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00:00January 1942, and in those sunny states along America's east coast and southern shores, the living was easy.
00:24For vacationers, the war in Europe that the United States had entered just three weeks before seemed a long way away.
00:36At night, the coastal neon burned brightly, from New York to Florida and down into the Gulf of Mexico.
00:42Life was still carefree, the bloody conflict in Europe a distant newspaper headline.
00:48Americans were unaware that just a few miles off their shores lurked one of the world's most potent military forces poised to strike against their country.
01:00Hitler's U-boats had arrived on the American seaboard.
01:04Vessel after vessel went down from Maine to Florida, into the Gulf of Mexico and through the islands of the Caribbean, all waters protected by the United States Navy.
01:22The German U-boat fleet had its way with the American coastal waters.
01:28In what has to be reckoned one of the greatest maritime disasters of all time, it was certainly the greatest defeat at sea suffered by the United States Navy in World War II.
01:39By the time that the United States finally got a grip on this situation, almost 400 ships had been sunk, with the loss of about 5,000 lives.
01:50Admiral Dönitz, head of German U-boats, had devised a daring attack on American coastal shipping, which was implemented 10 days after Germany declared war on the United States.
02:08Five U-boats were readied and secret orders issued to their commanders.
02:13We left Luoyang on the 23rd of December, 41, and I want to leave before Christmas because I don't want to have drunken sailors on board.
02:25And on Christmas Eve we submerged and then we make a young Christmas.
02:32We had Christmas trees on board and parcels for every man of the crew.
02:38I read the Christmas story of Lucas No. 2 and we were singing Christmas chorals and so on.
02:49We had a special good dinner and for some hours the war was very far off.
02:59It was the most impressive Christmas Eve I had in my life.
03:05Hardigan set course for America 3,000 miles away in his Type 9 U-boat.
03:11Four others followed him.
03:13I had the order to go to New York and to be there on the 12th January and not to attack other ships.
03:20They were to strike all at once on the same day against targets of opportunity.
03:26They were not to operate as a wolf pack but to operate independently to find targets, hold off, and then on January 13th strike at once in an operation that Dönitz called Haukenschlag, drum beat.
03:40Haukenschlag meaning the sudden beat of a drumstick against the tympanum or drum head of a drum.
03:52We had no charts of the American coast.
03:56I had no navigation aids at all.
03:58Because if Dönitz would have all the charts of East Coast of New York, maybe one spy remarked it and then the enemy would have known that the Germans would want to go to the East Coast of the United States.
04:14And so I had only a small Atlas functional of the American coast.
04:20There was only a small plan of New York and that was all.
04:25Unknown to him and to the other four U-boat commanders as they made their way west across the Atlantic was the fact that the British Admiralty in London was reading all of their radio traffic to and from Admiral Dönitz.
04:39And they were able to plot the position, course and speed of each of the boats day by day.
04:47And they gave all of that information to the United States Navy.
04:51The documents and the daily situation maps of the United States Navy itself show just how detailed U.S. knowledge was of the approach of that fleet.
05:03And yet when the fleet arrived, the United States Navy did nothing.
05:09The 21 destroyers that had been harbored by Admiral King, the chief of the entire United States Navy, for the purpose of resisting a German invasion fleet if it should come, were not sent out for that duty at all.
05:25The lights were all left on so that the German U-boats could silhouette their targets easily against coastal cities.
05:33The lighthouses, the buoys were all lit up.
05:36It's as though the United States was not at war.
05:39When I came to New York, I saw the lights of Kuni Island, of the amusement park, and it was all full light.
05:49During that successful week we were operating there.
05:55We saw cars driving along the coast road.
05:58We were so close we could smell the forest from where we were.
06:03It was like a deep peace time, and it was amazing for me, and we were very astonished.
06:11Afterwards, when I learned that Admiral Orenci King knew that we came, it is much more amazing for me that he did nothing.
06:21I think that we'd have 15 to 20 ships in sight at any given time, because they'd all be showing their navigation lights.
06:32And we could more or less pick and choose which ship we wanted to attack next.
06:40For us, this was totally unexpected, if you compare it with the way the U-boats had to fight in the North Atlantic or elsewhere,
06:54against stronger and stronger defensive forces.
06:59In the Canadian waters where two of the U-boats of Drumbeat were assigned, those U-boats were so harried by Royal Canadian destroyers and aircraft
07:14that they were forced out of Canadian waters, and fled south to the more benign waters of the United States.
