worldwide fleet of U-boats chiefly by means of an advanced radio network that carried as many as seventy messages a day to his U-boats at sea. Almost alone among the German High Command, Dönitz, convinced of the supremacy of his submarine weapon, grasped that if his subs could sever the Atlantic convoy chain, the Allies would be crippled.
By November 1940 the war in Europe had grown to frightening dimensions. Germany had overrun France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, and now threatened to roll over all of Europe. The British now stood alone.
Then, too, there was the peculiar darkness of Nazi Germany, which made the conflict so important and desperate. Adolf Hitler, appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, had risen to power on the fanatic appeal of his National Socialist German Workers Party and its weird proselytizing on the ideas of extremist nationalism, Aryan supremacy and a German master race, and absolute, authoritarian power. Later, after Hitler's rise, the Nazi Party had developed the plan for the war to advance and perpetuate the Thousand Year Reich. From this had grown the militant and bizarre specter of Nazi Germany, a state in which fervid, warped totalitarianism prevailed and the doctrine and figure of Hitler held complete sway. Under the Nazi state, the systems of society — art, culture, media, education, every social institution down to the Hitler Youth and the League of German Maidens — all these were manipulated and controlled by the state. Under the rule of the Third Reich, life by the tether was the law. The vision of Hitler and the Nazis was to export this horror by war.
Eventually, of course, came the midnight event of the Holocaust. In an attempt to eliminate Jews and Judaism, more than six million people — nearly two thirds of the Jews in the countries overrun by Hitler's armies — were shot in mass graves or marched into gas chambers and exterminated with Zyklon B gas in an act that was not only genocide, but also religiocide, an attempt to kill a people, a faith.
To counter Nazi Germany's attempt to propagate the Third Reich, the Allies had to go to war against the Reich at sea.
The endless, pitching, rolling, unforgiving conflict called the Battle of the Atlantic was waged on a vast scale — across the void, windswept, yawing wastes of 2,500 miles of open Atlantic Ocean. It unrolled on huge dimensions — some 1,000 warships belonging to numerous navies marshaled to decide the outcome of the war. Its significance was enormous, determining the fate not only of Britain but of Europe and the Western world. It was won almost entirely by the British Royal Navy, 300 years old, the blade of Jervis, Nelson, and Jellicoe, England's "Wooden Wall," which had defended her throughout her history. Until 1943, the United States, for the most part, was tied up in the Pacific winning an equally stunning triumph over the Japanese. After 1943, when the U.S. Navy took up a significant role in the engagement, most action and battles took place in the British sector of the Atlantic. The cost of the effort was staggering; British Commonwealth forces suffered more than 33,600 casualties on the sea and in the air; by comparison, the U.S. Navy and Army Air Force, alongside the British, lost roughly 2,600 servicemen. The British, to all intents and purposes, were the overwhelming factor in the immense contest that unfolded across the wide, vacant wilderness of the Atlantic Ocean.
The names of Trafalgar, Jutland, Omdurman, are names which rise from the gorge of time and stand as monuments to British military achievement. At these places, Englishmen won great battles which were not only victories, often against far superior odds, but also displayed ingenious strategies. So, too, the Atlantic victory should stand alongside them. In substance and stroke, the Atlantic victory was British, Royal Navy, Union Jack.
In terms of almost every phase of the war's prosecution — the makeup of the enormous fleet which fought the struggle, the officer and rating corps which manned the ships, the celebrated aces who racked up the top tallies, Captain F. J. "Johnnie" Walker; the crisp, ever-correct Captain Donald Macintyre; the superbly talented Commander Peter Gretton and his fabled B-7 Escort Group; in terms of the tactical thinking and strategic planning which underlay the triumph; combat victories; the command apparatus overseeing the effort — the victory on the Atlantic was overwhelmingly Britain's, with great assistance from its stout cousin, the Royal Canadian Navy. Up to 1943, virtually all confirmed combat victories in the Atlantic conflict were scored by British and Canadians. After 1943, when America took on responsibility for the South Atlantic, roughly 75 percent of the combat victories were still British Commonwealth.
