Convoys of WW2

During WW2, merchant supply ships delivering desperate supplies to the Allies in Europe were forced to sail in convoys under Allied naval protection, until the German U-Boat menace could be defeated.

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Before the bloody days of the First World War, the first German submarine, the U-1, made its initial sea trials by the end of 1906, while the first fully operational U-boat, armed with a single torpedo tube, had managed to complete a 600-mile cruise around German waters in 1908. To the British, the idea of a submarine was looked upon as ignoble and underhanded, leading then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill to comment in 1914, “I do not believe that this would ever be undertaken by a civilized power.”

That all changed after the start of World War One on July 28th, 1914, when a little less than a year into the war, Germany proved just how uncivilized they could be. On May 7th, 1915, RMS Lusitania, operated by the Cunard Line, plied her usual route between New York and Liverpool, when she was hit by a torpedo fired from a German U-boat, sinking in 300 feet of water just eleven miles off the southern coast of Ireland. Of the 2,000 men, women and children aboard, 1,200 would perish after the torpedo found its deadly mark. Arguably one of the most luxurious vessels in the age of ocean liners, the Lusitania sank in less than 18 minutes after the German torpedo tore through her hull. 

The loss of the Lusitania raised the curtain on unrestricted submarine warfare. All enemy vessels became legitimate targets to be attacked without warning, since German war leaders understood Britain’s heavy reliance on supplies from her allies in North America. As a result, German U-boat captains were ordered to sink as many Allied ships as possible in the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, leading to the loss of 900,000 tons of shipping in April 1917 alone; a loss that nearly brought Great Britain to her knees, with less than six weeks of vital war supplies remaining in her armories and stockades.

Gradually, the Allies began to realize that the submarine had completely changed the nature of maritime warfare, forcing them to employ new tactics such as Q-ships, which were warships disguised as merchant vessels, such as scruffy looking timber ships, tramp freighters, decoy passenger liners, fishing smacks and slow-moving sailing luggers. Hoisting the colors of neutral nations, Q-ships were fitted with a myriad of deceptive props, while guns were hidden conveniently inside chicken coops and other random deck cargo. When curious German U-boat crews sailed in for a closer look, Q-ship crews would shed their masquerade in a fusillade of deadly gunfire.

Only the reluctant introduction of the convoy system late in the war led to a decline in the numbers of lost merchant ships. By the end of the First World War, almost 6,000 Allied ships had been sunk by submarines, all at a cost of 15,500 merchant and naval sailors, sending a total of 14,200,000 tons of cargo and ships to their watery grave. For their part, the Germans lost 178 U-boats and over 6,000 sailors. Of the many horrific lessons learned during the First World War, Allied war leaders now understood the potential of the submarine as a devastating weapon, God forbid should a second mechanized war ever again raise its ugly head.

Such a war did arrive on September 1st, 1939, when Adolf Hitler launched a coordinated attack on Poland from the west, south and north, in clear violation of the Post World War One Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand Pact intended to maintain peace in Europe. Employing Hitler’s blitzkrieg or “lightning war” tactics, the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe at first laid down an extensive bombing campaign to destroy Poland’s air and rail defenses, along with communication lines and munition depots, before deploying a massive land invasion by troops, tanks and artillery, rapidly incapacitating resistance as they pushed their way across the country.

The same day Hitler stormed into Poland, the SS Athenia sailing under Britain’s Donaldson Atlantic Line departed Glasgow Scotland for Montreal Canada, with a cargo of 1,103 relieved passengers, desperate to flee yet another war in Europe. Making stops in Belfast and Liverpool to take on additional passengers, on September 3rd—mere hours after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared a state of war with Germany—at 7:30 P.M., the 26-year-old captain of German U-boat U-30, Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp, gave the order to fire upon the unarmed passenger liner. During the slow, 14-hour sinking of the SS Athenia, the HMS Electra and two destroyers were able to rescue the majority of the lives aboard the doomed ship, save for 93 passengers and crew, who were either lost in the initial explosion or died in mishandled lifeboats, making the SS Athenia the first British ship to go down in the Second World War. The Battle of the Atlantic and the war against the U-boats had begun in earnest; a battle that would slog on for 68 months and prove to be the longest continuous battle of the Second World War.

By the time of Chamberlain’s war declaration, Germany possessed 57 U-boats—all built in secrecy and clandestine intrigue, defying the strict limits for German rearmament imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. That same day, newly-minted U-boat captain Gunther Prien departed a German sub base at Kiel on his first war patrol aboard U-47, a Type VIIB U-boat carrying 14 torpedoes, an 8.8-centimeter naval gun, a 2-centimeter anti-aircraft gun and 33 tons of additional fuel in external tanks, which gave U-47 a range of 2,800 miles. Two days later, Prien and his crew of four officers and 43 men entered the Bay of Biscay, sending the SS Bosnia, Rio Carlo, and Gardevan to their watery graves over the course of a few short days. 

