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00:01The outbreak of World War II took many people by surprise,
00:05none more so than the men of the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy.
00:10They had been promised that no war would come before 1942,
00:14and the sudden onset of hostilities found the German surface fleet woefully unprepared.
00:20Only the U-boat fleet was on anything like a wartime footing.
00:30The commander of the German U-boat fleet was Karl Donitz,
00:35who had himself commanded a U-boat during World War I.
00:39Donitz appreciated the possibilities which were inherent in U-boat warfare,
00:44and was in a perfect position when it came to developing the new tactics
00:47which would shape the face of the battle for the Atlantic in World War II.
01:00The End
01:05The End
01:09The End
01:11The End
01:13In the wake of his overwhelming victory in France,
01:23Hitler hoped that Britain would make peace with Germany.
01:28But in June 1940, when Churchill refused to consider the German peace offers,
01:46Hitler threw one of his famous fits of pique.
01:49In a furious about turn, he ordered his strengthened U-boat fleet
01:53to make an all-out attack on British shipping,
01:56which he claimed would make the First World War U-boat campaign look like a sideshow.
02:03During the dark days of World War II,
02:06the men of Germany's U-boat fleet were the national heroes of their day,
02:10fated and adored by a grateful public.
02:13But their fame and adoration was hard won.
02:17Out of every four men who went to sea in the U-boats,
02:20three died in action, doomed to rest forever in an iron coffin.
02:26Of a total of 40,000 men who sailed in the U-boats,
02:305,000 were captured and 30,000 were killed in action,
02:34leaving only 5,000 to sail the boats home.
02:38Hitler wanted to make peace because he felt that peace was inevitable.
02:42In simple terms, he felt that by June 1940,
02:46Germany quite clearly had won the Second World War,
02:49at least the war in Europe up to that point,
02:52and that for Britain to continue fighting was nonsensical,
02:55as Britain quite clearly had no chance of winning.
02:58Unfortunately for Hitler,
03:00Britain did not quite agree with his analysis of the situation.
03:03The sudden onset of war had left the giant merchant ships
03:07of the British Navy scattered across the oceans of the world.
03:12As the unescorted and defenceless ships dashed frantically for safe havens,
03:16they fell easy prey to U-boats and the auxiliary cruisers.
03:22Throughout the winter months,
03:24there was massive destruction of British shipping.
03:27In those first months of the war,
03:29to travel alone courted oblivion from beneath the waves.
03:34Despite the lessons from the First World War,
03:46the Navy was caught ill-prepared for the new submarine menace.
03:50The scattered seaways provided admirable scope for a U-boat.
03:55The British warships themselves were not immune from danger.
04:00In terms of sheer numbers,
04:02the Royal Navy had a massive amount of force available
04:05for the protection of British trade.
04:07Over 200 destroyers were at sea.
04:10Despite this,
04:11it is shocking to note that in the interwar years,
04:13the Admiralty had not carried out any operational analysis
04:17of how it had defeated the U-boat threat in the First World War.
04:21In fact, in 1937,
04:23the Admiralty declared that the development of its ASDIC sonar system
04:27had defeated any future U-boat threat.
04:32These boasts were to prove hopelessly incorrect.
04:36In light of its experience in the First World War,
04:39when it defeated a substantial German U-boat campaign,
04:42it would be expected that in 1939 the Royal Navy
04:45had in place the doctrine, ships and tactics
04:48for dealing with a resurgent German U-boat threat.
04:51However, the Navy paid no attention to convoy drills
04:54or rehearsing convoy procedures.
04:57The number of destroyers available for convoys
04:59was in fact quite small.
05:01They were allocated to the support of the battle fleets.
05:03The escorts that did exist had a very short range.
05:07This was fine whilst the battle remained in the North Sea.
05:10But when the Germans captured France in May, June 1940
05:13and transferred their main U-boat bases to the French Atlantic coast,
05:17the Royal Navy faced the problem it would have to fight its opponents
05:21in the middle of the Atlantic.
05:23These created a major threat to Britain.
05:26On September the 17th, the aircraft carrier Courageous
05:29was sunk with the loss of over 500 men.
05:32It was a major loss to the Royal Navy.
05:35At this stage of the war,
05:38the U-boats would sink the unarmed ships by fire from their deck guns.
05:43Although this was a slow and dangerous manoeuvre,
05:46there was often no choice.
05:48German torpedoes were plagued by development problems
05:52which caused many to fail to explode.
05:55In the First World War, torpedoes had detonated by percussion.
05:59They hit the target, a percussion cell was ignited
06:03and the explosive detonated.
06:05This was all well and good,
06:07but sometimes the torpedo would run underneath the target
06:11and would therefore completely miss.
06:14Sometimes if the torpedo struck the target at a glancing angle,
06:18there was not enough pressure on the percussion cap
06:22and the thing didn't detonate.
