World War II and the Royal Navy
Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939. The war went well for Germany at first. By May 1940 German troops had conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium. They were already invading France. British, French and Belgian forces resisted fiercely but by late May they were trapped in a pocket of North West France. The British government decided to evacuate its troops from the port of Dunkirk between May 26th and June 4th 1940. This was known as Operation Dynamo. British forces returned to France further south but these troops were soon pulled out as well. France surrendered on June 21st 1940. A large number of Free French forces under General de Gaulle refused to accept this and remained in England until the D-Day invasions of 1944.
After the fall of France Hitler's attention turned to Britain. His biggest problem was the Royal Navy, which would destroy his troop ships as they tried to cross the Channel. The only way to destroy the navy was by air. To do this, he needed to defeat the RAF. So began the Battle of Britain. From June to October 1940 German bombers tried to destroy the airfields which the RAF used as bases. By October over 1000 planes on each side had been lost but the RAF was gaining the upper hand. At this point German tactics changed. They began bombing British cities, causing huge damage and killing thousands. Despite this, it was clear that Hitler's plans to invade Britain were now on hold. The main focus of the war would now turn to other fronts.
The Mediterranean and North Africa played a key role in WW2, especially in the earlier stages. North Africa contained important reserves of oil. Egypt was also a crucial British territory. If Hitler or his ally Mussolini, leader of Italy, captured Egypt then they could threaten British naval bases in the Mediterranean. They could also threaten the Suez Canal. This was a vital communications link for troops and resources from India and other parts of the British Empire. In November 1942 British Empire and American forces landed in the western corner of North Africa in Operation Torch. Montgomery continued to push from the East. By May 1943 German forces in North Africa had been defeated.
The Battle of the Atlantic began within hours of Britain declaring war on Germany on September 3rd 1939 when the German U-Boat U-30 fired on the SS Athenia, a British liner carrying passengers from Liverpool to Montreal causing the loss of 112 lives. What followed was a war over supplies. Britain needed over a million tons of food, oil and raw materials for her industries to arrive every week. With European ports under German control, all of Britain's vital supplies would now have to come across the Atlantic from Canada and the USA. German Naval Command calculated that if 750,000 tons of British shipping could be sunk each month, Britain would have to surrender within a year.
In October German planes begin dropping magnetic mines from the air, mines triggered by the weak electric field of a ship's hull. These proved devastatingly effective but the lucky find of an unexploded mine on a beach near Southend allowed British scientists to develop a defence against them within weeks.
British losses continued to mount. British ships were at risk not only from attack by U-boats, hidden beneath the water, but from German surface ships. The pocket battleship the Graf Spee alone sank nine ships in the last three months of 1939 before being heavily damaged and sunk off the coast of Uruguay.
The most dangerous time for British convoys was at the center of the Atlantic, in what became know as the mid-Atlantic gap. This gap fell between the furthest ranges of allied aircraft operating from Newfoundland and the coast of Canada and from Britain. Inside it, Allied shipping was especially vulnerable.
In May 1940 Britain occupied Iceland and increased the range of its air support but the gap remained with British losses running at 300 ships a month. In contrast only around 20 U-Boats were sunk in the whole of 1940. At the orders of their Commander, Admiral Karl Donitz, U-Boats began to hunt down enemy shipping in packs making them effective against even large, well protected convoys.
Only a few facts offered hope to the British. The first was the continued success of the Royal Navy against German surface ships. On 27th May 1941, in return for her destruction of HMS Hood, a force of 16 British ships hunted down the German battleship Bismarck and sank her. Bismarck's destruction caused gloom in Berlin and was a massive British propaganda victory.
In May 1941, the German battleship Bismarck headed out into the North Atlantic to raid Allied shipping. She was accompanied by the Prinz Eugen and her pursuit was an epic of naval warfare. Found and shadowed by British cruisers, she was engaged by the Hood and the Prince of Wales. Within minutes, she had sunk the Hood, pride of the Royal Navy, and damaged the latter. The next few days were agonising for both sides. The Bismarck was attacked by Swordfish of the Fleet Air Arm, lost then relocated, attacked once more and disabled. Now there was no choice for the pride of the Kriegsmarine but to run for safety and the French port of Brest. But then the battleships Rodney and King George V caught up with her.
The second source of hope to the British was the growing success of the top secret Station X at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire in cracking the codes used by German ships and the German high command to send messages. This ability to read the orders given to German ships began to allow convoys to avoid attack and Royal Navy destroyers to find targets more easily.
