The first HX convoy

On 16 September 1939 convoy HX 1 sailed from the port of Halifax, the capital of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. It consisted, according to various lists, of between 15 and 18 British and French merchant ships carrying grain, flour, tobacco, cotton, crude oil, lead, aircraft equipment, explosives and general cargo to Britain and France. They were led out of harbour by two destroyers of the Royal Canadian Navy, HMCS St. Laurent and HMCS Saguenay, and covered on the open ocean by the British heavy cruisers HMS Berwick and HMS York. It was the first of a long series of convoys from North America to Britain around which the Battle of the Atlantic was fought.

HX 1 is often described as the first eastbound transatlantic convoy, and it is added that a further 357 HX convoys followed it. The first claim needs qualifying: a day earlier, on 15 September, the fast convoy KJF 1 had left Kingston, Jamaica, for Britain, and on 14 September convoy SL 1 had sailed from Freetown in West Africa. HX 1 was the first convoy from Canada. The number of convoys depends on how they are counted, as explained below.

Halifax and the convoys

Britain imported by sea half its food, almost all its oil and most of the raw materials for its industry, and the most important supply route ran across the North Atlantic from Canada and the United States. Halifax, with its deep and easily defended Bedford Basin, in which several dozen ships could assemble, was the natural gathering point. It had already played this role in 1917–1918, when, after convoys were introduced during the First World War, convoys bearing the same letters HX had sailed from here. After barely a quarter of a century the port once again became the gateway through which cargoes and soldiers passed on their way to Europe.

The British Admiralty set up the convoy system in the first week of the war. After the torpedoing of the Athenia, in which 54 Canadians died, no one doubted that German submarines would attack shipping in the Atlantic. German surface warships were a threat too. The Admiralty reckoned with the possibility that German “pocket battleships” had put to sea before the outbreak of war, and one of them, the Deutschland, was indeed waiting in the North Atlantic for the order to attack shipping. Convoys from Halifax were therefore assigned cruisers, and later battleships and armed merchant cruisers as well.

The voyage of HX 1

Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September, six days before the convoy sailed, but its navy had been on a war footing since 1 September and was acting in concert with the Admiralty. The Royal Canadian Navy was very small at the time: it had six modern destroyers, a few minesweepers and a few thousand men, reserves included. Two of the destroyers, which had been stationed on the Pacific coast, were transferred to Halifax through the Panama Canal at the turn of August and September. The Canadians were to escort the convoys in coastal waters, that is, during the first stage of the voyage, the one most exposed to ambush.

According to the tables compiled by the British convoy historian Arnold Hague, the Canadian destroyers stayed with the convoy until 17 September, and the cruisers Berwick and York until 18 September. After that the ships crossed the ocean on their own until British destroyers took them over in the approaches to the British Isles. This arrangement stemmed from the shortage of escort vessels and from the belief that submarines would not venture far west of Ireland. The convoy sailed at the speed of its slowest ship and blacked out at night. On 30 September HX 1 reached Liverpool without loss. Some of the ships went on to London, Glasgow, Hull and French ports.

Further convoys soon followed HX 1. A separate HXF series was created for faster ships. The first of these, HXF 1, left Halifax a few days after HX 1 (sources give 17 or 19 September) escorted by the destroyer HMCS Fraser, and on 23 September HX 2 sailed under the escort of HMCS Skeena. From then on HX convoys sailed regularly, at first every few days, and they soon grew to several dozen ships each. In time BHX convoys began to sail from Bermuda, made up of ships from the Caribbean, which joined the HX convoys at sea.

How many HX convoys were there?

The HX convoys were numbered consecutively. The last, HX 358, sailed on 23 May 1945, two weeks after Germany’s surrender, and reached Liverpool on 6 June. The frequently quoted figure of 357 convoys that sailed after HX 1 is thus derived from the numbering. The actual number of convoys was larger, however, because during the war some convoys were split into sections and given additional letters, and in the first year of the war there was a separate series of fast HXF convoys. The most commonly cited tally gives 377 convoys, in which some 17,700 ships sailed.

Losses were small in relation to this figure. U-boats and other German warships attacked 38 HX convoys, about a tenth of the total. A total of 110 ships were sunk in convoy, and about 206 when stragglers, ships detached from their convoys and losses to marine causes such as collisions and storms are included – less than one per cent. The largest convoy of the whole war was HX 300 in the summer of 1944, numbering 166 ships, which reached Liverpool without loss.

Significance

The HX convoys formed the longest unbroken series of convoys of the Second World War and Britain’s main supply artery. The heaviest battles of the Atlantic were fought along their route. In October 1940 a U-boat wolf pack shattered convoy HX 79, sinking 12 ships. On 5 November 1940 convoy HX 84 was attacked by the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer; the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay sacrificed herself to give the merchant ships time to escape. In March 1943, at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, several dozen submarines attacked convoys HX 229 and SC 122. From 1940 the HX convoys were joined by the slower SC convoys from Sydney on Cape Breton Island, and in the autumn of 1942 the departure port of the HX convoys was moved to New York, since by then most of the cargo was passing through the United States.

HX 1 also marked the beginning of Canada’s great role in the war at sea. The small navy that in September 1939 could send only two destroyers to escort a convoy grew into one of the largest fleets in the world, with several hundred warships and more than 90,000 men. In 1941–1943 Canadian corvettes, frigates and destroyers took over a large share of convoy escort duty in the North Atlantic. Throughout the war Halifax remained the most important convoy port in North America, and thousands of ships for which Britain was waiting assembled in the Bedford Basin.