Fortress England Read online

  Fortress England

  Robert Jackson

  © Robert Jackson 1998

  Robert Jackson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 by Severn House.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  The Arctic — February 1941

  For several hours, a south-westerly gale had lashed the freezing ocean, its strength piling up the waves to a height of thirty feet or more. They rolled up in long roaring swells, dark, foam-flecked, white-crested. The gale ripped sheets of spray from the crests, hurling them horizontally across the water to mingle with icy flurries of snow.

  Through the murk and the darkness two great battlecruisers forged steadily on. From time to time a breaker reared up in front of one of them, hung there for a second in a column of ghostly foam, and then collapsed over the forecastle with a deafening roar, shrouding the long bows in a veil of swirling foam before dispersing in gurgling eddies across the anchor chains and through the scuppers.

  Four miles separated the two warships. A depth of 1,500 fathoms — 9,000 feet, one and three-quarter miles — of water lay between their keels and the sea bed. This was the Norwegian Deep, the triangle of sea bounded by Norway’s North Cape, Jan Mayen Island and Iceland. Some miles to starboard lay the great expanse of the Arctic pack ice, the invisible guardian of the warships’ northern flank; ahead was the Denmark Strait, the turbulent waterway between Iceland and Greenland, only 200 miles across at its narrowest.

  This was the gate through which the two battlecruisers must crash if they were to reach the North Atlantic.

  The mission that lay ahead of them had been meticulously planned and prepared. At various points in the Atlantic the warships would make rendezvous with tankers which would supply them with oil, ammunition and stores. They had already carried out their first replenishment at sea, from the tanker Adria, stationed to the east of Jan Mayen.

  The warships’ mission was to destroy the vital Atlantic convoys that were the lifelines of Britain, a nation that now stood alone against the seemingly all-conquering might of Nazi Germany.

  By the summer of 1940, after the collapse of France, these convoys faced a threat from several quarters. Firstly there were the U-boats, covering the North Sea and the Atlantic approaches; then there were the surface raiders, ranging from battleships and heavy cruisers to fast merchantmen converted to the armed raider role; and finally, with the capture by the Germans of air bases on the French Atlantic coast, there was the Luftwaffe, whose long-range Focke-Wulf Kondor patrol bombers had been wreaking havoc on British shipping for months now. Between August 1940 and February 1941 the Kondors had sunk Allied vessels amounting to 363,000 tons, far more than the U-boats or the surface warships.

  But the warships were a major threat — there was no doubt about that. One of them, the Admiral Graf Spee, had been effectively dealt with in December 1939, chased into Montevideo harbour by a British naval force and scuttled there on the orders of her captain; but there were others at large, equally as powerful and destructive, if not more so.

  Two of them, the battleship Admiral Scheer and the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, had broken out into the Atlantic from their north German ports in the closing weeks of 1940, reaching the open ocean by way of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. In November the Scheer sank five ships from one homeward-bound convoy, and the toll would undoubtedly have been greater had it not been for the gallant action of one of the convoy escorts, the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay, whose skipper, Captain Fegen, attacked the battleship and bought just enough time for the rest of the convoy to scatter before his ship was blasted into a blazing wreck and sent to the bottom. Evading strong naval forces sent to track her down, the Scheer headed for the South Atlantic, and by the end of the year was operating on the latitude of Cape Town.

  Meanwhile, on 24 December, the Hipper had made contact with a large troop convoy far to the west of Cape Finisterre, and attacked at first light on Christmas Day. The convoy, however, was strongly escorted, and the German warship was driven off without having caused any damage. She reached the French Atlantic port of Brest two days later and was still there, awaiting the reinforcements that were now ploughing through the Denmark Strait before making another sortie.

  The commander of the battlecruiser group, Admiral Lutjens, was grateful for the darkness and the foul weather. The ships had already made one attempt to break through to the Atlantic, but had been frustrated by the presence of British cruisers patrolling to the south of Iceland. This time, with luck and the protection of the weather, they would succeed.

  Soon it would be dawn, but dawn in these climes, at this time of the year, meant little. Dawn was a watery greyness on the southern horizon, above which the sun would rise only briefly before sinking from sight again. As the days went by its appearances would become longer, until from May to July it would not set at all. For this was the region of the midnight sun in summer and in winter of the northern lights, those phantom luminous veils that danced and shifted across the polar skies.

  With the coming of dawn, the storm abated. The crews of the two battlecruisers increased their alert, but no threat materialised out of the greenish-grey twilight. The hours went by, and at last Admiral Lutjens knew that his battle group was safe. Ahead of the warships now lay the broad expanse of the Atlantic.

  Signals flashed between the two battlecruisers, which altered course to the south-west, heading for latitude sixty degrees north. Soon, the long-range Kondor reconnaissance aircraft would alert them to the presence of a British convoy, and they would steer to intercept it.