The Royal Navy's campaign in the Mediterranean was costly in terms of losses, was conducted with barely adequate resources, and,more than once, appeared on the edge of disaster. Nevertheless, throughout 1940 and 1941 and for most of 1942, the Royal Navy held its own against usually superior forces and contributed materially, perhaps decisively, to the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa. While a major factor in this success was the superior British leadership (epitomized by the aggressive Admiral Cunningham) and the equally timid leadership of the Italian Navy, combined with the tactical excellence of the Royal Navy, the margin of victory was arguably provided by superior intelligence which permitted the hard-pressed British to maximize the effectiveness of their forces. This intelligence advantage was most pronounced after July 1941 when all Axis shipping movements were known to the British. But even this situation was not as advantageous as it could have beengiven the paucity of forces available to exploit it. However, when this level of intelligence was combined with the overwhelming air and naval forces committed to the Mediterranean after Operation Torch in November 1942, this advantage became crushing.
In 1941 the United States began to become more directly involved in the war at sea. American ships were sent to protect convoys at sea as far as Iceland, where they would be met by British vessels. In October this led to the first sinking of an American vessel by a U-Boat when U-552 torpedoed the USS Reuben James as it moved to protect a convoy carrying ammunition.
When America joined the war a few weeks later its naval command under Admiral King refused to accept the tactics the Royal Navy had spent the previous two years developing. New England coastal towns were not blacked out and King rejected the convoy system claiming a shortage of ships and insisting that poorly defended convoys just made bigger targets. At the same time German U-Boats launched a new offensive directed at ships off the American coast: Operation Drumroll. On January 12th 1942, the unescorted British merchant ship Cyclops was the first to be sunk. By the end of the month 45 more allied merchant vessels had been destroyed in the same area. In February the number was 65.
By the start of 1943, the situation for allied shipping had reached crisis point. Admiral Donitz, promoted to Commander in Chief of the German Navy now had over 200 U-Boats at his disposal, over five times the force that had been available in the first months of 1940. British supplies were now at critical levels, particularly oil stocks, and there was doubt that British ship production could continue to keep pace with the huge losses being suffered.
But the situation was changing. Increased US naval production began to lead to better escorted convoys. Likewise, the Canadian Navy, tiny in 1939 was now one of the world's largest. The arrival of US B-24 Liberator aircraft finally closed the mid-atlantic gap. Convoys now had air support across the entire Atlantic. More and more reliable British understanding of German codes enabled submarine packs to be avoided or targeted. Admiral Donitz personally contacted his boats regularly, giving Allied codebreakers plenty of material to work with. In May 1943 41 U-Boats were destroyed by Allied attacks. In July and August a further 62 were destroyed.
On the 24th May 1943, Donitz ordered U-Boats to be withdrawn from the North Atlantic convoy routes. This move allowed U-Boat numbers time to recover but it also gave the Allies more and more access to supplies to prepare for the D-Day landings in occupied Europe. On Boxing Day 1943 the Scharnhorst, the Reich's last capital ship was sunk off the coast of Norway by British and Norwegian vessels.
The Germans desperately attempted to fight these improvements in Allied resources and intelligence with technology. U-Boats were fitted with schnorkel apparatus that allowed their batteries to be recharged without surfacing. Acoustic torpedoes targeted ships by listening for the sounds of their engines. 432 Allied Ships were sunk in 1944. But in earlier years German submarines had managed to sink such numbers in a matter of weeks. Now allied production soared as commanders prepared for D-Day on June 6th and the final assault on northern Europe.
Tirpitz was the second Bismarck class battleship of the German Kriegsmarine, sister ship of Bismarck, named after Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. She never fired against an enemy ship but spent most of World War II in various bases in German-occupied Norway, where her mere presence was a threat to the Allies, tying up significant naval forces. Due to her role and bases of operations she was dubbed the "Lonely Queen of the North" ("Den ensomme Nordens Dronning") by the Norwegians. On 12th November 1944 Royal Air Force Avro Lancaster heavy bombers bombed and sank Tirpitz at her moorings.
U-Boats no longer ruled the waves and the Battle of the Atlantic was being overtaken by events elsewhere. On the 30th April 1945 the new Type XXIII submarine undertook its first mission. Tiny and highly advanced, these new vessels were destined to play no part in the war. On the same day, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.
The Arctic convoys of World War II travelled from the United Kingdom and the United States to Soviet ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. Seventy-eight convoys sailed between August 1941 and May 1945. Of the 1400 merchant ship sailings to Russia, eighty five were lost along with 16 Royal Navy warships. The Germans lost a number of vessels including one battlecruiser, three destroyers and at least 30 U-boats as well as a large number of aircraft.
Over the course of the six year Battle of the Atlantic some 3,500 allied merchant vessels had been destroyed with the loss of over 30,000 lives. Germany had lost 783 U-Boats and more than 28,000 sailors. Britons had had to undergo stringent rationing in order to make supplies stretch as far as possible but German attempts to starve Britain into submission had failed and her grip on the waters of the Atlantic was broken.
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