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Preface: A Momentous Victory

On 4 May 1945, with the Third Reich crumbling about him, Hitler’s successor as Führer, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, despatched a message to all U-boat commanders across the globe:

U-boat men! Undefeated and spotless you lay down your arms after a heroic battle without equal. We remember in deep respect our fallen comrades, who have sealed with death their loyalty to Führer and Fatherland. Comrades! Preserve your U-boat spirit, with which you have fought courageously, stubbornly and imperturbably through the years for the good of the Fatherland. Long live Germany! Your Gr. Admiral.¹

The longest campaign of the Second World War and the most destructive naval campaign in all history was finally over: Germany was defeated and broken. It could so easily have been otherwise.

By comparison with a global death toll of more than 60 million, the raw statistics of death and destruction in the Atlantic during the Second World War may appear modest – if any death in war can be so described. Though there are no precise figures, it is widely accepted that more than 3,000 merchant ships were sunk in the Atlantic, causing the deaths of more than 30,000 seamen. On the Axis side, in a macabre equivalence, some 27,000 officers and crew – or 75 per cent of those who went to war in the Kriegsmarine’s U-boats – lost their lives; a higher death rate than that of any branch of the armed forces on any side of the conflict between 1939 and 1945.²

When we think of the great struggles of those years, our minds generally turn to the Blitz, El Alamein, Anzio, Arnhem, Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Berlin, or a host of others by which our parents or grandparents may have been affected. Although territorial struggles in Europe delivered the coup de grâce against the Third Reich, those battles could not have been fought, let alone won, without the Allied victory in the Atlantic. If the German U-boats had prevailed, the maritime artery between the United States and the United Kingdom would have been severed. Lacking oil for transport or heating, and without the raw materials required to manufacture weapons of war, it would have been impossible to prosecute the war against Germany. ‘Blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ would have been to no avail. Even more fundamentally, in the absence of basic foodstuffs – most of which were imported from Africa, Asia, South America and the United States – the British people would have faced the prospect, in the words of the military historian John Keegan, of ‘a truly Malthusian decline’.³ Mass hunger would have consumed the nation. Not only would it have been physically and spiritually impossible to ‘fight on the beaches … on the landing grounds … in the fields and in the streets’, but Churchill – or, more probably, his successor – would have had little choice but to sue for peace with Hitler. It is for these reasons that Churchill wrote ‘The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome, and amid all other cares we viewed its changing fortunes day by day with hope or apprehension.’⁴

Even if the U-boats had failed to starve out Britain, mere survival would not have been enough to stave off disaster. Had the German Wolfsrudel (wolf packs) – remained free to prowl the ocean at will, they would have prevented the Allied armies from crossing the Atlantic in sufficient numbers to join the British in the invasion of Europe: there would have been no D-Day. It is very possible that, as a result, Stalin would have elected to make a cynical accommodation with Hitler of the kind that had produced the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact in August 1939. In this case, the outcome of the Second World War in Europe would have been – from the perspective of those who believe in freedom and democracy – catastrophically different.

Anyone with a modicum of imagination knows the fear of the deep that is in all of us. Good mariners exercise constant vigilance. Distances are distorted and dangers are magnified. In the gloom of twilight, cans, tyres, beer bottles – the unsinkable detritus of the sea – strain the detecting eye and become imagined hazards. Conversely, a faraway light turns out to be a tanker that threatens imminent collision. A cormorant’s neck or the head of a curious seal are mistaken for a barely submerged rock or – fatally – vice versa. All but the most foolhardy know that the delights of the sea are invariably tinged with anxiety even when the waters are benign and the air is balmy. When nature delivers a hurricane that builds a gentle swell into mountainous walls of water which no human force can resist, any mariner of substance acknowledges the spasm of terror that shivers through body and spirit.

And that is in peacetime. In the Battle of the Atlantic every seaman on either side was on edge for hours and weeks at a time. The enemy was always at hand, lurking just over the horizon or prowling beneath the waves. In the air, warplanes laden with bombs emerged suddenly from the clouds to wreak havoc below. Ships and submarines may have been forbidding in appearance but their hulls were a skin of metal so thin that, as Winston Churchill once remarked of battleships in action, they were like ‘eggshells pounding each other with hammers’.⁵ Sinkings were rarely prolonged, and neither was survival in the icy waters – something every sailor knew only too well.

Most of those who perished at sea lost their lives in the grimmest circumstances. The fortunate ones died swiftly, blown up by torpedoes or, in the case of the U-boat crews, by depth charges or machine-gun fire. Others were trapped in sinking hulls or asphyxiated by toxic fumes. Some died from their wounds in vessels which lacked anaesthetics or surgeons or, very often, both; some drowned because lifeboats had been smashed into flotsam or because, after days or weeks adrift without food and water, they succumbed to insanity and threw themselves overboard.