06:24So the Germans looked for a better kind of detonation device
06:28and they came up with a magnetic detonator
06:31in which the iron of the ship disturbed the magnetic field
06:36or a magnetic field created by the torpedo.
06:39The beauty of this was you didn't actually have to hit the ship.
06:43If you were close enough, the proximity of the iron
06:46would disturb the magnetic field and the torpedo would go off.
06:50And if it was underneath the ship, this was even better
06:53because the explosion would break the back of the ship
06:55and it would most certainly sink.
06:57The problem that developed, however,
06:59was that the magnetic device being used was simply too delicate
07:03and sometimes the Earth's magnetic field took it off,
07:06other reasons detonated it, and the result was pure mayhem.
07:12Most of the fighting in the U-boats was done
07:14by Germany's legendary Type 7-class submarines.
07:18They proved ideal for the task.
07:21With a low conning tower, only 5.2 metres above the waterline,
07:25they were hard to see from over a mile even in daylight.
07:29At night and head-on, they were practically invisible.
07:33They could dive in under half a minute.
07:35They could reach a depth of 100 metres without strain
07:38and 200 metres if pressed.
07:45To combat the U-boat threat, hurried arrangements were made
07:48for British ships to travel in tight escorted convoys,
07:52which allowed the unarmed ships to be guarded by destroyers and cruisers.
07:56In those early days, the system was makeshift and rather clumsy.
08:02No attempt was made to sort ships by their speed of travel,
08:06and the speed of the convoy was limited to that of the slowest ship.
08:10But it significantly increased the chances of survival.
08:16For the Kriegsmarine, the main burden of the fight at sea
08:19was carried by the smaller craft, destroyers, torpedo boats and mine layers.
08:24In the early months of the war, the most successful weapon employed
08:29by the surface fleet was the mine.
08:31This early German newsreel shows the mines being manufactured in the factories,
08:39then shipped to the channel, where they were laid in the sea lanes.
08:42Unnoticed by British observers, German destroyers clandestinely completed 11 mine-laying missions off the English coast,
08:52even venturing into the Thames estuary itself.
08:56Britain's North Sea coastline is very long.
09:02And in darkness, it's virtually impossible to prevent submarines and aircraft making fast incursions
09:10and laying mines and getting away.
09:13Indeed, fast surface craft would be very difficult to prevent.
09:17So it was not too difficult for the Germans to lay mines along the British coastline.
09:24The mines reaped havoc amongst the channel traffic.
09:2767 ships, including two destroyers, were lost.
09:32These losses added to the steadily rising toll by the U-boats themselves
09:36and clearly showed the way ahead.
09:39The U-boats had won the political war, but could they also be relied upon to win the real war?
09:46It seemed Hitler needed one more lesson to convince him.
09:51In the First World War, Britain had been saved from starvation by the development of the convoy system.
09:57Donitz believed that this time he could overcome the British convoys
10:01by a combination of a bigger, faster and more powerful submarine,
10:05allied to a new system of tactics which would become known as the wolf packs.
10:11From his headquarters at the French port of Lorient,
10:14Donitz was able to control wolf pack operations personally.
10:19Donitz would arrive in his headquarters at around 9 o'clock in the morning.
10:23There, his chief of staff, Captain Goethe, would inform him of the latest positions
10:28and up on the wall was an enormous map of the Atlantic.
10:32Here were the latest positions of German U-boats indicated in blue
10:36and allied merchant convoys and ships indicated in red.
10:40What then happened was that Donitz received a series of detailed staff briefings
10:44from his intelligence officer in particular.
10:47At this point, the Germans were reading the British intelligence codes
10:50and thus Donitz was able to form a clear picture of British movements and activities
10:54and thus direct his wolf packs effectively against the British convoys.
10:59The German wolf pack consisted of 15 to 20 U-boats.
11:04The tactics of the wolf pack dictated that initially all of the submarines in a pack
11:09were to be spread out in a wide fan, covering the likely sea lanes leading to the British Isles.
11:15Operating alone, they would remain constantly vigilant as they waited for British convoys to pass by.
11:22If a single ship was spotted, it was permissible for the U-boat to launch an attack,
11:29and many lone merchantmen were sent to the bottom in the first few months of the war.
11:35But the main target of the wolf packs were always the Atlantic convoys.
11:41So the crews of the British ships had to remain constantly on their guard.
11:46Once a convoy was sighted by a U-boat, it was an important part of the tactical doctrine
11:52that the submarine which spotted the convoy did not attack right away.
11:57Instead, it reported by coded radio signal using a highly sophisticated code
12:03which was encrypted on a specialized device known as the Enigma machine.
12:10These signals were sent directly to U-boat headquarters,
12:13giving the location, size, direction, and speed of the convoy.
12:18The lone submarine then shadowed the convoy, avoiding contact with the cruiser or destroyer escorts,
12:25but always keeping its prey in sight.
12:30Back at his headquarters, Donets radioed his orders to the other members of the wolf pack,
12:35who would then be instructed to close in for the attack.
