Publisher: Seaforth Publishing, £19.99, 1st ed
Publication Date: 2007
The book opens with a review of Britain’s pre-war anti-submarine preparedness, with a discussion of the warships available for convoy duty from the ageing V & W-class destroyers, to the pretty coastal corvettes of the Bird-class, including the sloops, A/S trawlers and the destroyers building under rearmament programmes. The author then goes on to follow the various phases of the Battle of the Atlantic, with the advancing and competing technologies – particularly radar and HF/DF direction-finding - holding centre-stage. He also touches throughout on the opposing German submarine development, concluding the book with an excellent summary of the ‘what-if?’ scenario raised by the Walther U-boats.
The Allied battle is dominated by the slow struggle for improvement in escort design and performance with its attendant difficulties and set-backs, the lack of resources and the use of extempore measures. The text occasionally presupposes the reader has at least a working familiarity with the subject so that some fundamental aspects risk being lost to the less well-informed. The book’s single stark reference to Gilbert Roberts’s ‘group’ training is an example. Such brevity emasculates the author’s point; another occurs when he states that Sir Frederick Bowhill ‘understood the ways of ships and the sea, but with an airman’s eyes’. This falls irritatingly short of the full story – which is a pity if one does not know that the distinguished C-in-C of Coastal Command began his career in the merchant marine. (Even turning to the reference quoted in John Terraine’s Business in Great Waters fails to make this clear.) But Mr Brown gives more credit than most to the early Commanders-in-Chief of Western Approaches: Dunbar-Nasmith and Noble, much of whose thunder was stolen, historically speaking, by Horton.
The author really gets into his stride and his metier in the last half of the book, paying tribute to the later escort designs and their sea-keeping capabilities, which is one of the best summaries on the subject this reviewer has come across. Mr Brown adds a dash of comparison with the elegant post-war Leander-class by way of a bench-mark. He makes the point, so often forgotten by modern seafarers, that a serious reduction in speed in bad weather will transform conditions on board and render damage negligible.
Food and living conditions have an effect on morale and were uniformly brutish in all classes of escort (there is a telling photograph of meat being prepared on the open deck amid the depth-charges), while losses of men overboard though acknowledged as ‘high’ is not precisely quantified, which is a pity. Referring to all this the author makes the point that: ‘Some of these problems arose…from the belief that sailors should be tough. There was little experience of sustained bad-weather, as peace-time exercises were usually held in times and areas where bad weather was unlikely.’ Much might have been learned from mercantile practice had the two sea-services talked to each other, while the knowledge of the cure without the means to effect it frustrated many of the RNR officers manning wartime convoy escorts.
The final sections on production and cost-benefit analysis are excellent, opening up fields for future research. The comparative costs of UK and US building are of interest, particularly as the cheaper UK buildings were achieved against a background of trade-union intransigence, blackout and a lack of space; while full tribute is paid to the remarkable transformation in all fields wrought by the Royal Canadian Navy.
As mentioned earlier, the book is lavishly illustrated, though I anticipate a number of master-mariners will object to the Wellington being described as a mere ‘club house’. Unfortunately, however, as with a mis-captioned map, there is some confusion over compass points. The contention that convoys were lightly-laden when ‘eastbound’ is surely incorrect. Merchant ships were the more likely to be in ballast when westbound, and consequently difficult to handle in bad weather.
There are some useful analytical tables embedded in the text so that this book will prove a valuable addition to the bibliography of the Battle of the Atlantic. - Richard Woodman.