Hunting groups against the raiders

On 5 October 1939 the British Admiralty, after consulting the French Ministry of Marine, ordered the formation of eight hunting groups to track down and destroy the German surface warships preying on Allied shipping. Designated by the letters F to N, the forces were deployed from Halifax and the West Indies to the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon. They included four aircraft carriers, a battlecruiser, two fast French battleships and more than a dozen cruisers – a large part of the most valuable ships of both fleets. The decision was taken by the Admiralty under the First Lord, Winston Churchill, while operational responsibility lay with the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Dudley Pound.

A popular account has it that Pound was reacting to news of “raiders” attacking shipping and, together with the French, formed eight forces to sweep the Atlantic. The number and the date are right: this is how the events are described in Stephen Roskill’s British official history of the war at sea, and after him in Jürgen Rohwer’s German chronology. One point, however, needs correcting. On 5 October the British knew for certain of only one ship, which had sunk the steamer Clement off the coast of Brazil, and they believed it to be the Admiral Scheer. The second raider, the Deutschland, was not detected in the North Atlantic until the second half of October. The hunting groups were thus not a response to two detected ships, but to the mere threat that the German “pocket battleships” might appear on any of the oceans.

A raider in the South Atlantic

Both German pocket battleships, the Admiral Graf Spee and the Deutschland, had put to sea before the war, in the second half of August 1939, and were waiting in remote positions for the order to begin the war on commerce. Adolf Hitler authorised it only on 26 September, once it had become clear that Britain and France would not make peace after Poland’s defeat. Four days later the Graf Spee sank her first ship, the British freighter Clement, off the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Her crew reached land on 1 October and described the attacker. Captain Hans Langsdorff had deliberately used the call sign of a sister ship, so the Admiralty concluded that the Admiral Scheer was on the loose in the South Atlantic.

German ships of this type were a dangerous opponent. Six 280 mm guns gave them the edge over any cruiser, and their diesel engines gave them an enormous range. They were, however, slower than the cruisers, and outgunned by the newer battleships and battlecruisers. The British had only three ships that were both faster and more powerful than a pocket battleship: the battlecruisers Hood, Renown and Repulse. The French had two such ships, the new battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg, built precisely in response to the German Deutschland class. The Admiralty’s pre-war plans assumed that cruisers would patrol the focal points of shipping, merchant ships would avoid threatened areas, and once a raider was detected, forces capable of catching and destroying it would immediately be formed. The report from the Clement set this machinery in motion.

Eight forces

According to Roskill’s list, the hunting groups were as follows:

• Force F (North America and the West Indies): the heavy cruisers Berwick and York, taken from the Halifax station;
• Force G (south-east coast of South America): the heavy cruisers Exeter and Cumberland, later also the light cruisers Ajax and Achilles, under Commodore Henry Harwood;
• Force H (the Cape of Good Hope): the heavy cruisers Sussex and Shropshire, brought from the Mediterranean;
• Force I (Ceylon): the aircraft carrier Eagle and the heavy cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire, taken from the China station;
• Force K (the Pernambuco area): the modern aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the battlecruiser Renown, taken from the Home Fleet;
• Force L (Brest): the French battleship Dunkerque, the aircraft carrier Béarn and three light cruisers, Georges Leygues, Gloire and Montcalm;
• Force M (Dakar): the French heavy cruisers Dupleix and Foch;
• Force N (the West Indies): the French battleship Strasbourg and the British aircraft carrier Hermes, and according to Rohwer also the British light cruiser Neptune.

The number of ships varies slightly between studies, because the composition of the forces changed over the following weeks. Some authors also count, together with the hunting groups, ships sent at the same time on other tasks. The Admiralty allowed the commander of the South Atlantic station to keep four destroyers that had been due to return home. To Halifax it sent the battleships Resolution and Revenge and the cruisers Enterprise and Emerald to escort convoys bound for Britain, and they were later followed by the Repulse, the aircraft carrier Furious and the battleship Warspite. The battleship Malaya and the aircraft carrier Glorious passed through the Suez Canal into the Indian Ocean. Some sources count these last two ships as a ninth group, designated J, which is why the figure of nine forces also appears in the literature.

The French contribution was considerable. The French Navy, the Marine nationale of Admiral François Darlan, provided three of the eight forces, including both new Dunkerque-class battleships. The Brest force, which the French called the Force de Raid, was their most powerful operational formation. The groups operating in the South Atlantic – Forces G, H and K – were placed under the commander of the South Atlantic station, Admiral George d’Oyly Lyon, whose headquarters were at Freetown in the British colony of Sierra Leone. They bore the main burden of the search.

