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By Root 1228 0

from North America to Britain during the war years arrived safely. Even in the bad days of April 1941, for instance, 307 merchantmen sailed in convoy, of which only sixteen were sunk, together with a further eleven unescorted vessels. In June that year, 383 ships made the Atlantic passage, in convoys of which submarines attacked only one, sinking six ships, along with a further twenty-two unescorted merchantmen. In 1942, by far the most alarming year of the U-boat war, 609 ships were sunk in the North Atlantic, a total of some six million tons. So prodigious was American shipbuilding capacity, however, that in the same period the Allies launched 7.1 million tons of ships, increasing their available pool of thirty million tons.

Yet, as is the way of mankind, the Allies perceived most of the difficulties on their own side. While posterity knows that in 1942 the U-boats inflicted the utmost damage of which they were capable, and that thereafter the tide of the convoy war turned steadily against them, at the time Churchill and Roosevelt saw only a steeply rising graph of losses which, if it had continued, would have crippled the war effort. In 1942 British imports fell by five million tons, imposing severe strains on food and oil supplies – the latter were reduced by about 15 per cent, requiring the government to dip into its admittedly large strategic stockpiles. This was attributable less to Dönitz than to the diversion of two hundred ships from the Atlantic shuttle to open an Arctic supply line to Russia. Whatever the causes, however, Britain’s shrunken deliveries alarmed a nation with its back to the wall in many theatres and three dimensions.

Even when the US supplied Britain with a few B-24 Liberators – suitable for very-long-range conversion and thus ideal for Atlantic convoy support – initially the RAF chose to use most of them elsewhere. Sir Arthur Harris, 1942–45 C-in-C of Bomber Command, fiercely resisted the diversion of heavy aircraft to the convoy war: ‘It was a continual fight against the navy to stop them as usual pinching everything,’ said Harris, who disliked British sailors almost as much as he abhorred the Germans. ‘Half my energies were given to saving Bomber Command from the other services. The navy and army were always trying to belittle the work of the air force.’ The Atlantic ‘air gap’ – the area of ocean beyond range of land-based cover – remained the focus of U-boat activity until late 1943.

An average of just over one convoy a week each way made the North Atlantic passage. Many crossed without suffering attack, because the Germans did not locate them. Ultra intercepts of U-boat position reports, together with ‘Huff-Duff’ – High Frequency Direction Finding by warships – often made it possible to divert convoys away from enemy concentrations: one statistical calculation suggests that in the second six months of 1941 alone, Ultra saved between 1.5 and two million tons of Allied shipping from destruction. For a few months in 1941 American escorts protected convoys east of Iceland, but after Pearl Harbor these were withdrawn; Canadian corvettes took up the strain, and the Royal Navy assumed responsibility once ships entered the Western Approaches. Throughout 1941–43, the key period of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Admiralty supplied 50 per cent of all escorts, the RCN 46 per cent, and American vessels made up the balance.

Yet if the German offensive was mismanaged, especially in 1941–42 Allied merchant seamen suffered grievously from its consequences. Crews were drawn from many nationalities; though some young British men chose the merchant service in preference to conscription into the armed forces, it would be hard to argue that this represented a soft option: some seamen were obliged to abandon ship two or three times. Michael Page described one such experience, in Atlantic darkness:

One minute we had been on watch on deck or in the engine-room, or sleeping snugly in our bunks; the next we were engaged in a frenzied scramble through the dense, shrieking blackness which assailed us with squalls