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Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink
Did German U-boats conduct a ‘clean’ campaign during the Second World War? Or were they guilty of routinely murdering survivors in the water? Roger Moorhouse weighs the evidence
On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness. As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind. Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position. Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear. The number killed by these actions is unknown, but only four members of the Peleus’ crew – three Greeks and a Briton – survived among the wreckage. Three of them would endure until they were finally picked up by a Portuguese steamer, more than a month later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-544740257-CMYKWeb-Ready-8cbb754.jpg" width="4950" height="3300" alt="A black and white photograph showing a row of young men sitting in a pew in court. The two men in the foreground are looking at each other, and one of them has his hands resting on top of a walking stick. Behind them, a man in full army uniform is standing, looking serious" title="Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck (left), commander of U-852, is tried for war crimes, October 1945. The following month he was executed by firing squad (Image by Getty Images)" /> A bloody exception It is often assumed that the brutal treatment of the survivors of the Peleus was somehow the norm: that U-boat crews thought little of brutalising, even of murdering, their victims. That certainly was the assumption of Doris Hawkins, a young British nurse who was torpedoed and then picked up by a U-boat in 1941. “We had heard so many atrocity stories,” she later wrote. “We feared a shower of machine gun bullets.” Bearing in mind the atrocities that were routinely committed by German forces elsewhere in the war – especially in eastern Europe – this assumption is entirely understandable. But, if the written records are to be believed, it is also entirely wrong. The example of the Peleus was very much the exception. Indeed, it was the only documented example of a U-boat action in the Second World War resulting in a war crime. Read more | The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy Sceptical readers might question this assertion – and rightly so. For one thing, it is well known that Hitler was instinctively secretive and had a preference for issuing verbal rather than written orders when dealing with sensitive matters. Consequently, at the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution was keen to assert that the available documentary record of the U-boat war was somehow incomplete, or that mendacious amendments could have been made. More than that, given the brutality with which most branches of the German armed forces conducted their war, is it perhaps naïve to imagine that the men of the Kriegsmarine somehow managed to resist both the heat of the moment – and the bloodthirsty rhetoric of their superiors – and refrained from straying into barbarism? Licence to kill? At Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the erstwhile commander of U-boat forces, rejected robustly the claims that the Germans had somehow covered up atrocities committed during the war at sea. Yet the testimony of Korvettenkapitän Karl-Heinz Moehle, former commander of the 5th U-boat Flotilla, suggested that the culture within the U-boat arm may have been less ‘clean’ than Dönitz was willing to admit. Moehle’s testimony centred around the so-called Laconia Order, Dönitz’s instruction to his crews, issued in 1942, to refrain from assisting shipwrecked crewmen. When he asked his superiors about the implications of the order, Moehle was told that it was a coded instruction to kill survivors. And that’s how he passed it on to his officers, albeit with the caveat that each individual commander had to act according to his own conscience. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-466684659-CMYKWeb-Ready-2d13be1.jpg" width="4867" height="3245" alt="A black and white photograph of a marge ship sinking into the sea" title="SS F.W. Abrams lies stricken in the Atlantic following a U-boat attack, June 1942. For much of 1941 and 42, British shipping losses outpaced production (Image by Getty Images)" /> It is quite possible, then, that there were other atrocities committed by U-boat crews against stricken merchant crewmen, but that circumstances conspired to consign them to oblivion. Perhaps there were no survivors to tell the tale, or the perpetrators were themselves sunk later in their patrol. Absence of evidence, then, should not be confused with evidence of absence. Nonetheless, it is striking that so few examples of atrocities committed by U-boat crews have come to light. And this should prompt the curious to seek to understand why. The reasons why commanders might have resisted the urge to kill survivors – assuming they felt it at all – would have been multi-layered and would doubtless have evolved with time. But a few explanatory factors are worth bearing in mind. Read more | In October 1939, two coffins were wheeled through Edinburgh draped in Nazi flags. But why? For one thing, the typical U‑boat – such as the Type VII – was small and cramped. With its crew of around 50, it had no space to accommodate survivors and only limited capacity to offer material assistance. Bearing that in mind, it is remarkable how often, in the opening phase of the war, U-boat crews assisted the surviving crewmen from the ships that they had sunk, offering food, cigarettes, blankets and a compass bearing. In the most astonishing example, the commander of U-35 opted to take the 28 surviving crewmen of the Greek-registered Diamantis aboard his submarine and sailed more than 30 hours to the beach at Ventry, in western Ireland, where they were then ferried ashore in a dinghy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-537152831-CMYKWeb-Ready-023b7fd.jpg" width="3708" height="2472" alt="Three men in dark coats and military uniform walk in a triangular formation. The man at the front is looking towards the right of the image" title="Admiral Karl Dönitz (left) claimed that the U-boats waged a ‘clean’ war. But was he being economical with the truth? (Image by Getty Images)" /> Such chivalrous actions could scarcely survive in the age of total war, of course, and after the Laconia Order, all such humanitarian impulses were formally banned by the German naval command. As a result, after the initial phase of the war, contact with survivors was effectively forbidden. By mid‑1942, then – aside from a brief interrogation to confirm the identity of the sunk vessel – U‑boats tended to avoid survivors altogether. The culture within the U‑boat arm is also worth consideration. One should be wary of underestimating the influence of ideology in any arm of the Nazi state, but it is notable that even contemporaries considered that the Kriegsmarine was less ideologically aligned with Nazism than other branches of the armed forces. Hitler himself is said to have complained that he had “a Nazi air force, a Prussian army and a Christian navy”. That quotation, though apocryphal, may nonetheless have had the ring of truth. Crewman Hans Goebeler, aboard U-505, recalled that – on his boat at least – ideology simply didn’t seem to matter: “Who were the Nazis aboard our submarine?” he asked: “I never met one. We were identical to the sailors from every nation who faced the hazards of war and the sea during those years. Party members or not, we performed our duties with professionalism and honour.” Every boat would have had a cross-section of German society aboard, from fervent Nazis to the apolitical and even those who opposed the regime. Yet the question of how far the U-boat arm was indoctrinated is an interesting and complex one. Dönitz himself was a convinced Nazi, who was fiercely loyal to Hitler, and a few of his commanders shared that enthusiasm. But active indoctrination of the U-boat arm appears to have been limited. While other branches of the German armed forces were increasingly subjected to ideological control as the war progressed, this was simply not the case for the navy. Despite his own enthusiasm for Nazism, Dönitz appears to have stopped short of establishing genuine ideological oversight over his men. The office responsible for indoctrination within the navy, for instance, was staffed largely by men without Nazi backgrounds and – given that they were also not permitted to ‘ride along’ on patrol – they were in any case prevented from exerting any real influence over operational units. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/B4832C-CMYKWeb-Ready-bd6dc39.jpg" width="3557" height="2371" alt="A boat is moored at a harbour. On the boat there is a group of men with their hands behind their backs and heads bowed. A young boy sits on the harbourside looking at them. In the background there is a large bridge and a building with a tall column chimney" title="U-boat crews enter Wilhelmshaven to surrender to Allied forces, May 1945. These men had, for the most part, not used the murderous methods employed by their compatriots on the eastern front, writes Roger Moorhouse (Image by Alamy)" /> This doesn’t mean that the U-boat arm was some sort of haven for anti-Nazi thinking or oppositional attitudes. It was not. The Kriegsmarine was far from apolitical, but its leaders held the view that its coordination to Nazi goals was self-evident, a natural corollary to the patriotism and sense of duty that were essential components of their collective identity. Dönitz held the attempts to enforce ideological conformity at arm’s length, not because he disagreed or was minded to resist, but because he considered such measures to be an unnecessary imposition. The Kriegsmarine, he believed, was already wholly on side. We should also keep in mind that there was no single ‘way of war’ practised by the forces of the Third Reich in the Second World War. The murderous methods deployed on the eastern front, for instance, were only rarely in evidence in the west, while the war in the desert, lacking an ideological dimension, tended to be similarly unsullied by atrocities. These differences in behaviour by German forces were not the result of whim or happenstance. Rather, they were contingent on the nature of the enemy and whether Nazi ideology deemed them to be civilised and worthy of respect – as in the west – or to be subhumans slated for extermination, as in the east. The available evidence shows that the naval war, and the submarine war in particular, cleaved more to that western model than to anything else. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the U-boat war does indeed appear to have been the ‘cleanest’ of the theatres of the European conflict, with many more instances of the old fashioned ‘solidarity of the sea’ in evidence than there were examples of atrocities. Moral outrage Such logic cut little ice with the judges at Nuremberg, of course, as Dönitz was found guilty on two of the three charges against him and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. As the former commander of the Kriegsmarine, and Hitler’s successor as Reich President, he deserved neither leniency nor sympathy. And, in the first flush of moral outrage over the crimes of Nazism, the Nuremberg judges were inclined towards the view that all Germans were Nazis and that everything that German forces had done was evidence of Nazi barbarism. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL2449488-CMYKWeb-Ready-379e129.jpg" width="4400" height="2933" alt="Captain Daniel V Gallery –pictured on the captured U-505 off the west African coast in June 1944 – condemned the Allies’ postwar prosecution of Karl Dönitz as “barefaced hypocrisy” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="Captain Daniel V Gallery –pictured on the captured U-505 off the west African coast in June 1944 – condemned the Allies’ postwar prosecution of Karl Dönitz as “barefaced hypocrisy” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Nonetheless, it was a verdict that provoked no little controversy, even from some senior Allied naval officers. US Admiral Daniel V Gallery – who had spent most of the war hunting U-boats – was especially vociferous in his condemnation. Dönitz’s trial, he said, was an “outstanding example of barefaced hypocrisy”, and his conviction was “an insult to our own submariners”. “If the old gentleman ever gets out of jail,” he wrote, “I hope I never meet him. I would have trouble looking him in the eye. The only crime he committed was the crime of almost beating us in a bloody but ‘legal’ fight.” He had a point. Dönitz’s defence at Nuremberg – brilliantly conducted by his lawyer, Otto Kranzbühler – had turned largely on the apparent hypocrisies of the Allies’ accusations, given that they, too, had effectively been carrying out unrestricted submarine warfare for most of the war. To hammer home the point, Kranzbühler had produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, which asserted that it had been customary for US submarines to attack Japanese merchant ships without warning, and that ‘general principles’ did not permit US submarines to rescue enemy survivors. In short, Nimitz’s testimony implied that the US Navy had conducted its submarine war precisely as Dönitz claimed to have conducted his. The truth on this point was more damning than Kranzbühler could have known. Naval records released in the 1960s would reveal that the crew of the American submarine USS Wahoo had themselves participated in an action not unlike that involving the Peleus. In January 1943, the Wahoo sank the 5,000-ton Japanese troopship Buyo Maru, north of Papua New Guinea, which had been carrying Japanese soldiers and nearly 500 PoWs from the British Indian army. In the aftermath, as Japanese and Indian survivors bobbed around some 20 lifeboats, the crew of the Wahoo opened fire with machine guns. “We proceeded to have a field day,” said the captain, Lt Commander Dudley Morton. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-181456547-CMYKWeb-Ready-ff88d67.jpg" width="4591" height="3061" alt="A Japanese ship sinks in 1942 after being attacked by USS Wahoo. The American sub would later be involved in one of the most controversial incidents of the war at sea (Image by Getty Images)" title="A Japanese ship sinks in 1942 after being attacked by USS Wahoo. The American sub would later be involved in one of the most controversial incidents of the war at sea (Image by Getty Images)" /> Biological hatred In his defence, Morton claimed that he was returning fire, but this is disputed. Some of his crew were even shocked by his evident “biological hatred” of the enemy. Whatever justification he felt he had, Morton’s attack on the Buyo Maru cost the lives of some 87 Japanese soldiers and more than 195 Indians. His after‑action report included the shooting, but he faced no punishment, and the incident was suppressed by his navy superiors. In postwar narratives, the example of the Buyo Maru was quietly forgotten, while that of the Peleus would be held up as symbolic of Nazi brutality. