Alone, 1932-1940

  German admirals had always suffered from an inferiority complex; in their country the army was the senior service. But Hitler knew how dependent England was upon imports, and how close she had been brought to her knees in 1917, nearly starved into submission by German submarines lying athwart Britain’s sea lanes and sinking all ships approaching England, regardless of nationality. To Birger Dahlerus he swore that he would create a great U-bootwaffe and destroy first the Royal Navy and then the merchant ships flying the red ensign. When the Swede looked skeptical, the Führer had given history one of its unforgettable moments. Flinging out his right arm and striking his breast with his left, he had cried: “Have I ever told a lie in my life?”24

  If the Führer’s confidant and the head of his navy expected little from the Reich’s forces at sea, it is unsurprising that England’s peril there was unknown to Churchill. He wasn’t even aware of Germany’s new naval strength. Here his intelligence had failed him. In the early summer of 1934 Hitler had given secret orders for the construction of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, battle cruisers of 26,000 tons, exceeding by 16,000 tons the limit imposed on Germany at Versailles. By 1939 the yards at Kiel and Bremen had built three battleships, eight heavy cruisers, an aircraft carrier, thirty-four destroyers and torpedo boats, and, at Krupp’s Germania shipyard, the first litter of the Kriegsmarine’s newly designed U-boats, vastly improved over those of the last war. Two vessels of particular interest to Jane’s Fighting Ships, the celebrity register of warships, were the Graf Spee and the Deutschland. The Germans called them Panzerschiffe (armored ships); to Ausländer they were “pocket battleships.”

  The Panzerschiffe were masterpieces of miniaturization. Powered by diesel engines, which gave them a range of 21,500 miles, each carried six eleven-inch guns and was capable of a 28-knot top speed. In the view of Jane’s, they were mightier than almost any warship fast enough to overtake them. Moreover, at the outbreak of the war shifts of German shipbuilders were working around the clock to finish a battle cruiser, two battleships with tonnages of 41,700—British, French, and American capital ships were limited to 35,000 tons—and the Bismarck, a superbattlewagon of 45,000 tons. Some military experts thought that in challenging Britain’s naval superiority, the Führer was repeating the kaiser’s mistake. They underestimated him. The British Admiralty’s classic strategy had been the blockade. It had defeated Napoleon and the kaiser. The German counter to this was to sink ships provisioning Britain. Their argument was that sinkings were no more monstrous than a blockade which starved German children—they never answered the charge that leaving the survivors of the ships they sank to drown was another matter—and in any event they intended to launch torpedoes whenever they thought the loss of a target vessel would hurt England.25

  One would have expected that the Royal Navy, after its harrowing duel with German submarines in the last war, would have been alert for signs that the Nazis were plotting a rematch. But all British naval glory seemed to lie in the past, and not the recent past. During the interwar years the sea lords had been refighting, not Jutland, but Trafalgar. They still glowed in anticipation of battles between ships of the line, firing broadsides that raked the enemy’s decks and maneuvering to cross his T. The U-boat threat, they assured their civilian superiors, had been solved by surface ships in 1918, and, besides, they had a new secret weapon. This was the asdic, “the name,” Churchill wrote, for “the system of groping for submarines below the surface by means of sound waves through the water which echoed back from any steel structure they met. From this echo the position of the submarine could be fixed with some accuracy.” Lord Chatfield, the first sea lord, had driven him to Portland for a demonstration on June 15, 1938. Afterward Winston wrote excitedly, “I could see and hear the whole process, which was the sacred treasure of the Admiralty.” He wrote Chatfield: “What surprised me was the clarity and force of the [asdic] indications. I had imagined something almost imperceptible, certainly vague and doubtful. I never imagined that I should hear one of those creatures asking to be destroyed. It is a marvellous system and achievement.”26

