A World at Arms (75 page)

The converse of German use of Spanish ports was the unsuccessful attempt of the Allies to secure bases in neutral Ireland and their eventual success in obtaining Portuguese agreement to their use of the Azores. After the failure of British attempts in 1940 to persuade the Irish Free State to exchange use of bases for steps leading to reunification
(discussed in
Chapter 3
), the issue rested for a while. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German and Italian declarations of war on the United States seemed to open the possibility for a reexamination of the issue. Consideration for Irish-American opinion had operated to restrain the British earlier; now it seemed reasonable to suppose that with the United States in the war and Irish-Americans fighting the Axis, the Irish government might change its policy. Churchill personally once again raised the issue, and the American government also urged Dublin to support the United Nations. But the de Valera government refused to alter its basic policy, though thereafter it was more accommodating in releasing Allied planes and crews which landed in the Free State.
²²

The hope of the Allies that they might be allowed to utilize bases in the Azores was related to one of the most difficult aspects of the struggle against the submarines. Airplanes were useful for patrolling but they were especially helpful in aiding convoys evade attack because the appearance of planes forced the submarines to submerge even if they did not damage or destroy them. The problem was that there were not enough very long-range planes available for this duty, and even those there were could not reach certain portions of the Central Atlantic. Airplanes based on the Azores would have solved this problem before the introduction of small escort carriers assigned to anti-submarine duty became available.
²³

The Portuguese, however, were very vulnerable to German threats of invasion and hence reluctant to take any action until it was obvious that Germany was not in any position to take effective retaliatory measures. In this case, as so often in World War II, the known reluctance of the Allies to deal violently with neutrals, by contrast with German enthusiasm for doing so, worked in Germany’s favor. Finally, in August 1943, the Portuguese government thought it was safe to act in accordance with its alliance of 1373 with England and allow the Allies to use the Azores for air and naval forces from October 8, 1943. By that time, the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic as well as the war as a whole had turned clearly in favor of the Allies, but the latter certainly derived considerable if belated help from their new bases.
²⁴

One other important semi–neutral in the war over the oceans has been referred to repeatedly: Vichy France. Its warships were potentially still important but most remained in port in Toulon and Martinique.
²⁵
Pétain and Darlan publicly declared on December 12, 1941, that these would not be used against the Allies, in order to obtain an American declaration of December 27 that France would keep its territory and place in the world.
²⁶
In private talks with the Germans, however, both Darlan and Laval expressed themselves as vehemently anti-British and pro-German.
Darlan warned the Germans about excessive signalling by their submarines and generally showed himself eager to side with them in December 1941 and January 1942.
²⁷
But as Hitler was absolutely unwilling to make even the slightest concession to the French, the approaches from Vichy did not lead to any basic changes in policy.
²⁸
Laval continued to believe in a German victory in the war and in a Franco-German rapprochement,
^b
but the only contribution he and Darlan could make to that objective was to promise to destroy the French cruiser and aircraft carrier in Martinique if the Americans tried to seize these ships for the Free French to use in the Battle of the Atlantic.
²⁹
When the Allies landed in French Northwest Africa in November 1942, the French allowed the Germans to take over their warships in Tunisia;
³⁰
but the attempt of the Germans to seize the French warships at Toulon failed as these sank themselves in the harbor.
^c

By the time the French were scuttling remnants of their navy in Toulon in November 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic was reaching its climax; in fact, that month saw the highest Allied losses of World War II: over 860,000 tons altogether, including over 720,000 sunk by submarines. The most important single measure used by the Allies to protect shipping was the convoy system. Originally developed to cope with the German submarine menace in World War I, it provided some protection to ships by enabling the Allies to allocate whatever escort forces were available to groups of ships scheduled to sail together, necessarily at the speed of the slower boats in each convoy. This had the disadvantage of slowing ships to one of the two speeds generally used, with the slow convoys going at six knots and the fast ones at nine knots, but greatly reduced the loss of ships. Detailed analysis showed that larger convoys lost proportionately fewer ships; and While in 1942 the slow convoys averaged forty–four and the fast twenty–five ships, in 1943 the slow ones averaged fifty and the fast fifty–two ships. By 1944, an intermediate speed had been added and convoys often included eighty to one hundred ships.
³¹
On the less threatened routes, some ships continued to sail alone, while the very fast liners like the
Queen Mary
and
Queen Elizabeth
carried their thousands of troops at a speed that made escort impossible and submarine attacks unlikely.
³²

