The US Navy and The War in Europe by Robert C.Stern

Author:Robert C.Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
Published: 2012-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

5

Climax in the Atlantic

November 1942–October 1943

With the surrender of the Vichy forces in Morocco, the battle for North Africa became, from the point of view of the US Navy, a land war. Much of the naval force assembled for the TORCH landings was redeployed, either to the Pacific or to the renewed struggle against the U-boat menace in the Atlantic. A significant number of the major ships involved were slated for transfer. Massachusetts and three of the four Sangamom were headed for the Pacific as soon as they completed hasty refits. Of the escort carriers, only Santee was retained; along with destroyers Livermore (DD429) and Eberle (DD430), she was assigned to TU23.1.6, based at Trinidad, tasked with patrolling the South Atlantic for German surface raiders and blockade-runners. The light cruiser Savannah soon joined the South Atlantic patrol. Ranger was also retained in the Atlantic and employed transporting fighters to North Africa in January and again in February. (Ranger was retained in the Atlantic mainly because she was not wanted in the Pacific. Her long, fine hull made her a poor sea boat; anything more than a moderate swell limited her ability to launch and recover aircraft.)

The Allied success in North Africa – by 17 November, forces that had landed at Algiers had pushed east as far as Bizerte, Tunisia – accelerated the need for a decision about what would come next. Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca starting on 14 January. Bowing to British resistance to a direct assault on France in 1943, the US agreed to postpone Operation ROUNDUP until 1944 and to proceed with an invasion of Sicily in mid-1943. Part of the reason the Americans agreed to the postponement of ROUNDUP was the mounting concern over the resurgence of the U-boat threat to the North Atlantic convoy routes.

The Allies, particularly the Americans, no doubt sighed in relief when the U-boat assault on the American East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean was finally mastered in mid-1942, but the battle was far from over in the Atlantic. If anything, the German Ubootwaffe (Submarine Fleet) was more powerful in November 1942 than it had been the preceding January. Compared to a monthly average of 42 U-boats at sea each day in January, by July, that number had risen to 70 and in November reached 95. These boats were increasingly spread over many theaters, so that, at any one time, only about one-third were in the North Atlantic.

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