Voices from the Battle of the Atlantic by Kate Tildesley

	The Atlantic Battles 1939-41.
	The Atlantic Battles 1941-42.
	This page: the Atlantic Battles 1942-45.

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"Guns and Butter", from Chapter V of the Admiralty Merchant Shipping Instructions 1944-45

Phase V: July 1942 to May 1943

I have to just sit down and scribble this note to you for once again I must thank you, this time for putting me in the charge of such a topping crowd of officers; they have all been simply marvellous to me...and great fun. Captain D is the life and soul of the party⁸⁰

The U-boats moved in, but so did we...then it was our turn, and as I say we put down...I think we put seven U-boats down in the end between us, and that was it. Old Dönitz didn't like that a bit. He'd decided he'd had enough.⁸¹

The fifth phase of the Battle of the Atlantic was the one in which, we can now acknowledge, the Allies gained dominance over the U-boats. But this was also one of the longest phases of the Battle, and there was much to be endured at sea before the U-boats' "Black May". One of the most infamous incidents of the Battle occurred on 12 September 1942, when the SS Laconia was torpedoed by U 156 to the north east of Ascension. The CO, Korvettenkapitän Werner Hartenstein surfaced to discover to his horror that the decks were crowded with women, children, and around 1,800 Italian prisoners. Hartenstein began to pick up survivors, rescuing 90 before signalling Dönitz in Paris. Dönitz ordered three other U-boats to assist with the rescue, encouraging Italian and Vichy French units to join the Germans. On his own initiative, and without Dönitz's approval, Hartenstein issued a signal announcing that he would not attack any ship coming to the aid of the Laconia survivors. Over the succeeding days, the survivors were gathered together, either huddled on the submarines, or under tow in lifeboats. At 1232 on 16 September, in spite of a large, improvised, Red Cross flag that Hartenstein had draped over his forward gun, an American Liberator dived and bombed the German submarine. Hartenstein was forced to order his passengers over the side. They were left to swim for their lives, whilst the submarine dived. Dönitz ordered Hartenstein to cease his rescue operation, and on 17 September, issued the "Laconia Order", forbidding any U-boat to come to the assistance of the victims of their torpedo attacks: 'Rescue runs counter to the rudimentary demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews...Rescue the shipwrecked only if their statements will be of importance to your boat'⁸².

The infamy of the "Laconia Order" did much to explain the length of Dönitz's sentence at Nürnberg. Yet Hitler is alleged to have issued an order 'that stated henceforth surviving crewmen of sunken ships were to be killed'⁸³, which Dönitz had refused point blank to implement. Had Dönitz acceded to Hitler's wishes, the Battle of the Atlantic might have descended into the ferocity that typified the Pacific battles between Japanese ships and American submarines⁸⁴. As it was, the "Laconia Order" did relatively little to change the face of war in the Atlantic. The cramped submarines had never been able to rescue large numbers of survivors, and the fear of counter-attack, or the ferocity of the weather, had made polite encounters between U-boat captains and sinking victims relatively uncommon. Pack operations also precluded any personal contact between the two enemies. Most of the casualties of torpedoed ships would henceforth be caused, as they always had been, by the sea. The figure remained high throughout this period not because Dönitz had issued the "Laconia Order", but because 'by the winter of 1942 the weight of the U-boat assault on the convoy routes was falling in the mid-Atlantic air gap many hundreds of miles from land'⁸⁵ where there was little hope of rescue, even by convoy escorts. As William Hallam recalls, 'all around for as far as you could see, there were little lights and voices calling out, 'Here I am. Here I am.' But you could do little. You couldn't stop; you couldn't pick 'em up. And so that was it, and maybe some of them were looking next morning, but no way could we pick 'em up at night at all, although we saw all these red lights'⁸⁶.

