The Happy Time: French Bases, Wolf Packs and Convoy SC 7

The fall of France in June 1940 gave Germany’s U-boats a string of Atlantic ports on the Bay of Biscay. For the next nine months a small number of boats, led by a handful of commanders, attacked British convoys on the surface at night and sank merchant ships faster than the escorts could find them. The worst of it came on two October nights northwest of Ireland, when the slow convoy SC 7 lost twenty ships.

Why it mattered

In the first winter of the war, described in Chapter 1, the U-boats had to sail from German ports on the North Sea and the Baltic and go around the north of Scotland to reach the Atlantic. That cost them days of passage each way and limited how long they could stay on patrol. In June 1940 that changed. Germany defeated Norway and France in quick succession, and within weeks the U-boats were sailing from the French Atlantic coast, hundreds of miles closer to the shipping routes into Britain.

At the same moment, Britain had fewer escorts than at any other time in the war. Destroyers had been lost or damaged off Norway and at Dunkirk, and through the summer of 1940 many of the rest were held in home waters against a German invasion. The convoys coming in from North America were often protected by one or two ships, and for part of the voyage by none. The U-boat commanders called the result die glückliche Zeit, the “happy time.” From June 1940 through March 1941 U-boats sank about 450 merchant ships, and they lost only 14 boats in doing it (uboat.net, losses by month; uboat.net, U-boat losses 1940 and 1941).

This was also when the shape of the campaign was set. The Germans worked out the group attack on convoys and the night surface attack that went with it. The British worked out, more slowly, what they would need to defeat both: more escorts, radar that could find a surfaced boat at night, trained escort groups, aircraft over the convoys and a single headquarters to run it all. In March 1941 Winston Churchill gave the struggle the name it has carried since: the Battle of the Atlantic.

Summer 1940: Norway, France and the Biscay ports

The spring of 1940 went badly for the U-boats. Almost the whole force was sent to support the invasion of Norway in April and achieved very little; commanders reported torpedo after torpedo that ran under its target or failed to explode. Five U-boats were lost in April and May 1940 (uboat.net, U-boat losses 1940). Dönitz pressed for investigations into the torpedoes and their magnetic and contact pistols, and the faults were only partly fixed by the summer.

Then the strategic picture changed in weeks. The German army broke through in France in May. The British army was taken off the beaches at Dunkirk, and France signed an armistice on 22 June 1940. Germany occupied the whole Atlantic coast of France. Norway, conquered at the same time, gave Germany bases at Bergen and Trondheim on the North Sea side of the Atlantic as well.

The U-boat arm moved fast. On 7 July 1940 Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp brought U-30 into Lorient, on the south coast of Brittany. She was “the first U-boat to make use of the newly captured French bases,” and the first to take on fuel and torpedoes at a French port (uboat.net, U-30; uboat.net, “U-boat bases: Lorient”). Lorient, founded in the 17th century as the port of the French East India Company, had long been a French naval dockyard. It became the busiest of the German bases, and the 2nd U-boat Flotilla was based there. Brest, St. Nazaire, La Pallice near La Rochelle, and Bordeaux on the Gironde followed. The Italian navy, at war with Britain since June, set up its own Atlantic submarine base at Bordeaux.

Dönitz moved his own headquarters from Germany to Paris in September 1940, and then in November to a requisitioned villa at Kernevel, across the harbor from Lorient, where he could look out at his boats coming and going (uboat.net, “U-boat bases: Lorient”). He stayed there until March 1942, when the British commando raid on St. Nazaire made the coast seem too exposed. In February 1941 work began at Lorient on the first of the great concrete shelters at Keroman, roofed with reinforced concrete several meters thick; by the end of 1941 two of them were finished, and in time the base could hold about thirty boats under cover (Wikipedia summary of French sources, “Lorient Submarine Base”). In 1940 those shelters did not yet exist, and the boats tied up in the open.

The British, for their part, had to change the routes of their shipping. With the enemy on the French coast and German aircraft over the Channel and the Western Approaches south of Ireland, ocean shipping for Britain was routed north of Ireland, through the North Channel to the Clyde and the Mersey. The official historian, Captain Stephen Roskill, titled the relevant chapter of his first volume “The Campaign in the North-West Approaches, 1st June, 1940–31st March, 1941,” and that is where nearly all the fighting in this chapter took place (Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. I, ch. XVII). Convoys inbound from Halifax and Sydney, Nova Scotia, now funneled toward the waters between Rockall and the Hebrides. The U-boats from Lorient went to meet them there.

Die glückliche Zeit

The figures show why the U-boat crews remembered these months fondly. In June 1940 U-boats sank 62 merchant ships of 335,319 gross register tons; in October, 60 ships of 342,204 tons, the highest monthly tonnage of the period. Over the four months from July through October they sank 215 ships of about 1.1 million tons (uboat.net, losses by month). In the whole second half of 1940 Germany lost nine U-boats, and in January and February 1941 it lost none at all (uboat.net, U-boat losses 1940 and 1941).

Those sinkings were made by a small force. Dönitz had begun the war with fewer than sixty boats, many of them small coastal Type IIs, and only a fraction of the force was in the operational area on any day. A few commanders did a large share of the damage, and they became famous in Germany. Three stood out.

Otto Kretschmer, 28 years old in 1940, had commanded the small U-23 in the first winter of the war and in April 1940 commissioned the new Type VIIB boat U-99. He was quiet and avoided publicity. He was also the most effective U-boat commander of the war. His method was to get inside a convoy on the surface at night and fire single torpedoes at close range, aimed to hit one ship each. The Knight’s Cross came on 4 August 1940 and the Oak Leaves on 4 November 1940 (uboat.net, “Otto Kretschmer”).