07:20But the U.S. Navy did precious little but to twiddle its thumbs and to watch a carnage develop the like of which had never happened in American waters in modern times.
07:35If you take all five of the U-boats, they sank 25 ships on that one Operation Haukenschlag, Operation Drumbeat.
07:44After three weeks, the five successful U-boats returned to Lorient in France, the U-boat's operational headquarters.
07:55Dönitz's goal of severing U.S.-British supply lines had taken a dramatic step forward with Hartigan's American success.
08:02Hartigan was a hero.
08:05That was a very big welcome. I had ten pendants on my telescope from the United States.
08:12There were a lot of people and nice girls came with flowers and kissed me and so on. It was very nice.
08:19Dönitz came on board and he made me the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross on my neck.
08:25And then there was a guard of honor and I had to pass this guard of honor.
08:35There were always a nice welcome, but this welcome was a special big one.
08:41We were the first of the five boats to return from the mission to the U.S. coast.
08:51So the propaganda made a great feature of it.
08:56I recall not liking that very much, I have to say honestly, because we hadn't encountered any resistance.
09:08And we had been successful without having really been attacked in any way by the enemy.
09:17That's why my feelings were a bit mixed.
09:22Captain Leuton Hartigan was seen as a man who could go with impunity, which in fact was largely true, right up to the North American coast.
09:35It was the best choice for Admiral Dönitz to move his chess pieces into an area where they were safe, where they could have a high toll for their armament,
09:43where they could pin down a great number of forces and also destabilize Allied operations.
09:51The U-boat that underpinned these long distance operations was the Type 9.
09:56This is the last remaining one in the world.
10:00A Type 9C would average more than a hundred days at sea for each patrol.
10:07They did not operate in packs, but typically individually as lone wolves.
10:13And usually they operated against independently routed ships in more distant zones where there were no escorts.
10:21And the commanders of these boats tended to be older men who embodied the virtues of maturity.
10:28Commanders would be on their own to make up their decisions about what kind of targets they could attack or avoid.
10:33Discretion was also an important part of being a Type 9 commander because the Type 9 boats were more vulnerable.
10:41Being larger, it took longer for them to dive.
10:45They were more sluggish.
10:46They would have much more trouble eluding anti-submarine weapons used underwater.
10:51Although the Type 9s never represented more than 12% of the total U-boat fleet,
11:00they nevertheless accomplished 37% of all the sinkings achieved by German U-boats during the war.
11:08Which is a reflection of the fact that U-boats really operated best against unprotected individual ships.
11:15As soon as they were up against convoys, it was a very different story.
11:20Extra torpedoes were loaded for these long-distance operations and meticulous attention was paid to provisioning.
11:26Each Type 9 was totally self-sufficient.
11:28Now, when we left Port, of course, we used every little nook and corner to stash provisions in there.
11:37And you see some of the provisions hanging from the so-called ceiling.
11:42The hams, the sausages hanging there.
11:45Crates on the bottom with eggs and lemons, potatoes.
11:50That was all fresh food that we needed to eat first before we went to the canned goods.
11:59The potatoes tasted of diesel oil.
12:02Everything tasted of diesel.
12:04And of the stench in the submarine, which was the smell of diesel oil, the crew's sweat and the toilets.
12:14This was a potent mixture which formed the deposit on the food.
12:17When the crew was back on land again, the food didn't really taste of anything because the stench wasn't there.
12:24Frankly, personal hygiene was non-existent.
12:28We didn't pay too much attention to it.
12:30Of course, we had no bathing facilities, except occasionally we could turn on a water hose and rinse ourselves down with salt water, with sea water.
12:40We couldn't do that very often. The opportunity just didn't arise.
12:44We were issued perfume by the gallons almost, and we took that along.
12:50That was supposed to relieve the odor a little and substitute for water.
12:55We rubbed ourselves down with perfume, and it was called 4711.
12:59It was a very, very famous perfume.
13:01Of course, we didn't use that much of it.
13:04We preferred to take it home to our mothers and girlfriends.
13:07It was a neat present. To this day, I really can't stand the smell of 4711.
13:14Following Group Hardigan's initial attack on America, Dernitz sent successive waves of his U-boats against the unprotected merchant shipping passing through American coastal waters.
13:24These onslaughts also met with massive success and minimal opposition as they headed further south.
