Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II

Now, in his final hours, Admiral Lütjens signalled to Germany ‘ship unmanoeuvrable’ and to Hitler ‘We shall fight to the end trusting in you, mein Führer.’ During the night, four destroyers, one of them Polish, attacked Bismarck with torpedoes. The German gunnery radar demonstrated its effectiveness in the hours of darkness, and none of the torpedoes scored a hit. No progress was made in mending the ship’s rudder.

Afterwards there were those who thought that the melancholy Lütjens had some sort of death wish. At the start of the voyage he had chosen to go through the Kattegat (between Sweden and Denmark) where the gigantic battleship was sure to be noticed by the Swedes, instead of through the Kiel Canal; then, against the advice of his staff, he had chosen the Denmark Strait where pack-ice and a minefield left him only a narrow and predictable course; and after that he had failed to hammer the Prince of Wales and escape. When safe at last, he sent a radio message that endangered him. The survivors also remembered that, before leaving Norway, Lütjens had declined the chance to have the fuel tanks topped up.

On Bismarck’s long last night afloat it was decided to catapult the three undamaged Arado Ar 196 aircraft and fly them to France with the ship’s log and other valuables. Men were invited to send mail home, and many last letters were written. Lütjens asked Berlin if his gunnery officer could be awarded the Knight’s Cross for his successful sinking of HMS Hood and the ceremony took place at 4 am. When daylight came, and the first Arado plane was loaded with mail, it was discovered that none of the planes could be launched because the catapult had been damaged beyond repair. That morning, at 7 o’clock, a doleful radio message from Lütjens asked for a U-boat to collect the log-book but the vessel (U-556) assigned to this task was submerged and didn’t get the order until 10 o’clock, by which time the battleships Rodney and King George V (sister ship of Prince of Wales) were on the scene. One of the first shells fired by the British destroyed the admiral’s bridge and killed Lütjens. Shelling Bismarck at point-blank range, Rodney fired broadsides from her nine 16-inch guns, instead of the more usual four-or five-gun salvoes. This failed to sink Bismarck, yet sheared so many of Rodney’s rivets, and damaged the foretower so badly, that the vessel had to go to the Boston navy yard for repairs.

At 9.25 am, planes were launched from Ark Royal in order to sink Bismarck with torpedoes, but when they flew over their target the men in the RN battleships would not pause in their firing, making a low run-in impossible. The airmen sent a signal asking Admiral Tovey to cease fire while they attacked. The only response to this was for King George V to fire its anti-aircraft guns at the planes.

It would seem that the battleship admirals were determined that Bismarck would not be sunk by airmen, even naval airmen.

More ships gathered and more torpedoes were fired at Bismarck but she did not sink. At 10.44 a signal from the C-in-C desperately commanded: ‘Any ships with torpedoes are to use them on Bismarck.’ Finally the Germans aboard decided to finish the job themselves. They exploded charges and all became ‘a blazing inferno for the bright glow of internal fires could be seen shining through numerous shell and splinter holes in her sides’. Only then did Bismarck die. ‘As it turned keel up,’ said a proud German survivor who was in the water, ‘we could see that its hull had not been damaged by torpedoes.’ The Germans never lowered their colours. At 11.07 HMS Dorsetshire made the signal: ‘I torpedoed Bismarck both sides before she sank. She had ceased firing but her colours were still flying.’ The Swordfish aircraft, which had not been permitted to participate in Bismarck’s end, now had to jettison their torpedoes, as it was too dangerous to land carrying them.

Despite the concentration of so many British warships, the U-74 was determined to get to the scene in order to assist Bismarck, or take its log-book back to Germany. But the submarine arrived too late. Bismarck had sunk and the water was covered in its fuel oil, its debris and its men. The U-boat periscope was spotted by a lookout on one of the RN ships during the time it had stopped to pick up survivors. Immediately the warning was given, the British ships moved off leaving many Germans to drown. The U-74 rescued three men, and the RN saved 107. Another German ship, Sachsenwald, retrieved two more of the crew. Of a complement of about 2,400 men, all the others perished.

At 1.22 pm German signallers at Naval Group Command West told Bismarck: ‘Reuters reports Bismarck sunk. Report situation immediately.’ But by this time Bismarck was resting upright on the sea bed 15,317 feet below water.

Prinz Eugen reached Brest safely on 1 June. Bismarck’s fate convinced the German navy – and Hitler, who needed far less convincing – that the Atlantic was fast becoming an Anglo-American lake in which submarines might survive but surface raiders could not. In future all German shipbuilding facilities were to give priority to enlarging and repairing the U-boat fleet.

