In Peril on the Sea – Episode Twenty Three Chapter 7Part 2 “THE ROYAL CANADIAN NAVY COMES OF AGE: JUNE 1943 - APRIL 1944” (cont’d) Continued from Chapter Seven Part 1 ……..The decimation of the escort must be the first objective. The destruction of a few destroyers will have considerable moral effect upon the enemy and will greatly facilitate the attack on ships of the convoy in addition. …… I expect of all commanding officers that each chance of a shot at a destroyer will be utilized. From now on, the U-boat is the attacker – fire first and then submerge.4 The stage was now set for the last of the great Atlantic convoy battles. “Beasts of prey were gathering:” The battle for ONS 18 and ON 202, September 1943 Bletchley Park was able to provide timely intelligence of the German commander’s intentions and deployment. At risk were two westbound convoys, slow convoy ONS 18 with 27 merchant ships and, coming up astern, fast convoy ON 202 with 40 ships. The escort for ONS 18 was provided by B-3 Group with two destroyers, a frigate and five corvettes assisted by a MAC (Merchant Aircraft Carrier) ship, Empire MacAlpine, which carried eight obsolescent Swordfish biplanes. ON 202 was under the guard of C-2 Group which comprised the destroyers HMCS Gatineau (Senior Officer) and HMS Icarus, the Canadian corvettes Drumheller and Kamloops and the British corvette Polyanthus. Available to reinforce either convoy was Canadian Escort Group 9 with the frigate HMS Itchen, the destroyer HMCS St. Croix and three Canadian corvettes, Chambly, Morden and Sackville. The commanding officers and crews of all three groups were experienced and they were backed up by no less than 73 VLR aircraft flying from Ireland, Iceland and Newfoundland. It was a Canadian aircraft that got first blood. At 0855 on 19 September a VLR Liberator of 10 RCAF Squadron was covering ONS 18 when it sighted a submarine on the surface 160 miles ahead of the convoy but moving toward it. The Liberator attacked but the U-boat commander, Oberleutnant zur See Dietrich Epp, elected to stay on the surface and use his heavy AA armament to defend himself – that proved to be a mistake as well-placed depth charges blew his vessel’s bows out of the water and U‑341 was no more. Just before midnight, U-402 of Gruppe Leuthen sighted ONS 18 and, at 0155, 20 September, Oberleutnant zur See Paul-Friedrich Otto of U-270 sent a Beta-Beta, what Allied code breakers called a “B-Bar signal” or sighting report giving the convoy’s location and heading: “beta/beta. Convoy square 1944, AL, 270 degrees, Otto.”5 Almost -immediately, the reply came back from Dönitz’s headquarters: “Leuthen at ’em. Otto report contact. Manseck [commander of U-758] report weather at once.” The battle was joined. Otto’s signal was picked up by the HF/DF equipment on board the vessels of C-2 Group, which was with ON 202 coming up behind the slow convoy. The group’s Senior Officer, Commander P.W. Burnett, RN, obtained a fix for U-270 and dispatched the frigate HMS Langan to investigate, and when Langan acquired a firm radar contact, reinforced her with HMCS Gatineau. The target was Otto’s U-270 but at 0259 Otto fired an acoustic torpedo at Langan which blew the frigate’s stern off and killed 29 of her crew – a spectacular debut for the new weapon. Gatineau, coming on the scene, responded with a depth charge attack that damaged U-270 and forced Otto to withdraw from the attack. The tug Destiny took the shattered Langan in tow and got her safely back to a friendly port but the frigate’s career was finished. Unfortunately, while the escort group was diverted by this incident, U‑238, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Horst Hepp, made contact with ONS 18 and, maintaining strict radio silence, manoeuvred into a - position ahead of the convoy. At 0732, as the lead ships were approaching his position, Hepp sank the merchantmen Frederick Douglas and Theodore Dwight Weld before diving deep and passing The Chiefs and Petty Officers had it no better under the convoy. C-2 Group carried out ASDIC searches and attacked The Chiefs and Petty Officers' messdeck on a corvette was no more spacious than those of the suspected contacts but U-238 escaped unharmed and remained in touch. ordinary sailors -- as this photograph demonstrates. (Canadian Naval Memorial Trust) The escorts, however, were -assisted in their work by the arrival of VLR aircraft, which stayed over the convoy the entire day. The loss of three ships in a few hours prompted Admiral Max Horton to -order the two convoys to merge and their escort to be reinforced by the RCN’s Escort Group 9. On receipt of this