In October 1942 the Allies lost 585,000 GRT of shipping. In November 1942 the total rose to almost 750,000 GRT. But the tenor of the Battle was in the process of changing once again. The tonnage sunk represented the zenith of German U-boat achievement, but this was also partially caused by American involvement in the Second World War. The shipping crossing the Atlantic was no longer employed solely in supplying Britain with the resources to survive. A substantial number of the ships in convoy were now bringing American troops and equipment to Britain to prepare for Operation "Torch", the invasion of North Africa, and also for the eventual invasion of North West Europe. The submarines had richer pickings simply because there were more ships at sea. It should also be remembered that, at the same time that the submarines appeared to be succeeding in the Atlantic, British submarines and RAF units were decimating the German and Italian supply lines in the Mediterranean, contributing substantially to the Allied victories at El Alamein and during "Torch". And as high as the figure for tonnage lost during November might seem, at some time during autumn 1942 Dönitz lost the "tonnage war", the lynchpin of his strategy. With British, Canadian and American shipyards at peak production, the numbers of Allied merchant ships now being built exceeded the numbers being lost. German U-boat victories were, moreover, attained at great price. In October 1940 three boats were lost for every million tons of shipping sunk. By November 1942 this had risen to 17 boats per million. What 18 boats had achieved in October 1940 took 55 boats by November 1942⁸⁷.

While Blackett's operational researchers pored over statistics like these back at the Admiralty, they mattered little to the men at sea, for whom the winter of 1942-3 was the fourth plying the Atlantic waters. Frank Richmond later remembered 'only...the tedious running backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. And the weather, particularly the gales, the movement of the boat, the exhaustion of working four hours on and four hours off, without getting a continuous night's sleep, and the relief of, when eventually hitting port, to be able to go to sleep and recuperate'⁸⁸. During this winter, as in all the others, if 'You heard the clang of a torpedo striking the hull of the vessel and exploding...you knew that your little war had started somewhere very close by'⁸⁹. And over a hundred "little wars" were begun during March 1943 when, with Bletchley Park "blind" for ten days and the German B-Dienst interpreting Allied signals, the Allies lost 105 ships. A total of 21 ships of those ships, or 140,842 tons, were sunk as a series of wolfpacks preyed on Convoys SC 121, HX 228, SC 122 and HX 229. The Second Engineer of the SS Nailsea Court, torpedoed by U 229 at 2145 on 9 March, described the frantic melee of the pack action: 'about the same time as we were torpedoed, the Commodore's ship Bonneville and the SS Coulmore were also torpedoed and I should think that the attacks occurred at intervals of between 3/4 minutes'⁹⁰. He joined 37 comrades in a water-logged lifeboat, which capsized, and clung on for 3½ hours before he could be rescued by HMCS Dauphin. Only two other men survived the exposure. The losses from four convoys constituted 20% of the participating ships and led 'to fears in Britain that the convoy system, the backbone of the Allied strategy against "Fortress Europe", might have to be abandoned'⁹¹. Yet, in spite of the ferocity of the onslaught, the Allied defences had not entirely crumbled. The long-range aircraft from 120 Squadron RAF proved themselves particularly useful in forcing the contact-keeping U-boats to submerge and lose the convoys. Elsewhere in the Atlantic on 13 March, the attempts by Gruppe Raubgraf to attack Convoy ON 170 were foiled by the 'exemplary'⁹² use of HF/DF by Lieutenant Commander Moore in the Whimbrel.

The growing confidence of the Allied escorts led two months later to "Black May" for the U-boat Arm, and the losses of March became 'a blip in an other wise smooth downward curve'⁹³. For the Allies, Convoy ONS 5 was 'probably the turning point of the Battle of the Atlantic, and probably the termination of the Battle of the Atlantic, in so far as we hammered the Germans so hard on that trip, and they did so poorly in sinking our ships, that history records that Dönitz realized that we'd got too good for him'⁹⁴. The convoy survived appalling weather and mountainous seas, but 'towards the end of the convoy....The wind just dropped; the sea flattened out; the fog came down. The U-boats moved in, but so did we'⁹⁵. Four years of technological innovation had provided the escorts of ONS 5 with both Type 271 radar and Hedgehog projectiles, which were used to great effect. In the fog the submarines were blind, but their attackers could still "see", and sank, or contributed to the sinking of, seven boats from the attacking packs⁹⁶. Stephen Roskill, the official historian for the Royal Navy wrote later that the battle 'has no name by which it will be remembered; but it was, in its own way, as decisive as Quiberon Bay or the Nile'⁹⁷. Not only had he lost seven of his boats, and their crews, but Dönitz also lost his son Peter when U 954 was sunk on 19 May by HM Ships Jed and Sennen. Germany had just experienced her "Stalingrad at Sea"⁹⁸.