13:31Texas had become a major oil producer, and since petroleum products were so vitally important in the war effort, the German Navy soon realized that the amounts of petroleum products coming out of the Galveston, Houston, Texas City area were vital.
13:49They then decided to come and make the attacks in the Gulf because almost half the oil in the United States was coming out of this little area.
14:01The first four or five sinkings were reported in the newspapers.
14:06Then, suddenly, the news stopped any reports of the sinkings altogether.
14:12All in all, in the almost two years they were in the Gulf, they sank 56 ships and damaged 14 more, which made a total of 70 ships.
14:23That was a major victory that people are unaware of to this day.
14:29Two lifetime friends meet to reminisce. One of the most daring attacks on American shipping took place just off the Florida coast near Jacksonville.
14:42It was experienced by Phil May and Vernon Townsend.
14:46Phil May and I had dates with two of our classmates in high school.
14:51We drove to the beach, went to the boardwalk, which had Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, and so forth.
15:03We were riding on the merry-go-round, and I remember coming around, facing the ocean, and looking just, you know, you're looking out at the ocean anyhow,
15:13and all of a sudden, here's this gigantic ball of fire right straight out in front of us.
15:21Within 30 seconds, somebody said, U-boat.
15:25Commander of that U-boat was Reinhardt Hardigan, his prey, the Gulf America.
15:32Off St. Augustine, I saw a big tanker and torpedoed her, and she was burning very hard, and I wanted to finish her with my gun.
15:42As the fire was blazing, I could actually see the outline of the deck gun on the submarine and the conning tower as they fired.
15:54It was a very dramatic sight.
15:56And it was very intimidating to realize that they could have turned their guns toward us, which they did not.
16:06I went around the ship because I thought if I would shell her from the seaside, maybe if one shell will miss the ship, I will hit a hotel or innocent people ashore.
16:18It was difficult for me because my boat was silhouetted against a burning tanker, and I had no opportunity to escape if a destroyer or a gun boat will suddenly come, because in shallow water I cannot dive, I cannot submerge.
16:33We had read about the war in Europe, but this was the first time we had seen the war, and we were dumbstruck that anyone would do that so close to the United States.
16:48I just could not believe the war had come right to our front door, and, you know, at 16 years old, I thought, my gosh, you know, we are really in the war.
16:58Nineteen men died that night in the burning oil, almost half the tanker's crew.
17:05This tragedy forced Admiral King to halt oil tanker traffic on the American East Coast for a month.
17:13As U-boat attacks on American coastal shipping escalated, so did public alarm.
17:18The public, I think, became more and more paranoid about the U-boat operations.
17:26An air of suspicion prevailed.
17:30The FBI even had people in Galveston spying upon each other to report who went in and out of certain houses.
17:37People were afraid that there were some people sending out secret messages to the U-boats,
17:43the U-boat ships, because no one could figure out how they knew where the ships were.
17:48It was all a very mysterious thing, and people were looking for Germans to come to shore in rubber dinghies.
17:56They even thought that they had come and snuck in sometimes and gone to the movies and had bought groceries.
18:02People were also afraid of possible sabotage.
18:06They thought that the enemy is going to sneak ashore and blow up the refineries and all of these petrochemical plants,
18:13which were highly explosive, that existed right there close to Galveston.
18:18There was just a lot of fear of the unknown.
18:21The fear of German landings on American beaches was not misplaced.
18:26In early summer 1942, at this spot on Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, the nightmare became a reality.
18:32Four Nazi saboteurs were put ashore by U-boat.
18:37They slipped inland under cover of darkness.
18:40They were to rendezvous with four other enemy agents who had made a simultaneous U-boat landing at Amagansett on Long Island.
18:47This was Operation Pastorius, a Nazi plot to blow up American industrial plants, damage war production,
18:55and achieve a devastating propaganda coup for the Third Reich.
18:58In these dunes, they buried cases of explosives and detonators before heading for New York.
19:08The plot was swiftly betrayed by two of its members, although FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover claimed the credit for their capture.
19:16Their cache of explosives in the Florida dunes was dug up by FBI agents and the conspirators were tried by a hastily convened military commission in Washington.
19:24Within weeks, the two informants were jailed and their six fellow spies executed at 14-minute intervals, the fastest multiple electrocutions in American history.
19:36To protect America, the Coast Guard formed beach patrols. In Texas, they took to the saddle.
19:45We patrolled the beach at night horseback, and to start with, they gave us shotguns, and we didn't have any shells for a month or two.