  It wasn’t, not then. Later versions, which Americans came to know as sonar, fulfilled the promise of the primitive device Churchill saw and would prove valuable antisub weapons, but during Churchill’s tenure as first lord the asdic was almost worthless. The clarity with which he had heard its unmistakable “ping” derived from the fact that its target subs were far from the transmitter. The shorter the range, the weaker the ping, and if a U-boat approached within fifteen hundred yards—the lethal range for torpedoes—the asdic signal was lost completely. U-boat commanders could hear the ping, too, and they would quickly learn how to take evasive action and approach at a deadlier angle. These problems challenged the most experienced asdic operators, of which there were very few in 1939; in the opening phase of the war at sea the transmitter-receivers would be in the hands of civilians who had been rushed through a three-month training course and assigned a task they simply could not grasp. Finally, the asdic could only be operated underwater. Admiral Karl Dönitz, a heroic submariner in the last war and now Befehlshaber der U-boote, simply ordered his commanders to attack at night from the surface. In the Royal Navy the asdic would be discredited, and its return to favor, like Churchill’s, came slowly.

  Dönitz, who knew the weaknesses of 1918 U-boats from personal experience—his had been sunk in the Mediterranean, and he had escaped drowning only to serve ten months of POW imprisonment—had devoted the 1920s to designing a tougher, more versatile underwater vessel. Ten days after the Anglo-German pact became effective in 1935 he had launched his new U-1 from a tightly guarded shed in the Kiel shipyard. Unlike its predecessors, the U-1 was equipped with heavy-duty batteries, which meant she could hide underwater for a much longer time. Of even greater importance was the revolutionary design of her torpedoes. Electrically powered, they left no telltale wakes, and each bore a magnetic firing mechanism which exploded it directly under the target vessel’s keel, where a ship is most vulnerable.

  If he had a fleet of a hundred U-boats, Dönitz believed, he could paralyze England by waging what he called a “tonnage war”—sinking all merchantmen carrying cargoes to England, whatever flag they flew. And with three hundred of them, organized in “wolf packs,” he could sink over 700,000 tons of shipping a month in the Atlantic, even if the merchantmen sailed in convoys, escorted by warships. Events later in the war proved he could have done it in the first year of hostilities, but Dönitz was plagued by Hitler’s chimerical moods and by interservice rivalry. Despite his vow to Dahlerus, the Führer blew hot and cold on submarine warfare. Yet sinking ships, particularly when civilians were aboard, appealed to the broad nihilist streak in him, and in that regard he found the reasoning of his Befehlshaber der U-boote flawless. In that last meeting with Dahlerus he had screamed: “Ich U-boote bauen, U-boote bauen, U-boote, U-boote, U-boote, U-boote!” (“I shall build U-boats, build U-boats, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats!”).27

  Had he followed through and given Dönitz his three hundred submarines, it is hard to see how England could have avoided starvation. But the Kriegsherr liked the idea of powerful warships flying the swastika even more; when they sailed into European ports they contributed to the Third Reich’s intimidating image. Furthermore, the senior admirals in Berlin, as in London, preferred to envision battles between surface ships, with enormous battleships trying to huff and puff and blow their enemies into submission. So Hitler let Britain’s misfortune slip from his hands.

  Even so, the war on the Atlantic shipping lanes opened with a series of savage, unexpected jolts for Britain. In the first week eleven merchantmen—65,000 tons of shipping—were sunk, half the weekly losses of April 1917, the peak month of U-boat attacks that year, when England’s Admiral John Jellicoe confided in his American counterpart that one freighter in four was going down, there was six weeks’ supply of corn in the country, and he expected an Allied surrender by November 1. By the end of September 1939, twenty-si
x ships had been sunk by torpedoes. The fighting at sea, Churchill told the House of Commons on September 26, had “opened with some intensity,” but, he assured the House: “By the end of October we expect to have three times the hunting force which was operating at the beginning of the war.”28