12:40When enough submarines had been assembled near the convoy,
12:43usually on the first night after it was sighted,
12:46the signal was given for the attack to begin.
12:50So, and when then the torpedo was taken,
13:03then was also the stop-uhr set,
13:06but with the distance,
13:08and if there was no detonation, oh god,
13:12then it was over, yeah.
13:14And if he hit or something,
13:17so,
13:19then the success was there.
13:22I can say,
13:24that it was not a hurrah,
13:25but it was more like,
13:27oh god,
13:28the poor soldiers are now.
13:32As soon as the U-boats had loosed their torpedoes,
13:34they dived further beneath the surface
13:37to escape the powerful explosive depth charges
13:40fired by the warships which escorted the convoy.
13:44The British destroyers posed a powerful threat to the U-boats.
13:48With their superior speed and agility,
13:51they could easily destroy any U-boat on the surface,
13:54and they proved to be tenacious in the chase for submerged U-boats,
13:58which could only travel very slowly underwater.
14:03If a convoy was well protected,
14:05the first attack would raise the alarm.
14:07In a moment the hunter became the hunted,
14:10and the real trial for a submarine crew began.
14:14It was a battle for survival,
14:16to outwit the enemy above in a tense and deadly game of hide-and-seek.
14:20A pattern of depth charges laid in a spread could either destroy the U-boat
14:27or cause damage enough to force it to the surface,
14:30to the waiting guns of the hunters.
14:33In the case,
14:34there was a bomb,
14:35a bomb,
14:36a bomb,
14:37a bomb,
14:38a bomb,
14:39a bomb,
14:40a bomb.
14:41Not only there,
14:42not only directly on the nerves,
14:43like on the nerves,
14:44but on the tube.
14:45And it was already srecking.
14:46Yeah.
14:47And who faltered,
14:48he had no fear,
14:51the wheeze.
14:52Yeah.
14:53Yeah.
14:54Wasserbomben waren wirklich nervig, also wenn sie es nahe kamen, das können sie sich gar nicht vorstellen.
15:03Und der Wasserschall, das ist ein so wahnsinniger Knall, den bringt eine Bombe an Land gar nicht mal.
15:11Und wenn dann also Beschädigungen waren, sprangen dann irgendwelche Ventile raus.
15:17Oder in der E-Maschine flogen die Schalter raus. Das Boot schĂĽttelte sich, dann war das schon kritischer.
15:47Die Schalter hatte eine Schöne, die Schöne war, und die Schöne war, um die Schöne zu schütteln.
15:57Für die U-Boot-Mensch, die Schöne war ein Schöner-Demacht, die in der Stoik-Kirche war.
16:03Das Schöne war, die Schöne war im Stoik-Kirche.
16:07Der Schöne war im Moment, als sie für die Schöne war, nicht wussten, ob es ein Schöne war.
16:15Despite the dangers, some of the bolder U-boat captains actually sought to draw off the escort ships,
16:21as this allowed the other members of the wolf pack to close in for the kill unmolested.
16:26Night after night, the U-boats repeated this pattern of attack,
16:30running away to avoid the destroyers and then returning once again to find a target.
16:36There were several reasons for preferring a night attack.
16:40Submerged, a U-boat traveled slowly.
16:42Eight knots was the maximum practical speed, and the duration of a dive was strictly limited.
16:49On the surface, a U-boat could maintain 16 knots, giving the boats a huge increased range.
16:56At that time, the convoy still relied mainly on visual observation to detect submarines.
17:02In the dark, the low profile of the U-boat was easily missed.
17:06The U-boat's much larger target was clearly silhouetted against any available light,
17:11particularly if another vessel had been set on fire.
17:15As they gained experience in their deadly trade, the wolf packs became bolder,
17:21and some adventurous captains even took to striking within the convoy itself,
17:25where the escorts dared not use their guns for fear of hitting their own ships.
17:30For the merchant seamen on the convoys, their working world had become a nightmare.
17:37Anybody who was sailing on a vessel, working in the merchant navy,
17:41and who was therefore a participant in this Battle of the Atlantic, for want of a better name,
17:46never knew when something was going to happen.
17:49The sea looks great, clear, but you just did not know if there was a U-boat out there with a torpedo ready to fire.
18:01And therefore, if you wanted to, you could be living on tent hooks,
18:05although you might say you were living dangerously, it didn't do any good to think about it.
18:09But it could happen, and suddenly, bingo, there's one ship less to worry about,
18:15as far as anybody was concerned, because the Atlantic Ocean is a very deep place,
18:20and you had to live with that.
18:23Britain now scrambled to find every available destroyer,
18:27as well as a number of armed merchant cruisers, in order to provide protection for the convoys.
18:33But there were simply not enough warships available
18:35to provide the level of protection which was required.
18:40During the first year of the war,
18:42British warships sank an average of four U-boats per month.
18:46But the German shipyards were already turning out new U-boats
18:49faster than the old ones could be destroyed.