Günther Prien was already a national hero. In the early hours of 14 October 1939 he had taken U-47 into the Royal Navy’s anchorage at Scapa Flow and sunk the battleship Royal Oak, the story told in Chapter 1. He had a former merchant officer’s eye for ships and a showman’s sense of publicity, and the propaganda ministry made the most of him. He received the Oak Leaves on 20 October 1940, the first U-boat commander to do so (uboat.net, “Günther Prien”).

Joachim Schepke, of U-100, was the youngest of the three and the most outgoing. He wrote a popular book about life in the U-boats and was a favorite of the press. He was also known among his fellow commanders for optimistic claims; men in the U-boat arm used the phrase “Schepke tonnage” for a sinking report that came out larger than the facts (Wikipedia, “Joachim Schepke,” citing German sources). He received the Knight’s Cross on 24 September 1940 and the Oak Leaves on 1 December 1940 (uboat.net, “Joachim Schepke”).

The pack and the night

Dönitz had been a U-boat officer in the First World War. He had seen convoys defeat the lone U-boat in 1917 and 1918, and he had concluded that the answer was to attack a convoy with several boats at once. The tactic was called Rudeltaktik, “pack tactics.” uboat.net’s summary of how it worked is a good outline. Boats were spread across the expected track of a convoy in a patrol line. The first to sight the convoy became the “shadower”: it did not attack at once, but followed the convoy and reported its position, course and speed by radio to U-boat headquarters ashore (BdU). BdU then ordered every boat within reach to close in, and they attacked together, “during the same night,” to swamp the escorts (uboat.net, “What is a wolfpack?”).

In 1940 the system was still rough. There were not enough boats to form proper patrol lines, so the early convoy battles were fought by groups gathered around whichever boat made contact, with experienced commanders left to act on their own once they arrived. uboat.net notes that formal wolf packs on the later pattern only became possible from about May 1941, when BdU had enough boats (uboat.net, “What is a wolfpack?”). The pack attacks of 1940 depended heavily on the commanders on the spot. They also depended on radio. Each sighting report, each order from Kernevel, went out over the air, and every transmission was a chance for the British to fix a boat’s position. In 1940 the British could do little with that yet. The equipment and the codebreaking that eventually exploited it are the subject of Chapter 5.

The second half of the method was the night surface attack. A Type VIIB U-boat was faster on the surface than submerged by more than two to one: 17.9 knots on its diesels, but only 8 knots on its electric motors, and that for a short time before the batteries ran down (uboat.net, Type VIIB). On the surface at night, with only the conning tower above the water, it was very hard to see. It could keep pace with a convoy, slip between the escorts and fire from inside the columns of merchant ships. Kretschmer’s motto was “one torpedo, one ship.” Of 116 torpedoes he fired in action, 74 hit, and at least 83 of his attacks were made on the surface (Wikipedia, “Otto Kretschmer,” citing German studies of his patrol records).

The first big convoy battle of this kind came against HX 72, a 41-ship convoy from Halifax, between 20 and 22 September 1940. Kretschmer, Prien, Schepke, Bleichrodt and Jenisch all attacked it. Eleven ships of 72,727 tons were sunk and three more damaged (uboat.net, convoy HX 72). The escort was not fully in place until the convoy was already under attack. Schepke’s U-100 did much of the damage in a single night.

Convoy SC 7

The SC convoys, for “Sydney, Cape Breton,” began in August 1940. They were made up of ships too slow for the fast HX convoys from Halifax: old tramp steamers, Great Lakes freighters and small coasters, many of them from the fleets of occupied or neutral countries. SC 7 left Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 5 October 1940 bound for Liverpool and other British ports. It had about 35 merchant ships, a planned speed of 8 knots, and some ships that could not make even that (Wikipedia, “Convoy SC 7”; warsailors.com, “Convoy SC 7,” gives the sailing date as 4 or 5 October). Cargoes were the bulk freight that kept Britain’s factories running: pit props for the coal mines, pulpwood, lumber, iron ore, steel, grain and sulphur.

The convoy commodore, responsible for the merchant ships but not for the escort, was Vice Admiral Lachlan Mackinnon, a retired flag officer serving in the reserve rank of commodore, who flew his flag in the small British freighter Assyrian (uboat.net, Assyrian). For most of the voyage the convoy’s only escort was the sloop HMS Scarborough. One ship, Winona, turned back on the first day with engine trouble. Others straggled in a storm in mid-ocean and had to make their own way.

The stragglers were the first losses. On 16 October Georg-Wilhelm Schulz in U-124 sank the small Canadian laker Trevisa, 1,813 tons, which had fallen behind. On the night of 16–17 October Heinrich Bleichrodt in U-48 sighted the main convoy, reported it, and at 0553 on 17 October torpedoed the tanker Languedoc and the freighter Scoresby, the vice commodore’s ship (uboat.net, convoy SC 7; uboat.net, Scoresby). All 39 men of Scoresby were picked up. Later that day Heinrich Liebe in U-38 sank the Greek straggler Aenos. Scarborough went off to hunt U-48 and lost touch with the convoy.

Reinforcements arrived piecemeal. The sloop Fowey and the corvette Bluebell joined on 17 October; the sloop Leith and the corvette Heartsease on 18 October, when Leith‘s captain took over as senior officer (Wikipedia, “Convoy SC 7”). The four ships had never worked together. They had no common plan for the defense of a convoy at night, and none had radar. Meanwhile, on Dönitz’s orders, five more U-boats were closing from the east and north: U-46 (Endrass), U-99 (Kretschmer), U-100 (Schepke), U-101 (Frauenheim) and U-123 (Karl-Heinz Moehle).

