2/17/2024 0 Comments German wolfpack logoThe SOE may also have had little faith in the information from Bury. Gleaves was also the SOE’s ship: taking her away from the convoy would remove the SOE from the battle. He had only one destroyer, Gleaves, while the rest of his group, including Spencer, were too slow to run a U-boat down or drive it off. Ideally he ought to have pushed out high-speed HF/DF-directed patrols to drive off each U-boat as it made its sighting report-that’s what Bury’s captain expected him to do-and at the same time order the convoy to take evasive action. The information of U-boat contact reports put the SOE on the horns of dilemma. The Admiralty warned the SOE that day that three U-boats from Wolf Pack Hecht had sighted the convoy, and that five more were moving in. On that day, Bury’s HF/DF operators plotted three U-boat contact reports as U-569, U-124 and U-94 settled in around ONS 92. The SOE had exercised A.3 prior to its departure from Londonderry, so the group was trained, and, by the standards of the day, ready.ĭönitz had wanted to keep Wolf Pack Hecht tightly controlled until it was fully on station and ready for operations May 14, but a chance encounter between ONS 92 and U-569 on May 11 set the battle rolling. Unfortunately, A.3 possessed no High Frequency Direction Finder, although a set was carried by the rescue ship His Majesty’s Ship Bury, and only Bittersweet-British-owned, but RCN operated-was fitted with modern 10-cm type 271 radar. The rest of A.3 was Canadian: the corvettes Algoma, Arvida, Bittersweet and Shediac. The escort was A.3, the last nominally American group in the mid-ocean, led by the USS Gleaves, the United States Coast Guard Cutter Spencer, and the Senior Officer, Escort Commander J.B. The first transatlantic convoy intercepted in May by Wolf Pack Hecht was ONS 92, a slow, 42-ship convoy headed for Halifax. Although in the end Allied losses were modest, the battles confirmed the vulnerability of the main convoys, and-for the British-their lingering suspicions about Royal Canadian Navy operational effectiveness. That made them easy targets, and the first test was so successful that Dönitz kept the group together and harried the main trade routes for a month. He suspected, rightly, that the Allies were saving time and escorts by sticking to the Great Circle route-the most direct line across the North Atlantic. Out there, U-boats en route to North American waters had bumped into transatlantic convoys, and so it made sense for German Admiral Karl Dönitz to learn more about the routes the convoys followed, and the quality of their escorts.ĭönitz tested the mid-ocean defences in early May by grouping U-boats in transit into a temporary Wolf Pack. When looking at the Atlantic war in the spring of 1942, historians tend to focus on the carnage that occurred in North American waters, and not so much on the dreadful situation facing convoys and their escorts in the middle of the Atlantic. The convoy’s escorts could not rob Dönitz of success. German Admiral Karl Dönitz seized an opportunity in the spring of 1942 when he sent a Wolf Pack-a group of U-boats-into the mid-Atlantic against a slow-moving convoy.
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