The Illustrated History of World War II by Owen Booth & John Walton

Author:Owen Booth & John Walton [Booth, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amber Books Ltd
Published: 2014-08-18T21:00:00+00:00

Throughout 1940 and 1941, the Germans went on scoring successes against British shipping. During a lull in U-boat activity in the winter, two German battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, sank over 20 merchant ships between them. Two others, the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, accounted for a further 23, the Scheer venturing as far as the Indian Ocean to prey on supply lines from Britain’s colonies in the East. On 23 May 1941, two of the Royal Navy’s premier ships, the Hood and the Prince of Wales engaged the cruiser Prinz Eugen and the Bismarck, the Kriegsmarine’s largest battleship, in the Straits of Denmark. In the ensuing battle, the Hood blew up and sank after her aft magazine was hit. Only three of the 1418 crew survived.

However, the Germans bought their victory at a high price. Two days later, attacked by torpedo-carrying Swordfish biplanes from the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, the Bismarck was crippled. Her steering gear wrecked and her rudders jammed, Bismarck was unable to manoeuvre and became a sitting target for three torpedoes from the cruiser Dorsetshire, which sank her at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday, 25 May. Two thousand German sailors went down with their ship.

Elsewhere, British successes were rare. One notable exception took place on 8 March 1941, when the British convoy OB293 was set upon by a U-boat wolfpack led by Günther Prien and the crew of U-47, which had sunk the Royal Oak in 1939. Although Prien’s U-boat was accompanied by the submarines of veteran captain Otto Kretschmer and a number of other experienced commanders, the British managed on this occasion to mount a powerful challenge. Two of the U-boats were crippled by depth charges from British escorts and one was forced to surrender. While attempting to pursue the fleeing convoy, Prien was obliged to crash-dive to avoid being rammed by the destroyer Wolverine. His damaged ship was chased until the Wolverine managed to destroy it with more depth charges. There were no survivors and within days, two more U-boats had followed U-47 to the Atlantic seabed. They included Otto Kretschmer’s vessel, although Kretschmer himself survived to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp. In Prien and Kretschmer, Dönitz had lost two of his best commanders.

By this time, there were almost 100 German submarines operating in the Atlantic. This gave vital importance to the ‘lend lease’ arrangement between Britain and the USA. Following his historic second re-election in 1939, President Roosevelt had convinced the US Congress that it must give Britain ‘all aid short of war’. The ‘cash and carry’ system had outlived its usefulness and was abandoned. Although not yet prepared to enter the war, America, Roosevelt declared, was ready to become ‘the arsenal of democracy’. Nearly 50 US warships were lent to Britain, US troops were garrisoned in Iceland, and the US Navy declared that it would escort shipping of ‘all nationalities’ between Iceland and the USA. In practice, this meant escorting British merchant ships for half their journey across the Atlantic.

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