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

from counterattack. 10 By contrast, the Allied convoys contained a motley assembly of ancient tramp steamers, ore carriers, oil tankers, mail and passenger ships, and refrigerated ships. b The cargoes they carried were equally heterogeneous—grain, linseed, meat, army supplies, aircraft fuel, sugar, bauxite (for aluminum), steel, tobacco, “African produce” (probably vegetable oil and hardwoods), and everything else needed to keep a nation of forty million people at war. British and American merchant ships were reinforced by boats flying the Panamanian, Norwegian, Greek, Polish, and Dutch flags. One of the unintended consequences of Hitler’s aggressions was that the island state’s limited fighting resources were boosted by considerable numbers of foreign merchant ships and crews, foreign fighter and bomber pilots, and foreign infantrymen—and Britain was happy to take them all.
    The story of convoys HX 229 and SC 122 confirmed that the Royal Navy faced one of the greatest logistical challenges in all of military history. There were thousands of Allied merchant vessels on the high seas at any given time—probably up to twenty convoys, plus hundreds of independently sailing boats. From Trinidad to New Jersey, and from Adelaide to the Cape, the lines stretched out, with most of this produce ultimately destined for the critical North Atlantic passageway. As the maritime war unfolded, the convoys would necessarily become larger and larger, which was no bad thing in itself. During the Casablanca discussions on the shipping crisis, P. M. S. Blackett, the Admiralty’s chief of operational research, had impressed listeners with an analysis showing that a convoy of sixty or even ninety ships was a more efficient way of getting goods across the Atlantic than a convoy of thirty; the number of escorts remained roughly the same, limited more by shipbuilding production and other duties (Operation Torch) thananything else, and the U-boats only had a limited number of days and hours in which to attack, and a limited number of torpedoes, too. That mathematical analysis reinforced the planners’ conviction that the convoy system was the best one to pursue, but it still left a practical problem: how on earth did one get such a large and heterogeneous bunch of merchant ships from one side of the ocean to the other, especially when the Allied warships were themselves such a mixed bag of destroyers, frigates, corvettes, cutters, trawlers, and others?
    One response, which went back to almost the beginning of the war, was to make a simple division between “fast convoys” and “slow convoys.” Much flowed from this, including the different nomenclature (“SC” was a slow convoy, “HX” a faster one, the latter usually coming out of the great harbor of Halifax, but also from New York itself). These convoys could leave from separate ports and be timed to arrive in the United Kingdom (or, on their return journeys, into East Coast harbors) on different days. Slower escorts such as sloops and armed trawlers were assigned more often to the slower convoys. The schedule of aerial patrols could be arranged accordingly. Allied warships dispatched to join one convoy in midocean might be instructed to help another one if it came under heavier attack. To be sure, and to the fury of every escort commander, all convoys, whether fast and slow, would have their stragglers—how could it not be, with forty, fifty, or sixty oddly assorted ships in a single group? Overall, dispatching large convoys and dividing the merchantmen into fast and slow concentrations made a lot of sense. Yet what would happen if the number of U-boats was simply too great?
    Already by March 13, 1943, B-Dienst had evidence that the slow convoy SC 122 (fifty-one assorted vessels, with four or five close escorts) had set off from New York. It was to be followed a few days later by the fast convoy HX 229 (forty-one vessels, with four escorts), from the same port. The latter fact