19:57We started out riding our own horses, and later on, they shipped some crazy horses that never had been ridden.
20:05It was quite a show for a while until we got them trained. We ride about 15-20 miles a night back and forth along the beach.
20:14We were told to look for spies that probably the U-boats had put out to come ashore to, like, sabotage Beaumont or Port Arthur to refineries,
20:27and any lights or anything that might be out in the Gulf.
20:33While the Coast Guard prepared to repel enemy landings, the U.S. Navy failed to sink a single U-boat
20:39in the three months following the launch of Operation Drumbeat. It was all too easy for U-boat aces like Erich Thomp.
20:46They were unprepared for it. The security forces were untrained, and they hadn't established a convoy system.
21:02So to that extent, it was child's play. And all the commanders who took part launched up huge successes there.
21:11It was obvious that the Americans were not prepared for war.
21:28Commander Erich Thomp returned home from America to a rapturous dockside welcome.
21:34Dönitz's bold initiative against U.S. coastal shipping and the overwhelming success of his U-boat men in their strikes at the heart of the enemy
21:42had not gone unnoticed by German High Command.
21:45Reinhardt Hardegen and Erich Thomp were summoned to Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia
21:50to receive the FĂŒhrer's personal congratulations and the addition of oak-leaf clusters to their knights' crosses.
21:57German success spelt disaster for merchant seamen. Sailing in American waters had become a hazardous undertaking, especially for tanker crews.
22:10We were running coastwise much of the time up to New York from down here in Texas. Cape Hatras seemed to be the big, big bugaboo.
22:18Up there it seemed like a kind of a junction point for everybody to go to Europe or go to New York or Boston.
22:26And the submarine seemed to hang out right around Cape Hatras, which was known as Torpedo Alley.
22:32Most of the time we got in that area while we'd all be wearing our life jackets and being prepared to abandon ship at any time.
22:39Because it just took just a few minutes. When a tanker got hit, the whole thing would be developed into fire and it would be just a terrible situation.
22:49You were going to abandon ship while they had these life rafts that would just slide off by gravity.
22:55And all somebody had to do was just cut the line and the raft would go floating off and it had, it was made up of barrels and planks.
23:02Our company had two boats that were sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, but we really didn't realize how bad it was until the war came to an end.
23:12Surprisingly, the U.S. Navy was very slow in putting into effect the convoy system, which had worked really well in World War I.
23:22It was just incredible that these ships, these tankers kept sailing singly across the Gulf of Mexico and got blown up just one after the other.
23:32From the point of view of the British, it was particularly galling because we had successfully convoyed ships across the Atlantic only to see them sunk when they were running down the American coast under the alleged protection of the United States Navy.
23:49And in particular, we were losing a lot of tankers that way. And of course, tankers, fuel oil, fuel, petrol was absolutely vital to the British war effort.
23:58The six-month disaster that took place along the east coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean could have been averted in great part if Admiral King, who held all of the strings of anti-submarine warfare in his own personal hands, had done a number of things.
24:16First, if he had heeded British intelligence that was reaching him each day from the Admiralty in London, and if he had heeded British tactical doctrine for fighting U-boats, hard-earned knowledge that the British gave Admiral King and his subordinates.
24:33But Admiral King did not heed either, because he was an Anglophobe. He detested the Royal Navy, and particularly its intelligence.
24:40And he simply refused to accept the idea of convoy on the ridiculous ground that this was really defensive warfare. But of course, as the British had learnt the hard way, convoy actually is offensive as well, because the U-boats have to go to the convoys, then you've got a chance of sinking them.
25:01The second thing he could have done and did not was to turn out the lights. He decided to order that the lights be dimmed, but not blacked out. And so the massacre continued, as the U-boat commander said, even with the dim out, we're able to see our silhouettes very clearly.
25:22Admiral King finally responded to the catastrophe off of America's shores. Hundreds of small boats, schooners, shrimpers, and even private yachts, were requisitioned to patrol U.S. coastal waters.
25:35To man these ships, the Coast Guard Auxiliary was formed. An early recruit was Charles Stamey.
25:43There were no physical, no experience necessary, no qualifications. If you were breathing, you were in, period.
25:51In fact, all of these Coast Guard Auxiliary boats, they didn't have any navigation equipment at all. Nothing.
25:58There was nobody on that boat that could tell at any time exactly where we were. Nothing.
