The Secret Capture
THE SECRET CAPTURE
The
SECRET CAPTURE
CAPTAIN S W ROSKILL DSC RN
New Introduction by Professor Barry Gough
New Foreword by Charles Baker-Cresswell
This book is dedicated to
Captain Addison Joe Baker-Cresswell, DSO, RN,
and to the Officers and Men
of the 3rd Escort Group
Copyright © Stephen Roskill 1959
New Introduction © Barry Gough 2011
This edition first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Seaforth Publishing,
Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street,
Barnsley S70 2AS
www.seaforthpublishing.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84832 098 7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.
The right of Stephen Roskill to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
CONTENTS
NEW FOREWORD
NEW INTRODUCTION
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER I.
Capture in Ancient and Modern Times
II.
Other Submarine Captures, 1939–45
III.
The Atlantic Battle, 1941
IV.
The Convoy
V.
The Enemies in the Way
VI.
The 3rd Escort Group and the First Attack, 7th May
VII.
The Second Attack, 9th May
VIII.
Capture and Search
IX.
Disaster—and Triumph
EPILOGUE
INDEX
MAPS
1.
The North Atlantic, showing Convoy OB. 318’s Course, and Events of 5th–10th May, 1941
2.
The Attack on Convoy OB. 318 by U.94 (Kuppisch) at 9.15 p.m., May 7th, 1941 The Attack on Convoy OB. 318 by U.94 (Kuppisch) at 9.15 p.m., May 7th, 1941
3.
The Attack on Convoy OB. 318 by U.110 (Lemp) at 11.58 a.m.-12.02 p.m., May 9th, 1941
4.
The Aubrietia’s Counter-attack on U.110 (Lemp) at 12.03–12.35 p.m., May 9th, 1941
5.
The Attack on Convoy OB. 318 by U.201 (Schnee) at 12.28–12.30 p.m., May 9th, 1941
6.
The Attack on Convoy OB. 318 by U.556 (Wohlfarth) at 2.48–2.50 a.m., May 10th, 1941
DIAGRAMS
1&2.
German gridded U-boat chart for the Atlantic
3.
Convoy OB. 318, Formation on Sailing, 2nd May, 1941
New Foreword
THE CENTRAL figure in this story, A J Baker-Cresswell (my father) was born in London in 1901. Queen Victoria was also in London then, but she was dead and would be buried at Windsor the following day.
My father grew up to become a good mathematician and chose the Royal Navy for his career. He specialised as a navigator. In the late 1920s the Navy kept two sloops based at Auckland, New Zealand. Their purpose was to suppress cannibalism in the Pacific Islands. He was posted to one of these sloops. It was in Auckland that he found his bride – he married her there when she was nineteen. On their return to England, they set up their home in the Meon Valley in Hampshire. By the time I was born – the youngest of their three children – he was navigating officer of HMS Rodney, and it was on board her that I was christened.
When World War II broke out, he was entirely ready for it. He was Staff College trained and had plenty of sea-going experience. He was the complete professional – one of a breed that the Navy had produced in enviable numbers.
During the war my mother and my two elder sisters saw him hardly at all. We watched the dogfights in the skies above the Hampshire Downs and came to recognise the peculiar undulating engine noise of German bombers at night. My mother had a touching faith in the ability of the dining-room table to shelter us from the bombs when the raids got too close, but she had bought a .22 with which to shoot German paratroopers. So we knew there was plenty of danger about and we heard of batdes far away. We also knew that my father was in the thick of it, and we knew when my father was awarded the DSO – but had no idea why until years later.
My mother once described to me how she had received a garbled message that HMS Bulldog, his ship, would be docking at Liverpool for repairs. Through the blackout and the irregularity of wartime trains she arrived there during an air raid and booked in at the Adelphi Hotel. She described walking to the docks with fires still blazing and stepping over criss-crossed fire hoses which jetted water from their punctures. She never found Bulldog, nor her husband, so simply made her difficult way back to Hampshire.
