Churchill’s Dark Side

[JasonC]

This is mostly slander.

The ships piling up in the Atlantic were an unplanned and unforeseeable windfall arising from the dramatic change in the rate of U-boat sinkings as the battle of the Atlantic was won, in the course of 1943.

The rate of sinkings was running 600,000 tons per month all through 1942 and the first 3 months of 1943. In March it was 633,000 tons. 85% of these losses were taking place in the North Atlantic with most of the rest in the Med. The Germans were losing only 10-15 subs a month inflicting these losses, which was less than their rate of new launches. For a sense of scale, there were 6.8 million tons of British shipping in the north Atlantic. The fleet had a half life of about six months, in other words.

In April the rate of sinkings fell by half, to 300,000 tons. U-Boat losses were still pretty low, but the success of signals intelligence, escort aircraft from jeep carriers, and radar on long range patrol aircraft, had already cut the sinkings rate. Understand there were month to month fluctuations as big as 200,000 tons however, so it wasn't obvious in April that the battle was anything like won. In May the sinkings fell to 270,000 tons and 38 U-Boats were sunk - meaning shipping losses had fallen by more than half and U-Boat losses tripled. In June the British got new codes that the Germans could not break, another leg up in the intel war. 34 more U-Boats were sunk in July, and by late summer they were practically driven out of the Atlantic. In the fall when they tried again, the rate of U-Boat sinkings exceeded the merchant ships they sank themselves, by a large margin.

In short, in the early summer of 1943 the Brits had a merchant fleet in the North Atlantic that they could only expect to live a year or less on past loss rates, that with the actually achieved loss rates was way more than was required. But this was not at all obvious until at the earliest the mid to late summer. The ships themselves were then out of position for other needs, because the Brits hadn't been able to count on their even being afloat at that point, when they planned where and how many they needed. It then took time to reallocate them to every other imperial priority. But there was no choice in the matter in early 1943. Nobody could count on defeating the U-Boats until it was actually an accomplished fact. If the shipping had been allocated any other way and the battle of the Atlantic hadn't turned exactly as and when it did, the lifeline to Britain itself would have been cut in 1943.