The Admiralty dreaded above all the losses caused to them by the merchant ships which the Germans had armed for combat. These, fast and well armed, were sent from Germany to act individually in the oceans. The difficulty was to find them. At the beginning of the war, groups of them had been formed to act in conjunction with the "pocket battleships", but this was to use them in a very unprofitable way. Indeed, most of the time they traveled hundreds of thousands of miles for nothing, for by the time they reached the last ship believed to have been sunk, the attacker himself had long since disappeared. However, they managed to completely disrupt the normal flow of English maritime traffic.
The first of these ships, launched in the first half of 1940 and what the Germans called "the first wave", was the Atlantis. It left Germany on March 31, soon to be followed by the Orion (April 6) and the Widder (May 5). Two others, the Thor and the Pinguin burst into the defenses of the Atlantic in June. In July and August, a sixth, the Komet, enters the Pacific through the Arctic Passage in northern Siberia. To allow them to stay longer at sea, tankers accompany them. They can thus restock as soon as the need arises.
It is only on two occasions that one of them comes into contact with an English warship . On July 28, the cruiser Alcantara met the Thor in the Caribbean Sea, off Trinidad (Trinidad). The English boat is completely dismantled by the enemy. He struggles to get back to his base to repair his damage while the Thor heads for the South Atlantic to repair his own damage and refuel.
A little over four months later Later, off the coast of South America, the Thor encountered another English cruiser, the Carnarvon Castle. Things happen the same way. While the English boat was seriously damaged, the assailant, unharmed, vanished into the background. Never had the Royal Navy been so close to sinking one of these elusive and dangerous boats. The damage they caused was severe and had many repercussions. In the North Atlantic as in the South Atlantic, in the Indian Ocean as in the Pacific, these 6 ships alone sank 54 British ships for a total of 367,000 tons. In addition, they caused considerable disruption in the flow of British trade:major delays and the obligation to change routes to avoid their attacks. Some even, in addition to their guns and torpedoes, were equipped to lay minefields which caused other delays and other losses.
It was not to be expected that the relative success of the first Deutschland and Graf Spee expeditions, as well as the aborted attempts of the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau in November 1939, would divert the enemy from his attacks against the English fleet. In September 1940, the cruiser Admiral Hipper tried to reach the Atlantic, but engine trouble forced her to abandon this project and return to her base.
Another attempt, successful this time , is carried out by the "pocket battleship" Admirai Scheer. The latter had left Germany on October 27. He was lucky not to be spotted by any English patrol and was able to reach the Atlantic in complete safety, passing through the Denmark Strait. On November 5, a merchant ship sank there which, alas! does not report this attack. If he had, we could have diverted a convoy returning from Halifax and headed right for the meeting place.
The convoy was the HX-84, escorted by the Jervis Bay, a cruiser whose upper deck was equipped with 6 150-mm guns. On the evening of 5 November, just hours after Scheer's first attack, Jervis Bay spotted the battleship coming from the north and approaching the convoy at high speed. Even before the first cannon shot is fired, the result is what was to be expected:the Jervis Bay is not only disarmed, but also sent down some ten thousand meters deep.
Before sinking, however, and in order to save as many ships as possible, Captain Fegen of the Jervis Bay orders the members of the convoy to scatter south, under cover of smoke. Which they did, because all of them were equipped with smoke-generating devices. Captain Fegen then initiates an action against his formidable adversary in order to give the convoy the maximum time to escape. The Scheer, of course, was unscathed—the shells from the Jervis Bay could not even hit her—but the delay caused by Captain Fegen's challenge gave the convoy the chance it needed. When the Jervis Bay sank, the convoy was already so scattered that the Scheer could only destroy five of its elements and damage another. The rest managed to escape. For his bravery and selflessness, Captain Fegen received a posthumous award, the "Victoria Cross".
The epic of the Jervis Bay begat another epic whose endurance and skill of its heroes is unparalleled in naval history. After sinking the Jervis Bay, the Scheer damaged the tanker San Demetrio. He was hit and caught fire. His crew abandoned him.
The next day, about 18 hours after the attack, he was found, still on fire, by a handful of his men who were adrift on a rescue boat manned by the second officer. The men rowed up to him and climbed back on board. The decks were still hot and the fire was still raging, but they improvised fire hoses and soon got the fire under control. Then they put their energy into repairing the engines and managed to make one work. The ship was then able to undertake a long and slow return to England. With no other chart than an old school atlas found on board, without any navigation instruments and at an average speed of less than 5 knots, these few men managed to bring the San Demetrio back to its base, with most of its precious cargo of fuel.
