All Hell Let Loose (50 page)

Early skirmishes were of a familiar character. A Luftwaffe Condor took up station off Jan Mayen island on 1 July. He115 torpedo-carrying seaplanes made an unconvincing and unsuccessful attack, during which the US destroyer
Wainwright
charged headlong towards the attacking aircraft, firing everything it had. Yet on 3 July, the Admiralty ordered the convoy’s cruiser screen to turn away west, towards the German capital ships which it now believed were at sea. Next day three merchantmen were sunk. That evening, a disbelieving Captain ‘Jackie’ Broome, commanding the close escort, received a signal from London: ‘Secret and immediate. Owing to threat from surface ships convoy is to disperse and proceed to Russian ports.’ Thirteen minutes later, a further brief signal confirmed: ‘Convoy is to scatter.’ After reluctantly passing the order to his charges, Broome closed a merchantman and addressed its master through a loud-hailer: ‘Sorry to leave you like this, goodbye and good luck. It looks like a bloody business.’

Tirpitz
indeed sortied briefly on 6 July, only to be ordered to return to Norway, to the disgust of its crew and escorts. A German destroyer captain wrote that day: ‘The mood is bitter enough. Soon one will feel ashamed to be on the active list … watching other parts of the armed forces fighting while we, “the core of the fleet” just sit in harbour.’ But the Germans had no need to risk their big ships: the Luftwaffe and U-boats sank twenty-four of PQ17’s merchantmen, struggling unprotected on lonely courses to Russia. Among their civilian crews, 153 men perished while British warships lost none. The shame of the Royal Navy was plain to behold, as were the disgust of the Americans and contempt of the Russians. It is indeed possible that PQ17 would have been destroyed by
Tirpitz
. But the navy’s response of ‘every man for himself’, the abandonment of the convoy by its escort, breached the tradition of centuries and inspired lasting mistrust within the merchant service, at a time when its morale was anyway precarious.

The decision resulted from a personal intervention by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. Pound already commanded scant confidence among his peers, and was in failing health. It is extraordinary that he was not sacked, but Churchill found him sympathetic, and thus he retained his post until shortly before his death in October 1943. A government minister, Philip Noel-Baker, was sent to Glasgow to address returning PQ17 survivors at St Andrew’s Hall. ‘We know what the convoy cost us,’ he told them. ‘But I want to tell you that whatever the cost, it was well worth it.’ He was howled down by embittered men. The government threw a censorship blanket over the entire episode, suppressing an eyewitness account by correspondent Godfrey Winn, who had sailed with the convoy. Only after the war was the magnitude of the Admiralty’s blunder revealed to the public.

PQ18 did not sail until September 1942, when it lost thirteen ships out of forty, ten of them to air attack. Among naval ratings and merchant seamen alike, it was now agreed that the Arctic passage represented the worst ordeal of the war at sea. Winn questioned Commander Robert Sherbrooke, recovering from severe wounds received when he won a VC for his part in one of the battles, about the loss of
Bramble
, in which the correspondent had sailed with PQ17. Sherbrooke said: ‘There was just a sudden flash of light on the horizon and that was all.’ Thus did nemesis strike many ships. A seaman described meeting survivors of the cruiser
Edinburgh
and finding them ‘rather sad and twitchy chaps’. Some men who served on the convoys remained afterwards traumatised by their experiences.

In the winter of 1942 another reckless Admiralty decision was made: to run some single merchantmen to Russia unescorted, manned by volunteer crews lured by cash bonuses of £100 an officer, £50 a man. Five out of thirteen such ships arrived. Of the remainder, one ran aground on Spitzbergen where its survivors suffered weeks of appalling privation – most died of gangrene following frostbite, before a handful were rescued by a passing Norwegian ski patrol. On another ship, the
Empire Archer
, there was a riot among firemen – the sweepings of Scotland’s notorious Barlinnie jail – who gained access to rum intended for Archangel. Two sailors were stabbed before discipline was restored.