Sixty years later I found his little leather bound Letts diary, only three inches by two-and-a-half and still with its blunt pencil pushed down the spine. It is for the year 1941. This was his year of commanding 3rd Escort Group from HMS Bulldog. On 9 January he notes ‘Assume command’. It gives details in the briefest form of all his convoys that he escorted. Most of the entries involve Greenock, Loch Ewe, Hvalfiord and Reykjavik.
A typical entry would be:
3 April 0800 Leave OB303
1400 Arrive Hvalfiord
1900 Arrive Reykjavik
2230 Sail with ‘Richmond Hill’
4 April 1400 Join HX116 (29 ships)
OB convoys were OUTWARD BOUND: HX meant they assembled off Halifax, Nova Scotia. Occasionally there were lists of his escorts.
12 July 0600 Sail
1000 Off Campbeltown
1530 Met OB 345
‘Nigella’ ‘Aubrietia’ ‘St Apollo’ ‘Notts
County’ ‘King Sol’ ‘Daneman’
‘Amazon’ ‘Georgetown’
Several of these were armed trawlers – the bravest of the brave. Think of them in this entry – one of several like it:
‘1 February. N gale. Hove to for fourteen hours. Lost convoy.’
‘4 February. S gale. Hove to twenty hours.’
Bad enough in a destroyer or a corvette with an open bridge but what about the trawlers?
I counted 28 convoys from January to October: 159 days at sea in that time, and no leave. Think of those days for all the men – both escorts and escorted. Days and long nights of constant danger, cold, tiredness, responsibility, discomfort, loneliness – and fear.
He reported the central action of this book in this way:
7 May 1941 0200 Sail
1800 Join OB 318
U-Boat attack
8 May Re-join convoy
9 May 1200 Attack on convoy
1245 Captured U-110
10 May 1100 U-110 sank
11 May 0100 Arrive Hvalfiord
A few days later:
15 May 1330 Arrive Hvalfiord
16 May Fish with Aitken
31b sea trout
17 May Fish with Roper
3 trout, one char
He never wasted words.
David Balme was the gallant young officer who led the armed boat's crew on its perilous mission from Bulldog. My father kept his friendship with him to the end. I noticed that even when
David was staying with him and was over sixty years old my father tended still to treat him as if he was a rash young Sub-Lieutenant of twenty.
‘When you take him to Berwick Station,’ he would say, ‘make sure he gets onto the right platform.’ ‘But Father, there are only two platforms, and he knows where South is.’ ‘Never mind, make sure.’
The North Atlantic was by no means his only battlefield. He fought all the King’s enemies: Vichy French, Italian, German and Japanese. I have in front of me his medals: DSO, Atlantic Star, Africa Star, Burma Star. He disapproved of sloppy dress. He described to me how he took a ship from Alexandria to Malta. During the day he fought the bombers of the Italian Air Force. Then he would go below for his supper, change into ‘Mess Undress’ and return to the bridge with a cigar, to fight the night battle against the Italian torpedo boats.
He died in 1997, aged 96. His New Zealand wife of seventy years died two weeks later. They are buried together in Bamburgh churchyard in his beloved Northumberland 100 yards from where I write.
CHARLES BAKER-CRESSWELL
November 2010
New Introduction
WITH HIS The War at Sea nearing completion (three volumes in four, 1954–1961) — undertaken while in the employ of the Cabinet Office under the direction of Professor Sir James Butler in the Military History Series — Captain Stephen Roskill, DSC, RN (Retd.) accepted an invitation from the publishers Collins to write a number of works in naval history and maritime affairs.1 The book reprinted here for the first time in this welcome edition was one of these works. It first appeared in March 1959; there was a second impression a month later, and a German translation appeared in 1960. Its success was further proof of the author’s outstanding capabilities as an historian and, equally important, his undeniable popularity with the reading public.
