- 1 day ago
For educational purposes
During World War II, Britain was absolutely reliant on maritime trade for its survival and therefore the protection of its merchant fleet became an issue of paramount importance.
After June 1940, however, German U-boats began to operate in the Atlantic and appalling losses were inflicted on allied merchant shipping.
Arctic convoys were twice suspended in 1942 as German aircraft and submarines wrought havoc on the waves - the trip to the Russian port of Murmansk, for instance, became known as the 'Death Trip' because so few ships returned.
For men aboard, there was little hope of escape should a ship go down; they could expect to survive for only a few minutes in the icy waters.
Featuring the filmed memories of convoy veterans this is the story of one of World War II most pitiless theatre of operations, where men lived in constant fear of the unseen dangers of the deep.
The programme also uses 3D graphics and animation to show the realities of a submarine attack and the mechanics of ships defences, Leading maritime and military experts are also featured.
During World War II, Britain was absolutely reliant on maritime trade for its survival and therefore the protection of its merchant fleet became an issue of paramount importance.
After June 1940, however, German U-boats began to operate in the Atlantic and appalling losses were inflicted on allied merchant shipping.
Arctic convoys were twice suspended in 1942 as German aircraft and submarines wrought havoc on the waves - the trip to the Russian port of Murmansk, for instance, became known as the 'Death Trip' because so few ships returned.
For men aboard, there was little hope of escape should a ship go down; they could expect to survive for only a few minutes in the icy waters.
Featuring the filmed memories of convoy veterans this is the story of one of World War II most pitiless theatre of operations, where men lived in constant fear of the unseen dangers of the deep.
The programme also uses 3D graphics and animation to show the realities of a submarine attack and the mechanics of ships defences, Leading maritime and military experts are also featured.
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LearningTranscript
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.
00:31The 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,
00:43and 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.
01:04The End
01:05The End
01:10The End
01:12The End
01:32In the wake of his overwhelming victory in France,
01:36Hitler hoped that Britain would make peace with Germany.
01:39But in June 1940, when Churchill refused to consider the German peace offers,
01:45Hitler threw one of his famous fits of pique.
01:48In a furious about-turn, he ordered his strengthened U-boat fleet
01:52to make an all-out attack on British shipping,
01:55which he claimed would make the First World War U-boat campaign look like a sideshow.
02:02During the dark days of World War II,
02:04the men of Germany's U-boat fleet were the national heroes of their day,
02:09fated and adored by a grateful public.
02:12But their fame and adoration was hard won.
02:16Out of every four men who went to sea in the U-boats,
02:19three died in action, doomed to rest forever in an iron coffin.
02:25Of a total of 40,000 men who sailed in the U-boats,
02:295,000 were captured and 30,000 were killed in action,
02:33leaving only 5,000 to sail the boats home.
02:37Hitler wanted to make peace because he felt that peace was inevitable.
02:42In simple terms, he felt that by June 1940,
02:45Germany quite clearly had won the Second World War,
02:48at least the war in Europe up to that point,
02:50and that for Britain to continue fighting was nonsensical,
02:54as Britain quite clearly had no chance of winning.
02:58Unfortunately for Hitler, Britain did not quite agree with his analysis of the situation.
03:02The sudden onset of war had left the giant merchant ships of the British Navy
03:07scattered across the oceans of the world.
03:10As the unescorted and defenceless ships dashed frantically for safe havens,
03:15they fell easy prey to U-boats and the auxiliary cruisers.
03:21Throughout the winter months, there was massive destruction of British shipping.
03:26In those first months of the war,
03:28to travel alone courted oblivion from beneath the waves.
03:41Despite the lessons from the First World War,
03:44the Navy was caught ill-prepared for the new submarine menace.
03:48The scattered seaways provided admirable scope for a U-boat.
03:53The British warships themselves were not immune from danger.
03:58In terms of sheer numbers,
04:00the Royal Navy had a massive amount of force available for the protection of British trade.
04:05Over 200 destroyers were at sea.
04:08Despite this, it is shocking to note that in the interwar years,
04:12the Admiralty had not carried out any operational analysis
04:15of how it had defeated the U-boat threat in the First World War.
04:19In fact, in 1937, the Admiralty declared that the development of its ASDIC sonar system
04:25had defeated any future U-boat threat.
04:30These boasts were to prove hopelessly incorrect.
04:35In light of its experience in the First World War,
04:38when it defeated a substantial German U-boat campaign,
04:41it would be expected that in 1939 the Royal Navy had in place the doctrine,
04:45ships and tactics for dealing with a resurgent German U-boat threat.
04:50However, the Navy paid no attention to convoy drills or rehearsing convoy procedures.
04:55The number of destroyers available for convoys was in fact quite small.
04:59They were allocated to the support of the battle fleets.
05:02The escorts that did exist had a very short range.
05:06This was fine whilst the battle remained in the North Sea.