The Royal Navy, ably supported by Britain’s Ministry of Information, pronounced the Bismarck episode a triumph. Others were not so sure. Churchill thought the Royal Navy had shown a lack of offensive spirit. He persuaded the first sea lord and chief of naval staff that the admiral in HMS Norfolk, as well as the captain of Prince of Wales, should be court-martialled for failing to engage Bismarck during the run south. The C-in-C Home Fleet blocked this

and Churchill must have soon realized how damaging such proceedings would be for the British cause.

Hitler became ‘melancholy beyond words’ at the loss of Bismarck. He was furious that the naval staff had exposed the mightiest warship in the world to such dangers. He had expressed doubts from the beginning and now he was proved right. The Führer complained of ‘red tape and wooden-headedness’ in the navy and said that the commanders wouldn’t tolerate any man with a mind of his own. From that day onwards, Admiral Raeder’s ideas were treated with suspicion: eventually command of the navy would be given to Dönitz, whose ideas were more in line with Hitler’s.

The ‘hunting of the Bismarck’ certainly provided lessons for those who would learn them. The battleship admirals saw it as proof of the value of the big ship, and the way in which more big ships had to hunt for them. Such people stubbornly persisted with the story that Bismarck had been sunk solely by gunfire and denied that the Germans might have opened the sea-cocks. They were wrong: in 1981 the wreck was inspected and the German version of her sinking confirmed.

Hindsight shows that the real lesson was the importance of aircraft. A land-based Catalina had discovered the Bismarck; a torpedo-carrying Swordfish had crippled it and thus decided its fate. History provides no evidence that those in authority at the time were converted to this line of thought. The US navy continued to line up the big ships of its Pacific fleet in ‘battleship row’ Pearl Harbor until the bombers smashed them. Before the year was over the Prince of Wales, which had exchanged salvoes with Bismarck, would be sent to the bottom by Japanese aircraft. Those tempted by the ‘what if ?’ game asked what might have happened to the two German ships had Prinz Eugen been an aircraft-carrier.

On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded Russia, and Churchill immediately declared Britain to be Stalin’s ally. Sorely needed Hurricane fighters and other war supplies were loaded and the first North Cape convoy departed for Murmansk in northern Russia in August. These tanks and guns and aircraft were all desperately needed elsewhere, and they would certainly make little difference to the outcome of Barbarossa, the most colossal clash of armed might in the world’s history. Perhaps it was a worthwhile gesture in propaganda terms, although Stalin made sure that his people heard little about it. As for the drain upon shipping that would come from sailing heavily escorted convoys so close to German bases in Norway, and mostly in cruel weather, this prospect must have filled the Royal Navy with gloom. It was a time when every ship was badly needed in the Atlantic.

America loses her neutrality

America’s neutrality had been defined by Congress and decreed in the Neutrality Act of 1937, but soon after Britain’s war began, the Act was modified to permit belligerent powers to buy war materials if they shipped them themselves: so-called ‘cash and carry’. This of course benefited Britain and France – whose navies dominated the North Atlantic – while providing no benefit to Germany.

In July 1940 – as France collapsed – Roosevelt signed an act to provide $4 billion to build for America a two-ocean navy. It was an amazing sum of money by any standards. Yet there were many Americans wondering how soon the French fleet, and the British fleet too, would be taken over by the Germans. Meanwhile, in response to an urgent request from Churchill, Roosevelt exchanged 50 old United States destroyers for 99-year leases on naval bases in Newfoundland, British Guiana, Bermuda and islands in the West Indies. British sailors were hurried to Halifax and picked up the first of these ‘four-stackers’ on 6 September 1940. This was essentially a political action; a signal to friends and enemies that Roosevelt, if re-elected in November, would move closer to an endangered Britain. In the latter part of the year, the US navy began to escort its own shipping on ‘threatened transatlantic routes’.

Then in December 1940 something happened that would influence the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic far more than the 99-year leases on naval bases. The American steel magnate Henry Kaiser launched the first ‘Liberty Ship’. Its welded hull showed the way to unprecedented production speeds. Welded ships were subject to all sorts of troubles but welded steel – for ships and tanks – was none the less a leap forward in technology. Such welding was strenuously resisted in British yards. It was not until 1943 that the Admiralty supported it. Even then the strikes of angry riveters, confronting timid management, ensured that the speed of change was slower than need be.

