Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [63]
First among these was geography. The advantage in this lay definitely with the Germans. At the start of the war, things were much as they had been before, with one exception: the independence of Ireland. In 1914-18, the British had operated large escort forces out of their base at Queenstown on the southern coast of Ireland. When the Irish Free State gained its independence the British lost the base. This pushed their escort forces back at least a hundred miles to the east, which meant two hundred miles coming and going; that in turn made the mid-Atlantic operational gap wider, and many British sailors would die in the waters off Iceland because of Irish neutrality.
After the 1940 campaigns, geography took another turn against the Royal Navy. The Germans occupied Norway and were able to operate out through the Norwegian Sea into the northern waters. When Russia came into the war the British convoys to North Russia were harassed all the way by attacks from Norwegian bases, and the convoys to Murmansk and Archangel had to run the gauntlet of U-boats, air attacks, surface ships, and even small motor torpedo boats. A sailor abandoning ship or a pilot shot down from the sky was dead in less than a minute in the waters off northern Norway, and the casualty toll on the Russian runs ran ten times higher than on the North Atlantic run.
The Germans also occupied the entire Atlantic coast of France, and were able to base their U-boats at Cherbourg, Brest, and Lorient as well as the smaller ports on the Bay of Biscay. From Brest and Lorient they were as far west as the British themselves, so geography was definitely on their side, compared with what it had been in the last war.
The British enjoyed some advantages, too. In World War I it took them three years to bring in a convoy system, because they thought the complexity of loading, marshaling, sailing, and unloading steamships would make it impossible. They found when they finally tried it that they had been wrong, and the convoy system, passive defense though it was, became the major anti-U-boat instrument. Now, in 1939, they resorted to it immediately. The Admiralty had the plans all worked out, and the whole mechanism began with the very declaration of war.
An underlying assumption of the convoy idea is that it is as difficult to find a block of fifty ships in the immensity of the ocean as it is to find one ship. Therefore, if you concentrate the ships in such a block, you have immediately reduced by fifty times the odds of their being spotted by an enemy. Further, if they are concentrated, it becomes possible to provide an armed naval escort for them. The enemy has to come to the convoy to destroy it, and that brings him to the escort as well, and it can destroy him. So you have fewer—if slightly larger—needles in the haystack, and you have some protection against the man looking for them.
The British problem was that they had few escorts, and the German problem was that they had few submarines. In fact, the Germans had only about thirty-nine U-boats at the outbreak of war, and that included several short-range training boats for the Baltic. Out of roughly thirty, a third would be on overhaul and a third in transit to operating areas at any given time. That left them only about ten boats actually on station to sink ships.
But the Royal Navy was almost as short of escort vessels. Destroyers were too expensive, and they were critically short of them anyway. They hoped at first to escort convoys with armed tugs and fishing trawlers, but these simply could not stand up to the North Atlantic. The answer eventually was found in the slower-speed escort vessel known as the corvette—the Americans called it a frigate—and these uncomfortable little ships finally bore the brunt of the Battle of the Atlantic. There were not too many of them to begin with, but the lull from 1939 to the end of