War Stories III (26 page)

Petersen's assessment of how dangerous it was to serve aboard a German U-boat is borne out by the numbers. From December 1939 to the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Dönitz deployed 830 U-boats into the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Only 134 returned. Overall, the odds were little better. Counting those deployed in the Baltic, Indian Ocean, and the Arctic approaches to Russia, Dönitz committed 1,175 U-boats to the war but lost 781 or them. Of 40,900 German U-boat crewmen, 25,870 were killed and another 4,879 were captured when their U-boats were sunk or—in three cases—captured.

The convoy system, initiated by the British during World War I and implemented again by the Royal Navy in World War II, eventually doomed Hitler's effort to strangle the British Isles. Though Dönitz attempted to adapt his tactics and deployment patterns to counter the Allied convoy measures, he was never able to make up for losses in U-boats and trained
crews as the U.S. and British improved their anti-submarine warfare capabilities. By May 1943, long-range variants of the American B-24 Liberator, Navy PBY-Catalina, and the British Wellington bombers made all but small areas of the mid-Atlantic deadly for U-boats and their crews.

German scientists invented dramatically improved magnetic and then acoustic-homing torpedoes, radar detection equipment, the
schnorkel
—air-intake devices—and even a hydrogen-peroxide propulsion system. But by mid-1943 Dönitz was losing more U-boats than German shipyards could replace, and Allied shipbuilders were launching more than six new ships for every one sunk.

 

Navy PBY-Catalina—instrumental in hunting down U-boats.

Though warships were vital, so were transport vessels. The first Liberty ship, the USS
Patrick Henry,
was launched on 27 September 1941. By 1943, eighteen U.S. shipyards on the East, West, and Gulf coasts were launching “Liberty ships” as fast as they could be welded together. Valued at $1.5 million each, Liberty-class ships were 440 feet long and could carry nearly 10,000 tons of cargo at eleven knots. Over the course of the war, 2,708 Liberty ships were built—the fastest going from keel to completion in just four days.

To man these thousands of new vessels—and the new tankers and coastal freighters being constructed—the U.S. Merchant Marine put out an urgent call for able-bodied seamen. Nearly a quarter-million American men answered the call—many of them too old to be drafted, others who had been spurned by military recruiters for poor eyesight, others who were just too young. And unlike the military, the U.S. Merchant Marine service wasn't segregated.

Those who volunteered to serve in the Merchant Marines were putting their lives on the line just as much as any soldier, sailor, airman, Guardsman or Marine. Going to sea in a Liberty ship exposed a seaman to risk of being
bombed by the Luftwaffe, sunk by a German surface combatant like the
Bismarck
, torpedoed by a U-boat, or attacked by one of Germany's ten surface raiders—deceptively constructed to look like a merchant ship, but every bit as lethal as any warship.

Throughout the war, the vessels most at risk of being attacked by a U-boat or a merchant raider were those that traveled alone. Though convoy operations were well underway by 1942, delays in loading, port and pier availability, and the need to deliver priority cargoes urgently were all problems that caused thousands of ships to make their transits without escorts. On 10 September 1942, George Duffy, of Newburyport, Massachusetts, the Third Mate aboard the Liberty Ship
MV American Leader,
found out just how dangerous steaming alone could become.

The ten German auxiliary raiders sank or captured 138 Allied merchant ships, totaling a million gross registered tons. The
Michele
was struck by a torpedo from the American submarine USS
Tarpon
on 17 October 1943, and the surreptitiously armed merchant ship that had sent nineteen Allied vessels to the bottom was sunk herself.

German raiders like
Michele
preferred unescorted merchantmen as targets. No Allied vessel in a convoy was ever attacked, sunk, or captured by a lone auxiliary raider. Forays by major German capital ships like
Bismarck
or
Tirpitz
were certainly threats to convoys—but so rare that losses in such action are remarkable only because there were so few.

Attacks on merchant shipping by Luftwaffe aircraft were likewise most effective against unescorted vessels. Though a large number of slow-moving merchantmen all within a confined sea-space might seem an attractive target, the escorting warships with effective radar and anti-aircraft guns increased the risk to the attacking aircraft.

It was the same for the U-boats. Though “wolf pack” attacks on convoys sound ominous, the numbers show otherwise. The majority of the Allied merchant vessels sunk were not in protected convoys, but were mostly single ships crossing alone.

The challenge then for the British—and the Americans after Pearl Harbor—was to find enough well-armed escorts to economically organize and protect the convoys plying the routes across the Atlantic. Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers had far too many other tasks and were too few in number to be employed exclusively in convoy duty.

The best ships for the job were smaller, lightly armored vessels, equipped with sonar, radar, and an effective suite of anti-aircraft and anti-submarine weapons. Based on a British design, the Americans called them “destroyer escorts”—and they became the guardians of the Atlantic convoys, crucial to eliminating the U-boat threat.

 

The dead and wounded are transferred from the USS
Menges
after the ship was struck by a German torpedo.