Darkest Before Dawn: U-482 and the Sinking of the Empire Heritage 1944

For Mum and Dad

And in memory of James Peterson, 1904–1980

who endured and survived the events in this book

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have received help and advice from various people and organisations who have given me information, documents or photographs and I would especially like to acknowledge the assistance of the National Archives at Kew and the Tyne and Wear Archives Service. Being able to remotely search and order copies of documents and photographs that could only otherwise have been studied in person is an incredible service and we are very fortunate to have it.

I would like to thank Ian Wilson for what has been an inestimable and invaluable contribution to this book. From the very beginning he provided me with documents, photographs and ideas, some of which I could never have hoped to find without him. He has been incredibly generous in sharing information with me and this book would have been much poorer without his help.

I would also like to thank Leigh Bishop for the help and information he gave me, and for allowing me to use his stunning wreck photographs in the book. Seeing Empire Heritage in her final resting place helps to add another dimension to the story.

And finally, thanks to Shelley, without whose endless love and support this book would never have been written.

INTRODUCTION

Out in the blustering darkness, on the deck

A gleam of stars looks down. Long blurs of black,

The lean Destroyers, level with our track,

Plunging and stealing, watch the perilous way

Through backward racing seas and caverns of chill spray.

One sentry by the davits, in the gloom

Stands mute: the boat heaves onward through the night.

Shrouded is every chink of cabined light:

And sluiced by floundering waves that hiss and boom

And crash like guns, the troop-ship shudders … doom.

Night on the Convoy, Siegfried Sassoon

At 0350 hours, in the early morning darkness of Friday 8 September 1944 the sea moved with a moderate swell in the north-westerly force 4 off the north coast of Ireland near County Donegal. The moon had shone intermittently throughout the night and early morning; there had been some cloud cover but it was generally clear and visibility was good. Sunrise would be in another two hours. The cliffs of Malin Head, the most northerly point of Ireland, were black, rugged silhouettes, and there was no movement but that of the sea. The only sound inshore was of the wind and waves. Some fifteen miles out to sea, the night was disturbed by huge black forms moving in from the west. Enormous shapes of steel and the rumble of massive steam engines moved through the dim air, frothing bow waves spread across the water creating white-tipped trenches on the murky morning surface. This was the darkness before the dawn.

An enormous convoy of ships slid east from the Western Approaches towards the North Channel, the narrow strait between Scotland and Ireland on its way to Britain. They were at the final stages of a voyage that had taken them across the North Atlantic from the east coast of the United States and Canada. The main convoy was composed of no fewer than 98 vessels, a variety of ships of all types, shapes and sizes, sailing together for the protection of safety in numbers and surrounded by an escort of armed ships. Collectively, the motley group was called HX-305, one of the thousands of supply convoys that moved across the world and converged on Britain throughout the Second World War. In the holds of these ships lay the necessary supplies to sustain the British people in this desperate time and supply the Allied forces with fuel and weapons for the continuing conflict in Western Europe.

The majority of the ships were American, though there were also British, Dutch, Norwegian and Panamanian vessels amongst the convoy, sailing from New York or Nova Scotia to Liverpool, before dispersing to other ports across the country such as Manchester, Cardiff, Hull, Belfast and the Clyde, amongst others. They carried cargoes of grain, foodstuffs, lumber, paper, fuel and mail for the British population, alongside weapons, ammunition, trucks, tanks and oil for military use. In addition, they carried a large number of passengers, including many naval personnel who had lost their ships on previous voyages and who were heading back across the Atlantic to join new ones. They were known as DBS or ‘Distressed British Seamen’. The most common reason for these men losing their ships was enemy action, and the most common perpetrator of those actions was the deadly U-boat.

