The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [209]
One of the most serious setbacks of the naval war occurred on 4 July 1942, three days after Convoy PQ-17 had been spotted by German submarines and aircraft. It was hard to miss, comprising thirty-five merchant ships (twenty-two American, eight British, two Russian, two Panamanian and one Dutch), protected by six destroyers and fifteen other armed vessels. That same morning, four merchantmen were sunk by Heinkel torpedo-bombers, and, fearing that four powerful German warships – including the Tirpitz – were on their way, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, ordered the convoy to scatter, overriding the C-in-C Home Fleet Admiral Sir John Tovey and the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre. It was a virtual death sentence.
The German warships had indeed been ordered to intercept the convoy, but, unbeknown to Pound, Hitler had told them to turn back. Instead, the scattered convoy was picked off from the air and by submarines. Only thirteen ships reached Archangel; of the 156,500 tons loaded on board the convoy in Iceland back on 27 June, 99,300 tons were sunk, with the loss of no fewer than 430 of the 594 tanks and 210 of the 297 planes on board. It was astonishing that not more than 153 sailors were drowned. Further tragedy was to follow three days later, when the returning convoy QP-13 ran into a British minefield off Iceland through bad navigation, and a further five merchant ships were sunk. There were further serious setbacks during the war, including Convoy PQ-18, thirteen of whose forty ships were sunk in September 1942, although it did at least manage to take a severe toll on its attackers, destroying four German submarines and forty-one aircraft. This led to the War Cabinet temporarily suspending convoys to Russia altogether, an action which Churchill told the War Cabinet on 14 September had left the Russian Ambassador to Washington, Maxim Litvinov, ‘squealing’ but the Ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, ‘plaintive’.50 It was not until late in 1943 that the Allies began to win the Arctic campaign: in November and December three eastbound and two westbound Arctic convoys reached their destinations without any loss.
Major scientific and technical developments during the war helped in the struggle against the U-boat. The Royal Navy used Asdic, the echo-sounding device for tracking U-boats, and 180 ships were fitted with it. It was not foolproof, however, so ships constantly zig-zigged hoping to escape submarines. As the battle of the Atlantic progressed, there were a number of factors that secured victory for the Allies, including the vast expansion of the Canadian Escort Force based at Halifax, Nova Scotia; side-firing as well as back-firing depth-charges; the new high-frequency, direction-finding (HF/DF) apparatus; Anti-Surface-Vessel radar, which the Germans greatly overestimated and often blamed for intelligence coups that actually derived from Ultra; Very Long Range bombers that reported U-boat positions, bombed them and closed off the Ocean Gap; powerful Leigh floodlights for spotting conning towers and periscopes; airborne centrimetric radar; and the alteration of the Royal Navy codes in June 1943 which plunged the German decrypters in the dark (although they were still able to read the Merchant Navy’s ciphers).
As so often it was the Commonwealth that played a vital, if largely unsung, part in winning the battle. The Royal Canadian Navy grew fifty-fold in the course of the conflict, and its anti-submarine arm, the Canadian Escort Force, contributed almost as much to victory as the Royal Navy. Protecting the HX (Halifax-to-Britain) and SC (Sydney-or Cape-Breton-to-Britain) eastbound convoys