05:09But when the Germans captured France in May, June 1940
05:12and transferred their main U-boat bases to the French Atlantic coast,
05:16the Royal Navy faced the problem
05:18it would have to fight its opponents in the middle of the Atlantic.
05:21These created a major threat to Britain.
05:25On September the 17th, the aircraft carrier Courageous
05:28was sunk with the loss of over 500 men.
05:32It was a major loss to the Royal Navy.
05:36At this stage of the war,
05:38the U-boats would sink the unarmed ships by fire from their deck guns.
05:42Although this was a slow and dangerous manoeuvre,
05:45there was often no choice.
05:48German torpedoes were plagued by development problems
05:51which caused many to fail to explode.
05:54In the First World War, torpedoes had detonated by percussion.
05:58They hit the target, a percussion cell was ignited,
06:02and the explosive detonated.
06:04This was all well and good.
06:06But sometimes the torpedo would run underneath the target
06:10and would therefore completely miss.
06:12Sometimes, if the torpedo struck the target at a glancing angle,
06:17there was not enough pressure on the percussion cap
06:21and the thing didn't detonate.
06:23So the Germans looked for a better kind of detonation device.
06:27And they came up with a magnetic detonator
06:30in which the iron of the ship disturbed the magnetic field
06:34or amagnetic field created by the torpedo.
06:38The beauty of this was you didn't actually have to hit the ship.
06:41If you were close enough, the proximity of the iron would disturb the magnetic field
06:46and the torpedo would go off.
06:48And if it was underneath the ship, this was even better
06:51because the explosion would break the back of the ship
06:53and it would most certainly sink.
06:56The problem that developed, however, was that the magnetic device being used
07:00was simply too delicate.
07:02And sometimes the Earth's magnetic field took it off.
07:05Other reasons detonated it.
07:07And the result was pure mayhem.
07:11Most of the fighting in the U-boats was done
07:13by Germany's legendary Type 7-class submarines.
07:17They proved ideal for the task.
07:20With a low conning tower, only 5.2 metres above the waterline,
07:24they were hard to see from over a mile even in daylight.
07:27At night and head-on, they were practically invisible.
07:32They could dive in under half a minute.
07:34They could reach a depth of 100 metres without strain
07:37and 200 metres if pressed.
07:44To combat the U-boat threat, hurried arrangements were made
07:47for British ships to travel in tight escorted convoys
07:51which allowed the unarmed ships to be guarded by destroyers and cruisers.
07:56In those early days, the system was makeshift and rather clumsy.
08:01No attempt was made to sort ships by their speed of travel
08:04and the speed of the convoy was limited to that of the slowest ship.
08:09But it significantly increased the chances of survival.
08:15For the Kriegsmarine, the main burden of the fight at sea
08:18was carried by the smaller craft, destroyers, torpedo boats and mine layers.
08:24In the early months of the war, the most successful weapon employed by the surface fleet was the mine.
08:32This early German newsreel shows the mines being manufactured in the factories,
08:38then shipped to the channel, where they were laid in the sea lanes.
08:43In the early months of the war, the German destroyers,
08:46the German destroyers clandestinely completed 11 mine-laying missions off the English coast,
08:51even venturing into the Thames estuary itself.
08:57Britain's North Sea coastline is very long.
09:00And in darkness, it's virtually impossible to prevent submarines and aircraft
09:06making fast incursions and laying mines and getting away.
09:12Indeed, fast surface craft would be very difficult to prevent.
09:16So it was not too difficult for the Germans to lay mines along the British coastline.
09:22The mines reaped havoc amongst the channel traffic.
09:26Sixty-seven ships, including two destroyers, were lost.
09:30These losses added to the steadily rising toll by the U-boats themselves
09:35and clearly showed the way ahead.
09:38The U-boats had won the political war.
09:41But could they also be relied upon to win the real war?
09:44It seemed Hitler needed one more lesson to convince him.
09:49In the First World War, Britain had been saved from starvation
09:53by the development of the convoy system.
09:55Donitz believed that this time he could overcome the British convoys
09:59by a combination of a bigger, faster and more powerful submarine,
10:03allied to a new system of tactics which would become known as the Wolfpacks.
10:10From his headquarters at the French port of Lorient,
10:13Donitz was able to control Wolfpack operations personally.
10:18Donitz would arrive in his headquarters at around 9 o'clock in the morning.
10:22There, his chief of staff, Captain Gotte, would inform him of the latest positions
10:27and up on the wall was an enormous map of the Atlantic.
10:30Here were the latest positions of German U-boats indicated in blue
10:34and allied merchant convoys and ships indicated in red.
10:38What then happened was that Donitz received a series of detailed staff briefings
10:42from his intelligence officer in particular.
10:45At this point, the Germans were reading the British intelligence codes
10:48and thus Donitz was able to form a clear picture of British movements and activities
10:53and thus direct his Wolfpacks effectively against the British convoys.
