Inferno - Max Hastings [176]
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 5 million tons, imposing severe strains on food and oil supplies—the latter were reduced by about 15 percent, requiring the government to dip into its admittedly large strategic stockpiles. This was attributable less to Dönitz than to the diversion of 200 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 in three dimensions.
Even when the United States 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 equipment on 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 2 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 For a few months in 1941 American escorts protected convoys east of Iceland, but after Pearl Harbor these were withdrawn; Canadian corvettes took up the strain, and the Royal Navy assumed responsibility once ships entered the Western Approaches.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 percent of all escorts, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) 46 percent, 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 of freezing spray,