Angus Constam (2023) The Convoy HG76: Taking the Fight to Hitler’s U-Boats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoy_HG_76

We know Britain wins the war. In the same way we can’t know that Ukraine will win its war. Hindsight blinds us. Angus Constam takes the reader back to a period in winter 1941 when it was all bad news. Nazi Germany had occupied most of Europe and Channel Islands. Britain was next on the Hitler’s list. The Royal Navy had been brought home to defend British shores. Despite Germany’s mass investment in a navy, Britain was still rated the most powerful in the world. The soft underbelly was British merchant shipping. Like now, post Brexit, Britain was wholly dependent on imports to survive. U-Boats at the end of the first world war showed spectacular success. At the outset of the second world war, what U-Boat captains called ‘Happy Times’ continued. Hundreds of thousands of tons of British merchant shipping was sunk with little or no U-Boat losses. Constam reiterates the belief then that if it continued, Britain would starve itself of supplies—such as iron pyrites, metal ores and food such as oranges on Convoy HG76—and the King would have to sue Hitler for the British Empire’s terms of surrender.

Constam’s first chapter is called ‘A Dark Time’. Convoy HG 76 had about 30 merchant ships. Navel escorts, including Audactiy, a prototype Royal Naval aircraft carrier with three Marlette planes on its deck, protected them. Ranged against it, and lying in wait, was around 10 U-Boats, a Wolf-Pack, as it sailed at around seven nautical knots (the pace of its slowest ship) from Gibraltar to dock in Liverpool and other British ports.

Earlier in the war, Admiral Karl Dönitz’s rule-of-thumb estimate was such a German Wolfpack would expect to sink around ten merchant ships. Perhaps more. Earlier German Commanders had sunk three or more boats in one voyage, before returning home to re-fuel and pick up more torpedoes. He flung everything against it. Merchant ships with their supplies were sinking faster than British yards could make them. There were easier pickings around Africa and further out in the Atlantic, but Karl Dönitz was determined to decimate convoy HG 76.

Monstam suggests a British hero here to rival Admiral Nelson in the more modest figure of Commander and later Captain Walker. His defence of his convoy with an outer and inner ring of Royal Naval support vessels was a war changer. But it wasn’t one thing, or one man, but many men, following Walker’s leadership. One of Britain’s most decorated pilots, ‘Winkle’ Brown, for example, cut his teeth on Marlette’s. Flying out and protecting their boats from U-Boats and Condors that mapped their every move and radioed in their positions. Air supremacy was one aspect of how many more ships were avoiding U-Boats.  American Land-Lease and Roosevelt’s selling of the war to the American public, allowing him to support British war efforts, was another. Radar didn’t work very well. ASDIC (Radar) had little success picking out U-Boats beneath the water. They slipped underwater largely undamaged after causing maximum damaged. Radar used to pick out U-Boats on the water worked even less well. But as they improved, so did Walker’s tactics.

Walker worked with spotter aircraft and used fast-paced boats to drop depth charges based on ASDIC readings. From the beginning of the war in 1939, thousands of depth charges sunk one U-Boat.  No better than random. Walker sunk around five U-Boats in five days. His crew were no longer reactive, but active, hunter killers. Training and technology. U-Boats were sinking faster than the Germans could replace them. They were no longer ‘Happy Days’ for Hitler’s submarine crews.

A shootout and shoutout between the U-Boat Wolfpack of around ten U-Boats, versus Walker and his crews. Admiral Donitz, getting the latest reports from Condor planes and U-Boats shadowing the convoy. Constam suggests, he wanted a win, because the battle got personal. Many of the U-Boat captains didn’t survive the war. Captain Walker did, but died shortly afterwards, to be largely forgotten. Constam has resurrected his name and reiterated his valiant deeds. Read on.