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 This is not a game of moral equivalence. It would be wrong to draw from a few isolated cases the false conclusion that the Allies and Axis were morally indistinguishable. The broader war aims mattered. However ‘clean’ the U-boat campaign may have been, it was serving a regime synonymous with evil. Conversely, even when the Allies faltered morally, their cause – resisting tyranny – remained just. The point, rather, is to challenge the lazy assumption that German U-boat crews were sadistic murderers. The Peleus atrocity was very real, but it was an outlier. U-boats dealt devastating blows to Allied shipping and caused enormous loss of life, but there was only one confirmed instance of the deliberate killing of survivors. The murder of the Peleus survivors was not a feature of the U-boat war. It was a chilling, singular exception. Britain's near-death experience How U-boats drove a nation to the brink of economic strangulation During the early years of the Second World War, Britain came perilously close to defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic – a prolonged struggle against German U-boats aiming to sever the maritime lifelines sustaining Britain. As an island nation dependent on imports for food, fuel and war materiel, Britain faced an existential threat from the Kriegsmarine’s submarine campaign. Between 1939 and 1945, German U-boats sank more than 2,700 Allied merchant ships, totalling approximately 14.5 million gross tons. The most dangerous period came in 1942, when 1,160 ships were lost to U-boats– more than 6.2 million tons – much of it along the poorly defended US coast during Operation Drumbeat. Britain’s shipping losses outpaced production for much of 1941–42, and food rationing became more severe. At one point, Britain had only six weeks’ worth of grain reserves. Winston Churchill later wrote that the U-boat threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during the war. The crisis peaked in early 1943, when monthly merchant shipping losses reached around 700,000 tons. German Admiral Karl Dönitz believed victory was within reach, committing more than 100 U-boats to mid-Atlantic ‘wolfpack’ operations.However, from May 1943 – dubbed ‘Black May’ by the Germans – the tide turned. Allied advances in radar, sonar, Ultra intelligence, long-range patrol aircraft and escort carriers decimated U-boat fleets. That month alone, the Germans lost 41 U-boats, forcing a temporary withdrawal from the Atlantic. Though never completely severed, Britain’s shipping routes were strained to their limits. Without technological breakthroughs, convoy reforms and American shipbuilding – producing Liberty ships faster than U-boats could sink them – Britain might have been economically strangled into submission. In the end, the U-boat campaign claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Allied seamen. But it failed to deliver a knockout blow. How the Allies turned the tide A timeline of the war against the U-boats 3 September 1939: The British liner SS Athenia is sunk by U-30 just hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, marking the start of the Battle of the Atlantic 14 October 1939: U-47 penetrates Scapa Flow and sinks the battleship Royal Oak, killing 833, shocking the Royal Navy and boosting German morale June 1940: Following France’s fall, Germany gains Atlantic U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest and elsewhere. This dramatically extends U-boat reach into the Atlantic and intensifies Allied shipping losses March–June 1941: U-boats enjoy high success against British shipping, aided by poor Allied convoy tactics and limited air cover, marking their most effective early-war period 12 September 1941: U-156 sinks RMS Laconia carrying civilians and PoWs. After surfacing to help survivors, the U-boat is attacked by US aircraft. This prompts the Germans to introduce the Laconia Order, forbidding the rescue of survivors October 1941: German U-boats operate in coordinated ‘wolfpacks’ to attack convoys, reaching peak effectiveness in the mid-Atlantic and causing severe shipping losses, despite increased Allied defences December 1941: Following Pearl Harbor, U-boats begin Operation Drumbeat, targeting unprepared US coastal shipping. This results in catastrophic losses early in 1942 May 1943: In what the Germans will dub ‘Black May’, the Allies turn the tide with improved radar, codebreaking and air cover. U-boat losses spike dramatically, forcing Germany to temporarily withdraw many boats from the Atlantic June 1944: U-boats fail to disrupt Allied landings in Normandy. With air superiority, improved technology and better escorts, the Allies dominate the Atlantic, further reducing U-boat effectiveness 5 May 1945: Admiral Dönitz orders all remaining U-boats to surrender. More than 150 comply, marking the official end of the U-boat war and the wider naval conflict in Europe This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The battle of Sandwich: England’s medieval Trafalgar
In 1217, with a French armada approaching the coast of Kent, English sailors secured what may be the most significant naval victory in their country's history. Sean McGlynn describes the battle of Sandwich
Nelson and Trafalgar? Yes. Drake and the Armada? Yes. But de Burgh and Sandwich? This unlikely-named combination of medieval naval hero and sea battle proved arguably of far greater importance than its more renowned successors. Errol Flynn would find it hard to measure up to a contemporary writer’s swashbuckling account of the hand-to-hand fighting that occurred at the battle of Sandwich in the summer of 1217: Reginald Pain of Guernsey, “with nothing of the coward in him, jumped from the English cog [type of naval vessel] onto the French flagship. His landing was not gentle, for his leap had been a fearsome one.” Reginald’s fall was broken by a French knight whom he bowled over. As he fell he also took down another knight with a well-timed blow. As he got to his feet he was set upon “with great force” by a third knight, and a lengthy duel – “a battle royal” – ensued with Reginald triumphing once again. The writer leaves our hero grappling with yet another French knight before breaking off to describe the rest of the battle. Yet the reality of Sandwich was a lot less stylised and a lot more bloody and brutal. The background to the battle was one of great peril for England. In the aftermath of King John’s rejection of Magna Carta in the summer of 1215, the rebel barons had asked the Capetian prince Louis, heir to the throne of France, to replace John as King of England. Louis ‘the Lion’ (compare this to John’s ‘Softsword’) landed with a large army on the Isle of Thanet in May 1216. A second battle of Hastings might have occurred but John bottled the battle, and Louis went on to conquer and occupy over one-third of England for a year. A royalist fightback only began to achieve any notable success after John’s death in October 1216, when the regent William Marshal’s army won a victory against the French and rebels at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. The defeated army retreated to its stronghold in London and there awaited reinforcements to begin the reconquest. The French fleet that the English engaged with off Sandwich that summer was bringing these reinforcements. The battle was a major one that attracted much coverage by contemporary writers. Our leading chronicle source in Latin comes from Roger of Wendover, who has been wrongly traduced by many historians; he was actually an invaluable commentator on the military affairs of his day. The vernacular accounts also offer rich details. Chief of these are The History of William Marshal and the under-utilised Romance of Eustace the Monk. From these and other sources we can construct a detailed picture of this great naval battle, of which a flavour is given here. Read more: Was King John really that bad? Conquer the realm A close reading of various sources points to a French army of some 300 cavalry plus infantry and crossbowmen. The History of William Marshal is not alone in saying that these reinforcements (when added to the rebel barons and the French already in England) were enough “to conquer the realm”. The leader of the armed contingent was Robert de Courtenay who had already served with Louis in England. The admiral of the fleet was Eustace the Monk, whom one English chronicler of the time condemns as “a shameful man and a wicked pirate”. The English regency council, headed by William Marshal – the king, Henry III, was still only nine years old – ordered a full muster at the port of Sandwich near Dover for 24 August. Here the English sailors were in high spirits as they “made seaworthy every one of their bowlines, guide ropes and guys, their sturdy anchors and strong cables”. William Marshal appointed Hubert de Burgh as admiral of the English fleet. De Burgh, justiciar of England since Magna Carta, was a veteran warrior who had successfully defended Dover Castle against Louis’ epic siege during the invasion. His second was the experienced naval captain Philip d’Albini. Marshal delivered a stirring battle exhortation, calling on his men to prevent the French reclaiming the land. Read more | Did the Earl of Sandwich invent the sandwich? The exact composition of the English fleet is hard to determine, but the various sources present a total of about 40 vessels, 22 of which were capital ships, fully armed and manned. The biggest ship was the cog, standing high out of the water with impressive fighting platforms and ‘castles’. The fighting galleys in both navies were reinforced by iron prows to ram enemy ships. The French fleet numbered about 80 vessels, but half of these would have been supply ships neither designed nor intended for combat, unlike the convoy escorts. The flagship was “the great ship of Bayonne”, on which sailed Eustace, de Courtenay and 40 knights. It was so laden down with supplies – horses, food, treasure and even a trebuchet siege machine – the waves almost washed over it. Their advantage was the mass of their numbers and the fact that they had the wind behind them. It was a clear day on Thursday 24 August when the two fleets set out from Dover and Calais to meet in the bloody climax of the French invasion of England. De Burgh led his fleet which was probably in column. He made a feint towards the oncoming French who thought he was about to attack them head-on. At the last moment, de Burgh’s ship veered away to starboard. The over-confident French let out the hunting cry of “La hart! La hart”. But this was part of the English plan to get windward of the French, a manoeuvre they had successfully performed against the French in May. It achieved its objective. Twenty ships passed and turned about; they now had the wind behind them, too. They joined in a bitter engagement with the enemy. The French ships resisted robustly, inflicting heavy casualties. The English quickly deployed a chemical weapon to great effect. Making use of their position in the wind, they launched large pots of quicklime onto the French decks. Here they burst open and the wind carried the dust into French eyes, “which blinded them totally”, says the Anonymous of Béthune. All of the four leading sources of the battle testify to the effectiveness of this tactic. Wendover’s hero is Philip d’Albini who “with his crossbowmen and archers directing their missiles into the French, soon caused many fatalities among them”. He reports English galleys ramming into French ships, sinking many. As the ships came alongside each other close-quarter fighting ensued. The lighter English vessels, designed for fighting and not weighed down with supplies, stood higher in the water than the French ones and thus were able to shoot down on them. With many of the French blinded, it was easier for the English to board them. Swords, daggers and spears were put to work. The focus of the battle was Eustace’s flagship. The English cog and three other vessels surrounded Eustace, and a remarkably intense engagement followed, starting with an exchange of missiles. The English threw grappling hooks onto the side of the French ship and boarded it; it is here we witness Reginald Pain’s full flow of martial prowess. Eustace’s biographer gives a more authentic portrayal of the messy combat: “Some had their arms broken, some their heads smashed, others a collar-bone shattered.” Eustace broke a few heads by swinging an oar. But his men “could no longer defend themselves, for their eyes were full of powder”. English aggression With the French flagship gone and the aggressive English tactics taking their toll, an English victory seemed imminent. French soldiers and sailors threw themselves overboard, opting to take their chances with the sea rather than the certainties of capture; when the English “caught up with a ship, I can tell you that they lost no time at all in killing those they found on board and throwing them into the sea as food for the fish”. Only the knights were spared – saved just in time by English knights eager for ransoms. One contemporary estimates that 4,000 French died. The end of the battle belongs to Eustace the Monk. He had deserted the fighting to hide in the ship’s hold. A search was made for him and he was soon dragged onto deck. He pleaded for his life and freedom, offering 10,000 marks to his captors and promising to serve faithfully the King of England. But he was not to be spared on any account. A sword was drawn and Eustace’s head was struck off. The English victory was not only a great one in terms of its scale – the haul of booty was paraded in the ports, and the sailors “were able to share out the coin in bowlfuls” – but a vitally important one, too. With their victory the English had put to an end Louis’ hopes of winning back England. The loss to Louis in terms of men and supplies was irreparable; he had invested all his resources in the fleet. Had his reinforcements reached him, they would have enabled him to lead another full campaign in the country of the type that had brought him great gains before. The defeat at Sandwich signalled the end of 18 months of invasion and occupation. Within a month Louis had agreed peace terms and left the country forever. Such large-scale naval encounters were rare in English waters, especially when they were as decisive as this. We have to wait until 1340 and the English victory at Sluys for something even remotely comparable. Even the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 arguably had less at stake than Sandwich. Why did the English win? For some contemporaries the answer was simple: the English ruled the waves. As an island, they had long invested in a maritime defence, something we can trace back to King Alfred in the ninth century and the occasional naval victory over the Vikings. The seas were now the first line of defence, especially since John’s loss of Normandy in 1204. In 1213, when another French invasion threatened, Wendover noted that John “placed his chief defence” in the fact that he “had a superior navy to the French king”. John’s strategy was therefore to fight the French at sea, just as the English planned at Sandwich. Wendover attributes the victory at Sandwich to the fact that the English “were skilled in naval warfare” while the French were “not used to it”. When in 1213 a successful English combined naval-marine raid on Damme on the Flemish coast burned a French invasion fleet, even that most French of chroniclers, William the Breton, had the French king admitting: “We do not know the ways of the sea.” It was English experience in naval matters that won the day at Sandwich. Eustace the Monk: “A shameful man and a wicked pirate” Just as in the Napoleonic Wars naughty children were told to behave lest ‘Old Boney’ came and grabbed them, so Eustace the Monk’s name struck fear into sailors and people living near the English Channel. He was certainly one of the most colourful and dynamic characters of the 13th century. Born to a noble family near Boulogne (probably c1170), Eustace trained as a knight and became an experienced seaman. For some unknown – but obviously completely unsound – reason he made a career change and became a monk. It did not work out. The Romance of Eustace the Monk portrays him as a foul-mouthed, irredeemably dishonest trickster, fond of four-letter words and farting – which he would blame on his horse’s saddle. In his favour we are told that he dressed up as a woman only once and that he was not a sodomite (the Romance uses a far more colloquial term). Little wonder Eustace renounced his holy orders to resume a startling military career as a naval mercenary. He proved a better pirate than monk. Such was his notoriety that after he was killed, his head was stuck on a spear and paraded across England to reassure people that this black legend was truly dead. Sean McGlynn is author of Blood Cries Afar: The Forgotten Invasion of England 1216 from The History Press This article was first published in the July 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
Jutland: the battle that won the First World War
The British press declared it a disastrous defeat, and the public despaired. But, argues Nick Hewitt, the battle of Jutland, fought in the North Sea in May 1916, ensured that Germany would never prevail in the First World War...
