The Fight is Harder

The German High Command admitted a bitter truth last week: U-boat sinkings in April were less than half the 926,000 tons claimed in March. Berlin's excuses only made the admission more impressive: the weather had been "extraordinarily bad"; it was impossible to watch all the convoy lanes at once; strongly escorted convoys were bagging three and four submarines in each attack.

But the U.S. Navy's Secretary Frank Knox had wisely cautioned against the large assumption that the April decline indicated victory over the U-boats. The Allied navies still expected to have a difficult struggle for months to come. Said Germany's Vice Admiral Friedrich Luetzow, broadcasting last week: "We willingly concede that our enemies leave nothing undone to make it very difficult for our U-boats. We admit that the enemy is doing everything in his power to render his anti-U-boat defenses ever more effective, to replace the losses by new construction and by strengthening discipline among his crews . . . the fight will become ever harder. We are prepared for this."

In the long view, the odds were mounting against Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz and his submarine force. The complete conquest of the Mediterranean--yet to be achieved--will afford a shortened route to Suez and the Persian gate to Russia, deprive the Germans of rich hunting in the South Atlantic. Possibly with an eye to further excuses, the Germans last week let out a report from Berlin that Russia is counting on a submarine-free supply route from the west coast of North America through the protected waters of the Arctic Sea. If this route is used instead of that to Murmansk, said the Berlin report, the Arctic convoys "will not lose one small thing."

Perhaps the time had come for Grand Admiral Doenitz' surface fleet to take a hand. Sweden reported that the Nazi fleet at Trondheim, Norway, had steamed northward to take over the Luftwaffe's task of attacking Allied convoys on the Murmansk run. A realistic view was that both the Germans and the Allies considered Southern Europe to be the next great theater of action, and that the Nazis were gathering their most effective forces --U-boats on the Atlantic approaches, aircraft over the Mediterranean--for a supreme test.

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