CHAPTER XI

OCEAN WARFARE

1st August - 31st December, 1942

  'The strength of Great Britain, however, lay in her great body of merchant seamen'.
    A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution and Empire. Vol. I, p. 70.


 

Map 25

Map 25. The Operations of Disguised German Raiders
1 August 1942 - 31 December 1942

 


Though it may reasonably be claimed that by the beginning of this phase the days of the German armed raiders were numbered, there were still three of them at sea - the Thor (Raider E), the Stier (J) and the Michel (H). A forth, the Komet (Raider B), which had returned home after her first successful cruise at the end of November 19411, now attempted to make a second; but as was told in the last chapter, she got no further than the English Channel.2

On the 1st of August the Stier and Michel, which had net three days previously, were still in company in the south Atlantic, and their Captains now decided to try joint operations.3 On the 9th the Stier, when to the east of Trinidade Island, sighted the Dalhousie in ballast from Cape Town to Trinidad. The British ship might have escaped had she not altered course towards the Stier, and so brought herself within range of the raider's guns. As soon as the merchantman realised what was up she turned away, and began to send raider reports. The Stier thereupon opened fire, and soon sank the ship. The Michel turned up while survivors were being rescued, and the two raiders decided that the Dalhousie's wireless reports made an immediate departure from the scene advisable. They thereupon separated.

The Stier steamed further south, to seek traffic between Cape Town and the River Plate. She spent some six weeks cruising in the remote waters around Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island, and she fuelled again from the Schliemann on the 27th of August. The tanker then left for Japan. On the 4th of September the raider sighted a large and fast passenger ship in about 33° 30' South and 15° 45' West,

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which she identified as the liner Pasteur (29,253 tons). She had been expecting her ever since Berlin had wirelessed that the liner had left Cape Town for Rio on the 30th of August.4 The identification was almost certainly correct, but the liner's speed was sufficient to keep her out of harm's way.

Having obtained no success in the south the Stier moved north again in mid-September. On the 24th she met the Michel once more, and next day found the blockade runner Tannenfels, which was acting as a supply ship, in about 24° 50' South 22° 10' West. At about 9 a.m. on the 27th of September in hazy weather in 24° 44' South 21° 50' West, she sighted a steamer on her starboard bow.5 The Tannenfels, which was still in company, was cast off and a signal was made ordering the steamer to stop. The raider's would-be victim, the American merchantman Stephen Hopkins (a 'Liberty ship', of 7,818 tons armed with one four-inch gun) was however very alert. She at once opened fire on the Stier at close range and quickly obtained about fifteen hits, two of which were 'disastrous' and set the raider on fire. The Tannenfels also joined in what Professor Morison has aptly described as 'an old-time sea battle . . . that recalls the war of 1812'. An attempt by the blockade runner to tow the damaged and burning raider was unsuccessful, and at about noon the latter sank. The Tannenfels rescued all her survivors, and later reached Bordeaux with them safely. The fate of the crew of the Stephen Hopkins was less happy. The ship sank after three hours of unequal combat. One boat, with fifteen of the crew still alive, reached Brazil after a thirty-one day journey, made without any navigational aids. All the rest were lost; but they fought an action of which all the Allied navies and merchant navies should be proud, and had rid the oceans of one of the heavily armed and dangerous German raiders.

Meanwhile the Thor was still in the Indian Ocean, where we last left her.6 Though some uncertainty still surrounds her movements we

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know that at the end of August she met the blockade-runner Tannenfels, en route to Bordeaux, in 27° South 76° East. The Thor was next given a new operational area and worked between 20° and 30° South, 80° and 100° East, from the 8th of August to the 20th of September; but she found no victims there. She next passed through the Sunda Strait and arrived at Balikpapan in Borneo on the 25th.7 There she fuelled, and then set course up the China Sea for Yokohama, which she reached on the 9th of October. On the 30th of November she was lying there alongside the supply ship Uckermark, whose fuel tanks were being cleaned. At 2 p.m. a heavy explosion occurred in the Uckermark, caused, so the German enquiry concluded, by ignition of fumes in the tanks. The supply ship blew up and the raider was burnt out. Another German ship (the Leuthen) which was in harbour also caught fire and became a total loss. Thus passed off the stage yet another German raider and, moreover, one which in her early career had done us considerable harm.8

