History of the Second World War (65 page)

But all the improvements took time, and it was fortunate that the small number of U-boats at this period restricted the activity of the new ‘wolf-packs’, Before the war Admiral Donitz had estimated that if the British adopted a world-wide convoy system Germany would need 300 U-boats for decisive results, whereas in the spring of 1941 she had an operational strength of only a tenth of that scale.

That was the more fortunate because the commerce raids by other warships, and by aircraft, reached a new peak in March. The pocket-battleship
Scheer
and the battlecruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
sank or captured seventeen ships, the long-range bombers sank forty-one, and the U-boats the same number — from all causes a total of 139 ships, and over half a million tons of shipping, destroyed.

After reaching Brest on March 22, however, the battlecruisers were immobilised there, by damaging British air attacks on the port during April.

Just after the middle of May the new German battleship
Bismarck,
accompanied by the new cruiser
Prinz Eugen
, sailed out into the Atlantic to multiply the threat. British Intelligence worked well and warning of their presence in the Kattegat was received in London early on May 21, while later the same day they were spotted by Coastal Command aircraft near Bergen. The battlecruiser
Hood
and the battleship
Prince of Wales,
under Vice-Admiral L. Holland, at once sailed from Scapa Flow to intercept their expected passage round the north of Iceland, and next evening, after air reconnaissance had shown they were no longer in the Bergen area, the main fleet (under Admiral Tovey), also sailed from Scapa in the same direction. On the evening of the 23rd the two German ships were sighted, by the cruisers
Norfolk
and
Suffolk,
in the Denmark Strait — between the west of Iceland and the edge of the icefields east of Greenland. By that time Admiral Holland’s force was close to the southerly end of the Strait.

On paper, this force had a big advantage, as the 42,000-ton
Hood
was nominally the largest ship in either Navy, and mounted eight 15-inch guns, while it was accompanied by the new battleship
Prince of Wales
(35,000 tons and ten 14-inch guns). But the
Hood,
built in 1920, before the Washington Treaty, had never been thoroughly modernised — the coming of war in 1939 had forestalled the Board of Admiralty’s decision in March that year to give her better armour-protection, horizontal and vertical — and the
Prince of Wales
was so new that her armament had not been fully tested.* The German ships, although supposed to conform to the treaty limitations — 35,000 tons for battleships and 10,000 for heavy cruisers — actually displaced about 42,000 tons and 15,000 tons respectively, which enabled them to be given heavier armour-protection than appeared. Moreover their disadvantage in main armament — eight 15-inch guns in the
Bismarck
and eight 8-inch guns in the
Prinz Eugen
— was offset not only by defects in the guns of the
Prince of Wales
and superior range-finding equipment on the German side, but by the way the British ships came into action.

* There were, in fact, still some Clydeside workers on board.

The Germans were sighted (in the twilight) at 5.35 a.m., an hour before sunrise, and at 5.52 all four ships opened fire — at a range of about 25,000 yards (fourteen miles). On the British side the
Hood
was leading, and both the German ships concentrated their fire on her. Besides being the flagship, she was the most vulnerable, and particularly vulnerable to plunging fire — a reason for seeking to close the range as soon as possible. The approach was nearly end-on, so the British could not bring their after turrets to bear, whereas the Germans could use their entire broadsides. Their second or third salvo took effect, and such effect that at
6
a.m. the
Hood
blew up, and sank within a few minutes — only three of her crew of over 1,400 surviving. That was all too grimly reminiscent of the fate of the British battlecruisers at Jutland a quarter of a century earlier.

The
Prince of Wales,
on which both German ships were now able to concentrate, also suffered from damaging hits from the
Bismarck
, as well as three from the
Prinz Eugen,
within a few minutes. So, at 6.13 a.m. the captain of the
Prince of Wales
wisely decided to break off the fight, and turned away under cover of a smokescreen. The range was now down to 14,600 yards. Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker, commanding the two cruisers — and now the whole force since Holland’s death — confirmed the decision, and decided merely to keep touch with the enemy until the main fleet under Tovey arrived on the scene. This was now about 300 miles away, and the prospects of catching the Germans were not good, since the visibility became worse during the morning. It was thus a relief to Tovey when he heard in the early afternoon that the
Bismarck
had altered course and dropped its speed to about 24 knots.