The same day

Paradoxically, on 5 October both German ships attacked further merchantmen, and the Admiralty did not learn of it at once. The Deutschland, which since the end of September had been cruising the route between Bermuda and the Azores, sank the British freighter Stonegate some 600 nautical miles east of Bermuda. Her master managed to send a distress signal, but it was unclear who had attacked her. The Graf Spee, which after sinking the Clement had moved east to the route from the Cape of Good Hope, stopped the British steamer Newton Beech that same day. Her radio report was picked up by another merchant ship and passed on to the cruiser Cumberland. The cruiser was keeping radio silence and, believing that the message had also reached Freetown, did not pass it on. Freetown, however, had not received it, and for several weeks Admiral Lyon knew nothing of the attack. Roskill believed that had the report been relayed at once, the raider and her supply ship could have been caught within a few days.

By 10 October the Graf Spee had sunk or captured two more ships, the Ashlea and the Huntsman. On 9 October aircraft from the Ark Royal, then on her way to Freetown, spotted west of the Cape Verde Islands a stopped ship claiming to be the American Delmar. Vice-Admiral Lionel Wells, who had no destroyers with him, decided against an inspection. It later turned out that the Delmar had been in New Orleans that day, and that the stopped ship had probably been the Altmark, the Graf Spee’s supply ship. On 12 October the Ark Royal and the Renown became the first of the hunting groups to reach their station at Freetown.

The hunt across the ocean

Over the following weeks the hunting groups swept vast areas, mostly to no avail. The ocean was empty, reconnaissance aircraft had little range, and the Admiralty learned of a raider’s position only when one of its victims managed to send a report. The Germans quickly understood this and threatened to sink at once any ship that tried to use its radio. At times, too, distress signals proved false, or it was impossible to establish whether they had been sent by a warship or by an armed merchantman. The warships lost time refuelling, because off the coasts of the neutral South American states they could take on fuel in the same port only once every three months, and the nearest British base was a thousand miles away.

The hunt did, however, have side effects. The hunting groups and patrols caught German merchant ships trying to slip through the blockade and get home. On 16 October the French cruiser Duguay-Trouin intercepted the freighter Halle west of Dakar, and she was scuttled by her own crew. On 5 November the Ark Royal’s force stopped the steamer Uhenfels. In November other German ships suffered a similar fate in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

Force F never operated as a hunting group at all. When it was confirmed in the second half of October that the Deutschland was at work in the North Atlantic, its cruisers were assigned to cover convoys from Halifax. On 21 October the crew of the Norwegian steamer Lorentz W. Hansen, sunk by the Deutschland on 14 October east of Newfoundland, reached the Orkneys, and the next day the American steamer City of Flint, captured by the German ship, put into Murmansk. Meanwhile the French force from Brest was covering the large convoys from the West Indies to Europe.

Significance

The hunting groups of October 1939 showed where a raider’s strength lay. Two German ships, which by the end of the year had sunk or captured a dozen or so merchantmen between them, tied down across thousands of miles of ocean more than twenty of the most valuable British and French warships, including most of the aircraft carriers Britain had left after the sinking of the Courageous. This was exactly what Admiral Erich Raeder expected of his pocket battleships. At the same time, the dispersal of forces was a feature of Pound’s naval strategy: the Admiralty preferred to weaken the Home Fleet rather than allow raiders to cut with impunity the shipping lanes on which Britain’s survival in the Battle of the Atlantic depended.

After two months the hunt ended in success. The Deutschland returned to Germany in mid-November without having met any of the groups. The Graf Spee moved into the Indian Ocean, then returned to the Atlantic, and on 13 December 1939, off the mouth of the River Plate, she ran into Commodore Harwood’s Force G, then made up of the Exeter, Ajax and Achilles. At the Battle of the River Plate the three weaker cruisers forced her to take refuge in Montevideo, and British disinformation about the approach of the Renown and the Ark Royal, in reality still far away, contributed to Langsdorff’s decision to scuttle his ship on 17 December. The Admiralty later used the hunting-group mechanism many times, most famously in May 1941 in the pursuit of the battleship Bismarck. The letter designations lived on in Royal Navy history: in 1940 Force H became the name of the celebrated squadron at Gibraltar, and Force K that of a force of ships based on Malta.