Phase VI: May to September 1943

It was said that a superstition existed among U-boat men that if a boat was sunk, all of her company who had been awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, were bound to drown⁹⁹

The second aircraft came towards us, and we thought this is really it. It turned out to be the Sunderland. Four men were actually standing there...looking down at us. Suddenly they threw something down...a dinghy...I thought it was a depth charge and wanted to dive out of the way, but of course I couldn't with the lifejacket on.¹⁰⁰

The enemy's claims for his new torpedoes were unusually extravagant¹⁰¹

May 1943 is generally seen as the "end" of the Battle of the Atlantic, but Germany's campaigns in the Atlantic were not over yet, and the U-boat Arm was far from finished. Robert Atkinson, one of the escort commanders, recalled that 'HX 231, which followed ONS 5, would probably be one of our most brilliant successes. And although that convoy was attacked and attacked and attacked, I don't think any U-boats were sunk, but no merchant ship was sunk'¹⁰². In actual fact, three merchant ships were lost, and two U-boats were sunk, one by HMS Tay, the other by an RAF Liberator, which shows how deceptive memory, and the Battle of the Atlantic itself, can be. Even in defeat the U-boats still had bite. Dönitz, who had 'had grave doubts about the prospects of victory'¹⁰³ even in 1939, must have come to understand during this period that the Battle of the Atlantic was no longer sustainable, but, in Churchill's own words 'there is no reason to suppose that the German submarines would have fought a losing campaign, if the defeat of the German army had not brought collapse and surrender. Their morale was unimpaired to the bitter end'¹⁰⁴. Between May and September 1943 Dönitz sent his boats back out into the Caribbean, and essayed a further wolfpack campaign in the Atlantic, this time armed with the latest in German technology.

Although Lieutenant Commander Harold Chesterman would argue, amongst others, that the Allies had the advantage because 'We had boffins allocated to us. They were useful people...whereas the Germans, the scientists weren't allowed near them'¹⁰⁵, German scientists had also been experimenting with weapon technology. They produced an acoustic homing torpedo, the T5 or Zaunkönig, which was designed specifically to target escorts, and the Lage-Unabhängige Torpedo or LUT, which could be manually programmed to follow a preset course. Herbert Werner, CO of U 230, and later author of Iron Coffins, wrote 'for the first time in months I believed we were beginning to get the weapons to survive and to risk our lives intelligently. We might yet be around to see the turn of the tide'¹⁰⁶. In the first combat use of the T5, a pack attack on Convoys ON 202 and ONS 18 in September 1943, the Allies lost the escorts HMCS St. Croix, HMS Polyanthus and HMS Itchen along with six of the merchant ships they were protecting, while HMS Lagan was damaged and never repaired. HMS Escapade was also damaged, by the misfiring of her own Hedgehog. Yet the attacking Leuthen Gruppe lost U 338 to a Liberator of 120 Squadron RAF and U 229 to HMS Keppel, returned with U 386 and U 584 badly damaged, and conceived a seriously inflated belief in the capabilities of their new weapon. As the Monthly Anti-Submarine Report dryly commented, 'it is interesting to note that the enemy claimed twelve escorts sunk and three damaged'¹⁰⁷. The new "miracle weapon" was not as good as the U-boat Arm needed it to be, and the passage of the convoys had also allowed the Allies to bring one of the newer weapons in their arsenal into play - the Empire Macalpine, a Merchant Aircraft Carrier flying off naval Swordfish aircraft, and filling the air gap where long-range aircraft could not.