By September 1944 U-boat activity in the North Atlantic was greatly reduced, having steadily tapered off over the previous fifteen months. Compared to the early days of the war, the U-boat threat was becoming negligible. Only a handful of merchant ships had been lost that year, a massive difference to the enormous losses suffered in 1940–1943 when U-boat successes had been at their height. In fact not a single ship had been lost to enemy action in an HX convoy since 22 April 1943, nearly seventeen months before. In previous years attacks had been much more frequent and deadly; for example, in 1942 the Allies had lost 124 ships in a single month and over 1,000 ships over the course of the year. Such losses represented an enormous number of men and shipping tonnage, lost forever beneath the freezing Atlantic Ocean, their holds full of supplies that would never serve their purpose. But by September 1944, as convoy HX-305 cruised east along the coast of County Donegal, successful U-boat attacks were at their lowest since the beginning of the war and developments in anti-submarine technology had given the Allies the upper hand. Also, the Allied invasion of Europe that had begun on D-Day had robbed Germany of her important U-boat bases along the Bay of Biscay. The subsequent breakout from Normandy and eventual liberation of France by the Allies meant that Germany had been forced to evacuate these bases and retreat her U-boats to her other occupied coasts such as Norway, or to Germany. This reduced her access to the Atlantic and meant a much longer trip for her U-boats trying to intercept Allied shipping as it moved through the Western Approaches.

But even though the Third Reich was rapidly unravelling and the Allies were edging ever closer to Berlin, the U-boat arm of the German Navy had proved itself notoriously determined and though the frequency and success of their attacks had certainly been diminished, the U-boats were still very much operational. In the previous two weeks at the end of August and beginning of September 1944, a number of unexpected and successful attacks had taken place in the coastal area where HX-305 was now sailing and three Allied ships had been sunk; a large American tanker, a Norwegian freighter and a Royal Navy corvette. Despite an extensive search the attacker had remained undetected and unidentified.

Whilst in Europe the war against Nazi Germany was slowly being won by the Allies, the men of the Merchant Navy had to remain ever vigilant, and could not for one moment forget the threat that the U-boats continued to represent. In late 1944, the tide had turned against Germany in nearly all the theatres of war, including the longstanding Battle of the Atlantic, but the Allied seamen were still sailing in almost constant danger.

That morning, as convoy HX-305 slid steadily eastwards, nobody looking out from amongst the vast scattering of ships could have known that they were not alone. There was nothing to tell them that they were being watched carefully by eyes from beneath the waves. In the calm of the dark September morning, a single periscope scanned silently across the vista in search of a possible target and a victim to add to the three that had already gone before. With just two days of the voyage left, the convoy moved steadily on, many of the ships’ crews asleep below decks at this early hour. On the submerged vessel lying in wait, every man was awake.

The commander watching through the periscope finally selected a victim from amongst the ships as they moved past. He looked for a weak spot in the convoy, a way to get inside it, a way to get out again. The target he picked was a large ship, heavily laden and lying low in the water yet with a considerable superstructure. It was possibly a tanker, but sailing amidst the convoy it was just another shape in the night, nameless in the periscope crosshairs. The commander issued orders to the men waiting eagerly around him and the course was altered and set while preparations began deep in the innards of the long, sleek vessel. Slowly the U-boat began to turn, her whole body swinging round like a blade in the water to follow the path of the tanker, and to aim the deadly torpedo tubes moulded into her hull. The tubes were loaded whilst the distances were checked and various calculations made. Everything was set and confirmed whilst a constant watch was kept on the course of the unfortunate tanker, still unaware. The hydrophone on the U-boat scanned and listened to the surrounding wall of water outside. It locked carefully onto the sound of the enormous propellers turning beneath the ship. The U-boat rudder kept her turning until she pointed well to the east of her target; the extra angle on the trajectory was carefully calculated to give the torpedo time to get to the target. For such a calculation the distance to the target, the target’s speed and the speed of the torpedo had to be vectored.

In the U-boat the crew were waiting, crowded around the commander at the periscope, watching him carefully. Even from behind the wall of water and layers of steel, they could hear the ships all around them ploughing through the darkness towards the North Channel. Everything was checked once more and then finally the order to fire was given.

The torpedo was pushed out into the darkness with a hiss of compressed air. Inside the U-boat a stopwatch began counting. Onboard the crew waited nervously as the seconds ticked away and everyone listened, their ears tuned to the ocean outside, for the sound of an impact. The stagnant air was thick with cloying diesel fumes and cooking smells along with the stink of unwashed bodies. Outside, the torpedo cut through the water just beneath the surface. At over seven metres in length, it was propelled by an electric motor capable of achieving a speed of 30 knots. At the front sat the deadly warhead, 280 kilograms of explosive power.