10:58The German Wolfpack consisted of 15 to 20 U-boats.
11:02The tactics of the Wolfpack dictated that initially all of the submarines in a pack
11:08were 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,
11:27and many lone merchantmen were sent to the bottom in the first few months of the war.
11:34But the main target of the Wolfpacks were always the Atlantic convoys.
11:39So 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
11:51that the submarine which spotted the convoy did not attack right away.
11:55Instead, it reported by coded radio signal using a highly sophisticated code
12:02which was encrypted on a specialized device known as the Enigma machine.
12:08These signals were sent directly to U-boat headquarters,
12:12giving the location, size, direction and speed of the convoy.
12:16The lone submarine then shadowed the convoy, avoiding contact with the cruiser or destroyer escorts,
12:24but always keeping its prey in sight.
12:28Back at his headquarters, Donets radioed his orders to the other members of the Wolfpack,
12:34who would then be instructed to close in for the attack.
12:38When enough submarines had been assembled near the convoy,
12:41usually on the first night after it was sighted,
12:44the signal was given for the attack to begin.
12:52Becker! Los! Ab!
12:59So, and when then the torpedo leaf,
13:02then was also the stop-uhr angesetzt,
13:05but with the Entfernung, ungefähr,
13:08and when there was no detonation, oh God,
13:11then was it over, yeah?
13:12And when it hit, or what?
13:16So, then was also the Erfolg there.
13:21I can also say from my boat,
13:23that was not a hurrah,
13:24but it was rather a thought,
13:25oh God,
13:27the poor people are now.
13:30As soon as the U-boats had loosed their torpedoes,
13:33they dived further beneath the surface,
13:35to escape the powerful explosive depth charges fired by the warships,
13:39which escorted the convoy.
13:42The British destroyers posed a powerful threat to the U-boats.
13:46With their superior speed and agility,
13:49they could easily destroy any U-boat on the surface,
13:52and they proved to be tenacious in the chase for submerged U-boats,
13:56which could only travel very slowly underwater.
14:01If a convoy was well protected,
14:03the first attack would raise the alarm.
14:06In a moment, the hunter became the hunted,
14:08and the real trial for a submarine crew began.
14:12It was a battle for survival,
14:15to outwit the enemy above in a tense and deadly game of hide-and-seek.
14:20A pattern of depth charges laid in a spread
14:23could either destroy the U-boat,
14:25or cause damage enough to force it to the surface,
14:29to the waiting guns of the hunters.
14:32Yeah, the Wasserbomben-Verfolgung,
14:34as such,
14:36ging natĂĽrlich
14:39nicht nur an die Nerven,
14:40sondern ans GemĂĽt.
14:42Und, äh,
14:44das war schon schrecklich.
14:46Ja?
14:47Und wer behauptet, er hätte keine Angst gehabt,
14:50der lĂĽgt.
14:51Ja?
14:52Wasserbomben waren
14:54wirklich
14:56nervig.
14:58Also, wenn sie es nahe kamen,
15:00das können sie sich gar nicht vorstellen.
15:02Unterwasserschall.
15:03Das ist ein so wahnsinniger Knall,
15:05den bringt eine Bombe an Land gar nicht mal.
15:09Und wenn dann also Beschädigung war,
15:12sprangen dann irgendwelche Ventile raus.
15:15Ja?
15:17Oder in der E-Maschine flogen die Schalter raus.
15:21Das Boot schĂĽttelte sich.
15:23Dann war das also schon kritischer.
15:27A damaged hull would be marked by a torrent of water,
15:30which would rapidly engulf the craft,
15:33taking it to the bottom.
15:35Often, the craft was merely damaged to the extent that control was lost.
15:39The hapless crew could do nothing but wait until it sank to a depth at which the massive pressure caused
15:45the hull to implode.
15:48The worst nightmare was to be trapped alive on the floor of the ocean with the prospect of a slow
15:54death by asphyxiation.
15:57For the U-Boat men, a depth charge attack was a nightmare world which tested their stoic resolve.
16:04The psychological strain was immense as they waited for the shock waves of an exploding charge,
16:10not knowing if it would be a fatal blow.
16:13Despite the dangers, some of the bolder U-Boat captains actually sought to draw off the escort ships,
16:19as this allowed the other members of the Wolfpack to close in for the kill unmolested.
16:25Night after night, the U-Boats repeated this pattern of attack,
16:28running away to avoid the destroyers and then returning once again to find a target.
16:35There were several reasons for preferring a night attack.
16:39Submerged, a U-Boat travelled slowly.
16:41Eight knots was the maximum practical speed and the duration of a dive was strictly limited.
16:46On the surface, a U-Boat could maintain 16 knots, giving the boats a huge increased range.
16:54At that time, the convoy still relied mainly on visual observation to detect submarines.