U-boat Survivors, Midshipman (E) Reimar Lüst (U 528), Oberleutnant zur See Georg von Rabenau (CO, U 528), Leutnant (Ing.) Karl-Heinz Förtsch (U 659), Leutnant zur See Werner Opolka (U 528), Oberleutnant (Ing.) Erwin Goerlich (U 528). Taken from CB 04051(71) U 528 Interrogation of Survivors

Away from the shifting fortunes of the Atlantic, during the summer of 1943 Coastal Command undertook a campaign to destroy U-boats transiting the Bay of Biscay on their way to or from the Atlantic. Although 'many a good flight crew flew for hundreds of hours, month after month, by day and night in all weathers over the grey, desolate wastes of the Atlantic, without ever having the excitement of so much as seeing a U-boat'¹⁰⁸, the Biscay Campaign was highly effective, with 218 U-boats attacked, 27 "kills", and 31 boats damaged. The submarines were additionally forced to remain submerged at night as well as by day, which was bad for morale, and reduced operation time by 5 days. On 30 July, in one of the most dramatic encounters of the Biscay Campaign, the outbound submarines U 461, U 462, and U 504 were sighted and sunk. U 461 by Sunderland "U" of 461 Squadron RAAF, U 462 by Halifax "S" of 502 Squadron RAF, and U 504 by the sloops of Captain Walker's legendary 2nd Escort Group. Not only had three U-boats been sunk in one action, but U 461 and U 462 were both "Milchkuh", "milk cow", submarine tankers, badly needed to maintain the long-distance operations the U-boat Arm now wished to expand.

Phase VII: September 1943 to May 1944

Ours was a happy ship, a very happy ship...We were a small, closely knit unit that only used discipline that was actually necessary. A lot depended on the captain. I had two good captains and you were all chums together and you were all doing the same sort of job and everyone looked after one another¹⁰⁹

He was equally unpopular with the officers, who rounded off a merry party one night by cornering him in a narrow alley-way and beating him up soundly¹¹⁰

Photograph taken during a patrol by the Second Support Group, February 1944. Taken from CB 04050/44(2) Monthly Anti-Submarine Report February 1944

When we were going to Newfoundland, that was a bit of a bonus...because when we got over there we could buy lots of tinned fruits¹¹¹

Whilst the Allies prepared for the invasion of Europe, the Axis struggled to maintain the Battle of the Atlantic, and life at sea continued for thousands of seamen, whose unremitting task was to cross and re-cross the ocean. In an attempt to defeat the Biscay bombers 'German shipyards began fitting boats with huge batteries of anti-aircraft guns so that the boats could remain on the surface when attacked from the air and fight it out'¹¹². Freshly equipped, the boats were sent out, still in packs, to hunt the convoys, but 'time and again wolfpacks were thrown against convoys with heavy escorts and stifling air coverage; time and again the boats were hunted down and the convoys escaped unscathed'¹¹³. In January 1944 Dönitz gave up on Rudeltaktik, sending his boats out on independent operations, and by February the Naval Staff could comment 'it is indeed satisfactory that the number of U-boat sinkings rose for the second month in succession...our convoys can pass through concentrations of U-boats, inflicting loss and suffering little or none themselves'¹¹⁴. The interrogators of the crews captured by escorts noticed somewhat self-righteously how their loss of fortune was changing the U-boat Arm. Not only was morale low, but the days of the respected and charismatic "Old Man" seemed well and truly over. Commanding Officers were described variously as 'elegant, selfish, stern and unpopular'¹¹⁵, 'vacillating and even cowardly'¹¹⁶ and with a mind 'which had succumbed to Nazi doctrines, and through consequent lack of use, had become vague and unreliable'¹¹⁷.