The night of 18–19 October

The pack struck after dark on 18 October, about 100 miles west of the Hebrides. Endrass in U-46 fired four torpedoes between 2058 and 2104 and sank the Swedish Convallaria, loaded with pulpwood, and the British Beatus (uboat.net, Convallaria). At 2112 Frauenheim’s U-101 hit Creekirk, carrying 5,900 tons of iron ore from Newfoundland. A ship full of ore sank like a stone. All 36 men aboard were lost (uboat.net, Creekirk). The escorts fired starshell, searched outward along the bearings of the explosions and found nothing; the U-boats were inside the convoy or close alongside it, on the surface.

Kretschmer came in a little later. U-99 first sank the British Empire Miniver, then the Greek Niritos. At 2355 he torpedoed Fiscus, carrying steel, lumber and crated aircraft. She went down so fast that of her 39 men only one survived, found clinging to wreckage by a lifeboat from the Norwegian Snefjeld (uboat.net, Fiscus). Schepke in U-100 and Moehle in U-123 were attacking at the same time. Ships were hit in ones and twos all through the night, some by more than one boat: Boekelo, Shekatika, Blairspey and Clintonia were each torpedoed twice, and two of them survived it (uboat.net, convoy SC 7).

Soon after midnight the commodore’s ship was hit. At 0122 on 19 October U-101 fired her bow torpedoes; one struck Assyrian, and her stern torpedo struck the Dutch Soesterberg. Assyrian, carrying 3,700 tons of grain, lost 17 of her 51 people. Mackinnon was in the water for a long time before Leith picked him up with the master, Reginald Kearon, and the other survivors (uboat.net, Assyrian). Sixteen minutes later U-99 sank Empire Brigade, with copper, ferro-alloys and steel in her holds, about 100 miles east-southeast of Rockall; 35 of her 41 men were saved (uboat.net, Empire Brigade). Kretschmer went on to sink the Greek Thalia, and then Snefjeld, which had stopped to pick up Thalia‘s survivors.

By daylight the convoy had ceased to exist as a formation. Merchant ships had scattered to save themselves, and the escorts had spent much of the night stopping to pick up men from the water; it was the one thing they could do that made any difference. Fowey rescued the survivors of Convallaria and Empire Brigade, Bluebell those of Scoresby and others, Leith those of Assyrian. Secondary accounts summarized by Wikipedia count sixteen ships sunk in about six hours that night, and about 141 lives lost in the convoy as a whole.

The final tally, as uboat.net records it, was 20 ships sunk, of 79,592 tons, and 6 more damaged, of 22,662 tons. No U-boat was lost. U-99 sank six of the twenty and damaged a seventh, Clintonia, which U-123 then finished off; some accounts credit Kretschmer with seven (uboat.net, convoy SC 7; Wikipedia, “Convoy SC 7”). By the morning of 19 October Kretschmer had used all his torpedoes and turned for Lorient.

HX 79: Prien’s night

The boats that still had torpedoes did not have to wait long. On 19 October Prien in U-47 sighted the 49-ship convoy HX 79, inbound from Halifax along almost the same track SC 7 had followed. HX 79 was far better protected. By the time it reached the danger area its escort had grown to two destroyers, Whitehall and Sturdy; four corvettes, Hibiscus, Heliotrope, Coreopsis and Arabis; three anti-submarine trawlers; the minesweeper Jason; and the Dutch submarine O 14 (uboat.net, convoy HX 79).

It made little difference. Prien brought in Endrass, Schepke, Bleichrodt and Liebe, and on the night of 19–20 October the boats attacked on the surface just as they had the night before. Liebe’s U-38 sank the British Matheran and the Dutch Bilderdijk. Prien sank Uganda and Wandby, and after midnight La Estancia and Whitford Point; he damaged the tanker Shirak, which Bleichrodt finished off, and the tanker Athelmonarch. Endrass sank Ruperra and the large Swedish motor ship Janus. Schepke sank the tanker Caprella, the tanker Sitala and Loch Lomond (uboat.net, convoy HX 79). Twelve ships of 75,069 tons were sunk and two damaged. Again, no U-boat was lost.

Between them, SC 7 and HX 79 lost 32 ships between 16 and 20 October, most of them in two nights in the same stretch of sea. Secondary accounts call the SC 7 attack the most successful pack attack of the war. The lesson of HX 79 was in some ways worse: a strong escort, by the standards of 1940, had been no more able than a weak one to stop boats attacking on the surface at night. The escorts lacked radar, training as groups, a common doctrine and, above all, numbers.

The Condor and the Empress

The U-boats had help from the air. The Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor had been designed by Kurt Tank as a long-range airliner for Lufthansa; it first flew on 27 July 1937. In wartime form, with a bomb load, defensive guns and extra fuel, it had a range of about 2,200 miles and could stay up for fourteen hours (Wikipedia, “Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor,” citing standard references). From the summer of 1940 the Condors of the Luftwaffe’s I. Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 40 flew from Bordeaux-Mérignac in great arcs out over the Atlantic west of Ireland and on to bases in Norway, and back again.

There were never many of them. Only 26 were built in all of 1940. But they found ships that the U-boats could not, and they bombed them from low level, where there was little to stop them: few merchant ships had more than a machine gun or two, and the RAF’s fighters could not reach that far out. German sources claimed some 365,000 tons of shipping sunk by Condors from June 1940 to February 1941; that is a claim, not a verified total (Wikipedia, “Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor”). Churchill called the aircraft “the scourge of the Atlantic.”