  At the same time, he felt he ought to inform Parliament that German Schrecklichkeit had reared its loathsome head. The Royal Navy had scrupulously observed the “long acquired and accepted traditions of the sea.” When the RN sunk enemy vessels, their crews were picked up. Even when German ships had deliberately sunk themselves to avoid the formalities of the prize court, the Royal Navy had rescued their crews, and no ship flying the flag of a neutral nation had been attacked. “The enemy, on the other hand,” said Churchill, had behaved very differently; in their zeal to prevent supplies from reaching England, the Nazis had torpedoed Finnish, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Norwegian, and Belgian vessels “on the high seas, in an indiscriminate manner, and with loss of life.” Churchill acknowledged that “from time to time the German U-boat commanders have tried their best to behave with humanity….” But many cruel and ruthless sea crimes had been committed. They all remembered the Athenia. Her “tragic end” had been followed by the loss of the Royal Sceptre, “whose crew of 32 were left in open boats hundreds of miles from land and are assumed to have perished. Then there was the Hazelside—only the day before yesterday—twelve of whose sailors were killed by surprise gunfire, in an ordinary merchant ship.” His Majesty’s Government “cannot at all recognize this type of warfare… as other than a violation of the laws of war, to which the Germans themselves have in recent years so lustily subscribed.” Such, he said, “is the U-boat war—hard, widespread and bitter, a war of groping and drowning, a war of ambuscade and stratagem, a war of science and seamanship.”29

  Speaking over the BBC a few days later, he described the first U-boat onslaught—how “they sprang out upon us as we were going about our ordinary business with two thousand ships in constant movement… upon the seas,” and how, in consequence, “they managed to do some serious damage.” But Britain was meeting the challenge with a threefold response: convoys, the arming of merchantmen and fast liners, and, “of course,” the “British attack upon the U-boats.” The Athenia had scarcely disappeared beneath the waves when “the Royal Navy… immediately attacked the U-boats and is hunting them night and day—I will not say without mercy, for God forbid we should ever part company with that—but at any rate with zeal and not altogether without relish.”30

  His voice vibrated with confidence, but in fact he was uneasy. Because the navy occupied a special place in the hearts of Englishmen, the Exchequer’s knife, which had slashed so deeply into War Office and Air Ministry budgets in the 1930s, had been relatively gentle with Admiralty estimates. But since prime ministers, Fleet Street, and the public had been united in their scorn for all uniformed men, morale had slumped throughout the services. At the docks, ports, and naval bases Churchill inspected, he saw tarnished brass, scuffed shoes, and sagging coils of rope—insignificant in themselves but symptomatic of an institutional défaillance. If Nelson had relied on men like these he would have lost the battles of the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and Napoleon would have galloped up the Mall at the head of his vieille garde to demand the palace keys.

  Nor was the fleet the force-in-being Churchill had ruled a quarter-century earlier. All that had been needed to keep it supreme had been hospitality to innovative ideas, supported by simple maintenance. The one new concept which both he and his admirals largely rejected was the enormous limits air power now placed on sea power. In all her wars till now, England had been able to control an island simply by stationing a warship offshore, or bottling up the enemy by sending a flotilla to bar a strategic strait. The kaiser’s Kriegsmarine, for example, had been confined to the Baltic Sea during most of the last war because British warships had guarded the Skagerrak, the narrows separating the Baltic from the North Sea, thus keeping Germany from, among other possible objectives, the long coast of Norway. But if the fleet was vulnerable to Luftwaffe bombers, which the Admiralty would not concede, German ships could no longer be denied passage through the Skagerrak. Under an umbrella of Nazi planes, they could steam through unchallenged. Because the first lord and his sea lords would not fully accept this in 1939, within eight months the lesson would be forced upon them, and at a bitter price.

  Maintenance was another matter. It seemed inconceivable that equipment vital to the navy should have been permitted to rust away, but that had happened. The sea lords blamed the small Admiralty appropriations under MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain. That wasn’t good enough. During the 1930s their budgets had been large enough to build five new battleships, six aircraft carriers, and nineteen heavy cruisers. They just let small matters slide. In the first war Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, trying to console Winston in the dark hour of his dismissal from the Admiralty, had reminded him of his thorough preparations for the war. “There is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you,” K of K had said. “The fleet was ready.” This time, Churchill was discovering, the fleet was not.31

  On the evening of September 15 he boarded a London train with Bracken, Sinclair, and Lieutenant Commander C. R. (“Tommy”) Thompson, the first lord’s flag commander. Their destination was Scotland and the sea anchorage of England’s Home Fleet—the sea basin of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. There, if anywhere, the Royal Navy should be buttoned up. Later he recalled how “on two or three occasions” in the autumn of 1914, most memorably on October 17, “the alarm was given that there was a U-boat inside the anchorage. Guns were fired, destroyers thrashed the waters, and the whole gigantic armada put out to sea in haste and dudgeon.” Scapa was that important.32