  Lutjens knew that his crews were eager for action. They had seen none for eight months, since the end of the Norwegian campaign, when they had sunk the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two escorting destroyers, the Ardent and Acasta. Adding to their keenness was the knowledge that they were serving in two of the most powerful warships afloat, each armed with nine 11-inch guns and a formidable array of lesser weapons.

  Their names were Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

  Chapter Two

  Atlantic Ocean — 16 March 1941

  It was three hours now since the big four-engined Short Sunderland flying boat had lifted away from the waters of Plymouth Sound in the pre-dawn darkness and set course south-westwards into the Atlantic, buffeted by a March wind that was almost a gale, but not quite. Now, several hours later, the aircraft’s position was marked by an invisible point on the ocean’s surface, designated by the navigator as forty-three degrees north, twenty degrees west. Its intersection of these lines of latitude and longitude placed it some 500 miles west of the outer limits of the Bay of Biscay, and a similar distance north-east of the Azores.

  The Sunderland’s pilot was a squadron leader and, like the twelve members of his crew, an Australian. In 1939 they, together with the rest of their squadron colleagues, had come to England to take delivery of nine Sunderlands for service with No. 10 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force, but their intention of flying them back to Australia had been thwarted by the outbreak of war. The squadron had been promp
tly affiliated to RAF Coastal Command and, based at Mount Batten in Devonshire, had begun Atlantic patrols early in 1940.

  The Australian squadron, and others like it — some equipped with Sunderlands, others with American-built Catalina flying boats or with Lockheed Hudson land-based patrol bombers — had soon found themselves locked in a bitter struggle to protect the vital Atlantic convoys that were the lifeblood of beleaguered Britain. On this March day, the Sunderland was due to rendezvous with a British-bound convoy from Sierra Leone, and shepherd it northwards until it was relieved by another flying boat.

  The Sunderland pilot, peering ahead through the windscreen — the aircraft was running through a rain squall, and the wipers were thumping rapidly from side to side, chasing away the rivulets of water — gave a slight start as a hand tapped him on the shoulder, then looked up, smiled, and reached out to take the enamel mug of coffee that was being offered to him by one of the crew.

  The latest air reconnaissance reports, the pilot knew, indicated that the Hipper was still holed up in Brest, but you could never be certain; she might have made a break for it within the last twenty-four hours, in which case — if she was heading directly out into the Atlantic — she might be anywhere within the Sunderland’s search area.

  So might a patrolling Kondor, but the squadron leader wasn’t worried about that. The Sunderland Mk I was armed with seven machine-guns, four of them in its tail gun turret — two more than the German aircraft carried.

  “Navigator to pilot.”

  The squadron leader put a hand to his face mask, which had been dangling loosely, and placed it over his mouth, flicking the intercom switch as he did so.

  “Go ahead, nav.”

  “We will be in position forty-two north, twenty-one west in fifteen minutes, skipper. Should be sighting the convoy shortly, if it’s where it should be.”

  The pilot grunted over the intercom. “Okay. Can’t see much up ahead yet, through this rain. It’s looking a bit brighter, though. Just a line squall. We should be out of it soon. Keep your eyes peeled, lookouts.”

  He glanced at his second pilot, a young United States Navy lieutenant. Officially, Lieutenant (JG) James A. McGill was not there; America was not in the war — not yet, anyway — but the US Navy was cooperating with the British in the war against the U-boat, short of actually sinking the German submarines, and was sending small numbers of personnel to England to fly with RAF Coastal Command in order to gain operational experience. All this was a well-kept secret; if the Germans found out about it, their propaganda people would really go to town. Just in case anything went wrong, McGill had a cover story that turned him into a Canadian.

  “Take over for a minute, Jimmy,” the pilot instructed. “I’m going back for a pee.”

  The young American’s face brightened at being given the responsibility. He acknowledged the instruction, placed both hands on the control wheel and peered intently into the distance. The Sunderland’s captain grinned, undid his harness and clambered out of his seat. Behind the two pilots’ seats, the flying boat’s flight-deck crew of navigator, radio operator and engineer were all busy at their stations. The captain went past them and along the companionway, past the beam gunners and the mid-upper, heading for the Elsan toilet at the rear of the fuselage. A few minutes later, feeling much relieved, he returned to his place, but allowed the American lieutenant to remain in command for the time being.

  It was the keen-eyed co-pilot, in fact, who saw the first sign of the disaster that had overwhelmed the convoy. It looked at first like a dark and threatening cloud, drifting low over the horizon. But as the Sunderland drew closer, the men in the cockpit could see that the base of the cloud was shot with red in places. Minutes later, the cloud resolved itself into several distinct columns, merging higher up into a single spreading pall that fanned out slowly before the easterly wind.

