The Royal Navy by Duncan Redford

Author:Duncan Redford [Redford, Duncan and Grove, Philip D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857735072
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

The other significant threat the Navy faced in autumn/winter 1940 and especially spring 1941 was German air attack. The losses due to air attack in the north-western approaches were so bad that finding a solution even featured in Churchill’s ‘Battle of the Atlantic declaration’. What the Navy needed were aircraft carriers to protect its convoys, but it had too few ‘fleet’ carriers to spare for such risky tasks. Nor had it been able to build ‘trade protection’ carriers during rearmament before the war; there was not enough money available to do everything. However, since January 1941 the Admiralty had been involved in producing the first of these trade protection or ‘escort carriers’ (CVEs) in the shape of the converted merchant ship HMS Audacity. Unfortunately, converting or building new ships was a time-consuming process. The immediate solution was to go back to an idea from the very start of naval aviation and use aircraft that could be launched from a ship but have to either ditch alongside the mother ship or head for an airbase on land when their task was done – the single aircraft Catapult Aircraft Merchantman (CAM ship) and the larger multi-aircraft Fighter Catapult Ships like HMS Springbank. With the German attack on the Balkans in May 1941 and then Russia in June 1941, much of the German Luftwaffe moved away from Western Europe and losses due to air attack fell.10

Sinking by U-boats also plummeted in the late spring and early summer of 1941. It was baffling for the Germans, as it seemed that suddenly there were no convoys. How the British had suddenly found a way to emasculate the U-boats became one of the most precious secrets of the entire war. It was down to signals intelligence: the British had broken the ‘unbreakable’ German naval codes.

The Admiralty and its Naval Intelligence Division under Rear Admiral John Godfrey were fully alive to the ways in which intelligence could be used both strategically and tactically. Indeed it was the desire to use intelligence in time to influence daily events that caused the Admiralty to set up the Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) which in time became the hub of the Admiralty’s control of the entire naval war. For the Battle of the Atlantic there was a special focus. The Submarine Tracking Room had the job of trying to keep tabs on where all the German U-boats were – even while they were at sea. To do this it needed information and happily the German wolf-pack tactics involved a lot of signalling between the U-boats at sea and Dönitz’s headquarters. The Germans used the ‘Enigma’ machine to encypher messages, which they believed to be unbreakable. Thus the OIC had a mass of messages it could not read. However, direction finding allowed the OIC and its subordinate Submarine Tracking Room to work out where U-boats were even if they did not know what the U-boats were saying to each other. As more direction-finding stations were set up in Iceland and Canada, so

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