The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Some still aboard Sinking fast. . .
Andrew Jeffrey, University of St Andrews, tracks the progress of the war at sea from 1939-1945
Scotland’s sea war began with a desperate distress message from the Glasgow liner Athenia on the day war broke out, September 3 1939: “SSSS SSSS SSSS Athenia GFDM Pos.n 5644N 1405W. Torpedoed. 1,400 passengers. Some still aboard. Sinking fast.” A torpedo had blasted a hole in Athenia’s side, destroyed her engine room and sent lethal red-hot splinters scything through a group of passengers on the promenade deck. A total of 117 men, women and children died that night and a tidal wave of revulsion swept around the world. But the U-boat that sank Athenia had fired only the first shot in a bitter war of attrition that would last almost six years. The first crisis came with a ferocious, week-long battle fought west of the Hebrides in the autumn of 1940. It began on October 12 when U-boats closed in on two convoys west of South Uist and sank 10 ships. Seven U-boats then rampaged through convoy SC7 near St Kilda, sinking 20 of the 34 ships in the convoy. And the agony began all over again the very next night
as convoy HX79 caught up with the shattered remnants of SC7 and another 12 ships were sunk. As dawn broke on October 20 1940, the sea west of the Hebrides was littered with wreckage, sinking ships and lifeboats packed with frozen survivors. But one ship, the Glasgow steamer Carsbreck, was refusing to die. She had a huge torpedo hole in her side and a dangerous list, yet Captain John Muir and his crew were still defiantly on course for home. After refusing a tow and battling through a storm at little more than walking pace, Carsbreck steamed triumphantly into the Clyde three days later. Carsbreck’s remarkable survival story is typical of the quiet heroism displayed by Allied merchant seamen throughout the Battle of the Atlantic. But there was no disguising the fact that 42 ships had been sunk off Scotland in just seven days and 353 merchant seamen, among them two boys aged 14 and 15, had lost their lives. Worse still, ships that made it across the Atlantic were being sunk as they made their way around Scotland to east coast ports, among them the Estonian steamer Anu which sank after detonating a magnetic mine in the entrance to the Tay on a storm-lashed night in February 1940. Of Anu’s crew 13 stumbled ashore at Carnoustie, among them badly injured stewardess Elna Jürisson who had to be left in a bunker on the snow-covered golf course while the others went for help. Elna died later in hospital and is buried, along with Anu’s captain,
Johannes Raudsoo and his wife Liis, in Dundee’s Eastern Cemetery. Three days later, on February 9, Arbroath lifeboat was attacked by enemy aircraft while rescuing survivors from a bomb-damaged ship, the Foremost 102, near the Bell Rock. Two of the Foremost 102’s crew died and Coxswain Swankie said later that the bombs, “seemed to lift the lifeboat out of the water and made all the air cases inside her rattle.” Spitfires from 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron shot down one of the enemy aircraft involved near North Berwick. By the end of 1940 more than 900 ships had been sunk in the North Atlantic and UK coastal waters; it seemed that Britain was losing the Battle of the Atlantic and, with it, the war. But Scotland would rise to the challenge and play a vital role in the Allied victory at sea. Scottish shipyards would complete more than 2,000 new vessels, vast minefields were laid to protect convoy lanes while Allied minesweeper crews, many based at HMS Unicorn in Dundee, dealt with enemy mines. Operation Pedestal, the costly convoy that saved Malta from starvation and surrender, sailed from the Clyde in August 1942 and 23 Arctic convoys, more than 570 ships in all, sailed from Scotland to Russia under the protection of the Home Fleet and submarines from Dundee and the Clyde. Scottish-based escort vessels and aircraft harried U-boat wolfpacks while naval units operating from Scotland secured many of the vital “pinches” of Enigma cypher technology that allowed Bletchley Park cryptographers to break enemy naval codes and route convoys away from danger. Yet the Battle of the Atlantic was always about a great deal more than mere survival. Scotland’s ports performed miracles as the Allies prepared for the liberation of Europe, the Clyde alone handling almost five million military personnel movements by 1945. One of the largest operations launched from Scotland involved loading 67,500 men and their equipment into 428 ships for the 1942 Allied invasion of Vichy North Africa. The decision to land in Normandy in 1944 was taken at a conference in a Largs hotel and the tactics that would see the Allies ashore on D-Day were rehearsed in the Clyde and Moray Firth. Meanwhile, driven from their mid-ocean hunting grounds, U-boats returned to the Scottish coast towards the end of the war and the final casualties in the Battle of the Atlantic were the British steamer Avondale Park and the Norwegian Snejland 1, sunk in the Firth of Forth late on May 7 1945. Three days later, on May 10, a delegation of disconsolate German naval officers boarded the battlecruiser HMS Renown moored off Queensferry. Vice-Admiral Edmund Drummond glared at his guests and asked coldly, “Have the terms of the surrender which were handed to the Commander-inChief of the German Fleet by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force been received by you?” Kapitän zur See Krüger replied simply “Ja”. At last, five years and eight months after the sinking of the Athenia, Scotland’s sea war was over. It is now clear that Germany never had enough U-boats to win the Battle of the Atlantic and, once the naval and industrial power of the United States had been fully mobilised, the outcome was never in any doubt. But the cost of keeping the Atlantic lifeline open had been grievous; 3,663 merchant ships had been sunk and well over 30,000 Allied seamen and airmen had died. Most have only a sailor’s grave, but many lie today in often remote Scottish cemeteries. Some, like the Anu’s dead buried in Dundee are identified; others have their last resting places marked only by the words: “A Sailor of the 1939-1945 War – Known unto God.” The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest single campaign of the Second World War and Scotland had been in the front line from first to last. The stakes were never higher and without Scotland’s people, her ports, her naval bases, her airfields and her shipyards, Allied victory would have been impossible.