Free Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy

problems, and Royal Navy crews thus discounted both their value and their use. Older corvettes did not usually have the larger front bow of later types, so they almost drowned in the 150-foot-high Atlantic waves. Not possessing the newer high-frequency direction-finding (HF-DF) radio detectors was obviously a massive disadvantage to most warships. Yet the minuscule radio crew of HMS
Volunteer,
which did possess such equipment as it shepherded convoy HX 229 across the Atlantic, had to choose whether to spend their time detecting enemy movements or receiving anxious queries from the Admiralty—they could not do both. And almost all the small escorts were manned by scratch crews and naval reserve officers (Royal Navy Reserve and Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve), many ofthem a year or less away from civilian life or university—naturally, the professional naval officers were kept for the fleet destroyers, the cruiser squadrons, the Home Fleet. Britain was not playing its strongest cards, and Canada was struggling, with extreme effort, to create a very large escort navy out of virtually nothing. Its time would come, but not in the spring of 1943.
    Other aspects appear less central to our story. The weather, for example, seems to have been sublimely neutral. A distinguished Canadian scholar of the convoy battles, Marc Milner, believes that the defenders had a stronger hand when winter gave way to spring and summer, with improved weather, calmer seas, and many more hours of light each day. 18 But the record itself suggests that if a convoy battle was fought in terribly rough or icy seas, then all the combatants—submarines, escorts, aircraft—were so battered by the storms that they naturally had less time and energy to devote to finding and sinking the enemy. Calmer waters and longer daylight hours did indeed offer warships and, especially, Allied aircraft more opportunity to detect U-boats on the surface, but it also provided submarines with better conditions for spotting a merchant ship’s giveaway smoke. Thus, improved weather conditions gave all of the operational elements—visibility, detection, maneuverability, firepower—a better chance of being exploited by either side.
    The disadvantages under which the Allied convoys were laboring in early March 1943 were, then, pretty overwhelming: inadequate naval protection, poor intelligence, nonexistent or minimal air cover (and no cover at night), together with a lot of poor, faulty, and outdated equipment. In these circumstances, it seems surprising that the shipping losses were not even greater. After all, HX 229 and SC 122 were scarcely in a better position as they steamed through the Atlantic air gap than the tragic and infamous Arctic convoy PQ 17, which had lost no fewer than twenty-three ships to German submarines and aircraft when it was forced to scatter while only halfway to north Russia in July 1942. 19
    The exceptionally pounding oceanic turbulence of this early spring of 1943—one elderly ore carrier simply snapped in half during the storms—had brought the pugilists’ match to a brief close. Doenitz used this opportunity to give his boats a breather and bring them back to their French bases, while sending others to the South Atlantic. The British used it to rethink and regroup, even as Admiralty plannersstruggled to ensure protection for ever more distant convoys, such as those carrying troops and supplies across the Indian Ocean.
    But by the beginning of April, as the ice floes diminished, the win-or-lose battle for control of the Atlantic was approaching its climax. By this time, Doenitz possessed a staggering number of operational submarines (around 240, with another 185 in training or refit), so he was capable of sending as many as forty or more U-boats against any particular convoy. The Allied navies and air forces had also rebuilt their fighting power, but perhaps the most noticeable change was in operational policy, in adopting a more aggressive stance, as