Fateful Figures

In April Britain and her Allies lost 488,124 tons of merchant shipping.

This announcement last week provided more talk for the U.S. Senate (see p. ip), confirmed most observers in the opinion that the Battle of the Atlantic was Britain's most crucial struggle. It also shed some interesting new light on the trend of that battle. This loss of almost half a million tons was terrific. The month was the third worst after June 1940, the month of Dunkirk (533,902 tons) and March 1941 (489,229 tons). Later revisions would probably put April above March and into second place.

But April was the month of the evacuation from Greece. The British admitted that 187,054 tons had been sunk in recent "intensive operations" in the Mediterranean--i.e., the Balkan campaign. Losses elsewhere, therefore, were only 301,070 tons--lower than total losses for any of the past twelve months except May 1940. And included in this figure were losses in the South Atlantic, off Africa, in the Indian Ocean, in the Far East. Apparently the convoy system was beginning to tell; perhaps the urgency for U.S. assistance in protecting shipping might be elsewhere than in the narrow northern lanes between America and Britain.

But even so, the total loss for April was grim in its implications. It was so grim, said the Admiralty in its comments on the figure, that ships might soon have to be diverted from carrying American war supplies to carrying food.

The full meaning of this statement was made explicit last week by a New Zealand butter-&-egg man named William Goodfellow, who passed across the U.S. on his way to Britain. William Goodfellow, who is managing director of Amalgamated Dairies, Ltd., of Auckland, stated that "about" 24 out of a fleet of 60 refrigerator ships which had plied from New Zealand to Britain via the Panama Canal had been sunk. Said Dairyman Goodfellow: "There are several million carcasses of mutton and lamb [in New Zealand warehouses] awaiting shipment. We also have an excess of 20,000 tons of butter--with a new season's make coming on." The immediate need: 20 refrigerator ships. If Dairyman Goodfellow's case was typical of all of Britain's food-suppliers, then sinkings were taking on a new and more dangerous threat. How could Britain build and maintain her war machine if ships to carry munitions material had to be used to keep her from starving?

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