The Michel (Raider H) was meanwhile continuing her cruise in the South Atlantic. After she had refuelled from the Schliemann early in August off Trinidade Island, she moved east and savagely attacked the British ship Arabistan south of St. Helena on the 14th. The raider only picked up one survivor. Her next exploit was to chase the large Dutch liner Marnix van St. Aldegonde (19,355 tons), then serving as an Allied troopship, which luckily had sufficient speed to shake off the pursuit. Later in the month the raider again met the faithful Charlotte Schliemann east of Tristan da Cunha and replenished her tanks.9 On the 10th/11th of September, by night attacks typical of von Ruckteschell's methods, she sank the American Leader and the British Empire Dawn, after which she returned once more to the mid-ocean rendezvous and again met the Stier. On the 25th she replenished from the supply ship Uckermark, which was kept in company with the raider until the 5th of October.

On the 27th of September the Michel, while still taking in stores from the Uckermark, intercepted firstly the Stephen Hopkins' distress message, and then a signal from the Stier asking that her sister raider should close her position. The Michel's captain did not guess that an action fatal to his colleague was being fought near by, but he considered it advisable to move away from rather than towards the Stier's position. Not till mid-October did he learn from Germany of the Stier's fate.

The Michel next steamed far south into the Antarctic - not, apparently, to seek Allied whaling ships, but to make a safe passage to his new operational area in the Indian Ocean. According to von

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Ruckteschell's diary, Berlin's order to him to move east was prompted by anxiety lest his continued activities in the South Atlantic might provoke strong Allied reactions, and so endanger the supply arrangements made for the U-boat group which was at the time southward bound for the Cape of Good Hope.10

The Michel cruised slowly east in the Antarctic and, at the end of October in 53° South, passed into the Indian Ocean.11 In mid-November she replenished stores and fuel from the Brake in 30° South 65° East, and met the homeward-bound blockade runner Rhakotis south of Rodriguez Island. The Michel's log for the preceding months was lost when the Rhakotis was sunk12, and this has made the raider's cruise in the South Atlantic difficult to piece together.

On the 29th of November, in 29° South 54° East, the Michel, by another typical night attack, secured her first victim in the Indian Ocean - an American freighter bound from Colombo to Cape Town. About a week later, still in the waters east of Madagascar, she sank a Greek ship. In both these cases the M.T.B. was used for reconnaissance and to take part in the attack.13 In mid-December she returned once more to the former hunting ground in the South Atlantic, and early in the New Year we find her again south of St. Helena. On the 20th of December the German Naval Staff told the Michel's Captain to plan his return to the Gironde for early February 1943, but on the 6th of January this was changed. Because of our greatly strengthened air reconnaissance in the Bay, Berlin considered that an attempt to return there was too risky and advised von Ruckteschell to proceed instead to Japan. It thus happened that his cruise, which had already lasted nine months, was greatly extended. In this phase he sank five ships of 30,591 tons, and so brought the Michel's total score to thirteen of 87,322 tons.

The German Naval Staff must have realised that, by the end of 1942, the days when surface ships could profitably be sent out to attack our merchant shipping in the broad oceans had passed and were not likely to return. No attempt to use warships in the Atlantic had been made since the disastrous Bismarck episode of May 1941; and the withdrawal home of the Brest squadron in February 1942 had marked the final defeat of the strategic purpose for which the battle cruisers and heavy cruisers had so long been stationed there.14 Now, in the closing months of 1942, it must also have been plain that the days of the disguised raiders were fast drawing to a close. The Stier was sunk in the South Atlantic in September, the Komet in the

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Channel in October and the Thor blew up in Yokohama in November. Only the Michel survived, and she, as has been told, was on her way to Japan, because it was considered unsafe to try to bring her back to Europe. In these circumstances the enemy's hope of continuing sporadic warfare in remote waters could only lie with the U-boats. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that they now come to replace the surface raiders of the first three years of the war.