For his War at Sea, Roskill had consulted Commander Michael G Saunders in the Translation Division of the Admiralty Historical Section concerning German naval strategy and operations, and he was drawn to passages in Dönitz’s 1939 book Die U-Bootswaffe. The German U-boat chief held that the destruction of the enemy’s trade and the attack on his sea communications to be the true objectives of naval warfare. The First World War, the German admiral believed, demonstrated the effectiveness of the U-boats in trade warfare. Saunders thought Dönitz too reductionist but he had no doubt about the main theme, adding ‘it is a sad thought that the British Naval Staff appeared in the interwar years largely to ignore these fundamental truths.’2 For his description of German naval strategy Roskill had a useful summary (JIC 46 (33)) at his disposal and Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs 1939–1945. All of these provided the background understanding for ‘the secret capture’. He did not interview German survivors of the episode but he did have correspondence with various persons in the Royal Navy who knew of the event or were otherwise involved in it. Roskill wished to keep the story a British one, and as will now be explained sought to make clear to the widening English-speaking world reading the naval history of the Second World War that the Royal Navy had made a significant contribution to the winning of the war by ‘the secret capture’.
Two years earlier, in 1957, the British publishers Sidgwick and Jackson published a book by Rear-Admiral Daniel V Gallery, USN, entitled We Captured a U-Boat. The work was a publishing success. When in command of USS Pillsbury in June 1944, a destroyer escort, Gallery had sent a boarding party to the foundering U-505. The submarine was saved from sinking and the party retrieved an Enigma coding machine and current code books. U-505 was towed triumphantly into Bermuda. Gallery claimed that his was the only U-boat capture on the high seas. But in fact this was not the case. U-570 surrendered to a Sunderland flying boat in 1941. Other attempts came close, including the Royal Canadian Navy’s of 10 September 1941. In this event, HMCS Chambly and HMCS Moose Jaw forced U-501 to the surface, but she sank. On 30 October 1942 HMS Petard seized German coding material from a sinking U-558 in the eastern Mediterranean. But Gallery had made a good literary job of it. Thus Roskill’s goal was to disclose to the wider world that the Royal Navy had done its work ‘more than three years before Gallery’s men hoisted the Stars and Stripes above the Nazi’s crooked cross on board U-505.’ Roskill held that his relations with American naval officers were always excellent, which was true for the period after 1945 and notably when he was Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. In short, Roskill did not seek to score points at Gallery’s expense; he only wished to correct the record – and to tell what he could of a story hitherto largely unknown.
Roskill reconstituted the story of the capture and boarding of the U-110 on 9 May 1941 on the basis of what he admitted was contained in ‘one small file’. He was hamstrung by many limitations, not least the Official Secrets Act. From the current literature, based on research long after Roskill wrote his book, the story has been more fully told.3 Remarkably, much has come to light, as is the case with HMS Bulldog and U-110. But before we recount that episode we need to be reminded of what Roskill said about the limitations he faced and which obliged him to admit that he had written a ‘short account of perhaps the most important and far-reaching success achieved by our antisubmarine forces during the whole course of the last war….’ But getting access to files kept under wraps was only one problem. It was linked to a second: the requirement and necessity of not exposing Ultra. ‘Official historians, working on a brief drawn up soon after 1945, are mostly silent about Intelligence.’ So wrote the historian and editor, Donald McLachlan, a retired naval officer, in his book Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action, 1939–45.4 ‘In most volumes of the official history [in the Military Series] the word does not appear in the index. Only in the four volumes of The War at Sea can it be said that an effort is made to give credit and apportion blame to intelligence; perhaps because the author, Captain Stephen Roskill, had been a Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence and knew his way about an explosive field of activity’ McLachlan was favoured by the release of documents, and at the time he wrote his book the thirty-year rule about access to official files was about to be introduced. Roskill had no such advantage, and his book must be read with a full appreciation of the fact that he worked under many limitations.