Between the hazy late afternoon of 31 May 1916 and the grey dawn of 1 June, more than 100,000 British and German seamen aboard 250 warships fought a brutal naval engagement. They were battling for control of the North Sea, global oceanic trade and, ultimately, victory in the First World War. For the British it became known as the battle of Jutland. For the Germans it was the Skagerrak. By the end, 25 ships had been sunk, almost one in 10 of those sailors was dead, and Europe’s fate had been decided. For both sides, this battle was a new experience. The British had been the undisputed masters of the seas since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, more than 100 years earlier. However, the last time the Royal Navy had fought a sea battle against an enemy fleet, it had entered the fray with wooden sailing ships armed with muzzle-loading cannon. The service now went to war in armoured, steel ships, powered by steam engines and armed with breech-loading rifled guns in revolving turrets. Uninterrupted peace in western Europe had arguably led to complacency, failure of imagination and tactical stagnation. Nevertheless, the Royal Navy was still the most powerful navy in the world. Read more | 10 WW1 generals you should know about The Kaiserliche Marine, or Imperial German Navy, had existed only since Germany unified from a multitude of kingdoms and principalities into a single, Prussian-dominated state in 1871. The German kaiser, Wilhelm II, was determined to make Germany a world power, and in 1897 he had appointed Rear (later Grand) Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz as secretary of state of the Reichsmarineamt, or Imperial Navy Office. Tirpitz was a compelling advocate of the need for a larger navy, and within a year he had persuaded the German parliament to pass the first of a series of naval bills calling for the construction of 19 battleships and 50 cruisers. The British responded in kind, and an expensive arms race between the two powers followed, vociferously supported on both sides of the North Sea by popular nationalist lobbying. In 1906, the British reset the arms race. Under the dynamic leadership of the visionary First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher, they emphatically replied to the German challenge by launching the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought – faster, and with better armour and more heavy guns than anything else afloat. At the same time Fisher developed a new type of ship, the battlecruiser, with heavy guns but light armour to allow exceptional speed, intended to outgun enemy cruisers but able to use its speed to escape enemy battleships. At a stroke, the existing British and German battle fleets were rendered out of date. It was a gamble, but it stemmed from absolute confidence that Britain could outbuild Germany, which was trying to maintain the largest army in Europe at the same time. The battle of Jutland: quick facts What? Jutland, the biggest naval battle of the First World War, was fought between the British and German fleets in the North Sea about 75 miles from the Danish coast. Why? The Germans hoped to reduce the numerical superiority of the Royal Navy by ambushing an isolated detachment. The British had broken the German code and sailed in full strength to meet them. When? Most of the fighting occurred on 31 May 1916. The German fleet was worsted and escaped that night, arriving in the safety of their own minefields after dawn on 1 June. Who? It was close to being the largest naval battle ever fought. The British, under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, had 151 warships, German Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer had around 93. British firepower A new and even costlier arms race followed, with both sides building ‘dreadnoughts’, as the new battleships became known. But the British had judged correctly. Between 1905 and 1914 Germany’s defence budget increased by a staggering 142 per cent, but when Britain declared war on 4 August 1914, the British had 28 dreadnoughts and nine battlecruisers. The Germans had only 16 dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers. The battle of Jutland was essentially decided two years before the first shots had been fired. The British war plan was to concentrate the Royal Navy’s most modern warships into a Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands, from where it could maintain a close watch on the North Sea and blockade German trade. The blockade stopped vital imports of food and raw materials, including nitrates from South America, essential for producing both fertilisers and explosives. The German Hochseeflotte (High Seas Fleet) was essentially under house arrest, able to patrol the North Sea but unable to make a meaningful impact on the war. The status quo favoured Britain, which really did not have to take any action at all to be assured of gradually starving its enemy, leaving the French, its continental ally, to fight the land campaign against a progressively more demoralised and weaker foe. The onus was on the Germans to defeat the far bigger Grand Fleet, unlock the door to global trade, and change the outcome of the war. The first two years of the war at sea were characterised by confrontations that were little more than skirmishes, in the North Sea and further afield, with the Royal Navy rounding up and destroying Germany’s small overseas naval forces. The German fleet was constrained by the kaiser’s unwillingness to risk his expensive battleships. But in January 1916, a new, more energetic officer took command of the High Seas Fleet: Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who persuaded the kaiser to approve a more aggressive strategy. Scheer proposed a plan to give the Germans their holy grail: Kräfteausgleich – equalisation of forces, the numerical parity that was an essential prerequisite for victory. Vice Admiral Franz von Hipper’s battlecruisers were to threaten British trade convoys to neutral Norway, hoping to provoke a response. Scheer assumed that the British would respond in force, but he also assumed that the British battlecruiser force, under Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty, would reach his chosen battlefield before the Grand Fleet because the former was based in Rosyth on the Firth of Forth – closer than the Orkney Islands. Scheer was gambling that he could destroy Beatty’s squadrons, which had been reinforced by the Royal Navy’s four newest and most powerful dreadnoughts, giving him Kräfteausgleich by the time the Grand Fleet, under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, arrived. Famous outburst Scheer’s plan failed. Beatty and Hipper met at the Jutland Bank off the Danish coast late in the afternoon of 31 May, and Hipper dutifully turned to lead his adversary south on to Scheer’s guns. Early signs were good for the Germans: errors in signalling and gunnery by the British gave their foe a tactical advantage. Two British battlecruisers, HMS Queen Mary and HMS Indefatigable, blew up and sank, thanks in part to poor ammunition-handling procedures. Queen Mary’s dramatic loss provoked Beatty’s famous outburst: “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today!” But as soon as Beatty sighted the main German fleet he reversed course, pulling the Germans back to Jellicoe’s far more powerful Grand Fleet. When Scheer saw his enemy at sea at full strength, he realised that his only chance for victory had passed. Though half an hour of bitter fighting saw his ships sink another British battlecruiser, Invincible, and three large but obsolete armoured cruisers, he was forced to withdraw into the mist and head for home. The British were poorly prepared for night fighting and, though the battle continued with a series of vicious skirmishes in the dark, the High Seas Fleet returned safely. The Germans got home first, and newspapers announced a German victory. On 5 June, Kaiser Wilhelm travelled to Wilhelmshaven to proclaim that: “The English were beaten. The spell of Trafalgar has been broken. You have started a new chapter in world history.” The Grand Fleet made for home, burying its dead on the way. The British public had been conditioned for a century to expect another Trafalgar, ending with their enemy’s fleet scattered, sunk or captured, and they were bewildered and bitterly disappointed when that didn’t happen. The Admiralty exacerbated the situation, issuing a communiqué that was achingly honest about British losses and suspiciously vague about German ones. It came out on 3 June, after rumours had already begun to spread like wildfire from the dockyards, and after publication of the German account had – unbelievably – been permitted. The communiqué began: “On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 31, a naval engagement took place off the coast of Jutland. The British ships on which the brunt of the fighting fell were the Battle Cruiser Fleet and some cruisers and light cruisers, supported by four fast battleships. Among these the losses were heavy.” British newspapers were quick to declare the battle a disaster, and the Grand Fleet’s men met a very different welcome to that received by their German counterparts. Midshipman Henry Fancourt of the battlecruiser Princess Royal remembered going ashore in Rosyth and meeting people who asked: “What’s the navy been doing?” It’s undoubtedly true that the British lost more ships, and many more men: 6,094 dead, compared with 2,551 Germans. But to declare the battle a defeat based on a simple comparison of losses was to oversimplify what was a complicated, subtle strategic situation. Jutland was a clumsily fought and costly battle, followed by a public-relations disaster, but it was a clear win for Britain. Jellicoe was not Nelson, and Jutland was certainly not Trafalgar. But in 1916 Britain did not need Trafalgar. Jellicoe, described by Churchill as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon”, knew exactly what was required – and delivered it. Nelson may well have won a more dramatic and convincing victory, but Jellicoe still delivered a victory. More perceptive observers, such as the London newspaper The Globe, agreed: “Will the shouting flag-waving [German] people get any more of the copper, rubber and cotton their government so sorely needs? Not by a pound. Will meat and butter be cheaper in Berlin? Not by a pfennig. There is one test, and only one, of victory. Who held the field of battle at the end of the fight?” Flight from the field Across the North Sea, informed Germans were in no doubt about the implications of the flight of the High Seas Fleet from the ‘field’. Georg von Hase fought at Jutland aboard the battlecruiser Derfflinger and wrote afterwards that: “The English fleet… by its mere continued existence had so far… fulfilled its allotted task.” Admiral Scheer agreed, writing in a confidential report submitted on 4 July that: “The disadvantages of our military-geographical position, and the enemy’s great material superiority, cannot be compensated [for] by our fleet to the extent where we shall be able to overcome the blockade.” The Grand Fleet was a knife permanently held to Germany’s throat, pushing steadily against the national jugular, and nothing that happened at Jutland changed this situation. The Grand Fleet was ready for action again the next day, as strong as before, and it soon increased in size thanks to a steady flow of new and refitted ships joining the fleet. The Imperial German Navy needed to take the initiative again, but many German ships took months to repair and, even when the High Sea Fleet was again battle-ready, the Germans were so badly shaken by the weight of the British response that they never staged another serious challenge. German naval building, unable to compete before the war, could not hope to do so now. The British blockade continued unabated, eventually leading to a 50 per cent reduction in German food supplies and terrible privations for German civilians. Some areas came close to famine thanks to an unfair and inefficient rationing system: a British intelligence report on the Strasbourg region in July 1917 grimly noted that “their children are dying like flies and coal production is 30 per cent down”. After February 1917, the Germans tried to use submarines (U-boats) to starve the British into submission. At the peak of their attacks in April 1917, U-boats sank an average of 13 ships per day; at one point in early 1918, Britain was reduced to reserves equivalent to just two weeks’ food. But in the end submarine attacks on neutral ships helped bring the US into the war on the side of the Allies, hastening Germany’s defeat. The blockade continued its remorseless erosion of the German will to fight. Many Germans became hungry, war-weary and open to communist anti-war propaganda, sparking a revolution that began on 29–30 October 1918. The uprising began, appropriately enough, among the demoralised sailors of the High Seas Fleet, who mutinied when ordered to carry out one final operation. On 21 November 1918 they steamed their ships to surrender and internment at Scapa Flow, and on 21 June 1919 the ships were scuttled in an act of defiance against their British jailers. It was the end of the kaiser’s dream of global power. The long-term, strategic consequences of Jutland were complex and hard to explain to a British public steeped in Trafalgar lore. The debate, focused on the respective roles played by Jellicoe and Beatty, raged well into the interwar period, and still raises the hackles of historians today. It hinged on the question of whether overwhelming victory had eluded the British as a result of Jellicoe’s alleged caution, inflexibility and lack of initiative, or Beatty’s alleged impetuosity, vanity and glory-seeking. Both admirals, to their credit, stayed largely aloof (at least publicly) from this poisonous internecine conflict, which was fought mainly through the sometimes vitriolic outpourings of their friends and supporters. Beatty’s wife was more outspoken, writing to a family friend on 10 July 1916 that: “There seems to be very little to say except to curse Jellicoe for not going at them as the B.Cs [battle cruisers] did… I hear he was frightened to death in case he might lose a B. ship. I think the real truth he was in a deadly funk.” Read more: Britain’s 10 most significant naval battles There is no question that, for the Royal Navy in general and the Grand Fleet in particular, what became known as ‘The Jutland Controversy’ soon overwhelmed objective consideration of the battle, with both sides broadly accepting the myth of defeat to reinforce the case against their rivals. Perhaps inevitably, defeat slowly became the popular perception and, as decades passed, the battle was largely discarded as one of the First World War’s key symbols, engulfed by a torrent of literature, poetry and art, drawing almost exclusively from the tragedy, sacrifice and ultimate triumph of the trench war on the western front. Rejection of the battle in Britain was perhaps encouraged by its public celebration in Germany, where the ‘victory’ of the Skagerrak was used to offset the ‘shame’ of the 1918 naval mutiny and as the foundation of a new naval tradition. Skagerraktag (Skagerrak Day) was observed in Germany until the end of the Second World War and, when German re-armament gathered pace in the 1930s, the ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Scheer, cruiser Admiral Hipper and a number of destroyers were named after their Jutland heroes. In Britain, Jutland gradually began to be dismissed as a mere appendage to the arms race story: an inconsequential stalemate that failed to justify Britain’s huge investment in dreadnoughts before 1914. A reappraisal of Jutland is long overdue. It is surely high time that this extraordinary encounter, arguably the greatest naval battle in history and simultaneously a triumph and a tragedy on an epic scale, was placed back at the heart of the lexicon of the First World War. It is, quite simply, the forgotten battle – the clash by which the Royal Navy won the war. Nick Hewitt is head of heritage development at the National Museum of the Royal Navy. His books include The Kaiser’s Pirates (Pen and Sword, 2014) This article was first published in the May 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
Bismarck: why was the WW2 German battleship so feared? Plus 9 things you didn’t know about its only mission
Named after the ‘Iron Chancellor’ who masterminded the unification of Germany in 1871, the battleship Bismarck was intended to be a national icon – but it had a short life at sea. Iain Ballantyne reveals nine lesser-known facts about the ship and its sole mission…
