War of the U-Boats

British Merchantmen Under Fire

Bernard Edwards

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781781596296
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

From the earliest days of the Second World War, Hitlers U-Boats were unleashed with the mission of sinking as much Allied merchant tonnage as possible. From the sinking of the Glasgow-based ship Olivegrove by U-23, to the end of hostilities six years later officers and seamen of the Merchant Marine played a key role in winning the war by their blatant disregard of the risks from Axis forces. The most dangerous were the U-Boats working unseen but there were also surface raiders and aircraft.All too often the result was the loss of ship, cargo and, tragically, crew. But as described in this excellent book great gallantry against overwhelming odds brought rewards and surprising results.We learn of acts of both chivalry and brutal activity by the enemy.The actions described in this book are varied but always make for excellent reading.

Chapter One

To War

In the halcyon years leading up to World War II, Britain’s merchant ships dominated the world’s seaborne trade. British shipowners waxed fat, re-investing their profits in new tonnage, and their horizons became even wider. It was claimed that, on any one day, some 2,500 ships flying the Red Ensign were at sea or at work in the various ports of the world. Such prestigious liner companies as P & O, Ellermans and Blue Funnel took the cream, but it was the old tramps of Runcimans, Ropners, Radcliffes and their many contemporaries that carried the greatest burden of the trade – and subsequently profited most.

Ironically, the men who sailed in these ships – the men who created the wealth – were those who benefited least. The general public saw them as a necessary evil; lower-class civilian sailors hawking their rust-bucket ships around the trade routes of the world to the greater glory of King and Empire. Shipowners exploited them, judges and titled ladies equated them with the scum of the earth. They drank, they fought and they fornicated, keeping solvent countless dockside pubs and whorehouses from Cardiff to Canton. Yet at their job they were the best the world has ever seen, resilient, resourceful, innovative and blessed with an unfailing sense of humour. Such were the men who crewed Britain’s tramp ships of the 1930s.

The average British tramp of the day was of about 5,000 tons gross, blunt in the bow, rounded in the stern and capable of carrying a vast amount of general cargo. She boasted a forest of spindly derricks, her decks were cluttered with steam-belching winches, and her tall masts and funnel were reminiscent of a bygone age. Her propulsion unit, crammed into the smallest possible compartment to avoid wasting precious cargo space, was usually a basic but reliable triple-expansion, steam-reciprocating engine. Fed by three Scotch boilers, into the hungry furnaces of which her ‘black gang’ of scrawny firemen shovelled best Welsh steam coal, this ponderous machine produced a top speed of eight to nine knots – when the weather was kindly.

Accommodation for her crew was often no more than an after-thought, as though the shipowner was reluctant to burden his ship with structures that earned no freight – as indeed he was. The ratings lived in a dark, airless cavern under the forecastle head, sleeping in two tiered bunks that rose and fell with every swell passing under the bow. Her deck officers – the ruling hierarchy – bunked amidships, directly below the bridge, in cabins just big enough to swing the proverbial cat, of which there were always two or three on board to keep at bay the army of voracious rats that inhabited the cargo holds. Engineers spent their off-watch time in similar cabins perched on top of a steamy engine-room, beautifully warm in the British winter, but uninhabitable in the tropics. Only captains and chief engineers enjoyed the luxury of their own bath and toilet; the rest took their place in the queue in the alleyway.

Navigational equipment was of the most rudimentary, conforming only to the minimum requirements laid down by the omnipotent Board of Trade, namely a magnetic compass, a deep-sea sounding lead and an alert lookout man. That is not to say that the standard of navigation was any the less for such limitations. Sextant and chronometer were put to good use, and it is much to the credit of their masters and deck officers that the tramps wandered to the far reaches of the earth and back with remarkably few casualties by stranding.

Unlike their more privileged sisters, the cargo liners, tramps had no regular or recognised itinerary. They were, for the most part, engaged in the cross trades, often leaving British shores laden down to their marks with Welsh coal and thereafter working the charter market between the diverse ports of the world, earning their keep as they went. It was not unusual for a ship to be away from her home port for up to two years, shuttling coal from Barry to Rio de Janeiro, wheat from the River Plate to Shanghai, sugar from Surabaya to Bombay, and so on, ever circling the globe in search of employment.