After attacking convoy HX-84, the Scheerse then heads south, away from the area where it had just operated. She refueled with ammunition and fuel and, after patrolling off the Azores, moved into the South Atlantic. There he captures an English ship laden with supplies and deliberately allows it to radio a report of the attack on it. The reason for this maneuver was to draw attention to its new position in the South Atlantic, in order to attract English hunters there. Thus the coasts were cleared to the north where the cruiser Hipper was making a second attempt to penetrate the Atlantic.
The Hipper left Germany on November 30, while in the North Sea, the Scheer escaped air patrols. He entered the North Atlantic without problems on December 7, where he began looking for convoys to attack them. His captain not having realized that at that time the convoys were still taking the route to the Far North, he found none. This failure had the effect of driving him south where, on the road to Sierra Leone, he came into contact with a convoy on the evening of December 24. He watches over him all night, hoping for victory the next day.
This convoy, in fact, was a troop transport heading for the Middle East. Convoys of this kind were generally the best protected. Approaching him on Christmas Day, the Hipper was disconcerted to find that the convoy was accompanied by an aircraft carrier and 3 cruisers. The English have no trouble scaring him away. Unfortunately, they lose track of him, due to poor visibility. During the cannonade, the Hipper had been slightly damaged and had decided to cut the attack short. Two days later, he took refuge in the port of Brest, on the French coast.
The Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau took over. It was their first operation since the Norwegian campaign, during which they had been quite seriously damaged. They had just spent 7 months in the repair yards. Their effort is ineffective. The Gneisenau is damaged by the storm while sailing up the coast of Norway and the two boats will turn back to return to Kiel.
This “second wave” was responsible for the loss of 17 English ships (97,000 tons), which brought the total losses of the year 1940 to the impressive figure of 1,059 ships for a tonnage of 3,991,641 tons. Sixty percent of the ships sunk were by U-boats, most of them on the vital North Atlantic route.
Let's leave the Atlantic for a moment and report us quickly on the last link of the circle drawn around the Axis powers. When Italy joined the conflict on the side of Germany, in the last fighting in Europe, its position in the Red Sea immediately caused some concern. Based in Massawa, Ethiopia, the Italians had a fleet of 9 destroyers, 8 submarines and 1 armed merchantman.
The Red Sea was a vital link for British forces operating in the Middle East. East. The preponderance in this area was essential to keep Germany and Italy away from the trade of the outside world and to route the reinforcements of men, arms and ammunition necessary for operations on all fronts.
In the end, the Italian threat never materialized. No sooner had Italy entered the conflict than 3 of its submarines were sunk. Another was captured intact; his destroyers took no action against the English convoys in the Red Sea and the spasmodic efforts of the Italian air force against the English ships were completely in vain. The Red Sea route remained firmly in British hands and the circle was never broken.
A certain balance had been established in the whole situation, at the end of 1940. Certainly the Allies had been defeated in Norway and France, but at sea they held their ground, even though their defenses were weakened in places. To counterbalance the enemy occupation of the Norwegian and French bases, with all that this entailed, and in particular the extension of the field of action of the submarines, England had occupied Iceland, where it equipped an air base and maritime which would prove to be very effective in overcoming conflicts against German submarines. Against the rapid increase in the fleet of these submarines, which were at one time to exceed the figure of 360, the certainty took shape that, during the year 1941, the convoys would be able to cross the Atlantic escorted from one end to the other. This fact was to make the U-boat mission even more difficult and perilous.
A shadow to this picture remained, however. It had already been noticed during the First World War that submarines hesitated to attack convoys when these were escorted at sea or in the air, although at the time there was no airborne weapon capable of sinking a submarine. In 1940, this hesitation remained the same.
Aerial escorts for maritime convoys demanded long-range, high-endurance aircraft — the very ones that were particularly sought after for bombing over Germany. The R.A.F., which provided the air escorts, was completely short of such aircraft. This failure resulted in heavy losses. The solution to this problem could be brought only in 1943. At that time, the navy had enough auxiliary aircraft carriers, whose planes could provide convoy protection. Later, America joined in and these carriers were able to fulfill other missions.
Towards the end of the year, some glimmers of hope appeared in a situation which, at remaining, was always gloomy because of the defeats suffered on the continent. The defense at sea, whose field of action was now more extensive, still held firm, as did the blockade of Germany and Italy. This blockade remained the fundamental weapon. If it could be maintained, it was he who would ultimately lead to victory. The great danger which England then had to face was no longer so much the invasion of its territory, the risks of which had disappeared — if indeed they ever existed — but the fear of losing the battle against the submarines. .
The entire future of the war depended on this uncertain battle waged on the vastness of the oceans. It had become a race against time between the construction program undertaken by the Germans and the establishment of an effective system of maritime, as well as air, escorts along the entire length of the Atlantic. As soon as this device was put in place, the defeat of the submarines was assured, but before arriving there, a long and painful road remained to be traveled.