But Britain did not win the Battle of the Atlantic alone. U.S. Navy and Coast Guard units did join in the war, fighting straight across the ocean alongside the British. Beyond the naval battle, U.S. shipbuilding pumped out a boggling total of some 27 million tons of shipping and in the end flooded the Atlantic with ships faster, literally, than the Germans could sink them, helping to swing the outcome of the war. American advances in science and technology — including radar, communications, and aviation — all helped to win the day.
All record begins with the gleaming new tanker San Demetrio, shoving through the ocean 700 miles west of Cape Clear, Ireland, one in a thirty-eight-ship convoy, HX 84, departed Nova Scotia October 28, 1940. She was an oil-burning ship, 463 feet in length, carrying 11,200 tons of oil. She had two deckhouses midships and aft, and nine cavernous tanks. Before her journey was done, she would tell a remarkable tale of men and survival. That was in the future, however, far ahead across the great distances which lay before her. Now she was just a plodding, anonymous merchant ship, registered in London, pushing east across a bright sea.
She nudged through the broad, quiet distance, a hobo, workhorse ship, 8,073 tons, her Kincaid 8-cylinder engine chugging on, plowing through the sea. Finally, during the morning, the Kincaid broke down, so she had to drop out of the convoy on the open, broad Atlantic and come to a stop on the blank face of the ocean for engine repairs. She slipped out of drive, steadily, slowly lost way, and drifted to a halt on the trackless ocean expanse. The San Demetrio sat as the engineers went below to the engine. They tinkered, worked on the engine — burning oil, not coal. The repairs took sixteen hours; after that, she got underway, her big propellers biting into the deep green water, and she picked up head, rejoining the convoy that night.
The next day was November 5, 1940, by coincidence Guy Fawkes Day, a British holiday onboard; the San Demetrio was a British ship. Now, on the great, flat, Atlantic terrain, thousands of miles away, HX 84 proceeded, shedding the miles of open sea which dropped behind. It was as peaceful a day as any sailor could remember. The convoy commodore, the officer commanding the merchant ships, was well satisfied with the progress of his charges, spread over the Atlantic. The convoy proceeded east across the empty, unending distance. In time, evening descended, a wash of hue against the horizon. It was a tranquil, pale dusk; the San Demetrio's engine rumbled in fine health.
They saw it just after sunset. They saw it on the horizon, small as a fleck of pepper. At first it was no more than a speck, but unmistakable, a mast on the horizon. Then they saw quite clearly it was the mast of a warship. Then they saw a superstructure, a forward turret, a bridge; finally the huge battle cruiser was in sight: the Nazi raider Admiral Scheer. Captain George Waite, the master of the San Demetrio, sprang into action. He signaled all ahead full to the engine room below and ordered the lifeboats readied. The gun crews manned the 4.7-inch low-angle gun and the 12-pounder. No one onboard the San Demetrio needed to wonder what would happen next. The ships of the convoy and the German battlewagon closed slowly across the water, drawing nearer and nearer. Now the Scheer was clearly in sight, bearing in upon the flotilla. The raider drove down on them, getting larger and larger, plowing through the sea. She continued, steaming in, a big sash of bow wave in her teeth — then, all at once, she opened fire. Crashes rocked the evening. Thuds and whumps of salvos shook the sky. Thundering echoes and sharp cracks filled the distance. Onward came the Scheer, lobbing salvo after salvo onto the convoy; now the men on the San Demetrio commenced firing. The immense Scheer, big as a fort, kept coming.
The convoy now proceeded to pour fire onto the German battlewagon; the sea shook with shellfire. The commodore of the convoy, its senior merchant officer, ordered his ships to scatter and make off at full speed. The roar of the guns continued, the reverberations shuddering through the tints of the evening. What followed next was a selfless and remarkable act of bravery so extraordinary that every San Demetrio crewman who witnessed it remembered it forever.
