“Convoy HG-76 marked a real turning point. It showed the Allies how they could successfully take the fight to Hitler’s U-boats and defeat them.”
By Angus Konstam
IT WAS 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Sunday, Dec. 14, 1941. The Blue Peter flag fluttering at the masthead of the SS Spero was hauled down as she lay at anchor in Gibraltar Bay. It was the signal for Convoy HG-76 to proceed to sea.
The Spero was the flagship of Convoy Commodore Raymond Fitzmaurice, a former Royal Navy vice-admiral who’d been brought out of retirement to help shepherd Britain’s vital wartime convoys. One of them, Convoy HG-76, was about to begin the 2,000-mile voyage from Gibraltar to Liverpool.
Her 32 merchant ships carried an abundance of goods that wartime Britain desperately needed; everything from iron ore and ammunition to Moroccan tomatoes and Spanish onions. She was just one of hundreds of wartime convoys who made similar voyages through the U-boat infested Atlantic, to help keep Britain in the war. This time though, things were a little different.
Convoy HG-76 had been singled out for special attention by Vizeadmiral Karl Dönitz, commander of Hitler’s U-boat fleet. On the Führer’s orders, Dönitz had diverted U-boats from the transatlantic convoy routes to concentrate on the Gibraltar convoys. While the admiral had his doubts about this gambit, Hitler was adamant, as he wanted to do whatever he could to help his struggling Italian ally. Thanks to British Enigma intercepts, the Allies knew of Berlin’s interest in inflicting maximum damage on the convoy. So, HG-76 was especially well-defended.
Preparations
The convoy also held two distinct advantages. The first of these was the commander of the convoy’s escort. Commander Frederic “Johnnie” Walker RN was a specialist in anti-submarine warfare, but one whose radical ideas on tactics had been ignored by the Admiralty. Now, having been given responsibility for HG-76’s protection, Walker finally had the chance to show just what he could do.
During the decade before the war, Walker had developed his own ideas about how to fight U-boats and how convoys should be defended. These differed from the official tactics laid down by the Admiralty. Despite this, in mid-1941, Walker was given command of the 34th Escort Group, an assortment of small anti-submarine escorts. Now, he could finally put his ideas into practice.
For Walker, passive defence of a convoy wasn’t enough. He didn’t want to just drive enemy U-boats off; he wanted to destroy them. Accordingly, he developed aggressive tactics involving teamwork. Walker believed escorts should work together to keep a U-boat in contact with sonar (or Asdic to the British). Then surface vessels could converge to attack the quarry. Convoy HG-76 was Walker’s opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his tactics.
HG-76’s second trump card was HMS Audacity, the Royal Navy’s prototype of a new kind of warship: the escort carrier.
It was well established that aircraft were one of the best ways to detect surfaced U-boats. They could also effectively drive off enemy planes that would shadow convoys. However, once a convoy passed out of range of land-based air cover, into what was known as the air gap, its vulnerability to U-boats greatly increased. Planes operating from the new escort carriers could bridge that gap.
Oddly enough, Audacity began its life as the German cargo liner SS Hannover. Captured in early 1940, the vessel was converted into what the British called an auxiliary aircraft carrier. The smallest and most basic type of aircraft carrier afloat, they had no hangers and no island, and could carry just six fighters on her exposed flight deck.
In June 1941, the ship was commissioned as HMS Empire Audacity, when naval aviator Commander Douglas MacKendrick assumed command of her. The carrier’s six Grumman Martlet fighters (known in the U.S. Navy as the F4F Wildcat ) were provided by 804 Naval Air Squadron.
“You’re going to a ship called Empire Audacity. She’s called an auxiliary carrier,” the squadron leader briefed his pilots. “The ship herself used to be a German merchantman… the Admiralty cut her down by a couple of decks and stuck a flight deck on top of her.”
He then added dryly: “It’s not a very big flight deck.”
In fact, Audacity’s was half the size of those found on conventional carriers.
