Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ – was none the less a leap forward in technology. Such welding was strenuously resisted in British yards. It was not until 1943 that the Admiralty supported it. Even then the strikes of angry riveters, confronting timid management, ensured that the speed of change was slower than need be.

      By January 1941, with the presidential election won, Roosevelt authorized his military leaders to have secret talks with their British counterparts. Soon it was decided that, should America ever go to war against both Germany and Japan, the conquest of Germany would take precedence. It was not a decision easily arrived at, and for some American military commanders it remained a contentious issue for years to come.

      The ever-present threat of a successful German occupation of England, which would have deprived America of a base for operations in Europe, made the ‘Germany First’ policy logical. Looking back now, it seems that arguments to reverse this policy were bluffs used by American military commanders to get more resources for the Pacific war, and also by American politicians as a threat that kept Churchill under control. The policy, all the same, was never seriously challenged.

      In April the United States signed an agreement that gave them the right to build and maintain military installations in Greenland, and in this same month the Americans extended their ‘ocean security zone’ to longitude 26 degrees west, which is about halfway to England. An agreement with the Icelandic government to install and use military bases there followed in July. It was a vitally important development, for Iceland provided a vital base from which ships and aircraft could protect the Atlantic convoys. Without it there would have always been a mid-Atlantic gap in which the U-boats could operate at will.

      Roosevelt and Churchill met in a warship off Newfoundland in August 1941 and pledged themselves to the common goal of destroying Nazi tyranny. It was no empty boast. In a decision no less than breathtaking, America extended $1 billion of credit to a USSR that most observers believed to be near total defeat.

      Aboard Prince of Wales, returning home from his meeting with the president, Churchill was provided with a chance to see the merchant service at work. On the prime minister’s instructions, the battleship went right through a convoy, the escorts taking the outer lanes. The convoy was making a steady 8 knots; the warships doing 22. From the signal halliards Prince of Wales flew ‘Good luck – Churchill’ in international code.

      Those seventy-two ships went mad. Quickly every ship was flying the ‘V’ flag; some tried a dot-dot-dot-dash salute on their sirens. In the nearest ships men could be seen waving, laughing and – we guessed though we could not hear – cheering. On the bridge the Prime Minister was waving back to them, as was every man on our own decks, cheering with them, two fingers on his right hand making the famous V-sign.

      Soon we were through them and well ahead, when to everyone’s surprise we did an eight-point turn, and shortly after another. Mr Churchill wanted an encore.¹⁰

      The US navy entered a shooting war in September 1941 when U-652 was attacked by depth charges and fired two torpedoes at a nearby destroyer. Both missed. The U-boat captain had made two errors: the destroyer was the US navy’s Greer (a First World War four-funnel profile making it look like those sent to the Royal Navy); and the depth charges had come from an RAF plane. Greer retaliated with a pattern of depth charges but did only minor damage to the German boat which crept away. Roosevelt was angry about the ‘unprovoked attack’ and said that U-boats were the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic. The press echoed his verdict, and reported that the US navy had been ordered to ‘shoot on sight’ in future. It was a phrase which Roosevelt himself was happy to repeat.¹¹

      The next month the American destroyer USS Kearney was damaged in a convoy battle and eleven American sailors died. At the end of October the American destroyer Reuben James – convoying merchant ships between the States and Iceland – was sunk by a U-boat and only 44 of its 120 men were rescued from the ocean. By this time the US navy was fully integrated into the Atlantic battle, to the extent that American orders often went out to Allied warships in the two-thirds of the Atlantic Ocean that was now ‘American’.

      It was in the final weeks of December 1941 that the Atlantic battle reached a new and ferocious pitch. Dönitz coordinated his U-boats and Condors with skill. The route from Gibraltar to Britain had become especially hazardous. To escort a 32-ship convoy the Royal Navy had sixteen warships, and one of them was a new sort of vessel: the escort carrier. Cheap and hastily prepared, HMS Audacity was converted from an ex-German prize, the Hannover.

      Commanding this escort group there was one of those rare breeds, an RN officer who had specialized in anti-submarine warfare in the prewar years. Commander F. J. ‘Johnny’ Walker RN had had enough differences of opinion with authority to have damaged his career. Passed over for captain he had spent the first two years of war in ‘uninspiring shore appointments’. Now he was about to become the most famous and most successful group commander of the entire Atlantic campaign. His desperate battle with the U-boats lasted six days and nights. Two of the convoy were lost, and so was the escort carrier, but four U-boats were sunk and a Condor shot down. It was a setback for Dönitz and proof that cheap little aircraft-carriers could give convoys air protection far away from land. And on the morning of 22 December 1941, the sixth day of the fight, the weary sailors looked up and saw another new and welcome sight. One of the very long-range Liberators had come 800 miles to perform escort duties. It circled the convoy and dropped depth charges upon some U-boats trailing behind. Dönitz called off his submarines. Air power had begun to turn the tide of the battle.

       FIGURE 11

       The US long-range Liberator, used for convoy escort duties

       The ships kept coming

      The Atlantic campaign was the longest and most arduous battle of the war, much of it fought in sub-arctic conditions, in gales and heavy seas. When considering the moral questions arising from the RAF ‘terror bombing’ of cities, consider too the civilians who manned the merchant ships. Casualties of the air raids upon cities usually had immediate succour; the merchant seamen, and ships’ passengers too, men, women and children, were mutilated, crippled and burned. There was no warning save the crash of a torpedo tearing the hull open. Few men from the engine room got as far as the boat deck. The attacks usually came at night and, on the northerly routes the convoys favoured, it was seldom anything but very cold. Many of the merchantmen’s crews were not young. Survivors, many of them bleeding or half-drowned, were abandoned to drift in open boats upon the storm-racked ocean where they went mad or perhaps died slowly and agonizingly of thirst or exposure.

      Almost all Britain’s oil and petroleum supplies came across the Atlantic by ship.¹² So did about half its food, including most of its meat, cheese, butter and wheat, as well as steel and timber, wool, cotton, zinc, lead and nitrates. British farmers could not have produced home-grown crops without imported fertilizers: neither could farmers in neutral Ireland have survived. ‘Ships carried cargoes they were never built for, in seas they were never meant to sail,’ said one official publication. During the war I remember that in London scarcely a day passed without someone in my hearing mentioning our debt to the merchant service. Anyone leaving a particle of food uneaten on a plate was risking a reprimand from any waiter or passer-by who saw it. No heroes of the war – not even the fighter pilots – excelled in valour and dogged determination the men of the merchant service and their naval escorts. The public knew it. One merchant navy officer said:

      armed with free railway ticket issued by ‘Shipwrecked СКАЧАТЬ