Wages and conditions of service for the men sailing in the tramps were usually the minimum allowed under British law. A first mate holding a foreign-going master’s certificate could expect to earn about £23 a month, an ordinary seaman £6. For these princely sums they were expected to work up to ten hours a day, seven days a week, and at any other time the safety of the ship or cargo required. There was no paid leave at the end of a voyage, no matter how long it lasted. If a man wished to spend time with his family, he had no alternative but to quit the ship and go off pay. While at sea, medical attention was confined to that which could be provided by the master of the vessel, whose expertise depended on his familiarity with the Ship Captain’s Medical Guide, the Board of Trade’s ‘bible’ on the treatment of the sick and injured. Yet treatment on board was often preferable to that offered by the half-trained quacks who masqueraded as company doctors in the far-flung outposts of the Empire. But afloat or ashore, baffling illnesses were frequently diagnosed as malingering, and woe betide the man who contracted ‘lady sickness’, as the seaman’s shore-going occupational hazard was delicately described. VD was considered to be a self-inflicted disease, and the shipowner was not obliged to pay for the treatment of such.

The diet of the tramp ship men – again dictated by the Board of Trade – would not have been acceptable in many Victorian work-houses. Salt beef, salt pork, potatoes half rotten after a few weeks in the locker, haricot beans, split peas, rice and oatmeal were the staple fare at sea, and in port were supplemented with –‘when procurable at a reasonable cost’ – a limited amount of so-called fresh meat and fresh vegetables. Much of the food supplied by ship’s chandlers, who regarded pigs and seamen as being roughly on a par, was of such poor quality that no self-respecting landsman would allow it near his plate. Nevertheless, even in the tramps, the time-honoured British sense of fair play prevailed and provisions, issued daily or weekly, were meticulously doled out by the pound and pint under the eagle eye of the ship’s chief steward. It was their more fortunate brothers in the cargo liners, where a much higher standard of feeding was enjoyed, who coined the phrase ‘pound & pint ships’ to describe the Board of Trade scale.

Without the benefit of air-conditioning, the tramp-ship men sweated out their lifeblood in the tropics. Deaths from heat exhaustion, especially in the engine-room department, were commonplace. In the depths of winter they hovered on the fringe of hypothermia, their suffering only sometimes eased by a cranky, inefficient steam-heating system. In port, after working hours, both heating and electric lighting were often turned off in the interest of fuel economy, leaving them huddled around smoking oil lamps in overcoats and mufflers.

Little wonder that, in Britain alone, there were more than 150 charities dedicated to the care of merchant seamen.

What induced these men to sign on voyage after voyage, sure in the knowledge that they would endure such discomforts and indignities? Were they masochists, or just plain simple? Far from it. The 1930s had seen years of worldwide economic depression, and the threat of unemployment was still a strong incentive, though by no means the main driving-force. The sea was in their blood, as it always had been in all successive generations of this island race. For the tramp-ship men, the sea held no image of romance – this they knew existed only in the fertile imagination of the fiction writer; but there was adventure to be had in plenty, and by this prospect they were all too easily seduced. They lived in a harsh, demanding environment, often akin to a prison afloat, but it was a well-ordered society, which looked after its own, and who knew what adrenaline-stirring challenge or sumptuous delight lay over the horizon? The awesome roar of the hurricane, the insidious, blinding fog that muffled the approach of danger – or perhaps the arms of a beautiful Japanese whore, whose gentle ministrations healed all wounds and stilled all longings. For the seaman, the horizon was always beckoning.

When war came in 1939, the tramp-ship men, like all British merchant seamen, took it in their stride. As civilians following an occupation demanding so much for such niggardly rewards, they might have been excused if they had been loath to face the additional dangers brought by war. Yet never once did they hesitate. No British merchant ship was ever held in port by its crew, even at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, when to cross that ocean in a slow-moving merchant ship was to walk hand in hand with death for every minute of the day and night. Nor, when there was a need to supply arms to the Soviet Union via the Arctic route, did they flinch. German surface ships and aircraft, based in northern Norway, savaged them without mercy, while the everpresent U-boats continued to snap at their heels like the Hounds of Hell. Of those who died – and they were legion – the fortunate fell to the guns and torpedoes of the enemy, the luckless froze to death in minutes in the icy waters of the Arctic Sea. Those who were spared to reach their goals often endured round-the-clock bombing by German aircraft while in port. But the greatest indignity many of these men suffered was to be treated by their erstwhile Russian allies as outcasts, tainted by the dread disease of capitalism.

Not that they fared any better at the hands of their own kind. Under British law, when a merchant ship was lost, even in wartime, the shipowner’s obligation to pay wages to its crew went with it. There were some who took a more philanthropic view, but others closed the books the minute the ship disappeared beneath the waves. To die in the water unemployed was a distinction often awarded to British merchant seamen. Those who survived a sinking found their ordeal was by no means over when they reached the shores of Britain: they were sent home in the clothes they stood up in, with a free railway warrant and half a crown in expenses to speed them on their way. It was almost as though their country was ashamed of them. And yet, they still went back to sea, some staying ashore only long enough to get together some new kit.

