World War: BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC: Britannia Rules the Waves

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Last week Sir Percy Noble was aware that he was losing the Battle of the Atlantic. Up to him was the question of whether it could be lost slowly enough so that the tide of battle could turn before Britain was beaten.

The British Admiralty announced last week that it will no longer publish weekly figures of the British merchant marine’s losses—henceforth they will be issued only monthly. The reason for the change was partly to keep the Germans from knowing how effective particular attacks had been. But if the change was also made partly for reasons of home morale, it was an ominous sign. For the weekly report of merchant-tonnage losses has been the best barometer of how the war was going for Britain, and every Briton knows that although his country may survive disasters in the Mediterranean, it cannot survive losing the Battle of the Atlantic.

The chart below shows how British shipping losses have piled up since the beginning of the war (not counting the shipping losses of Britain’s allies; including them, the total through the end of March was 5,300,000 tons). What this rate of losses means is best explained by the tally of what shipping Britain now has.

How Much Left. When the war broke out, Britain had about 21,000,000 tons of shipping in all categories, and has since acquired about 9,000,000 tons of Allied and neutral shipping. Meanwhile Britain has built, bought, chartered and captured an additional 3,000,000 tons—a grand total of 33,000,000. Deducting 5,300,000 tons lost, Britain has at present available a grand total of 27,700,000.

This fine, fat, encouraging figure is misleading. For one thing, a large proportion of this tonnage is impounded by the Admiralty and requisitioned for military purposes: transport of troops, supply of the Mediterranean campaigns, armed merchant-cruising with convoys. Besides, much of the tonnage is unsuitable for the task of supplying Britain: some ships are inland water vessels, others were used before the war for the trans-Channel trade. Much of the tonnage of big passenger liners is not usable cargo space. And many ships have specific jobs they cannot leave in distant parts of the world. According to London estimates, all these factors reduce tonnage which can actually be used to carry life-stuffs and death-stuffs to Britain to 13,000,000.

Nor is that all. Voyages are slower, owing to the fact that convoys must assume the speed of their slowest members and must steer in zigzag courses. On the average, voyages take twice as long as they did before the war. So these 13,000,000 tons of shipping carry roughly only as much goods as 6,500,000 tons could carry in peacetime.

Nor is that all. Of all the British ports, only Liverpool and those on the Clyde and Severn—lying on the western side of Britain—are operating at anywhere near full efficiency. Edinburgh, Newcastle, Hull, London and Southampton, thanks primarily to U-boat concentrations and to a lesser extent to the Luftwaffe’s awful flirtations, are decreasingly effective (in the order named). The ports, in short, are bottlenecks which reduce the effective use of the merchant fleet to the equivalent of about 5,000,000 tons.

That is still not all. Serious and minor damages keep about 1,000,000 tons constantly in shipyards under repair or waiting for facilities. About one-quarter of this tonnage is damaged by the ordinary hazards of navigation and depreciation; the rest is Nazi damage. An important part of the damaged tonnage is also bottlenecked because the shipyards are so urgently trying to build new ships, both naval and merchant.

Figured in this way, Britain, with a merchant fleet of 27,700,000 tons actually has the effective use of only about 4,000,000 tons to supply her needs from overseas during the war. Since the first week of March the average rate of loss had been over 100,000 tons a week. At that rate, Britain stood to lose over 5,000,000 tons in 1941. If Britain and the U.S. succeed in building 2,100,000 tons this year—probably the maximum, this would mean a net loss of nearly 3,000,000 tons —or about 23% of the 13,000,000-ton fleet now supplying Britain. It would reduce the effective tonnage of ships engaged in that essential function to little more than 3,000,000 tons. At this rate the British would not be licking the problem ; it would be licking them.

Differences. In World War I, the British did lick the submarine menace. After the terrible losses (394,700 tons) of April 1917, the worst month of unrestricted submarine warfare, the convoy system was devised. And it worked. Of all the British ships convoyed across the Atlantic in 1917 and 1918, 99.08% reached their destinations safely. Destroyers learned how to spot and sink U-boats. By the end of the war, destroyers and their depth charges had reduced the rate of sinkings by 71%. The striking difference between this record and that of World War II is the result of strikingly different conditions.

