The Beginnings Of The Sea War - And The Stalking Of The Graf Spee

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THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SEA WAR - AND THE STALKING OF THE GRAF SPEE


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WWII* Chapter 9

In this book, we have already noted some of the events of the war at sea in the context of other episodes and battles that took place before the end of 1940. It now seems right to take a brief yet detailed look at the course of the sea war from September 1939.
For the first three weeks of hostilities, the German Navy was kept tightly in check. Commanders were ordered to follow the rules of the London Convention of 1936 to the letter - and that meant that attacking passenger ships or French vessels was outlawed. Hitler was anxious not to repeat the mistakes of the First World War, when the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 had become a significant factor in the entry of the United States into the conflict, although the British liner SS Athenia was torpedoed and sunk by U-30 on 3rd September 1939 with the loss of 112 lives. On September 24th, Nazi Germany's unaccustomed pretence of adhering to the rules was abandoned, and the ban on attacks on French ships was lifted. By the end of the month, the pocket battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland had sailed to their holding positions in the Atlantic, and the Allies awaited developments.
Most of the significant naval attacks of the period September - December 1939 have been mentioned earlier; suffice it to say that, despite the considerable naval inferiority in terms of both ships and training of the German Navy, they finished 1939 only marginally the loser. German U-Boats had sunk 114 Allied and neutral merchant ships, and would have sunk many more but for the reintroduction of the convoy system, which had saved many ships and lives in the First World War, and for the extraordinarily inefficient magnetic trigger mechanisms of the German torpedoes. But for these defective triggers, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal , later to be "sunk" so many times by Goebbels' propaganda, would actually have gone to the bottom on September 17th. Similarly, on October 30th, the battleship Nelson was hit three times by torpedoes, none of which exploded.
The British (and later the Americans) started with the clear advantage of having Asdic, the submarine detection equipment that the US Navy called Sonar. The Germans had no equipment like it, and U-boats were frequently located, although in the early stages rarely destroyed, by British ships uttering the pinging signal of the Asdic transmitter. Nonetheless, nine U-boats were sunk during 1939, six of them ocean-going vessels.
Hitler had placed great reliance upon the big guns, vast fuel capacity and enormous range of his pocket battleships, and had frequently expressed the belief that their value as ocean raiders would give Germany command of the seas and the ability to enforce a blockade. In practice, the pocket battleships were a disappointment. The Deutschland , renamed Lutzow after her first cruise of the war because of Hitler's deep-seated fear of a ship named "Germany" being sunk, disposed of only 7,000 tons of small-scale shipping in her two months at sea from August 24th to November 1st.
On November 23rd, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau , ordered to lay on a show of force in the North Atlantic to draw some of the attention of the Allied Navy from the Graf Spee in the South, had surprised and overwhelmed the armed merchantman Rawalpindi , which sank with considerable loss of life. Among the dead was her commander Captain Kennedy, the father of Britain's well-known author and TV personality Ludovic Kennedy. But even this was a lone incident in an otherwise inglorious career for the pocket battleships.
The Graf Spee had more success in her first couple of months. Ordered to commence hostilities against Allied shipping while off Brazil on September 27th, she sank over 50,000 tons of shipping before meeting her Waterloo in the form of Commodore Harwood's Royal Navy South Atlantic cruiser squadron, near the estuary of the River Plate, at dawn on December 13th, an action mentioned in an earlier chapter of this book.
Commodore Harwood's force consisted of the cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles , whose 8-inch and 6-inch guns were hopelessly outclassed by the six 11-inch guns of Graf Spee . The German ship was also better armoured, and was equipped with radar, which Commodore Harwood did not have on any of his ships. Despite these disadvantages, Harwood went straight into action, sending the Exeter in for a head-on confrontation, while Ajax and Achilles skirted the battle to attack on the flank. Before Ajax and Achilles could bring their guns to bear, Captain Hans Langsdorff of the Graff Spee had brought the full force of the 11-inch guns down on the Exeter , knocking out all her guns, holing the hull and making the ship largely unmanoeuvrable. Even with this terrible damage, the captain and crew of the Exeter maintained the attack by firing torpedoes right to the last moment, but had to break away and limp smoking out of range at 7.15am.
