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By Root 1058 0

increase in intensity after the fall of France. Norwegian and French bases were now available, and the Germans were putting more effort into submarine construction. The British had lost heavily in their destroyer and escort forces in the Norwegian campaign and at Dunkirk; the new corvettes were not ready until late in the summer and early in the fall, and the services of the French Navy were also lost. Late 1940 saw the American destroyers-for-bases deal, but in spite of extensive news coverage, the fifty old American ships needed a great deal of work, and had no more than a marginal effect on British needs.

Losses mounted steadily. From June of 1940 till the end of the year, the British lost 638 ships, almost a threefold increase over the previous period. In the first six months of 1941, they lost more than seven hundred. They tried various expedients; Coastal Command was strengthened, and attacking the U-boats got equal priority with reconnaissance. The arming of merchant ships continued, and the use of the Q-ship was increased. This was a heavily armed vessel disguised as a merchant ship; the idea was to fool the submarine into thinking that it had an easy target, so that it would surface to finish it off with gunfire. Then the decoy ship would let down false partitions and stagings and sink the U-boat with its hidden guns. It was a pretty hazardous business, and in a sense it was self-defeating, for if the Q-ships succeeded often enough, the Germans would soon learn not to surface, but to rely on torpedoes instead.

The British discovered that aircraft were among the most effective means of countering the submarines, but not until the production of the small escort carrier, with a flight deck built on a merchant ship hull, did they have enough ships to provide most convoys with air escort outside the range of land-based planes. As an interim measure they introduced the catapult fighter. They put steam catapults on some merchant ships, and mounted a Hurricane on them. When a German reconnaissance plane was sighted, or a submarine on the surface, the Hurricane would be shot off from the catapult and do its bit. The obvious limitation on this was that the Hurricane was not a seaplane. Once in the air, if it could not make it to land, it had to ditch, hopefully alongside an escort which would then pick up the pilot. It was a pretty desperate business, but 1941 and 1942 called for pretty desperate measures.

The Germans responded by producing bigger and better U-boats that could range farther into the Atlantic, to the areas beyond the effective reach of the short-range escorts or the land-based planes. The British then had to develop means of refueling their escorts at sea, so they could go all the way across to Halifax in Nova Scotia, or St. John’s in Newfoundland. That eventually got rid of the mid-ocean gap, but it increased the strain and the wear and tear on men and ships. The German shift to mid-Atlantic brought increasing conflict with the United States, but that did not unduly hinder the submarine operations, though there was some falling off of sinkings in the second six months of 1941.

Hitler’s U-boat commanders introduced new tactics, too. They had originally operated independently, and like successful trout fishermen, the leading aces had their own private fishing grounds. Now they brought in group tactics; the first U-boat to spot a convoy would surface and radio a report to U-boat headquarters, which would then signal other U-boats in the area. Or German long-range reconnaissance planes, the famous Focke-Wulf Condors, would radio back reports. The subs would home in on the convoy, form a “wolf-pack,” and systematically attack it and whittle it down. The British intercepted the radio signals, and in their turn warned their escorts what to expect. Each night the submarines would make their attacks; in the morning they would meet behind the convoy, figure out what to do next, and sail on the surface to get ahead of their victim. The U-boats were generally faster on the surface than were the convoys, zigzagging