"The Quick and the Dead", from Chapter II of the Admiralty Merchant Shipping Instructions 1944-45

Not everyone at the Admiralty felt so openly triumphant. The Naval Staff sounded a note of caution in February when they commented, 'the ascendancy which we have established over the enemy in ocean waters may perhaps be challenged in the not far distant future under very different conditions, which will test to the uttermost the training of our anti-submarine forces'¹¹⁸. There was still a risk that Dönitz would produce an exceptional weapon or strategy, undetected by Allied intelligence, which would change the balance of the Battle once more. While the vast majority of Atlantic crossings might be described as 'an average corvette passage with good companions and more up and down than forward motion...'¹¹⁹, and the average seaman might comment 'if you see...a batch of seagulls, circling round something, you report that. Because it could be something in the water there you know...You'd just report anything. It gets boring after a while, but at night you're looking out, you can't see a thing you know, but you're still looking out just the same, just looking into black'¹²⁰, until it was known that there were no more U-boats in the Atlantic, both merchant ships and Royal Navy would have to remain vigilant.

Phase VIII: May 1944 to May 1945

You thought "Well, this ship's looked after me through three years of heavy seas, calm seas, rough seas, snow, the lot. And we've come through together¹²¹

Hitherto only a very meagre oil slick stretching down tide had been brought to the surface...after Rowley had stirred up the target but failed to raise conclusive evidence, Duckworth closed to deal out "tin-opening" attacks with depth charges. By dusk much debris had been brought to the surface¹²²

All the Commodores will bear me out when I say that the convoy system would not have been so successful but for the fact that we had you taking care of our interests when we were absent on the high seas¹²³

The Naval Staff had been right to sound a note of caution. During the final phase of the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boats kept going out on patrol, no matter how bleak their situation, and the Battle changed completely once again. The switch to independent operations had been made in January 1944. Dönitz now instituted an inshore campaign, a return to US coastal waters, and patrols that penetrated along the north western approaches of the UK and the English Channel. The inshore campaign had been originally intended, as described in an interrogation from May 1944, as 'a diversion...with the intention of drawing off some of the escort groups from the Atlantic and so ease the pressure on the U-boats operating there'¹²⁴, but the D-Day landings altered the war at sea. For a U-boat that could survive the hazards, there would now be plenty of targets in the Channel, and around the western coastline of the UK, as smaller convoys sought to supply the invasion forces with troops and equipment. Dönitz lost dozens of submarines as the French ports were targeted by heavy bombers, and then lost his access route across the Bay of Biscay in the wake of the invasion, but submarines could still battle their way round from the Norwegian ports to wreck havoc in the shipping lanes.

Hans-Joachim Förster in U 480 and Helmut Graf von Matuschka in U 482 left their respective ports to patrol the UK in August 1944, Förster in the Channel, Matuschka in the North Channel. The U-boats' "Happy Times" had ceased long before either of them made command, but their patrols in August 1944 are representative of the continuing power of the U-boat. Förster sank four ships, including HMCS Alberni and HMS Loyalty, and damaged one; Matuschka sank five ships and damaged two. U-boat Command gratefully awarded them with the Knights Cross in Gold on the same day¹²⁵. Gerhard Meyer in U 486, venturing from Bergen in late November 1944, only sank three ships, damaging one other, but they included the SS Leopoldville, an 11,000 ton troopship packed with American soldiers, and the frigate, HMS Capel. The sinkings took place on 24 and 26 December, a terrible seasonal reminder, even after the beginning of the Ardennes offensive, that the war was not over yet. The War Diaries of these boats also record that, with the technology of T5 and LUT torpedoes, attacks could now be made at a range of 2-3,000 metres, with a higher success rate than in the Atlantic. And in the spring of 1945 the first patrols were made with the revolutionary new Type XXI and Type XXIII boats. They were 'the miracle boats for which the U-Bootwaffe had been waiting so long'¹²⁶, and it was a Type XXIII that caused the final casualty of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Avondale Park, sunk as late as 7 May 1945 by U 2336.