26:06If you saw something happen, if something happened out there, you could radio into the Navy base there at Galveston and say,
26:14Hey, you know, here's what's going on. Well, where are you? And about the only thing you could tell them is, it beats the hell out of me.
26:25Another recruit sent out to confront the U-boats was Walter Daigle.
26:29The ship I was on was a two-mass schooner. We had a diesel engine besides the sails. We were given pictures of German U-boats, so we had an idea of what one looked like.
26:46We would go out 12 miles, and we patrolled the Gulf of Mexico, and we spent our time scanning the horizon with binoculars for several days at a time before we returned to Pier 12 in Galveston.
27:04Initially, we had three boats in that auxiliary. These boats had a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the deck up front, and it had four ash cans, commonly called depth charges, that were on racks, and that was it.
27:24If we dropped one of those depth charges, I don't think we could get up enough speed in the boat to get away from the explosion, so you'd blow yourself out of the water.
27:32What would have happened if we saw a U-boat? We would have attacked it immediately. That was our goal. I'm sure we would have did that. We would have fired depth charges. What would have happened after that, I have no idea.
27:50It was suicide. If you went out and challenged one of those big German submarines, it would be like challenging a battleship in a rowboat. They would probably have used the deck gun and just sunk us right there. That would have been the end of it.
28:08Passengers board a ferry near Cape Hatteras on the North Carolina coast. Their destination, Ocracook, a remote island on the outer banks.
28:23Wartime residents have their own special memories of the U-boat war. Arnold Tolson.
28:29I was in the Coast Guard, Chief Petty Officer, in charge of the 83-367, the sub-chaser. Our main duties was to protect the shipping up and down our coast. In fact, we were all after German subs.
28:46You could come beside one ship and count fifteen, sixteen more stacks at one time in the ocean, which had been torpedoed. It was a bad, bad time.
28:55His Majesty's ships come over and helped us patrol this coast, trying to rid the coast of the submarines and the menace. And that was one of the reasons that the HMS Bedfordshire was over here.
29:11Her and several of her sister ships come over to help us protect our coast.
29:19We did not have in this country, we didn't have any anti-submarine fleet capable of doing the job.
29:26HMS Bedfordshire was one of a fleet of British anti-submarine vessels that came over to answer a very desperate call from the U.S. Navy for assistance against the submarine sinkings,
29:39which were reaching a crescendo in March and April of 1942.
29:45The Bedfordshire was one of twenty-four that went across to the States.
29:48We sailed down to Norfolk, Virginia, then down to Moorhead City, which was our base.
29:54And we worked from there, convoying, escorting, then patrolling.
30:00In May 1942, HMS Bedfordshire was U-boat hunting off Ocracoke when tragedy struck.
30:07That night, on May 11th, we were tied up to the dock at the Coast Guard Station.
30:14It was an awful boom. It shook the island.
30:17And just a minute or two later, there was another one.
30:22And that's what got my curiosity up for it to come over here the next morning and look and see if I could find out what happened or see what was along the shore or what have you.
30:33Arnold was to recover four bodies from the ocean.
30:37There were no survivors from the Bedfordshire, but there was one miraculous escape.
30:42The night before the Bedfordshire sailed, Sam Nutt had been picked up by the Moorhead City Police and detained.
30:48I never did know what the Americans were going to charge me with.
30:51I spent a day and a night in the cells, and they let us out, and the American soldiers took us down to the dock to join the Bedfordshire.
31:02But she'd gone to sea.
31:04We had to go aboard another boat to go look for the Bedfordshire.
31:08They was going to take us out to join the ship at sea.
31:12But when we got there, there was no trace of her at all.
31:17It was assumed the Bedfordshire had been the victim of a U-boat attack.
31:21This was confirmed after the war in the captured patrol diary of U-558.
31:27She had sunk the Bedfordshire with one of her torpedoes.
31:30This is a tremendous outburst of compassion on the part of the local citizenry hereabouts.
31:39These residents of this rather isolated island, they all recognized the fact that these Japs had given their lives in defense of, in effect, the United States at the time.
31:50And they are the ones who suddenly take this to heart and say, we're going to take care of it.
31:57They did, and they continue to do so.
32:00The residents of Ocracoke created this corner of a Carolinan field that is forever England.
32:07It's a measure of the deep affection felt by a small American community for the crew of an obscure little ship that became a casualty of the U-boat war, far from home.