Even when ships reached Russia, they found little to cheer them. ‘The arrival in Kola Inlet was eerie,’ wrote one sailor. ‘It was December and pretty dark. There were great swirls of fog, black water and white snow-covered ice. The bare rocks on either side of the inlet were menacing and silence was broken only by constant sounding of mournful fog-horns of various pitches … I felt that if Hell were to be cold, this would be a foretaste of it.’ At Murmansk they remained subject to almost daily Luftwaffe attack. A bomb fell into the bunker of the freighter
Dover Hill
, where it lodged unexploded beneath twenty feet of coal. Her captain and crew laboured for two days and nights, removing coal in buckets, before with infinite caution they were able to hoist the bomb to the deck for defusing. Ashore, Russian hospitality was frigid, facilities negligible. Some British seamen arrived proclaiming an enthusiasm for their Soviet comrades-in-arms, which vanished amid the bleak reception. American sailors, denied every comfort to which they were accustomed, recoiled in disgust. The Allies were permitted to harbour no delusions that Western assistance merited Soviet gratitude. In the words of a Russian after the war, ‘God knows we paid them back in full – in Russian lives.’ Which was true.

The turn of the year proved the critical landmark of the campaign. Weather and the enemy – especially U-boats armed with acoustic homing torpedoes – ensured that service on Arctic convoys never became less than a miserable and alarming experience, but losses fell dramatically. In 1943 the Royal Navy was at last able to deploy escort carriers and powerful antisubmarine and anti-aircraft defences. The Germans, hard-pressed in Russia and the Mediterranean, were obliged to divert much of their air and U-boat strength from Norway. Hitler refused to sanction major warship attacks on convoys until an ill-judged sortie was attempted by
Scharnhorst
in December 1943, which resulted in its sinking off the North Cape by a British fleet led by the battleship
Duke of York
.

The US began to move massive supplies by other routes: half of all wartime American shipments reached Russia through its Pacific ports, a quarter through Persia, and only a quarter – 4.43 million tons – via Archangel and Murmansk. The human cost of the PQs was astonishingly small by the standards of other battlefields: though eighteen warships and eighty-seven merchantmen were lost, only 1,944 naval personnel and 829 merchant seamen died serving on Arctic convoys between 1941 and 1945. The Germans lost a battleship, three destroyers, thirty-two U-boats and unnumbered aircraft. Given their extraordinary opportunities for strategic dominance of the Arctic in 1942, what is remarkable is not how many Allied ships they sank, but how few.

The Royal Navy accounted the Russian convoys among its most formidable wartime challenges. It was the service’s misfortune that the professionalism and courage which characterised its performance were tarnished by the memory of PQ17. The Fleet Air Arm never distinguished itself in the north, partly for lack of good aircraft. Some of the navy’s most senior officers failed to display imagination to match the courage and seamanship of their subordinates. They refused to acknowledge, as Churchill and Roosevelt always acknowledged, that at any cost aid must be seen to be sent to Russia. If the supplies shipped in 1941–42 were of greater symbolic than material importance to the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front, they were a vital earnest of Western Allied support for the decisive campaign to destroy Hitler.

3
THE ORDEAL OF
PEDESTAL

Between 1940 and 1943, the Mediterranean witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the Royal Navy’s war. British submarines, based on Malta when conditions there allowed, attacked Axis supply lines to North Africa with some success. Battle squadrons sought to assert themselves in the face of the Italian navy, U-boats and the Luftwaffe. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham inflicted severe damage on the Italian fleet in his November 1940 carrier air strike against Taranto, and in the surface action off Cape Matapan on 28–29 March 1941. But every capital ship sortie into open waters within range of the enemy was a perilous venture, which took a harrowing toll. The carrier
Illustrious
was badly damaged by German bombing in January 1941. On 25 November that year, the battleship
Barham
blew up, with the loss of most of its crew, after being torpedoed by a German submarine. The battleships
Queen Elizabeth
and
Valiant
rested for seven months on the floor of Alexandria harbour after falling victim to an attack by courageous Italian human-torpedo crews on 19 December 1941. The Royal Navy, having lost five capital ships in a month, was for a time obliged to cede the central Mediterranean to the Axis. There was a steady drain of British cruiser and destroyer losses to mines, bombs and torpedoes. For some months in 1941, the navy suffered severely while holding open a sea link to besieged Tobruk, which was deemed symbolically if not militarily important.

