Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [64]
The first ten months of the war, until the fall of France, was a period in which the contestants groped their way toward some conception of what was actually going to happen. Prior to war, the Germans had signed agreements restricting the use of submarines against merchant shipping, but these soon went by the board. The British expected that they would, and even before war began they were making plans to arm their merchant vessels. After 1945, both sides threw charges against the other of the “he-did-it-first” variety, but these are largely retrospective rationalizations. The U-boat was just too good a weapons system, and the merchant ship too crucial a target, for either side to be unduly concerned with the niceties of behavior. It is difficult to think of an instance in history when a weapon that was available and effective—gas was not—has not been used by the state possessing it.
On the day war was declared, the German U-30 torpedoed and sank the passenger liner Athenia with no warning and with large loss of life. The British made capital out of this, and the Germans did their best to deny the matter; in fact the U-boat commander either acted against his orders or misread them, but the damage had been done. After that beginning the campaign slowed down, and until June of 1940, the Allies were ahead on points, sinking more U-boats than the Germans commissioned, for their own loss of 222 ships, about 100,000 tons a month. The Germans calculated that they would have to sink about three-quarters of a million tons a month to defeat Britain, so 100,000 a month, whatever agony it meant for those involved, was not an unacceptable loss. More serious in this period were the German air strikes against convoys along the vulnerable east coast of Britain, for which the Royal Air Force had made no provision.
Equally important right from the start was the influence of new techniques and new technology. The British found, for example, that their Coastal Command air patrols were an effective anti-submarine device, and this element would increase in importance until the U-boat was mastered. The Germans introduced a new wrinkle by sowing magnetic mines in the Channel, and the British were for a while at a loss to counter them. The magnetic mine sat on the sea floor, and when a ship passed over it, it was detonated by the magnetic field generated by the ship. The whole British minesweeping service was set up to deal with moored contact mines, which float just below the surface of the water, and are moored to the bottom by a long cable. To defeat these the minesweeper cuts the cable, the mine floats to the surface, and the sweeper destroys it with small arms fire. With no vulnerable cable to be cut, the magnetic mine was for a while unbeatable. Fortunately, in November a mine was dropped on a tidal flat, the British retrieved and examined it, and were able to develop countermeasures. One of these was a device known as degaussing, in which an electric cable was run around a ship’s hull. A current activated through this cable counteracted the magnetic field of the ship itself, so that there would be no disturbance to detonate the mine.
Throughout the war, there was a constant battle by the scientists to invent new weapons, and to counter them, so that the war had two incongruous aspects: on the one hand, the completely objective and scientific search for improvement, on the other, the physical, dangerous business of putting those weapons to use. The war produced its own schizophrenia.
In October, the Germans scored another striking material, and even greater propaganda, success when U-47 worked its way inside the northern British naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak; she took more than 800 men to the bottom with her, and the whole matter was a severe blow to British pride.
The U-boat campaign began to