Название: Crisis Convoy: The Story of HX231, A Turning Point in the Battle of the Atlantic (Submarine Warfare in World War Two)
Автор: Peter Gretton
Издательство: Sapere Books
Год: 2021
Страниц: 155
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub
Размер: 10.2 MB

In April 1943, Commander Peter Gretton was in charge of escorting a vital Allied trade convoy from New York to Great Britain across the North Atlantic. Over the course of the voyage, the sixty-one merchant ships of convoy HX231, along with the six ships of B7 Escort Group, were continuously shadowed and attacked by a German wolf pack of twenty U-boats.

With the aid of air support, the convoy and defending escort fought valiantly across hundreds of miles of ocean and, despite poor weather conditions, managed to sink and severely damage several enemy submarines. Tragically six merchant ships were torpedoed and with no rescue vessel any survivors were left stranded in the freezing waters of the Atlantic as the convoy continued on its journey.

Drawing on reports from both sides, Gretton details the sequence of events as convoy HX231 battled its way through a large wolf pack and offers an authoritative post-battle analysis of the strategies, decisions and actions taken that would ultimately see the tide of war turn in favour of victory for the Allies.

Crisis Convoy takes the reader to the heart of the action and is a thrilling account of naval warfare during World War II.

There were several reasons why I determined to write this book. I hoped that it would be the first full story of an important Atlantic convoy to be written with the benefit of all the sources of information which have become available since the thirty-year rule relating to public records came into force in 1972.

Captain S. W. Roskill, in his official history of the ‘war at sea’ (see Bibliography), while making clear that the maintenance of the Atlantic lifeline was the prerequisite to any continuation of the war, was unable, for reasons of space, to give more than a cursory account of Atlantic convoy passages. It is time that a full and authoritative story be written.

Not only will I use the reports of the escort commander and of the surface escorts, but also those of the Coastal Command aircraft which joined with such distinction in the defence of the convoy. There will be the report of the commodore of the convoy and of some of his ships, and especially of the ships which were lost and the stories of their survivors. In addition, the German records, which are very full, are now available; and so it has been possible to compare each side’s account of particular incidents, to analyse the narratives and to sort out a number of hitherto unexplained events. Many, if not all, of the puzzling incidents have been resolved and it is now possible to look at the convoy passage as a whole, to determine its importance and to adjudicate on the outcome.

A second reason for writing this book was that I wanted to give a clear picture of the work of the merchant seamen during the Second World War which I do not think has yet been fully appreciated by the historians. These men did not belong to the armed forces and were rated as civilians. They were volunteers, though one must admit that if they decided to give up the sea, they were liable for conscription into the Forces. They endured great hardship, great discomfort and very great risk. I learnt only recently from a book, Rescue Ships (see Bibliography), that the merchant seaman had a higher casualty rate than any of the armed forces. Out of about 185,000 British merchant seamen, 32,952 lost their lives. This gives a casualty rate of 17 per cent, which can be compared with 9.3 per cent for the Royal Navy, 9 per cent for the Royal Air Force and 6 per cent for the Army. If the servicemen who manned the guns of the merchant ships are taken into account, the figures are even more startling. Men of the Defensive Equipped Merchant Service (or D.E.M.S. ratings, as they were colloquially called) were taken from the Royal Navy and the Royal Regiment of Maritime Artillery. They carried out some sterling work in ships which encountered enemy submarines and surface raiders in every part of the world. Their loss rate was high.

The third reason for this book was that I recently reread the Memoirs of Admiral Donitz, who was head of the German U-boat arm throughout the war and who also took over command of the German Navy from Admiral Raeder in January 1943. From the first day of the war, indeed from earlier still, Donitz was certain that Germany’s only chance of defeating Britain was to cut the Atlantic lifeline to America. He held firmly to this concept throughout the war, and I believe that he was right. Consequently, to Donitz, Hitler’s orders to station U-boats off Gibraltar, in the Mediterranean, off West Africa, in the Indian Ocean and even off Norway, where they aimed to stop supplies from reaching Russia, were unimportant sidelines which gravely jeopardized the main object. If he had had his way, every U-boat would have been in the North Atlantic.

So I chose a routine trade convoy in the North Atlantic, sailing from the United States and Canada to Britain at a time, in late March 1943, when the Battle of the Atlantic had reached a turning-point.