Been sort of reading here and there HMS Ulysses by Alistair Maclean, and it’s made me really think of operations in Arctic during WWII.
Ex. most students of the war I’m sure are aware of the Arctic Convoys intermittently run from the UK to the Soviet Union, but I feel that this is a particularly overlooked theatre.
Due to German control of Denmark + the Danish Straits, and of the Baltic in general, convoys had to take the northern Arctic route to Murmansk and Archangel, as they had done during WWI.
Unlike the first WW, however, the Germans had acquired control of Norway and the Norwegian fiords that extend above the Arctic Circle.
These lie between the northwestern coast of Russia and the island of Great Britain, and thus the British convoys had to pass within close proximity of these fiords. Given the southward extension of sea ice during winter, the British were forced to move even more closely to this coast during those months.
The Germans were not slow in taking advantage of their position in Norway to establish bases in the fiords and to strike these convoys en route to the Soviet Union. The Battle of the Atlantic is reasonably well-known to students of this particular war, and you can only too easily imagine the terror and nightmares of being in a convoy hunted by U-Boats.
But it’s kind of * to note that night operations were extremely rare in the age of sail, the only two I know of were in Cape St. Vincent (1780) and Saumarez’s decision to renew the Battle of Algeciras in a night action (1801).
But by the time of WWII actions at night became entirely possible. The FAC’s in the Narrow Seas operated almost entirely at night to avoid attack from the air, and this was one of the reasons U-Boats preferred to attack at night too (?).
Another reason they preferred night attacks is b/c they could surface w/o being seen, which gave them much greater speed and maneouvrability than while underwater, and made them invisible to sonar.
The Battle of the Atlantic was a grim and ruthless contest on the seas between Europe and the Americas, and dealing with U-Boats were terrifying enough. Unfortunately for the PQ convoys, yet very interesting to me, U-Boats were about the least of their worries.
Being so close to Norway they were brought under attack by German aircraft whenever weather permitted this, thankfully not all the time, but their primary worry was the activity of the German surface fleet.
During WWI the German fleet was mostly inactive, it fought a couple of actions at Dogger Bank and Jutland, but was too cautious to challenge the Royal Navy. Interestingly, despite being much smaller than before, the German surface fleet was very active in WWII.
Most terrifying of all was the Bismarck’s sister ship, KMS Tirpitz. With eight 15-inch guns Tirpitz could sink any ship in the Royal Navy, including the battleships, and small fry like destroyers and frigates that would have had an advantage against a U-Boat would be as nothing to her.
The Bismarck is beloved of all naval enthusiasts and has always been overrated in my opinion. Many popular and standard accounts of WWII explain the drama of the Bismarck’s escape + her loss in the Denmark Strait, and act as if that was the end of the German surface fleet.
Far from it. Her neglected sister fought much longer and to much greater use in the Arctic convoys, and she became something of an obsession for Winston Churchill who devised all kinds of schemes and stratagems to strike her in her anchorages.
This finally succeeded when she was sunk during Operation Catechism, in November 1944. By then the war only had a few months to go, so the Germans got much use out of the Tirpitz, much more than out of Bismarck. Apart from melodramatically named operations like Wonderland, the actions near Norway are typically not given the names of battles or operations, which tends to obscure their importance.
This is similar with other convoys in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the actions often being known simply by the names of the convoys themselves.
But these were very much hard-fought and desperate battles, and they demanded a lot from the men and put great strain on them, not least b/c of the weather.
In essence nerves must have been strained, as an attack could come at any time from any direction. And this was jarring enough when the enemy was a U-Boat, when it was Tirpitz it must have been the stuff of horror.
Out there, somewhere in the fog and the ice, was a forty-thousand tonne battleship that would send any ship in the Royal Navy to Davy Jones if they had the misfortune of running into her.
Whereas a destroyer would have the leg up on a U-Boat, it would have no chance against Tirpitz. To her a destroyer was like a toy boat in a bathtub.
The KGV-class could contend with Tirpitz, but England had few of them to spare and while they could *match* Tirpitz, the latter was still very capable of winning and sinking a KGV.
Tirpitz must have become almost mythical, a monster of the deep, like a ghost pirate ship, haunting the men at every moment.
Now it’s clear that even with the contribution of airpower and powerful surface assets, the Germans were unable to entirely prevent convoy sailings (though lots of them were cancelled or delayed due to losses or danger), which proves the robustness of the convoy system.
It demonstrates that even the most vigorous raids can’t rly compensate for command of the sea.
You saw one of these you were saying your prayers.