Undoubtedly the greatest strains of the war fell on the shoulders of the masters and deck officers of the tramp ships. Their charges were slow and maneouvred like the lumbering barges they were. Station-keeping in convoy was for these men an unending ordeal. On a dark, moonless night it required nerves of steel and the eyes of a cat; in poor visibility or stormy weather it was an impossibility. They straggled, they romped and they veered, becoming the easiest of targets for the stalking U-boats. The men in the engine-room suffered the tortures of the dammed, never knowing when a torpedo might tear through the thin plates of the hull, sending their ship plunging to the bottom before they had a chance to reach the first rung of the ladder to the deck. Burdened, as they so often were, with heavy bulk cargoes, the tramps sank like punctured tin cans filled with lead shot. For those who took to the lifeboats or rafts, the process of dying was more prolonged. Lacking protection from the sun and storms, striving to exist on rations measured in ounces per day, many eventually succumbed to exposure, starvation, thirst or sheer mental exhaustion.

By the time the war finally ended, 29,180 British merchant seamen had lost their lives in the conflict, almost fifty per cent of them in the tramp ships. Within the pages of this book an attempt has been made to bring to life the stories of some of these men and their ships.

Chapter Two

A Game for Gentlemen

The dark clouds of war were brushing the hilltops of Europe when, shortly after nightfall on 19 August 1939, seventeen sinister black shapes slipped out of Wilhelmshaven, motored in line astern across Jade Bay, and fanned out into the North Sea. The cream of Admiral Dönitz’s undersea battle fleet was on its way to take up station off the western approaches to the British Isles. In its midst was U-33, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Hans-Wilhelm von Dresky, who, by his own admission, was a reluctant warrior.

It was not that von Dresky’s courage or loyalty to his own country was in question, nor did he lack confidence in his crew or his boat. His men were hand-picked from the elite of the Kriegsmarine, and U-33 was as formidable a weapon as any man could wish to command. Displacing 740 tons and 220 feet long, the new Type VII U-boat had a maximum range of 6,500 miles, with a top speed of 17 knots on the surface and 7½ knots when submerged. She was armed with an 88 mm deck gun, one 37 mm and two 20 mm anti-aircraft guns, and five 53 cm torpedo tubes. Von Dresky’s problem was that he could just not see any reason for open conflict between two nations as closely linked as Britain and Germany.

To the U-boats, as they exchanged their last guarded signals before dispersing into the dark night, the threat of war was very real. Some 4,500 miles to the south-west, on the West Indian island of Cuba, a very different atmosphere prevailed. Here the sun was still high in a cloudless sky, the surf boomed good-naturedly on the white sands and the talk was of tobacco, sugar and the price of rum. In Puerto Padre, a small harbour on the north-east coast of the island, the British ship Olivegrove was loading a full cargo of raw sugar which she had been chartered to carry to Europe.

The 4,060-ton Olivegrove, built by Lithgows on the Clyde in 1929, and managed by David Alexander & Sons of Glasgow for the Grove Line, was very much the archetypal deep-sea tramp of her day. Her wide-bellied hull fell only a little short of the rectangular, her accommodation was equally unattractive, and her triple-expansion steam-reciprocating engine cranky and under-powered. But, despite her graceless lines, the Olivegrove was well cared for, her black hull and white superstructure showing only the minimal signs of rust and her teakwood bridge-house in a good state of repair and freshly varnished. She was grandly classed by her owners as a ‘general trader’, which in effect meant she was on the market to carry anything anywhere, providing the price was right and the water deep enough. Of her crew of thirty-three, the majority were Scots, as would be expected of a Glasgow ship, with a sprinkling of English, Irish, Tiger Bay Arabs, and the inevitable 15-year-old galley boy from Barry in South Wales, from which port she had sailed in ballast in late July of that year.

On the lower bridge of the Olivegrove, her master, 46-year-old Captain James Barnetson of Leith, paced the scrubbed wooden deck deep in thought, stopping from time to time to run a critical eye over the slings of bagged sugar as they came swinging over the ship’s rail. His mind was grappling with two problems, both complex and both disturbing.

Uppermost in Barnetson’s thoughts was the weather, for early autumn in the West Indies is a time of danger, when hurricanes spawned in the open Atlantic to the east of Barbados sweep north-westerly, bringing with them devastating winds, mountainous seas and torrential rain. Cuba stands square in their path, and to be caught in harbour during such a storm could spell disaster for the Olivegrove. Had the time been thirty years on, Barnetson would have been able to call on a highly sophisticated weather forecasting organisation backed by satellites, but in 1939 he had only the barometer and his own experience to warn of approaching danger.He was unlikely to rest easy until his ship was loaded and heading for the open sea.