Launched on Valentine’s Day 1939 at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, the battleship Bismarck inspired love in many of those watching her go down the slipway. A powerful representation of Germany’s rise from the ashes of the First World War, it was a fearsome combination of size, swiftness and firepower. Bismarck was nominally meant to be 35,000 tons to meet the stipulations of the Washington Naval Treaty [which placed limits on the size of battleships]. That treaty lapsed, allowing naval architects of the major maritime powers to add a further 5,000 tons, but then the Germans secretly pushed it even further. Bismarck’s true displacement when fully laden was 50,933 tons – a fact the Allies only discovered when they acquired secret German naval documents after the Second World War. With a top speed of 29 knots, Bismarck (and her sister vessel Tirpitz, launched in April 1939, were faster than any the Royal Navy could send to war. Its eight 15-inch main guns were of a bigger calibre than those of Britain’s new King George V-class battleships – and though Britain did possess warships with larger guns, they were built in the 1920s and couldn’t match Bismarck for speed. By May 1941, with the battle of the Atlantic in full swing, Bismarck was a latent threat. British naval forces were spread thin, tasked with protecting Atlantic convoys, fighting the Italians and Germans in the Mediterranean, and watching a belligerent Japan. Could the overstretched British stop Bismarck from breaking out of the Baltic and into the Atlantic to join forces with U-boats? The vessel’s long-awaited first deployment was expected to be a severe trial of Britain’s national will and the Royal Navy. And so it proved, though for the Germans it was a major test of nerve that ultimately ended with the sinking of the Bismarck. Here Iain Ballantyne, author of Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom, reveals nine lesser-known facts about the battleship and its one and only sortie… The Kriegsmarine was afraid to tell Hitler that Bismarck had gone to war For all Bismarck’s power, the top brass of the Kriegsmarine still feared the Royal Navy. So they did not give Adolf Hitler advance notice of Bismarck’s deployment in case he banned them from doing so. They knew the Führer was anxious about the humiliation Germany would face if she lost a ship named after its first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. When Kriegsmarine boss Grand Admiral Erich Raeder finally confessed to having sent Bismarck out, Hitler asked if it and her consort – the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen – could be called back. He was especially worried about what British aircraft carriers might do to cripple Bismarck and leave her at the mercy of enemy battleships. Bismarck almost sank a second Royal Navy ship during its sortie For the Germans, the breakout into the Atlantic got off to a good start. During a clash in the Denmark Strait on 24 May, Bismarck managed to sink the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Hood, when a cataclysmic explosion ripped the elderly battlecruiser apart. All but three of her 1,418-strong crew were lost. The new Royal Navy battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, almost suffered a similar fate. Bismarck hit Prince of Wales close to its ammunition compartments, but in that instance Bismarck’s shell fragmented and did not explode. However, Prince of Wales did land three hits on Bismarck, one of which punctured a fuel-oil tank, forcing plans for Bismarck to attack convoys to be abandoned – the ship was forced to make for port for repairs. Bismarck may have escaped had it not been for loose German tongues Still reeling from the loss of Hood, in the early hours of 25 May the British lost track of Bismarck. During the 31 hours following Bismarck’s disappearing act, Royal Navy warship commanders mostly kept their radio silence – unlike the Germans, who were wireless signal blabbermouths. Admiral Günther Lütjens, who was aboard Bismarck and was the mission’s commander, made frequent progress reports to German naval headquarters. It was a huge error. Although Germany’s naval Enigma signal codes were still hard to crack, the Bismarck’s transmissions enabled British Radio Direction Finding (D/F) stations to identify the battleship’s general location and heading. This was allied with intelligence gleaned from elsewhere, allowing the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) in London to ultimately confirm Bismarck was heading for a French Atlantic coast port. It was information crucial to turning the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet around to head southeast. Bismarck’s crew were offered a ‘last supper’ on the eve of their final battle After being found by an RAF Catalina flying boat and later attacked by Swordfish biplanes from the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal – with a torpedo crippling the ship’s steering and halting her escape – the morale of Bismarck’s crew was shattered. Officers fell into a state of deep depression and the battleship’s captain told his men they could take whatever they wanted from the stores, including watches, cheese, cigarettes and alcohol. This proved to be a poor idea the night before battle. It plunged many of the men into despair and meant they performed their jobs poorly. 'Real life battleships': the secret game that countered German U-boat attacks during WW2 The only U-boat that reached Bismarck couldn’t help to save it In the absence of readily available Kriegsmarine battleships or battlecruisers to sail over the horizon, any rescue of Bismarck came down to U-boats being ordered to abandon plans for ambushing the British fleet. It was an impossible task for slow, tiny submarines that, due to stormy seas and threat of enemy attack, had to crawl along submerged on battery power. U-556 got the closest, but had no torpedoes left when some of Bismarck’s pursuers came into view of her periscope. On the night of 26/27 May, it was relegated to sending reports to Kriegsmarine headquarters while watching the British attack Bismarck. Hitler was furious When it became clear Bismarck was at the mercy of the Britain’s naval forces, Hitler asked why it wasn’t possible for the Luftwaffe to inflict the same kind of pain on the British battleships. He was told that the only way to do that properly, with a co-ordinated torpedo-bomber attack, would have been to have an aircraft carrier at sea. The Germans had started building one, the Graf Zeppelin, but it lay incomplete in a Baltic shipyard. Making friends with Hitler: Britain’s pre-war admiration for the Nazi dictator Some Bismarck crew tried to surrender When the final battle came on the morning of 27 May, the Royal Navy battleships HMS King George V and HMS Rodney, along with heavy cruisers HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Norfolk, swiftly incapacitated Bismarck. Hundreds of officers and men were killed on the German vessel, and there was evidence that some people aboard tried to surrender – using semaphore flags and light signals – even as Bismarck’s surviving guns carried on firing. As for actually taking the surrender of a still defiant enemy, it would have been time-consuming and complex. Also, the British capital ships were running out of fuel and were expecting hundreds of Luftwaffe bombers to come over the horizon at any moment. Had Britain lost either Rodney or King George V to air attack, the blow would have been severe, especially in the wake of Hood’s loss. Bismarck proved hard to sink Despite being utterly destroyed as a fighting vessel, Bismarck was hard to sink, a product of it being a new warship, but one still based on First World War-era design principles. Her armoured citadel enclosed her engine room spaces and ammunition magazines, but not other vital areas of the battleship, and hence she stayed afloat even after being utterly destroyed as a fighting vessel. British torpedoes and shell hits would have slowly taken Bismarck down, but the final blow was levied by the German vessel’s own crew, who detonated the scuttling charges when they abandoned ship. The Royal Navy rescued some of the surviving Bismarck crew The men of the Royal Navy wanted to sink Bismarck – there was a desire for some measure of retribution for the loss of the Hood and the fire-bombing blitz of Plymouth (the homeport for Rodney, Dorsetshire and other warships) by the Luftwaffe in March-April 1941, which had seen many loved ones made homeless, injured or killed. Destroying a symbol of the Nazi regime on the high seas was likewise a major motivation. But once the guns fell silent on 27 May 1941, the men of the Royal Navy just saw fellow sailors struggling to stay alive. The Blitz: what happened and when, plus 9 places affected by the bombings In the end, 110 Bismarck survivors were rescued by the Dorsetshire and Maori despite heavy seas. Dorsetshire was forced to withdraw – leaving behind hundreds survivors in the water – after a possible U-boat sighting, but its crew dropped floats over the side for those left behind. Maori too had to leave the scene; as it was running low on fuel, there were concerns about it being sunk by an enemy air attack. After the war, sailors from the cruiser Dorsetshire and destroyer Maori – themselves both sunk in 1942 – enjoyed reunions in the UK and Germany with the Bismarck survivors they had rescued. The former foes had forged strong bonds of friendship. Iain Ballantyne is a journalist, editor, and author who has written several military history books on the Second World War and the Cold War, including Bismarck: 24 Hours to Doom. Buy it now on Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org This content was first published by HistoryExtra in 2021
The battle for Iwo Jima: why did it happen and why was it so hard fought?
The 1945 battle for Iwo Jima was bitter and brutal: few of the 20,000 Japanese defenders survived it, while the attacking American marines suffered 25,000 casualties. Why was the US so committed to wresting this tiny island from Japanese control? Julian Humphrys tells the story...
Just over four miles long and two miles wide, Iwo Jima is a speck on the map. But in early 1945 this tiny volcanic island was the scene of some of the most savage fighting of the Second World War. By late 1944, the war in the Far East had turned decisively against the Japanese. The British had forced them back in Burma while in the Pacific the Americans were steadily closing in on the Japanese home islands, capturing strategically important islands in a series of amphibious operations. The capture of the Mariana Islands in late 1944 had given the US a base from which to launch long-range bombing raids on Japan, but its fighter planes, which couldn’t carry so much fuel, were unable to accompany the bombers on what was a 3,000-mile round trip. But as Iwo Jima was just 650 miles from Japan, it was thought that it offered an ideal base for US fighter planes. A task force was assembled to capture it and a two-month bombing campaign was mounted to soften it up. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander on Iwo Jima, wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He turned the island into a fortress with a vast network of pillboxes, bunkers and fortified caves linked by trenches and 11 miles of underground tunnels. Hundreds of hidden artillery, mortar, machine gun and sniper positions were set up. The 11 most significant battles of the Second World War The storm begins The US assault was preceded by a three-day naval bombardment, but this, it later became apparent, was not long enough. In any case, the 20,000 Japanese defenders were so well dug in that it had little effect. On the morning of 19 February, the attack began. Ferried by an armada of nearly 500 landing craft and ships, the first 8,000 US marines splashed through the surf onto beaches on the south side of the island. Iwo Jima: Battle facts Who fought at Iwo Jima? Japan and the US. The Japanese had around 20,000 men under General Tadamishi Kuribayashi, the US around 70,000 men under Admiral Chester Nimitz. When was the battle of Iwo Jima? It was fought between 19 February and 26 March 1945, during the Second World War. Where is Iwo Jima? Iwo Jima is a small volcanic island in the Bonin chain, 750 miles southeast of Tokyo. Why was there a battle at Iwo Jima? The US wants to use the island as an airbase from which to attack Japan’s home islands. Who won the battle of Iwo Jima? Iwo Jima was captured by the US. How many were killed at the battle of Iwo Jima? Losses were severe on both sides. Up to 19,000 Japanese were killed, with American losses amounting to around 6,800 killed and around 19,200 wounded. The marines had expected the shoreline to be heavily defended so were surprised when they came under little fire as they stormed ashore. But those who thought that this was because the preliminary naval bombardment had silenced their enemy were in for a shock. The Japanese were merely waiting for the beaches to fill up with targets before opening fire. When the beaches were clogged with men and vehicles they opened up with their mortars and artillery on the exposed US forces. It wasn’t just this storm of steel that the Americans had to contend with – the terrain was also against them. The surf was violent and the steep beaches were made of soft volcanic ash that made driving or walking across them difficult, and digging in almost impossible. One marine compared it to trying to dig a hole in a barrel of wheat. Almost 2,500 marines were killed and wounded on the beaches but, even so, by the end of the day 30,000 Americans were ashore. Why were there no banzai attacks? In previous battles, a frequent Japanese response to an enemy advance had been to launch a massed and often suicidal ‘banzai’ counterattack (literally meaning ten thousand years, ‘banzai’ was the Japanese battle cry). The Americans were expecting something similar but Kuribayashi forbade it on Iwo Jima – there were to be no easy targets. Instead, the Japanese stayed in caves and bunkers inland and waited for US forces to come to them. On 20 February, the marines attacked Mount Suribachi, a dormant volcano that dominated the southern end of the island. Opinion: Midway’s treatment of the Japanese enemy highlights the power and limits of empathy Many of the Japanese gun positions around the foot of Suribachi had been destroyed by naval gunfire but on the mountain itself it was a different story. At each pillbox and bunker, the Japanese fought with extraordinary determination. Eventually, after four days of non-stop combat, a small group of US marines reached the summit. In capturing Suribachi, 800 marines had died, and it was not even the main defensive position on the island. It did, however, give rise to one of the most famous war photographs ever taken. When the marines reached the summit they set up a small US flag on a metal pole. The event was photographed by Staff Sergeant Louis R Lowery, a photographer with Leatherneck, the magazine of the US marines. However, because the flag was too small to be easily seen the decision was taken to replace it with a larger one. A second patrol of marines climbed to the summit and as five of them, plus one navy corpsman, set up the second flag they were photographed by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press. His picture was an instant success and it won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography. It’s sometimes claimed that the photo was staged but this isn’t the case. Rosenthal did later admit to having staged a photograph but that was a group photo of marines posing around the flag once it had been set up. Pearl Harbor: 12 things you (probably) didn’t know about the "date which will live in infamy" Almost all of the 1,200 Japanese defenders were dead. Their code of war scorned surrender and most sold their lives dearly. Some were burned alive by flame throwers or torn apart by explosives thrown into their bunkers. Many too badly wounded to fight on kept a grenade at hand, ready to detonate it when US forces came near. A small group of defenders managed to battle their way out and somehow made it to the main Japanese headquarters further north. Even though they had been ordered to break out by their dying commander in order to report the fall of Suribachi, their failure to fight to the last was greeted there with fury. Their officer, a navy lieutenant, was called a coward and was nearly beheaded. One of the senior Japanese commanders, Captain Samaji Inouye, drew his sword, and the lieutenant knelt with his head bowed awaiting his death. But as Inouye raised the weapon, his aides wrestled it from his hands. America and WW2: when, how and why did the US get involved, and why they didn’t enter sooner? It would take the US forces more than a month to clear the island. Painfully inching their way across a largely barren landscape of rocks and craters, they often found themselves under fire from positions they thought they had cleared as the Japanese used their tunnel network to reoccupy them after the US forces had passed by. Some of the bitterest fighting took place near the centre of the island, around a high point called Hill 382; a heavily-fortified hill dubbed the Turkey Knob; and a shallow depression called the Amphitheater. For most Americans, however, the area around these related features was simply known as the Meat Grinder. The battle drags on Iwo Jima rapidly became a stinking hellhole with decomposing bodies and parts of bodies lying unburied. Soon the whole island became infested with vast swarms of flies, adding the threat of disease to the hazards faced by the combatants. Eventually the Americans were forced to send over planes to spray the place with the insecticide DDT in a bid to keep the problem under control. As US forces slowly advanced, Captain Inouye found himself cut off with nearly a thousand of his men near Tachiwa Point on the eastern side of the island and on 8 March, ignoring Kuribayashi’s orders against such a thing, he drew his sword and led them in a last desperate ‘banzai’ charge against the Americans. In the confused fighting that followed the US suffered nearly 350 casualties but the following day nearly 800 Japanese dead were counted. Inouye was one of them. Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? You debate By 11 March, the remaining Japanese were trapped in an area around Kitano Point at the far north of the island and on 16 March, General Harry Schmidt announced that the island was secure. Even then a few hundred men still held out in a fortified ravine that US marines dubbed the Gorge. In the early hours of 26 March, in a final act of defiance, the Japanese emerged from their tunnels to attack US positions. It is believed that this is when General Kuribayashi met his death, although his body was never identified because he had removed his insignia and fought as a common soldier. Only 216 Japanese soldiers had been captured during the fighting (many of them unconscious or too badly wounded to kill themselves) though more remained at large for some time, emerging from caves at night to forage for food. The last two, a pair of Japanese navy machine gunners, finally gave themselves up in January 1949, three and a half years after the end of the war. What happened after Iwo Jima? The Americans had suffered around 26,000 casualties in capturing the tiny island. It had been the only major battle in the Pacific War in which US casualties were higher than the total of Japanese dead. Five days after the fighting stopped on Iwo Jima the US launched a massive amphibious assault on the much larger Japanese island of Okinawa. In the 12-week battle, more than 50,000 US soldiers were killed or wounded, more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers died, and a similar number of civilians lost their lives. Iwo Jima and Okinawa had shown the Americans just how far the Japanese would go to defend their country. Julian Humphrys is a historian and development officer at the Battlefields Trust This content first appeared in the January 2015 issue of BBC History Revealed
