A Century of British Naval Aviation 1909 - 2009 by David Wragg

Author:David Wragg [Wragg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844681747
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2012-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

The Second Phase

Bringing the United States into the Second World War was the most dramatic move of the entire conflict, completely altering the strategic position. It formalized the unofficial alliance between the United States and the British Empire, and while the vital Lend-Lease supplies continued, it also opened the way for what some have described as ‘reverse lend-lease’, with a number of corvettes fitted with Asdic, or sonar, as it is now known, supplied to the United States Navy from the British and Canadian fleets.

Nevertheless, the Germans were anxious to strike while the United States Navy was still relatively weak, with its available resources divided between the Atlantic and the Pacific. On 13 January 1942, the Kriegsmarine launched Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Kettledrum Beat) against US shipping. Between January and March, they accounted for 1.2 million tons of Allied shipping in the Atlantic, with losses reaching a monthly total of 628, 074 tons in June. The figure for the year was to be 5,366,973 tons for the Atlantic alone. Added to this, however, were figures for the Barents Sea at 234,158 tons, while in the Mediterranean losses had almost quadrupled to 193, 644 tons as Malta began to starve to death, and 666,003 tons in the Indian Ocean, against which the Pacific losses of 85,494 tons faded into insignificance. The latter were undoubtedly a reflection of both the way in which the United States Navy bounced back so quickly, taking the war to the Japanese and putting them on the defensive within six months of Pearl Harbor, and also Japanese inability to take the war to American convoys and merchant shipping.

The losses were increased by the decision during the winter of 1941/2 that the Allies should send convoys to the Soviet Union. There were three routes to the USSR, of which the most famous was the Arctic route off the coast of Norway and round the North Cape to Archangel and Murmansk, mainly carrying supplies from the UK but also including materiel from the United States, so that many of these convoys were routed via Iceland. The other two routes included the main route from the United States via the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean to the Gulf, with consignments offloaded in Iran for onward delivery to the USSR. A third route was from the West Coast of the USA and Canada to Vladivostok, but this was the least important in terms of equipment supplied, largely because the Trans-Siberian Railway was the only viable route to the battlefronts and this had severe limitations on its capacity.

This period saw the U-boats at their maximum strength in the North Atlantic when, from September 1943 to March 1943, there were more than a hundred craft in the area at any one time. Hitler had by this time decided that the Kriegsmarine’s surface fleet was a waste of resources and the entire burden of pursuing the German naval offensive fell to the submarine, but despite the U-boats building up for what was to be the largest convoy battle of the Second World War, a decisive naval engagement did not take place.

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