In the first place, relative strength of the attackers and the attacked is radically different. Toward the end of the last war Britain had 496 destroyers, and could call to her assistance 100 U.S., 92 French and 67 Italian destroyers—a total of 755 friendly destroyers. Last week Britain had a few more than 300 escort vessels and destroyers, counting the 50 turned over by the U.S., and a few score of corvettes. In the spring of 1917 Germany had 128 submarines in commission; this spring she has at least 180, probably many more. And submarines are much faster now. So while Germany’s offensive flotilla is more than half again as strong, Britain’s parrying strength is less than half as strong.

This fact is not materially offset by the relative improvement of Britain’s strength in capital ships. In the last war, Germany’s battle fleet was so strong that Britain had to keep her battleships together at Scapa Flow in case of a sortie by the Germans. In this war, because Germany has few battleships and because the Italian Fleet has proved so impotent, Britain has been able to disperse her Fleet and use much of it in convoy duty. But battleships, with less speed than destroyers, are not a weapon to use against submarines. The use of battleships in convoy is chiefly to keep surface raiders at a distance.

To keep German submarines bottled up in 1917-18, all the British had to do was guard the narrow Straits of Dover and the mouth of the North Sea between Scotland and Norway—altogether a blockade front of only 300 sea miles. Before the war ended, this entire front was covered by a mine barrage. This time the Germans took Norway, and France fell. From Narvik to Bayonne, 2,300 sea miles, the Germans had their choice of ports. The chart shows how sinkings spurted after the Germans took over Norwegian and French bases.

Perhaps the most important difference this time is the Germans’ use of aircraft. Here again, the use of upper Norwegian and lower French bases has proved invaluable. At first the Germans used aircraft principally as eyes, and to sow magnetic mines, but with the development of two long-range fighter-bombers, the Focke-Wulf Zerstorer and Kurier, which can sweep halfway across the Atlantic and back, they began to use planes for destruction as well. The British ogling of Irish bases is not so much for the sake of the Navy as for the R.A.F., which is hampered in the Battle of the Atlantic by a lack of long-range fighters.

The fall of France had another important effect. The Germans seized certain French vessels which had been equipped with secret British anti-submarine devices, notably the supersonic detector called ASDIC. A study of this gear enabled the Germans to develop new tactics (TIME, March 17).

In the last war the British were free to use the Mediterranean as a supply route. The entrance of Italy into this war signalized the stoppage of the Mediterranean short cut. The British have only tried to put one large convoy through since last June, and that was the one in which the light cruiser Southampton was sunk and the aircraft carrier Illustrious was given a dreadful pasting by Axis dive-bombers. The effect of this was not only to put an added strain on British merchant shipping by requiring it to use the longer Cape route, but to force Britain to send many of her ships, including destroyers, to the Mediterranean where they are not useful in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Germans took advantage of this situation, risking their fastest surface ships in commerce raiding. Last week the German radio declared that Chief of Staff Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (rhymes with raider) had gone to Brest and pronounced the Scharn-horst and Gneisenau, which the British had had nearly three weeks to bomb, “ready for renewed service in the Battle of the Atlantic.”

Whereas in World War I the “submarine menace” was the only thing to fear, the threat this time has come from all these new factors. A recent breakdown of British sea losses by cause:

Submarines . . . . . . . 39%

Aircraft . . . . . . . . . . . 23%

Mines . . . . . . . . . . . . 22%

Warships . . . . . . . . . . 8%

Unaccounted . . . . . . . 8%

However, since the Zerstörer and Kurier have gone into action, the percentage of sinkings by bombings has probably begun to rise even higher.

Beating the U-Blitz. Around a huge chart-spread table in the Merchant Ship Plotting Room of the grey old Admiralty off London’s Trafalgar Square, a number of officers and clerks bustle every morning, plucking out and sticking in little colored pins. Each pin represents a ship; its color designates whether it is in convoy or independent, whether inbound or outbound.

When the men in the Plotting Room have spotted the exact location of every ship at sea—some 600 independents and hundreds more in convoy—the charts are taken to another room where convoy experts fight a paper skirmish, determining the best routes for each ship to pursue in the light of information on where U-boats, enemy raiders and planes are operating. By the afternoon the plotted charts and recommended courses are forwarded to the naval staff for study. Then directions are teletyped to the secret headquarters, in a west-coast port, of the man whom Britons consider the protector of the Atlantic: Admiral Sir Percy Noble, Commander in Chief of the Western Approaches.