The best-known Condor attack came on 26 October 1940. The Canadian Pacific liner Empress of Britain, 42,348 tons, among the largest ships sunk by a U-boat in the war, was homeward bound as a troopship about 70 miles northwest of Donegal when a Condor of 2./KG 40 flown by Oblt. Bernhard Jope hit her with two 250-kg bombs. She caught fire and was abandoned; 25 crew and 20 passengers were killed, and 578 of the 623 aboard survived. Two days later, on 28 October, as tugs towed the burned-out hull toward Scotland, Hans Jenisch in U-32, who had followed the tow for almost 24 hours, put two torpedoes into her and she sank northwest of Bloody Foreland (uboat.net, Empress of Britain). U-32 was sunk two days after that by the destroyers Harvester and Highlander, and Jenisch was taken prisoner (uboat.net, U-boat losses 1940).

The Condor was also a scout, though cooperation between KG 40 and the U-boats was poor in 1940 and 1941: navigation over the ocean was inaccurate and the two services reported in different ways. Even so, Churchill’s directive of March 1941, described below, named the U-boat and the Focke-Wulf together.

HX 84 and the Jervis Bay

The U-boats were not the only danger. At the end of October 1940 the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, under Kapitän zur See Theodor Krancke, slipped out into the Atlantic through the Denmark Strait. Her six 11-inch guns could outrange and outfight anything likely to be escorting a convoy in mid-ocean.

Convoy HX 84 left Halifax on 28 October, bound for Liverpool: 38 merchant ships. Two Canadian destroyers saw it out to sea and left on 29 October. From there its only escort was the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay, a former passenger liner of the Aberdeen and Commonwealth Line fitted with old 6-inch guns and commanded by Captain Edward Fogarty Fegen, Royal Navy (Wikipedia, “Convoy HX 84”; Wikipedia, “HMS Jervis Bay”). Armed merchant cruisers were meant to deter surface raiders and lone cruisers, not to fight a pocket battleship.

On 5 November Scheer‘s floatplane found the convoy at 1205. Earlier that day the raider had stopped and sunk the independently routed banana boat Mopan, whose crew were taken prisoner. In the late afternoon, in mid-ocean near 52°41′N, 32°52′W, Scheer came in sight of the convoy (Wikipedia, “Convoy HX 84”). The convoy was ordered to scatter behind smoke, and Fegen turned Jervis Bay toward the enemy. The raider opened fire beyond the range of the British guns. Jervis Bay was hit almost at once, set on fire and disabled; Fegen’s arm was shattered, and he went on directing the fight until he was killed. The ship burned and sank. The VC citation records that she held the German’s fire “for nearly an hour” (London Gazette, 22 November 1940, as quoted in Wikipedia, “HMS Jervis Bay”).

That hour, and the falling darkness, saved most of the convoy. Scheer sank five ships, Maidan, Trewellard, Kenbane Head, Beaverford and Fresno City, and set the tanker San Demetrio on fire. San Demetrio‘s crew abandoned her, then found her still afloat, reboarded her and brought her into port, a story that became the 1943 film San Demetrio London (Wikipedia, “Convoy HX 84”). A popular account has Beaverford fighting the raider with her two guns for hours; Krancke’s own postwar account does not support it, and the question is open. Of Jervis Bay‘s 254 men, 68 were picked up by the Swedish freighter Stureholm, which turned back after dark to search for them, and three of those died of their wounds. About 190 were lost (Wikipedia, “HMS Jervis Bay”).

Victoria Cross · Posthumous

Capt. Edward Fogarty Fegen, RN, HMS Jervis Bay

“For valour in challenging hopeless odds and giving his life to save the many ships it was his duty to protect,” the citation begins. Sighting a powerful German warship, Fegen “at once drew clear of the Convoy, made straight for the Enemy”; “crippled, in flames, unable to reply, for nearly an hour the Jervis Bay held the German’s fire.” It ends: “of the Merchantmen all but four or five were saved.” Gazetted 22 November 1940. Fegen was 49.

Citation →

The Scheer went on into the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean and returned to Germany in April 1941. Her raid showed how thin the protection of the convoys was against a heavy ship, a problem the Bismarck would raise again six months later, in the story told in Chapter 3.

Fifty old destroyers and the Flowers

Britain’s most urgent need was more escorts, and it looked for them in two places: the reserve fleet of the United States Navy and its own small shipyards.

In May 1940 Churchill had asked President Roosevelt for the loan of forty or fifty old destroyers. The United States was neutral, American law limited what could be sent to a belligerent, and the 1940 presidential campaign was under way. The answer, worked out over the summer, was an exchange. On 2 September 1940 the two governments concluded the destroyers-for-bases agreement: fifty old U.S. destroyers in return for 99-year leases on sites for American bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda and the British West Indies (Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, “The Anglo-American Leased Bases Agreement”). The bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda were described as gifts; the others, in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua and British Guiana, as the exchange. The formal leases were signed on 27 March 1941.

The fifty were flush-deck, four-funneled destroyers of the Caldwell, Wickes and Clemson classes, built at the end of the First World War: three Caldwells, twenty-seven Wickes and twenty Clemsons. Forty-three went to the Royal Navy and seven to the Royal Canadian Navy, renamed after towns with the same names in Britain and America, and so known as the Town class (Wikipedia, “Destroyers-for-bases deal”). Many needed long refits after years in reserve. They rolled badly, and their turning circle was poor for anti-submarine work. Only about thirty were in service by May 1941. But they had long range, and by 1941 every hull counted.

The other answer was British, and in the long run more important. Just before the war the Admiralty had looked for an escort that could be built quickly and cheaply in yards that did not build warships. The shipbuilder Smiths Dock, on the Tees, offered a design based on its 700-ton whale catcher Southern Pride. The first 26 were ordered on 25 July 1939, and the class took its names from flowers. The first, Gladiolus, was laid down on 19 October 1939 and commissioned on 6 April 1940 (Wikipedia, “Flower-class corvette”). By the end of the war about 294 had been built in Britain and Canada, including 69 of a modified design.