Yet despite her lack of facilities, the squadron leader pointed out that her former passenger accommodations were “the most wonderful quarters any warship ever had.”
By the time the new escort carrier put to sea that September her name had been shortened to Audacity. The voyage to Gibraltar escorting Convoy OG-74 was a real eye-opener, as her pilots shot down two FW-200 Condors, operating out of Bordeaux-Mérignac airfield. These huge four-engined maritime reconnaissance bombers could range almost 2,000 miles out into the Atlantic and could stay airborne for 14 hours. Their main task was to locate convoys then send regular sighting reports, which were then passed on to Donitz’s U-boats. There was nothing the convoy could do about it — until the arrival of Audacity.
Into Harm’s Way
By early evening of Dec. 14, convoy HG-76 was heading west into the Atlantic. Her merchantmen were arrayed in nine columns, each one a thousand yards apart, and four rows, with the ships spaced out 400 yards. Tucked into this last row was Audacity, although due to mechanical problems she only carried four fighters. This large rectangle of ships four miles across was now making a steady seven and a half knots. HG-76 would keep in that formation until it reached Liverpool two weeks later. Arrayed around it was a double ring of escorts, commanded by Walker in his anti-submarine sloop HMS Stork. He certainly had his work cut out. Intelligence reports suggested Wolfpack Seeräuber (“Sea Robber”) was waiting for the convoy to the west of Gibraltar.
The Germans knew HG-76 had put to sea, convoy commodore Fitzmaurice neatly sidestepped the lurking wolfpack. The next day though, the convoy was spotted by a patrolling Condor, and Seeräuber headed west to intercept it.
The first clash came at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 17, when a patrolling Martlet spotted a U-boat 22 miles from the convoy. The boat dived, but the Martlet kept circling, and guided four of Walker’s escorts towards it. Once submerged the U-boat could only make seven knots, and so it was hard for her commander to escape his tormentors.
Sure enough, using Walker’s new tactics, the warships soon detected her, then forced the boat to the surface after a string of depth-charge attacks. She was Korvettenkäpitan Baumann’s U-131. As the submarine surfaced a circling Martlet strafed her, but the Germans managed to shoot the tiny fighter down, killing the pilot. Moments later, the U-boat was then hit by the escort’s guns, and Baumann was forced to abandon his now sinking craft. It was the convoy’s first blood. Although honours for the “kill” were shared by HMS Penstemon and HMS Stanley, it was made possible by the vigilance of Audacity’s young pilots. The escort carrier however was now down to just three aircraft.
New Tactics Pay Off
Over the days that followed, MacKendrick, the carrier’s commander, perfected the routine. U-boats could only keep up with the convoy by staying on the surface. With the help of the circling Condors, they could shadow the Allied convoy from just over the horizon during the day, then close in once darkness fell. So, just before dawn every morning McKendrick would send up two Martlets on a sweep, searching for the tell-tale wake of a surfaced U-boat. When one was spotted, Walker would send off a group of escorts to hunt the sub down.
These tactics led to the second enemy kill of the convoy when on Thursday, Dec. 18, destroyers HMS Blankney and HMS Stanley forced Kapitänleutnant Heyda’s U-434 to the surface with depth charges and destroyed it.
Despite the losses suffered in the pursuit of HG-76, Dönitz reinforced the wolfpack. Fitzmaurice and Walker learned of this from the Admiralty’s Ultra intercepts. It was clear that a major attack was now imminent.
When it came, in the early hours of Friday, Dec. 19, the Lend-Lease destroyer HMS Stanley (formerly the USS McCalla) was sunk, along with the convoy’s first merchant ship casualty, the SS Ruckinge.
When Stanley was torpedoed though, Walker initiated “Operation Buttercup,” his novel tactic designed to harry and destroy the attacking U-boat. Sure enough, Oberleutnant Gengelbach’s U-574 was brought to the surface, then dramatically rammed and sunk by Walker’s escort HMS Stork.