With German U-boats in full control of the Atlantic—a body of water some 41.1 million square miles in magnitude—Allied naval leaders scrambled to defend their limited naval assets at sea, along with the desperately-needed supplies bound for Great Britain’s war efforts. Convoys carrying supplies and troops to Britain were slow and had limited defensive technology. Planes could only escort a convoy so far before they had to turn back for fuel, making Allied ships easy prey for German submarines who hunted in groups known as wolf packs, coordinating their attacks—often under the cover of darkness—with the objective of overwhelming convoy defenses. In 1941, German submarines were sinking ships faster than Allied shipyards could build them, while for every U-boat the Allies managed to sink, the Germans built eight more as replacements. By the Fall of 1942, some 2,000 merchant ships had been lost, along with thousands of men and millions of tons of much needed cargo. 

Known respectively as the Mid-Atlantic Gap, the Greenland Gap, the Black Pit or simply The Gap, this new and ominous no-man’s land was essentially an area where air cover from either North America and Europe failed to adequately defend exposed merchant vessels and naval warships. Early in the war, the typical range of Allied aircraft, such as the Consolidated B-24 Liberator or the Lockheed Hudson was limited, leaving a stretch of Atlantic Ocean approximately 300 to 500 miles wide unprotected and exposed, in a gap extending roughly from the southern tip of Greenland to the Azores. U-boat commanders relied on signal intelligence and reconnaissance to determine when convoys departed from either England or North America, laying in wait along convoy routes once their prey had entered the gap. Without air cover, even escorting naval warships were at risk from wolf pack attacks, allowing German U-boats to operate on the surface without fear of airborne reprisals, which in turn enhanced their speed, maneuverability and ability to sail close enough to enemy ships for the best odds of an accurate torpedo strike.

Success after success bolstered the German’s resolve, as well as their growing understanding that if they could effectively cut off the supply chain to England, they could potentially force the British into a position of capitulation. To that affect, in May of 1942, Dönitz ordered brazen U-boat attacks in the waters off North America, and when some of his U-boat crews entered Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, they managed to sink 21 ships in rapid succession.

After Germany invaded Russia on June 22nd, 1941—injecting some 4.2 million Axis troops across the soon-to-form Eastern Front, Russia was caught flat-footed and unprepared, allowing German tanks to cross halfway to Moscow before the Soviet’s managed a coordinated defensive response. Realizing that Great Britain would most likely fall to the Nazis without the help of Russia, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put aside his longstanding objections to communism, culminating in the Soviet-British Mutual Assistance Pact of July 12th, 1941, which combined with FDR’s Lend-Lease Act to support Russia’s war effort with a steady supply of weapons and essential materiel.

The most direct sea route was around northern Norway to the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel, which proved to be especially dangerous during the summer months, when 24 hours of daylight exposed merchant and naval ships to constant attacks by German U-boats and Nazi warplanes stationed in Norway. The vital route left the British with little choice but to ply the icy waters under the near total blackout conditions of the region’s six-month-long winters, forcing brazen seamen to ply the treacherous waters of the Norwegian and Barents Sea. Fierce storms sent mountainous, ice-laden waves crashing down on ships, buckling funnels and bridges while sweeping men overboard as they chipped away at ice formations that threatened to sink their ships under its crushing weight. Endless cold sapped crewmen of their strength, frequently leaving them without sleep for days at a time.

Nicknamed “The Suicide Run” by sailors, the first convoys sailed in September of 1941, initially coded PQ for outbound and QP for homebound, which changed to JW and RA respectively after 1943. Fighting both “The Weather War” and the threat of enemy attacks, the worst Allied losses occurred shortly after June 27th, 1942, when convoy PQ-17 sailed from Hvalfjord Iceland to the Russian port of Archangel, laden with critical war supplies for the Russian army. Departing Iceland under the protective screen of its naval escort fleet, The Kriegsmarine’s deadly warship the Tirpitz and her formidable entourage lay in wait for their planned operation codenamed “Knight’s Move.” The looming confrontation would go down in history as one of the most controversial and disastrous episodes during the Arctic Convoys, quickly devolving into a story of miscalculations both at sea and in war rooms in London and Berlin that badly exposed the harsh realities of naval warfare. 

Fearing an allied invasion of Norway by Stalin’s Red Army, The German high command transferred their new and most powerful battleship Tirpitz—the sister ship to the now famous Bismarck, which was sunk on May 27th of 1941—from the Baltic to Trondheim Norway. 