The Flower was 205 feet long and displaced 925 tons. A single four-cylinder triple-expansion steam engine of 2,750 horsepower, the kind any merchant yard could build, drove her at 16 knots. She carried a 4-inch gun forward, a 2-pounder pom-pom aft, depth charge throwers and rails with 40 charges, and an ASDIC set, and had a crew of about 85, which grew as more equipment was added. She was meant for coastal convoys. Instead, because nothing else was available in numbers, she went out into the open Atlantic. Her short, round hull rode the swell like a cork. Rolls of 80 degrees were not unusual, and her crews said she “would roll on wet grass.” Mess decks were wet for weeks on end. Both corvettes that joined SC 7, Bluebell and Heartsease, were Flowers.

The Flower was slower than a Type VII on the surface, 16 knots against 17.9, and that told against her at night. She could not run down a U-boat that kept its distance. What she could do was stay with a convoy across the ocean, force a U-boat down, and hold it down with ASDIC and depth charges while the convoy moved on. Canada’s yards on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes built Flowers in large numbers for the Royal Canadian Navy, which grew from a handful of ships in 1939 into one of the largest escort forces in the Atlantic. Their story continues in Chapter 3 and later chapters.

Derby House and the directive

The organization had to change as much as the ships. Western Approaches Command, which controlled the convoys and escorts in the ocean approaches to Britain, had been based at Plymouth, at the southwest tip of England. That made sense when the main routes ran south of Ireland. After the summer of 1940 they ran north of it, and the main convoy ports were Liverpool and Glasgow. In late 1940 the Admiralty decided to move the command north, and on 7 February 1941 its headquarters opened at Derby House, an office building in Liverpool’s business district, beneath which a bomb-proof operations center had been built (Wikipedia, “Commander-in-Chief, Western Approaches”; Western Approaches Museum).

On 17 February 1941 Admiral Sir Percy Noble took over as Commander-in-Chief from Admiral Sir Martin Dunbar-Nasmith. The headquarters covered about 55,000 square feet below and around Derby House, with a staff of nearly 1,000, about four-fifths of them women of the Women’s Royal Naval Service and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (Western Approaches Museum). It was shared with the RAF’s Coastal Command, whose No. 15 Group worked from the same building; for the first time the admiral responsible for the convoys and the airmen responsible for patrolling over them worked side by side, in front of the same wall map. In April 1941 Coastal Command came under the Admiralty’s operational control.

Noble’s main contribution was to turn individual escorts into teams. Instead of assigning whatever ships were available to each convoy, Western Approaches formed permanent escort groups, each under a senior officer, which trained and sailed together and developed common tactics for the night. New escorts were worked up at Tobermory in the Hebrides, and escorts based at Londonderry were closer to the convoy routes. The effects took months to show.

In London, Churchill brought the campaign to the top of the government’s agenda. On 6 March 1941, as Minister of Defence, he issued a directive to the service departments and the ministries concerned with shipping. It became known as the Battle of the Atlantic directive, and Roskill printed it in full as an appendix to his official history (Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. I, appendix O). It ordered an offensive against the U-boat and the Focke-Wulf wherever they could be found, priority for fitting merchant ships with catapult-launched fighters and guns against the Condors, and a drive to clear the congestion in British ports and repair yards, where large numbers of damaged ships lay idle. A standing Battle of the Atlantic Committee, chaired by Churchill, met weekly to see it carried out.

In their words

In view of various German statements, we must assume that the Battle of the Atlantic has begun.

The directive went on to say that the next four months should enable Britain to defeat the attempt to strangle its food supplies and its connection with the United States. The name it gave the struggle stuck. It is the reason this collection, and nearly every book about the war at sea, calls the whole six-year campaign the Battle of the Atlantic.

March 1941: the aces fall

The winter of 1940–41 brought a lull. Storms in the North Atlantic made it hard to find convoys and harder to attack them; there were few boats at sea; and in January 1941 U-boats sank only 15 ships (uboat.net, losses by month). In February the numbers rose again, and with them the British losses. But the escorts were also improving. More of them carried radar, they were starting to work in groups, and at night they were less likely to rush off after every explosion. When the U-boats came back in strength in March, the results were different.

OB 293: Prien disappears

On 7 March 1941 four boats attacked the outbound convoy OB 293 south of Iceland. Kretschmer’s U-99 hit the big whale factory ship Terje Viken, 20,638 tons, and sank the tanker Athelbeach (uboat.net, ships hit by U-99). But the escort, led by the destroyers Wolverine and Verity with the corvettes Camellia and Arbutus, fought back hard. Camellia and Arbutus sank U-70, on her first patrol, south of Iceland at about 60°15′N, 14°W; 25 of her crew, including her commander, Joachim Matz, were taken prisoner and 20 were killed (uboat.net, U-70).

Prien’s U-47 was also following the convoy. Her last radio message was received at 0454 on 7 March 1941, from a position south of Iceland. After that, nothing. For decades the credit went to Wolverine, which made a long depth charge attack on a U-boat early on 8 March. Postwar research has shown that Wolverine‘s target was almost certainly Hans Eckermann’s UA, which reached port damaged. uboat.net now lists U-47 as missing since 7 March 1941 at about 60°N, 13°W, with all 45 men, and says that “there is presently no convincing explanation for its loss” (uboat.net, U-47). Mines, a circling torpedo of her own and a later attack by Camellia and Arbutus have all been suggested. The German navy kept the loss secret until 23 May 1941, and the armed forces communiqué announced it the next day.