At 3.55 that morning, the torpedo struck its target in a perfectly aimed shot, and within seconds the fleet was plunged into chaos. The stricken vessel was a British merchant tanker called Empire Heritage. A large hole was blown in her side just above the waterline, and she immediately began to flood as the terrific blast from the torpedo ignited her massive oil tanks. The heavy ship could not possibly survive with her hull burst open and she subsequently became one of the biggest merchant losses of the war.

With news of the attack spreading through the convoy, a rescue ship called Pinto that was sailing nearby came quickly to her aid but within minutes of closing the wreck, she suffered a second torpedo from the same U-boat and went down in almost the same spot. As the convoy escorts tried desperately to reorganise a defensive screen, a third ship, the armed trawler HMT Northern Wave moved in, first to locate the attacker and then to rescue the men who had spilled out of the two sunken ships. She narrowly missed becoming a third victim as the enemy U-boat began her run for cover, which she eventually achieved without reprisal.

In under an hour, the peaceful September morning just north of County Donegal had been brutally shattered and the large convoy flung into disarray. As a desperate search began to find the attacker and save further losses, the two British ships settled broken on the seabed, and over a hundred men had lost their lives. Once more, it was brought home to the Allies that the U-boats could still pose a significant and deadly threat to their supply lines.

This is the story of convoy HX-305 told in full for the first time. It is the story of the two ships lost that morning – and others – of the men that survived, the subsequent inquiry and the aftermath of the attack. It considers the development of anti-submarine warfare by the Allies – some of which was prompted by the events described. It is the story of U-482, and of how a lone U-boat on her first active patrol managed to pull off one of the most extraordinary and dramatic U-boat attacks of the Second World War.

I

THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC

The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all during the war. Never for a moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere – on land, sea and in the air – depended ultimately on the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Winston Churchill

In the years since taking power in 1933, Hitler’s National Socialist Party had turned around the crumbling post-war Germany and made her into one of the most powerful countries in the world through a programme of military expansion and rearmament that had led to worldwide tension, mobilisation and eventually war.

What became known as the Battle of the Atlantic was in fact the longest continuously fought campaign of the conflict. After war broke out between Britain and Germany, it became clear that the biggest initial threat to the island nation was to her shipping. Britain was an island of 48 million people with an average annual import of some 55 million tonnes of raw materials; upwards of a million tonnes a week. Some of these materials were for use in factories for manufacturing and export, but most was simply what the population needed just to survive, let alone fight a war. Hitler knew that these supply lines were the key to achieving a quick finish to the war with Britain – and thus in Western Europe – and so his Kriegsmarine (‘War Navy’) began a focused operation to cut off the small island, shatter her merchant fleet, destroy her supplies and bring her to her knees.

Britain had the biggest Merchant Navy in the world with a fleet of around 18 million tonnes. These ships were continuously travelling all over the world, which meant that it would be an enormous and wide-ranging task to defeat them. Though the war was fought in every corner of the globe, it was the supply lines pouring into Britain from the Atlantic that were the key to her survival. On one side of the battle was the Allied Merchant Navy, desperately trying to make it through to Britain with food and supplies, and on the other side were the U-boats, intent on preventing them. For Britain to survive, it was imperative that the ships crossing the Atlantic got through with the food, the weapons and the fuel to keep the country running. The celebrated pilots of the Royal Air Force could never have fought off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain without the fuel for their aircraft and the ammunition for their guns. They could not have defended their coastline, or sent bombers across the English Channel without the necessary materials to build them. The tanks and guns for the Africa Campaign, the fuel for the evacuation of Dunkirk, the aircraft for the bombardment of Germany, the equipment for the invasion force for D-Day all came across the Atlantic in the holds of the Allied Merchant Navy ships. It is little wonder that Churchill acknowledged the Battle of the Atlantic as the dominating factor during the war.

Within twelve hours of the declaration of war on 3 September 1939 it became clear that Britain’ s greatest fears were to come true. The liner SS Athenia was torpedoed 200 miles out into the Atlantic on her way to Canada by U-30, who had mistaken her for a troopship. In fact she was carrying many civilians, of whom 118 died in the sinking. This tragedy was a sign of things to come. There grew an all-out tonnage war between the ships of the Merchant Navy and the Kriegsmarine as the U-boats began their campaign to starve Britain into submission. Later on, they would no longer be trying to simply defeat Britain – from mid-1942 when the war escalated with American involvement, the U-boats worked tirelessly to try and prevent the enormous movements of men, weapons and materials being shipped into Britain in preparation for the anticipated Allied invasion of Europe.