And then there were storm clouds of another kind gathering on the world’s horizon. Since Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich in September 1938 waving his worthless piece of paper and promising ‘peace in our time’, the momentum of German expansionism had been speeding up. Czechoslovakia had gone the same way as Austria, and it seemed that Poland was about to follow suit, flattened under the marching jackboots of Hitler’s legions. For the second time in a generation the talk was of war between Britain and Germany, and this troubled James Barnetson greatly. In the Great War of 1914–18, such had been the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front that the sacrifices made by Britain’s merchant seamen had gone almost unnoticed, in spite of the loss of 2,479 ships and 14,789 men. Barnetson had been a young man in that war and had good cause to remember the hideous toll it had exacted among his shipmates. It was his fervent hope that such a thing would never happen again, but he knew in his heart that it was now as inevitable as the coming of the next dawn.

The Olivegrove sailed from Puerto Padre on the afternoon of 22 August and, loaded down to her tropical marks, wallowed like a heavily pregnant duck as soon as she left the shelter of the land. It was obvious to Barnetson that his ship would not break any records on the run to the north, but he was well used to this state of affairs. His immediate and most pressing objective was to clear the mass of cays and islands that make up the archipelago of the Bahamas, for here, caught by a hurricane, the Olivegrove would have no room to maneouvre.

As it turned out, Barnetson’s fears proved groundless. The weather remained fine and calm and, thirty-six hours after leaving Puerto Padre, the Olivegrove was clear of the Bahamas and settled down on her long, diagonal run across the Atlantic. In accordance with common practice in the charter market, where cargoes often change hands overnight, the port of discharge for the Olivegrove’s cargo had not yet been declared. She was heading for ‘Land’s End for orders’, meaning Barnetson would be notified by radio of his destination only a few days before reaching British waters. By past experience, those on board knew this would almost certainly be London, Liverpool or Glasgow, with the ship’s Scottish home port being a hot favourite. Whatever decision was taken by the wheelers and dealers of the Baltic Exchange, ahead of the Olivegrove lay a voyage of 3,700 miles, sixteen or seventeen days’ steaming, in which a great deal might happen.

Oblivious to the stratagems of man, the Olivegrove pushed north-eastwards under an untroubled sky, dipping her blunt bows into a boisterous sea with gay abandon. It was as though she sensed she was on her way home. The miles seemed to fly by, and before long the homeward-bound spirit was rampant throughout the ship. Paintbrushes worked overtime, stores and repair lists were drawn up, and shore-going clothes brought out of musty wardrobes to air on deck.

Meanwhile, half a world away, Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and the end of two decades of uneasy peace in Europe drew near.

On Friday 1 September, German tanks rolled across the Polish frontier, and the die was cast. Two days later, at 11 am on the 3rd, when the Olivegrove was 350 miles north-west of Flores in the Azores, where Sir Richard Grenville had fought his last battle, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war with Germany. Within five minutes, the following radio signal went out from Wilhelmshaven to the U-boat fleet:

1105/3/9.39 FROM NAVAL HIGH COMMAND STOP TO COMMANDERS-IN-CHIEF AND COMMANDERS AFLOAT STOP GREAT BRITAIN AND FRANCE HAVE DECLARED WAR ON GERMANY STOP BATTLE STATIONS IMMEDIATE IN ACCORDANCE WITH BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE NAVY ALREADY PROMULGATED.

At this time, U-33 was patrolling to the west of Ireland, and it was with a decided lack of enthusiasm that Hans-Wilhelm von Dresky opened his small safe and took out the sealed orders he had carried with him from Wilhelmshaven. He was instructed to move south to cover the south-western approaches to the English Channel and there attack and sink any British ships sighted.

The news of the outbreak of war was received philosophically on board the Olivegrove. The general consensus of opinion was that they would have little to fear from the Germans; the omnipotent Royal Navy would look after them. But there were those who said otherwise, and they spoke with the voice of authority and experience. Barnetson himself, his chief officer William Wilson and Chief Engineer Duncan Robb had lived through the other war and had no leanings towards complacency. The Olivegrove was immediately brought onto a war footing, with watches doubled, extra lookouts posted, and the ship darkened at night. That evening, her radio officer reported plaintive cries for help f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter One To War
• Chapter Two A Game for Gentlemen
• Chapter Three Ropner’s Gunboats
• Chapter Four No Quarter Given
• Chapter Five The One that Got Away
• Chapter Six The Other Enemy
• Chapter Seven The Inishtrahull and the Bomb
• Chapter Eight The Hard Road to Russia
• Chapter Nine The Voyage of No Return
• Chapter Ten In the Darkest Hour
• Chapter Eleven All Roads Lead to St. Paul’s
• Chapter Twelve Caribbean Ambush
• Chapter Thirteen The Slaughter of the Tankers
• Chapter Fourteen To the Bitter End
• Chapter Fifteen Mediterranean Nightmare
• Chapter Sixteen Appointment off Minicoy
• Chapter Seventeen When Will We Learn?
• Bibliography