In October 1942 two U-boats were sent to the mouth of the Congo River to attack shipping which the enemy believed to be passing to and from adjacent West African ports. In fact such traffic was of small dimensions, but on the 23rd of October one of the U-boats encountered the cruiser Phoebe which, with her sister ship the Sirius, was proceeding to Pointe Noire in French Equatorial Africa, and torpedoed her.15 She was badly damaged and had to be sent to America for repairs. The U-boats, finding the Congo delta unrewarding, next moved north to the Gulf of Guinea, to try their luck off Lagos and Takoradi. But they accomplished very little there either.

Meanwhile the Admiralty's long-felt anxiety regarding the great concentration of ill-defended shipping entering and leaving Cape Town and passing round the Cape of Good Hope was justified by events. It will be remembered that the enemy's earlier attempts to attack these focal waters had been defeated by the interception of the U-boats' supply ships.16 He did not repeat the attempt to use such ships. As early as the 21st of September the Submarine Tracking Room had, with prescient accuracy, given warning that a southward movement of U-boats appeared imminent. All shipping was routed further west, away from the African coast, and east-bound traffic was, if possible, sent to Durban instead of Cape Town. Orders were issued for those west-bound ships which had to call at Cape Town to be escorted clear of the danger area. These arrangements were the best that could be organised quickly; it will be told shortly how they failed to save us from heavy losses.

Actually it was not until the 7th of October, nearly three weeks after the Submarine Tracking Room's warning had been given, that the first five U-boats reached the waters off Cape Town. Although U-179, the first of the new 'U-cruisers' of 1,600 tons with a radius of action of 30,000 miles, was quickly sunk by the destroyer Active, and Cape Town roads were found empty, the other enemies reaped a rich harvest between that base and Durban. By the end of the month they had sunk twenty-four ships of 161,121 tons, many of which were loaded with important military cargoes. For the first time on the WS convoy route we lost several of the large and valuable liners which had served us so well as troop carriers. The Oronsay (20,043 tons) fell

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victim to a U-boat just north of the equator on the 9th of October, and on the following day the Orcades (23,456 tons) was sunk off the Cape, while the Duchess of Atholl (20,119 tons) was caught by another 'U-cruiser' north of Ascension Island. These were grievous losses, for such fine ships could never be replaced during the war. Fortunately there were comparatively few casualties among their passengers and crews.

Anti-submarine reinforcements had to be sent out, even though the enemy's widely separated lunges had already forced us and the Americans to disperse our still inadequate strength to a dangerous degree. The Admiralty ordered out twelve anti-submarine trawlers from the Western Approaches, and asked the U.S. Navy Department to release the last eighteen of those which we had lent them in the previous February.17 The Americans agreed, and they soon began the long passage to Cape Town; but it was nearly the end of the year before they arrived. Other reinforcements were sent from home and from the Halifax Escort Force; refits of destroyers at Simonstown were postponed, while six destroyers and four corvettes were detached from the Eastern Fleet to the South Atlantic station. Substantial escort-vessel strength was thus assembled at Simonstown, but it did not make its presence felt until after serious losses had been suffered. The South African Air Force contributed anti-submarine patrols with its Venturas and Ansons; British naval aircrews training in South Africa were also pressed into service, and four Catalinas of the R.A.F.'s No. 209 Squadron soon arrived to make long range patrols from Saldanha Bay near Cape Town, and from Durban.

The Admiralty told Admiral Tait (Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic) to sail ships through the dangerous waters in organised groups, even if they could only be weakly escorted. But he could do little until the destroyers, corvettes and trawlers mentioned earlier had become available.

