The Second World War (36 page)
From the autumn of 1940, the German U-boat fleet had finally begun to inflict grave damage on Allied shipping. It possessed bases on France’s Atlantic coast and the torpedo detonator problem, which had bedevilled U-boat operations early in the war, had been sorted out. In a single week in September, U-boats sank twenty-seven British ships amounting to more than 160,000 tons. Such losses were even more striking considering how few submarines the Germans had at sea. Grossadmiral Raeder still had no more than
twenty-two ocean-going U-boats operational in February 1941
. Despite all his pleas to Hitler, the submarine-construction programme became a lower priority with the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The German navy had initially expected much from its pocket battleships and armed merchant raiders. The
Graf Spee
may have been scuttled to British jubilation off Montevideo, but the most successful sortie had been that of the pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
. During a voyage lasting 161 days in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, she accounted for seventeen ships. It soon became clear, however, that U-boats were far more cost effective than pocket battleships and other surface raiders, which sank only 57,000 tons of shipping. The most successful U-boat commander, Otto
Kretschmer, sank thirty-seven ships totalling over twice the tonnage sunk by the
Admiral Scheer
. The Royal Navy’s forces of escort vessels began to increase only after the fifty ancient American destroyers had been refitted, and corvettes began to be launched from British shipyards.
Admiral Karl Dönitz, the head of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat command, saw his mission as a ‘tonnage war’: his submarines had to sink ships faster than the British could build them. In mid-October 1940, Dönitz began ‘wolfpack’ tactics in which up to a dozen U-boats would congregate once a convoy was sighted, and then start sinking them at night. The blaze of one ship would illuminate or silhouette the others. The first wolfpack struck against Convoy SC-7 and sank seventeen ships. Immediately afterwards, Günther Prien, the U-boat commander who had sunk HMS
Royal Oak
in Scapa Flow, led a wolfpack attack against Convoy HX-79 from Halifax. With just four submarines, they sank twelve ships out of forty-nine. In February 1941, Allied losses soared again. Only in March did the Royal Navy escort vessels achieve a measure of revenge through the sinking of three U-boats, including the
U-47
commanded by Prien, and the capture of
U-99
and its commander Otto Kretschmer.
The introduction of the long-range Type IX submarine soon caused losses to mount again until the summer, when Ultra intercepts made a difference and assistance came with the US Navy in September escorting ships in the western Atlantic. Bletchley Park’s output of intercepted signals did not often lead directly to the sinking of U-boats at this stage, but it greatly helped convoy planners with ‘evasive routing’, which meant diverting them away from gathering wolfpacks. It also provided Naval Intelligence and Coastal Command with a much clearer idea of the Kriegs-marine’s resupply and operational procedures.
The Battle of the Atlantic was a life of maritime monotony against a constant background of fear. The bravest of the brave were the crews of oil tankers, knowing they were sailing on a giant incendiary bomb. Everyone from captain to deckhand could not help wondering whether they were already being stalked by U-boats and whether they would be hurled from their bunks by the juddering shock of a torpedo explosion. Only appalling weather and heavy seas appeared to reduce the danger.
Theirs was a perpetually damp and cold existence spent in duffel-coats or sou’wester oilskins, with few chances to dry their clothes. The eyes of lookouts ached from scanning the grey seas in the hopeless search for a periscope. Mugs of hot cocoa and corned-beef sandwiches offered their only break and comfort. On the escort vessels, mainly destroyers and corvettes, the sweep of radar screens and the ping of Asdic or sonar echoes provided a hypnotizing yet fearful fascination. The psychological strain was even greater for merchant navy sailors because of their inability to hit back.
Everyone knew that if the convoy was attacked by a wolfpack, and they had to leap into the oily water after being torpedoed, their chances of being pulled out of the sea were very small. A ship stopping to rescue survivors provided an easy target for another U-boat. The relief of reaching the Mersey or the Clyde on the return journey transformed the atmosphere on board.
