If the Allies were going to win the fight to control the Atlantic, they would have to find a way to defeat their most dangerous enemy at sea: U-boats Written by Nick Soldinger
The Anglo-Canadian convoy SC 42 left Nova Scotia bound for England on 30 August 1941. It consisted of more than 60 slow-moving merchant ships protected by four warships from the Royal Canadian Navy. Ahead of it lay 4,500 kilometres of wild ocean, temperatures cold enough to freeze the sea spray to the ships’ handrails, and waves the size of tower blocks.
The crossing, which would take the ships a minimum of two and half weeks to complete, held a far deadlier threat than anything the environment could throw at them, however. Shortly after leaving port, the lumbering fleet got word from British intelligence that a vast wolf pack of German U-boats was prowling off the coast of Greenland. Ordinarily, such information would have allowed the convoy to reroute and avoid the waiting menace – but not this time.
A storm had whipped up that was so ferocious that the convoy, with dwindling fuel, was forced to keep steaming along the doomed course fate had selected for it – directly into the U-boats’ killing ground.
By now Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for two years. Isolated from the rest of Europe for much of that time and blockaded by the German navy, it had relied on its ally Canada to keep it alive – literally. When Hitler’s plan to invade Britain in 1940 faltered in the wake of the Battle of Britain, he switched tactics – if the island was a fortress, then he’d besiege it. Blitzed from the air and starved of supplies from the sea, the country was by this time nearing exhaustion. It was desperate for the supplies SC 42 was bringing. Much of it, however, tragically never finished the journey.
The man Hitler had chosen to choke off Britain’s food supply was Admiral Karl Dönitz. A veteran U-boat commander from World War I, he was a brilliant tactician, ruthless in battle and respected by his men. It was his controlling nature over the U-boat fleet, however, that would cost him what would come to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic.
In the autumn of 1941, it was a weakness that had yet to manifest itself in the outcome of this war under the waves; Dönitz was apparently winning the struggle. His U-boats were sinking nearly 150,000 tons of Allied shipping a month, and Convoy SC 42 was about to significantly add to that tally when, ten days into the crossing, it blundered into the jaws of the lurking wolf pack.
In the early hours of 9 September, the U-boats attacked their first merchant ship. Surfacing under cover of darkness to both keep pace with the convoy and avoid detection by the underwater sonar devices on the warships, the British freighter Empire Springbuck was the first to be picked off – all 39 of its crew were lost. W