In November German U-boats moved to the southern approaches to the Mozambique Channel, the waters where their Japanese allies had wrought considerable havoc in the previous June and July.18 Twenty-four ships of 127,261 tons were sunk. It was the worst month in the Indian Ocean since Japanese warships had scoured the Bay of Bengal in the previous April.19 The port of Lourenco Marques had twice to be closed, with serious effects on the coal traffic for the Middle East theatre; and again troopships were among the victims. In December enough escorts had arrived to enable convoys to be sailed between Cape Town and Durban (CD-DC Convoys), and in some cases northwards to Lourenco Marques as well. This, and

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the fact that the U-boats now started to make their way homewards, caused a drop in sinkings to five ships of 23,251 tons. A crisis, which might have assumed serious proportions had the enemy been able to reinforce the attackers, thus subsided. Though the U-boats' foray into these distant waters had been short, it had been very fruitful. They had done more damage than the disguised raiders, which were their predecessors in the guerre de course in these waters, and at vastly less effort. Indeed it was in these months that Dönitz's policy of constantly probing for weak spots in our defences, even at the cost of sending his U-boats thousands of miles away, reaped its greatest reward. Thus, just when the first group was withdrawing from the Indian Ocean, another of nine U-boats, aided by a 'milch cow' which fuelled them off St. Paul rocks, found easy targets between those islets and the Brazilian coast. In December they sank seven ships, but the Americans then strengthened the air patrols, and the surviving U-boats withdrew, after suffering losses.

The arrival of Japanese submarines and armed raiders in the Indian Ocean was mentioned in an earlier chapter.20 In July and early August they reconnoitred many Allied island bases, such as Reunion, Mauritius, Seychelles and Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago21, but did no damage at any of them. They returned to Penang in August. The shipping routes off East Africa were thus left to the German U-boats throughout the present phase.

It has already been told how two Japanese surface raiders, the Hokoku and Aikoku Maru cruised in the southern Indian Ocean, in co-operation with a number of submarines, from May to July 1942; and how the submarines then wrought considerable havoc among our unescorted shipping, while the surface raiders achieved little success.22 The latter returned to their base at Penang in July and did not reappear until the autumn. Not only was the second Japanese attempt at the guerre de course no more successful than the first, but it led to one of the most remarkable actions ever fought by a small escort vessel in defence of a merchant ship.

On the 11th of November the Bengal, an Australian-built minesweeper of 733 tons manned by the Royal Indian Navy, under Lieutenant-Commander W. J. Wilson, R.I.N.R. and armed with one twelve-pounder gun, was escorting the Dutch tanker Ondina (armament one four-inch gun) from Fremantle to the island of Diego Garcia. Shortly before noon 'on a beautiful sunny day with a calm sea' in about 23° South 93° East two strange ships were sighted nearly ahead on a closing course. The Bengal quickly identified them as enemy, ordered the Ondina to 'act independently' and steered

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straight for the approaching strangers. Enemy reports were made with a speed and efficiency which would have been commendable in a much larger ship. Soon after noon both enemies opened fire, to which the Bengal promptly replied with her one little gun at about 3,500 yards range. She soon obtained a satisfactory hit which caused a large explosion and a fire, but herself sustained two hits.23 As the tanker had now opened the range to about seven miles the Bengal's Captain decided 'to break off the engagement against uneven odds' and retire under cover of smoke towards his charge. His ammunition was now running very short. The undamaged raider pursued and continued the fight, firing broadsides of four quite heavy guns (about six-inch). At 1:12 p.m. a second and heavier explosion was seen on board the first enemy, which had been burning continuously since she had first been hit. Shortly afterwards she was seen to sink. The Ondina had meanwhile also been under fire, and had suffered severe hits. But 'Ah Kong' (the Chinese helmsman) 'remained at his post throughout the action', and the enemy fire was returned by the four-inch gun's crew. After firing about twenty rounds the Bengal obscured the range for the tanker, whose fire was therefore checked. 'Gunlayer Hammond', states the tanker's report, 'told his crew to carry on smoking, and gave them each a cigarette from his packet. As soon as the range was clear he carried on the action'. What the gun's crew then did with their cigarettes is not recorded.24

The enemy had now closed the range, and a hit on the Ondina's bridge killed her Master, William Horsman. As she herself had fired all her ammunition, the order to abandon ship was given. The raider fired two torpedoes and several shells into the tanker, then machine-gunned the boats at point blank range, killing the Chief Engineer and several of the crew. She then returned to the scene of her sister ship's destruction, presumably to rescue the crew.