Actium, 31 BC: the beginning of the end for Mark Antony and Cleopatra
Military historian Julian Humphrys explains what happened at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and why this naval clash off the Greek coast presaged both the end of the Roman Republic and the deaths of one history’s most famous couples
Mark Antony’s campaign to become sole ruler of Rome was crumbling. By the summer of 31 BC, his fleet was trapped in the Ambracian Gulf, on the west coast of Greece, by the ships of his enemy Octavian. He was chronically short of men, and the spot where his army was camped was a mosquito-infested marsh near Actium, on the south shore of the gulf. Their every move was being watched by Octavian’s men from the high ground on the opposite shore. Supplies were running out, malaria and dysentery were decimating his army, and the oarsmen who powered his ships were starting to desert. Antony had to make a move, and soon – if he didn’t, before long he’d have no forces with which to fight. The Battle of Actium was the climax of 13 years of civil wars. Sparked by the assassination of Julius Caesar, they had torn the Roman world apart. Julius Caesar’s heir, Octavian, and his former right-hand man, Antony, had been two-thirds of the triumvirate, which, in 42 BC, brought down Caesar’s murderers. But once that common enemy had been tackled, their fragile alliance began to fracture and the two became bitter enemies. Octavian’s power base was in the western part of the Roman territories, while Antony controlled the eastern part – with the aid of his lover, Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. That relationship gave Antony access to the riches of Egypt but it also scandalised Rome, a situation exacerbated by the fact that Antony had abandoned his Roman wife – who, significantly, was also Octavian’s sister. Octavian’s propaganda machine was soon hard at work, portraying the struggle not as one between him and Antony but as a war between virtuous Rome and decadent Egypt. What happened at the Battle of Actium? Who | Octavian and Agrippa (400 ship) versus Mark Antony and Cleopatra (500 ships, reduced to 230) When | 2 September 31 BC Where | Ionian Sea near Actium, off the west coast of Greece Why | Antony and Cleopatra were attempting to break through Octavian’s naval blockade Outcome | Victory for Octavian. Antony and Cleopatra escaped with their treasure but lost most of their ships In 32 BC, Antony and Cleopatra relocated their forces to the Ambracian Gulf. With a powerful navy numbering some 500 ships, they probably hoped to lure Octavian and his forces into Greece, before destroying his fleet in a pitched battle, thus cutting his supply lines. If so, the ploy worked. Octavian crossed into Greece with a large army. Disastrously for Antony, however, sickness ravaged his forces. Much of his land army was unfit for battle, and he could muster crews for barely half his fleet. Meanwhile, Octavian’s loyal general Marcus Agrippa led his own fleet along the coast, capturing key bases. Soon it was Antony and Cleopatra who found themselves cut off near Actium. Antony and Cleopatra, and 6 more of the best couples in history Antony made a foray to outflank Octavian’s army by marching round the Ambracian Gulf, but his efforts came to nothing. He was left with no choice but to abandon Greece, loading up his treasure, embarking as many of his soldiers onto his ships as he could and attempting to break through Octavian’s naval blockade. He would then, he hoped, pick up the prevailing wind, sail round the Peloponnese and make for Egypt. Ordering the rest of his army north to Macedonia, Antony readied his fleet – burning many ships for which he no longer had crews – and waited for the weather, which had been stormy for some days, to improve. On 2 September his chance came. At about noon, he moved his ships out of the gulf and into the open sea – where Octavian and Agrippa waited for them, backing up to give themselves enough room to manoeuvre. Who fought at the Battle of Actium? Gaius Julius Octavius (Octavian) Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, named by Caesar as his adopted son and heir; later known as Augustus. The two couldn’t have been more different: Caesar was bold, impetuous and an inspiring leader, whereas Octavian was careful, methodical and an effective delegator. Festina Lente (‘Make haste slowly’) was his motto. He was no great general, but his old friend Marcus Agrippa was an able soldier, and commanded his forces. Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) A key supporter of Julius Caesar, he helped the great general in his conquest of Gaul. Antony was a born soldier but a rather naive politician. There’s no doubt he fell under Cleopatra’s spell, but his romantic interest in the Queen was probably heightened by her great wealth and the resources available to her. Cleopatra VII A member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, a family of Greek origin who had ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years, Cleopatra infamously had love affairs with both Julius Caesar and then Antony. Indeed, she bore them both children. Though Octavian’s PR machine portrayed her as a decadent oriental seductress and the implacable enemy of Rome, Cleopatra’s main priority was to ensure the survival of her dynasty and the independence of Egypt. What was Antony and Cleopatra's plan? As the sweating oarsmen below decks hauled away, the two fleets began to close in on each other. Up on deck, archers drew their bows and those manning the ballistae (huge crossbows) stood ready to shoot; waiting soldiers gripped their weapons and offered silent prayers that they might not become the victims of enemy missiles. The ships’ prows were fitted with rams, but by this era ramming was a comparatively rare occurrence. Instead, helmsmen tried to manoeuvre their vessels into an advantageous position while soldiers rained arrows, javelins and ballista bolts into the ranks of their enemies, while waiting for an opportunity to board the opponent’s vessels. Alternate history: What if the Spanish Armada had landed? The outcome of another naval battle reimagined... Antony was drastically outnumbered. His fleet, reduced by his own hand, now numbered 230 ships compared with Octavian’s 400. True, many of his vessels were quinqueremes, formidable warships powered by hundreds of oarsmen and sporting high wooden towers packed with archers. But such ships were slow, and Octavian’s advantage in numbers soon began to tell. As the navies clashed and hand-to-hand fighting surged across the decks, some of Octavian’s ships began to work their way around the flanks of Antony’s smaller fleet. To counter this, and to avoid being completely encircled, Antony’s own ships edged sideways as well – creating a gap in the very centre of the line of battle. Cleopatra made her move. The galleys under her command had been waiting in reserve, guarding transport ships laden with treasure. Now, she ordered them to hoist their sails and make straight for the gap, quickly escaping from the gulf and getting clean away. Antony followed in hot pursuit. Abandoning his flagship for a smaller, lighter craft, he sailed after his lover, followed by a handful of galleys that escaped the fighting. The face of Cleopatra: was she really so beautiful? Octavian’s ships gave chase, and the men on Antony’s fleeing vessels frantically tried to make them lighter and faster. Towers, catapults, weapons and nonessential equipment were all hastily dumped into the sea; anything that might slow them down was thrown overboard in a desperate bid to enable the ships to outrun their pursuers. Who won the Battle of Actium? Eventually, Octavian’s fleet gave up the chase. Their leader would later claim that Cleopatra had sailed off in a panic, and that Antony had abandoned his comrades in order to slavishly follow his lover. In fact, it seems far more likely that this had been a pre-planned gambit, employed to rescue Antony’s treasure and escape with as many ships as possible. Antony’s wealth was safe – but most of his fleet, left behind at the gulf, had been abandoned to its fate. Anxious to preserve these ships and their crews for his own use, Octavian sailed from vessel to vessel, shouting that Antony had fled and pointing out the futility of further resistance. Not all of Antony’s crews were convinced. The 8 bloodiest Roman emperors in history As Octavian’s men approached, expecting to board the defeated ships and accept their surrender, they found themselves driven back by a barrage of missiles. Unwilling to risk their lives now that the victory had been won, Octavian’s men resorted to incineration. They circled Antony’s doomed ships, bombarding them with flaming javelins and burning arrows. Fanned by a stiff breeze, fires quickly spread through the wooden vessels – but even then, with their ships ablaze, some of Antony’s men refused to surrender. One account says that, when they ran out of water to put out the fires, they tried to smother the flames with the bodies of their dead comrades. But at when the weather took a turn for the worse and, faced with the risk of capsizing and drowning as well as burning alive, the survivors finally gave up the fight. Antony’s mighty fleet had been all but destroyed. What happened after the Actium? When news of the battle reached Antony’s eastern allies, most of them abandoned him, while the army he’d sent to Macedonia also defected. He retreated with some 60 ships to the fragile safety of Alexandria in Egypt. But the following summer, Octavian invaded. Deserted by his allies and his surviving troops, Antony committed suicide. Egypt was swallowed up by Octavian’s empire and, unwilling to face the humiliation of being paraded through Rome in Octavian’s triumphal procession, Cleopatra also killed herself. 6 things you (probably) didn’t know about Cleopatra Octavian, now undisputed master of the Roman world, introduced a series of reforms that gave him control over all aspects of government. Abolishing the old republic, he declared himself emperor for life. Taking the name Augustus, which means lofty or serene, he ruled for over 40 years, until his death in AD 14. Julian Humphrys is a historian and development officer at the Battlefields Trust This content first appeared in the May 2015 issue of BBC History Revealed
The Spanish Armada: one of history’s biggest fibs?
From Elizabeth I’s rousing speech at Tilbury to that famous game of bowls, much of what we think we know about the events of 1588 is the product of four centuries of spin, argues Lucy Worsley...
In a world where thousands of opinions are competing for our attention, we like to think of history books speaking with one clear voice to tell us the definitive truth about the past. But it’s not like that at all. One of the stopping-off points in the usual story of England’s journey towards becoming a global superpower with a world-class navy is the so-called defeat of the ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada in 1588. The quotation marks are used advisedly, for all is not as it seems. The schoolgirl version of the story is that Philip II of Spain, deadly foe of Elizabeth I of England, sent his huge Armada of ships to invade England and return it to the Catholic faith, only to be defeated by the plucky little English navy, whose courageous captains included Sir Francis Drake. Drake’s celebrated against-the-odds victory is often depicted as the moment that England took on Europe and won. For example, here’s Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain: “We must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls...” Was Sir Francis Drake really playing bowls when the Armada approached? Yet that game of bowls is problematic. You probably have the idea that it was while Drake was enjoying a game on the greens of Plymouth Hoe that the Spanish Armada was first sighted on the horizon. The usual story has Sir Francis turning to Lord Effingham, commander of the English fleet, and saying that there was no need to hurry, there would be plenty of time to finish the game, and to thrash the Spaniards too. It’s deep in our national psyche as a moment of coolness in the face of fire; of the stiff upper lip. Disappointingly, though, none of the early accounts of the Armada mention anyone playing bowls at all. It was a number of years after the event that one account finally describes sailors in Plymouth in July 1588 “dancing, bowling and making merry” on the shore as the Armada appeared. But it was an irresistibly juicy detail. In the 1730s, a biography of Sir Walter Ralegh tells us that Drake was determined to finish his game – and from then on it became ‘history’. Another strand of the traditional story of the Armada concentrates on the psychodrama between two bitter and personal enemies: Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I, locked in an existential struggle between their differing religious beliefs. In 1588, Philip was 61, a devout Catholic and king of the biggest empire in the world, reaching from South America to the Philippines. Elizabeth I was in her 50s, still unmarried, still childless, and ruling over a Protestant England in which Catholic plots were a constant threat. Was Elizabeth I really a ‘Virgin Queen’? But in 1554, some 34 years earlier, Philip had set sail from the northern Spanish port of Corunna in order to become part of the Tudor royal family. We often forget that before he was king of Spain, Philip II – the great villain in the Armada story – spent four years as king of England, due to his marriage to Mary, Elizabeth’s older half-sister. Mary was desperate to secure England’s future as a Catholic country, and dreaded the thought that she might die childless and leave the Protestant Elizabeth to take the throne. But Philip felt differently. The alternative to Elizabeth, in the event of his and Mary’s marriage producing no children, was Mary, Queen of Scots. She was Catholic, which was a plus, but – due to her ancestry and powerful ties to the French court – she would have taken England firmly into the orbit of Philip’s French enemies, which was intolerable. Listen | Following calls for statues of Drake to be removed for his role in the slave trade, Claire Jowitt explores a dark chapter in Tudor history So Philip rooted for his sister-in-law, persuading Mary to release Elizabeth from the house arrest under which she had been placed. When Mary lay dying, Philip realised that the only way he could persuade Elizabeth to support Catholics was to marry her, and get her to convert. And so he proposed. Elizabeth, as ever, refused to commit herself. A few months later, hearing that Philip had started new negotiations with a French princess, she said (and this is classic Elizabeth I) that he couldn’t have loved her all that much if he couldn’t wait a month or two for an answer. Although the proposed match failed to materialise, Elizabeth and Philip remained friends. But over the next decade, as Elizabeth and her nation became decidedly Protestant, there were rumblings from Rome. In the late 1560s, Catholics in the north of England attempted an unsuccessful rebellion. To encourage them, in 1570 the pope excommunicated their queen. Elizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics Philip was now under pressure from Rome to topple Elizabeth. But with his vast empire to run, he had plenty of other priorities. Although films – notably Elizabeth: The Golden Age, directed by Shekhar Kapur – often show Philip as some sort of God-crazed psychopath, religion alone wasn’t a strong enough reason for Philip to invade England. Two other factors tipped his hand: firstly, Drake’s raids on Spanish ships, which Philip saw as piracy. Then there was Elizabeth’s support of Philip’s rebellious Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. This finally goaded Philip into planning his Armada. Listen | Jessie Childs tells the story of Tudor gentleman Thomas Tresham whose faith set him at odds with the Virgin Queen Invincibility myth The Spanish fleet that Philip assembled is usually depicted as an ‘invincible’ Goliath to England’s little David of a navy. In reality, it was anything but. It wasn’t even the biggest fleet ever to have attacked England: the Norman invasion fleet of 1066, and the French force that crossed the Channel in 1545 and sank the Mary Rose, both boasted more vessels. The Spanish had around 130 ships – from war galleons to messenger vessels and provision boats. Although the English navy was smaller, a host of merchant and private boats were commandeered to create a force equal to that of the