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By Root 1438 0

home waters was a phenomenal success. US merchant ships sailed alone, no convoys, and often sailed at night while US cities continued to burn their lights, creating perfect silhouette targets for the Germans. Often, the subs attacked at night on the surface using deck guns rather than the more valuable and limited torpedoes.[286] The British hounded the United States to adopt the convoy system, which Admiral King, commander of the US Navy, refused to do in spite of the fact the US Navy knew from WWI that convoys worked. Three hundred and ninety-seven (397) cargo ships hit the ocean bottom between January and June of 1942. This was a naval and logistics disaster. Admiral Earnest King was the man solely responsible for the failure to adopt convoys, a known remedy for submarine attacks. As merchant ships sailing along the US Atlantic coast plunged to the ocean floor, King steadfastly maintained that he did not have enough escorts for convoy protection and stated that a weakly protected convoy was worse than no convoy.[287]

King’s argument was pure rubbish. The English and the US had the experience and proof that convoys alone (without escorts) cut shipping losses tremendously. Every naval officer in WWI, in both the Royal and the US Navy, knew these facts. This is so because the submarine has problems locating ships. Locating one ship is about as hard as locating an entire convoy, because the convoy does not take up much more sea space. By sending ships out singly, it gives the submarine many targets. By sending out convoys the submarine has fewer targets because they are all concentrated in one relatively small area. After adopting convoys enemy submarines look at a lot of empty sea. Admiral King had to know this, but why did he block effective action while this Atlantic slaughter was going on? There is no answer to this question. There is no excuse for failing and refusing to adopt convoys immediately to prevent the loss of so many vital cargo ships and their crews. This situation grew so critical that General Marshall, the general in charge of the entire war effort, asked President Roosevelt to order Admiral King to start using convoys. Apparently, it never came to that because a strongly worded letter from Marshall to King turned the tide. King adopted convoys. Nonetheless, King’s actions cost the Allies dearly in lives and material.

All this causes one to wonder, how many men does a leader get to needlessly slaughter before being relieved of command? Admiral King slaughtered many, Generals MacArthur and Clark many more, and the Generals of World War I on the Allied side hundreds of thousands more. Somehow, these “leaders” literally get away with murder. It is easy to understand how ruthless dictators such as Hitler and Stalin can throw away lives, but how can military leaders of democracies get away with such dim-witted brutality?

As 1943 began the Battle of the Atlantic came to a head. Admiral Max Horton determined he could protect the convoys from German wolf packs, and he was ready to prove it.[288] The turning point came in April and May of 1943 with convoy ONS-5 that was made up of forty-three merchant ships. ONS-5 was attacked by thirty U-boats in a coordinated wolf pack assault. After the battle’s end thirteen merchant ships were gone, but six U-boats were lost. Such losses were unacceptable to Donitz, but it would get even worse for the U-boats. In May of 1943 these Allied efforts paid off with the sinking of thirty German submarines in one month with the corresponding loss of only a few Allied cargo ships. Admiral Donitz would continue to send his submarines out to fight, but these would increasingly become suicide missions. The German submarine branch suffered a higher percentage loss rate than any branch of any other service of any warring nation (over 70 percent).

Some argue the German submarines failed as a strategic threat because the vast majority of supplies and troops crossed the Atlantic without a problem (about 98 percent), and the Germans never came close to sinking even the tonnage they calculated