For in the brief morning action the
Prince of Wales
had made two hits on the
Bismarck,
and one of these had caused an oil leak which reduced its fuel endurance, and led the German admiral, Lutjens, to make for a western French port, abandoning his raid into the Atlantic — and the alternative of turning back to Germany before the several British forces now converging towards the scene could intercept him.

That afternoon Tovey detached the 2nd Cruiser Squadron under Admiral Curteis and the aircraft-carrier
Victorious
— which had been about to start for the Mediterranean with a cargo of fighters — to proceed to a position within 100 miles of the
Bismarck
and near enough to launch the
Victorious’
s nine torpedo-bombers. These took off soon after 10 p.m., in very bad weather, and had difficulty in finding the
Bismarck,
but eventually delivered successive attacks on her soon after midnight. One hit was achieved, but did no serious damage to the heavily armoured battleship. Moreover she managed to give her pursuers the slip early on the 25th, and the rest of that day was spent in fruitless efforts to find her again.

Not until 10.30 a.m. on the 26th was she spotted and reported, by a patrolling Catalina aircraft of Coastal Command, about 700 miles distant from Brest. Tovey’s widely spread fleet was by then badly placed to catch her before she reached shelter, and was also running short of fuel. But Admiral Somerville’s Force H, coming up from Gibraltar, was now close enough to intercept the
Bismarck.
Moreover this force included the large carrier
Ark Royal.
The first strike miscarried, but a second one, around 9 p.m., was more successful. Two of the thirteen torpedoes released reached their mark. Although one hit was on the
Bismarck’s
armour belt and had little effect, the other, right aft, damaged her propeller, wrecked her steering gear, and jammed the rudders. That proved decisive.

While Captain Vian’s destroyers held the ring, as well as making further torpedo attacks during the night, the battleships
King George V
and
Rodney
arrived on the scene, and pounded the crippled
Bismarck
with armour-piercing shell from their heavy guns for 1½ hours. By 10.15 she was a flaming shambles. On Tovey’s order the British battleships then withdrew, before U-boats or the Luftwaffe’s heavy bombers arrived to endanger them, leaving the cruisers to finish off the sinking ship. The
Dorsetshire
did this, with three torpedoes, and the
Bismarck
disappeared under the waves at 10.36.

Before the end came she had suffered, and survived, at least eight, and possibly twelve, torpedo hits, and many more heavy shell hits. That was a remarkable tribute to her designers.

The
Prinz Eugen
had left the
Bismarck
on the 24th, to refuel in mid-Atlantic, but after doing so she had developed engine defects, so her Captain had decided to abandon his excursion and make for Brest. Although her approach to that port was detected, she reached it safely on June 1.

However, in the end these dramatic events of May 1941 marked the climax, and final defeat, of the German plans and efforts to win the Battle of the Atlantic with surface ships.

The U-boat campaign continued for a much longer time, and became a grave menace, although it ran a fluctuating course.

In May U-boat sinkings rose sharply and in June again reached the high figure of over 300,000 tons — to be exact, sixty-one ships of 310,000 tons. That was as many ships as there were in a single large convoy. It was remarkable that sailors were not deterred from manning them, and there was never a shortage of crews.

A number of important counteracting factors came into play, however, that spring. On March 11 the United States Lend-Lease Bill became law, and in that same month the American ‘Atlantic Fleet Support Group’, of destroyers and flying-boats, was formed. In April, the American ‘Security Zone’, patrolled by U.S. Navy forces, was extended eastward from 60° to 26° West.