  Anxiety over the sea basin had returned, and this time the threat was real. In his lap lay a locked box of secret documents, among them a shocking report from the Chiefs of Staff Committee revealing that Scapa’s defenses would not be ready until the spring of 1940. Arriving, he called on Sir Charles Forbes, the commander in chief, aboard H.M.S. Nelson, the admiral’s flagship. Sir Charles confirmed that the basin’s entrance channels were “not properly netted.” The old steel webs had rusted, rotted, broken up, and drifted away. Winston immediately issued an order, stamped “urgent,” calling for nets, booms, blockships (sunken ships barring entrance channels), antiaircraft guns, patrol craft, balloons, and searchlights. Until they were in place Scapa was insecure, an inviting target for daring German submarine commanders.33

  And U-boat Kapitäns, so successful in sinking merchantmen, were now turning their periscopes toward Britain’s ships of war. The enemy had actually laid a minefield across the mouth of the Thames, disabling one warship. After a second RN ship was sunk, the government, worried about civilian morale, had suppressed news of the loss. Two days before Churchill entrained for Scotland a U-boat had fired a salvo of torpedoes at H.M.S. Ark Royal, an aircraft carrier; they missed, and the carrier’s destroyer escort sank the sub, but it was disquieting to know that Dönitz’s vessels were lurking in British waters, capable of striking one of His Majesty’s capital ships at any hour.

  Indeed, it happened while Churchill was slumbering aboard H.M.S. Nelson, as he learned the next day. He and his party returned from Inverness to London aboard an overnight sleeper, and “as we got out at Euston,” Winston wrote, “I was surprised to see the First Sea Lord on the platform. Admiral Pound’s look was grave. ‘I have some bad news for you, First Lord. The Courageous was sunk yesterday in the Bristol Channel.’ ” The ship had been an aircraft carrier, “a very necessary ship at this time,” as Churchill wrote, and Bristol Channel, lying between South Wales and Somerset, was very close to home. Churchill told Pound, “We can’t expect to carry on a war like this without these sorts of things happening from time to time. I have seen lots of this before.” But within he was seething. He knew there would be questions in the House of Commons. To bring unconvoyed merchantmen into port he had been using carrier
s as escorts. Courageous had been attended by four destroyers, but two of them had been detached to hunt a Nazi submarine elsewhere. As the carrier turned into the wind to receive her aircraft, another U-boat Kapitän ran up his periscope and saw her naked flank in his cross hairs. He emptied his torpedo tubes and 518 Englishmen drowned, including the captain, who chose, as captains in those days did, to go down with his ship.34

  Churchill’s anxiety over Scapa Flow continued and mounted after His Majesty’s Government spurned a peace feeler from Hitler. The offer had reached London via Birger Dahlerus. In Göring’s presence, the Führer had proposed that a British representative—Ironside’s name was mentioned—meet Göring “in some neutral country.” Halifax on October 5 told the War Cabinet that “We should not absolutely shut the door”; Hoare suggested that Britain “damp down” her “anti-Göring propaganda”; Kingsley Wood also thought Göring the man to back, because “he would be glad to secure the removal of Herr Hitler.” They had learned nothing, could not grasp the strength of the Führer’s hold on his people, did not realize that the life expectancy of any German who moved against him would be measured in minutes. Churchill swiftly disposed of their arguments. If the overture was insincere its “real object might be to spread division and doubt amongst us”; if sincere, it had been inspired “not from any sense of magnanimity, but from weakness.” The war, he suggested, might not be so popular in Germany as Goebbels insisted. On October 12 Chamberlain rejected the Nazi approach in the House. Winston had written the firmer parts of his speech, and afterward he told Pound that “one must expect a violent reaction from Herr Hitler. Perhaps quite soon.” He ordered “special vigilance,” suggested that “the Fleet at Scapa should be loose and easy in its movements,” and concluded: “Pray let me know anything else you think we can do, and how best to have everything toned up to concert pitch. The next few days are full of danger.”35