17:00In the dark, the low profile of the U-Boat was easily missed.
17:04The U-Boat's much larger target was clearly silhouetted against any available light,
17:10particularly if another vessel had been set on fire.
17:14As they gained experience in their deadly trade, the Wolfpacks became bolder,
17:19and some adventurous captains even took to striking within the convoy itself,
17:23where the escorts dared not use their guns for fear of hitting their own ships.
17:29For the merchant seamen on the convoys, their working world had become a nightmare.
17:35Anybody who was sailing on a vessel, working in the merchant navy,
17:39and who was therefore a participant in this Battle of the Atlantic, for want of a better name,
17:45never knew when something was going to happen.
17:48The sea looks great, clear.
17:51But you just did not know if there was a U-boat out there with a torpedo ready to fire.
17:59And therefore, if you wanted to, you could be living on tent hooks.
18:04Although you might say you were living dangerously, it didn't do any good to think about it.
18:08But it could happen, and suddenly, bingo, there's one ship left to worry about,
18:13as far as anybody was concerned, because the Atlantic Ocean is a very deep place.
18:18And you had to live with that.
18:22Britain now scrambled to find every available destroyer,
18:26as well as a number of armed merchant cruisers in order to provide protection for the convoys.
18:31But there were simply not enough warships available to provide the level of protection which was required.
18:39During the first year of the war, British warships sank an average of four U-boats per month.
18:44But the German shipyards were already turning out new U-boats faster than the old ones could be destroyed.
18:51For their part, the U-boats were sinking an average of three or four British merchant ships every single day.
18:58At that time, this was more than six times the level of construction of the new shipping in the British
19:04Isles.
19:04In the year between the 19th of June 1940 and the 19th of June 1941,
19:10the Germans sank more than 1,300 British merchant ships.
19:15In all, they had destroyed 5,700,000 tons of British shipping.
19:20In that same year, British shipyards were able to build only 800,000 tons of new ships.
19:28Due to the restrictions of the electric motors, which needed frequent recharging,
19:32the U-boats spent almost all of their time on the surface.
19:37The submarines of World War II were, in truth, no more than submersible torpedo boats
19:43with a very limited submerged endurance.
19:46They had to surface at regular intervals for air and to recharge the batteries.
19:51This was often to prove their undoing.
19:55Destroyers, or prowling aircraft, often caught U-boats on the surface
19:59as they attempted to refuel or recharge the batteries.
20:03Sixty years on from the events he describes,
20:06Werner Seimer can still remember vividly the effects of an air attack.
20:12There were some batteries in the air attack.
20:16There were some batteries in the air attack.
20:17And during this load period, we got the flying aircraft.
20:22Before, I must say, we had a Sunderland-Agriff.
20:25That were these flying boats.
20:28And as they hit us, we only saw one of the bullets from the right to the right to the
20:36left.
20:38And we also shot with two centimeters.
20:42And we saw how the ammunition from the Council of the aircraft
20:46was out of the air.
20:48The air ammunition.
20:51We didn't go through.
20:53It was.
20:54In the early years of the war, the British had two devices for detecting submarines.
20:59The first was the hydrophone, a simple listening device which could detect propeller noise.
21:05It could be defeated by the submarine shutting down its engine,
21:09and it could only be used if the ship stopped its own propellers.
21:13Much more was expected of the ASDIC,
21:16a device which emitted high-frequency sound
21:19and detected the reflections from the submarine.
21:23A searching vessel could continue at full speed
21:26and could determine the submarine's position and course.
21:30ASDIC operators became the eyes of the hunting battleship.
21:35We would pick them up, ASDIC,
21:36and you'd fix onto a submarine and you'd get the bleep, bleep, bleep coming back.
21:44And then you'd probably be on them.
21:46I know at one time in the Battle of the Atlantic,
21:50we sunk three U-boats in nine hours.
21:54Infuriatingly, the early ASDIC sets lost the signal when they were immediately over the submarine,
22:00making the accurate placing of depth charges difficult.
22:04Additionally, the U-boat crew alerted by the distinctive pings of the ASDIC
22:09would 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
22:19-boat crew as the Happy Time.
22:22Initially, the British had realised on their ASDIC sonar system, but there was incredible flaws in this.
22:27It was effective to up to three quarters of a mile, and as German U-boat commanders believed in engaging
22:32at around 2,000 to 3,000 yards,
22:35the 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
22:44use.
22:45ASDIC's other failure, of course, was it worked only on submerged submarines,
22:48and the German U-boat tactics were to attack at night on the surface and thus avoid detection.
22:54The chances of Britain's survival during the period of 1941 to 1942 was by no means guaranteed.
23:02However, the evidence suggests that the chances of Britain ever losing the convoy battle in the Atlantic during this period
23:09were in fact very slim.
23:12British merchant marine of the outbreak of the Second World War was absolutely huge.