On the Allied side, survivors of the Battle of the Atlantic have left first-hand accounts of their travails which are as vivid as those from any other military front. However, with the possible exception of British naval commanders such as Peter Gretton, Donald Macintyre, and ‘Johnny’ Walker, none of them achieved popular renown in their lifetimes. Their war was played out far from the correspondent’s notebook or the photographer’s lens. Their experiences were thus largely overlooked except in so far as official announcements of the time would permit. It was not until Nicholas Monsarrat, who had served in a wartime corvette, published his novel The Cruel Sea in 1951 that a wider public was able to appreciate the purgatory of the war at sea. In this volume, I have drawn extensively from the oral and written testimonies of those who fought in the ships that saved Britain and survived to tell their tales.

By contrast, the U-boat crews were hailed at the time as heroes of the Third Reich. Their most successful commanders – so-called ‘aces’ such as Otto Kretschmer, Erich Topp, Joachim Schepke, Günther Prien and Reinhard Hardegen – were household names throughout Germany, their acts of derring-do spread across the popular press and on cinema screens. Feted like film stars, they were garlanded with the highest honours, very often by the Führer himself. As those U-boats which were destroyed generally sank with the loss of every member of the crew, there are very few accounts of what it was like to go down in a fatally stricken vessel, but the exhausting combination of boredom, elation and terror has been vividly described by several U-boat commanders and a few of those who served under them. The Battle of the Atlantic draws no less from these first-hand testimonies.

As a phrase, memorable though it is, the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ is misleading in a number of pertinent ways. It suggests a single conclusive encounter like the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 or Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet in 1805. But the former was accomplished within ten days and the latter lasted no more than a few hours. The Battle of the Atlantic not only lasted from the very first to the very last day of the war but, so far from being a single battle, it involved hundreds of hostile encounters on a wide variety of fronts, some of which lasted a few hours, some many days. It was not a battle but a campaign.

Moreover, it was a campaign fought not only in the strategic bubble of a single ocean but also in the seaways which both conjoined and separated the combatant nations via a network of arteries. Though navigators may chart the cross-hairs of latitude and longitude by which cartographers have distinguished the Atlantic from the Indian, Pacific and Arctic oceans, they were as strategically and militarily entwined as the commingling waters which flow from one to the other. To treat the Battle of the Atlantic in isolation from the naval battles fought in these waters (as well as in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the North Sea) is like presuming the carotid artery is the only means of pumping blood through the body. Yes, it was vital, but the ‘capillary’ routes along which a multitude of vital supplies flowed until they reached their final destination were of no less significance. For that reason, although the principal focus of The Battle of the Atlantic is on the campaign in that ocean, its narrative is not to the exclusion of other maritime fronts.

Nor should the war at sea be viewed only through a military prism. Of course, in such a long contest, the strategies and tactics adopted by both sides were not only critically important but also changed constantly through the experience of triumph and disaster which were themselves the product of new types of weaponry, novel technologies and breakthroughs in the gathering of crucial intelligence. With each innovation the advantage would switch suddenly and fatally from one side to the other. These are important ingredients in any account of this prolonged maritime struggle, but the full story of the Battle of the Atlantic is as much about the competing objectives, judgements and imperatives within and between the high commands of the principal protagonists as it is about a maritime clash of arms. For that reason, this book focuses as much on the individuals who wielded power and influence in the war capitals of Europe and America – London, Berlin, Moscow, and Washington – as on the men who fought and died on the high seas at their behest.

Those responsible for the direction of the war on the Allied side were swift to appreciate the critical importance of the Battle of the Atlantic but rather slower to give their navies the tools to finish the job. In the early years of the war Winston Churchill juggled with many competing priorities as he sought to safeguard Britain from invasion and to defend a global empire. As a result, the nation’s resources were stretched to the limit and sometimes beyond it; to the profound frustration of the prime minister, who found it exceptionally difficult to reconcile his boundless ambition with the fact that the men, the armour, and especially the ships were not available in sufficient force to achieve everything at once. Nonetheless it remains one of the great conundrums of his leadership that, although he was to reflect that ‘the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril’,⁶ he failed to follow through the logic of this foreboding until it was almost too late and certainly well beyond the point at which that ‘peril’ could have been eliminated. For every month from the start of hostilities until the early summer of 1943, Britain was losing merchant ships at a faster rate than they could be replaced, largely because they were inadequately protected against the Third Reich’s rapidly expanding U-boat fleet.