signal, Commander M.B. Evans, RN, the Senior Officer of B-3 Group with the slow convoy, later recalled that, although the fast convoy astern of him “was the centre of attraction around which the beasts of prey were gathering,” he “felt rather a brute in leading my poor little ONS 18 into the turmoil,” although his crews expressed “delight at a chance of activity – with handsome escort – after months of dreary ocean plodding.”6 However, combining 65 merchant ships and three escort groups into a new and defensible formation proved to be a very difficult task and, as the commander of C-2 group later commented, throughout most of 20 September ONS 18 and ON 202 “gyrated majestically about the ocean, never appearing to get much closer, and watched appreciatively by a growing swarm of U-boats.”7 As this cumbersome elephant dance took place on the face of a calm sea, VLR aircraft and the convoy escorts were keeping the prowling enemy at bay. Several attempted attacks were foiled and in the early evening an RAF Liberator sank U-338. When another aircraft reported a surfaced U‑boat a few minutes later, HMCS St. Croix of Escort Group 9 steamed toward the area, right into the periscope sights of Kapitänleutnant Rudolf Bahr of U- 305 who fired an acoustic torpedo that blew off her stern. While his crew struggled to keep St. Croix afloat, her captain, Lieutenant Commander A.H. Dobson, RCN, ordered her boats lowered and the wounded placed in them as a safety measure and then signalled HMS Itchen, which was coming to his rescue, that he was “leaving the office.”8 Almost at that same moment, U-305 fired a second, standard torpedo at St. Croix that cut the vessel in half. When Itchen arrived on the scene, she found only the destroyer’s bow above water and the sea around it dotted with the heads of survivors. Presented with a new target, Bahr fired an acoustic torpedo at Itchen which detonated in the frigate’s wake and her captain wisely decided to wait for support from the corvette HMS Polyanthus before attempting to pick up survivors. Unfortunately, Polyanthus never made it. While she was standing by St. Croix’s survivors, Itchen fired starshells that drew no less than four U-boats toward her. Polyanthus had just carried out an attack on one of these - opponents when another submarine, U-952 commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Oskar Curio, fired an acoustic torpedo that immediately sank the corvette, taking down her entire crew except one survivor who was rescued the next day. It was now quite dark and the night that followed degenerated into a confused series of separate actions as the escorts tracked down and attacked several U-boats, which responded by firing acoustic torpedoes without success. Just before dawn on 21 September, a thick blanket of fog descended on the two convoys which had finally managed, more by luck than skill, to position The Pleasures of Dining at Sea In a time when Canadian warships had only rudimentary refrigeration facilities, fresh themselves abeam of each other. Thirteen hours after St. Croix had sunk, food, particularly bread, quickly became stale. Here, Able Seaman C.G. Walker of Itchen finally found time to return and rescue her survivors who had spent a HMCS Georgian demonstrates how to cut rock-hard bread with a saw. Note the crowded quarters and the off-duty sailor sleeping in his "mick" or hammock behind long and cold night in the oil-soaked Atlantic. Many had drowned or Walker. (Photograph by W.H. Pugsley, courtesy National Archives of Canada, PA succumbed to hypothermia, but through the diligent efforts of Dobson, just 134351] over half the destroyer’s complement of 147 men were plucked from the sea. The fog continued throughout 21 September and into the next day. In such weather, the radar-equipped escorts had the advantage over the U-boats that were trying to manoeuvre into positions to attack the combined convoy, which now consisted of 18 columns of ships spread out over 30 square miles of ocean. Time and time again, they beat off the enemy but the only escort to score a kill was the destroyer HMS Keppel, which ran down a HF/DF fix during the early hours of 22 September and surprised Oberleutnant zur See Robert Schetelig’s U-229 running on the surface – Keppel promptly rammed and sank it. Despite hazardous flying conditions, the Empire MacAlpine launched one of her rickety Swordfish biplanes and VLR aircraft patrols were kept constantly overhead. THE ROLE OF OPERATIONAL INTELLIGENCE On both sides, the forces employed in the Battle of the Atlantic were subject to highly centralized command from shore-based headquarters.