23:16Well over 20 million tonnes of shipping, and in simple, rather brutal terms,
23:22Britain could afford to lose huge quantities of shipping before real crisis began to lose.
23:29It was estimated by the Germans that they had to sink 750,000 tonnes of merchant shipping every month,
23:36consistently for 12 months, to defeat Britain.
23:40British losses had climbed to that level.
23:44During 1941, a new danger emerged to join the U-boats.
23:49The long range Focke-Wulf Condor bombers now joined the attacks against British shipping.
23:55At this point of the war, there was little the British could do in reply.
23:59British fighter planes simply did not have the range to interfere with the Condors,
24:04and 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
24:18Atlantic.
24:20We must take the offensive against the U-boats whenever and wherever we can.
24:25The U-boats at sea must be hunted. The U-boats in the building yard or in dock must be
24:30bombed.
24:31The Focke-Wulf bombers employed against our shipping must be attacked in the air and in their nests.
24:38As far as aerial attackers are concerned, the better option really was to equip merchant ships, not just escorts, but
24:45merchant ships with anti-aircraft weapons.
24:48.3, .303 machine guns and then half-inch machine guns, preferably 20mm or 40mm anti-aircraft guns.
24:57These, of course, were not readily available in the dark days of 1940 and 1941.
25:02But if you could equip most of the ships in the convoy with anti-aircraft weapons,
25:09then the volume of fire put up, not terribly accurate, but a huge volume was quite enough to deter the
25:16Condors from attacking,
25:17because they tended to attack from quite low altitudes in order to be sure of putting the bombs on the
25:23ships.
25:25Winston Churchill was also to play a leading part in the next phase in the battle for the Atlantic.
25:30In a momentous conference between the British Prime Minister and American President Roosevelt,
25:35held 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,
25:47Roosevelt recognized the danger to Western civilization if Hitler succeeded in starving Britain into surrender,
25:54and he agreed that the American Navy would not permit the German submarines to attack British shipping
26:00in any part of the Atlantic Ocean west of Iceland.
26:06Roosevelt realized that if Britain went under, the consequences for America would be extremely severe.
26:12As a result, he introduced legislation to provide the British with 50 worn-out destroyers from World War I,
26:19from the American Fleet Reserve.
26:22In April 1941, Roosevelt extended the Pan-American Neutrality Zone,
26:28in 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
26:40and Canada a relative degree of security.
26:43Roosevelt extended this up to 1,000 miles into the Atlantic,
26:48which meant that German U-boat activity was restricted to the western side of the Atlantic,
26:53where the British escorts and convoys were more numerous.
26:56There was also a renewed glimmer of hope for the British surface fleet.
27:02Following a successful battle against a British convoy in May 1941,
27:07the Bismarck, a new battleship and the pride of the German surface fleet,
27:11accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prince Eugen,
27:14was engaged by a British naval force southwest of Iceland.
27:18The Germans fought back fiercely, destroying the British battlecruiser Hood
27:23and crippling the battleship Prince of Wales.
27:26But the Bismarck herself had been hit,
27:29and in the continued fighting suffered further damage from an airstrike launched from the Ark Royal.
27:35There was no escaping the guns and torpedoes of the converging home fleet.
27:40Hitler's most powerful battleship finally sank on the morning of May the 27th.
27:48In 1941, the lifting of the German invasion threat to Britain allowed extra British destroyers to be released for convoy
27:56duty.
27:56As the numbers grew, the escorts developed better tactical methods to combat the U-boats.
28:03They were aided by rapid improvements in wireless communications.
28:07Ironically, the cohesiveness which made the Wolfpack so successful was also the Achilles' heel which made them vulnerable.
28:17When it became necessary for dispersed U-boats to gather together to form a Wolfpack,
28:22regular wireless contact with base was inevitable.
28:26A new British apparatus, the High Frequency Direction Finder, or HuffDuff,
28:31allowed escort ships accurately to locate a U-boat from its radio signals.
28:37HuffDuff was a success.
28:39In commanding his U-boats and in organising them in Wolfpacks, Dernich used radio signals.
28:44Now, he accepted that the Allies could use land stations to detect these and pinpoint the positions of U-boats.
28:51But as the U-boats would only be signalling normally at the moment of attack,
28:55it was regarded that the threat to them would be minimal.
28:58It would be too late for the Allies to act.
28:59The Allies, however, developed HuffDuff, or High Frequency Direction Finding Radar,
29:06which was mounted unbeknownst to Dernich on escorts in 1943 onwards.
29:11The result was that they could actually themselves detect German U-boats sending radio signals nearby,
29:17locate them and engage them.
29:20Also introduced in 1941 was another device that changed the whole pattern of war at sea.
29:26During the course of 1941, radar scanners began to sprout from the mastheads of British destroyers.
29:34The newly perfected radar would prove decisive in the long-fought battle of the Atlantic.