32:23I think they were a down-good crowd.
32:30It was a good bunch of lads.
32:33We'd always replace a ship, but not 37 men.
32:37Boy, I'd come to miss that boat. There again, there's another story only him up there can answer, I presume.
32:44The Bedfordger's loss was not in vain.
32:53The lessons taught by those 24 anti-submarine trawlers sent by Winston Churchill and Admiral King's belated introduction of convoying ended the U-boat mayhem in American waters.
33:05When finally Admiral King was brought around to convoys, he then declared convoys are the only means for fighting U-boats.
33:14He became a very determined convert.
33:17He realized from sheer bitter experience with all these ships going down off his own coastline that convoy must be adopted, that it was the only answer.
33:26And in June 1942, he actually did a dock convoy and immediately the U-boat sinkings fell away sharply and the U-boat's happy time was over.
33:37But it was too late for the hundreds of ships that had already been lost and the thousands of men who had already died.
33:45With the end of the American happy time, Dernitz's wolf packs returned to the North Atlantic convoy lanes with a vengeance.
33:54At Bletchley Park, the British code breaking center, disaster had struck.
33:59Early in 1942, the Germans had improved their naval Enigma code machines by adding a fourth rotor.
34:06Overnight, the British code breakers had lost their means of deciphering the secret messages that passed between Dernitz and his crews.
34:13No longer could the Allies eavesdrop on Dernitz's orders to his boats or pinpoint their positions.
34:19Bletchley was blind.
34:21They were obviously going to concentrate on the convoys again and give up the American seaboard or basically give it much lower priority.
34:30And we stared therefore in the face a problem which consisted of an unbreakable enigma.
34:39No intelligence.
34:40A known increasing number of U-boats.
34:44The German output of U-boats was reaching its peak and everybody was desperate.
34:51We were under much pressure from the Admiralty.
34:54A liaison man would come down and say, look, you must get this U-boat cipher broken because unless there are some ways found of dealing with these U-boats, now that they're coming back to the convoys, the country's going to starve.
35:09Beneath the streets of Liverpool lay one of the best kept secrets of World War II.
35:16In this vast bomb-proof, gas-proof bunker, a massive effort was underway to defend the vital supplies coming to Britain against U-boat attacks.
35:25Western Approaches was the world's first combined operations command headquarters.
35:31Here, Royal Navy and Air Force personnel worked together, plotting and protecting the convoy routes across the Atlantic.
35:38On their joint efforts hung not just the safe and timely arrival of each convoy, but the outcome of World War II itself.
35:46Responsible for the air war against the U-boats were RAF Coastal Command.
35:52The primary role of aircraft in the Battle of the Atlantic was to support the Royal Navy in their task of defeating the U-boat menace.
36:05U-boats were frightened about air cover right from the very start.
36:11The role of the aeroplanes was firstly to deny the surface to the U-boats, a very important role in convoy defence.
36:22The other role, of course, was to kill U-boats.
36:26By 1942, we had made considerable progress.
36:30Better aircraft, better search equipment, the introduction of the early marks of radar, the standards of navigation improved,
36:38crew training improved, and the introduction of the naval depth charge had made a big difference in our attack capabilities.
36:47Those attack capabilities were greatly enhanced by the purchase of American-built planes like Consolidated's PBY, the Catalina.
37:01Though lightly armed and heavy to handle, the Catalina's extended range gave air protection to the convoys against U-boat attacks further out into the Atlantic.
37:10Crew losses were high. Solitary sorties of 18 hours or more above the grey wastes of the Atlantic took their toll.
37:17Mechanical failure, bad weather and human fatigue, as well as exchange of fire with the U-boats themselves, meant many planes never made it back.
37:26Air cover was very important. From Newfoundland, the aircraft could come out 500 miles. From Iceland, they could come out 500 miles.
37:37In between, there was about a 300-mile stretch called the Black Pit. That's where the majority of losses took place.
37:48The German U-boats knew that. They always had a wolf pack there in the Black Pit. They'd string it across, and somewhere the convoy would have to go through it.
37:56My comeuppance came. At the end of 1942, when I came out with a convoy called SC-107, 45 ships, and they got us in the Black Pit.
38:07They attacked for 72 hours. They sank 15 ships. And as soon as we got aircraft to come from the other side, the battle was over.
38:16They withdrew. From that on, nothing. We got the convoy across without further incident, but it was a harrowing loss and a terrible experience.
