Spread from MY STORY: U-Boat Hunter
by Bryan Perrett
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September 1940 — March 1941
At times throughout the months that followed I truly thought that we might lose the War. There were fewewr escorts to protect the convoys — as the Captain had predicted — and because the enemy now possessed the French and Norwegian ports, the U-boats were not only present in greater numbers, but also capable of operating further out into the Atlantic. Our trips therefore became longer, leaving us on the edge of exhaustion for much of the time.
Always present during the day were the Condors, circling the convoys and reporting their progress. At night the U-boats, operating in groups called wolf packs, would close in on the surface, penetrate the lines between the merchant ships and torpedo several of them. Sometimes we would lose as much as a third of a convoy in one trip. Knowing how long it took to build a merchant ship, I began to feel that the enemy was sinking them faster than we could launch them, and at the same time building U-boats faster than we could sink them. When, later in the War, I spoke to some captured U-boat men, they described this period as their “happy time,” and I could understand why. We felt a terrible frustration at not being able to hit back effectively, for by the time we responded to an attack, the enemy had vanished into the night. Perhaps the unhappiest man on the ship was Pingy. On the rare occasions that his Asdic did produce a faint echo, it disappeared almost immediately. Little did we know at the time that it was the effectiveness of the Asdic that had forced the enemy to attack on the surface, for their own protection.
I saw many ships die. A sinking ship is always a tragic sight, but the end for many of them was truly terrible. Most take a little time to go down, enabling much of the crew who survived the torpedo explosion to take to their boats. Not so Prince Madoc, which went down during an eastbound convoy. I saw the explosion as the torpedo hit, sending up a great column of water as high as her funnel. Flames appeared aboard her, then a second explosion blew the side out of her. Within seconds she had rolled on to her beam ends, and, still moving, slid beneath the waves.
“She was a collier,” commented Mr. Swinson. “Very dangerous ships to serve aboard. They don’t have bulkheads between the cargo holds like a conventional ship — just shifting boards to stop the coal moving about. If the coal starts to move you’ve got a real problem on your hands, because it can cause a list from which you’ll never recover.”
“But surely she wouldn’t have survived two torpedo hits, anyway, sir?” I queried.
“As far as I could see, she was only hit once,” he replied. “The other danger with colliers is coal dust, which is highly explosive. The torpedo started fired and sent up clouds of the stuff. That caused the second explosion. When the sea poured in she began to list, the coal shifted, and that was that.”
From My Story: U-Boat Hunter. Copyright © 2005 by Chris Priestley. All rights reserved.
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