Wednesday - May 18, 2005

Lest We Forget

he Atlantic, with its extensions such as the North Sea, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, is the most important ocean in the world. The only major populated land mass that the Atlantic does not touch is Australia. For centuries, the Atlantic has been the key trade highway of civilization. Exactly sixty-four years ago today, it became the scene of a tremendous battle.

In September 1939, this highway once again became the theater in which a major war would be won and lost. It had often been such a theater.  World War I and the Napoleonic Wars come immediately to mind.

“September 1939.  The Atlantic becomes the primal chasm, the wild void on whose conquest rests the fate of men...”

For Britain and her allies, victory in the Atlantic war meant keeping the Atlantic sea lanes open to their shipping.  From the outset, Britain was vulnerable.  She could not feed herself.  A vast quantity of her food had to be imported via the Atlantic sea lanes.  Over these sea lanes also came all of Britain’s oil, a vital strategic resource then, as now.  Apart from this, practically every GI who would fight in Europe was convoyed over the Atlantic sea lanes, not to mention fuel, food and supplies for all the Allied armies.

For the Germans, victory in the Atlantic meant denying its use to Britain and her allies.  Britain herself would be isolated, strangled, and knocked out of the war.  Denial of the sea lanes to the Allies meant a war to destroy, or at least immobilize, the Allied merchant marines.

Although magnetic mines, the Luftwaffe, and surface raiders took a certain toll, the burden of the German effort was borne by the U-boats, and this fact shaped the general character of the Atlantic war.

“Everywhere beneath the sea, everywhere the enemy.  Resolute ships struggle to survive...”

Because of its nature, the Atlantic war was possessed of little of the grandeur and drama of the Pacific war, with its monumental carrier battles, its far-flung amphibious operations, and the battles for remote islands, such as Guadalcanal, that became legend.  Only a few legends, such as the pursuit of the battleship Bismarck, came out of the plodding, dreary, monotonous, but vital battle over the key oceanic supply line of the war, the Battle of the
Atlantic.

The Bismarck sortie of 18-27 MAY 1941 represented the supreme effort of the German navy to exploit surface raiders in the Battle of the Atlantic. The most notorious prior effort had been that of the pocket-battleship Graf Spee during the early months of the war.

Graf Spee’s raiding cruise netted nine merchant ship victims in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and had put the Allies to a vast amount of trouble in an attempt to corner her.  And corner her they did, on 13 DEC 1939, in the Battle of the River Plate, with British cruisers Ajax, Achilles and Exeter.  Following the battle, the Graf Spee sought shelter and time to lick her wounds in the neutral port of Montevideo.  On 17 DEC 1939, facing a choice of internment in Uruguay, further battle, or suicide, her captain, Hans Langsdorff, chose suicide, for both the ship and himself.

The regular warships of the German Navy did not return to the Atlantic trade war until October 1940, when the Graf Spee’s sister ship, Admiral Scheer, broke out on a five-month raiding cruise, under the wily Captain Theodor Krancke.  With this effort is associated another of the few legends of the Atlantic war, the epic and fatal struggle of a single convoy escort (the auxiliary cruiser Jervis Bay) against the Scheer’s overwhelming firepower, in an attempt to protect convoy HX-84, or at least give its ships time to scatter and escape.  And in this, Jervis Bay was largely successful.  Thanks to her gallantry, Scheer’s bag was much smaller than it might have been.

Scheer cruised on, however, through the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans, to run up a total score of destroyed or captured merchant shipping roughly twice that of the Graf Spee.  And unlike Spee, she returned safely home.  Again her pursuers had been put to a vast amount of trouble in trying to corner her, wearing out ships’ hulls and machinery, wearing down the efficiency of their crews, diverting ships that were needed elsewhere, and burning tons upon tons of fuel oil that could only be replaced across the very ocean lifeline the Scheer, like U-boats and other raiders, was threatening. 

While Scheer was still out, heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper darted out on a pair of hit-and-run raids that were modestly successful, and then came Fleet Admiral Gunther Lütjens with battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.  These raiders inaugurated a two-month reign of terror on the North Atlantic convoy routes, accounting for 22 merchant ships before following Hipper into the French port of Brest.  There they were held for maintenance and repairs, in preparation for even bigger things to come.

These took the shape of Operation Rheinübung, the first Atlantic war cruise of the Bismarck. The original plan was for Bismarck to sortie in company with Hipper’s sister cruiser, the Prinz Eugen.  As they broke into the Atlantic, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were to sortie from Brest in support (Hipper had broken back to German waters), and the four ships were to join hands at sea and thus form a battle squadron that could be strong enough to sever Britain’s ocean lifelines.

However, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau could not be made ready in time. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen had to break out alone, in the teeth of a Royal Navy that was aroused and smarting from its humiliations of recent months.  And on 18 MAY 1941, under Admiral Lütjens, Bismarck sailed to her destiny.

In the course of breaking out into the Atlantic on 24 MAY 1941, Bismarck sent the pride of the Royal Navy, battle cruiser Hood, to the bottom.  But in turn, the Royal Navy mounted an unprecedented effort to corner and destroy Bismarck.  After being chased across the North Atlantic, Bismarck was crippled by planes of the Fleet Air Arm (flying from carrier Ark Royal), pounded into a wreck by British battleships and cruisers, and sunk, on 27 MAY 1941.  Hood was avenged, and the Atlantic lifelines were reprieved.

No German battleship ever again attempted to cut them.

“There are no tombstones in the sea, only the drifting remnants of disaster.  The ocean floor is littered with the skeletons of ships and sailors who died that freedom might live...”

Acknowledgements:
Quotations: abstracted from introductory narration, “Victory at Sea”, movie version.
Painting: “Breakout,” by artist Alan Randall.

Posted by Tannenberg     on 05/18/2005 at 01:53 AM   
Filed Under: • History • Military •  
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