38:29The very long-range Liberator in 1942 was a new American plane that alone had the distance capability of reaching out into the gap.
38:37One pilot, credited with more U-boat kills than anyone else, was one of the first to fly the VLR.
38:43Based in Iceland, British ace Terry Hawkeyes Bullock.
38:47We were there for over two years, and this airplane, of course, could get out to where the U-boat packs were.
38:55The Germans were very surprised to see us, but they didn't know where these aircraft suddenly appeared from.
39:00When we sighted a U-boat, our instructions were to just go hell for leather for it and attack it at any angle.
39:10I devised a method where we could stalk the U-boat after sighting it and attack it either up-track or down-track at an angle of about 20 to 25 degrees across it.
39:23We used to have to descend to a height of between 50 and 100 feet.
39:28The lower you got, the more chance you'd get the depth charges within 10 feet of the hull to make sure that it was lethal.
39:38The bombings from airplanes, they are coming on to you very sudden.
39:47Aircraft have come out of the clouds within seconds.
39:52They pursued you by radar and you didn't even know.
39:55Or they sighted you out of the clouds and you did not know.
40:00Then there was a roar.
40:02And the aircraft flew over the bridge just about 10 or 15 or 20 feet above you.
40:09And dropped a series of bombs or a series of depth charges straddling the submarine.
40:19If you were lucky, none of the bombs exploded below the submarines.
40:26Or none of the bombs or depth charges hit the submarines.
40:35My first successful sinking was on U-boat U-597 in the Atlantic.
40:43We'd been shadowing it in and out of cloud to get in the right position.
40:47I dived from a height of 1,200 feet and I carried out my normal attack procedure.
40:55Only the bar of the U-boat had submerged.
40:58So we really caught them practically on the surface.
41:01And released the depth charges at about 80 feet.
41:04That, to me, was a perfect attack.
41:08That was credited straight away as a kill.
41:29But despite such successes from the air in late 1942, Dönitz was winning the tonnage war.
41:35Shortage of VLR liberators meant the gap was not fully covered.
41:39And Allied merchant sinkings had climbed to a record level.
41:43The Royal Navy and her allies at sea took the brunt of the battle.
41:48Especially towards the end of 1942, things were very bad in the Atlantic.
41:54The weather was simply unbelievably atrocious regularly.
41:59The westbound convoys spread out due to weather.
42:04Losses were severe.
42:06Losses were greater than replacements.
42:09During these horrific storms which we ran into,
42:13and the water sometimes was 60 feet above you.
42:18And the next thing you were looking down, 60 feet.
42:21But that sort of weather was ideal for us from the point of view that we were free from attack.
42:26Because no U-boat could stay on the surface in that sort of weather.
42:30On the Atlantic swells which could be two, three hundred yards apart,
42:34a corvette would ride up and over like a duck.
42:37You had every confidence in the corvettes.
42:39They were tough boats.
42:40But life on board the smaller escort vessels was grim in the extreme.
42:46In the mess decks themselves, they were overcrowded, grossly overcrowded,
42:50because of the extra equipment that had been put in for being on a war footing.
42:55Hammocks were slung side by side and touching each other.
43:00You had a constant wash of water, an inch or so of water,
43:04with all the debris that had fallen into it,
43:06swishing backwards and forwards as you rolled and pitched.
43:10People being sick.
43:12Under conditions like that, of course, you had skin diseases to contend with.
43:18You had dovey itch. You had ringworm.
43:20You even had lice at times.
43:22And quite a number of people in the escorts were lost overboard.
43:27Some even reckoned to have been washed overboard by one wave
43:31and washed back on board by the next one.
43:34In early 1943 we were attacked by a wolf pack
43:38and for six days and five nights until we got air cover
43:43we were more or less at action stations continuously.
43:48There was very little respite.
43:50You slept on the upper deck.
43:52You got wet.
43:53And, of course, the guns were going off.
43:55The depth charges were being loaded and fired.
44:01You'd fire what they call a box pattern of ten depth charges.
44:06Two would roll off the back of the destroyer or ship.
44:10Then two of the throwers would go out.
44:12Then shortly again, a slight pause of time, say two seconds,
44:16another two throwers would go out.
44:18And then two more would drop off the back,
44:21making a total of ten depth charges.
44:23For the enemy below, a depth charge attack
44:26was the most terrifying experience of all.
44:29Everyone is white in the face.