German U-boat crews lived in even greater discomfort. The bulkheads streamed with condensation and the air was foul with the stench of wet clothing and unwashed bodies. But morale was generally high at that stage of the war, when they were achieving such successes and British counter-measures were still evolving. Much of the time was spent on the surface, which improved speed and fuel consumption. The greatest danger came from Allied flying-boats. As soon as one of these aircraft was sighted, the klaxon sounded a warning and the U-boat went into a well-practised crash-dive. But until radar was mounted in the aircraft, the chances of the U-boats being found remained fairly remote.
In April 1941, Allied shipping losses reached 688,000 tons, but there were encouraging developments. Air cover to convoys was extended, although the ‘Greenland gap’, the large central area of the north Atlantic beyond the range of the Royal Canadian Air Force and RAF Coastal Command, still remained. A German armed trawler was seized off Norway, with two Enigma coding machines on board with the settings for the previous month. And on 9 May, HMS
Bulldog
succeeded in forcing
U-110
to the surface. An armed boarding party managed to seize her codebooks and Enigma cipher machine before they could be destroyed. Other captured vessels, a weather ship and a transport, also provided valuable pickings. But as Allied convoys began to escape the U-boat screens, and then when three submarines were ambushed off Cape Verde, Dönitz began to suspect that their codes might have been compromised. Enigma security was tightened.
The year as a whole had been a very hard one for the Royal Navy. While losses mounted in the Mediterranean during the Battle of Crete, the great battle-cruiser HMS
Hood
exploded when hit by a single shell from the
Bismarck
on 23 May in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. Admiral Günther Lütjens in the
Bismarck
had sailed from the Baltic accompanied by the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen
. The shock in London was considerable. So was the desire for revenge. More than a hundred warships were involved in the hunt for the
Bismarck
, including the battleships HMS
King George V
and
Rodney
and the aircraft carrier
Ark Royal
.
Contact was lost by the shadowing cruiser HMS
Suffolk
, but on 26 May, when the British battle squadron was running short of fuel, a Catalina flying-boat sighted the
Bismarck
. The next day Swordfish torpedo bombers
took off from the
Ark Royal
in bad weather. Two torpedoes wrecked the
Bismarck
’s steering gear as she headed for the safety of Brest. The great German warship could only go round and round in a circle. This gave the
King George V
and
Rodney
, escorted by the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, time to close in for the kill with massive broadsides from their main armament. Admiral Lütjens sent a final signal: ‘Ship incapable of manoeuvring. Will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer.’ The cruiser HMS
Dorsetshire
was sent in to finish her off with torpedoes. Lütjens, who ordered the ship to be scuttled, died along with 2,200 of his sailors. Only 110 men were saved from the sea.
APRIL–SEPTEMBER 1941
I
n the spring of 1941, while Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia achieved a rapid success, Stalin decided on a policy of caution. On 13 April, the Soviet Union signed a five-year ‘neutrality agreement’ with Japan, recognizing its puppet regime of Manchukuo. This was the culmination of what
Chiang Kai-shek
had feared ever since the signing of the Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact. Chiang had been trying to play a double game in 1940, through offering peace feelers to Japan. He had hoped to force the Soviet Union to increase its greatly diminished level of support and thus sabotage its rapprochement with Tokyo. But Chiang also knew that an actual agreement with the Japanese would hand leadership of the Chinese masses to Mao and the Communists because it would be seen as a terrible and cowardly betrayal.
After Japan’s signature of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, Chiang, like Stalin, had seen that the chances of Japan fighting America were increased and he was greatly encouraged by the prospect. China’s survival now lay in the hands of the United States, even though Chiang sensed that the Soviet Union would also end up as part of an anti-fascist alliance. The world, he foresaw, was about to polarize in a more coherent way. The three-dimensional game of chess would finally become two-dimensional.
Both the Soviet and Japanese regimes, which loathed each other, wanted to secure their own back door. In April 1941, after signing a Soviet– Japanese neutrality pact, Stalin turned up in person at the Yaroslavsky railway station in Moscow to bid farewell to the Japanese
foreign minister Matsuoko Yösuke
, who was still drunk from the Soviet leader’s heavy-handed hospitality. Among the crowd on the platform, Stalin suddenly spied Oberst Hans Krebs, the German military attaché (who would become the last chief of the general staff in 1945). To the German’s astonishment, Stalin slapped him on the back and said: ‘
We must always stay
friends, whatever happens.’ The dictator’s bonhomie was belied by his strained and sickly appearance. ‘I’m convinced of it,’ Krebs had replied, recovering from his surprise. He clearly found it hard to believe that Stalin had not yet guessed that Germany was preparing to invade.
