AT SEA: Tougher & Tougher

Germany last week jubilantly quoted the master & crew of the Brazilian freighter Magalhaes, just back in Lisbon from Southampton, as saying that that great British port was now “dead.” The Magalhaes had waited there two weeks for a cargo, finally left without one when Germany announced her total blockade of the British Isles. In that time, the Magalhaes’ master was quoted as saying, only one ship left Southampton with industrial products. Rail lines from the interior had been crippled by repeated air bombing. Most Southampton warehouses were destroyed or damaged. The King George V graving dock, only one in England big enough to accommodate giantesses like the Queen Mary, was out of commission with smashed floodgates. The Empress basin was blocked by a sunken tanker, its wharves torn by gaping holes. Leaving port the master of the Magalhaes counted 23 wrecks in the Solent. “South England is dying,” he concluded, “no miracle can stem the tide.”

Blitzkrieg had, however, not yet closed the port of London. U. S. correspondents who last week visited that 3,668-acre area at the mouth of the Thames, which in peacetime used to handle more than 1,000,000 tons of cargo per week, found scores of ships from all parts of the British Empire, South America, the Far East, unloading food and war goods for Britain, loading cargoes for export. With no passenger trade and with all Scandinavian and Continent traffic suspended, the port was far less bustling than normally, but workers employed (including crews) ran as high as 35,000 per day in August; warehouses were piled with grain, tobacco, flour, tea, rubber, sugar, meat, wool, timber, leather. At Tilbury Docks, which the Germans claimed to have destroyed Aug. 16, patches showed where bombs had struck but about 30 ships lay at berths handling cargo or making ready for sea. Officials admitted that as much traffic as possible had been diverted to safer ports in the west and north.

The air war on Britain’s ports, which last week reached to Liverpool (see p. 20) and included new batches of German mines laid by air in many harbors, tended to obscure Germany’s continued war on British shipping at sea. Reviewing the year, Minister of Shipping Ronald Hibbert Cross last week reported that while she lost 1,900,000 merchant tons, Britain more than replaced it with 2,000,000 tons built, bought, leased and captured. He cited 33,000 vessels escorted in convoys during the year.

Minister Cross did not mention the fact, ascertained by neutral observers last week, that Britain’s destroyers in home waters were now whittled down to about 60, with a like number laid up for repairs. To eke out surface escorts, big British seaplanes now fly convoy far out over the Atlantic. This situation underlay Britain’s anxious effort to buy old U. S. destroyers.

Last fortnight a mine got the destroyer Hostile and this week the Germans claimed two more destroyers were torpedoed. Last week the armed merchant cruiser Dunvegan Castle (15,007 tons) was torpedoed and sunk in the north Atlantic.* German submarine commanders apparently had orders to press boldly against British convoys. Refugees arriving in Canada last week told of four ships in their group being sunk far out in the Atlantic the day after their armed escorts left them. A ship carrying 320 British poor children to Canada was sunk off Ireland, all hands being saved except the purser. Italy last week declared that some of her submarines had run the gantlet past Gibraltar to join in raiding Atlantic sea lanes. Thus, by sea as by air, Britain’s position grew tougher & tougher.

— *Another vessel of the northern patrol, the British submarine Spcarfisk, long overdue, was given up for lost last week. The submarine Sealion was luckier. Rammed by a German merchantman, who sheared off her periscopes and shook her up with depth charges, the Sealion wallowed for two days while making emergency repairs, got home safely.