  Stunned, the Sunderland’s crew gazed down on the carnage. The sea was littered with dying ships, many of them fiercely ablaze. Dense smoke boiled up from stricken oil tankers, their shattered hulls surrounded by circles of blazing fuel in which men screamed and died. Some freighters, which must have been carrying chemical cargoes, burned with a fierce multi-coloured light. The aircraft circled the remnants of the convoy slowly. The crew counted eleven vessels, either sinking or so badly damaged that it was doubtful if they could be salvaged.

  The Australian squadron leader knew that convoys from Sierra Leone were provided with a light escort for the first few hundred miles of their journey; from then on they were supposed to be provided with an ocean escort, sometimes a cruiser or a battleship, but more often one of the armed merchant cruisers — converted fast liners capable of a speed of at least fifteen knots — which were no match for German warships. Ten had already been lost.

  Whatever had hit this convoy, it had done so in the dangerous gap when the merchantmen were unescorted.

  “Whatever did this, it wasn’t a U-boat attack,” the Australian said. “If it had been, there’d be ships trailing back for fifty miles. In any case, there are only half a dozen Italian boats operating in this area, and they aren’t much use.”

  It wasn’t exactly true. The Italian Admiralty had seventeen submarines operating in the area west of Biscay under the tactical command of the German Navy, and they had scored their first successes in the North Atlantic in November 1940, ranging as far afield as the waters off southern Ireland. They were a valuable addition to the German effort against the Atlantic convoys, for the German submarine service was still hampered by a lack of operational U-boats; the low priority given to submarine construction in the early part of the War — partly because the German naval planners had not expected to go to war before 1944 — meant that the Germans did not have enough craft coming off the slipways to replace the thirty-one boats lost in the first fifteen months of hostilities. There was also the German training system, which required a U-boat crew to undergo nine months of training in the Baltic and carry out sixty-six simulated attacks before it was considered operational. The overall result was that, by the end of 1940, their operational strength stood at only twenty-two submarines. It was fortunate for Britain that this was so, because even with the depleted U-boat resources at their disposal, the Germans had come close to severing the Atlantic lifeline.

  Now there was another threat, and the Sunderland captain knew that it had to involve surface warships. The question was, which ones? Not the German commerce raiders, which were operating in the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic. Not the Hipper, which was still holed up in Brest; and not the Scheer, last seen far to the south.

  Something new and deadly was out there, and it couldn’t be far away. The Sunderland captain took over the controls from the young American, circled the convoy once more after instructing his wireless operator to transmit a coded signal for help, and then flew off towards the west, searching the sea.

  He was going in the wrong direction. The warships that had devastated the convoy were steaming at full speed north-eastwards, towards the port of Brest.

  Admiral Lutjens was reasonably content with the results of the battlecruisers’ sortie into the Atlantic, which was code-named Operation Berlin; since breaking through the Denmark Strait the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had sunk twenty-two merchant ships totalling over 115,000 tons. The total would certainly have been greater, but an attempted attack on one convoy 300 miles north-east of the Cape Verde Islands had been frustrated by the presence of a strong naval escort that included the battleship Malaya, and a couple of days later, while picking up survivors from a freighter, the Gneisenau had been surprised by the battleship HMS Rodney. Only the German warship’s superior manoeuvrability and speed had enabled her to get away.

  After attacking one more convoy, Lutjens — conscious that superior British naval forces were probably closing in on him — had ordered the captains of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, Hoffmann and Fein, to make independently for Brest. Also proceeding independently towards that haven were three captured
oil tankers, manned by prize crews.

  Lutjens was right about one thing: the Royal Navy was out in force, searching for his ships. By now, the British Admiralty was fairly certain of the identity of the warships that had been cutting a terrible swathe through the Atlantic convoys; what it did not yet know was whether the German battle group commander would turn north, heading back towards the Denmark Strait, or whether he would elect to make for one of the French Atlantic ports. It was all a big gamble, and the best the Admiralty could do was to station the limited forces at its disposal at strategic points in the hope of intercepting the enemy.

  The most powerful British naval force, consisting of the battleships Rodney, Nelson and King George V, the cruiser Nigeria and two destroyers, was hurriedly sent to patrol the waters off Iceland. Another — the Gibraltar-based Force H, with the battlecruiser Renown, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, the cruiser Sheffield and several destroyers, set out to patrol the waters south-west of the Bay of Biscay.

  On 20 March, a Swordfish reconnaissance aircraft from the Ark Royal sighted two of the captured oil tankers, the Bianca and San Casimiro, its report bringing the warships racing up. They were too late to prevent the German prize crews from scuttling the vessels.

  Later that day, another Swordfish located the two enemy battlecruisers, but was unable to transmit an immediate report because of wireless failure. By the time the fault was put right, any chance of intercepting the warships had vanished.

  A few hours later, led by German destroyers and minesweepers which had put out to meet them, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau entered the sanctuary of Brest harbour. They had it to themselves, for a couple of days earlier the Admiral Hipper had slipped quietly to sea and was now far out in the North Atlantic, making for the Denmark Strait. On 28 March she arrived in Kiel, having successfully evaded the British warship screen.