Sir Percy and his aides then send wireless orders to the ships at sea. In the case of convoys, they signal the naval escort, which consists in most cases of two destroyers, with here and there a corvette thrown in, trying to protect 20 to 60 vessels in the convoy.

Thus, from the brain down to the nervous finger tips of Britain’s fighting organism, run the impulses of considered daily action. Occasionally there come surprises and crises, and when they do come the point of reflex is the busy headquarters of Sir Percy Lockhart Harnam Noble.

Sir Percy is a definition of versatility. He has had experience at sea on destroyers, cruisers, battleships. He has been in charge (1928-30) of plans for fleet operations in case of war. He has been a social sailor, as naval aide-de-camp to King George V and later as captain of the royal yacht. He has taken on the toughest diplomatic job in the Royal Navy—Commander in Chief of the China Station, at a time (1938-40) when Japan was sowing her wildest oats; this post turned Sir Percy’s hair from black to grey in 18 months. Now he has a tactical problem which ought to turn any responsible Admiral’s hair from grey to purest white overnight.

Sir Percy is a stickler for good form. He has the reputation of being Britain’s best-dressed Admiral. When not in uniform he looks like a Lawrence Fellowes in stiff collar, polka-dot tie, black Derby hat. In uniform he is splendid. In his first public appearance at the China Station he held a full-dress parade at Hong Kong race track seated on a handsome brown horse, clanking unnautical golden spurs. He used to be a great athlete—an all-Navy cricket and rugby player, a squash-courts intimate of Edward of Windsor, an enthusiastic pursuer of the fox’s brush—and still keeps himself trim by touching the floor 100 times every morning. He looks so spruce that he is often taken for a brother of his elder son.

Toward his men, Sir Percy is precise, unostentatious, efficient in a banker’s quiet way rather than with the bluff explosiveness most commanding salts are supposed to have. But he is a stiff rewards-and-punishment disciplinarian of the old grog and rod school. He has had two wives, but he is married to the Navy. When he was appointed Commander in Chief of the Western Approaches, his wife said: “My husband has one hobby, the Navy.”

Eyes West. “What is to happen in the future if losses continue at the present rate? Where are we to find another 3,000,000 or 4,000,000 tons to fill the gaps which are being created and to carry us on through 1942?”

Winston Churchill asked the House of Commons these questions fortnight ago, and every Briton has been asking himself similar questions. British replacements would certainly not fill the gap. The most optimistic hope for 1941 is 1.000,000 tons, which after shipyard bombings may be closer to 750,000 tons.

Since September Britons’ weekly price-fixed beef, mutton and pork ration had fallen from two shillings twopence (43¢) to one-and-ten (37¢), then one-and-six (30¢), then one-and-twopence (23¢), and finally, last month to one shilling (20¢) —enough to buy about a pound of stewing meat. More immediately serious is a shortage of certain minor essentials such as alloy metals, which meant that the British Army was going to have to be satisfied with brittler steel in its tanks.

Responsible citizens were looking westward for the answer to this riddle of the seas. In Washington a whole delegation of British experts were looking hard for five or six million tons of answer. Winston Churchill’s best reply to his own questions had been: “When all is said and done, the only way in which we can get through the year 1942 without a very sensible contraction of our war efforts is by another gigantic building of merchant ships in the United States similar to that prodigy of output accomplished by the Americans in 1918.”

It would, in fact, take an effort more prodigious than the U.S. was materially prepared soon to make. Shipbuilding cannot be expanded overnight. The top estimate for U.S. 1941 production is 1,100,000 tons.

There are, however, other things which the U.S. can do, some of which President Roosevelt has already planned, or done. He has already seized 290,000 tons (equivalent to three weeks’ sinkings) of Italian, German and Danish vessels. These might be turned over to Britain, but it would take time to repair sabotage and devise juridical excuses. He has opened the Red Sea to U.S. shipping, but it would take time for ships to get there. He has assigned $500,000,000 under the Lend-Lease Act for the construction of 212 new quickly built “ugly ducklings” and other vessels; but it will take time to build them. He has made it possible for British ships to put into U.S. harbors for repairs; but it would take time to ease the burden on Atlantic Coast shipyards enough to take on in full this additional job. The one really effective action that the U.S. could take this year would be to begin convoying—or patrol the sea lanes to ease the work of escort vessels.

That has not yet even been considered by Congress, although soon the U.S. will have to decide the question, yes or no.