World War: Formidable Dangers

“Being gunned by enemy ship of Graf Spee class in Lat. 52.45° N., Long. 32.13° W.”

Signed with the call letters of the 16,698-ton New Zealand freighter Rangitiki, just after noon one day last week, this ominous radio flash was followed after 99 minutes by one from the 4,952-ton British freighter Cornish City:

“Being shelled in Lat. 52.50° N., Long. 32.15° W.” A bit later the marine radio station in Portishead, England, which was relaying the convoy’s messages, reported: “Convoy still being leisurely attacked by raider of Graf Spee class, Lat. 52.50° N., Long. 32.15° W.”

Then the North Atlantic fell silent, for hours that lengthened into days.

British hearts sank. The Rangitiki and Cornish City were members of a big convoy, perhaps 30 or 40 merchantmen, that had left Halifax a week prior, bound straight across to Great Britain. Even allowing for rough weather and zigzagging, they should have been nearly across instead of only halfway between Cape Race, N. F. and North Ireland. They were in a stretch between where their warship escorts from Canada left them and their escorts from Britain would pick them up. None of them was equipped to fight anything except submarines or armed merchantmen of their own size and speed. If a German pocket battleship—the Admiral S cheer or the Lutzow—was indeed among them, the havoc could only be like that of a wolf in a hen roost. For the raider, armored against the merchantmen’s light weapons, would have 11-inch guns, aircraft, torpedo tubes and surpassing speed of 26 knots. Unless they could scatter and escape in bad weather or darkness, the entire convoy could be blasted in their huddle, and, if necessary, run down and sunk one by one.

After three days the German Admiralty tersely claimed the complete destruction of a British convoy totaling 86,000 tons “on the British western route” by “surface craft of the German oversea Navy forces. . . . The attack of the German units was made with striking quickness, because, from the other ships sunk, not even SOS signals were caught by American radio stations.” British authorities called the whole story “unlikely.” They said that “a number of ships successfully eluded the raider.” But day followed day with no further word from the Rangitiki, Cornish City or any other ship that had been with them.

The disaster at Lat. 52° N., Long. 32° W. put a gloomy crown upon several weeks of increasingly grave inroads into British shipping. Obscured by the dramatic aerial Battle of Britain, in which the R. A. F. brilliantly held its own, the Axis counter-blockade against Britain began to press in late September, after the Nazis got submarine bases working along the long coast line they took from France in June. Startling was the official British admission last fortnight of 146,528 tons (plus 51,502 neutral tons) lost in the week ended Oct. 21. That disastrous week was followed by the loss of the Empress of Britain on Oct. 26. Last week, in a report to Parliament which was otherwise fairly cheerful. Prime Minister Winston Churchill faced the black facts about Britain’s oversea supply lines by saying:

“More serious than the air raiding has been the recent recrudescence of U-boat sinkings in the Atlantic approaches to our island. . . .

“We have been, during the last month, at the lowest point of our [destroyer] flotilla strength. The threat of invasion had always to be met and the great forces we are maintaining in the Mediterranean, in addition to escorts necessary to the protection of our innumerable convoys, have imposed upon the Royal Navy a gigantic task. . . .

“When I speak of our shipping tonnage not being appreciably diminished from the beginning of the war, it must be remembered that our shipping is not so fruitful in war as in peacetime because the ships have to go a long way round and often to zigzag, and there are delays in the marshaling of convoys and congestions at ports. . . .

“The dangers in the air are sudden and might have become catastrophic, but dangers to our seaborne traffic mature much more slowly, but they are none the less formidable, and if in any way neglected they would touch the life of the State. We must expect that next year still heavier U-boat attacks will be made upon us and we are making immense preparations of all kinds to meet them.

“We have had to look a long way ahead in this sphere of war. We have had to think of the years 1943 and 1944 and of the tonnage we shall be able to move and have to move across the seas then.”

