All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [179]
This convoy’s experiences, each one sufficiently harrowing to represent the drama of a lifetime save in the circumstances of a world at war, were repeated again and again by merchantmen and escorts on the Atlantic run. Moreover, such losses were relatively light for the period. Later that October fifteen ships of SC107 were sunk, while SC125 lost thirteen in a seven-day battle, without destroying a single U-boat. In 1942 as a whole, 1,160 Allied merchantmen were sunk by submarines. Just as the tide of the war was turning dramatically against the Axis, Britain was confronted with its most serious import shortfall. In the winter of 1942 Dönitz’s wolf packs reached their greatest strength, with over a hundred U-boats at sea. The North African campaign, and especially the November Torch landings, obliged the Royal Navy to divert substantial resources to the Mediterranean.
Canadian corvettes, which had assumed much of the burden of western Atlantic escort duties, proved to lack both equipment and expertise to match Dönitz’s wolf packs: some 80 per cent of mid-Atlantic losses between July and September were suffered by Canadian-escorted convoys. Contemporary reports highlighted a critical shortage of competent captains with adequate training, and of skills in using Asdic. The Royal Canadian Navy had expanded much faster than its small nucleus of professional seamen could handle – 3½ times more than the Royal Navy or the USN. Of one RCN warship arriving in Britain, a reporting officer concluded: ‘This low state of efficiency appears to be evident generally in all Canadian-manned corvettes.’ A historian has noted: ‘These problems often resulted in poor performance against U-boat packs.’ The Canadians had to be relieved of mid-ocean responsibilities for some months early in 1943, as soon as the Royal Navy could spare its own ships to replace them.
In March that year there was another breakdown of U-boat radio traffic decryption at Bletchley. In consequence, for two months half of all Atlantic convoys suffered attack, and one in five of their merchantmen were sunk. Yet this proved the final crisis of the campaign. That spring, at last the Western Allies committed resources which overwhelmed the U-boats. Escort groups equipped with 10cm radar, VLR aircraft with improved depth-charges, small carriers and renewed penetration of Dönitz’s ciphers combined to transform the struggle. Admiral Sir Max Horton, who became C-in-C Western Approaches in November 1942, was a former World War I submariner of the highest gifts, who made a critical contribution to victory, directing the Atlantic campaign from his headquarters in Liverpool.
In May 1943 forty-seven U-boats were sunk, and almost a hundred in the year as a whole. Sinkings of German submarines by aircraft alone rose from five between October 1941 and March 1942, to fifteen between April and September 1942, to thirty-eight between October 1942 and March 1943. Dönitz found himself losing a U-boat a day, 20 per cent of his submarine strength gone in a month. He was obliged drastically to curtail operations. There was a steep fall in merchant ship sinkings, so that by the last quarter of 1943 only 6 per cent of British imports were lost to enemy action. The wartime Atlantic passage was seldom less than a gruelling experience, but for the rest of the war British and American forces dominated the ocean, challenged by a shrinking U-boat force, and German crews whose inexperience and waning morale were often manifest.
Britain’s merchant fleet was devastated to a degree which contributed to the nation’s post-war economic woes: almost all the fourteen million tons of new Allied shipping launched in 1943 were American. But the immediate reality was that Germany had lost its war against Atlantic commerce. In the last seven months of 1943 sinkings of Allied shipping fell to 200,000 tons, around a quarter of this total by submarines.