18:52For their part, the U-boats were sinking an average of three or four British merchant ships
18:57every single day.
19:00At that time, this was more than six times the level of construction
19:04of the new shipping in the British Isles.
19:07In the year between the 19th of June, 1940, and the 19th of June, 1941,
19:12the Germans sank more than 1,300 British merchant ships.
19:16In all, they had destroyed 5,700,000 tons of British shipping.
19:22In that same year, British shipyards were able to build
19:25only 800,000 tons of new ships.
19:30Due to the restrictions of the electric motors, which needed frequent recharging,
19:35the U-boats spent almost all of their time on the surface.
19:39The submarines of World War II were, in truth, no more than submersible torpedo boats,
19:44with a very limited submerged endurance.
19:47They had to surface at regular intervals for air and to recharge the batteries.
19:53This was often to prove their undoing.
19:56Destroyers, or prowling aircraft, often caught U-boats on the surface
20:00as they attempted to refuel or recharge the batteries.
20:05Sixty years on from the events he describes,
20:08Werner Zeimer can still remember vividly the effects of an air attack.
20:12Hans Pagliar ist, man.
20:14Da waren wir zum Batterieladen ĂĽber Wasser
20:16und während dieser Ladeperiode kriegten wir den Fliegerangriff.
20:23Davor, muss ich sagen, hatten wir noch einen Sundaland-Angriff.
20:27Das waren diese Flugboote.
20:30Und wie der uns angegriffen hat,
20:33da haben wir ja nur noch eine Feuersäule von rechts nach links,
20:37von einer Tragfläche zur anderen gesehen.
20:39In the early years of the war, the British had two devices for detecting submarines.
20:46The first was the hydrophone, a simple listening device which could detect propeller noise.
20:53It could be defeated by the submarines.
20:56The first was the hydrophone, a simple listening device which could detect propeller noise.
21:01It could be defeated by the submarines.
21:05And it could only be used if the ship stopped its own propellers.
21:10Much more was expected of the ASDIC, a device which emitted high-frequency sound and detected the reflections from the submarine.
21:17A searching vessel could continue at full speed and could determine the submarine's position and course.
21:24ASDIC operators became the eyes of the hunting battleship.
21:29We would pick them up, the ASDIC, and you would fix onto a submarine and you'd get the bleep, bleep, bleep coming back.
21:45And then you'd probably be on them.
21:47I know at one time in the Battle of the Atlantic, we sunk three U-boats in nine hours.
21:55Infuriatingly, the early ASDIC sets lost the signal when they were immediately over the submarine, making the accurate placing of depth charges difficult.
22:04Additionally, the U-boat crew alerted by the distinctive pings of the ASDIC would often alter course and slip away.
22:13During the early phase of the war, this period of havoc visited on Allied shipping became known to the U-boat crew as the happy time.
22:22Initially, the British had realised on their ASDIC sonar system, but there was incredible flaws in this.
22:28It was effective to up to three quarters of a mile, and as German U-boat commanders believed in engaging at around 2,000 to 3,000 yards, the escorts could rarely detect the approaching attack.
22:39ASDIC was modified as the war went on and improved in quality, but it still remained a problematical machine to use.
22:46ASDIC's other failure, of course, was it worked only on submerged submarines, and the German U-boat tactics were to attack at night on the surface and thus avoid detection.
22:55The chances of Britain's survival during the period of 1941 to 1942 was by no means guaranteed.
23:04However, the evidence suggests that the chances of Britain ever losing the convoy battle in the Atlantic during this period were in fact very slim.
23:13British merchant marine at the outbreak of the Second World War was absolutely huge, well over 20 million tonnes of shipping, and in simple, rather brutal terms, Britain could afford to lose huge quantities of shipping before real crisis began to boom.
23:30It was estimated by the Germans that they had to sink 750,000 tonnes of merchant shipping every month consistently for 12 months to defeat Britain.
23:42British losses had climbed to that level.
23:45During 1941, a new danger emerged to join the U-boats.
23:50The long-range Focke-Wulf Condor bombers now joined the attacks against British shipping.
23:56At this point of the war, there was little the British could do in reply.
24:00British fighter planes simply did not have the range to interfere with the Condors,
24:05and the aircraft carriers which could have made a fighter cover available were urgently required elsewhere.
24:11Winston Churchill recognised the threat when he issued his 1941 orders to the fighting forces in the battle for the Atlantic.
24:20We must take the offensive against the U-boats whenever and wherever we can.
24:26The U-boats at sea must be hunted.
24:28The U-boats in the building yard or in dock must be bombed.
24:31The Focke-Wulf bombers employed against our shipping must be attacked in the air and in their nests.
24:37As far as aerial attackers concerned, the better option really was to equip merchant ships, not just escorts,
24:46but merchant ships with anti-aircraft weapons.
24:49.3, .303 machine guns and then half-inch machine guns, preferably 20mm or 40mm anti-aircraft guns.
