Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War
freighter
Irene du Pont
by two. HMS
Mansfield
rescued survivors. As dawn broke, all that really could be done was finish off the abandoned, wrecked merchant ships. The corvette HMS
Anemone
did half that job, while U 91, arriving on the scene an hour or two later, completed the messy task. The British escorts were now full to overflowing with rescued crewmen.
    Farther east, the convoy SC 122 had begun its own encounter with the furies. The fifty-one vessels enjoyed the protection of seven escorts, including the American destroyer USS
Upshur
and a specially equipped rescue ship, the
Zamalek
. At around 2:00 a.m. on this same dreadful night U 338 was racing westward to join the attack upon HX 229 when its commander, Captain Lieutenant Kinzel, saw a mass of ships on the horizon, a full 12 miles away; a hunter’s moon, indeed. Kinzel’s first two torpedoes mortally damaged the British freighters
Kingsbury
and
King Gruffydd
. The second salvo (also two torpedoes) tore into the Dutch four-masted freighter
Alderamin
and broke it into three pieces; it was gone in two minutes. In turning away from this mayhem, U 338 fired her stern torpedo at another nearby ship. The torpedo missed its intended victim but drove on through the middle of the convoy to the far end, where it blew a great hole in the side of the British merchantman
Fort Cedar Lake
. Five torpedoes, four ships.
    As the next morning unfolded, the Allied naval authorities became aware that they were facing a double disaster: the gutting of two of their vital supply convoys plus the prospect that Doenitz was dispatching more and more U-boats into this great contest. The two convoys had not yet joined and would not do so until the night of March 17–18, but the overall picture was obvious. A great quantity of Allied merchantmen, seventy or eighty or more, and their cargoes were caught in the middle of the Atlantic, with a completely insufficient number of escorts, and with the enemy submarines massing for the coup de grâce.
    But with the dawn came light, and with the light came aircraft.And there was nothing that terrified a U-boat commander so much as the sight, or even the noise, of an approaching Allied plane. It really was the rock-paper-scissors game. Merchant ships were horribly vulnerable to U-boats and their torpedoes, but U-boats, even those that decided to stay on the surface and fight, were seriously outgunned against aircraft. On many occasions, the submarine hardly had more than a minute or two to fire, because the aircraft came in so fast; the only thing the sub’s commander could do was dive, dive, dive … and wait for the depth charges. Catalinas, Liberators, Sunderlands, and Wellingtons were to them the scariest of the Allied weapons system, the Ringwraiths of the sky. This, after all, is why the U-boats waited to attack Allied merchant vessels in the mid-Atlantic air gap.
    On March 17, 1943, that gap began to be closed. At the urgings of Western Approaches Command, the first few very long-range (VLR) B-24 Liberators were flown out of their base near Londonderry, Northern Ireland. For a number of reasons, all of RAF Coastal Command’s squadrons (in Northern Ireland, Iceland, the Hebrides, and Scotland) were at this time significantly understrength, but the Liberators could at least reach the closest convoy, SC 122. During the course of the day these aircraft sighted U-boats on numerous occasions and made six attacks on them before they had to return to base. No submarines were destroyed or even damaged, but they were repeatedly forced to dive. In fact, during that whole day the only ship in the convoy to be sunk (again, by the indomitable Kinzel, in U 338) was the Panamanian freighter
Granville,
carrying supplies for the U.S. Army.
    By contrast, convoy HX 229 was not within the reach of aerial protection, and the few escorts actually with the main body of the convoy, or not catching up after rescuing survivors or chasing a sonar trace, were completely

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