Convoys PQ 18 and ON 127

On 14 September 1942 two convoy battles, fought thousands of kilometres apart, reached their climax. In the Barents Sea German torpedo bombers attacked convoy PQ 18, carrying supplies to Archangel, for the second time in two days. In the middle of the North Atlantic, in the zone beyond the reach of aircraft, the wolf pack Vorwärts was ending a four-day battle with convoy ON 127, sailing from Liverpool to America – before dawn that day the Canadian destroyer Ottawa went down. The vague formula “further convoy losses in the Atlantic”, found under this date in war chronologies, thus conceals two different faces of the Battle of the Atlantic in the autumn of 1942: the Arctic route to the USSR, where the main enemy was the air force, and the transatlantic route, where Karl Dönitz was throwing ever more submarines against the convoys.

After the PQ 17 disaster

After the scattering and destruction of convoy PQ 17 at the beginning of July, the British suspended convoys to the USSR for two months. Part of the Home Fleet went to the Mediterranean for Operation Pedestal, while Stalin demanded the resumption of deliveries at a time when the Germans were advancing on Stalingrad and the Caucasus. The commander of the Home Fleet, Admiral John Tovey, drew lessons from the July disaster. He concluded that the battleships of the distant cover gave a convoy no protection east of Bear Island, and decided that this time the convoy would have with it an escort strong enough to beat off a sortie by German surface ships on its own. Tovey directed the operation from Scapa Flow, which was linked to the Admiralty by telephone cable.

The operation was codenamed EV. Convoy PQ 18 comprised 40 merchant ships, including the catapult ship Empire Morn with a Hurricane fighter (a CAM ship) and the rescue ship Copeland. The close escort consisted of destroyers, corvettes, minesweepers, trawlers, two anti-aircraft ships and two submarines. To these was added the Fighting Destroyer Escort: Rear Admiral Robert Burnett’s anti-aircraft cruiser Scylla and sixteen fleet destroyers. For the first time an escort carrier sailed with an Arctic convoy – the new HMS Avenger, converted in the United States from a merchant ship, with twelve Sea Hurricane (PL) fighters and three Swordfish aircraft. The distant cover, with the battleships Anson and Duke of York, was led by Vice Admiral Bruce Fraser. British and Australian Hampden torpedo bombers, Catalina flying boats and reconnaissance Spitfires were flown to airfields near Murmansk to keep watch on the German ships in the Norwegian fjords.

The Germans had prepared too. The Luftwaffe used the break in the convoys to assemble in northern Norway some ninety He 111 and Ju 88 torpedo bombers from the bomber wings KG 26 and KG 30, together with dive bombers and reconnaissance aircraft. Twelve submarines of the Eispalast group lay in wait on the convoy’s route, and the heavy cruisers Admiral Scheer and Admiral Hipper, with the light cruiser Köln, moved to the Altafjord. Both sides were reading some of the other’s signals: the British thanks to the work of Bletchley Park on Luftwaffe and naval ciphers, the Germans thanks to the B-Dienst.

PQ 18: the “Golden Comb”

The convoy left Loch Ewe in Scotland on 2 September; off Iceland it was joined by further ships and escorts, and it headed north, far beyond Bear Island – the summer melting of the ice made it possible to give Norway a wide berth. German reconnaissance aircraft spotted it on 8 September. On 12 September the destroyer Faulknor sank U-88 ahead of the convoy. On the morning of 13 September U-boats torpedoed the Soviet freighter Stalingrad and the American Oliver Ellsworth.

The main blow fell on the afternoon of 13 September. First Ju 88s dive-bombed through gaps in the clouds. At about 3.40 p.m. more than forty He 111 and Ju 88 torpedo bombers arrived and – in a formation known in English-language literature as the “Golden Comb” – came in on a broad front just above the water and dropped their torpedoes at close range. The Sea Hurricanes were on Avenger’s deck at that moment, and two columns of the convoy failed to make their emergency turn in time. In less than a quarter of an hour eight ships went down; Empire Stevenson vanished in an explosion with her entire crew. The British shot down or damaged many aircraft, but the price was enormous. Avenger’s commanding officer, Commander Anthony Colthurst, decided from then on to keep some of his fighters permanently in the air to break up the formations of incoming torpedo bombers.

14 September

Before dawn on 14 September U-457 torpedoed the tanker Atheltemplar, whose burning wreck had to be scuttled. A few hours later the escort, guided by a Swordfish, destroyed U-589 with depth charges. At noon another wave of torpedo bombers arrived. This time Avenger moved out ahead of the convoy, while Scylla and the anti-aircraft ships went out to meet the attackers. The German airmen, who had been ordered above all to sink the carrier, dispersed their attack; the manoeuvring Avenger dodged every torpedo. Eleven Ju 88s were shot down without hitting a single ship. In the afternoon, in a further attack by He 111s and Ju 88s, a torpedo dropped from a few hundred metres struck the American Mary Luckenbach, which vanished in a huge explosion. According to Luftwaffe returns, the Germans lost at least 23 aircraft on 14 September; the British lost three Sea Hurricanes – all shot down by the convoy’s own anti-aircraft fire, and the pilots were rescued.

