Attacks on convoys OB 288 and OB 290

On the night of 23–24 February 1941, in the North Atlantic south of Iceland, five German submarines caught convoy OB 288, which had been dispersed a few hours earlier, its ships already sailing independently for American ports. By morning they had sunk nine merchant ships and a Royal Navy auxiliary. That same night, several hundred miles further east, another U-boat sank three ships from convoy OB 289. Two days later, on 26 February, Günther Prien’s boat and long-range Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor bombers attacked convoy OB 290 and sank about ten more. In less than a week three outbound convoys from Liverpool lost more than twenty ships, and others were damaged. The Germans did not lose a single U-boat in the process.

War chronologies carry a general note under 24 February that the German submarine offensive in the Atlantic was “achieving ever greater success”. The figures bear this out: according to the tallies of uboat.net, in January 1941 U-boats sank 15 ships totalling some 99,000 GRT, and in February 44 ships of nearly 212,000 GRT. The increase, however, came not from a greater number of boats – there were fewer of them at the time than at any other point in the war – but from better weather, from the new cooperation with aircraft and from the weakness of the British escort at the western limit of its range. The attacks on convoys OB 288, OB 289 and OB 290 were the best example of this.

Winter in the Atlantic

In the autumn of 1940 the U-boats had achieved their greatest successes so far, shattering convoys HX 72 in September and SC 7 and HX 79 in October. In the winter their results fell sharply. North Atlantic gales made it hard to find convoys and to shoot accurately, and Karl Dönitz had only twenty-odd boats at the front, of which usually only a handful to a dozen or so were in the operational area at any one time. By his own reckoning, in February 1941 the U-boat arm had fewer front-line boats than at any other time in the war: 22. New boats, being built ever faster, were still training their crews in the Baltic. Italian submarines from the Betasom base at Bordeaux were also operating in the Atlantic, but their results were modest.

Dönitz had long complained that his boats, with their low conning towers and limited field of view, could not find convoys on their own in the vastness of the ocean. He needed air reconnaissance. On 6 January 1941, while Hermann Göring was away, the commander of the Kriegsmarine, Erich Raeder, obtained from Adolf Hitler the subordination to Dönitz of I Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 40 (I./KG 40), based at Bordeaux-Mérignac and flying Condors. These were four-engined aircraft converted from airliners, with a range that allowed them to fly from France around Ireland to Norway. They were structurally weak, and rarely could more than a few be sent out at once, but they searched for convoys far to the west of Ireland and themselves attacked ships sailing alone with bombs from very low altitude. On 6 February Hitler signed Directive No. 23, which made the destruction of Britain’s seaborne imports the most important task of the air and sea war against Britain.

The first joint success of submarines, aircraft and surface ships came at the beginning of February. On 8 February U-37 located convoy HG 53 from Gibraltar west of Portugal, sank two ships and homed in the Condors, which sank five more the next day; one more ship from the convoy was later sunk by the cruiser Admiral Hipper. On 12 February the same cruiser fell upon the unescorted convoy SLS 64 from Africa, sinking seven ships. The battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau under Admiral Günther Lütjens were also at large in the Atlantic. On 22 February, several hundred miles east of Newfoundland, they sank five ships from a recently dispersed convoy. The Royal Navy, which since the raid by the Admiral Scheer had had to assign battleships to convoys, was stretched to the limit.

The Liverpool convoys

Convoys designated OB (Outward Bound) left Liverpool and sailed north through the Irish Sea and the North Channel and then west. Most of the ships were in ballast or carrying coal to America, where they were to load grain, fuel, steel and arms. The escort accompanied them only through the most dangerous waters of the Western Approaches, roughly as far as the 20th meridian. There the warships turned back to take over an inbound convoy, and the ships of the outbound convoy dispersed and continued independently. In the winter of 1940–1941, after the autumn attacks, the convoys were routed far to the north, between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, well away from the French U-boat bases. At the end of February four such convoys, OB 287 to OB 290, left Liverpool at two-day intervals.

The first of them was spotted on 19 February by a Condor flying from France to Norway. Dönitz directed all the boats in the area south of Iceland onto its route, but the airmen’s reports were inaccurate and the U-boats did not find the convoy. The aircraft did, however, damage several ships, and one of them, the abandoned tanker Scottish Standard, was finished off on 22 February by Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock’s U-96.

