Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

favor. The great expert on these March convoy battles, Juergen Rohwer, provides us with a meticulous order of battle:
    The SC.121 … consisted originally of 59 ships and … was escorted by the Escort Group A 3 under Capt Heineman, USN, with the US coastguard cutter
Spencer,
the US destroyer
Greer,
the Canadian corvettes
Rosthern
and
Trillium
and the British corvette
Dianthus
. The Commander U-boats [i.e., Doenitz] deployed against this convoy the
Westmark
group comprising U 405, U 409, U 591, U230, U 228, U 566, U 616, U 448, U 526, U 634, U 527, U 659, U 523, U 709, U 359, U 332 and U 432. At the same time he ordered U 229, U 665, U 641, U 447, U 190, U 439, U 530, U 618 and U 642 … to form another patrol line,
Ostmark,
on the suspected convoy route. 9
    So there were fifty-nine vulnerable and slow merchantmen, with initially only five escorts, against twenty-six U-boats, and with no air cover for the convoy until the third day of the fight—and what was air cover anyway if the submarines attacked chiefly at night? The result was an ordeal from March 7 until March 10, when Doenitz called off his boats. Thirteen merchant ships totaling 62,000 tons had been sunk, but not a single submarine had been lost. It was perhaps the most disproportionate, one-sided battle of the entire war—and was deeply satisfying to Hitler, to whom Doenitz regularly reported.
    There were, however, another couple of early March convoys across the Atlantic that also command attention. Convoy ON 170, for example, was ably directed away from all of these deadly mid-Atlantic battlefields and thus steamed across the northern waters without a loss and without (so far as we can tell) an encounter with a U-boat. Here was the case for shepherds and sheep simply taking the high Alpine passes and avoiding the wolf-strewn valleys below. Many an Allied convoy, in fact, survived the crossing unscathed, either because of clever routing or simply because Doenitz had directed all his boats to go after a different one.
    A more mixed story is that of Convoy HX 228, which fought its way across the Atlantic between March 7 and 14 in a craziness and confusion that might remind naval historians of Nelson’s entanglements with the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile (1798). At one stage in this battle the destroyer HMS
Harvester,
having rammed U 444, got its propeller shaft entangled in the latter’s rudder and was only released by the French frigate
Aconit
ramming and sinking the submarine. The
Harvester
was torpedoed the next day, but the
Aconit
promptly sank the submarine that had done so, U 432. At the end of it all, HX 228 lost only four merchantmen plus the destroyer, while the escorts—joined, limpingly, by the first escort carrier, USS
Bogue,
a harbinger of things to come—kept a good account of themselves throughout. The U-boat crews were composed of formidable and intrepid men, but the British, American, and Canadian sailors—a small number of old hands and a vast recruitment of new officers and crew to their navies and merchant marines—showed themselves on this occasion to be equally resourceful.
    However suggestive of a possible Allied recovery at sea, these hints were swept away by the achievements of the U-boats against convoys HX 229 and SC 122 between March 16 and 20. This was the most frightening moment, and not just for the fate of those two groups of merchantmen but for the overall convoy strategy as well.
    Unlike a classic land battle (between Greeks and Spartans, or Wellington and Napoleon), where each opponent was roughly similar in composition, the two sides’ forces in the Atlantic struggle were very different. Doenitz’s U-boats were, roughly, all the same; the captain and crew of an older Type VII submarine were no doubt envious of those inthe faster, larger, and better-equipped Type IXs—unnecessarily, as it turned out—but all of them could reach out far into the Atlantic, fire their deadly torpedoes, and dive fast, away