The ‘one small file’ that Roskill used to reconstitute the story is now in The National Archives, Kew, Surrey, Adm 1/11133. Contained in it are: the report of proceedings of the commanding officer of HMS Bulldog, Captain Joe Baker-Cresswell, Senior Officer, 3rd Escort Group, and the report under the heading ‘Boarding Primrose’, being the account of twenty-year-old Sub-Lieutenant David E Bahne, RN. The latter contains personal recollections of interest, for it was he who led the boarding party aboard U-110, codenamed Primrose by the British.
In the immediate months leading up to this episode U-boat command had lost a number of submarines and ‘aces’: Prien, Kretschmer and Schepke. The operational area of U-boats was therefore pressed farther west, near Iceland. At 1202 GMT on 9 May 1941 two ships of west-bound convoy OB 318 were torpedoed in position 60° 20′ N 40° W. The British escorts, destroyers Bulldog (lead ship) and Broadway and the corvette Aubrietia, all made contact, and Aubrietia’s depth charge attack was a good one. At 1235 a conning tower was sighted, and fire was immediately opened by 4.7m, 3m, 2pdr pom-pom and stripped Lewis guns. One 3m shell struck the conning tower, and men were seen abandoning the submarine. The small arms fire continued. Broadway approached to ram but the submarine turned stern on to her. The British vessel dropped a depth charge close to the submarine’s bow. Oil covered the water. As we now know, that submarine had come quickly to the surface, surprisingly so, in fact. Her depth meters were not functioning, her electric motors out of commission, and she was taking on water.
The U-boat commander, the noted ‘ace’ Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, Knights Cross, was first to emerge from the conning tower, ordering his crew to evacuate as soon as possible. Between gun bursts from the British ships, the German officers and men made their way up and out and sought security in the cold At
lantic, hoping for rescue. Lemp was under the impression that the damage to his submarine was so extensive that it would sink, taking its secrets with it. He also had given orders to set scuttling charges; these had failed to detonate.5
From the bridge of the Bulldog no sign of a white flag could be seen. Baker-Cresswell ordered Balme and an armed whaler’s crew (six seamen, one telegraphist and one stoker) bearing small arms as a boarding party. By the time the whaler was alongside the submarine the whole crew appeared to have jumped into the water. Balme, under orders to seize all books and anything that looked important, opened the conning tower hatch. He went down the ladder to the lower conning tower, made a further entrance and found himself unopposed in the U-boat. He and others of the boarding party faced unimaginable circumstances aboard the wallowing U-boat: an eerie silence, the ominous hissing of air, a motor that they could not control, the fear of the enemy possibly lurking behind a bulkhead, the worry that the scuttling-charges would go off, and much else. Throughout these desperate hours the British escorts were attacking U-boats with depth charges, and Balme’s fear was that their explosions, which felt very close, would set off the detonating charges. The various rooms and compartments were searched, and chief among the prizes was an Enigma machine, which looked somewhat like a typewriter but one in which keystrokes lit up different letters which without a code book were incomprehensible to the British telegraphist who had gone on board the U-boat. Various code books and other materials were gathered up from the immense clutter of paper and debris. These items were all passed up and out of the submarine by human chain, and meanwhile the clock steadily advanced.
The material was safely passed to the Bulldog then taken to Scapa Flow and thence to Bletchley Park, where before long it was added to other sources employed by the Operations Intelligence Centre at the Admiralty for deploying naval assets. By this time the British had already broken the main German naval codes. On 4 March, in the Lofoten Islands raid, Enigma material was captured from the armed trawler Krebs. This helped Bletchley Park to break the whole of the traffic of April 1941 down to 10 May. On 7 May the weather ship M? was captured. From these ‘pinches’ vital information was gleaned. Indeed, signals from U-110 were able to be read before it was captured. The treasures from U-110 added confirming, parallel or associate details. More specifically, the secret capture gave the British entry into the German ‘officer-only’ signals and the Kurzsignale (the shortened code) both of which were of extreme importance.6