Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [66]
Sailors developed a grim appreciation of their chances, measured in how you slept: if you carried iron ore, you slept on deck, for if hit by a torpedo, there were only seconds to get clear. If you carried general cargo, you could sleep below decks, but had to leave your door open, and sleep with your clothes on so you would have time to get out. If you were on a tanker carrying aviation gas, you could undress, close your cabin door, and have a good night’s sleep, because if you were hit, it wasn’t going to make any difference at all; you’d never get out anyway.
Eventually, to deal with the wolf-packs, the British introduced the hunter-killer group. This was an escort group that was unattached, a sort of fire-brigade free to come to the rescue of convoys under attack; once it found a wolf-pack, it could harry the U-boats just as they had harried the convoy. But this came only later, when the Allies had sufficient material to afford such luxuries.
In early 1942, with the entry of the United States into the war, the U-boat campaign hit its stride. For the Germans the first six months went down in legend as “the happy time” or “the American hunting season.” The Americans were by no means fully organized for war, and U-boat operations shifted to the eastern seaboard. Large replenishment submarines known as “milch cows” brought fuel, torpedoes, and supplies over to submarines which remained on station off New York, Boston, Charleston, and Gulf Coast ports. The American cities were in many cases not even blacked out, and the Germans had a field day sinking ships silhouetted against the lights as they moved along the coast. It got so bad for a while that there was a “reverse Lend-Lease” with British and Canadian corvettes turned over to the Americans and Royal Navy ships escorting American merchantmen up and down the Atlantic coast. In two weeks the Germans sank twenty-five ships—200,000 tons—off the coast of Florida. The Florida towns refused to turn their lights off at night because it would damage their tourist trade. In February, 432,000 tons went down, 80 percent of it in American coastal waters. By spring the Germans were winning the war.
The crisis continued through the summer, but both the British and Americans rallied to it. Massive shipbuilding programs in the United States began to catch up with the losses; increased numbers of air patrols kept watch over the convoy lanes. At sea there was a deadly equilibrium, with the escorts and the U-boats locked in a death grapple. But between the new escorting tactics and the accelerating production, the situation began to stabilize. November of 1942 was the last month in which shipping losses outpaced construction. By the end of the year, though it was hard to be certain, the Allies had turned the corner.
Through 1943 the Allies tried to retain the advantage, and the Germans strove desperately to recapture it. Both sides were, now fully aware of the importance of the Atlantic, both knew that whoever won that battle would eventually win the war. When they met at Casablanca in January of 1943, the Allied leaders decided the U-boat was their absolutely first priority. They diverted their strategic bombing campaign to U-boat bases and building yards, they increased their production of ships, escorts, escort carriers, and anti-submarine patrol aircraft, and through 1943 they brought these new weapons and their new tactics into use.
The Germans too increased their efforts. They built bigger and better submarines, armed them with more anti-aircraft weapons, laid more mines