From the British perspective, the story of the Battle of the Atlantic is in significant measure about a prolonged struggle between the Admiralty and the Air Ministry which became so fierce that a senior admiral was driven to comment that it was ‘a much more savage one than our war with the Huns’.⁷ Their hostilities were suspended only when, after three and a half years of war, Allied losses in the Atlantic reached such an alarming level that for a while it looked as though the U-boats were on the verge of severing Britain’s lifeline, a prospective catastrophe which forced a resolution in favour of the Admiralty.

This damaging clash between two branches of the wartime government owed much to Churchill. In the summer of 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged overhead, the new prime minister was naturally obsessed not only with the need to stiffen national morale but also to orchestrate action against Germany which would reverse Britain’s fortunes and, in time, lead on to victory. As he cast around for a means to this end, he swiftly concluded that ‘an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ was the ‘only one sure path’ to the defeat of Hitler.⁸ The ethical controversies provoked by this misapprehension have persisted to this day. By contrast, the consequences for the course of the Second World War have received less scrutiny. Yet Churchill’s failure to insist that an adequate number of aircraft be released from the bombing of Germany to do battle against the U-boats in the Atlantic until it was almost too late was a strategic error of judgement that made a fateful contribution to Britain’s failure to nullify the U-boat threat until many months later than would otherwise have been possible. The price of this delay may be measured in the thousands of lives and hundreds of ships which were lost unnecessarily in consequence. It may also be measured in terms of its strategic implications.

There is a tempting, indeed mind-boggling, scenario for those students who are lured by the ‘what if’ or ‘if only’ school of historiography: if the U-boat threat had been aborted several months earlier than it was, could the mass transportation of American troops and armaments from the United States to Britain have started in time to countenance a cross-Channel invasion of France in the autumn of 1943? Might the Allied armies have advanced deeper into Germany before the Red Army’s own push towards the German capital in the summer of 1944? If so, would the Allies have been in a position at Yalta to ensure that the Cold War map of Europe was drawn more nearly to reflect their own strength on the ground, greatly to the strategic advantage, therefore, of not only the post-war West but also those millions of Europeans who later found themselves entrapped behind the ‘Iron Curtain’?

It is a tempting vision that is explored later in these pages. What is surely beyond doubt, though, is that the prospect of an earlier victory in the Atlantic – by, say, the early autumn of 1942 rather than the early summer of 1943 – would have had a powerful impact on the fractious debate between London and Washington over Allied strategy in the prolonged build-up to D-Day (which this book also describes in some detail). In a cable to Roosevelt, which he despatched in July 1941, Churchill made it clear that he foresaw the liberation of Europe by a seaborne invasion ‘when the opportunity is ripe’.⁹ The single greatest obstacle in the way of this undertaking was the threat posed by the U-boats to the Atlantic convoys. Had this threat been eliminated earlier than it was, the strategic disputes between the Western Allies would have been even fiercer than they became by 1943; in particular the British would have found it far more difficult to persuade the Americans that victory in the Mediterranean (via North Africa and then Sicily) should precede the cross-Channel invasion of France. As it happened, of course, all such speculation, however intriguing, is rendered profitless because the prime minister was unwilling to prioritize the destruction of German U-boats over the destruction of German cities.

Churchill was a titanic leader whose strategic vision has often been unjustly disparaged but, in relation to the war at sea, his impetuous nature led him to embrace a false dichotomy. Contrasting the indubitably ‘offensive’ character of strategic bombing with the ostensibly ‘defensive’ task of forcing a lifeline passage for the convoys through U-boat infested oceans, he invariably favoured the ‘offensive’ initiatives hatched in the Air Ministry over the ‘defensive’ role assigned to the Admiralty. However, the prime minister was not alone in making this misleading distinction. Not only was it shared by his colleagues in the War Cabinet but also by the British chiefs of staff, including the First Sea Lord, Admiral Pound, who had most to lose. Although Pound became increasingly dismayed by Churchill’s refusal to withdraw from Bomber Command the aircraft needed to nullify the U-boat onslaught, he fatally weakened his case by failing to question the prime minister’s underlying premise. This collective mindset was evidently unable to recognize that the Atlantic convoys were no less ‘offensive’ in character than the wagon trains which opened up the American Midwest in the nineteenth century or (to borrow a twenty-first-century parallel) the military escorts which forced a way through the Taliban-infested deserts in Afghanistan to succour front-line towns and settlements. As it was, the Battle of the Atlantic soon materialized into a conflict that essentially was an asymmetric conflict between the convoys and the U-boats, a struggle in which, for month after month, the pendulum of triumph and disaster swung wildly from one side to the other.