However, the majority of the sinkings during this final period were caused by the same Type VII boats that were familiar enemies from the Atlantic, and the escort groups were well able to cope with them. 'More than one hundred boats were lost in the first four months of 1945, most of them with their entire crews, for negligible returns in tonnage and no strategic benefit whatsoever'¹²⁷. U 480, U 482 and U 486 were all sent back out to patrol, only to be sunk with all hands¹²⁸, and the seas around the UK were filled with escorts groups making attacks with depth charges, Hedgehog, and the Allies' newest deadly weapon, Squid. Personal contact between the enemies had become extremely rare, and confirmation of sinking relied more often on analysis of diesel fuel than interrogation. Since it was far too dangerous to send signals back to BdU most of the boats simply disappeared and remained unaccounted for when Dönitz surrendered, a quiet, impersonal, end to one of the most ferocious and protracted campaigns in naval history.

The Battle of the Atlantic meant many things to many people. While it is an almost impossible task to re-assert the primacy of the individual into our collective awareness of this period, there is little doubt that 'the Battle of the Atlantic was a searing experience for everyone who participated in it, and there are still many questions to be asked about it, simply as a human experience'¹²⁹. Retrospective accounts of the Battle may conflict with the official, contemporary-sourced, histories, or even, more often than not, with each other. But they bring an immediacy to our knowledge of how the war at sea was waged. And what emerges from studies of personal accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic is both an overwhelming contemporary respect for the enemy - the fact that neither side 'had the desire to kill...we did not think of our task as killing people, just of sinking ships'¹³⁰ - and an understanding that people emerged from the "anonymous" battle with a sense of community. The War might have left them as battle-scarred individuals, but they had lived as part of family units, and that would always remain with them. For those who survived it, the Battle of the Atlantic meant simply 'every one of you have shared the same experiences, the same feelings. And you have the same feelings when you bring survivors on board who can't stand up or are completely unconscious because of their time in the water...it was a family affair'¹³¹.