HX 112: Walker and Vanoc

A week later came HX 112, a 41-ship convoy from Halifax, escorted by the 5th Escort Group under Commander Donald Macintyre in the old destroyer HMS Walker. Macintyre had just taken over the group. Fritz-Julius Lemp in U-110, the same officer who had brought U-30 into Lorient the summer before, sighted the convoy on 15 March and the next night damaged the tanker Erodona. Kretschmer and Schepke closed in, with U-37 and U-74 (uboat.net, convoy HX 112).

On the night of 15–16 March Kretschmer did what he had done in October. He took U-99 into the convoy on the surface and sank the Norwegian Beduin, the Canadian J. B. White, the Swedish Korshamn, the British Venetia and the Norwegian Ferm, and damaged the tanker Franche Comté (uboat.net, convoy HX 112). They were the last ships he sank. He had used all his torpedoes and turned away for home.

Schepke was still trying to get in. In the small hours of 17 March Walker and Vanoc hunted U-100 with depth charges, and the damaged boat was forced to the surface in the dark. On the destroyer Vanoc, commanded by Lt. Cdr. James Deneys, the new Type 286M radar picked up the surfaced boat at a range at which no lookout could have seen her (Wikipedia, “HMS Vanoc”; uboat.net, U-100). Vanoc turned and rammed. At 0318 U-100 went down southeast of Iceland at about 61°04′N, 11°30′W. Schepke was crushed on his bridge by Vanoc‘s bow, by the most common account; 38 of the crew were killed and 6 survived (uboat.net, U-100; uboat.net, “Joachim Schepke”).

While Vanoc picked up survivors, Walker‘s ASDIC operator reported a new contact. It was U-99. Kretschmer’s officer of the watch had seen Vanoc and dived, which put the boat where the destroyers’ ASDIC could find it. Macintyre attacked with a pattern of depth charges. U-99 was badly damaged and sank deep before her crew regained control and blew her to the surface among the destroyers. Kretschmer had a signal flashed to Walker, then ordered the boat scuttled. At 0343 U-99 sank at about 61°N, 11°48′W; her chief engineer and two other men went down with her, and Kretschmer and 39 of his crew were picked up by Walker (uboat.net, U-99; uboat.net, “Otto Kretschmer”). Macintyre kept Kretschmer’s binoculars and used them for the rest of the war; he returned them in 1955 (Wikipedia, “Donald Macintyre”).

In ten days the U-boat arm had lost its three most famous commanders, two of them dead and one a prisoner. Five U-boats were lost in March 1941 in all, the fifth being U-551, sunk with all hands on 23 March (uboat.net, U-boat losses 1941). That equaled the worst month of the war so far for the U-boat arm. Dönitz responded by moving his boats farther west, out of range of the escorts’ new bases and aircraft, and the battle moved with them toward Iceland and the mid-ocean “air gap.” The Happy Time was over.

Timeline

The Happy Time, June 1940 to March 1941

1. 22 Jun 1940France signs an armistice; Germany occupies the French Atlantic coast.
2. 7 Jul 1940U-30 (Lemp) arrives at Lorient, the first U-boat to use a French base.
3. 4 Aug 1940Kretschmer awarded the Knight’s Cross.
4. 2 Sep 1940Destroyers-for-bases agreement: fifty old U.S. destroyers for 99-year base leases.
5. 20–22 Sep 1940Convoy HX 72 attacked by Kretschmer, Prien, Schepke and others: 11 ships sunk.
6. 16–19 Oct 1940Convoy SC 7: 20 ships sunk, 6 damaged; no U-boat lost.
7. 19–20 Oct 1940Convoy HX 79: 12 ships sunk, 2 damaged; Prien sinks four.
8. 26–28 Oct 1940Empress of Britain bombed by a Condor, then sunk by U-32.
9. 5 Nov 1940Admiral Scheer attacks HX 84; Jervis Bay sunk; Fegen awarded the VC.
10. Nov 1940Dönitz moves his headquarters to Kernevel, Lorient.
11. 7 Feb 1941Western Approaches headquarters opens at Derby House, Liverpool.
12. 17 Feb 1941Adm. Sir Percy Noble becomes Commander-in-Chief, Western Approaches.
13. 6 Mar 1941Churchill’s Battle of the Atlantic directive.
14. 7 Mar 1941U-47 (Prien) lost with all hands near convoy OB 293; U-70 sunk by Camellia and Arbutus.
15. 16 Mar 1941Kretschmer sinks five ships of HX 112.
16. 17 Mar 1941U-100 rammed by Vanoc at 0318, Schepke killed; U-99 scuttled at 0343, Kretschmer captured by Walker.

People

Adm. Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) commanded the U-boat arm from 1935, and from January 1943 the whole German navy. He developed the pack tactics and ran the campaign from a small staff, from Kernevel during the period of this chapter. He succeeded Hitler as head of state in May 1945 and served ten years in Spandau prison after the Nuremberg trial.

Otto Kretschmer (1912–1998) commanded U-23 and then U-99. uboat.net credits him with 47 ships sunk, of 274,418 tons, and 5 damaged; other German compilations give 46 ships of 273,073 tons. After almost seven years as a prisoner in Britain and at Bowmanville in Canada, he returned to Germany in December 1947, joined the new West German navy in 1955 and rose to rear admiral and command of NATO’s naval forces in the Baltic approaches. He died in 1998 after a fall on a Danube cruise (uboat.net, “Otto Kretschmer”; Wikipedia, “Otto Kretschmer”).

Günther Prien (1908–1941), a former merchant officer, commanded U-47 from her commissioning in December 1938. He is credited with 30 merchant ships of 162,769 tons and the battleship Royal Oak, and 8 ships damaged (uboat.net, “Günther Prien”). He was 33 when U-47 disappeared.