Ajax and Achilles kept fighting as best they could with their light guns, but in the effort to get close enough to do some damage, Ajax had most of her guns knocked out, so Commodore Harwood decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and retired to an honourable distance. On board the Graf Spee , 36 men had died, and 59 were wounded. The ship was not at risk, but was quite seriously damaged superficially, and Langsdorff decided, perhaps over-cautiously, not to attempt the home run through the northern seas in winter, but to put in to Montevideo, in neutral Uruguay, for repairs.
The Uruguayan Government was less than enthusiastic about the appearance of a German armed raider in the River Plate, and allowed Langsdorff only the 72 hours' grace that the strict letter of international law permitted. This was not long enough for the repair work to be carried out, and on December 17th, Langsdorff sailed from Montevideo. Believing entirely unfounded rumours that Britain's battle cruiser Renown and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal were waiting for Graf Spee out in the Atlantic, Langsdorff scuttled his ship in the Plate estuary. Perhaps because he felt unable to face the fury of Hitler, or possibly as a result of the humiliation he had suffered, he shot himself on December 20th.
A more serious hazard to Allied and neutral shipping in the early stages of the war was the magnetic mine, a massive semi-submerged or submerged bomb detonated by the magnetic field of a ship passing over it. Germany laid thousands of these mines from aircraft and U-boats, and sank 59 Allied and neutral ships with them before the end of 1939.
The salvation of the Allies' shipping came in the form of a magnetic mine washed up at Shoeburyness, on England's Thames estuary, on the night of November 22nd/23rd. Defusing this unexploded monster was a daunting and extremely dangerous task, for the techniques of coping with unexploded bombs were still in their infancy by comparison with the level of expertise a year or two later. Nonetheless, Commander J.G.D. Ouvry, Royal Navy, tackled the job and succeeded. As a result, scientists were able to understand how the mines operated, and devised a countermeasure known as degaussing. An electric cable carrying a current was passed around the ship, effectively neutralising the vessel's magnetic field. By March 1940, most Allied ships had been degaussed, and the peril of the magnetic mine was largely past.
In the first quarter of 1940, the Allies were more or less in control of the situation at sea. There were as yet relatively few ocean-going U-boats, the terror of the magnetic mine had been overcome, and the convoy system was proving reasonably effective in protecting merchant ships from those submarines that were at sea. Nonetheless, 108 merchantmen were sunk between January 1st and March 31st 1940, almost 350,000 tons in the three months, at a time when British shipbuilders were constructing new ships at the rate of 200,000 tons every month. Naval convoy escorts sank eight U-boats during the same period, and the British and French navies felt they had matters well in hand.
The German invasion of Norway in April 1940 took most of Admiral Doenitz's U-boats out of the Atlantic raiding business for two months, and the merchant convoys had eight weeks of comparative respite. During that time only 20 Allied merchant ships totalling about 88,000 tons were sunk. Defective torpedo detonators continued to dog the efforts of the German submarine commanders, and Doenitz is on record as having said that the magnetic trigger problem spared an entire Royal Navy battle squadron - the battleship Warspite , seven cruisers, seven destroyers and five transports. Meanwhile, six U-boats were sunk in the North Sea between April 10th and May 31st.
June brought a wave of appalling destruction to the merchant fleets, as the U-boats were released after Germany's victory in Norway, and returned to the task of sinking merchant ships. Fifty-eight vessels were sunk by U-boats in one month, and the Luftwaffe , from their newly-acquired bases in Holland, Belgium and Northern France, claimed forty-four more. More than half a million tons of Allied shipping - 144 separate ships - were sunk by the end of the month.
Now the balance of naval power shifted sharply in Germany's favour as the Italian Navy entered the war on Germany's side, and the French Navy was effectively put out of the fight by the fall of France. Maintaining the pressure on the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean, formerly a problem left to the French, was now entirely in the hands of Admiral Somerville's Force "H", based at Gibraltar. The Royal navy had only a limited choice of bases in Britain and elsewhere, whereas the Germans had the facilities of every Atlantic port between Tromso and St Jean-de-Luz. Britain had a naval base outside the British Isles only because, on May 10th 1940, following the German occupation of Denmark, Britain had occupied Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, until then Danish territory. Thus, although the Royal Navy could no longer blockade the North Sea between Scapa Flow and Norway, it was able still to maintain coverage of a line from the Orkneys and Shetlands, through the Faeroes to Greenland.