29:40The Germans, too, had radar technology, but under the Nazi regime its potential had not been realised.
29:48Research was erratic.
29:51Their first countermeasure to the new detection system was to deploy radio silence.
29:57Radar allowed the fast destroyers to provide protective cover to a convoy even when out of sight.
30:04The range over which they could seek out the enemy was also extended.
30:08The happy time was not yet over, but Britain was on the point of fighting back.
30:15The much-needed infusion of support which came from the American intervention did a great deal to free British warships
30:22to concentrate on escort duty in the eastern part of the ocean,
30:26where German attacks were growing ever more destructive.
30:30It was just as well, because the British Navy was about to embark on one of the greatest tests of
30:36World War II,
30:37the Russian convoys.
30:40In June 1941, Hitler sent his armies into Soviet Russia,
30:44and the Germans won spectacular victories as they drove closer and closer to the beleaguered Soviet capital of Moscow.
30:53Stalin had appealed to Britain for help, and in the late autumn of 1941,
30:57the first convoys sailed through the treacherous Arctic waters, laden with aid for Russia.
31:04In Great Britain and the United States sent the Soviet Union during the war about 22,000 aircraft and about
31:1012,000 tanks.
31:11But when you consider the fact that the Russians produced 106,000 tanks during the war,
31:17then therefore our tank supplies were roughly about, somewhere about 10%.
31:22And there were other supplies which are extremely important.
31:25I mean, the food supplies were important.
31:27Talk to Russians now and they'll tell you about the bags of flour with the stars and stripes,
31:31they'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
31:46world.
31:47During the summer months, darkness never really comes in the Arctic Circle,
31:52and the 24 hours of daylight provided a superb opportunity for the German long-range bombers and surface ships,
31:58which were stationed on the coast of Norway to launch punishing attacks against the Arctic convoys.
32:05When winter came, the violent storms, almost constant darkness and ever-present dangers of the ice added to the misery
32:14of the crews manning the ships in the Arctic.
32:17The guys who were on the Mermansk run, when convoys would leave the north-east coast of England and head
32:27up around that North Cape,
32:29that was bloody murder.
32:31The icy conditions of January and February, let alone the other winter parts,
32:38if you got torpedoed up in the real North Atlantic around the North Cape, Spitsbergen,
32:44and there, if you went in the sea, you would last for 20 minutes.
32:49And that would be it. You would just freeze to death.
32:52So the guys who went up on that Mermansk run were real heroes.
32:58They just had a lot to put up with, and a lot, of course, didn't come back.
33:03In June 1941, the first U-boats appeared in Arctic waters,
33:07the most dangerous and inhospitable seas in the world.
33:12For the sailors of both sides, conditions in the Arctic were appalling,
33:16a numbing, unending nightmare of fog, ice, and blizzards.
33:21Although the threat of enemy action was the fear always uppermost in the seamen's minds,
33:26they could equally succumb to exposure, frostbite, or drowning in ferocious storms.
33:32Of the 81 vessels sunk in these waters, the U-boat fleet accounted for all but three.
33:39In return, 38 U-boats were lost with all hands in the same, unforgiving waters.
33:46Conditions on the Arctic convoy routes really almost stretched the bounds of human imagination.
33:53This was an area of water between Iceland and the Russian ports of Mermansk and Archangel
33:59that was traversed during the Second World War by around 40 convoys of about 800 ships in total,
34:06about 100 of which were lost during the Arctic convoy battles.
34:10The seas in this area are mountainous.
34:14The area is subject to vicious north-easterly gales with sleet and snow and hail.
34:20Sea temperatures are rarely above more than a few degrees centigrade,
34:25which means that anybody unlucky enough to find themselves in the water
34:28has a life expectancy of mere minutes.
34:30So all in all, it was pretty awful.
34:33These harsh conditions did not prevent the U-boats in the Wolfpacks from stalking the convoys.
34:38And although losses began to mount, it was obvious to Britain that Russia's need was so great
34:43they had to continue to send supplies regardless of the costs.
34:48And those costs could be enormous.
34:52By early 1942, the Germans had managed to concentrate powerful air, surface and submarine forces in Norway
34:59with the aim of causing as much damage as possible to the convoys.
35:04The admiralty in Britain was particularly concerned to discover that the giant German battleship Tirpitz had arrived in Trondheim.
35:13Even more ominously, she was joined in the Norwegian waters by the pocket battleships,
35:18Scheer and Lutzau, and the heavy cruisers Hipper and Prince Eugen.
35:24The German surface fleet entered the war in 1939 as a relatively balanced but rather small surface fleet.
35:32Certainly, it was incapable of engaging the Royal Navy on any serious battle so as to try and gain command
35:38of the sea.
35:40The one area of operations in which the German surface raiders managed to achieve some degree of effect was in
35:47the Arctic Ocean.