Within range of Allied air bases in Newfoundland, Iceland, Northern Ireland, England, Gibraltar and the Gambia, airplanes could provide additional protection to the convoys; but, as already mentioned, there was a 6oo-mile wide gap south of Greenland where air support was at first impossible.
³³
There was much debate in the British government, especially in 1942, about the allocation of planes to convoy duty since it competed for the larger models with the desire of Bomber Command to utilize all such planes for the bombing offensive against Germany.
³⁴
This issue spilled out into public view occasionally, was a major point of criticism of Churchill’s direction of the war at the time, and remains a contentious issue among students of the war.
³⁵
The problem was solved in stages beginning in late 1942 and during 1943. There was the increased assignment of very long range American Liberator B-24S which were in more and more cases equipped with the British-developed Leigh lights that could be used to illuminate U-Boats running on the surface at night. Even more helpful eventually was the building and employment of escort carriers, ships capable of carrying a small but substantial complement of airplanes, which began to be built in 1942 and entered service in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943.

These small carriers were closing the Central Atlantic gap in air coverage even before the establishment of bases on the Azores and played a critical role in the defeat of the U-Boats in 1943. Barrage balloons occasionally helped keep German planes from low-level and more accurate attacks on shipping, and blimps, small helium–filled airships used for patrol purposes off the coast of North America, provided some assistance; but the main burden of defending the convoys against attack always fell on the escort ships and their crews in endless duty on rough and dangerous seas. For the sailors as for the soldiers, war was a combination in which 99 percent boredom and anxiety alternated with 1 percent terror and exhilaration. But at sea, the likelihood of rescue and survival was generally lower than on land, a truth as ominous for the merchant sailors as for naval personnel.
³⁶

The northern Atlantic was for most of the war the main battlefield. Early and late in the war the coastal waters around Britain were the site of great activity, and in the first half of 1942 first the coast of North America and then the Caribbean were centers of attention, while periodically some German submarines operated in the South Atlantic, off the Cape of Good Hope and in the Indian Ocean as well as in the Mediterranean; but for the majority of the time most of the action was on the
North Atlantic convoy run. There are several reasons for this. The need to keep Britain supplied and to build up forces and supplies there for any invasion of Europe meant that there was no way for the Allies to abandon that route without losing the war. They could reroute the convoys as far north or south as weather, intelligence, and other factors might indicate, but they had to keep this route open. For the Germans, this area offered both the largest number of targets for their submarines and an approach route substantially shorter than that to any other area, a matter of great importance both as regards fuel consumption by the submarines on the way out and back as well as the length of time taken out of the total operational period for each mission by these two journeys. It was accordingly in this area that both sides concentrated most of their strength. In the early years of the war, both operated with small numbers of ships; in 1942 and 1943 both escorts and submarines became more numerous, until over a hundred submarines confronted literally hundreds of British and American escort ships, with Canada also playing a steadily increasing role.
³⁷

The most important element in the struggle was always the skill and endurance of the crews on the ships engaged, but intelligence probably played a larger role over a greater period of time in this struggle than elsewhere in the war. If Allied intelligence could discover the present and intended location of submarines, the convoys could be routed around them, and any convoy that was
not
attacked at all represented a small but significant victory: the ships and their crews and cargo survived intact while the by–passed submarines had wasted several of their limited number of days at sea without accomplishing anything.
³⁸
Conversely, if German intelligence could locate a convoy and its assigned route, submarines could be strung out on a patrol line across that route to attack that convoy once the first sighting of the ships had been made.