By January 1941, with the presidential election won, Roosevelt authorized his military leaders to have secret talks with their British counterparts. Soon it was decided that, should America ever go to war against both Germany and Japan, the conquest of Germany would take precedence. It was not a decision easily arrived at, and for some American military commanders it remained a contentious issue for years to come.

The ever-present threat of a successful German occupation of England, which would have deprived America of a base for operations in Europe, made the ‘Germany First’ policy logical. Looking back now, it seems that arguments to reverse this policy were bluffs used by American military commanders to get more resources for the Pacific war, and also by American politicians as a threat that kept Churchill under control. The policy, all the same, was never seriously challenged.

In April the United States signed an agreement that gave them the right to build and maintain military installations in Greenland, and in this same month the Americans extended their ‘ocean security zone’ to longitude 26 degrees west, which is about halfway to England. An agreement with the Icelandic government to install and use military bases there followed in July. It was a vitally important development, for Iceland provided a vital base from which ships and aircraft could protect the Atlantic convoys. Without it there would have always been a mid-Atlantic gap in which the U-boats could operate at will.

Roosevelt and Churchill met in a warship off Newfoundland in August 1941 and pledged themselves to the common goal of destroying Nazi tyranny. It was no empty boast. In a decision no less than breathtaking, America extended $1 billion of credit to a USSR that most observers believed to be near total defeat.

Aboard Prince of Wales, returning home from his meeting with the president, Churchill was provided with a chance to see the merchant service at work. On the prime minister’s instructions, the battleship went right through a convoy, the escorts taking the outer lanes. The convoy was making a steady 8 knots; the warships doing 22. From the signal halliards Prince of Wales flew ‘Good luck – Churchill’ in international code.

Those seventy-two ships went mad. Quickly every ship was flying the ‘V’ flag; some tried a dot-dot-dot-dash salute on their sirens. In the nearest ships men could be seen waving, laughing and – we guessed though we could not hear – cheering. On the bridge the Prime Minister was waving back to them, as was every man on our own decks, cheering with them, two fingers on his right hand making the famous V-sign.

Soon we were through them and well ahead, when to everyone’s surprise we did an eight-point turn, and shortly after another. Mr Churchill wanted an encore.

The US navy entered a shooting war in September 1941 when U-652 was attacked by depth charges and fired two torpedoes at a nearby destroyer. Both missed. The U-boat captain had made two errors: the destroyer was the US navy’s Greer (a First World War four-funnel profile making it look like those sent to the Royal Navy); and the depth charges had come from an RAF plane. Greer retaliated with a pattern of depth charges but did only minor damage to the German boat which crept away. Roosevelt was angry about the ‘unprovoked attack’ and said that U-boats were the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic. The press echoed his verdict, and reported that the US navy had been ordered to ‘shoot on sight’ in future. It was a phrase which Roosevelt himself was happy to repeat.

The next month the American destroyer USS Kearney was damaged in a convoy battle and eleven American sailors died. At the end of October the American destroyer Reuben James – convoying merchant ships between the States and Iceland – was sunk by a U-boat and only 44 of its 120 men were rescued from the ocean. By this time the US navy was fully integrated into the Atlantic battle, to the extent that American orders often went out to Allied warships in the two-thirds of the Atlantic Ocean that was now ‘American’.

It was in the final weeks of December 1941 that the Atlantic battle reached a new and ferocious pitch. Dönitz coordinated his U-boats and Condors with skill. The route from Gibraltar to Britain had become especially hazardous. To escort a 32-ship convoy the Royal Navy had sixteen warships, and one of them was a new sort of vessel: the escort carrier. Cheap and hastily prepared, HMS Audacity was converted from an ex-German prize, the Hannover.

Commanding this escort group there was one of those rare breeds, an RN officer who had specialized in anti-submarine warfare in the prewar years. Commander F. J. ‘Johnny’ Walker RN had had enough differences of opinion with authority to have damaged his career. Passed over for captain he had spent the first two years of war in ‘uninspiring shore appointments’. Now he was about to become the most famous and most successful group commander of the entire Atlantic campaign. His desperate battle with the U-boats lasted six days and nights. Two of the convoy were lost, and so was the escort carrier, but four U-boats were sunk and a Condor shot down. It was a setback for Dönitz and proof that cheap little aircraft-carriers could give convoys air protection far away from land. And on the morning of 22 December 1941, the sixth day of the fight, the weary sailors looked up and saw another new and welcome sight. One of the very long-range Liberators had come 800 miles to perform escort duties. It circled the convoy and dropped depth charges upon some U-boats trailing behind. Dönitz called off his submarines. Air power had begun to turn the tide of the battle.