Spanish. And, anyway, the invasion fleet had sailed into trouble long before it had an opportunity to engage its English foes. Soon after departing from Lisbon, they faced disease, rotting provisions and bad weather. They had to stop at Corunna for repairs. From there, the commander of the fleet wrote to Philip, confessing that he could see “hardly any of those on the Armada with any knowledge or ability to perform the duties entrusted to them... we are very weak”. Was the Spanish campaign doomed to fail from the start? But Philip said the attack was to go ahead anyway. So off the Armada went, planning to sail up the English Channel towards its narrowest point. There it was to meet with an army of soldiers from the Netherlands led by the Duke of Parma, who were to be ferried across on barges to invade Kent. First, though, the Spanish had to make it up the Channel, and here they began to experience more problems. The first major casualties they experienced were self-inflicted: a crash and explosion lost them two ships. Dramatic effect Once the Spanish were sailing up the Channel, the next narrative beat in most popular retellings of the story is Elizabeth I’s rousing speech to her men at Tilbury on the northern bank of the Thames. That famous piece of oratory – in which the queen tells the assembled troops that she may “have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king” – has been dramatised in countless films. Elizabeth is often depicted riding a horse, dressed in white velvet, or even in armour. “I myself will be your general,” she tells her men. But this involves a tweaking to the timing of events for dramatic effect. Elizabeth had come up with the plan to address the troops while the Spanish were still in the Channel. Yet by the time she did so, the Armada were already staring defeat in the face. Eleven days earlier, English fireships had attacked the Spanish fleet while it was waiting off France for its rendezvous with Parma’s army. These burning vessels caused the Spanish to panic, with further crashes and losses. So when Elizabeth uttered her famous words at Tilbury, what was left of the Armada was on its way home, running up around Scotland and Ireland to get back to Spain. And there, in the north, the death knell was dealt to Spanish plans: not by Drake, Elizabeth I or brave English sailors – but by bad weather. Alternate history: what if the Spanish Armada had succeeded? Interestingly, the content as well as the timing of Elizabeth’s speech has also ‘evolved’ over time. The sources don’t mention the famous “heart and stomach of a king” line until more than three decades after the event. It was first introduced by a Protestant chaplain who had been at Tilbury – and it sounds like just the sort of thing Elizabeth would have said. But historians cannot be sure that she really used those very words. Does that matter? Tilbury has become a touchstone of history, not because of the facts, but because of the emotion it inspires. Shortly before the Second World War, when the actor Flora Robson, playing Elizabeth I, delivered the speech in the 1937 film Fire Over England, she was really talking about the feared Nazi invasion. Eight decades later, Elizabeth’s words were employed again – this time to sell feminism, football and beer as part of a Budweiser advertising campaign throwing its support behind the England Lionesses in the 2019 Women’s World Cup. As these examples prove, the idea that Elizabeth, Drake and underdog pluck defeated a practically invincible Armada is now firmly established at the heart of England’s conception of itself. The Victorians found this idea particularly appealing. They were especially drawn to a story about a nation with a brilliant navy – something that’s reflected in the fact that the Armada formed part of Prince Albert’s planned decorative scheme for the House of Lords. But, for all the veneration of Drake and co, there was no straight line from 1588 to Britain’s imperial greatness in the 18th and 19th centuries. For one thing, the defeat of the Armada didn’t bring victory in the war with Spain; in fact, that conflict dragged on into the 17th century. For another, the Spanish themselves never really saw the Armada as a significant setback. And that’s because, in 1589, the English suffered an embarrassing naval disaster of their own. That year, Drake led a so-called ‘Counter Armada’, with the aim of destroying the remainder of Philip’s fleet while it was under repair in Santander. It was a fiasco, in which 15,000 Englishmen died, and many of the 86 ships were lost. 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Spanish Armada Drake and his fleet were forced – just like Philip II’s own fleet a year earlier – to stop at Corunna for lack of provisions. And here, a local woman, Maria Pita, led fierce resistance against the English navy. Still celebrated as a heroine in Corunna, Pita is said to have killed an English soldier herself, thereby inspiring the town to victory. In another football connection, she has become a symbol of the local women’s team. Someone should have told Margaret Thatcher about the ‘Counter Armada’. When Spain tried, unsuccessfully, to extradite the Chilean dictator General Pinochet from Britain for human rights abuses, the British prime minister sprang to the defence of the man who’d supported her during the Falklands War. She sent him a silver plate commemorating the English victory over the Spanish Armada, with a note decrying Spanish colonialism. Thatcher herself had often been photographed among her troops during the Falklands conflict, yet always appeared hyper-feminine in her personal style. She had learned a way of being a female war leader from Elizabeth I – to be womanly, yet to deny that gender mattered. Listen | Historian and author Dominic Sandbrook explores the pivotal early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in Britain: 1979-1982 The legend of the Spanish Armada created by the Elizabethans and retold by generations after them has a powerful legacy. In times of crisis – from the Second World War to the Falklands – it’s been used to convince us that this small island can take on superpowers; that we come from a long line of cool-headed and inspirational leaders; that, small as we are, we can still play a mighty role on the world stage. The popular version of the story of the Armada – true or not – gives us confidence to believe in that fantasy. Who knows where this impressive mingling of facts, fantasy and fibs might take us next? Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. The Spanish Armada was one of the topics she covered in her three-part series History’s Biggest Fibs on BBC Four in February 2020. This article was first published in the February 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Battle of the Atlantic: why Britain almost lost to Hitler's U-boats
Historian Gavin Mortimer delivers an explosive tale of how the British ignored the German U-boat threat in the early days of the Battle of the Atlantic – and how that could have led to defeat in the Second World War
On the second day of September 1939, a 13,000-ton liner, SS Athenia, of the Donaldson Atlantic Line, set sail from Liverpool for Montreal, across the Atlantic Ocean. Among the 1,103 passengers were a number of German Jews and 72 British nationals, along with 315 crew, under the command of Captain James Cook. The next day, the Athenia was makin good progress as passengers sat down to dinner. There was only one topic of conversation: the message pinned to the ship’s noticeboard that morning announcing Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. Not all passengers had an appetite. A few, like Mrs McMillan Wallace, were getting some fresh air on the promenade deck. Suddenly from the crow’s nest she heard a a yell: “Submarine!” She looked out to sea and saw an ominous white wake. Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp sounded the klaxon for battle stations, as U-30 dipped below the surface of the Atlantic to attack what he thought was “an armed merchant cruiser” travelling at 16 knots. When the U-boat was 1,600 yards from its target, Lemp “called out his firing intervals for a spread of four torpedoes”. Back came the message: “Torpedoes loose!” Greyhound, a World War Two film starring Tom Hanks, is set at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic. Read more from us: The real history that inspired WW2 film Greyhound The Battle of the Atlantic: the "desperate" WW2 campaign featured in Tom Hanks film Greyhound Danger in the deep: key questions about the Battle of the Atlantic answered At 7.43pm, the Athenia shook with a mighty explosion. The ship listed to port, and diners screamed in confusion as tables, chairs and cutlery went flying. In the melee, husbands were separated from wives, mothers from children and sisters from brothers. The crew rushed to lower the 26 lifeboats, as a few hundred yards away the crew of U-30 roared their delight. They had struck the first submarine blow for the fatherland, sinking an armed cruiser less than 12 hours after the declaration of war. But as Lemp ordered the U-boat’s withdrawal, the wireless picked up a distress signal. It wasn’t an armed cruiser slipping beneath the waves: it was a passenger ship. “What a mess,” muttered a shocked Lemp.“What a mess.” The Second World War: a timeline A few hours before 117 passengers and crew went down with the Athenia, Winston Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in the war cabinet formed by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. One of Churchill’s first calls was to Admiral Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, who provided a thorough briefing on the state of the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, Pound was the head of a service dangerously naive to the threat posed by U-boats. In the late 1930s, senior figures at the Admiralty thought that the errors made during the U-boat campaign of World War I had convinced Germany that submarine warfare was not of strategic benefit. There was also the Second London Naval Treaty, signed by 30 countries in 1936 (including Germany), which outlawed ‘unrestricted warfare’ at sea. For these reasons, the Admiralty believed the naval battles of World War II would be between surface vessels. Winston Churchill's first crisis The sinking of the Athenia presented Churchill with his first crisis. Informed that the Germans had 60 U-boats (they had in fact 46 with 100 more in production), he introduced the convoy system – whereby merchant ships sailed en masse with naval escorts – but there was a problem: the Admiralty’s complacency in the interwar years had resulted in a lack of suitable vessels. Some ships would just have to take their chances crossing the Atlantic. The dismay felt by Churchill at the sinking of the Athenia was replicated by Adolf Hitler. He was well aware of the mistakes made during World War I, when U-boat attacks on American vessels had precipitated that country’s entry into the war. The Führer didn’t want to provoke US President Franklin Roosevelt and cause the past to repeat. “Until further orders, no hostile action will be taken against passenger liners, even when sailing under escort,” he ordered, a command that frustrated Rear Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was in charge of the U-boat fleet. It wasn’t Dönitz’s only irritation. A U-boat commander in the first war, he was convinced that submarines were the most potent weapon in the German navy, and the best means to defeat the country’s Allied adversaries. This strategy wasn’t shared by Erich Raeder, head of the navy, who believed surface vessels were the most effective way to fight the British at sea. A pessimist compared with the more positive Dönitz, Raeder baulked at his subordinate’s demand for a fleet of 300 U-boats, despite the damage they inflicted. Between September and December 1939, the U-boats sank 110 merchant vessels, the consequences of which were soon felt in Britain. With 70 per cent of its food supply imported, Britain could ill afford to lose so many ships. There were also the precious metals required for the war effort: tin, lead, iron ore, aluminium, copper and zinc – all now resting on the ocean bed. This situation wasn’t what the Royal Navy had envisaged in the buildup to war, and nor was the U-boat’s ‘wolfpack’ tactic of attacking at night and on the surface. Attached to the hulls of British surface ships were the much-heralded ASDIC (Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee) detection devices, which could locate a U-boat with a ‘ping’ from an echo. But ASDIC only worked if the U-boats were underwater. Hitler senses success The early success of the U-boat attacks gave Hitler a glimpse of what they might achieve. He relaxed the rules of engagement so that now his submarines could attack any vessel that was using its wireless. What Hitler didn’t do, however, was increase U-boat production – instead being persuaded by Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, to prioritise aircraft manufacture. Johnnie Walker: U-boat hunter in the Second World War In August 1940 alone, 56 merchant ships were sunk by U-boats. But there was some good news for Churchill at the beginning of September, when he persuaded Roosevelt to sign the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, whereby the US transferred 50 of its old destroyers to Britain in exchange for land rights on British possessions. Now convoys would have better protection as they made the hazardous crossing. Or that was the theory. On 13 September 1940, the SS City of Benares sailed from Liverpool, bound for Canada. Among the 407 crew and passengers were 90 children, whose parents wanted them out of harm’s way as the Luftwaffe intensified the Blitz. There were 20 vessels in total in the convoy, escorted by one destroyer and two armed sloops. The sinking of the SS City of Benares Four days out of England, the City of Benares was hit by a U-boat torpedo just as 11-year-old Fred Steels climbed into bed. As water rushed into the cabin, he rushed out. “When I got out of the cabin, there was a huge hole in the deck,” Steels later recalled. “A dirty great seaman grabbed me and another boy and threw us into a lifeboat.” In the panic to abandon the rapidly sinking vessel, many passengers were thrown into the water beside poorly launched lifeboats. Steels was one of the lucky ones. His lifeboat, No 12, was in the capable hands of Fourth Officer Ronald Cooper, who had under his command 32 Indian crew, four British and six boys with their two chaperones. “We were frightened, but we tried not to show it,” remembered Steels. Most survivors were picked up within 12 hours, but lifeboat No 12 had drifted out of sight. When dawn broke, Cooper handed out sardines, biscuits and water to the occupants of the boat and led them in a series of songs. Soon, morale began to waver in the face of mountainous seas. “We went through three storms – great Atlantic gales,” said Steels. After a week adrift on the Atlantic, there was no longer any singing, nor much in the way of food. Cold, wet and hungry, the survivors lay huddled in the boat. On day eight they were spotted by an RAF flying boat, and within hours Steels was on board a Royal Navy destroyer. In his report, Cooper remarked that the boys had “behaved splendidly”. In all, 260 people drowned in the sinking of the City of Benares, including 77 of the 90 children. The incident caused worldwide outrage, but the government and the Admiralty knew it had to take some of the blame: it was evident that U-boats were operating further west than previously thought, and the ‘mid-Atlantic gap’ – the section of the ocean that was beyond the range of RAF Coastal Command aircraft – had to be closed. That meant increased protection for convoys from destroyers. Nevertheless, the U-boats continued to take a heavy toll on the Atlantic convoys: 59 ships were sunk in September 1940 and 63 in October, which, combined with the 56 vessels lost in August, meant that in three months 700,000 tons of supplies had disappeared beneath the waves. The figures were even worse in early 1941, with nearly one million tons lost in February and March. Churchill knew such losses were unsustainable. And then: a glimmer of hope for the Prime Minister. On 17 March 17 1941, U-100 was sunk by the destroyer HMS Vanoc, which had been guided to its prey by a seaborne radar device, a first in the Battle of the Atlantic. That wasn’t the only weapon in the Admiralty’s armoury. In the same month the Vanoc sunk U-100, a British destroyer seized an armed German trawler close to the Norwegian Lofoten Islands. A search of the vessel unearthed documents containing codes. They were sent to Bletchley Park, a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire that housed a team of brilliant codebreakers. Sinking the Bismarck: a cat and mouse chase across the Atlantic The discovery of Enigma machine Among the documents found on the trawler was one that provided the settings for the typewriter-like German cipher machine Enigma. The previous year, a young mathematician called Alan Turing - benefiting from information provided by Polish codebreakers - had not only deduced how Enigma functioned, but also created what he called his ‘bombe’: a machine that deciphered the Enigma codes to reveal their contents. The codes seized in Norway were used to decrypt several German naval messages, and a few weeks later Britain got lucky again, at the same time that Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp’s fortune ran out: in May 1941, Lemp drowned when the submarine he was commanding, U-110, was attacked and forced to the surface of the Atlantic 300 miles west of Ireland. On board was found an intact Enigma machine, the first to fall into British hands. The discovery