The White House was no less aware of the strategic importance of the Atlantic lifeline. In May 1941 President Roosevelt made this unambiguously clear in a cable to Churchill. ‘I believe the outcome of this struggle is going to be decided in the Atlantic and unless Hitler can win there he cannot win anywhere in the world in the end.’¹⁰ But Roosevelt viewed the Battle of the Atlantic from a specifically American perspective and he was also under very different and strongly competing pressures. Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a sizeable majority of the American people – whose views were reflected vehemently in the media and in Congress – remained stubbornly averse to any military entanglement that might bring the United States into a faraway struggle in Europe from which they could detect no significant threat to the homeland.

Following Pearl Harbor, their visceral response was that retribution should be exacted against the Japanese at the expense of any other objective. That view was shared by some of the president’s most powerful military advisors, most notably Admiral King, the commander-in-chief of the US Navy, whose ill-concealed prejudice in favour of prioritizing Japan over Germany was to aggravate the mood of negotiations with his British counterpart. However, in what was to prove the most important strategic presumption of the Second World War, Roosevelt had long been persuaded that the destruction of German Nazism should precede the elimination of Japanese imperialism: his mantra, to which all his subordinates were obliged to subscribe, was ‘Germany First’.

However, since the White House had not only to prepare for a ‘two-ocean war’ but also to heed public opinion, he had to move in a crablike fashion towards his overriding strategic objective – which he accomplished with a legerdemain that Houdini would have envied. Thus, by the autumn of 1941, not only was the US Navy preparing for action in the Pacific but openly confronting the Third Reich in the Atlantic. By the ruse of extending America’s security zone to encompass virtually half the Atlantic Ocean, Roosevelt engineered a de facto – though not a de jure – declaration of war against Hitler three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But there was a twist to this quasi-subversive commitment to the British cause. Although he was an Anglophile, his support for Churchill was strategically contingent. Partly as a result of the prime minister’s seductive diplomacy, FDR was convinced that a Nazi victory in Europe would ultimately threaten the regional if not the global interests of the United States. However, following the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, he rapidly appreciated that the Soviet Union had the key to the destruction of the Third Reich. Though Britain mattered, Russia mattered even more – and this would lead to almost as much tension between London and Washington as it did between those two capitals and Moscow.

From the moment Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 it became an American priority to despatch military supplies by every means possible to the beleaguered Soviet regime. And since the Atlantic flowed into the Arctic, the former was an essential conduit via which the United States could turn warm words about Stalin into effective support for the Red Army. The prime minister did not fail to acknowledge that the Soviet Union was indispensable to the defeat of the Third Reich but – for reasons explored in these pages – he repeatedly found cause to delay or suspend the Arctic convoys. This often irritated the White House and invariably infuriated the Soviet leader. The extensive correspondence between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin reveals in the starkest way the scale of the diplomatic and personal challenges posed by their overlapping but often competing priorities.

The military significance of the supplies despatched to Russia was to be a matter of much debate. Higher estimates suggest that 10 per cent or even more of the Soviet Union’s military and material needs were despatched through Washington’s Lend-Lease programme which was initiated by Roosevelt following the German invasion. Whether it was as high as that figure or as low as 4 per cent (as some Soviet analysts were to assert), Allied assistance indubitably played a crucial part in providing vital raw materials and military equipment that Moscow could not otherwise source.¹¹ Certainly, Stalin behaved as though the West’s military support was vital to the Red Army’s prospects of arresting and reversing the Wehrmacht’s advance. Of the three supply routes to Russia – via the Far East, Persia and the Arctic Ocean – the last, though lowest in terms of total tonnage, was the most important in the critical period up to 1943. When Arctic convoys were suspended, either because the conditions were judged too perilous or because the ships were required for other major Allied operations, Stalin railed openly against Churchill, and less aggressively against Roosevelt, whose correspondence with the Soviet Union was invariably warmer in tone than that adopted by the British prime minister. In language that would in other circumstances have led to a breakdown in diplomatic relations, his Western partners were variously and not infrequently accused of bad faith or breaching solemn commitments. Stalin did not let diplomatic niceties stand in his way; on one occasion, Churchill even refused to accept delivery of a particularly abusive cable, returning it in person to the Soviet ambassador in London ostensibly unread.

