Chapter 11; The Big Bad Wulf

The type at present in operation is an all-metal monoplane with a span of a hundred and eight feet and a length of seventy eight. It has four engines ; in a " blister " beneath its body there are cannon, machineguns and bombs. It has little armour, and perhaps for this reason is known in the Luftwaffe as the " tinfoil " bomber.

At first these Kondors-to give them the name by which they are usually known, though it applies strictly only to the civil version of the type-were used mainly to attack shipping. This phase in its intensity lasted somewhat less than six months. The steadily increasing skill with which the gunners of our merchantmen handle their guns, the anti-aircraft fire of the naval escorts to the convoys, the fighters manned by pilots of Fighter Command and of the Fleet Air Arm catapulted from the decks of ships, the patrolling aircraft of Coastal Command have all played their part in forcing the Kondor to adopt a passive rather than an active role.

At the outset the Focke-Wulfs found them selves at an advantage, but as the ships which were the objects of their attack became more heavily armed they were no longer able to face the mounting casualties to their line of battle. They began to abandon attack for reconnaissance. It became, and still is, their practice to try to discover a convoy, shadow it, and send out wireless signals giving its whereabouts so that it may be attacked by any U-boat within range. This co-operation between U-boat and Focke-Wulf first became evident in February 1941

Before then, however, the Kondors had 6hown considerable enterprise on their own account, for they attacked seventy-eight ships in the first three months of 1940. Their daily activity was the subject of special concern on the part of the Commander-in-Chief, Coastal Command, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry, who took energetic steps to deal with a form of attack which threatened to increase in severity and to achieve striking results. Their efforts were not immediately successful, for 36 ships were attacked in the month of April.

It was on the 6th May that the first encounter occurred between a Focke-Wulf and a Catalina. A running fight ensued, broken off at frequent intervals as the aircraft lost each other in the clouds. By the skilful use of cloud cover the Catalina twice got within range, on the second occasion silencing the enemy front gunner and scoring a number of hits. The Kondor replied but without much success, most of its fire going well below the Catalina. The German aircraft finally made off at 10.0 in the morning, some three hours after it had first been sighted.

The falling-off in attacks by Focke-Wulf Kuriers on shipping in the Atlantic began in May and continued with slight ups and downs until the end of the year. Altogether 220 attacks were made during 1941 in the area of the Group mainly concerned with the Battle of the Atlantic. That they diminished as the year went on was largely due to the efforts of this Group. Not only were they attacked by our flying boats far out in the Atlantic, but the shorter range land aircraft played an important part. It was, indeed, not a little due to their efforts that the Focke-Wulfs were compelled to fly much farther afield, or rather " a-sea." To patrol too close to land was to risk a fight.

The story of one encounter between a Hudson and a Focke-Wulf on 23rd July can be told in the words of the Hudson's pilot. The Hudson had just taken leave of a convoy which it had been protecting throughout the morning. The usual farewell signals had been exchanged, when a naval corvette was seen flashing a signal with its lamp. " Suspicious aircraft to starboard," it read. The captain of the Hudson thought that in all probability the corvette had mistaken for an enemy a Wellington of Coastal Command known to be in the neighbourhood. When he himself caught sight of it he made the same error.

