The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [22]
The first of hundreds of Atlantic convoys left Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 15 September 1939. Learning the doleful lessons of the Great War, the convoy system was adhered to rigidly by the British between 1939 and 1945, even for ships moving along the coastline between Glasgow and the Thames. Destroyers, frigates and corvettes used an echo-sounding device called Asdic (named after the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee) to try to track U-boats, while the convoys’ merchantmen sailed together within a protective cordon. They also adopted a zig-zagging route, the better to outfox their submerged foes. Overall the system was a success, but when a waiting U-boat ‘wolf-pack’ broke through, the losses among the huddled merchantmen could be correspondingly high, and on occasion as many as half of the vessels were sent to the bottom.
The Royal Navy started the war with only five aircraft carriers, and on 17 September the veteran HMS Courageous was sunk in the Western Approaches by two torpedoes from U-29, which had already despatched three tankers. She slipped beneath the Hebridean waves in less than fifteen minutes, with only half of her thousand-strong crew being saved, some after an hour in the North Sea, where they kept up morale by singing popular songs of the day such as ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. The sea, recalled a survivor, ‘was so thick with oil we might have been swimming in treacle’. The following month the Kriegsmarine scored an almost equally spectacular success near by when Lieutenant-Commander Günther Prien’s U-47 got through a 50-foot gap in the defences of Scapa Flow and fired seven torpedoes at the 29,000-ton battleship HMS Royal Oak. Three hit, capsizing the ship and killing 810 of her 1,224 crew in only thirteen minutes.
One task of the U-boats was to place magnetic mines in the sea-lanes around the British Isles; this could also be done by parachute by low-flying Heinkel He-111s and by E-boats (motor torpedo boats) and destroyers. By the end of November these had sunk twenty-nine British ships, including the destroyer HMS Gipsy, and had also put the brand-new cruiser HMS Belfast out of action for three years. Through the immense bravery of bomb-disposal experts Lieutenant-Commanders R. C. Lewis and J. G. D. Ouvry, who removed the two detonators, one of which was ticking audibly, from a mine spotted in the Thames Estuary, the secrets of the steel-hull-activated device were discovered. Within a month, Admiralty scientists had discovered a way of counteracting the mines by fitting electric cables around ships’ hulls, to create a negative magnetic, or ‘degaussed’, field. Soon afterwards a means of blowing up the mines, using wooden-hulled trawlers towing buoyant electrical cables, was also invented.
It was the spotting, disabling and eventual forced scuttling of the German pocket battleship the Admiral Graf Spee that was the Royal Navy’s greatest victory during the so-called Phoney War. Operating off South America, Captain Hans Langsdorff had sunk ten ships totalling more than 50,000 tons. The term ‘pocket’ battleship is somewhat misleading; although a limit of 10,000 tons had been imposed on German warships by the Versailles Treaty, once the Graf Spee was loaded up with her six 8-inch, eight 5.9-inch and six 4.1-inch guns, as well as ammunition and stores, she weighed more than half as much again. In the battle of the River Plate on 13 December she took on the 8-inch guns of the cruiser HMS Exeter, along with the 6-inch guns of the light cruisers HMS Ajax and the New Zealander-crewed HMS Achilles, badly damaging the first two ships.
When the Graf Spee was