24:58These, of course, were not readily available in the dark days of 1940 and 1941.
25:04But if you could equip most of the ships in the convoy with anti-aircraft weapons,
25:10then the volume of fire put up, not terribly accurate, but a huge volume was quite enough to deter the Condors from attacking,
25:18because they tended to attack from quite low altitudes in order to be sure of putting the bombs on the ships.
25:25Winston Churchill was also to play a leading part in the next phase in the battle for the Atlantic.
25:31In a momentous conference between the British Prime Minister and American President Roosevelt,
25:36held in Newfoundland early in 1941, Churchill managed to elicit American help in protecting convoys sailing to Britain.
25:44Although the United States was not yet at war with Germany, Roosevelt recognized the danger to Western civilization
25:52if Hitler succeeded in starving Britain into surrender, and he agreed that the American Navy would not permit the German submarines
26:00to attack British shipping in any part of the Atlantic Ocean west of Iceland.
26:07Roosevelt realized that if Britain went under, the consequences for America would be extremely severe.
26:13As a result, he introduced legislation to provide the British with 50 worn-out destroyers from World War I,
26:20from the American Fleet Reserve.
26:23In April 1941, Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Neutrality Zone,
26:29in which the Germans were forbidden and warned not to attack shipping.
26:34This had been quite convenient for the British, in that it allowed their convoys on the eastern coast of America and Canada
26:41a relative degree of security.
26:43Roosevelt extended this up to 1,000 miles into the Atlantic,
26:48which meant the German U-boat activity was restricted to the western side of the Atlantic,
26:53where the British escorts and convoys were more numerous.
26:57There was also a renewed glimmer of hope for the British surface fleet.
27:03Following a successful battle against a British convoy in May 1941,
27:07the Bismarck, a new battleship and the pride of the German surface fleet,
27:12accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen,
27:15was engaged by a British naval force southwest of Iceland.
27:19The Germans fought back fiercely, destroying the British battlecruiser Hood
27:24and crippling the battleship Prince of Wales.
27:27But the Bismarck herself had been hit,
27:30and in the continued fighting suffered further damage from an airstrike,
27:34launched from the Ark Royal.
27:36There was no escaping the guns and torpedoes of the converging home fleet.
27:41Hitler's most powerful battleship finally sank on the morning of May the 27th.
27:47In 1941, the lifting of the German invasion threat to Britain
27:54allowed extra British destroyers to be released for convoy duty.
27:58As the numbers grew, the escorts developed better tactical methods to combat the U-boats.
28:04They were aided by rapid improvements in wireless communications.
28:09Ironically, the cohesiveness which made the Wolfpack so successful
28:13was also the Achilles' heel which made them vulnerable.
28:18When it became necessary for dispersed U-boats to gather together to form a Wolfpack,
28:23regular wireless contact with base was inevitable.
28:27A new British apparatus, the High Frequency Direction Finder, or HuffDuff,
28:32allowed escort ships accurately to locate a U-boat from its radio signals.
28:37HuffDuff was a success.
28:40In commanding his U-boats and in organising them in Wolfpacks,
28:44Durnich used radio signals.
28:46Now, he accepted that the Allies could use land stations to detect these
28:50and pinpoint the positions of U-boats.
28:53But as the U-boats would only be signalling normally at the moment of attack,
28:56it was regarded that the threat to them would be minimal.
28:59It would be too late for the Allies to act.
29:01The Allies, however, developed HuffDuff, or High Frequency Direction Finding radar,
29:07which was mounted unbeknownst to Durnich on escorts in 1943 onwards.
29:12The result was that they could actually themselves detect German U-boats sending radio signals nearby,
29:18locate them and engage them.
29:21Also introduced in 1941 was another device that changed the whole pattern of war at sea.
29:28During the course of 1941, radar scanners began to sprout from the mastheads of British destroyers.
29:35The newly perfected radar would prove decisive in the long-fought battle of the Atlantic.
29:42The Germans, too, had radar technology, but under the Nazi regime its potential had not been realised.
29:49Research was erratic.
29:52Their first countermeasure to the new detection system was to deploy radio silence.
29:58Radar allowed the fast destroyers to provide protective cover to a convoy even when out of sight.
30:05The range over which they could seek out the enemy was also extended.
30:09The happy time was not yet over, but Britain was on the point of fighting back.
30:17The much-needed infusion of support which came from the American intervention
30:21did a great deal to free British warships to concentrate on escort duty in the eastern part of the ocean,
30:27where German attacks were growing ever more destructive.
30:31It was just as well, because the British navy was about to embark on one of the greatest tests of World War II,
30:38the Russian convoys.
30:41In June 1941, Hitler sent his armies into Soviet Russia,
30:46and the Germans won spectacular victories as they drove closer and closer
30:50to the beleaguered Soviet capital of Moscow.
