Battle of the Atlantic 1942–45 by Mark Lardas & Edouard A. Groult

Author:Mark Lardas & Edouard A. Groult
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2020-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Coastal Command needed a new seaplane quickly after the failure of the Lerwick, intended to replace biplane flying boats. The Consolidated Catalina, in use by the US Navy since 1937, was available and Britain began acquiring them in 1941. (AC)

The solution was an air-droppable 250lb depth charge. Development started early in 1940, but it was January 1941 before the first ones appeared and not until May 1941 that these depth charges were widely available. In July, tactics maximising hit probabilities were adopted and a month later Coastal Command sank its first U-boat using 250lb depth charges. A few days later, Coastal Command aircraft captured U-570.

It broke a long drought. Between July 1940 and August 1941 British aircraft sank no U-boats, even as the U-boat threat grew. New ports on the French Atlantic coast, seized after the fall of France gave U-boats direct access to the British shipping routes. Worse still, a new threat emerged in the form of the Focke-Wulf 200 Condor.

Beginning in September 1940 these aircraft, operating from French or Norwegian airfields, took a terrible toll on merchant shipping. They attacked merchant vessels caught sailing individually, and if they found a convoy they circled it, out of anti-aircraft gun range, radioing its location to German stations. These reports were passed to U-boat headquarters, which vectored U-boats to the convoy. Between September 1940 and February 1941, Condors sank 365,000 tons and U-boats 1.4 million tons of Allied shipping.

The counter to the Condor proved to be ship-borne fighter aircraft: one-shot fighters launched from merchant vessels equipped with catapults or fighters launched from escort carriers. The Royal Navy commissioned its first escort carrier in June 1941. It had a short life, being sunk in December 1941, but during that time provided remarkable anti-submarine and anti-Condor protection for the convoys it escorted.

Coastal Command gained a boost in priority in March 1941, when Churchill issued his ‘Battle of the Atlantic Directive’, focussing effort against the U-boats and Condors. Coastal Command began getting new and effective aircraft. The first Catalinas entered service in March 1941 and the first Liberator squadron became operational in June. Radar-equipped aircraft began hunting U-boats. In May, Coastal Command started barrier searches in the Bay of Biscay and the Greenland–Iceland–Faeroes–Scotland gap to detect and attack U-boats leaving German ports for the North Atlantic.

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