FIGURE 11 (#ulink_a9184a55-79a3-5900-91ce-9b916ade0827)

The US long-range Liberator, used for convoy escort duties (#ulink_a9184a55-79a3-5900-91ce-9b916ade0827)

The ships kept coming

The Atlantic campaign was the longest and most arduous battle of the war, much of it fought in sub-arctic conditions, in gales and heavy seas. When considering the moral questions arising from the RAF ‘terror bombing’ of cities, consider too the civilians who manned the merchant ships. Casualties of the air raids upon cities usually had immediate succour; the merchant seamen, and ships’ passengers too, men, women and children, were mutilated, crippled and burned. There was no warning save the crash of a torpedo tearing the hull open. Few men from the engine room got as far as the boat deck. The attacks usually came at night and, on the northerly routes the convoys favoured, it was seldom anything but very cold. Many of the merchantmen’s crews were not young. Survivors, many of them bleeding or half-drowned, were abandoned to drift in open boats upon the storm-racked ocean where they went mad or perhaps died slowly and agonizingly of thirst or exposure.

Almost all Britain’s oil and petroleum supplies came across the Atlantic by ship.

So did about half its food, including most of its meat, cheese, butter and wheat, as well as steel and timber, wool, cotton, zinc, lead and nitrates. British farmers could not have produced home-grown crops without imported fertilizers: neither could farmers in neutral Ireland have survived. ‘Ships carried cargoes they were never built for, in seas they were never meant to sail,’ said one official publication. During the war I remember that in London scarcely a day passed without someone in my hearing mentioning our debt to the merchant service. Anyone leaving a particle of food uneaten on a plate was risking a reprimand from any waiter or passer-by who saw it. No heroes of the war – not even the fighter pilots – excelled in valour and dogged determination the men of the merchant service and their naval escorts. The public knew it. One merchant navy officer said:

armed with free railway ticket issued by ‘Shipwrecked Mariners Society’ to my home in Colchester, Essex, I proceeded on leave. My journey across London via the Underground from Euston to Liverpool Street Station clad in a salt-stained (not to mention vomit!) uniform and still jealously clutching my orange-coloured life-jacket was more of an ordeal than the whole of the western ocean with the masses of people sheltering from the nightly blitz all wanting to crowd around me to slap my back or shake my hand.

The Battle of the Atlantic continued until Germany surrendered. When that happened, U-boats were ordered to surface, hoist black flags, report position and proceed by fixed routes to designated ports and anchorages. I remember spotting them, one after another, from a Fleet Air Arm plane as they made that final journey up the Channel. It was a heartening sight.

Churchill, in a letter to Roosevelt dated 8 December 1940, declared that the decision for 1941 lay upon the seas. He went on to detail the threat to Britain’s lifelines, and his concern was real. ‘PM very gloomy on shipping situation,’ Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office wrote after a meeting of the war cabinet in February 1941. A few days later, on 1 March, the Australian prime minister noted that Churchill called shipping losses the supreme menace of the war. To Mackenzie King, Churchill telegraphed on 24 March: ‘The issue of the war will clearly depend on our being able to maintain the traffic across the Atlantic.’ Churchill was so concerned that he formed a special Battle of the Atlantic Committee which discussed every aspect of shipping, escorts, imports, repairs and so on. As part of this allotment of resources, 17 squadrons from Bomber Command were assigned to Coastal Command. These heavy aircraft could range out into the ocean where the U-boats were operating so freely. Howls of protest and pain came from Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal and his deputy, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris, who later became known as ‘Bomber’ Harris.

Harris insisted that patrolling the sea lanes with bombers was a complete waste of time and effort. Citing the records of the Armstrong Whitley bombers used by 502 Squadron over a six-month period, he pointed out that on 144 sorties only six submarines had been spotted: four were attacked and one, perhaps two, sunk. Harris could not resist the observation that this meant 250 flying hours per sighting. In his note to his boss Portal, he scoffed at the Admiralty and the ineffectiveness thus proved. Portal was able to prevent any of the new long-range four-engine Halifax bombers going to Coastal Command. By July 1941 Churchill had been persuaded to switch priority back to the build-up of Bomber Command. Harris and Portal refused to admit the vital difference their planes could have made to closing the ‘gap’. They would not see that success in the vital battle for the sea lanes was measured by the number of ships that arrived safely, not by U-boat sinkings.