The Ondina's survivors now believed the Bengal to have been sunk, the latter believed the Ondina to have escaped, and the second raider obviously believed the tanker to be doomed; for she had been seriously holed by shells and torpedoes, was on fire and had taken a heavy list. All three beliefs were actually incorrect. By 4:30 p.m. the raider had disappeared over the horizon, and the survivors of the tanker's crew, under the second officer, boarded their ship once more. They put out the fire, got the list off the ship, raised steam again and by 9 p.m. on the next day had set course to return to Fremantle. She arrived there safely on the 18th of November. The Bengal had meanwhile given her wounds first aid and set course for Colombo,

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which she too reached safely. She had fought a most gallant and successful action, and well might one of her officers record his pride and astonishment 'that a small ship with only one twelve-pounder gun, should engage two raiders, both more than ten times her size and each with about twenty times her gun power, and so enable the tanker to escape, sink one raider, and then get away herself'. The young Indian Navy had good reason to feel proud 'of their little Bengal tiger'. In conclusion it should be mentioned that the Ondina's gun's crew consisted of three British soldiers of the Royal Artillery, four Able Seamen of the Royal Navy and a Dutch Merchant Navy gunlayer. This was typical of the mixed crews provided to merchantmen by the Admiralty's Trade Division, which was responsible for their defensive arming25. The Japanese ships were armed with half a dozen guns of six-inch calibre, as well as torpedo tubes, and they carried two seaplanes. It was the Hokoku Maru (10,438 tons) which was sunk by the Bengal and Ondina.

 

It will be remembered that up to the middle of 1942 the Germans had been comparatively successful in their attempts to get home cargoes of essential raw materials, and especially rubber, from the Far East.26 In the present phase the enemy's early successes were not repeated. One important factor was the constant photographic air reconnaissance of the French ports to and from which blockade runners habitually sailed. From these photographs the enemy's intentions and expectations could often be deduced. Since the use of Coastal Command's few and precious long-range aircraft to find and attack enemy ships off the north-west corner of Spain had proved expensive and not very successful, in September it was agreed that joint action by aircraft and submarines should be tried. The aircraft would patrol and report enemy movements, and the submarines attack any ships identified as blockade runners. The new arrangements came into force in mid-October.

For homeward blockade running in this phase the enemy had originally planned to use thirty-two German and Italian ships, nine of which were tankers. At first he hoped to bring back 440,000 tons of cargo between August 1942 and May 1943, but his hopes soon had to be drastically modified and the final programme aimed at bringing to France only 210,000 tons. Thirteen dry cargo ships and two tankers actually left the Far East for Europe, but four of them turned back early in their voyages and seven were sunk. Seventeen ships, four of them tankers, sailed outwards from France during the same period, but only ten of them reached Japan; and they carried

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no more than some 24,000 tons of cargo.27 In September, when it appeared that at least five ships were loading at Bordeaux, we tried to bomb them while in port, but none was damaged. It was in that month that the light cruisers Sirius and Phoebe arrived on the South Atlantic station.28 They and some South African minesweepers made patrols to the south of the Cape to catch blockade runners coming from Japan or Indo-China; but they met with no success. American warships and those allotted to our own West African Command patrolled likewise in the South Atlantic, and kept watch on the Cape Horn route.

In October the Air Ministry formed a squadron of Wellington torpedo-bombers (No. 547) in order to accomplish better results in the Bay of Biscay. It was no easy matter at this stage to find aircraft capable of striking effectively against escorted ships at distances of 350 to 480 miles from their bases. The Lancasters' attempts had not proved at all successful; in fact, when they were used to strike at an outward-bound blockade runner on the 19th of August, no results were obtained, and the cost to us was four of these valuable aircraft. The Commander-in-Chief, Coastal Command, hoped to employ a combined torpedo and bombing strike force to better purpose; but it proved impossible to make the Wellingtons available, and the idea came to nothing.