35:48Their bases in Norway put them astride the main communication lines of the convoys, from Britain to Mamansk.
35:56And sorties on several occasions did create panic amongst the Allies.
36:02The U-boats continued to hit home.
36:05And on the Arctic convoys, losses now grew to a point that they were even heavier than the massive losses
36:10which were still being sustained on the North Atlantic sea lanes.
36:14Between March and June of 1942, five British convoys sailed for Russia.
36:20And all five suffered heavy losses, which included several British cruisers and destroyers.
36:27Despite these losses, the situation in Russia appeared so desperate
36:32that authorisation was given for convoy PQ-17 to sail for Mamansk.
36:38Allied covering forces of two battleships, one aircraft carrier, three cruisers and eight destroyers were sent to the North Sea,
36:46ready to strike if the German battleships appeared.
36:50By 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.
37:03That same day, the Admiralty learnt that a German squadron consisting of the Tirpitz, Prince Yugen, Lutzow, the Hipper,
37:12and several German destroyers had gone to sea.
37:15The report suggested that the Germans would be able to reach the British convoy long before the covering naval force
37:22could catch up with them.
37:24It was feared that the German ships would overwhelm the escort vessels and then sink all of the merchant ships.
37:32In fact, the German surface ships were not as close to the convoy as the Admiralty had feared.
37:38But the escort vessels with the convoy were ordered to draw off in an attempt to decoy German task forces
37:45away from the convoy.
37:48It was to prove to be a disastrous decision.
37:51With the escort safely out of the way, the wolf packs and bomber forces moved in on the unprotected merchantmen
37:58and had a field day.
38:00They sank 20 more British merchant ships, which meant that out of a total of 34 ships that had started
38:06in the convoy, only 11 finally struggled into Mamansk.
38:10With hindsight, it's easy to say that convoy PQ-17 was a disaster waiting to happen.
38:18The core of the problem was the presence of the Tirpitz.
38:22This battleship, if it emerged and engaged the convoy, could sink the convoy and the escorts in reasonably short time.
38:31The only defence against the Tirpitz was for the convoy to scatter.
38:36And so they are easy and single victims for the aircraft and the U-boats, and they simply massacre them.
38:46To add insult to injury, the Russians refused to believe that the missing 23 ships of convoy PQ-17 had
38:55actually been sunk.
38:56They accused the Allies of inventing the story of great losses and of pretending to give more help than they
39:03were really providing.
39:05The suspicious Russians never fully understood the terrible conditions which the convoy encountered sailing to Mamansk.
39:12And the value of the aid they received by these great sacrifices was never fully appreciated.
39:21Despite the value of the supplies, after the disaster of PQ-17, the Allies were temporarily forced to discontinue the
39:30convoys to Russia.
39:32The halting of the convoys until September that year went down extremely badly in Moscow.
39:39The Soviets were engaged in the very costly Battle of Stalingrad and were desperate for war supplies which the convoys
39:46provided.
39:46And there were some sharp words sent to both Washington and London from the Soviets about halting these convoys.
39:54The battle for the Atlantic had reached its peak, and there were simply not enough warships to protect convoys on
39:59both the North Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans.
40:03By the time they were restructured, the Admiralty had realised that the convoy losses on the Mamansk run were less
40:09during the dark and stormy winter months than they had been during the summer with its 24 hours of daylight.
40:16Although the terrible conditions of ice and snow meant misery for the crews, ironically it produced an increased chance of
40:24survival.
40:25The 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, and the German propaganda machine was quick to seize
40:40on the opportunity to trumpet the impending victory in the Atlantic.
40:44British 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 favour of
41:00the Allies.
41:02Perhaps the most significant breakthrough in the U-boat war came with the breakthrough by the British intelligence services operating
41:09from Bletchley Park.
41:11Thanks to the extremely fortunate capture of an Enigma encoding book, British scientists were able to begin cracking the coded
41:19signals which told the U-boats where to gather for the attack.
41:23Armed with this information, they could intercept at sea, and the level of the U-boat sinkings rose dramatically from
41:291943 onwards.
41:32The intelligence war in the Second World War was, as we now know, of absolutely crucial importance to the winning
41:38of that war, and so too was the intelligence war in the context of the battle for the Atlantic.
41:43In particular, British ability to read German signals traffic, in particular traffic between the U-boats and their higher commands
41:52from December 1942 onwards, was very important.
41:55Because it allowed convoys to be rerouted to avoid the German U-boats on many occasions.
42:01This certainly saved the Allies literally millions of tons of shipping as a result of this.
42:07Of course, it should be said that the Germans had actually broken British naval codes even before the Second World
42:13War.
42:13However, from 1943 onwards, when the British changed their codes, effectively the Germans were fighting almost blind in terms of
42:21their intelligence sources, whilst the Allies were going from strength to strength.
42:27One of the other significant developments in 1943 was the closing of the air gap over the Atlantic convoys, with
42:34the appearance of long distance American bombers.