All the Royal Navy’s requests for long-range aircraft to aid in the Atlantic battle were dismissed contemptuously by the RAF. (Three things you should never take on a yacht: a wheelbarrow, an umbrella and an RN officer, advised ‘Bomber’ Harris in one of his less caustic remarks about the senior service.) Even in 1941, when the April total of lost shipping tonnage went to almost 700,000 and Britain’s rations were reduced – ‘the moment when Great Britain came nearest to losing the war,’ said A. J. P. Taylor

– the RAF were vehemently resisting the transfer of any aircraft away from their ineffective bombing campaign.

The Battle of the Atlantic was never won in the sense that land battles were. Germany could win the war by cutting the sea traffic to Britain but Britain could not win by conquering the U-boat menace. In fact the submarine was never conquered, which is why the victors all built submarine fleets after the war. Far from being the weapon of minor naval powers, the nuclear submarine became the modern capital ship.

The German navy failed to win the Battle of the Atlantic despite the willingness that Dönitz showed to flout international treaty. In theory it should have worked. Obsessed by the desire to starve Britain, he directed his forces to sink the merchantmen and rewarded his captains according to tonnage sunk. During the entire war his U-boats sank only 34 destroyers and 37 other escort vessels. Strategically it was right and his tactics were sound, but the shipbuilders defeated this effort.

And Hitler’s Third Reich never put its full strength behind the submarine campaign. Hitler was a soldier and he was determined upon a land victory over the Bolsheviks he detested. Unlike his predecessors, a naval victory over Britain was not something of which he dreamed. Partly for this reason the German navy did not improve their submarines and torpedoes in the fundamental ways that the army’s tanks and guns were endlessly modified. Submarine technology did change of course, but the German U-boat fleet did not improve well enough or fast enough. Most of the changes were defensive. By the end of the war German submariners were neither expert nor determined.

Their opponents, on the other hand, learned quickly, and invented tactics and weapons that countered the U-boats, most of which were little different to those in service in 1939. High-frequency direction-finding sets were made small enough to go into ships, and these gave a more exact position for immediate tactical response. Radar improved and it was used more skilfully from ships and from aircraft. Land-based aircraft flew from Newfoundland, Iceland and Britain to provide better and more effective air cover. Escort carriers – their decks built upon merchant ship hulls – brought aircraft to eliminate any last ‘gaps’ in the ocean.

Technical developments contributed to the Allied success but (senior officers on both sides say) the German U-boat arm liked to declare that Enigma intercepts, radar or HF/DF decided the war because these allowed them an excuse for losing. For many postwar years the British over-emphasized the role that HF/DF had played. This was a way of keeping their Enigma work secret. Once the Enigma secret was out, the contribution of Bletchley Park was in turn exaggerated.

In the final year of war, the U-boat arm became worn out and demoralized. These men, more than any other Germans, were provided with evidence that Germany could never win. On every operational mission they encountered bigger and better convoys of new ships stacked high with shiny new tanks and planes. They faced tired but highly motivated and ever more expert Allied seamen who knew they were winning. The German sailors, at sea for many weeks, became concerned about what was happening to their friends and families in the cities under Allied air attack by night, and later by day too. As the Russians started their remorseless advance the U-boat men had new worries about what was happening to their families in cities overrun by the vengeful Red Army.

It was German policy to send conscripts (draftees) into the submarines. This was a mistake. The policy in most other navies was to use only tested volunteers in this specialized warfare. And while RN training improved and became more practical as time went on, the U-boat training schools in the Baltic remained out of touch with the latest anti-submarine techniques, and even the sea conditions of the Atlantic. Shortages of men caused U-boat trainees to be posted to operational duties even when instructors had doubts about their ability. Half-trained men made less expert and less resolute adversaries; they also were crippled and killed by the remorseless ocean. Some fell down companionways, others lost their fingers in machinery and still more were swept overboard and never seen again. Towards the end U-boat crews were no longer singing old songs like ‘Denn wir fahren gegen Engeland’ but cynical ditties about the failings of the mechanisms they operated and about the radar that hunted them. A German historian acknowledges: ‘The men knew that they were beaten and that their end was inevitable …’

Yet the U-boat as a weapon was certainly not defeated. The schnorchel (anglicized as snorkel) enabled the diesel engines to breathe air while the submarine remained just below the surface. Postwar trials showed that 94 per cent of U-boats using the snorkel went undetected by airborne radar. The German Type XXI U-boats could go 300 miles on electric motors while remaining totally submerged. Added to this there were some remarkable target-seeking torpedoes: ones that homed on engine noise and others that turned and (programmed for the forward speed of the target) made run after run until they hit something or exhausted their propellant. But such devices were gimmicks rather than innovations.