References

80. Letter from Daphne Higgins to Richard Rankin, Naval Historical Branch collections T5508. The letter is not dated, but must have been written around September - October 1942 when Mrs Higgins was on passage from Liverpool to Durban. She wrote again in January 1943 announcing the birth of baby girl on Christmas Day 1942. She had arrived in Durban 'carrying all before' and made the rest of her journey across Africa in an aircraft.
81. Howard O. Goldsmith, Sick Berth Attendant, HMS Snowflake, describing Convoy ONS 5, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p32-33.
82. Dönitz's "Laconia Order", quoted by Tony Bridgland, Waves of Hate. Naval Atrocities of the Second World War, Barnsley, Leo Cooper, 2002, p85.
83. Vause, op. cit., p183.
84. See Bridgland, as above.
85. Williams, op. cit., p225.
86. William Hallam, HMS Campanula, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p79.
87. See Vause, op. cit., p169
88. Frank G. Richmond, HMS Clematis, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p144.
89. Don Kirton, Leading Supply Assistant, HMS Bluebell, Williams, op. cit., p91.
90. Report of an Interview with the 2nd Engineer of the SS Nailsea Court, Mr H C C Bette, 23^rd March 1943, Public Record Office, ADM 199/2144.
91. Rohwer and Hümmelchen, op. cit., p201.
92. Rohwer and Hümmelchen, op. cit., p199. Rohwer mistakenly refers to MacIntyre as Commander of the Whimbrel.
93. Vause, op. cit., p174.
94. Howard O. Goldsmith, Sick Berth Attendant, HMS Snowflake, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p32-33
95. Howard Goldsmith, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p32-33.
96. The fates of two of the boats is not entirely clear, but it is considered that their sinking during the attacks on ONS 5 remains the most likely explanation for their sinking. See reassessment report by Foreign Documents Section of NHB, Naval Historical Branch collections FDS 435 from October 1991.
97. See Williams, op. cit., p263.
98. Vause, op. cit., p175.
99. Interrogation of Survivors of U 459, September 1943, CB 04051(79), Public Record Office, ADM 186/808.
100. Recollections of Able Seaman Alex Franz, U 461, written in 1996, taken from an unpublished manuscript by Günther Paas, translation by Kate Tildesley, Naval Historical Branch collections FDSN/1998.
101. Monthly Anti-Submarine Report for September 1943, CB 04050/43(9), Anti U-boat Division of the Naval Staff.
102. Sir Robert Atkinson DSC**, HMS Pink, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p41.
103. Vause, op. cit., p34.
104. Quoted by Erich Topp, 'Manning and Training the U-boat Fleet', Howarth and Law, op. cit., p216.
105. Harold G. Chesterman, HMS Zinnia, HMS Snowflake, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p54.
106. Vause, op. cit., p176.
107. Monthly Anti-Submarine Report for October 1943, CB 04050/43(10), Anti-U-Boat division of the Naval Staff.
108. Sir John Slessor, The Central Blue, p468, quoted by Henry Probert, 'Allied Land-Based Anti-Submarine Warfare', Howarth and Law, op. cit., p 381.
109. Richard K. Grant, HMS Polyanthus, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p18.
110. British comments on Oberassistenarzt Wolfgang Junghans of U 264, who 'had distinguished himself by introducing a Spartan health routine for the luckless crew', expecting them to take ice-cold baths at 6 in the morning, U 406, U 386 and U 264 Interrogation of Survivors, CB 04051(99), May 1944, Public Record Office Reference ADM 186/809.
111. Richard K Grant, HMS Polyanthus, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p101
112. Vause, op. cit., p193.
113. Vause, op. cit., p193.
114. Monthly Anti-Submarine Report for February 1944, CB04050/44(2), Anti-U-boat Division of the Naval Staff.
115. Kapitänleutnant Horst Dieterichs of U 406, U 406, U 386 and U 264 Interrogation of Survivors, op. cit.
116. Both Dieterichs and Fritz Albrecht of U 264, U 406, U 386 and U 264 Interrogation of Survivors, op. cit.
117. Kapitänleutnant Heinz Hungerhausen of U 91, U 257, U 91, U 358 &U 744 Interrogation of Survivors, June 1944, Public Record Office reference ADM 186/809.
118. Monthly Anti-Submarine Report for February 1944, op. cit.
119. Letter from Ted Watt (Commander Frederick Watt RCNVR, Canadian poet) to Richard Rankin dated 24 June 1944, Naval Historical Branch collections T5621.
120. Dennis Jolly, Seaman, HMS Crocus, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p23.
121. Cyril J. Stephens, HMS Orchis, Howard-Bailey, op. cit., p145.
122. Précis of Attack by the 3rd Escort Group 24 February 1945, Naval Historical Branch collections. This attack was always believed to have been on U 480. This attack is still undergoing investigation, but was probably on U 327.
123. Letter from Commodore Gerald N Jones RNR to Richard Rankin, dated 11 July 1945, Naval Historical Branch collections T5512.
124. Comments made by the crew of U 386, U 406, U 386 and U 264 Interrogation of Survivors, op. cit.
125. U 480 Kriegstagebuch 12 September 1944, Admiralty reference PG 30529, Naval Historical Branch collections.
126. Vause, op. cit., p202.
127. Vause, op. cit., p202.
128. U 480 and U 482 were thought to have been sunk by escort groups, but were both, in fact, sunk on deep trap minefields in February 1945 and December 1944, see reports reference FDSN1/1998 and FDS 450, Naval Historical Branch. U 486 was sunk by HM Submarine Tapir on 12 April 1945.
129. Geoffrey Till, op. cit., p587.
130. Horst Elfe, U 99, Williams, op. cit., p95.
131. Roy F. 'Dick' Dykes, Sub-Lieutenant and Lieutenant RNVR, HMS Honeysuckle, Howard-Bailey, p20-21.

Article by Kate Tildesley

	The Atlantic Battles 1939-41.
	The Atlantic Battles 1941-42.
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