Pitched Battle

A speech with the sound of history about it was made before Parliament last week. The First Lord of the Admiralty--the authority on naval affairs who is personally most responsible to Parliament and the people, the receptacle of active Admirals' suggestions and complaints, the focus of naval policy, a man who more than any other knows to what extent Britannia rules the waves at a given moment--rose to report. What he said about merchant shipping was a chilling mouthful.

First Lord Albert Victor Alexander coined a phrase to make vivid a threat: he warned his people that they were now witnessing "The Battle of the Atlantic." This was not a matter of slow attrition: this thing would have all the hazards and blood and suddenness of a pitched battle.

The burden of his speech was urgent: "Never before in the history of our sea power have we had such need of many more ships and great numbers of men." Britain was at last wide awake to the immediate threat of the counter-blockade, had at last realized that this time the sea offensive was incomparably more dangerous than in 1917.

Unlike 1917, the whole coast of Europe from Narvik to Bayonne was now German. The shipbuilding facilities of the whole Continent were now German. Germany now had not 100, but (with the Italians) at least 300 U-boats, and more being readied. Germany now had long-range bombers, notably the Focke-Wulf Kurier, specifically designed to ride far out over the seaways to sink ships.

In this battle, Germany had again improved its tactics. Before the war one of Britain's most closely guarded weapons was the ASDIC (after the Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee), a supersonic wave locater. The Germans apparently entered the war under the impression that the British still had nothing much better than hydrophones, which picked up the sounds of U-boat motors in World War I. Early in the war tactics were therefore to attack, then drop to the bottom and shut off the motor. This was meat for the ASDIC.

After the fall of France, Germans examined ASDICs on French destroyers. Then U-boats tried a new tactic. From a distance they fired what the British called "Browning shots"--hit-or-miss attempts aimed diagonally into convoys from an extreme range of five or six miles--and then ran for it. This tactic was unsuccessful, for at such long range torpedoes often missed altogether.

Last week, after a winter layoff during which 4,000 raw ratings were trained at the Kiel Submarine School by veteran U-boatmen, the Germans were out in force again with another tactic which was the fruit of winter experiments: hunting in packs. Survivors arriving at a Canadian port told of having been attacked by "at least three or four" German submarines; others arriving in Manhattan referred to "a nest of at least seven subs." In one recent case, nine simultaneous torpedo explosions gave a convoy its first warning of the presence of submarines.

"They lose more subs that way." said one survivor, "but we lose more ships. The Jerries seem to feel it's worth it."

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