wasn’t as significant as the Admiralty had hoped, though, and for the most part Ultra - the codeword for the Bletchley Park intelligence - furnished the Navy with limited advantages during the long years of the Battle of the Atlantic. In January 1942, a fourth ‘rotor’ was installed in the German naval Enigma, and it took the brains at Bletchley Park ten months to crack the new codes. In addition, Germany’s own naval intelligence, B-Dienst, was skilled in decrypting Royal Naval messages, so in effect the two departments cancelled each other out. Three and a half years after the Battle of the Atlantic had begun, the conflict was nearing its climax. The winter of 1943 was especially brutal for the Merchant Navy, both on account of the weather and U-boat activity. A total of 38 vessels were sunk in January and 63 in February 1943, but in March the tally reached crisis point for the Allies. That month, three U-boat wolf packs ambushed two convoys, SC122 and HX229, as they crossed the Atlantic, sending 141,000 tons of shipping and more than 300 merchant seamen to the ocean bed. As the Admiralty reflected a few months later, “the Germans never came so near to disrupting communications between the New World and the Old as in the firstb 20 days of March 1943”. That they didn’t was because, in the nick of time, the Allies brought into service the technology required to defeat their foe. The first was HF/DF, nicknamed ‘huff-duff’, a high-frequency radio direction finder fitted to many escort vessels. It was able to detect the smallest signal sent from one U-boat to another, as well as messages sent between a submarine pack and their U-boat HQ in France. Once detected, the submarine appeared as a point of light on a fluorescent screen, and a fast escort vessel set off on the bearing to attack it. Also deployed was a new 10cm radar system, used in warships and the air, based on the system of coastal radar stations that had proved so effective in the battle of Britain. The radar had been in use for a while, but German U-boat commanders believed they had negated its effect with the installation of a radar detection system known as the Metox 600, which warned when an enemy aircraft was within 60 miles. Did the British Navy have submarines during the battle of the Atlantic? One weapon deployed by the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic was the X-Craft – a vessel that was only 51 feet in length and crewed by just a commander, pilot, engineer and diver. In September 1943, two of these midget submarines attacked the battleship Tirpitz, the sister ship of the Bismarck, while it was at anchor at Kåfjord in northern Norway. The Tirpitz, which had been used to intercept Allied convoys transporting supplies to the Soviet Union, was badly damaged in the attack and put out of action for six months. The skippers of the midget subs, Lieutenants Place and Cameron, were awarded the Victoria Cross, the citation describing how they “worked their small craft past the close anti-submarine and torpedo nets surrounding the Tirpitz, and from a position inside these nets, carried out a cool and determined attack”. X-Craft later played an important role in D-Day, guiding the main invasion fleet accurately to the beaches. The crew of U-333 discovered otherwise in March, when they were attacked at night by a Wellington bomber that “just jumped out of the darkness”. The submarine escaped with minor damage, but Dönitz was alarmed when he heard of the attack. Not only did the Allies have groundbreaking technology at their disposal, but Britain’s war cabinet had belatedly recognised the importance of aircraft support for convoys. In March 1943, it allocated 39 VLR (Very Long Range) Liberators to Coastal Command, with dozens more to follow. Dönitz could only look on in envy, deprived of similar aerial resources. The 11 most significant battles of the Second World War The consequences were to quickly prove catastrophic for his fleet of U-boats. On 1 May, two convoys, HX237 and SC129, sailed from New York for Liverpool. Forty U-boats were sent to sink the 72 freighters, stacked with supplies for Britain, but managed to destroy only five; in the deadly game of marine cat and mouse, the convoy’s escort located and sank the same number of U-boats. In total, 56 U-boats were sunk in April and May 1943, and among the hundreds drowned was Dönitz’s own son, Peter, killed on his first patrol. The Battle of the Atlantic would continue, but with the technology and aircraft resources now at the Allies’ disposal, the outcome was guaranteed. So, too, was Britain’s vital supply line to North America. The cost to both sides was enormous, as was the courage of sailors and submariners, whose grave was the grey, pitiless Atlantic. Of the 38,000 men who served in the U-boats, only 8,000 survived the war; no other branch of any service in any nation that participated in the war suffered such a casualty rate. One of the very few commanders to survive was Peter-Erich Cremer, who returned to Germany desolate. “Most of my comrades were no longer alive; the years of my youth had gone,” he reflected. “All around me was emptiness.” What role did the Merchant Navy play during the battle of the Atlantic? The Merchant Navy Memorial in Bristol was unveiled by the Princess Royal in May 2001, a worthy tribute to the 32,000 merchant seaman who lost their lives during World War II. Yet the Merchant Navy, known as the ‘fourth service’, had to wait until 2000 before its veterans were permitted to march as an official body in the Cenotaph commemorations. In all, about 185,000 seaman flew the ‘Red Duster’ – the Merchant Navy ensign – during the war,"performing a vital role around the world, while the force proportionally lost more men than any of the other three services. It had been taken over by the Admiralty in August 1939, and on the first day of the war, 3 September, suffered its first losses when 18 of its seaman went down with the SS Athenia when it was torpedoed in the Atlantic en route to Canada. U-boats were the fear that haunted every merchant seaman. “Every second of every minute of every day, you could have had a torpedo in you,” recalled one veteran, Ronald Quested, in a 2015 interview. “Nobody could tell you how many U-boats"were around.” German U-boats weren’t the only enemy, however, and in December 1941 the service had 98 vessels sunk by the Japanese navy in the South China Sea. On every ocean and sea during the war the merchant navy sailed, transporting vital supplies for the Allied effort on ships crewed by men from Britain, Ireland, Australia, India, South Africa, Canada, China, Africa and the Caribbean. Conditions were often atrocious, and the spectre of death was never far away. “I was attacked by mines, U-boats, bombers,” recalls Donald Hunter, a veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic. “We had the bloody lot.” War on the water elsewhere: the Mediterranean and the Pacific As well as the Atlantic, two other watery theatres witnessed intense submarine battles during World War II. The first was in the Mediterranean, where a submarine campaign was waged from September 1941 to September 1944, inflicting a heavy toll on both German and British submarines. Of the 60 U-boats that entered the Med through the Strait of Gibraltar in 1941, only one returned, but they inflicted great damage on the Allied convoys endeavouring to supply the besieged island of Malta!and British troops in North Africa. The Royal Navy’s 10th Submarine Flotilla, based in Malta from 1941 onwards, was tasked with protecting the convoys the U-boats were attacking, as well as trying to disrupt Axis supplies to their own forces in North Africa. US submarines achieved notable success in the Pacific as they sought to avenge the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Operating from that same Hawaiian base, as well as Fremantle and Brisbane in Australia, American submarines were in continual action until the surrender of Japan in August 1945. Pearl Harbor aftermath: the fallout from the attack Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War Overall, US submarines sank 1,314 enemy ships in the Pacific, a total of 5.3 million tons of shipping, representing 55 per cent of Japan’s maritime losses. The price, though, was heavy, and of the 16,000 American submariners who served, 375 offcers and 3,131 enlisted men were lost, along with 52 submarines. Nonetheless, this still represented the lowest casualty rate of any combatant submarine service in World War II. Arguably the most famous American ace was Richard O’Kane, who sank 33 enemy ships while in command of USS Tang. In addition, the Tang rescued numerous American aircrew who had bailed out into the ocean. This content first appeared in the April 2019 issue of BBC History Revealed
Danger in the deep: key questions about the Battle of the Atlantic answered
Jonathan Dimbleby talks to BBC History Magazine editor Rob Attar about how German U-boats nearly changed the course of the Second World War during the Battle of the Atlantic – and why salvation for the Allies came from the skies...
Jonathan Dimbleby, author of The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War, answers key questions about one of the most important campaigns of World War Two... How important was the Battle of the Atlantic to the outcome of the war? It was fundamental. The Atlantic was the route by which all resources came to Britain, without which the country would have collapsed. Had we lost the battle, we wouldn’t have had enough weapons – nor the industrial capacity to make weapons – and American troops would not have been able to get across for D-Day. In fact, there wouldn’t have been a D-Day. Was it possible that the Allies could have lost the Battle of the Atlantic? With the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that we were likely to win, but at the time it appeared that we could very easily lose. Had Adolf Hitler not been so obsessed with the urge to conquer Russia, and instead diverted more resources to the Atlantic, it could have been a very close-run thing. To my mind it’s academic whether we could or couldn’t have lost, because what is intriguing is that it was an open question for so long. With all the demands on ships elsewhere, it took only a small number of vessels to be lost in the Atlantic for the reduction in supplies to inhibit the ability to wage war. Winston Churchill claimed that nothing caused him greater anxiety than the U-boat threat, while President Roosevelt said that the war would in the end be won or lost in the Atlantic. At the start of the battle, which of the two sides was best prepared? Neither was very well prepared. The British came to the battle having misread the lessons of the First World War – when U-boats first displayed their destructive potential – and they underestimated their capacity to damage Allied routes across the Atlantic. They did not have enough escorts to protect their ships, and were torn between that requirement and the need to protect against invasion across the Channel. There just weren’t enough ships to go round. As for the Germans, they were torn internally. Grand Admiral Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, believed that surface vessels posed the greater threat, whereas U-boat commander-in-chief Karl Dönitz thought that submarines would be most effective. This is still contentious territory because there is no doubt that great German ships such as the Bismarck had the capacity to cause significant damage. However, Dönitz argued that U-boats – properly resourced and in large enough numbers – would be much more effective in the tonnage war. If they could sink more tonnes of shipping than the Allies could build, it would result in victory for the Third Reich. Sinking the Bismarck: a cat and mouse chase across the Atlantic Was Dönitz right? Yes, I think he was. At the start of the war he set a rather arbitrary requirement of 300 U-boats, yet he began with only 60 or so. When you consider that some of these would always be journeying to and from the battlefield, and some would be undergoing repairs, he often had only around 20 U-boats operational at any one time. However, the amount of damage that such a relatively small number of U-boats could inflict was quite astonishing – particularly when they operated in wolf packs from French ports after France had been neutralised. One of the most devastating attacks occurred in March 1943 when 22 ships from two convoys were sunk by a large group of U-boats. It was at this point that the British Air Ministry was persuaded that very long range bombers – which had been theoretically available for nearly two years – could be deployed in the mid-Atlantic to cover what was known as the Atlantic gap. Within two months, the story of the battle had completely changed – and by May 1943 the campaign had been won. Johnnie Walker: U-boat hunter in the Second World War So was the introduction of such bombers the crucial factor in Allied victory? U-boats were more frightened of aeroplanes than anything else. Planes came out of the sky at high speed, forcing the U-boats to keep diving, meaning that they lost contact with the convoys. Prior to the introduction of the very long range bombers there was a large area in the mid-Atlantic that could not be reached from Iceland, Greenland, Northern Ireland, Scotland or the US by existing aircraft. When these bombers first became available they were given to the Air Ministry which, in an extraordinarily dogmatic way, held on to them rather than making them available to the Admiralty. This contributed to a ferocious internal struggle between the two departments that one admiral likened to being more bitter than “our war against the Hun”. Listen | Jonathan Dimbleby describes the pivotal World War Two naval clash Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris was convinced that the strategic bombing of Germany was the most effective way of bringing that country to heel, and that it was a waste to use aeroplanes to protect merchant convoys. Churchill invariably sided with Harris, until very late in the day, thus prolonging the Battle of the Atlantic by at least a year. As a result a great many ships were sunk and lives lost unnecessarily. Churchill was a great war leader but this was a great error, the greatest, in my view, of his entire leadership between 1940 and 1942. When the Air Ministry finally consented, it took just 40 of the very long range bombers to transform the battle. So the introduction of the bombers was absolutely fundamental – but of course other things counted, including intelligence, weaponry, the skill of escort captains and the tactics they had begun to deploy to thwart U-boat attacks. How important was the role of Bletchley Park? In my view, not as important as people like to believe – especially if they watch movies! Of course, Enigma was broken thanks to Turing and his team. However, the naval Enigma was more complicated and better protected than the land version, and there were key periods where we couldn’t break it. The delays were quite considerable, despite the amazing efforts and skill within Bletchley. Between January and December 1942 there was nearly a year when we were not able to penetrate German codes at all; this was a big killing time, to use an unfortunate contemporary phrase. Meanwhile, the German codebreaking system was getting into the British naval codes almost with impunity because of an underinvestment in security on our side. So at key points they were breaking our codes when we weren’t breaking theirs – and even when we were breaking their codes and diverting convoys accordingly, these orders to divert were being picked up by Dönitz, who was able to redirect the submarines. Enigma would then pick up on these redirections, and a kind of blind man’s buff went on. It was an extraordinary period. What was life like for those who served in the battle? In some ways it was just like the experience of war more generally: long hours and days of discomfort and boredom, punctuated by moments of extreme danger. It was a stressful experience and you had to be very resilient. The weather played a big part in this. Sometimes ships would be sailing through appalling storms, unable to move. Slow, lumbering merchant vessels could not even make headway against the ferocity of these gales, and very often they would be driven back and unable to advance any distance at all. It could be extremely uncomfortable, very cold and very frightening. On the other hand, when the weather was lovely and skies were balmy you might think that all was well – but this was actually the most dangerous time, when it was easiest for the U-boats to attack. 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Second World War There was often not much in the way of medical facilities. Nicholas Monsarrat, whose novel The Cruel Sea was set during the battle, joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and found himself a ship’s surgeon. He had never wielded a scalpel in anger nor given an injection, yet he found himself putting people’s eyes back in, stuffing their guts back into their stomachs. People were required to do things, while short of antibiotics – short of anything – to ease pain and suffering. Plus the food was dreadful, with not enough storage or fridge space. Things were similar in the U-boats, which were extremely cramped and got very airless. If you were forced down by a ship or aeroplane depth charging, you would stay underwater until you were virtually asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen. You would be there waiting, waiting, waiting with the prospect of another depth charge descending from the surface. There would be the sound of creaking hulls and then, suddenly, massive explosions all around, leaving the whole U-boat shaking and shivering – or, very often, completely destroyed. How much did people in Britain follow the battle? People noticed when ships went down, but in general it was very under-reported. Winston Churchill required significant censorship of the fact that U-boats were sinking British, Allied and neutral cargo ships. He was extremely worried about the paucity of good news – that very few U-boat crews were being captured compared with the huge Allied tonnage being lost month after month. There had to be some reporting of it, but it was often delayed and calculated to minimise the impact. This was compounded by the fact that the battle was being fought far away, out at sea, and that very few reporters were following the events. So in general the British public did not know a great deal about the sea war at the time. What do you hope readers might take from your book – The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War – about the battle? I wanted my book to have an upstairs/downstairs quality, exploring the dramas at sea and in the capitals of the warring powers. I’ve sought to place the battle in the context of the wider war and I hope I’ve told the story in a way that brings it alive and makes people aware of just how vital these events were. The Atlantic was a lifeline – the carotid artery on which Britain depended. This was no motorway but a minefield, and it was a great mercy that the ships made it through. Jonathan Dimbleby is a broadcaster, film-maker and historian who regularly presents BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? His books include Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein and The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War This article was first published in the Christmas 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Battle of the Atlantic: the "desperate" WW2 campaign featured in Tom Hanks film Greyhound
