Inferno - Max Hastings [180]
Throughout the daylight hours of 13 October the convoy struggled through mountainous seas, occasionally glimpsing U-boats which submerged before they could be attacked. That night, two more merchantmen were torpedoed. At 8:43 p.m. the Viscount spotted a submarine on the surface at a range of 800 yards. Spray blinded her gunners; the enemy dived as the destroyer closed to ram, the bridge crew catching a last glimpse of the U-boat’s conning tower thirty yards distant. Again and again through the night, escorts pursued contacts without success. The senior officer’s feelings, in his own words, “amounted almost to despair.” At dawn he found that half the convoy had lost formation during the night’s terrible weather; nine of the stragglers were rounded up, but six ships had been sunk, and the passage was only half over.
The struggle continued through 14 October, with four U-boats identified around the convoy. At nightfall, to the captains’ relief visibility worsened, making submarine attacks more difficult. The convoy changed course repeatedly to throw off its pursuers. During the following night, escorts attacked six successive radar contacts. One of these took place at 11:31 p.m., when the Viscount picked up a U-boat at 6,200 yards. Her captain closed to ram at twenty-six knots; the U-boat commander took evasive action, but made a disastrous misjudgement which swung his craft across the Viscount’s bows. The destroyer smashed into the submarine twenty feet aft of its conning tower, then rode up onto the stricken enemy’s hull. The U-boat swung clear, under fire from every calibre of British gun, and finally received a depth charge at point-blank range. U-619 sank stern-first at 11:47. Yet success was dearly bought: the damaged Viscount was obliged to set immediate course for Liverpool, where it arrived safely two nights later, needing months of dockyard repairs.
At sunrise on 16 October came the welcome sight of a long-range Liberator, the first covering aircraft to reach the convoy: SC104 had passed through the mid-Atlantic “air gap.” The Norwegian navy’s Potentilla transferred a hundred survivors from her packed mess decks to a merchantman. The morning was uneventful, but at 2:07 p.m. the Fame’s Asdic detected a U-boat at 2,000 yards, and she attacked with depth charges five minutes later. The subsequent drama was played out in the midst of the convoy, with merchantmen steaming past on both sides. A large bubble exploded onto the surface, followed by the dramatic spectacle of a U-boat bursting forth with water cascading off its hull, to meet a hail of gunfire. The Fame ran alongside, scraping her bottom, and launched a whaler as German crewmen dived over the side. A courageous British officer scrambled into the conning tower, seized an armful of documents from the submarine’s control room, then made his escape seconds before U-253 sank.
But the Fame, like the Viscount, suffered heavily in the collision. Her captain repented his decision to ram, as crewmen struggled for hours to close great gashes in the ship’s hull with collision mats and baulks of timber. With pumps straining to keep ahead of seawater gushing into the engine room, the Fame followed the Viscount towards Liverpool, and thence into dockyard hands. Four slow corvettes now remained to escort twenty-eight ships. At 9:40 that night of 16 October, yet another U-boat was detected by the Potentilla. The two approached each other at full speed before the Potentilla’s captain swerved at the last moment, to avoid a thirty-two-knot collision which must have been fatal to his own small vessel. The corvette’s 4-inch gun, pom-poms and Oerlikons blazed at the submarine, but it escaped almost unscathed. This was SC104’s last