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By Root 1237 0

forever the cruel sea. Signalman Richard Butler described a typical Atlantic storm: ‘I couldn’t see anything for the swirling spray. The wind shrieked through the rigging and superstructure. It looked as though we were sailing through boiling water as the wind whipped the wave tops into horizontal spume, white and fuming, which stung my eyes and face. Now and again I caught a glimpse of one of the big merchant-ships being rolled on its beam ends by the huge swells sweeping up under rain-laden skies.’ Butler’s destroyer, Matchless, hove to near a struggling merchantman with a twelve-foot split in its upper deck. Soon afterwards, one of their own men was washed overboard. The captain took the brave, futile decision to turn in search of him. Butler thought: ‘The captain’s gone crazy, he’s going to risk the lives of two hundred men to look for some silly bastard that hadn’t the sense to keep off the upper deck.’ After a few anxious moments, the hopeless quest was abandoned. Then Butler learned that the lost man was one of his own messmates. ‘I was saddened and shocked, filled with remorse about my selfish attitude … “Snowy” was well liked and had the reputation of being a “gannet” who never stopped eating. Never again would we hear him ask cheerfully at mealtimes, “Any gash left?”’

Aboard corvettes, workhorses of convoy escort groups, conditions were much worse, ‘sheer unmitigated hell’, in the words of a seaman. ‘Even getting hot food from the galley to fo’c’sle was a tremendous job. The mess decks were usually a shambles and the wear and tear on bodies and tempers something I shall never forget. But we were young and tough and, in a sense, we gloried in our misery and made light of it all. What possible connection it had with defeating Hitler none of us bothered to ask. It was enough to find ourselves more or less afloat the next day with the hope of duff for pudding and a boiler-clean when we reached port.’

And then there was the enemy. While Germany’s capital ships commanded headlines and their sorties inflicted some injuries, Axis submarine and air forces represented a much graver long-term threat, and the men of both arms displayed courage and skill. U-boats achieved striking early successes, such as sinking the old battleship Royal Oak in Scapa Flow, and wreaking havoc upon vulnerable merchantmen. Churchill as First Sea Lord estimated that the introduction of convoying in 1939 was responsible for a 30 per cent fall in Britain’s imports. Merchant ships were obliged to waste weeks waiting for convoys to assemble. Once ocean-bound, they travelled painfully slowly, and were offloaded on arrival by a lethargic and sometimes obstructive British dock labour force. Many ships that carried commodities in peacetime had to be diverted to move troops and munitions across huge distances by circuitous routes, to avoid Axis air and submarine concentrations – for instance, almost all Egypt-bound cargoes travelled via the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage to Suez lengthened from 3,000 miles to 13,000, while a Bombay-bound ship made a passage of 11,000 miles against the pre-war 6,000.

Until 1943, the Royal Navy was desperately short of escorts and effective technology to hunt U-boats. The British sank twelve German submarines in 1940, and just three in the six months between September that year and March 1941; intelligence and skilful convoy routeing did more to frustrate Admiral Karl Dönitz than did anti-submarine escorts. The Royal Navy was slow to realise the vulnerability of merchantmen off the African coast, where in 1941–42 just two long-range Type IX U-boats achieved some spectacular destruction, partly because they maintained wireless silence and partly because few defensive resources were available. The British were grievously hampered by lack of air support. The RAF’s Coastal Command was short of planes; its long-range Sunderland flying boats suffered from crews’ poor navigational and depth-charging skills, together with technical problems that reduced their effort in 1941 to an average two sorties per aircraft a month. Meanwhile,