44:34Everyone turns very, very pale.
44:37Strangely enough, people tend to look up to the ceiling and it doesn't do a bit of good.
44:44But that's where the noise was coming from.
44:47You can hear a destroyer approaching.
44:50You hear the propeller noise that goes pitcha, pitcha, pitcha, pitcha, pitcha.
44:54And then you hear the bomb dropping underwater.
44:56And then from then on, it's only seconds before it will explode.
45:00There is an automatic sense of wanting to preserve your life.
45:15Some people seek a different location in the ship, the control room, for a very simple reason.
45:21The main hatch is through the control room.
45:24They feel they probably have a better chance of surviving by being close to the only escape there might be.
45:32Everybody was encouraged to lay down, to consume as little oxygen as possible,
45:38because we never knew how long we had to stay down.
45:43At one time, we were under attack for 36 hours.
45:51War at sea is an impersonal thing.
45:57You seldom see the enemy.
46:00He's distant.
46:02You fire guns at him.
46:04In the U-boat war, you might never even see the U-boat that you sink.
46:10Now it really depends.
46:12If you're lucky and the depth charge is further away, you'll get shaken around a bit.
46:19It is not very far away.
46:22The lights go out.
46:23There's a leak here, a leak there.
46:28That's the worst part.
46:30The attack from when the depth charges go off until the attack is over.
46:37If you're lucky, you don't get hit and you come back home.
46:42If you're not, you end up on the seabade.
46:53The U-boats, when they went down, they made terrible dying noises.
47:02They were crushed in the depth, and then you would get explosions.
47:06And all these things were indicative of whether you had got a genuine kill or not.
47:11We used to send away sea boats after we thought we'd killed a U-boat to see if we could pick up any evidence.
47:26Things like remains coming to the surface.
47:29There were certainly stories that U-boats would send up awful and things of this sort to try and convince us that there were human remains.
47:41But the destruction of U-boats and the safe passage of merchant ships at sea was the question and the answer to the prosecution of the war.
47:54Unless the Navy was successful in defeating the U-boats, then we would go under.
47:59That was close to happening. Allied tonnage sunk in 1942 by Dernick's wolf packs was more than the combined total for the three previous years of war.
48:12In 1942, into March 1943, it looked as if the Allies were finally going to lose the Battle of the Atlantic,
48:21that the convoy system itself was going to break down and that the seaways between the old world and the new were going to be cut.
48:27We should have meant no American expeditionary forces, no invasion of Europe, no defeat of Hitler in Western Europe.
48:35The U-boats were really unquestionably winning.
48:38They were hanging on the flanks of convoys of days at a time, sinking numerous merchant ships.
48:44They were really torpedoing their way to victory.
48:50At Western approaches, the secret underground headquarters for waging the war against the U-boats,
48:55the grim realities of the situation were clear.
48:59In particular, to the hundreds of service women working there, many of whom had strong personal reasons for wishing to see the U-boats defeated,
49:08Gwen Feathney was typical.
49:09My brother was seafaring, and in 1941, his convoy was attacked by U-boats.
49:20He was on an oil tanker, and there were 12 oil tankers in that convoy.
49:24They were all sunk just a day from home.
49:28I decided I would join the Rends because I was so enraged by all the sinking of the ships and the loss of my brother.
49:39He was only 21.
49:40We used to feel like putting the flags out when they sunk a U-boat.
49:45It sounds a bit ghoulish now, but it wasn't then, believe you me.
49:53We cheered for everyone that was sunk.
49:56We knew that things were not good by the signals that were coming in.
50:04The shipping we were losing, the aircraft we were losing.
50:10There was a naval officer who one day, it must have been the end of 42,
50:17just suddenly said, we've lost it.
50:23We have only fuel for two, maybe three weeks, for the whole of the country,
50:30and the number of ships we have lost.
50:34There's no way we can possibly win this war now.
50:39And we were all so fully aware that if we lost the Battle of the Atlantic,
50:45we'd lost everything.
50:51We knew what had gone on in other countries.
50:54Was it going to happen here, to this wonderful country of ours?
51:00It just couldn't be.
51:02I was taught a great love of my country.
51:06A great love of the people of the country.
51:10And all my country had gone through.
51:12All my friends and people I didn't know had gone through.
51:18This could not possibly be the end.
51:22We were British.
51:24Great Britain could never be conquered.
51:28And could never be conquered.
51:29ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS
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