Inferno - Max Hastings [182]
Perhaps the most vivid statistic of the Battle of the Atlantic is that between 1939 and 1943 only 8 percent of slow and 4 percent of fast convoys suffered attack. Much has been written about the inadequacy of Allied means to respond to the U-boat threat in the early war years. This was real enough, but German resource problems were much greater. Hitler never understood the sea. In the early war period, he dispersed industrial effort and steel allocations among a range of weapons systems. He did not recognise a strategic opportunity to wage a major campaign against British Atlantic commerce until the fall of France in June 1940. U-boat construction was prioritised only in 1942–43, when Allied naval strength was growing fast and the tide of the war had already turned. Germany never gained the capability to sever Britain’s Atlantic lifeline, though amid grievous shipping losses it was hard to recognise this at the time.
2. Arctic Convoys
WHEN HITLER invaded Russia, the British and American chiefs of staff alike opposed the dispatch of military aid, on the grounds that their own nations’ resources were too straitened to spare arms for others. The Royal Navy saw a further strategic objection: any matériel shipped to the Soviets must be transported through their Arctic ports, Murmansk and Archangel, the latter accessible only in the ice-free summer months. This would require convoys travelling at a speed of eight or nine knots to endure at least a weeklong passage under threat or attack from German U-boats, surface warships and aircraft based in nearby northern Norway. Britain’s prime minister and America’s president overruled these objections, asserting—surely rightly—that support for the Soviet war effort was an absolute priority. Hitler at first took little heed of the significance of the Arctic link to Russia, though his obsession with a possible British landing in Norway caused him to fortify its coastline. Churchill remained a strong advocate of such an assault until as late as 1944, though he was thwarted by the implacable opposition of his service chiefs. What mattered in 1942, however, was the strong German naval and air presence in the far north, which threatened Arctic convoys.
The First Sea Lord, Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, deplored the diversion of resources from the Battle of the Atlantic to open a hazardous new front merely to aid the repugnant Soviets, who seemed likely to soon succumb to the Germans. Pound was especially uneasy about the prospect of outgunned elements of the Home Fleet meeting one of Hitler’s capital ships, most likely the Tirpitz; the navy was scarred by memories of its difficulties and losses before the Bismarck succumbed. Apprehension was heightened by an unsuccessful carrier air strike against German coastal shipping off northern Norway on 30 July 1941, which cost eleven of twenty Swordfish torpedo bombers dispatched—one of the Royal Navy’s notable strategic failures was interdiction of the vital German iron-ore traffic.
Churchill remained implacable: he insisted that the navy must brave the passage, whatever its perils, carrying to Russia such weapons and supplies as Britain and America could spare. He was undeterred by the prospect of battle. In 1941–42, one of his foremost objectives was to exploit opportunities to engage German forces; he thus demanded the establishment of a continuous cycle of Arctic convoys. The few merchantmen which Britain dispatched to Russia in late 1941 arrived unscathed, carrying small quantities of tanks, aircraft and rubber. The Germans barely noticed their passage.
In 1942, however, as the British began to transport substantial shipments eastwards, Hitler’s forces intervened with mounting vigour.