" I flew over," he said, " to have a look at her, pulling down my front gun sights just for practice. In fact, I was just remarking to Ernie (the navigator and second pilot) that we were in a lovely position, and that I had the Wellington beautifully in the sights, when he suddenly let out a wild Irish oath - Ernie is from Ulster - and shouted : ' It's a Kondor ! ' " Automatically I increased speed and he ran back to man one of the side guns. The wireless operator grabbed another. The rear gunner swung his turret round and trained his twin Brownings. Flying towards the convoy, at about a hundred feet above the sea, was one of the big Focke-Wulf Kondors. We were overhauling him fast. Whether he saw us or not I don't know, but at four hundred yards I opened up with about five bursts from my front guns. I don't think I hit him. He returned the fire at once from his top and bottom guns and I could see his tracer bullets whipping past the nose of the Hudson in little streaks of light. But he missed us and his pilot turned slightly to starboard and ran for it parallel to the course of the convoy. " We had the legs of him all right. We were overhauling him very fast. Once he put his nose up a trifle, as though meditating a run for the clouds. He must have decided he couldn't make it and was safer where he was, right down on the sea. As we drew closer in my rear gunner opened fire. He was firing forward and I could see his tracer nipping over my wing. Ernie watched it flash straight past him as he waited with his side gun pointing through the window. We drew closer and closer. The Kondor began to look like the side of a house. At the end all I could see of it was part of the fuselage and two whacking big engines. My rear gunner was pumping bullets into him all the time. When we were separated by only forty feet I could see two of his engines beginning to glow. I throttled back a bit so as not to over-shoot him or, what was more likely, crash into him. For one short moment Ernie saw a white face appear at one of the windows in the Kondor's side. Then it disappeared. "Just then the Kondor began to turn away. His belly was exposed to us and Ernie opened fire with the side gun, the rear gunner keeping up his stream of bullets all the time. There was a wisp of smoke, a sudden belching of smoke, and then flames shot out from beneath his two port engines. He turned away to starboard and I made a tight turn to port ready to come round at him again. I remember vividly thinking that I must keep up, we were so close to the sea. We came out of the turn and I could see the Kondor again flying steadily away, seemingly unhurt. I was wild with disappointment. I thought he had got away with it. Then I saw he was getting lower and lower and next minute he hit the sea. I found myself yelling : ' We've got him ! He's in the sea. Ernie, we've got him ! ' The gunner was yelling down the inter-com, too, great, strange, exultant Yorkshire oaths. " It was only then that we realised how hard and how silently we had all been concentrating, and how full the Hudson was of cordite fumes, and how short of petrol we were getting.
	"We flew over the Kondor-its wing-tips were just awash-and Ernie photographed him."

	"Four of the crew were id the water, two hanging on to their rubber dinghy, which was just inflating."

Two corvettes were rushing to pick them up and the whole crew seemed to be crowded on the deck of the leading one, waving and shouting to us. One man was waving his shirt. Another was in pyjamas. Our relief Hudson and the Wellington on U-boat search were circling round too, and as we made off for home we could see the white puffs of steam as all the ships in convoy sounded their sirens."

The capacity of the Focke-Wulf to do harm is being reduced still further as more American four-engined Liberators come into service. These aircraft can compete on more than equal terms with the Kondor. They are heavily armed and can remain in the air up to twenty hours, A sortie made by one of them in October gives some indication of their possibilities.

The Liberator took off at 5.0 a.m. and met the convoy it was detailed to protect at 8.30. It carried out its patrol until 1.0 p.m., when a signal from the convoy's Commodore sent it to investigate a suspicious aircraft seven miles astern. It was a Kondor, and what is probably the first duel between two four-engined land aircraft took place. It lasted ten minutes. It was indecisive, the Kondor eventually turning sharply and crossing two hundred feet above the Liberator to disappear into cloud.

Some time later another Kondor, or possibly the first, was seen, but before the Liberator could get within range it, too, had sought the refuge of cloud cover. The Liberator went in pursuit, when the captain spotted a submarine on the surface three miles away on the port bow. He abandoned the now invisible Kondor, dived from a height of 1,200 feet to 50 feet and dropped a stick of depth charges. There were three explosions throwing up huge columns of water and then, after a short interval, a fourth explosion underneath the surface.

" The sea shook and began to boil. A dark centre appeared and rings went out from it." The crew of the Liberator had hopes that they had caused the U-boat some hurt. On landing at base they discovered that only three of the four depth charges released had fallen. One had hung up. There had, however, been four explosions. A blade of one of the propellers was perforated, but this, too, was not discovered until after the Liberator had landed, no difference in the performance of the engines or propeller having been noticed during the flight.

The menace of the Focke-Wulf, though not eliminated, has been greatly reduced. Sunderlands, Catalinas and Hudsons, all of them far slower aircraft, have again and again gone into the attack without pause or thought of the odds. They are still doing so whenever they encounter the enemy and he stays to fight. " Who's afraid of the big bad Wulf " is inscribed on the walls of many of the Stations from which they set out. Their deeds supply the answer.

Some account of the Battle of the Atlantic has now been given. It is, of necessity, incomplete, for the end is not yet, nor in all probability will it be reached so long as fighting between ourselves and Germany continues. To speak, therefore, of a decision would be wrong, for none has as yet been achieved. From the beginning the Germans have been loud and lavish in their claims.