Hitler was supremely confident. He had decided to ignore both Bismarck’s warning against invading Russia and the recognized dangers of
a war on two fronts. He justified his long-held ambition of smashing ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ as the surest way to force Britain to come to terms. Once the Soviet Union was defeated, then Japan would be in a position to divert American attention to the Pacific and away from Europe. Yet the Nazi leadership’s primary objective was to secure the Soviet Union’s oil and food, which they believed would make them invincible. Under the ‘Hunger Plan’ devised by Staatssekretär Herbert Backe, the Wehrmacht’s seizure of Soviet food production was intended to lead to the deaths of thirty million people, mainly in the cities.
Hitler, Göring and Himmler had seized on Backe’s radical plan with enthusiasm. It seemed to promise both a dramatic solution to Germany’s growing food problem and a major weapon in its ideological war against Slavdom and ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. The Wehrmacht also approved. By feeding its three million men and 600,000 horses from local sources, the difficulties of supply over huge distances with insufficient rail transport would be greatly eased. Clearly, Soviet prisoners of war would also be systematically starved under the guidelines. Thus the Wehrmacht became an active participant, even before the first shots had been fired, in a genocidal war of annihilation.
On 4 May 1941, flanked by his deputy Rudolf Hess and Reichsmarschall Göring, Hitler addressed the Reichstag. He proclaimed that the National Socialist state would ‘last for a thousand years’. Six nights later, Hess took off in a Messerschmitt 110 without warning anyone in Berlin. He flew to Scotland by the light of a full moon and baled out, but broke his ankle on landing. Astrologers had convinced him that he could arrange peace with Britain. Although slightly deranged, Hess clearly sensed like Ribbentrop that the invasion of the Soviet Union might prove disastrous. But his self-appointed peace mission was doomed to ignominious failure.
His arrival coincided with one of the heaviest raids of the Blitz. The Luftwaffe, also making use of the ‘bomber’s moon’ that night, attacked Hull and London, damaging Westminster Abbey, the House of Commons, the British Museum, numerous hospitals, the City, the Tower of London and the docks. Incendiary bombs started 2,200 major fires. The raids brought the total of civilian casualties up to 40,000 killed and 46,000 badly injured.
Hess’s bizarre mission caused embarrassment in London, consternation in Germany and deep distrust in Moscow. The British government mishandled the whole episode. It should have announced straight away that Hitler had tried to make a peace overture, and it had rejected it outright. Instead, Stalin was convinced that Hess’s aircraft had been guided in by the British Secret Intelligence Service. He had long suspected Churchill of trying to provoke Hitler into attacking the Soviet Union. He now wondered whether that arch anti-Bolshevik Churchill was plotting
with Germany. Stalin had already dismissed all warnings from Britain about German preparations to invade the Soviet Union as ‘angliiskaya provokatsiya’. Even detailed information from his own intelligence services was angrily rejected, often on the grounds that officers abroad had become corrupted by foreign influences.
Stalin still accepted Hitler’s assurance, given in a letter at the beginning of the year, that German troops were being moved eastwards purely to put them out of range of British bombing. Lieutenant General Filipp Ivanovich Golikov, the inexperienced director of GRU military intelligence, was also convinced that Hitler would not attack the Soviet Union until he had conquered Britain. Golikov refused to pass on any of his department’s intelligence on German intentions to Zhukov, the chief of the general staff, or to Timoshenko, who had replaced Voroshilov as the commissar of defence. Yet they were well aware of the Wehrmacht build-up and had produced a contingency planning
document dated 15 May
, discussing a pre-emptive strike to upset German preparations. In addition, Stalin had agreed to a general build-up of forces as a precaution, with 800,000 reservists called up and almost thirty divisions deployed along the western borders of the Soviet Union.