Roy Conyers Nesbit - Ultra Versus U-Boats: Enigma Decrypts in the National Archives

A t the outbreak of the Second World War the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) faced enemies at sea which seemed vastly superior in strength and experience to the vessels and personnel it could muster. These were the combined forces of the British and French Navies. The outlook seemed so gloomy that Grossadmiral Dr Erich Raeder, the Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, told Adolf Hitler that all his force could do was to show the world how to die with dignity. This force consisted of the fast battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau , the pocket battleships Deutschland, Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer , the ancient and obsolete battleships Schlesien and Schleswig-Holstein , five cruisers and seventeen destroyers. There were also fifty-six U-boats, of which thirty-five were immediately operational; of the total, twenty-five were ocean-going types while the remaining thirty-one had been designed for coastal work, primarily in the Baltic Sea.

In contrast, the Royal Navy alone possessed sixteen battleships, plus five more of the King George V class nearing completion, sixty-one cruisers and ten aircraft carriers. Some of these were outdated, but the Royal Navy stood to be victorious in encounters between heavy warships. If the war could have been deferred for about three years, the Kriegsmarine would have become far more powerful. In May 1935 Hitler had announced that he was deliberately breaching the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on his country after the First World War. The Luftwaffe was already being re-formed, conscription into the armed forces was being reintroduced, and a vast new programme for rebuilding the Kriegsmarine was under way. There were to be six new battleships, two or three new aircraft carriers, eighteen new cruisers, about thirty new destroyers and about 17,500 tons of new U-boats. All these were intended to be completed by 1942. Hitler had undertaken to restrict this growth so that the ultimate strength of the Kriegsmarine would be no more than 35 per cent of that of the Royal Navy, although of course guarantees from this individual were worthless. The international community was intent on a desire to avoid another ruinous armed conflict and did nothing to impede this programme.

Raeders words were prophetic, but there would be years of unremitting struggle in a harsh and unforgiving environment before they became a reality. His prognosis underestimated the enormous successes that would be achieved by his small U-boat Arm from the early months of the war and the dismay, coupled with fury, which it would cause in Britain.

It was only a few hours after Britain and France declared war on 3 September 1939, in response to Germanys invasion of Poland two days earlier, that the British public received a foretaste of the conflict at sea. The Type VIIA U-30 under the command of Leutnant Zur See Fritz-Julius Lemp was already out in the Atlantic in preparation for war, about 250 miles north-west of Ireland, when a lookout spotted a large vessel steaming in a westerly direction. At 2100 hours Lemp ordered two torpedoes to be fired. Both hit the vessel, which sank. She was the liner Athenia of 13,581 tons, carrying over 1,100 passengers to America, including child evacuees. Of those on board, 112 lives were lost, including 28 Americans.