30:53Stalin had appealed to Britain for help,
30:56and in the late autumn of 1941,
30:58the first convoys sailed through the treacherous Arctic waters,
31:02laden with aid for Russia.
31:05Great Britain and the United States sent the Soviet Union during the war about 22,000 aircraft,
31:10and about 12,000 tanks.
31:12But when you consider the fact that the Russians produced 106,000 tanks during the war,
31:18then therefore our tank supplies were roughly about, somewhere about 10%.
31:23And there were other supplies which are extremely important.
31:25I mean, the food supplies were important.
31:27I mean, you'll talk to Russians now and they'll tell you about the bags of flour with the stars and stripes,
31:32they'll tell you about the butter in the hospitals, all of these things.
31:35Though appearing to be on the surface rather minuscule, had very important consequences.
31:41In order to reach Russia, the Arctic convoys had to sail through some of the most inhospitable oceans in the world.
31:48During the summer months, darkness never really comes in the Arctic circle,
31:53and the 24 hours of daylight provided a superb opportunity for the German long-range bombers and surface ships,
31:59which were stationed on the coast of Norway to launch punishing attacks against the Arctic convoys.
32:07When winter came, the violent storms, almost constant darkness and ever-present dangers of the ice
32:14added to the misery of the crews manning the ships in the Arctic.
32:19The guys who were on the Murmansk run, when convoys would leave the north-west coast,
32:26north-east coast of England, and head up around that North Cape, that was bloody murder.
32:33The icy conditions of January and February, let alone the other winter parts,
32:39if you got torpedoed up in the real North Atlantic around the North Cape, Spitsbergen,
32:46and there, if you went in the sea, you would last for 20 minutes, and that would be it.
32:52You would just freeze to death.
32:54You know, the guys who went up on that Murmansk run were real heroes.
32:59They just had a lot to put up with, and a lot, of course, didn't come back.
33:05In June 1941, the first U-boats appeared in Arctic waters,
33:09the most dangerous and inhospitable seas in the world.
33:14For the sailors of both sides, conditions in the Arctic were appalling,
33:18a numbing, unending nightmare of fog, ice, and blizzards.
33:23Although the threat of enemy action was the fear always uppermost in the seamen's minds,
33:28they could equally succumb to exposure, frostbite, or drowning in ferocious storms.
33:33Of the 81 vessels sunk in these waters, the U-boat fleet accounted for all but three.
33:40In return, 38 U-boats were lost with all hands in the same unforgiving waters.
33:48Conditions on the Arctic convoy routes really almost stretched the bounds of human imagination.
33:54This was an area of water between Iceland and the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangel
34:00that was traversed during the Second World War by around 40 convoys of about 800 ships in total,
34:07about 100 of which were lost during the Arctic convoy battles.
34:12The seas in this area are mountainous.
34:15The area is subject to vicious northeasterly gales with sleet and snow and hail.
34:22Sea temperatures are rarely above more than a few degrees centigrade,
34:26which means that anybody unlucky enough to find themselves in the water
34:29has a life expectancy of mere minutes.
34:31So all in all, it was pretty awful.
34:34These harsh conditions did not prevent the U-boats in the Wolfpacks from stalking the convoys.
34:39And although losses began to mount, it was obvious to Britain that Russia's need was so great
34:45they had to continue to send supplies regardless of the costs.
34:49And those costs could be enormous.
34:54By early 1942, the Germans had managed to concentrate powerful air, surface and submarine forces in Norway,
35:01with the aim of causing as much damage as possible to the convoys.
35:06The admiralty in Britain was particularly concerned to discover that the giant German battleship Tirpitz had arrived in Trondheim.
35:15Even more ominously, she was joined in the Norwegian waters by the pocket battleships, Scheer and Lutzau,
35:21and the heavy cruisers Hipper and Prince Eugen.
35:26The German surface fleet entered the war in 1939 as a relatively balanced but rather small surface fleet.
35:33Certainly, it was incapable of engaging the Royal Navy on any serious battle so as to try and gain command of the sea.
35:40The one area of operations in which the German surface raiders managed to achieve some degree of effect was in the Arctic Ocean.
35:49Their bases in Norway put them astride the main communication lines of the convoys from Britain to Mamansk.
35:57And sorties on several occasions did create panic amongst the Allies.
36:01The U-boats continued to hit home, and on the Arctic convoys losses now grew to a point that they were even heavier than the massive losses
36:12which were still being sustained on the North Atlantic sea lanes.
36:16Between March and June of 1942, five British convoys sailed for Russia,
36:22and all five suffered heavy losses which included several British cruisers and destroyers.
36:29Despite these losses, the situation in Russia appeared so desperate that authorisation was given for convoy PQ-17 to sail for Mamansk.
36:40Allied covering forces of two battleships, one aircraft carrier, three cruisers and eight destroyers were sent to the North Sea,
36:47ready to strike if the German battleships appeared.
36:52By the 4th of July, swarms of German aircraft began a series of attacks against the convoy.