Made up of 35 freighters and tankers, Convoy PQ-17 departed Iceland on June 27th of 1942, escorted under the command of Rear Admiral Lewis Hamilton by six destroyers, four corvettes, two anti-aircraft vessels and two submarines. Hovering just out of sight of the main convoy was a second cover group, made up of two British and two American heavy cruisers, along with their destroyer screens, and despite such heavy defense presence, the German U-boat U-456 spotted the convoy on July 1, prompting Kriegsmarine command in Berlin to order its ships scattered near Altafjord on the northernmost tip of Norway to stand ready within three hours after the first sighting. In response, a Wolfpack of U-boats set up a patrol line across the the convoy’s intended line of advance, while 264 aircraft from the Luftwaffe’s Air Fleet Five were put on high alert.

Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft shadowed the convoy until the morning of July the 3rd, a lone bomber dropped down beneath dense cloud cover to release his torpedo, which passed cleanly between two vessels until in struck the lead ship in the next row over, the Liberty ship Christoper Newport. Struck dead center, within minutes the crew was forced to abandon ship. 

The following morning at 8:00 A.M., 23 Heinkel 111Ts and a number of JU-88 dive bombers attacked in force, striking the Soviet tanker Azerbaijan, the American Liberty ship William Hooper and the British freighter Navarino, and while the Azerbaijan signaled that her fires were under control and could remain with the convoy, the two other ships had to be scuttled after their crews were ferried aboard other ships. 

Back in Whitehall, 1st Sea Lord Admiral Dudley Pound had a hard decision to make, since his naval intelligence spies in Norway were unable to verify whether the Tirpitz was still in port or out too sea. Concerned that the Tirpitz could decimate the entire convoy, he ordered convoy PQ-17 to separate and scatter in the hope that they would present less of an amassed target, thereby sailing for Russian independently. Receiving the order at sea, Admiral Hamilton could only assume that the order meant that the Tirpitz was bearing down on his convoy—just over the horizon—thereby ordering his destroyers to join him on a westward withdrawal toward Iceland. Assuming the warships were about to engage the enemy in a major battle, merchant seamen let out a communal cheer for the turn of events, unaware that they were being abandoned to their fate. 

Luftwaffe pilots and U-boat captains looked on in disbelief as the convoy disengaged from one another, and when German air patrols indicated that there were no Allied warships in the area, Hitler gave his approval for Operation Knight’s Move to proceed. By 2:30 A.M. on the morning of July the 5th, Tirpitz and two other cruisers sailed northeast with their destroyer screens to the now scattered and helpless freighters, just as the Wolfpack of U-Boats and Luftwaffe fighters close in for the kill. Fourteen ships were sunk with 24 hours after they scattered—the largest single-day loss on the high seas for either side during WW2—while seven more merchant ships were sunk on the following day. Of the original 35 merchant ships sailing under Convoy PQ-17, only eleven would reach their destination at Archangel in Russia, while the germans lost a scant five aircraft in the operation.

Of the 24 vessels that went down at a loss of 153 lives, some 150,000 tons of shipping went to the ocean floor during the two-day sinking spree, including 3,300 trucks, 200 aircraft, 435 tanks and 99,000 tons of supplies and ammunition. In the aftermath, the Russians harshly condemned Pound’s decision to scatter the fleet, since the loss of so much vital supplies severely risked their ability to carry on the fight. During an investigation by the House of Commons into the fiasco, Admiral Pound admitted making the decision to scatter the convoy, but given the first Sea Lord’s duel political and military position in British government, legislators felt he was too high up to be sacrificed. Instead, Rear Admiral Hamilton, whose only offense had been to follow orders, was transferred to the Mediterranean and assigned a desk job.

As war in Europe dragged on, the Allies made closing the Mid-Atlantic Gap and ending U-boat dominance a top priority in their fight against Nazi aggression. In early 1943, the Allies established air bases in Newfoundland, Iceland and Greenland in an effort to extend air support over the Gap, at the same time employing new long range bombers equipped with the first ever air-to-surface radar systems, which could penetrate the perpetual fog over the Grand Banks—a weather pattern that gave U-boats their advantage earlier in the war. The proliferation of Allied aircraft carriers and roving support groups of warships further degraded the U-boat’s ability to hunt with impunity. Increased reconnaissance and anti-submarine patrols combined with advances in anti-sub warfare techniques, including sonar and new depth charge systems, which severely curtailed the German’s ability to sink Allied ships. By the end of May, 1943, new anti-sub technology had sunk nearly 100 German U-boats, effectively turning the hunters of the early war into the hunted of the war’s later years.

In one of the most costly battles in world military history—not to mention the most costly war in human history—some 3,500 Allied merchant ships and 175 Allied warships were sunk for a total loss of 14.5 million gross tons. 741 RAF coastal command aircraft were also lost in anti-submarine sorties—all at a cost of 36,200 naval personnel and 36,000 merchant seamen. 

German losses were equally egregious, including an estimated 30,000 U-boat sailors, all at a cost of 783 submarines and 47 surface warships, making the arctic convoys of WW2, some of the most gutsy missions of the Second World War.