If air intelligence and its photographic element was potentially useful for the Germans but rarely available, it was increasingly important for the Allies in observing the building of new submarines, their completion, and their trials in the Baltic Sea.
³⁹
As already mentioned, the use by the Allies of locator intelligence, especially Huff-Duff, was of central importance. At times traffic analysis, that is the careful examination of the patterns and frequency of radio traffic (even if it could not be read) provided major clues, for example to the sending out of new groups of submarines or their being given new orders. The most important clues for intelligence, outside of the use of Huff-Duff during convoy battles, was the actual reading of the other side’s coded messages. This process was facilitated by the way both sides conducted the major aspects of the
battle: from land by radio messages to the convoys and to the submarines. By definition, such direction and redirection from land had the enormous advantage of enabling those in charge to base decisions on the latest information and to act on it swiftly in issuing new directives, while simultaneously providing the other side with enormous quantities of radio traffic for the code–breakers to work on. These issues are discussed in additional detail in
Chapter 10
, but their relevance to the war at sea calls for comment here. The fact that the Germans were able to break into the British convoy codes and utilize information gleaned in that way to direct their submarines was of enormous help to them in 1941 and 1942 and contributed greatly to their ability to employ submarines effectively. It also reduced the value to the Allies of their breaking into the German codes, to be discussed shortly, because repeatedly the new British orders redirecting the convoys were in turn read by the Germans who then issued new orders to their submarines. It was only when the British eventually broke the new German submarine code in December 1942 that they recognized the vulnerability of their own system and, in June 1943, introduced a new machine code which the Germans apparently never broke.
⁴⁰

The ability of the British, developing their code-breaking program on the basis of materials furnished by the Poles, to read at least some of the German enigma code system, enabled them to reroute much of the convoy traffic in 1941 in a manner that greatly reduced sinkings. Combined with increasing American assistance in the North Atlantic and the diversion of German submarines into the Mediterranean, this seemed to give the Allies a distinct edge, especially in the fall of 1941.
⁴¹
The balance, however, swung in favor of the Germans early in 1942 from a combination of two factors; the declaration of war on the United States opened American shipping and the American and Caribbean coasts to U-Boat attack, and a new development in the German code system.

The lifting of all restraints on the German submarine campaign in the Western Hemisphere and against American ships–for which the German navy had been pleading for over two years–inaugurated a period of several months in which German submarines sank Allied shipping off the coast of the United States in record numbers. On the one side were experienced U-Boat crews; on the other was a merchant marine not yet in convoy, very poorly protected by the navy, and at night visible to the submarines by the glowing lights of the American coastal area which had not been blacked out. It was fortunate for the Allies that the number of German submarines employed in their operation “Paukenschlag” (Roll of the Drums) was quite small; about a dozen
were on station off the North American coast for most of the months from January to May 1942 because of the assignments to other areas, especially the Mediterranean and off the coast of Norway.

In short order, these few submarines, operating independently, sank ships left and right, quite literally in sight of the American coast, as the American navy took an unbelievably long time to wake up to the danger and take appropriate steps. Admiral King for weeks refused to adopt the most obvious lessons which the British had learned at high cost earlier in the war. He had to be prodded by President Roosevelt, General Marshall, Winston Churchill, and an aroused American public. Not until April was a partial convoy system initiated, and over the following months the extension of that system, increased sea and air patrol activity, and the dimming out of the coast pushed the submarines first into the Caribbean-where they sank many of the precious oil tankers–and by July back into the Central Atlantic.
⁴²
By the end of August, the submarines had sunk some 485 ships, a total of almost 2,600,000 tons, off the coast of North and Central America in what must be regarded as the most disastrous defeat ever suffered by American naval power.
⁴³