On 28th January, 1941, Grand Admiral Raeder felt able to announce to the dockyard workers of Germany that the last traces of imports into Great Britain "are being dealt with everywhere in the Atlantic, in the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific." He went on to assure them that since the beginning of the war 6,300,000 tons of Allied merchant shipping had been sunk.

On 24th February, 1941, the Admiral's chief took up the tale. Hitler informed the Party in its Munich Beer Cellar that " the struggle by sea is only now beginning. . . . In the last two days surface vessels and U-boats have sunk 215,000 tons.190,000 were sunk by U-boats, 125,000 yesterday, in one convoy." A month later Deutschlandsender struck a more poetical note. "The wolf pack of the ocean," it said, "has got hold of another strongly protected convoy off the African coast. 77,000 tons of shipping were lost."

During October 1941, according to the Donau wireless news, " the German Air Force sank 168,000 tons of British shipping in the waters around England." It was left to Radio Paris to complete the picture of our doom. " U-boats," it proclaimed on 15th November, 1941, " have been so successful in hunting British convoys that they find themselves rather idle."

It is, of course, possible that these and other claims have been made in good faith and that the German High Command when adding up the figures really believe what the U-boat and Focke-Wulf captains -those of them, that is, who return- tell them. It is also possible that they find it advisable to give the German public heartening news from time to time. Or perhaps they are adopting a more subtle plan and seek, by vaunting the prowess of the German Navy and Air Force, to provoke our own High Command into publishing the facts.

It is best, perhaps, to judge these claims by comparing them with those made concerning the losses inflicted on His Majesty's ships and vessels since the outbreak of war. If the Germans are correct they have sunk most of the Royal Navy more than once, and it is now keeping the seas with minus 29 capital ships and minus 13 aircraft carriers, escorted by minus 96 cruisers and minus 2 destroyers.

The enemy's tale of our losses during the Battle of Britain may also be usefully remembered. Goring and Goebbels then boasted that 2,380 British aircraft were destroyed in combat alone in the space of 78 days. During that time we did, in fact, lose 758 aircraft. It is idle to follow the enemy into these realms of fancy. The ordinary citizen of this country has a very shrewd idea of the truth, for he can base his opinion on the circumstances of his own daily life, and that is enough for him.

Official secrecy, which has to be imposed in order to prevent the enemy from learning what he would much like to know, is not the only veil spread over this battle. There is a more tangible shroud -the surface or the sea itself.

Only the enemy can know the number of his submarines compelled to submerge because an aircraft of Coastal Command is quartering the sky overhead, and the number of hours thus spent in cruising at a speed only twenty-five per cent. of what it might have been. Even this knowledge cannot be complete and perfect, for not every U-boat that sets out returns, How many knots of speed they have lost, how many miles of sea they have failed to traverse, how many meetings with others of their kind have not been held at the scheduled hour and place must be a matter of constant speculation for Admiral Raeder and his staff.

It would, however, be a grave mistake to suppose that the Allies have as yet won the battle. To do so would be completely to misjudge the nature of the conflict. Such a struggle as this, carried on as it is over so vast an area, can have no rapid, no easy conclusion. Neither success nor failure has so far crowned our arms. The fight sways to and fro. The red line on the graphs recording the sinkings of merchant vessels, pinned to the walls of secret rooms in the Headquarters of the Naval or Air Commanders, rises and falls. One month it may move upwards, the next downwards. The variations are often sharp ; rarely does it run level.

On both sides of the Atlantic there are gathered millions who realise what is at stake and who wait, as once an Athenian army waited by the harbour of Syracuse, the issue of a mortal conflict. Unlike the troops of Nikias they are not passive spectators. They have it in their power to exercise a decisive influence on the combat, for they are at work producing the weapons of war and the ships which must carry them to the field. If victory is to be won they must identify themselves with the effort to achieve it.

The battle by air and sea is relentless and there is no pause. It is being fought by the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Merchant Navy, the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force, to whom the puissant aid of the sea and air forces of America has of late been extended. In the air the brunt is being borne by Coastal Command. Nowhere better than over the Atlantic is its unofficial motto " We Search and Strike " more exactly followed.