The Burning Shore by Ed Offley Read Free Book Online Page B

breakers continued to penetrate lower-security German naval channels and reaped tactical intelligence from high-frequency direction-finding (HF/DF) radio intercepts, photographic reconnaissance, and other means, hunting U-boats at sea had become a far more difficult task.
    The British Operational Intelligence Centre’s (OIC) U-boat Situation Report for the week ending February 9 confirmed that the loss of German naval Enigma had rendered tracking U-boat movements nearly impossible. However, Bletchley Park was able to infer from isolated HF/DF intercepts and the pattern of ship losses that at least ten U-boats were moving westbound across the North Atlantic to form a third wave of attack off the Newfoundland and US coastlines. This time, officials at the Eastern Sea Frontier acknowledged the OIC warning, but the Americans could still do very little to protect shipping along the eastern seaboard. Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews andhis staff were still grappling with an impossible situation since neither the Atlantic Fleet nor COMINCH intended to reinforce the command’s motley defenses. Admiral King sent no reinforcements. Admiral Dönitz sent several more waves of U-boats.
    In February 1942, sixteen U-boats patrolling in North American waters west of 060 degrees west—a north-south line running from the eastern tip of Nova Scotia to eastern Venezuela—sank thirty-five Allied merchant vessels and one warship totaling 225,390 gross registered tons; just five long-range Type IX boats that began operations in the Caribbean on February 16 sank another fifteen ships totaling 86,507 tons and damaged five more during the last thirteen days of the month alone. Their favorite targets in the oil-producing regions of the Caribbean were, unsurprisingly, Allied oil tankers. Among the ships destroyed in the first phase of the Caribbean operation were ten tankers with a total of 57,560 gross registered tons. Their comrades operating in the chill waters of the western Atlantic did even better, sinking thirteen tankers totaling 103,059 gross registered tons.
    The month of March brought two developments that seemed to promise relief to the Eastern Sea Frontier—yet both would prove illusory. First, U-boat attacks suddenly ceased at the end of February. Lieutenant Lawrance Thompson wrote in the ESF War Diary that the first week of March “was unexpectedly and pleasantly free from enemy activity.” This was technically accurate: U-boats sank only five merchant ships in the western Atlantic during that time, four of them off Newfoundland and the fifth four hundred miles south of Bermuda. But attacks suddenly spiked again during the week of March 7 to 14 as no fewer than nine U-boats arrived off the eastern Canadian and US coasts.Another eight U-boats would appear off Nova Scotia and the American Atlantic coast during the last two weeks of the month. Together, they went on to sink forty-seven merchant ships and two warships totaling 289,123 gross registered tons, damaging another four for 25,841 tons. 2
    Admiral Royal Ingersoll at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters was well aware of the deepening crisis and made what appeared to be a significant offer to Vice Admiral Andrews. In a message to all destroyers under his command on March 8, Ingersoll stated, “When such employment is practicable and does not interfere with escort fleet vessels, tasks, and fleet operations, destroyers and other suitable escort ships making passage through Sea Frontier Zones incident to scheduled movements should be utilized to fullest extent in the protection of merchant shipping.” On the surface, it appeared that a sizable part of the Atlantic Fleet destroyer force—some eighty to ninety warships—would soon be available to hunt U-boats in the western Atlantic. In fact, the results were pathetic. During the last three weeks of March, only fourteen destroyers and Treasury -class cutters briefly paused in their higher-priority missions to help in the fight against the