• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1058 0

with men in every circumstance of conflict, merchant seamen’s performance was uneven: drawn from many nations and lacking the armed forces’ discipline, they were often careless of convoy routines, courses and signal procedures. Crews sometimes panicked and abandoned ships that might have been saved. But there were many examples of heroic endeavour, such as that of the 10,350-ton diesel cargo liner Otari. On 13 December 1940, 450 miles west of the British coast homeward-bound from Australia, she was hit by a torpedo, causing the sea to rush into her after holds. Frozen sheep carcasses and cases of butter were soon bobbing in the ship’s wake. The Otari’s propeller shafts were leaking, and the engine-room bulkhead threatened to collapse. But Captain Rice, her master, decided she might be saved: alone on the ocean, mercifully shrouded by mist from further enemy attentions, for three days he and his crew patiently coaxed the Otari onward, her pumps just sufficing to sustain buoyancy. The ship at last reached the mouth of the Clyde in darkness, to find the port’s defensive boom closed. Only at dawn on 17 December was Rice finally able to bring his ship, decks almost awash, into the anchorage, where most of its precious cargo was salvaged by lighters. By such stubborn determination and courage was Britain’s Atlantic lifeline held open.

In 1941, Britain launched 1.2 million tons of new vessels, and achieved dramatic economies of transport usage. Though few U-boats were sunk by naval escorts, which were slowly being equipped with improved radar and Asdic underwater detection systems, the Germans failed to force a crisis upon Churchill’s besieged island. By late summer of that year, the British were reading German U-boat signal traffic with reasonable regularity. Some of Dönitz’s submarines were transferred to the Mediterranean, or to northern Norway to screen the flank of Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union. By Christmas 1941, Hitler had already lost his best chance of starving Britain; once the United States entered the war, the consequent enormous accession of shipping and construction capability transformed the struggle.

But the U-boats enjoyed a surge of success in the months following Pearl Harbor, chiefly because the U.S. Navy was slow to introduce effective convoy and escort procedures. In those days, before attrition diluted the quality of the Kriegsmarine’s personnel, the Freikorps Dönitz, as its members proudly called themselves, was an elite. The U-boat captain Erich Topp wrote: “Living and working in a submarine, one has to develop and intensify the ability to cooperate with other members of the crew, because you could need each other simply to survive … When you are leaving harbour, closing the hatch, diving, you and your crew are bidding farewell to a colourful world, to the sun and stars, wind and waves, the smell of the sea. All are living under constant tension, produced by living in a steel tube—a very small, cramped and confined space with congested compartments, monotony and an unhealthy lifestyle, caused by bad air, lack of normal rhythms of day and night and physical exercise.” Topp took immense pains to massage morale. Once, a few hours after leaving port, he found his navigator looking morose. The man revealed that he had inadvertently left behind a myrtle wreath, the German symbol of marriage which was also his operational talisman. He was convinced that U-552 was thus doomed. Topp reversed course and returned to Bergen to let the navigator fetch his wreath before sailing again, a happy man.

Many of Dönitz’s officers were fanatical Nazis; by 1943 their average age had fallen to twenty-three, while that of their men was two years lower: they were finished products of Goebbels’s educational system. U-181’s Wolfgang Luth regularly harangued his crew about “race and other population policy issues … Germany, the Führer and his National Socialist movement.” The notion of holding indoctrination sessions in a stinking, sweating steel tube a hundred feet beneath the Atlantic seems surreal; not all Luth’s crew