Outgunned and outpowered by the German raider, mounting only 6-inch rifles against the Scheer's 11-inch armament, E. S. F. Fegen, the captain of the armed merchant cruiser escorting the convoy, the Jervis Bay, proceeded to make directly for the Scheer and challenge her. Tied up all at once by the Jervis Bay, the Scheer now commenced firing at the Jervis at 18,000 yards, far beyond the range of the British warship's guns. The Jervis was suddenly hit and burst into flames; still Captain Fegen drove on, not yet shooting. He closed on the Scheer, and only when his guns were close enough to score direct hits did Fegen let loose with his barrage. He did not have a chance against the battleship. His ship was hit again and again, but his guns kept roaring, the two ships firing back and forth. The guns rocked with their thundering salvos. The duel went on. The Jervis was finally outstripped, and ablaze. At last, with flames enveloping her from stem to stern, her ensign still flapping from her rigging, the Jervis Bay went under. She was gone, but her action, distracting the Scheer without any consideration for her own chances, had given most of the convoy time to escape. Captain Fegen, mortally wounded, had given his life and his last defiant fight to save the convoy and allow the ships to pass on.
The German raider now turned on Cornish City and Rangitiki, two other ships in the convoy. Rangitiki, turning through the seas, managed to escape through her own smokescreen. Aware that the San Demetrio was next in the line of attack, Captain Waite at this point ordered a course change, as the Scheer opened fire.
The first shells missed, nearly, sending up columns of water on either side of the ship. The second salvo slammed into the tanker, ripping into her amidships and blasting through her port bow. The wireless operators were killed instantly. The lookout was killed as well. Waite, whose first thoughts had been for his cargo and his ship, now turned his concern to the lives of his crewmen. He signaled "Abandon Ship" and rang down to the engine room "Finished with Engines," a prearranged signal to take to the lifeboats. The engineers, who would die trapped in their steel catacombs if the ship went down, lost no time in abandoning their gauges and wheels, and ran across the catwalks, up to the deck.
Fire was ripping overhead with a whine, and steel fragments tore through the air. Speeding through the hail of volleys, the men raced to lifeboat stations. Charles Pollard, the chief engineer, took charge of one lifeboat; Samuel Wilson, the first officer, took charge of the other. The crew lowered away, let go the falls, and dipped their oars into the dark water. At any moment the San Demetrio, fully laden with a highly volatile cargo, could blow up. Tracers like red flashes were whizzing across the night; the Scheer sent up flares to illuminate the dark. The men took hold of their oars and began desperately to pull away from the ship. There were sixteen men in Mr. Pollard's boat, and they pulled, their arms pumping like pistons until they were free and the tanker well behind. Then they were away, alone. The other ships in the convoy had long since moved on. They were not to see Mr. Wilson's boat again. Chief Pollard's sixteen men stroked slowly along. Not a sound stirred. Behind them, the pyre of the ship lit up the night.
They rowed, slipping in silence across the water. Soon they were safe. They had nothing now but the immense void stretching out in all directions around them. They huddled over their oars, rowing quietly in the dark and the cold. Calum Macneil, a young sailor who was an expert at handling small boats, chanted out a rhythm for the stroke. They had little hope of making land or being rescued. What morning would bring would stun even the most hardened of them. But tonight they had only the small, open boat, on the black, inky sea spreading away.
The San Demetrio had been obliterated by the Scheer and her 11-inch guns; the Scheer was typical of the heavy surface ships on which the Germans had depended in the first years of the war. In 1940, the German navy's High Command looked to big battlewagons like the Scheer, the Bismarck, and the Scharnhorst as a key piece of their strategy to devastate Allied shipping. The U-boat would come next. After the humiliating defeat of the Graf Spee in 1939 and the Bismarck in 1941, Hitler would turn away from a strategy centering on heavy surface ships, and take up the U-boat as his chief naval weapon. The day of Dönitz's blunt, dark raptors would come. The long, gray subs would multiply, and spread out all across the ocean in dozens of flotillas. Copyright ©2006 by David Fairbank White