Although there was a good deal of enemy traffic in both directions in October, no blockade runners were sunk, or even forced to abandon their journeys. In November the tempo quickened; more ships were sighted inward or outward-bound, generally with warship and powerful air escorts, and more offensive sweeps were flown by Coastal Command. Mines were laid in the approaches to the Gironde, and when a concentration of shipping was observed off the entrance to the river a heavy bombing attack was made by Coastal and Bomber Command aircraft on the 7th. This resulted in one outward-bound blockade runner, the Elsa Essberger, being put out of action. Another, the Anneliese Essberger was also attacked from the air but continued her journey, only to be caught by the American cruiser Milwaukee in the South Atlantic on the 21st of November. This month saw heavy activity by both sides, but our only other success was to damage the Spichern so seriously by air attack that she put into Ferrol. Errors in sighting reports, faulty wireless communications and inadequate training of aircrews in this specialised task were all found, by enquiry at Coastal Command Headquarters, to have contributed to our poor results. It had been shown once again that

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aircraft trained in one duty could not successfully be switched suddenly to a totally different function. The lesson was clear, to the Germans as well as to the British. Maritime air operations demanded a high degree of tactical and technical skill, which could only be acquired after long training and much practice. Further, the assimilation of such work into the general pattern of sea warfare required the most careful planning and co-ordination, if success was to be achieved and losses kept as small as possible.

Another difficulty which had to be faced and accepted lay in operating our own submarines in among the enemy U-boats' approach routes to his Biscay bases. Restricted bombing zones were established in the submarines' patrol areas, but it was difficult, especially in bad weather, for our aircraft to navigate with such accuracy that they could be sure whether a submarine sighted near the limits of a restricted area was a friend or an enemy. It is possible that the loss of the Unbeaten on the 11th of November, some twelve miles within an area where total restriction of night attacks was in force, was attributable to a navigational error by one of our own aircraft, which reported making an attack on a submarine in a position only a few miles from that of the Unbeaten.

At the end of November the departure of the outward-bound Italian ship Cortellazo caused us to bring into force the arrangements for combined air and submarine action already described. Four submarines, including the captured and renamed Graph which we first encountered as U-57029, took part in the chase, and many air searches were flown. None the less the blockade runner would probably have escaped had she not accidentally run right into the south-bound 'Torch' convoy KMF 4. She was sunk by its escort on the 1st of December. Neither Coastal Command nor the Flag Officer, Submarines, was satisfied with the performance of their forces on this occasion; and the Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, considered that success in such intricate operations would continue to prove elusive until firm and centralised control of all units taking part was established.

On the 7th of December a new form of attack was carried out against the enemy blockade runners lying in the Gironde River. A small party of Royal Marine Commandos under Major H. G. Hasler landed by canoe from the submarine Tuna and successfully fixed limpet mines to the hulls of four large ships. They were all seriously damaged by flooding, and were put out of action for several months. Major Hasler and one of the commandos then escaped successfully into Spain and so back to Britain.30

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The next outward-bound ship, the tanker Germania, met a somewhat similar fate to the Cortellazo's; for she encountered one of our north-bound convoys on the 12th of December and scuttled herself. Another success was achieved on New Year's Day, 1943. Intelligence had indicated that an inward-bound ship was approaching the Bay and, as the cruiser Scylla and an escorted convoy (MKS 4) from Gibraltar were in the vicinity, it was possible to add surface ships to the more usual submarine and air pursuers. After many hours of searching a Sunderland of No. 10 (R.A.A.F.) Squadron sighted the ship. The flying boat then made contact with the Scylla, and guided her to the quarry by the unorthodox but effective method of laying flame floats along the course to be steered. The cruiser finally sank the enemy ship, which was the Rhakotis, about 140 miles north-west of Cape Finisterre on the evening of the 1st of January. The operation showed how much more could be done when a fast surface ship was available to co-operate with Coastal Command's aircraft.

The adventures of the remaining ships which the enemy had organised to break through our blockade will be told in a later chapter, in which the results of his second wave of blockade running will also be summarised.

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