U. S. Ships. One direction in which Mr. Churchill & colleagues were looking ahead most anxiously was toward the U. S. In his speech to Parliament he made a bow for the 50 World War destroyers already acquired from Washington and now “rapidly coming into service just when they are most needed.” Britain’s sea dogs have tried out these ships and found them up to snuff, except in armament (particularly anti-aircraft), to which they promptly added. With Franklin Roosevelt reelected, a British drive started last week to get as many more as possible of the 79 remaining “surplus” U. S. destroyers. Perhaps also a not-too-old U. S. cruiser or two, on the practical argument that it would serve the U. S. Navy well to have these tried out under actual war conditions. Furthermore, Mr. Churchill &colleagues were looking for U. S. merchant bottoms. To 101 they had already bought they were prepared to add as many more, old and new, as the U. S. Maritime Commission could and would sell. They earmarked an initial $50,000,000 for this purpose and to finance large-scale production of standardized 10,000-ton freighters in U. S. shipyards.

The dragging of Greece into the war added another 1,800,000 tons, comprising 589 ships (mostly antiques), to the five-to eight-million tons that have come into British control since war began. British ports are crowded with freighters waiting their turn—but so are Britain’s shipyards crowded with tonnage under repair. For many a ship, which the Germans wrongly claim to have sunk, has had enough plates sprung by near bomb hits to make it unseaworthy. The truth of Britain’s tonnage position is not all told in Admiralty admissions of sinkings, however honest, any more than it is in German claims. Last week, on the very heels of Mr. Churchill’s tonnage speech, the German Admiralty claimed in 36 hours the air bombing—from Duncansby Head to Eastbourne and from Norwich to 325 miles west of Ireland—damage of not less than eleven ships (including two cruisers), totaling some 34,000 tons. They claimed to have bombed the 26,032-ton Canadian Pacific Liner Empress of Japan, with several hundred Japanese aboard, but the Empress reached port safely with minor damage and no casualties.

Irish Bases. In his speech to Parliament, Prime Minister Churchill made one wistful aside which might well presage an effort, more or less drastic as circumstances may warrant, to rip a stubborn impediment from the sharp bows of the Royal Navy. That impediment is Eire.

In 1921 Winston Churchill was one of England’s signatories to the treaty setting up the Irish Free State. In that treaty Britain retained, largely at Sea Dog Churchill’s experienced insistence, the right to continue using three of R. N.’s bases on the new State’s coasts. When, in 1938, old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and young Dominions Secretary Malcolm MacDonald relinquished Britain’s rights in these bases, even for wartime, Winston Churchill spoke hotly and prophetically. “The dark forces of the Irish underworld,” he barked, “already tried to stab Britain in the back during the World War and [Prime Minister Eamon] de Valera would not be able to control them if he assumed a friendly attitude toward Britain.”

Last week Eire was still neutral, Britain was still without the use of the Eire bases, and Winston Churchill said: “The fact that we cannot use the south and west coasts of Ireland to refuel our flotillas and aircraft and thus protect trade by which Ireland, as well as Great Britain, lives, that fact is a most heavy and grievous burden and one which should never have been placed upon our shoulders, broad though they may be.”

On the map the distance from Belfast or Newcastle in Northern Ireland, where the R. N. and the R. A. F. may be at home, does not look so much greater out into the northern trade route than the distance from Lough Swilly, where R. N.’s nth Cruiser Squadron and the U. S. Navy’s destroyers based in World War I. But it is 200 miles farther, out & back, and in wartime at sea every 100 miles counts. The distances from Berehaven and Cobh (Queenstown) in Eire to the southern trade lane (approach to Cardiff and Bristol as well as to Liverpool) are even more disparate when laid against the extra miles the R. N. must plow from Portland, Devonport or even Pembroke.

In the face of their great disadvantage in these respects, the Royal Navy’s patrols —fewer by far than in World War I—must now cope with enemy submarines based, not way up the Channel coast at Zeebrugge or clear around the continent’s shoulder in Bremen, Hamburg and Kiel, but just across the Channel in Le Havre, Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire—perhaps in a dozen other obscure ports where they can slip home at night for more fuel, food and torpedoes after brief but lethal runs to meet convoys spotted if not bombed by the far-roving Luftwaffe.

Yet Prime Minister de Valera of Eire was handcuffed last week, if not by the “Irish underworld” then just as securely by his Briton-hating Eire political colleagues. He replied to Mr. Churchill:

“There can be no question of handing over these ports. . . . Any attempt to bring pressure on us by any of the belligerents—by Britain—would only lead to bloodshed.”

As though his conscience were speaking, for Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper had long ago officially denied the charge, Eamon de Valera blurted: “It is a lie to say that German submarines are being supplied with fuel or provisions on our coasts. … It is known to be a falsehood by the British Government itself.”