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The battle of the Atlantic was a grim affair. ‘Seas the size of houses would come from every side,’ recalled one who fought in it, ‘so that on duty or off one could rarely rest, was always bracing the body, bending body and knees like some frozen skier to meet the motions of the ship.’26 Able Seaman Edward Butler, who served on an Atlantic convoy escort ship, told of how cold the crossings could get, when the ice was ‘freezing everything on the upper deck and the captain had to turn all hands to chip it off because it was becoming over top weight and there was a very severe danger of the ship capsizing. So we had to work during the night, in complete darkness, to get the ice off.’27 The best fictional account of the battle is Nicholas Monsarrat’s 1951 autobiographical novel The Cruel Sea, which was later made into a fine movie starring Jack Hawkins and Denholm Elliott. The story of the 1,000-ton, 88-man corvette HMS Compass Rose, from her commissioning in 1940 to her torpedoing in 1942, and then of the frigate HMS Saltash, the book covers the U-boat war, the Murmansk convoys and D-Day. Monsarrat particularly expresses his unstinting admiration of the men of the merchant marine who sailed in oil-tankers: ‘They lived, for an entire voyage of three to four weeks, as a man living on top of a keg of gunpowder: the stuff they carried – the life-blood of the whole war – was the most treacherous cargo of all; a single torpedo, a single small bomb, even a stray shot from a machine-gun, could transfer their ship into a torch.’28 The logistics of organizing a convoy were also well described; at any one time there might be more than 500 British ships at sea in a dozen or so convoys, and each ship:

would have to be manned, and loaded at a prescribed date, railage and docking facilities notwithstanding… their masters would have to attend sailing conferences for last-minute orders: they would have to rendezvous at a set time and place, with pilots made available for them: and their readiness for sea would have to coincide with an escort group to accompany them, which itself needed the same preparation and the same careful routing. Dock space had to be waiting for them, and men to load and unload: a hundred factories had to meet a fixed dispatch-date on their account: a railway shunter falling asleep at Birmingham or Clapham could spoil the whole thing, a third mate getting drunk on Tuesday instead of Monday could wreck a dozen carefully laid plans, a single air raid out of the hundreds that had harassed the harbours of Britain could halve a convoy and make it not worth the trouble of sending it over the Atlantic.29

A major problem with British strategy at the start of the war was that too much attention was paid to taking the offensive against the U-boat threat, and not enough to protecting convoys, which the Great War had proved was the best way of keeping the sea-lanes open. ‘Instead of employing the maximum number of vessels in the escort role,’ Vice-Admiral Sir Peter Gretton believed, the Royal Navy ‘wasted a great deal of energy in hunting for submarines in the open ocean’.30 When the captain of the unarmoured, converted passenger liner HMS Jervis Bay, Edward Fogarty Fegen, bravely but suicidally attacked the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer in November 1940, thereby allowing convoy HX-84 to scatter in a smokescreen at dusk, she had been the only escort vessel accompanying thirty-seven merchantmen. (Scheer nonetheless sank five of them. Fegen won a posthumous Victoria Cross.)

It was not until May 1941 that convoys were escorted all the way across the Atlantic, and very often they were woefully under-protected even then. Although Liberator bombers from Britain had the range to search the Eastern Atlantic for enemy submarines on the surface, and then attack them before they could dive to safety, Bomber Command would release only six squadrons to Coastal Command, which was not enough to make a serious difference.