36:58They succeeded in striking three merchant ships, but there was worse to follow.
37:04That same day, the Admiralty learnt that a German squadron consisting of the Tirpitz, Prince Yujian, Lutzau, the Hipper,
37:13and several German destroyers had gone to sea.
37:16The report suggested that the Germans would be able to reach the British convoy long before the covering naval force could catch up with them.
37:25It was feared that the German ships would overwhelm the escort vessels and then sink all of the merchant ships.
37:34In fact, the German surface ships were not as close to the convoy as the Admiralty had feared.
37:40But the escort vessels with the convoy were ordered to draw off in an attempt to decoy German task forces away from the convoy.
37:49It was to prove to be a disastrous decision.
37:52With the escort safely out of the way, the wolf packs and bomber forces moved in on the unprotected merchantmen and had a field day.
38:01They sank 20 more British merchant ships, which meant that out of a total of 34 ships that had started in the convoy, only 11 finally struggled into Mamansk.
38:12With hindsight, it's easy to say that convoy PQ-17 was a disaster waiting to happen.
38:19The core of the problem was the presence of the Tirpitz.
38:23This battleship, if it emerged and engaged the convoy, could sink the convoy and the escorts in reasonably short time.
38:33The only defence against the Tirpitz was for the convoy to scatter.
38:38And so they are easy and single victims for the aircraft and the U-boats.
38:45And they simply massacre them.
38:48To add insult to injury, the Russians refused to believe that the missing 23 ships of convoy PQ-17 had actually been sunk.
38:58They accused the Allies of inventing the story of great losses and of pretending to give more help than they were really providing.
39:06The suspicious Russians never fully understood the terrible conditions which the convoy encountered sailing to Mamansk.
39:14And the value of the aid they received by these great sacrifices was never fully appreciated.
39:20Despite the value of the supplies, after the disaster of PQ-17, the Allies were temporarily forced to discontinue the convoys to Russia.
39:34The halting of the convoys until September that year went down extremely badly in Moscow.
39:40The Soviets were engaged in the very costly Battle of Stalingrad and were desperate for war supplies which the convoys provided.
39:48And there were some sharp words sent to both Washington and London from the Soviets about halting these convoys.
39:55The battle for the Atlantic had reached its peak.
39:58And there were simply not enough warships to protect convoys on both the North Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans.
40:03By the time they were restructured, the Admiralty had realized that the convoy losses on the Mamansk run were less during the dark and stormy winter months than they had been during the summer with its 24 hours of daylight.
40:18Although the terrible conditions of ice and snow meant misery for the crews, ironically it produced an increased chance of survival.
40:26The sacrifice of the merchantmen made a real difference to the Russian war effort.
40:31By 1942, British losses in the Atlantic had reached epidemic proportions.
40:38And the German propaganda machine was quick to seize on the opportunity to trumpet the impending victory in the Atlantic.
40:45British losses were approaching the level which the German propaganda machine called the Death Line.
40:52Just as victory appeared to be within the grasp of the wolf packs, the scales suddenly shifted in favor of the Allies.
41:03Perhaps the most significant breakthrough in the U-Boat War came with the breakthrough by the British intelligence services operating from Bletchley Park.
41:12Thanks to the extremely fortunate capture of an Enigma encoding book, British scientists were able to begin cracking the coded signals which told the U-boats where to gather for the attack.
41:24Armed with this information, they could intercept at sea, and the level of the U-boat sinkings rose dramatically from 1943 onwards.
41:33The intelligence war in the Second World War was, as we now know, of absolutely crucial importance to the winning of that war.
41:40And so too was the intelligence war in the context of the battle for the Atlantic.
41:44In particular, British ability to read German signals traffic, in particular traffic between the U-boats and their higher commands from December 1942 onwards,
41:55was very important because it allowed convoys to be rerouted to avoid the German U-boats on many occasions.
42:02This certainly saved the Allies literally millions of tons of shipping as a result of this.
42:08Of course, it should be said that the Germans had actually broken British naval codes even before the Second World War.
42:14However, from 1943 onwards, when the British changed their codes, effectively the Germans were fighting almost blind in terms of their intelligence sources,
42:23whilst the Allies were going from strength to strength.
42:28One of the other significant developments in 1943 was the closing of the air gap over the Atlantic convoys,
42:35with the appearance of long-distance American bombers, and with the increased availability of new aircraft such as the Short Sunderland,
42:43there was now no place for the U-boats to hide over the entire expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
42:50In the early years of the war, when the U-boats submerged, it had been almost impossible to pinpoint their position.
42:58However, by 1943, increasingly sophisticated detection methods were beginning to eliminate the ability of the U-boats to hide from detection by surface vessels or aircraft.
43:12In 1943, the technical side of Allied innovations in sonar, radar detection, and in weapons development, along with improvements in tactics and training,
43:22came together in a series of devastating battles, which saw the U-boats suffer horrendous losses.