Joachim Schepke (1912–1941), born in Flensburg, commanded U-3 and U-19 before U-100. uboat.net credits him with 36 or 37 ships sunk, of about 154,000 to 156,000 tons, and 4 damaged; his own claims were higher (uboat.net, “Joachim Schepke”). He was 29 when he died on U-100’s bridge.

Capt. Edward Fogarty Fegen (1891–1940), born in Southsea, Hampshire, to a naval family, commanded Jervis Bay and was killed in her. His Victoria Cross was gazetted on 22 November 1940. Memorials to him and his ship stand in Bermuda and Canada, among other places.

Adm. Sir Percy Noble (1880–1955) commanded Western Approaches from 17 February 1941 to 19 November 1942, when he was succeeded by Adm. Sir Max Horton and went to Washington as head of the British Admiralty Delegation. He built the escort-group system that Horton later led to victory.

Cdr. Donald Macintyre (1904–1981), born at Dehra Dun in India, was a naval aviator before he went to destroyers. He commanded escort groups for most of the war, was credited with sinking six U-boats and received the DSO with two bars and the DSC. His memoir, U-Boat Killer (1956), is one of the best escort captains’ accounts of the battle (Wikipedia, “Donald Macintyre”).

Losses and uncertainty

There is no agreed start or end date for the Happy Time, so its totals depend on who is counting. Some accounts confine it to July through October 1940, the months of the great convoy battles; others run it from June 1940 to the loss of the aces in March 1941, as this chapter does. The German term was used by the crews, not by any official order. The monthly figures below come from uboat.net, which counts ships sunk by U-boats only (not by aircraft, raiders or mines) in all waters, including some outside the North Atlantic.

By the numbers

Merchant tonnage sunk by U-boats, month by month

Gross register tons sunk (ships sunk in brackets), June 1940 to March 1941

Jun 1940335,319 (62)

Jul 1940203,709 (41)

Aug 1940287,311 (57)

Sep 1940285,152 (57)

Oct 1940342,204 (60)

Nov 1940171,787 (33)

Dec 1940234,707 (41)

Jan 194199,050 (15)

Feb 1941211,885 (44)

Mar 1941234,847 (40)

The convoy figures vary less than one might expect, but they do vary. For SC 7, uboat.net lists 30 ships in the convoy, Arnold Hague’s database 34 (not counting stragglers), and most narrative accounts 35. Twenty ships sunk is the usual figure, but it includes the stragglers Trevisa and Aenos, sunk before the main attack; some writers count only the ships sunk in company and get a smaller number. The number of men killed in SC 7 is given as 141 and as 142 in different places in the same secondary summary, and no full roll has been published that we could check. Jürgen Rohwer, the leading postwar authority on U-boat sinkings, warned that for SC 7 “it is very difficult to establish with certainty the U-boats responsible” for each hit, because several boats attacked the same ships within minutes of each other (Rohwer, Axis Submarine Successes, as quoted by warsailors.com). That is why Kretschmer is credited with six SC 7 ships by uboat.net and seven by other sources.

Two of the losses at the end of the Happy Time are still uncertain. U-47’s fate is unknown, as described above. And the circumstances of Schepke’s death, crushed on the bridge by Vanoc‘s bow, rest on the accounts of U-100’s six survivors and the British ships; uboat.net is careful to say that he “is said to have been caught on the bridge.” On the British side, Jervis Bay‘s dead are usually given as 190, but the figure follows from the number of survivors and the ship’s complement rather than from a published roll, and accounts differ by a few.

Questions readers ask

What was the “Happy Time”?

It was the U-boat crews’ name, die glückliche Zeit, for the months after the fall of France when they sank Allied shipping in large numbers at little cost to themselves. It is usually dated from June or July 1940 to the spring of 1941. A second “happy time” came in the first half of 1942 off the American coast, the subject of Chapter 4.

Why did the French bases matter so much?

Because a U-boat’s fuel was its time on patrol. From Germany a boat had to pass the North Sea and go around Scotland before it even reached the Atlantic. From Lorient it went straight out into the Bay of Biscay and was on the convoy routes in days. Each boat could therefore spend more of each patrol hunting, and the same small force had more boats on station at any one time.

Why couldn’t the escorts find the U-boats at night?

Because the U-boats were on the surface, where ASDIC could not detect them, and in 1940 the escorts had no radar able to pick up a conning tower. A Type VII on the surface at night was very hard to see and was faster than a corvette. The escorts could only fire starshell and hope to sight it. The engineer’s note above explains the problem.

How many ships did SC 7 lose?

Twenty sunk, of 79,592 tons, and six damaged, out of about 35 ships, according to uboat.net. Sixteen of the twenty went down on the single night of 18–19 October. No U-boat was lost. About 141 men were killed.

Was the destroyers-for-bases deal worth it to Britain?

Militarily, the old destroyers were a mixed bargain: many needed long refits and only about thirty were in service by May 1941. But they came when Britain was shortest of escorts, and politically the agreement was a large step by a neutral United States toward Britain. The bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda later became important to the American share of the battle, as Chapter 3 describes.

How it connects

The convoy system that SC 7 and HX 79 sailed in, and the first U-boat campaign that preceded the Happy Time, are told in Chapter 1, The Lifeline, along with Prien’s raid on Scapa Flow. After March 1941 the battle moved west, toward Iceland and Newfoundland, and the United States moved step by step from neutrality to an undeclared war in the Atlantic; the next chapter, The Undeclared War, follows Lend-Lease, the loss of the Reuben James and the hunt for the Bismarck. Two months after HX 112, Lemp’s U-110 was captured with her Enigma machine and codes intact, the beginning of the intelligence story told in Chapter 5. The radar that found U-100 in the dark was the first of the scientific advantages described there as well. For the whole campaign, see the Battle of the Atlantic collection, its ocean atlas and its timeline.