Greyhound, an upcoming World War Two film starring Tom Hanks, is set at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic. But how much do you know about this crucial period of Second World War history, which saw the Merchant Navy fend off German Kriegsmarine's U-boats? Here GH Bennett explores the desperate six-year campaign to preserve the Atlantic supply line and prevent Britain from starving
Learn about the campaign featured in forthcoming Hollywood film Greyhound, starring Tom Hanks and based on C S Forester’s 1955 novel The Good Shepherd In March 1941 Winston Churchill coined the phrase ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ to describe a campaign that had opened on 3 September 1939. That battle would not conclude until the last day of the war. It was the longest, and perhaps strangest, clash of the Second World War – one that would see British merchant seamen using kites and wire-carrying rockets in defence of their ships. In a struggle for control of the sea lanes from Britain to the Americas, the Royal Navy and United States Navy would be pitted against the German Kriegsmarine. Against the sea lanes, upon which depended Britain’s ability to feed and maintain itself in the war, Germany would deploy U-boat submarines, surface raiders, mines and aircraft. The convoys of merchant ships would be defended by a variety of armed escort vessels from makeshift ships like armed merchant cruisers and trawlers through to purpose-built corvettes, frigates and destroyers. It was a war of technological innovation – of Enigma code-breaking, radar, sonar and high frequency direction-finding. From 1940 until 1943 the combat in the Atlantic hung in the balance. Yet, due in part to the fact that they were able to make better use of these technical innovations than the enemy, from the middle of 1943 the Allies slowly gained the upper hand. Success and failure in the battle would be measured in tonnage: tonnage of ships sunk and tonnage of cargo delivered safe to port. Civilians would play a significant part in the battle. Campaigns like ‘Dig for Victory’ and ‘Make do and Mend’ were ancillary elements in the Battle of the Atlantic – programmes aimed at minimising civilian demand on the cargoes from North America. But the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic depended most heavily on one group of civilians in particular: the men and, in some cases, the women who made up the British Merchant Navy. Bismarck: why was the WW2 German battleship named after the Iron Chancellor so feared? At the start of hostilities in 1939 the British Merchant Navy made up almost a third of the world’s total merchant shipping. Its strength was testament to generations of British shipping company owners who over the past 100 years had embraced the technological shift from sail to steam to oil power, and had been ready to respond to newly emerging routes carrying everything from guano to corned beef. The shipping fleet in 1939 was as diverse as it was large, embracing passenger liners (easily converted into troop ships or armed merchant cruisers), fast vessels such as refrigerated cargo ships, oil and petrol tankers, cargo liners, tramp steamers, coasters and colliers. A typical ship: MV Olivebank MV Olivebank was one of 18 identical 5,000-gross-registered-ton cargo ships built for Andrew Weir and Company in the mid-1920s. In her five holds Olivebank could carry everything from agricultural produce to weapons of war. While she survived the war, eight of her sister ships were sadly not so fortunate. Olivebank was the British empire in microcosm. She had a crew of 57 (30 per cent Europeans and 70 per cent lascars - sailors from the Indian subcontinent). The senior personnel of the ship were European (master, officers and engineers, including apprentice deck officers who could be as young as 16). In addition, the ship carried 8 to 10 gunners drawn from the Royal Artillery and Royal Navy. Accommodation for Europeans was in two sets of cabins amidships, while lascars lived in a cramped fo'c'sle below deck in the bows. Asian members of the crew, recruited in Bengal, were almost all Muslims. They were organised in three departments: deck, engine room and catering. The deck department was led by the ‘serang’ (or bosun), the ‘tindal’ (his deputy), and the ‘cassab’ (storekeeper). Four other men were rated as ‘seacunnies’. They steered the ship, ran messages, and acted as gangway watchmen in port. Below them in the hierarchy came the ‘calassies’ (able and ordinary seamen). They had to clean decks, rig cargo-handling gear and act as lookouts. In the engine room a similar hierarchy existed. Beneath the engine room serang and tindal there was a ‘donkeyman’ to look after auxiliary machinery and ‘greasers’ to service the main engines. The catering department, run by the chief steward, was primarily concerned with caring for the European officers. Under the chief were three stewards, two of whom served meals in the saloon and one in the engineers’ messroom. They also cleaned the officers’ cabins. The galley was manned by three cooks, one of whom was always a Christian to cook pork products for the Europeans. At the bottom of the deck, engine room and catering departments were three ‘topass’, Hindus of low caste employed to do jobs or handle materials which were taboo for Muslims. The men of the British Merchant Navy were similarly diverse. By the end of the war in 1945 over 30,000 British merchant seamen had lost their lives. Not all of them, however, were British nationals. In fact, Merchant Navy vessels were staffed by seamen from across the British empire and the occupied nations of Europe such as Norway, Greece and Denmark. Some 25 per cent hailed from India and China, while a further five per cent came from the Caribbean, Middle East and Africa. On the continued willingness of this multinational group to put to sea would depend the survival of Britain in the dark days of 1941 and beyond. Watch: Greyhound trailer starring Tom Hanks View oEmbed on the source website The job of protecting the Merchant Navy fell to Allied naval and air forces. During the course of the war both would become increasingly effective due to the introduction of more deadly depth charges, longer range radar-equipped aircraft and escort carriers to cover those sections of the ocean outside the range of shore-based aircraft. Yet perhaps nothing saved more Allied vessels than the decision, taken in 1939, to start grouping individual ships into convoys, escorted across the Atlantic by destroyers, frigates, corvettes and larger naval vessels. Each convoy was controlled by one of the larger merchant ships, while the British Admiralty organised routing and changes of course in the light of new intelligence. The real history that inspired WW2 film Greyhound Defensively, the convoys made great sense, as unescorted ships proved relatively easy pickings for the enemy. However, convoying reduced the efficiency of individual ships. Forming 40 or more vessels into a convoy took time, and co-ordinating such a large and diverse force was difficult – especially in the midst of enemy action, mechanical breakdown, constant zig-zagging and changes of course designed to throw off potential attacks. Some ships found it almost impossible to conform to the speed of the rest of the convoy, becoming a ‘straggler’ or a ‘romper’ steaming ahead of the main body. Yet merchant ships didn’t just rely on the Royal Navy for protection: as the strength of the German threat became fully apparent in 1940, increasing numbers of merchant vessels were equipped to act in their own defence. During the first six months of the Second World War, 1,900 ships were fitted with defensive armament ranging from light machine guns to 4-inch deck guns. By the end of 1940 this had grown to 3,400. Men were drawn from the Royal Navy and Royal Artillery to man the heavier weapons. Listen | Jonathan Dimbleby describes the pivotal World War Two naval clash Merchant ships were also equipped with less conventional weapons: the Parachute and Cable Rocket (PAC) could be fired from the bridge of a merchant ship. The device was designed to be fired as an enemy aircraft made a bombing run against the ship. The rocket would carry a cable into the air which would then be supported by means of a parachute. The cable would either force the attacking aircraft to break away or it would catch the wing of the bomber causing it to crash. Cable-carrying box kites were designed to achieve a similar result. No backing down With equipment which was often more ‘Heath Robinson’ than deadly effective, facing up to the dangers posed by enemy bombs, torpedoes and surface ships required a certain bloody mindedness on the part of Merchant Navy crews. Fortunately, life at sea and penny pinching owners in the hungry days of the Depression bred exactly this kind of mindset. The Merchant Navy became renowned for its unwillingness to back down from the enemy – or anyone else for that matter. In home ports, merchant seamen, without a recognised uniform, were sometimes subjected to abuse from other civilians who mistook them for ‘shirkers’ refusing to do their duty to enlist in the armed forces. The introduction of an ‘MN’ (Merchant Navy) lapel badge went a small way to addressing the problem. But what mattered more in 1940 and beyond was a growing national recognition of the work and heroism of the Merchant Navy. This duly arrived in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain, as the press began to give the struggle in the Atlantic increasing coverage. Timeline: Germany and the Allies in the Atlantic August 1939 In preparation for hostilities, the German submarine fleet deploys into the North Sea, sinking its first ship a few hours after the outbreak of war with Britain June 1940 Capture of the French Atlantic ports gives Germany easy access to the North and South Atlantic Late 1940–1941 First ‘happy time’ of the U-boat arm as convoys sail with weak escorting forces January–June 1942 German submarines enjoy great success off the east coast of the United States March 1943 In a series of convoy battles German submarines threaten to overwhelm the escorting warships April–May 1943 Allies regain the initiative in the Atlantic, sinking more U-boats and losing fewer merchant ships Late 1943–1945 Long decline of the German submarine campaign The heroism of the Royal Navy and the stoicism of the Merchant Navy when confronted by the enemy, or following the destruction of their vessels, were routine themes in newspaper and radio reports. Citations for medals awarded to merchant seamen could encapsulate the grim drama of the Battle of the Atlantic in a personal story lasting just a handful of sentences: "The ship [en route Milford Haven to London on 24 June 1940] was torpedoed during the night, and listed to port, settling down by the head. The master mustered his crew, and ordered the port lifeboat lowered. It was known that one man had been killed by the explosion, but another man was not accounted for. Although the ship's decks were awash, the second engineer, taking a torch from the lifeboat, volunteered to search for him. Forcing his way to the forepart of the bridge-deck, he found the man badly cut about the head and unconscious in his bunk. He got him out safely, the two men going straight from the rail to the lifeboat. The ship sank as they pulled away. The rescued man owed his life to the gallant act of the second engineer." – Award of Lloyd's War Medal and British Empire Medal to Second Engineer W Pybus of MV Kingfisher Public attention on the role of the Merchant Navy, and the need to maintain a steady flow of recruits into the service, resulted in a number of government initiatives between 1939 and 1945. The senior surviving member of each crew shipwrecked as a result of hostile action was interviewed by a Royal Navy officer to ensure that lessons were learned about enemy attacks and mariners’ prospects for survival when their vessels were sunk. The Board of Trade, shipowners and the Medical Research Council did their best to enhance the survival chances of merchant mariners by developing new rations for lifeboats and survival gadgets, from portable wireless transmitters through to life jacket lights and flameproof lifeboats of particular use on oil tankers. Meanwhile the Ministry of Information (MOI) celebrated the role of merchant seamen in posters and publications, and used the press, public exhibitions and films to highlight the efforts being made to improve the survival chances of merchant crew. How important was the battle of the Atlantic to the outcome of WW2? San Demetrio, London (1943) recounted the heroic efforts of a Merchant Navy crew who manage to nurse their badly damaged oil tanker into port following an attack on a convoy by a German surface raider. The film was a reasonably accurate portrayal of real events in the Atlantic in 1940 following the attack on convoy HX-84 by the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer. The on-fire San Demetrio, carrying 12,000 tonnes of aviation fuel, was abandoned by her crew during the attack. Part of the crew later reboarded the vessel and extinguished the fire and brought her home despite damage to the steering gear and lack of a working compass. While fictional, Western Approaches (1944) was a groundbreaking film in a number of respects. It was the first shot in colour by the Crown Film Unit and it utilised real merchant seamen rather than professional actors. The commendable efforts at authenticity were not, however, allowed to stand in the way of a narrative in which a U-boat is triumphantly sent to the bottom by merchant seamen manning their ship's deck gun. Western Approaches went on general release just as the Second World War, and the Battle of the Atlantic, were drawing to a close. The U-boat campaign had gone badly for the Germans since a critical series of convoy battles in March 1943. By May of that year it was obvious that the German navy was going to struggle to win the tonnage war, thanks to the Allies' increasingly effective use of air power, the greater availability of Allied escort vessels, and the productivity of American shipyards able to turn out massive numbers of merchant ships to standard designs. Obsolete U-boats The increasing obsolescence of the standard Type VII and IX German submarines became manifest in 1943 and 1944. This, despite the fact that the Germans were placing considerable hopes on the introduction of innovations like a snorkel which meant that boats could stay submerged instead of having to regularly surface to recharge their batteries using their diesel engines. Johnnie Walker: U-boat hunter in the Second World War However, the Battle of the Atlantic almost had one last sting in the tail. In the last few weeks of the war the German navy made ready to renew the conflict in the Atlantic with a new generation of submarines: the type XXI and type XXIII. Able to remain beneath the waves out of sight of Allied aircraft, and able to travel faster underwater than the top speed of most escort vessels, this new generation of U-boat threatened to give the Kriegsmarine the technological edge over its Allied foes. Unfortunately for the Kriegsmarine – and happily for the Merchant Navy crews who would have been their principal target – the new generation of submarines only reached the stage of operational deployment as the war in Europe drew to a close. The remarkable thing was that after six years of combat in the Atlantic the morale of both the Merchant Navy and their German adversaries remained unbroken despite the differences in makeup between the two forces, and the fact that both sides had lost around 30,000 men. GH Bennett is associate professor of history at the University of Plymouth. He is co-author of Survivors: British Merchant Seamen in the Battle of the Atlantic, (Continuum, 2007) This article was first published in the March 2011 edition of BBC History Magazine