43:29When the U-boats attacked a convoy, the support groups would be freely able to move up and bring overwhelming force to bear with the new technology and destroy them.
43:40It was devastating.
43:42These advances together produced a huge shift in the U-boat war.
43:511942 had been known by the U-boat crews as the happy time.
43:55In that year alone, the Allies had lost over 1,700 ships, which accounted for a massive 8 million tons of shipping.
44:02In the same year, they had been able to build only 7 million tons of shipping.
44:07There was to be no such triumph in 1943, although, ironically, the last of the U-boat victories took place in February and March of that year.
44:17In a fierce battle against a large Allied convoy bound for Liverpool, the Wolfpack sank 21 ships for the loss of only one submarine.
44:27It looked as if the pattern would be repeated, when in early May, a pack of 12 submarines found a convoy that had been scattered in a storm.
44:36In just two days, the U-boat sank nine ships, but this time, the escort struck back.
44:43In the next few days, they sank 11 of the attackers without losing a single ship.
44:48It was this action which clearly demonstrated that the tide had now turned.
44:56By 1943, Allied losses were less than 3 and a half million tons, during which time they built 14 and a half million tons of new shipping.
45:07In a war of attrition, in which the tonnage of shipping sunk was the key indicator to both sides of how effective the war was being fought, the shipyards were vital.
45:19British shipyards averaged around 2 million tons of merchant shipping a year throughout the war.
45:25This helped to sustain and replace the massive losses, 22 million in all to the Allies.
45:32But of course, the key to the Allied victory was the American shipyards.
45:38In the first three months of 1942, they produced 1.5 million tons of shipping.
45:43And for every quarter of the war afterwards, they never fell below 2 million tons.
45:48Inexorably, the balance was tipping against the Kriegsmarine in the Atlantic.
45:54The rate of Allied shipbuilding was climbing far above losses.
45:58In the first three months of 1940, when on average 14 U-boats were on patrol, over 800,000 tons of Allied shipping had been sunk.
46:07In a similar period in 1943, with 115 U-boats operating, the tally was nearly 550,000 tons.
46:17100 more U-boats were actually sinking less tonnage.
46:22There were never enough U-boats.
46:24Germany entered the war in 1939 with only 57 operational U-boats.
46:29And although the number later climbed in 1943 and 1944 to several hundred,
46:34by virtue of the fact that many of them had to be fitting out or were training their crews
46:39or were moving back and forth between their patrol stations and their ports,
46:44it meant that only a very small proportion, very rarely more than 20%,
46:49were ever actually on patrol in battle stations, if you like, in the Central or indeed the Western and Eastern Atlantic.
46:57More significantly, U-boat losses were growing at an alarming rate.
47:03The conventional submarines, which had fared so well in the first winter of the war,
47:07were now highly vulnerable to the Allied hunter-killer groups.
47:11It became rare for a U-boat to survive more than two sorties.
47:16It was not just the undersea fleet that was now on the run.
47:19The German surface fleet had suffered a number of serious losses in late 1942,
47:24and in consequence, the German capital ships spent most of 1943 standing idle in port,
47:31where they had endured the disfavour of Hitler and Donitz.
47:35In December of that year, the Scharnhorst was sunk by the guns from the battleship Duke of York
47:40and sent to the bottom.
47:42In 1944, the mighty Tirpitz was also sunk, this time by the RAF,
47:47who were able to sink the battleship with six-ton bombs which were designed especially for the task.
47:54There were a few German attempts to re-establish a technological lead in the battle for the Atlantic during 1944 and 1945.
48:02Most notable was the adoption of the Biscay cross-radar system, which allowed radar to be carried on U-boats.
48:09This gave the commanders at least some warning of an impending air attack.
48:14Of even more value was the adoption of their snorkel system,
48:17which allowed U-boats to run underneath the surface and still draw the air for the diesel engines
48:22through a thin tube which extended a few feet above the water.
48:26This made U-boats almost impossible to detect from the surface.
48:31But it was a case of far too little, too late.
48:38On May the 4th, Grand Admiral Donitz, now Head of State, issued the order for the U-boats to cease hostilities.
48:49The battle for the Atlantic had been won by the bravery and skill of the men and women
48:54who worked together in the intelligence gathering network,
48:57in the British Merchant Navy,
48:59the convoy escort aircraft of the RAF,
49:02and in the ships of the Royal Navy.
49:05The Lumber of the Pacific with the French Navy inbound
49:07the Pacific and National Honor
49:08The Lumber of the Pacific and the National Heat
49:10Like this, the National Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
49:13...M.A.V.
49:14The British Merchant
49:16?
49:17This is a specialиях.
49:18The American Union
49:19?
49:20The American Union
49:21?
49:22The American Union
49:23?
49:24?
49:25Guys ?
49:26What do you seem to be an enemy?
49:27?
49:28?
49:29I don't have a new name ?
49:30?
49:31The American Union
49:33?
49:34?
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