What happened afterward

The loss of the three aces did not end the U-boat threat; it ended one way of fighting. Dönitz’s force grew rapidly through 1941 as new boats came out of the German yards, and with more boats he could at last form the patrol lines and true wolf packs he had planned. The boats moved west, beyond the reach of escorts working from Britain and of most RAF aircraft, and the British responded by basing escorts in Iceland and, from May 1941, running continuous escort across the ocean with the Royal Canadian Navy’s Newfoundland Escort Force. In May 1941 U-110 was captured; in December the United States entered the war; and in January 1942 Dönitz sent his boats to the American coast, where for six months they found conditions even easier than in 1940.

Lorient remained the main U-boat base until August 1944. The Allied air forces finally bombed it heavily in January and February 1943, and nearly 90 percent of the town was destroyed, but by then the Keroman pens were finished and the bombs did not penetrate their roofs. When the Americans reached Brittany in 1944 the Germans held Lorient as a fortress, and it did not surrender until May 1945. HMS Periwinkle went to the U.S. Navy in 1942 under reverse Lend-Lease, one of several Flowers loaned as patrol gunboats.

Walking the ground today

The most direct way to see the battle of this period is in Liverpool. The Western Approaches headquarters under Derby House, in Rumford Street behind Exchange Flags, reopened as a museum in 1993 and has been restored. Visitors can see the two-story Operations Room with its wall plot of the Atlantic, the teleprinter and code rooms and the offices of the commanders-in-chief (Western Approaches Museum). The Merseyside Maritime Museum at the Albert Dock has galleries on the Battle of the Atlantic, and the Liverpool Naval Memorial at the Pier Head lists merchant seamen lost at sea. Merchant mariners with no grave but the sea are commemorated by name at the Tower Hill Memorial in London, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

In Lorient, the Keroman base passed to the French Navy and is now partly a museum, with the preserved French submarine Flore, launched in 1961, tours of the K3 bunker and a view from its roof across the harbor to Kernevel. The villa where Dönitz lived is still used by the French Navy and is not open. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the corvette HMCS Sackville, commissioned at Saint John, New Brunswick, on 30 December 1941, is the last surviving Flower-class corvette; she is Canada’s Naval Memorial, and is open to visitors in summer beside the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (Royal Canadian Navy, “HMCS Sackville”). Memorials to Jervis Bay and Captain Fegen stand in Hamilton, Bermuda, and Saint John, New Brunswick, among other places.

Closer to home, North Carolina has no sites from this phase of the battle; the war reached the state’s coast in 1942. But the escorts built and borrowed in 1940 and 1941 run through the North Carolina story. British anti-submarine trawlers, one of them HMT Bedfordshire, came to the Outer Banks in 1942, and four of her crew lie in the British Cemetery on Ocracoke Island. The old flush-deck destroyers like those traded in 1940 also fought off the Outer Banks: USS Roper, a sister of the Town-class ships, sank U-85 off Nags Head in April 1942. Those stories, and the NOAA Monitor National Marine Sanctuary’s survey of the wrecks, are told in Chapter 4.

Sources and further reading

• uboat.net convoy battle pages: SC 7, HX 79, HX 72 and HX 112; ship pages for Scoresby, Creekirk, Convallaria, Fiscus, Assyrian, Empire Brigade and Empress of Britain.
• uboat.net boat and commander pages: U-99, U-100, U-47, U-70, U-30, ships hit by U-99; Otto Kretschmer, Günther Prien, Joachim Schepke; Type VIIB.
• uboat.net statistics and background: ships hit by U-boats, by month; U-boat losses, 1940 and 1941; “What is a wolfpack?”; “U-boat bases: Lorient.”
• S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945, vol. I, The Defensive (HMSO, 1954), especially ch. XVII, “The Campaign in the North-West Approaches,” and appendix O, the Battle of the Atlantic directive of 6 March 1941: HyperWar contents page (text in progress).
• Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. II, Their Finest Hour (1949), and vol. III, The Grand Alliance (1950), for the destroyers-for-bases correspondence and the March 1941 directive.
• Warsailors.com, “Convoy SC 7”, with ship lists from Arnold Hague, The Allied Convoy System 1939–1945, and notes from Jürgen Rohwer, Axis Submarine Successes of World War Two.
• Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, “The Anglo-American Leased Bases Agreement”.
• Western Approaches Museum, Liverpool, “About Western Approaches”; Royal Canadian Navy, “HMCS Sackville”; Naval Historical Society of Australia, notes on ASDIC and escort tactics.
• Wikipedia summaries used for cross-checking, with their cited sources: Convoy SC 7, Convoy HX 84, HMS Jervis Bay (including the text of Fegen’s VC citation), Edward Fegen, Destroyers-for-bases deal, Flower-class corvette, Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor, Commander-in-Chief, Western Approaches, HMS Vanoc, Donald Macintyre, Otto Kretschmer, Lorient Submarine Base.
• For the full narrative: Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942 (1996); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939–May 1943 (vol. I, 1947); Marc Milner, North Atlantic Run (1985) and Battle of the Atlantic (2003); Donald Macintyre, U-Boat Killer (1956); Terence Robertson, The Golden Horseshoe (1955), on Kretschmer; and Dan van der Vat, The Atlantic Campaign (1988).

Photographs: Royal Navy official photographs, Imperial War Museum (Crown copyright expired, public domain); captured German photograph, U.S. National Archives (public domain); Bundesarchiv portraits licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.