The reinforcement of naval strength as a result of German conquest did not all flow Germany's way. A thousand ships of the Norwegian merchant fleet, totalling four million tons, and much of the Dutch and Belgian merchant marine had escaped the clutches of the Germans, and had been put at the disposal of Britain after May 1940. This additional tonnage was considerable - equivalent to some 34 per cent of the total British merchant marine in September 1939. As a result, Britain was able to face the Battle of the Atlantic with almost 30 million tons of shipping.
Admiral Karl Doenitz was not slow to seize for his U-boat fleet the benefits of the new bases that were available to the German Navy. As early as July 7th, the port of Lorient received its first U-boat for refuelling and rearming, and by August, when Doenitz established the headquarters of the U-boat fleet at Kernevel, just outside Lorient, work on refitting the port with the most up-to-date equipment in the world was well under way.
The subsequent successes of the German submarine flet owed much to the dedication with which German scientists had pursued advanced radio technology, and to the readiness of the German Navy to accept what were then new scientific ideas. German radio direction finding had become very sophisticated by mid-1940, and the new installation at Lorient was capable of establishing a position from the briefest of transmissions by a convoy at considerable range. German codebreaking was also very effective, and the records suggest that Doenitz's team were usually able to decipher signals to convoys from British Western Approaches Command. Most important of all, the development for the Wehrmacht of what was for the period an immensely powerful radio that enabled whole tank formations to be controlled in a cohesive manner - something that the Allies could not yet do - made is possible for the Lorient U-boat headquarters to be provided with radio transmitters able to communicate directly with U-boat commanders at great range, and direct several submarines on to the same target. This was the origin of the infamous "Wolf Pack", that was to wreak such terrible havoc on Allied convoys.
As the new Lorient HQ was brought into commission, the U-boat fleet was still not large - 57 boats in September 1940. In the first year of war, the Germans had lost 28 submarines, and had commissioned exactly the same number. Because the training of a submarine crew took (and still takes) a long time, Doenitz was rarely able at this time to put more than nine U-boats into the Atlantic West of Ireland. That his hand-picked and dedicated commanders managed to maintain an average of 920 tons of shipping sunk per U-boat, per day, during October 1940 is an indication of just how effective his crews and his organisation were.
In the face of this efficient offensive force, Britain was desperately short of convoy protection and anti-submarine vessels. Until the destroyers and corvettes ordered during 1939 and 1940 were available, Britain needed more ships, and fast. In May 1940, Churchill had asked President Roosevelt for help in the form of some 50 American destroyers built at the end of the First World War. By July, having heard nothing and with an ever-more pressing need, Churchill tried again, with a further request on July 11th. Although a majority of American public opinion was in favour of helping Britain, and was sympathetic towards both the magnitude of her problems, and the fortitude with which she withstood them, there was great concern about the possible reprisals that such help might exact from Germany and Italy. Fears were expressed that the USA would be dragged into a war for which its industrial production facilities were as yet ill-prepared.
Roosevelt sought a compromise by offering Churchill an alternative deal that would have a direct benefit to US security. In return for the 50 destroyers, proposed Roosevelt, the USA would be allowed to establish bases in Guiana, the Antilles, Bermuda, the Bahamas and, given the agreement of Canada, in Newfoundland, for 99 years. London accepted these terms, but objected sharply when Roosevelt attempted to make a further condition that the British Government declare that Britain's fleet would be sailed to America if it could not be maintained in Home waters. Churchill curtly pointed out that the risk of having to scuttle or surrender the Fleet was one to which the German navy, or what was left of it, was more subject than the British.
Thus Britain approached the sea war of 1941 and 1942 with growing strength, but little effective means to fight the menace to merchant convoys posed by the U-boat. The terror of the wolf-pack was to prove one of the most fearsome chapters of the war. But, for the moment, let us return to the land-based war, and the warmer waters of the Mediterranean.

[Antipodean Andy]

There's something about the Battle of the River Plate that has always fascinated me. Love the film too, especially with INS Delhi returning to her roots and becoming HMS Achilles again. Cumberland did the same but came in after the battle after Exeter had limped away to the Falklands. There's something about watching those big gun ships heeling over, turning hard, making smoke...can't replicate that today!

Britain's well-known author and TV personality Ludovic Kennedy
He wrote Pursuit didn't he?