Also in March, American air bases were opened on the east coast of Greenland, and installations in Bermuda, while in May the U.S. Navy took over the leased base at Argentia in the south-east of Newfoundland. Early in July U.S. Marines relieved the British garrison at Reykjavik in Iceland, and from then on U.S. naval forces protected American shipping to and from Iceland. American ‘neutrality’ in the Atlantic was becoming markedly less neutral. The refitting of British ships in American yards had already been approved in April, while the building of warships and merchant-ships on Lend-Lease account had started.

Meanwhile Canada was becoming more strongly a relief to Britain in the Atlantic struggle. A Canadian Escort Force was created in June, and based on St John’s, Newfoundland. The Royal Canadian Navy now took the responsibility for ocean anti-submarine escort eastwards to a rendezvous south of Iceland. Thus the British Admiralty’s plans for continuous escort became possible.

In the summer of 1941, Canadian and British escorts met and handed over their convoys to one another at the Mid-Ocean Meeting Point in about 35° West. The Iceland escorts and the Western Approaches escorts met, and handed over at the Eastern Ocean Meeting Point in about 18° West.

From July onwards, too, a close escort group accompanied Gibraltar convoys the whole way there, and continuous escort, down the West African coast, was also given to the Sierra Leone convoys.

Convoys now could be provided with an average of five escort vessels. A convoy or forty-five ships had a perimeter of over thirty miles to protect. Even so, each escort vessel’s Asdic would only sweep an arc of a mile — so there were still wide gaps through which a U-boat could penetrate without being detected.

As to air cover, the addition of Lend-Lease Catalina flying-boats from the spring onward extended such cover to some 700 miles from the British Isles (forcing the U-boats away from Western Approaches) 600 miles from Canada, and 400 miles to the south of Iceland. But a gap about 300 miles wide remained in mid-Atlantic, and the very long-range American Liberators, which could have covered it, were not regularly available until the end of March 1943, and by mid-April only forty-one were in service.

Meanwhile, the number of U-boats was increasing. By July 1941, sixty-five were operational and in October eighty. The total U-boat strength on September 1 was 198 — while forty-seven had been lost so far. In sum, new U-boats were entering service much faster than they were being sunk. Moreover U-boats were being made stronger. Their welded pressure hulls were proving more difficult to break than the British plated and riveted hulls and a depth-charge had to explode much closer than before for a kill.

During September four convoys suffered heavy losses — all of these lacking adequate air cover.

That month, however, following an August meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, co-operation between the two navies was increased still more by the President’s approval of the well-planned American ‘Western Hemisphere Defence Plan Number 4’. Under this the U.S. Navy was permitted to escort convoys of non-American ships, and started to provide escorts for certain Atlantic convoys eastwards as far as the Mid-Ocean Meeting Point, while this Meeting Point was moved eastwards to about 22° West.

This helped to ease the British problem of providing adequate escorts between the British Isles and the Mid-Ocean Meeting Point. By the end of the year they had been increased to eight groups, each of three destroyers and about six corvettes. A further eleven groups, each of five destroyers, were nominally in reserve to reinforce the escort of any convoy that might be in trouble, or to deal with the U-boat concentrations, but were largely occupied with routine tasks.

In October U-boat sinkings fell to thirty-two ships of 156,000 tons. Significantly no ships were sunk within 400 miles of a Coastal Command base. That showed the reluctance of U-boats to enter zones covered by long-range reconnaissance and bomber aircraft, although the drop was also due in part to the despatch of U-boats to the Mediterranean to support Rommel’s operations in North Africa.

In November, U-boat sinkings fell again — to little more than a third of the October total — and in December they were smaller still in the North Atlantic. But the heavy losses in the Far East that followed Japan’s entry into the war raised the total sinkings from all causes to 282 ships of nearly 600,000 tons.

In the West, the German long-range bombers had become a greater menace than U-boats during the second half of 1941, especially to the Gibraltar convoys. This led to a realisation of the need for fighters in close support of any convoy, and thus to the introduction of the first escort carrier, H.M.S.
Audacity,
with catapult-launched fighters, in June. She played a key part in the successful defence of a homeward-bound Gibraltar convoy in December, although herself sunk in the nine-day fight.