Later that day, Audacity’s Martlets shot down two Condors. The first was destroyed in a head-on attack by Sub Lt. “Winkle” Brown, who’d worked out that the Achilles heel of the well-armed FW-200 was its cockpit. Brown would go on to be Britain’s most celebrated postwar test pilot.
The second Condor kill came when Sub Lt. Sleigh copied Brown’s head-on tactic. It worked, but when his Martlet landed back on Audacity, Sleigh’s fighter had part of the Condor’s aileron stuck to its tail wheel.
Audacity Lost
Two nights later though, disaster struck. The reinforced wolfpack was still shadowing HG-76, and that night, Sunday, Dec. 21, Commander MacKendrick pulled Audacity out of the convoy. With the Germans now gunning for the troublesome escort carrier, he felt her presence placed the merchantmen at risk.
Alone and several miles from the convoy, MacKendrick’s luck ran out. Audacity was spotted by Kapitänleutnant Bigalk in U-751, who fired two torpedoes at the carrier. One of them hit her stern, leaving Audacity without power and dead in the water.
With the convoy itself also under attack, Walker sent escorts to help, but it was too late. After calmly reloading his bow tubes, U-751 closed in on the surface, and torpedoed Audacity again. She sank at 8:35 p.m., with the loss of 73 of her crew. One of the casualties was Commander MacKendrick. Pilots Brown and Sleigh though, were among the lucky ones, rescued by the corvettes sent out to help. U-751 though, slipped away in the darkness.
That wasn’t the only disaster during that gruelling night. Boosted by its reinforcements, wolfpack Seeräuber launched one more concerted attack on HG-76.
At 10.32 p.m., the Norwegian merchant ship D/S Annavore was torpedoed by U-567 and sank in less than a minute. All but three of her crew were lost. However, the U-boat herself, commanded by the celebrated U-boat ace Kapitänleutnant Engelbert Endrass, was sunk later that evening by one of Walker’s escorts, HMS Deptford.
Success
That was the last climactic attack on the convoy. The following day, HG-76 came within range of British land-based aircraft, and Dönitz called off the attack. Convoy HG-76 finally reached Liverpool on Dec. 29. During the voyage the convoy had lost just two of her 32 merchant ships — a remarkably low casualty rate for that stage of the war. Of the 11 U-boats ordered to attack it, four had been sunk in the convoy battle. This doesn’t count another boat from the wolfpack, U-127, which was sunk off Cape St. Vincent by Allied destroyers. Stanley had been lost, and so had HMS Audacity, however.
Still, during the HG-76 convoy battle Audacity had certainly proved her worth. Despite the superb tactical skills of Commander Walker, without Audacity’s aircraft, losses to the convoy would have been much higher. Afterwards, thanks to the success of the HG-76 battle, the Admiralty made two decisions which would dramatically alter the course of the naval war.
First, advice from the newly-promoted Captain Walker was heeded; his new aggressive tactics were adopted by the Royal Navy and its allies. He would go on to become the most celebrated U-boat hunter of the war.
As for Audacity, she had impressed the Admiralty so much that many more of her kind would be built; enough to accompany most major convoys for the remainder of the war. In the United States, the escort carrier USS Long Island had also just entered operational service.
Thanks to Audacity and her young pilots, and the new wave of Lend-Lease carriers being built in American shipyards, the escort carrier would go on to play a key part in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Convoy HG-76 marked a real turning point in that hard-fought campaign. It showed the Allies how they could turn the tide, and how they could successfully take the fight to Hitler’s U-boats and defeat them.
Angus Konstam is the author of The Convoy HG-76: Taking the Fight to Hitler’s U-Boats. A former Royal Naval officer, maritime archaeologist and museum curator, Konstam is also a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Historical Society. He is the author of several major books, including: Blackbeard, Jutland 1916, The Battle of North Cape, Sovereigns of the Sea, Mutiny on the Spanish Main and Hunt the Bismarck. For more on the author, please visit www.anguskonstam.com.
Enjoyed the read. My grandad, who had been in the Royal Navy, bought me the book, “Walker, RN” when I was a boy. Still have it. Cheers,