OB 288: the night of 23–24 February

Convoy OB 288 left Liverpool on 18 February. After being joined by ships from Loch Ewe it numbered 46 vessels – British, Greek, Norwegian, Dutch and Danish – led by the convoy commodore, Rear Admiral (retired) R. A. A. Plowden, in the Sirikishna. Three ships turned back with defects. The convoy was escorted by three destroyers, a corvette and an armed trawler, and with it sailed HMS Manistee, a merchant ship taken over by the Admiralty as an ocean boarding vessel.

On the morning of 22 February, north-west of the Hebrides, the convoy was attacked by a Condor. Two ships, the Kingston Hill and the Estonian Keila, were damaged and escorted into port; the master of the Kingston Hill was killed. The aircraft’s crew sent a sighting report, and U-73 briefly made contact with the convoy. Although Western Approaches Command knew that the convoy was being shadowed, on the morning of 23 February the escort left it as planned. From then on the ships sailed unprotected, and the commodore, for reasons that have never been established, kept them in formation all day. At about 9 p.m. on 23 February he ordered the convoy to disperse. The ships scattered on courses ranging from north-west to south, straight into the patrol line that Dönitz had placed in their path.

Five boats, U-69, U-73, U-95, U-96 and U-107, attacked on the surface during the night of 23–24 February under a bright aurora borealis. By morning nine ships had gone down: the Anglo Peruvian, Marslew, Svein Jarl, Cape Nelson, Temple Moat, Linaria, Sirikishna, Waynegate and Huntingdon, as well as HMS Manistee, which U-107 hit in the evening and finished off in the morning. There were no survivors from the Sirikishna, which U-96 torpedoed twice, so Commodore Plowden was also lost. The Temple Moat and the Linaria also went down with all hands. Accounts differ in attributing some of the sinkings to particular boats: according to the German historian Jürgen Rohwer, the Huntingdon was probably sunk by the Italian submarine Michele Bianchi, while some authors credit the Marslew and the Svein Jarl to U-69 and others to U-95. According to the figures of the British researcher Roy Martin, 246 seamen were killed in all. It could have been worse: German reports mention many torpedoes that failed to explode, and the master of the motor ship La Pampa charged a surfaced submarine to ram it and forced it to dive, which probably saved several ships sailing nearby.

OB 289: the loss of the Jonathan Holt

Convoy OB 289, of 25 ships, left Liverpool on 21 February. On 23 February, south-west of the Faroes, it was located by Kapitänleutnant Erich Topp’s U-552, which called up other boats. The blow was struck by Kapitänleutnant Udo Heilmann’s U-97, on passage from Kiel to France on its first war patrol. Shortly after midnight on 24 February, in three attacks, it sank the freighter Mansepool, the tanker British Gunner and the Jonathan Holt, and damaged the Norwegian tanker G. C. Brøvig.

Most of the crews of the Mansepool and the British Gunner were saved, but the sinking of the Jonathan Holt, bound for West Africa with general cargo and passengers, claimed 51 lives; only six people were rescued. Among the dead were the British travel writer Robert Byron, author of The Road to Oxiana, the celebrated account of his journey through Persia and Afghanistan, and the French archaeologist Joseph Hackin, a scholar of ancient Afghanistan and curator of the Musée Guimet in Paris, together with his wife Marie. Both had joined the Free French in 1940 and were travelling east as envoys of Charles de Gaulle.

OB 290: Prien and the Condors

Convoy OB 290 left Liverpool on 23 February. According to the account of its commodore, Rear Admiral R. A. Hornell, who sailed in the Norwegian motor ship Samuel Bakke, it numbered 41 ships. On 25 February the Admiralty warned that the convoy was being shadowed. On the night of 25–26 February, west of Ireland, it was attacked by Prien’s U-47, which had sailed from Lorient on 20 February on another patrol. According to the commodore, Prien entered the formation from astern, exploiting the fact that the escorts’ star shell lit up the wings of the convoy while its centre remained in darkness. He sank the Norwegian Borgland, the Belgian Kasongo and the Swedish Rydboholm and damaged the tanker Diala. The escort searched for the boat on the wings and did not find it. Otto Kretschmer, who had sailed from Lorient in U-99 on 22 February, tried to join the attack, but the destroyers drove both boats off.