As the war progressed and it became clear that the U-boats were Germany’s biggest hope in defeating Britain, production of the submarines escalated dramatically. At the outbreak of war Admiral Karl Dönitz who was Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote or Commander of Submarines, had just 56 U-boats in commission. This was nowhere near the number he wanted to begin his planned campaign but at least they were all new, and equipped with state-of-the-art submarine technology. Once war was declared U-boat production began immediately in nineteen different shipyards spread over eleven cities including Kiel, Wilhelmhaven and Hamburg. These shipyards would produce the 1,174 vessels that were ultimately launched during the conflict. Over the course of the war submarine technology developed rapidly and by 1945 the U-boat was a much more advanced fighting vessel than it had been at the start. But during the war years, the bulk of the U-boat fleet was made up of the Type IX and more importantly the Type VII, the latter a relatively small boat that varied in size from 630 to 760 tonnes. The Type VII was the most productive and widely used U-boat of the war, with almost 700 of them going into service. It was incredibly successful in theatre, totally unmatched as an attack submarine, and a combination of crew resourcefulness and endurance saw it succeed way beyond the parameters it was designed for.

In a time of war, all vehicles and crafts are used in any way they can to aid the war effort. From merchant ships to fishing boats, aircraft to motorcycles, cars and trucks, everything can be armed and armoured, and converted from its primary use to one of attack or defence. But a submarine is virtually unique in that it is exclusively a weapon, used for the stalking and stealthy attacking of enemy ships.

As an island nation, it is not surprising that in 1939 Britain had the largest Merchant Navy in the world. Somewhere in the region of 185,000 men crewed the ships that crossed the globe and it is estimated that during the war there were around 144,000 men at sea on any given date as they struggled to keep up the supply of food, men, supplies and munitions to Britain and the European front. Therefore there was enormous demand for merchant seamen and many experienced seamen chose to join the merchant marine over the Royal Navy. Life in the Merchant Navy would have been similar to life on a trawler or whaling ship. However, it was common for merchant seamen, fisherman or whalers to be part of the Royal Naval Reserve and many who were between trips at the outbreak of war were drafted straight into the Royal Navy. In 1938 the average age of a merchant seaman was 36 but there were also boys as young as fifteen or less aboard some of the ships, most of them from large ports areas such as London, Liverpool, Glasgow and the Tyne.

The men of the Merchant Navy – often referred to as ‘the fourth service’ – wore no distinct uniform like those in the Armed Services, and at most men on leave wore a small silver Merchant Navy lapel badge. This often resulted in sailors on leave being the victims of abuse from an ignorant public who seeing them without uniform mistakenly thought they were able-bodied men who were avoiding war service. In reality these were the men who were helping to keep the country alive and were often in much more significant danger than their uniformed counterparts in the armed services. In 1941 and 1942, 15,000 merchant seamen were lost as a result of enemy action and over the course of the war nearly 63,000 Allied and neutral merchant seamen lost their lives. It was a life spent endlessly crossing and re-crossing the seas, loading and unloading their cargoes, working four hours on and four hours off, never a full night’s sleep or a full day’s rest. And always there was a tenacious enemy lying in wait, ready to take the ship from beneath them. These men received little recognition for their dedication to duty. Ultimately many had no grave but the sea.

On top of these terrible human losses was the incredible tonnage of ships and cargoes being sent to the seabed by the enemy submarines. By the end of 1939, after fewer than four months of war, 147 ships had been lost; a total of 510,000 tonnes. This level of loss could not possibly be withstood by the British population, and the country was under immense strain as it continued to stand alone against Nazi Germany. It became clear that even a single U-boat was capable of inflicting levels of damage at sea that would have taken an entire army to achieve on land. Admiral Dönitz later wrote in his memoirs of the colossal impact a U-boat could make: ‘How many soldiers would have to be sacrificed, how great an endeavour made,