On 16 September, as the destroyer Impulsive sank U-457, the ships of the Fighting Destroyer Escort and Avenger transferred to the homeward-bound convoy QP 14. PQ 18 sailed on with its close escort and Soviet warships. On 18 September off Cape Kanin torpedo bombers attacked for the last time and sank the freighter Kentucky. The pilot of the Hurricane catapulted from Empire Morn shot down a Heinkel and then – unable to land back on the ship – flew on to an airfield near Archangel. After a storm at the mouth of the Dvina, during which several ships ran aground, the convoy entered Archangel on 21 September.

The balance: of the 40 merchant ships, 13 were sunk – ten by aerial torpedoes and bombs, three by U-boat torpedoes – and the rest reached their destination. The Germans lost three submarines; Stephen Roskill’s British official history, which also counts losses around convoy QP 14, gives four submarines and 44 aircraft, 38 of them torpedo bombers. The homeward-bound QP 14 lost a further three ships, the destroyer Somali and the minesweeper Leda.

ON 127: the air gap

Convoy ON 127 – 32 ships sailing from the British Isles to North America – left Liverpool on 4 September. It was escorted by the Canadian escort group C4 of the Mid-Ocean Escort Force: the destroyers HMCS St. Croix and Ottawa and four Flower-class corvettes. It was a typical Royal Canadian Navy escort of the period: inexperienced, without high-frequency direction-finding sets, and with metric radars that were mostly out of action during the critical days. Only the British corvette Celandine had a modern centimetric radar.

Waiting for the convoy west of Ireland, just beyond the range of land-based aircraft, was the wolf pack Vorwärts – twelve boats. U-584 sighted the convoy on 9 September, and on 10 September U-96, in a single submerged daylight attack, torpedoed three ships, including the Belgian Elisabeth van België and the Norwegian tanker Svene. On the nights of 10–11 and 11–12 September further co-ordinated attacks followed: the British tanker Empire Oil, the Norwegian Hindanger, the whale factory ship Hektoria and the freighter Empire Moonbeam were sunk, and several tankers were damaged, though they managed to keep station. The escort, busy rescuing survivors, could not hunt the attackers at the same time; it managed only to damage two submarines, which had to return to France. ON 127 was the only North Atlantic convoy of 1942–1943 against which every boat of the wolf pack sent to attack it fired torpedoes.

On 13 September the convoy came within range of Canadian flying boats from Newfoundland, and U-594 finished off the straggler Stone Street. In the evening reinforcements arrived from the local escort. In the darkness before dawn on 14 September U-91 torpedoed the destroyer HMCS Ottawa, which sank; according to the records, 114 of her crew were killed. In all the convoy lost seven merchant ships and a destroyer; the rest reached New York on 20 September. The Germans lost no boats.

Place in the war

Both battles showed where the Allies’ weak points lay in September 1942 and how they could be remedied. PQ 18 proved that even a small escort carrier and a strong escort could take a convoy through an area dominated by the Luftwaffe. The British official historian judged the operation a success, others – such as Richard Woodman – a Pyrrhic victory; the German naval staff assessed the result as “dearly bought and unsatisfactory”. The Luftwaffe lost experienced torpedo aircrew, and in November it moved its torpedo bombers from Norway to the Mediterranean to oppose the landings in North Africa. The already announced PQ 19 never sailed, because the escorts were needed for Operation Torch; the Arctic convoys resumed in December 1942 under the new designations JW and RA, covered by the polar night.

ON 127, by contrast, foreshadowed the autumn and winter of 1942–1943, the hardest period of the struggle in the North Atlantic. The poorly equipped Canadian escort groups, which at the time bore a large share of the protection of transatlantic convoys, suffered mounting losses, and at the turn of 1942 and 1943 the British secured their temporary withdrawal to quieter routes for re-equipment and training. The withdrawal of the U-boats from the US coast in July had shifted the weight of the battle precisely here. The decision came only with the closing of the air gap by very-long-range B-24 Liberator aircraft, escort carriers such as Avenger, centimetric radar, direction-finding and the recovery of access to the U-boat ciphers – in May 1943. In those same days, on 12 September, the Laconia was sunk in the South Atlantic, and the order Dönitz issued in its wake on 17 September took away from the survivors of subsequently sunk ships any hope of help from the attacker.