If the Soviet leader conducted his diplomatic relations with his Western counterparts like a bear with a sore head, he did not lack cause. Both Churchill and Roosevelt habitually gave him the impression that they regarded their military assistance to the Soviet Union as though it were a charitable donation rather than an essential contribution to a common cause. This clearly aggravated Stalin’s suspicion that he and his people were being taken for granted by London and Washington, and that their unique contribution to the arrest of Nazism was being undervalued or even ignored. Between the lines of his correspondence, it is possible to detect a twin-edged resentment that, despite their warm words, the two Western leaders regarded Red Army lives as more expendable than those of their own combatants and that they were content to allow the Soviet armies to absorb crushing losses until they were ready to come in to reap the benefit. Whether or not this was so, Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s attitude towards Stalin bordered on the cavalier. This was particularly so when it came to an even graver source of discord between East and West: the opening of a Second Front via a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, which thereby became a source not only of disputatious debate within the Western Alliance, but also of bitter recrimination between the Western Allies and Moscow. Once London and Washington had agreed their own priorities, they were only too inclined to allow Stalin to believe that a tentative proposition was a cast-iron commitment. Thus they indicated a resolve to launch a Second Front in 1942 and, when that failed to materialize, they reiterated their determination to make it happen in 1943, only to postpone it once again until 1944. In the light of their own strategic priorities, these decisions were inevitable; but, sometimes by concealment and on occasion with downright duplicity, they stretched diplomatic propriety to its limits by allowing the Soviet leader to believe on each occasion that their contingent commitments to him were unequivocal. It was not surprising that Stalin’s manner frequently betrayed his grievance at being gulled by allies who purported to be in awe of the gallantry displayed on the battlefield by a Red Army yet behaved as though the Soviet Union’s main contribution to the defeat of Nazism was merely to drain the resources of the Third Reich in time for the eventual victory of the West.

The Allies were fortunate that Adolf Hitler was the final arbiter of German strategy for the Battle of the Atlantic and not Admiral Dönitz, the commander-in-chief of the U-boat fleet. Like Admiral Erich Raeder, the commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, Dönitz believed that Britain was Germany’s ‘mortal enemy’.¹² Mercifully from the Allied perspective, the two admirals fell out over the best means of defeating their foe. Dönitz was adamant that the Third Reich’s overriding military priority should be a U-boat campaign to throttle Britain’s supply lines by sinking merchant ships at a faster rate than they could be replaced – the tonnage war, as he called it. Raeder acknowledged that U-boats had an important task but also saw a greater role for the battle fleet and especially the mighty surface raiders like the Bismarck, Scharnhorst and Tirpitz. In the absence of the single-minded conviction required to persuade Hitler that his overriding priority should be to build a U-boat fleet of sufficient size and power to achieve victory in the Atlantic before the Allies had put in place enough countermeasures to blunt the impact of Dönitz’s plan of attack, the U-boat commander was deprived of the means required to secure an unequivocal victory in the Atlantic.

As it was, Raeder soon found himself sidelined by Hitler, who took greater heed of those members of his high command who were more effective at wheedling or blustering their way into his misplaced confidence. Crucially, the Führer’s designated successor, Hermann Göring, the devious and preposterous commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, not only drowned out Raeder but, in his role as Reichsmarschall, was instrumental in denying the Kriegsmarine the resources needed to build the U-boat fleet rapidly enough to inflict terminal damage on the British convoys. This internal battle within the German high command – which closely mirrored that between the Air Ministry and the Admiralty in London – was critical to the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic.

In January 1943, after enduring what he described as ‘a vicious and impertinent harangue’ from the Führer,¹³ Raeder was peremptorily dismissed. His replacement was Karl Dönitz, whose influence grew so rapidly that in the final stages of the war he became Hitler’s chosen successor. But, by the time he found himself at the helm of the Kriegsmarine, the Ship of State was already heading for the rocks. Had Dönitz been given a free hand to shape the war at sea, the Second World War might have taken an alarmingly different course. Like Churchill and Roosevelt, he understood that Germany’s fate would be settled in the Atlantic Ocean. Happily, Hitler had no such strategic clarity.

In the chapters that follow I have sought to weave the themes outlined above into a narrative about a sustained drama in which the motives and actions of every combatant – from the most senior members of the competing high commands in London, Washington, Berlin and Moscow to those individuals who fought and died in the Battle of the Atlantic – are crucial to a full appreciation of the epic scale of the campaign. To place the stories of those who fought and died at sea for either side against the background of the momentous dilemmas and decisions of those who sent them there is not to diminish but to illuminate the epic scale of their endeavour. In so doing, I hope I have been able to establish that the Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic was a precondition for the defeat of Nazism and therefore as important as any other struggle on any other front between 1939 and 1945.

Jonathan Dimbleby

THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC

How the Allies Won the War

VIKING

Contents

THE BEGINNING

By the same author

Maps and Illustrations

Maps

Illustrations

Preface: A Momentous Victory