42:37And with the increased availability of new aircraft, such as the Short Sunderland, there was now no place for the
42:44U-boats to hide over the entire expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
42:49In the early years of the war, when the U-boats submerged, it had been almost impossible to pinpoint their
42:56position.
42:57However, by 1943, increasingly sophisticated detection methods were beginning to eliminate the ability of the U-boats to hide from
43:06detection by surface vessels or aircraft.
43:11In 1943, the technical side of Allied innovations in sonar, radar detection, and in weapons development, along with improvements in
43:20tactics and training, came together in a series of devastating battles, which saw the U-boats suffer horrendous losses.
43:28When the U-boats attacked a convoy, the support groups would be freely able to move up and bring overwhelming
43:34force to bear with the new technology and destroy them.
43:38It was devastating.
43:45These advances together produced a huge shift in the U-boat war.
43:501942 had been known by the U-boat crews as the happy time.
43:54In that year alone, the Allies had lost over 1,700 ships, which accounted for a massive 8 million tons
44:00of shipping.
44:01In the same year, they had been able to build only 7 million tons of shipping.
44:05There was to be no such triumph in 1943, although, ironically, the last of the U-boat victories took place
44:13in February and March of that year.
44:16In a fierce battle against a large Allied convoy bound for Liverpool, the Wolfpack sank 21 ships for the loss
44:23of only one submarine.
44:26It looked as if the pattern would be repeated, when in early May, a pack of 12 submarines found a
44:32convoy that had been scattered in a storm.
44:35In just two days, the U-boat sank nine ships, but this time, the escort struck back.
44:42In the next few days, they sank 11 of the attackers without losing a single ship.
44:47It 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
45:03a half million tons of new shipping.
45:06In a war of attrition, in which the tonnage of shipping sunk was the key indicator to both sides of
45:13how effective the war was being fought, the shipyards were vital.
45:18British shipyards averaged around 2 million tons of merchant shipping a year throughout the war.
45:24This helped to sustain and replace the massive losses, 22 million in all to the Allies.
45:31But, of course, the key to the Allied victory was the American shipyards.
45:36In the first three months of 1942, they produced 1.5 million tons of shipping.
45:42And 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.
45:53The rate of Allied shipbuilding was climbing far above losses.
45:57In the first three months of 1940, when on average 14 U-boats were on patrol, over 800,000 tons
46:04of Allied shipping had been sunk.
46:06In a similar period in 1943, with 115 U-boats operating, the tally was nearly 550,000 tons.
46:15100 more U-boats were actually sinking less tonnage.
46:20There were never enough U-boats.
46:23Germany entered the war in 1939 with only 57 operational U-boats.
46:28And although the number later climbed in 1943 and 1944 to several hundred,
46:33by virtue of the fact that many of them had to be fitting out or were training their crews,
46:38or were moving back and forth between their patrol stations and their ports,
46:43it meant that only a very small proportion, very rarely more than 20%,
46:48were ever actually on patrol in battle stations, if you like, in the Central or indeed the Western and Eastern
46:54Atlantic.
46:56More significantly, U-boat losses were growing at an alarming rate.
47:01The conventional submarines, which had fared so well in the first winter of the war,
47:06were now highly vulnerable to the Allied hunter-killer groups.
47:09It became rare for a U-boat to survive more than two sorties.
47:14It was not just the undersea fleet that was now on the run.
47:18The German surface fleet had suffered a number of serious losses in late 1942.
47:23And in consequence, the German capital ships spent most of 1943 standing idle in port,
47:29where they had endured the disfavour of Hitler and Donitz.
47:34In December of that year, the Scharnhorst was sunk by the guns from the battleship Duke of York and sent
47:39to the bottom.
47:41In 1944, the mighty Tirpitz was also sunk, this time by the RAF,
47:46who were able to sink the battleship with six-ton bombs which were designed especially for the task.
47:52There were a few German attempts to re-establish a technological lead in the battle for the Atlantic during 1944
47:59and 1945.
48:01Most notable was the adoption of the Biscay cross-radar system, which allowed radar to be carried on U-boats.
48:08This gave the commanders at least some warning of an impending air attack.
48:13Of even more value was the adoption of their snorkel system,
48:16which allowed U-boats to run underneath the surface and still draw the air for the diesel engines
48:21through a thin tube which extended a few feet above the water.
48:26This made U-boats almost impossible to detect from the surface.
48:30But it was a case of far too little, too late.
48:37On May the 4th, Grand Admiral Donitz, now Head of State, issued the order for the U-boats to cease
48:44hostilities.
48:47The battle for the Atlantic had been won by the bravery and skill of the men and women who worked
48:53together in the intelligence gathering network,
48:56in the British Merchant Navy, the convoy escort aircraft of the RAF, and in the ships of the Royal Navy.
49:30To be continued...
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