The pervasive strategic reality was that the Royal Navy remained vulnerable in the Mediterranean until the British Army could gain control of the North African littoral, providing the RAF with bases. In 1942, the hazards were increased by German deployment of U-boat reinforcements. But Winston Churchill conducted the war effort on the basis that Britain must be seen to challenge the enemy at every opportunity, especially when the army accomplished so little for so long. Malta, within easy range of Axis Sicilian air bases, suffered almost three years of intermittent bombardment. In March and April 1942 the little island received twice the bomb tonnage dropped on London during the entire blitz; its people almost starved, and its resident submarine flotilla had to be withdrawn. The requirement to sustain Malta became a priority for the Royal Navy, and every supply ship had to be fought through in the face of air, U-boat and surface attack. Each convoy demanded a supporting fleet operation: there must be battleships in case Italian heavy units sortied, carriers to provide air cover, and cruiser and destroyer escorts. Each venture precipitated an epic battle. The most famous, or notorious, took place in August 1942, when Malta’s shortages of oil, aircraft and food attained desperate proportions: Operation
Pedestal
was launched to bring succour.

Vice-Admiral Edward Syfret took command of the battlefleet that sailed from the Clyde on 3 August, escorting fourteen merchantmen. Several of these were chartered American ships, notably the tanker
Ohio
, provided with British crews. All had been fitted with anti-aircraft armament manned by soldiers, and on the passage to Gibraltar the convoy intensively exercised both gunnery and manoeuvre. The ships that set forth on 10 August to make the Malta passage formed a mighty array: the battleships
Nelson
and
Rodney
; fleet carriers
Victorious
,
Indomitable
and
Eagle
; the old carrier
Furious
, ferrying Spitfires to reinforce the island as soon as the range narrowed sufficiently to fly them off; six cruisers; twenty-four destroyers and a flotilla of smaller craft. To one cadet aboard a merchantman it was ‘a fantastically wonderful sight’.

Only weeks had elapsed since the Royal Navy’s Arctic humiliation, and the service felt on its mettle: a destroyer captain, Lt. Cmdr. David Hill, said: ‘There was a strong touch of desperation and bloody-mindedness following PQ17.’ One of the
Pedestal
destroyer flotillas, led by ‘Jackie’ Broome, had endured that ghastly experience. A host of German and Italian eyes, watching Gibraltar from Spain and North Africa, saw the fleet sail. Axis commanders were undeceived by a feint convoy which sailed simultaneously from Alexandria, trailing its coat in the eastern Mediterranean. ‘I felt indeed that some of our party were entering the narrow seas on a desperate venture,’ wrote George Blundell of the battleship
Nelson
, ‘and prayed to the Ruler of Destiny for his favour.’

On the 11th, amid a still, azure sea
Furious
began flying off its Spitfires, which set course for Malta, 550 miles distant, where most arrived safely. But now the first disaster struck. In the western Mediterranean, Asdic was confused by freak underwater conditions created by the confluence of warm seas with colder Atlantic currents: ships were thus acutely vulnerable to submarine attack. Even as the fighters were being launched, a salvo of torpedoes fired by U-73 struck
Eagle
, which sank in eight minutes with the loss of 260 of her complement of 1,160 men. ‘She presented a terrible sight as she heeled over, turned bottom up and sank with horrible speed,’ wrote an awestruck witness. ‘Men and aircraft could be seen falling off her flight deck as she capsized … It makes one tremble. If anyone took a good film of it, it should be shown throughout the country … I remember thinking of the trapped men.’ That evening
Furious
, its flight deck now empty, turned for home and safety. One of her escorts, the destroyer
Wolverine
, spotted an Italian submarine and raced in to ram; the Axis boat sank, but
Wolverine
suffered severe damage.

At 2045 the first enemy air attack was launched against
Pedestal
, by thirty-six Heinkel 111s and Ju88s flying from Sicily. These achieved no hits, and four German aircraft fell to the intense AA barrage. Next day at noon, a much more serious strike took place, by seventy bombers and torpedo-carriers with fighter escort. The ensuing battle lasted two hours. The freighter
Deucalion
was damaged and later sunk off the Tunisian coast by a torpedo-bomber, despite gallant efforts to save the ship by her master, Captain Ramsay Brown. During the afternoon, the convoy survived a submarine ambush unscathed. The destroyer
Ithuriel
rammed and sank another Italian boat, at the cost of crippling herself.