Prien, however, kept transmitting reports, and on 26 February Condors from Bordeaux appeared over the convoy. The first aircraft attacked in the morning from a height of a few dozen metres and hit three ships. In the evening, at about 6.40 p.m., a group of several aircraft arrived – Hornell saw four, another ship reported six – and attacked simultaneously from several directions with bombs and machine-gun fire. The ships’ anti-aircraft fire could do little. After this attack the commodore dispersed the convoy. That day the airmen sank or destroyed seven to nine ships, depending on how they are counted, among them the Dutch Amstelland and Beursplein, the British Llanwern and Mahanada and the Norwegian Solferino, and damaged several more. According to figures cited in the literature their combined tonnage came to nearly 50,000 GRT. It was the Condors’ greatest single success of the entire war. On 27 February the Italian Michele Bianchi sank one more ship from the scattered convoy, the Baltistan, and on 28 February Prien sank the Holmelea, which Kretschmer had failed to hit.

According to figures cited in the literature, in February 1941 alone the Condors sank 21 ships with a combined tonnage of more than 84,000 GRT. Their successes were all the more painful because the aircraft attacked far beyond the range of British fighters, and the merchant ships had only single light guns and machine guns. Rear Admiral Hornell wrote in his report that if German aircraft could attack convoys ever further from their bases, the British must send their own aircraft out over the ocean in numbers sufficient to intercept them before they reached the ships.

The British response

The attacks at the end of February exposed weaknesses that the Royal Navy knew of but had not yet had time to remedy. Outbound convoys were dispersed too early, and the escort reached no further than the 20th meridian; the Germans had therefore moved their patrol lines further west, just beyond the limit of its range. The escort vessels did not form well-drilled teams, radar was still lacking, and the aircraft of RAF Coastal Command had too short a range. Ships’ masters complained that the U-boats always attacked once the escort had gone.

Changes were already under way. On 7 February Western Approaches Command moved from Plymouth to Liverpool, to the bunker at Derby House, where it was housed together with the staff of No. 15 Group, Coastal Command, responsible for air operations over the area. On 17 February Admiral Percy Noble took over command. He expanded the system of permanent escort groups that trained together under a single commander and put the emphasis on training. Escorts were soon to reach further west from bases in Iceland, and in time convoys were to be protected along their whole route. Against the Condors, ships fitted with a catapult and a single-use Hurricane fighter were being prepared, along with more anti-aircraft armament for merchant ships.

The Germans were also reorganising, though not in the way Dönitz wanted. Göring had not reconciled himself to handing over his aircraft to the navy, and on 28 February he obtained Hitler’s agreement to set up a Luftwaffe command for air operations over the Atlantic (Fliegerführer Atlantik) within Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3. Its commander was Martin Harlinghausen, a specialist in anti-shipping operations. From then on the air arm and the U-boat arm cooperated through two separate staffs, and there were never as many aircraft over the ocean as Dönitz wanted.

Place in the war

The last week of February 1941 was the peak of the first phase of the Battle of the Atlantic, which U-boat crews called the “happy time”. A few boats and a handful of aircraft working together managed in a matter of days to shatter three convoys without losing a single U-boat. No German submarine was lost in the Atlantic in February, although the Italians lost the submarine Marcello in those days. Britain, cut off from its European suppliers and dependent on imports of food, fuel and raw materials, could not bear such losses for long, and the American aid that Congress was then debating required that ships from America actually reach British ports.

A few weeks later the tables were turned. On 6 March Winston Churchill issued his directive on the “Battle of the Atlantic”, giving the campaign its name and the highest priority. On the night of 7–8 March, during an attack on convoy OB 293, U-47 vanished without trace with Prien and all her crew, and on the night of 16–17 March, at convoy HX 112, Joachim Schepke was killed when U-100 was rammed, while Kretschmer, the most successful U-boat commander, was taken prisoner after U-99 was sunk. Within ten days Dönitz had lost his three most famous commanders, and he moved his boats further west, beyond the range of the British escorts. The Battle of the Atlantic went on until the end of the war in Europe, and the number of U-boats and of ships sunk was still to rise many times over. But February 1941 had shown both sides what the combination of air reconnaissance and wolf-pack attacks could do, and it was on this combination that the British subsequently concentrated their efforts.