Nazis, U-boats and the Battle for the Atlantic (2025) s01e01 Episode Script
Episode 1
1
The north coast of Ireland
has been a huge maritime highway
for centuries.
And that has meant that we have
one of the greatest collections
of shipwrecks anywhere in the world.
This is such a special place
for divers.
The variety of sunken shipwrecks
here is unique.
I mean, there literally is
nowhere else that has submarines,
ocean-going liners, cargo ships.
You know, it's all here.
20 miles off the Irish coast
..a specialist team
are diving into history
It's mind-blowing, the scale
of everything down there.
It's quite sort of scary
to see these things
and what they were built to do.
..to rediscover the lost wrecks
These are really big things,
and you just feel
..so small.
..of World War Two's
longest and most critical battle
..the Battle of the Atlantic.
RAID SIREN BLARES
Up!
From 1939 to '45,
over 100,000 lives were lost
at sea
So many bodies washed ashore
that the local authorities
are talking about reopening
famine pits.
..and brought Britain to the brink
of total defeat.
"Britain's an island,
and if we can cut that off,"
the German high command think,
"then we can starve Britain out,
force her to capitulate."
At the heart of the battle to defeat
the U-boat killing machines
of the German Kriegsmarine
was a small city in
Northern Ireland.
The hinge on which
the Battle of the Atlantic moved
was actually the City of Derry.
80 years after one of the most
perilous conflicts of World War II,
experts are re-examining
the pivotal moments.
We have a document here from 1940
I don't think has been
in the public domain.
Uncovering hidden history
"The period between 1940 and 1945,
"I was a prisoner of war in
Germany."
And he signed it.
..revealing unsung heroes
The pilot tried to take off again,
but they clipped
the side of the ship
and they were in the Atlantic
for about an hour,
the three of them.
..and laying bare
the very human cost of war.
You read something
and it was written by your father,
which is the closest we ever came.
To me, it's a gift.
In this deadly game of
cat and mouse
The U-boats could hide themselves
in the dark
and attack whenever it suited
to them.
"The Hedgehog was the very latest
"and the most desperately
secret weapon
"designed for the discomfort
of U-boats.
"They never knew what hit them."
..the allies and the Nazis
were in a race
against time and technology.
It's not just one side winning
the whole time.
There's the punch and counter-punch.
There's the technology introduced.
There's the reaction
from the allies.
For both sides, the stakes
couldn't have been any higher.
Winning the Battle of the Atlantic
did not guarantee that the Allies
would win the war.
Total war means there's nothing
between what the Nazis called
the final victory or total defeat.
Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
would have meant that the Allies
lost the war.
I'm just looking now at that river.
And if that river could talk,
I'd tell you its story.
It would be worth listening to,
I can tell you.
94-year-old Bert Whoriskey
grew up in Lisahally village
on the banks of the Foyle River,
just 16 miles
from the Atlantic Ocean,
where war was raging.
Just where the crane is now,
there was 12 houses,
and I lived in the middle one -
number six.
And our back gardens came
down to the shore, to the river.
And I think as a wee fella running
up and down there, you know,
not knowing what we were living in,
it's unbelievable.
In May 1945, as a young teenager,
Bert was witness to
an extraordinary moment in history
when the German U-boat fleet
surrendered right outside his house.
NEWSREEL: Eight more U-boats
crept up the waters
of Loch Foyle to Londonderry,
where their surrender was received
by Admiral Sir Max Horton, Commander
in Chief, Western Approaches.
The day they surrendered,
I'll never forget it.
We were out for hours waiting
on them, you know,
wondering what was keeping them.
Were a battleship come up
in front of them,
and that was followed by the U-boats
coming in to surrender at Lisahally.
They just drifted in quietly
and nicely.
Seeing submarines,
as we called them -
you know, they weren't U-boats
to us, those were submarines -
and we thought,
well, here they are now,
and they're full of Germans.
I know when you looked at them,
they were young lads.
They were very few of them
in their 30s, you know,
they were all young fellas.
I can see it all happening again.
I can see the destroyers,
I can see the submarines,
I can see the activity.
You know, it's in there
and it's not going to go away.
The German U-boat fleet ending up in
Londonderry in Northern Ireland
was not mere happenstance.
The port was specifically chosen
by the head of the British Navy,
Admiral Sir Max Horton.
Horton decided that the U-boat fleet
would surrender formally.
And he decided that
the most important base
in the Battle of the Atlantic
had been on the River Foyle.
They would surrender at Lisahally.
And so a token flotilla of U-boats
escorted by three ships
came in through Loch Foyle
into the Foyle at Lisahally
on the 14th of May 1945.
Derry's strategic importance and its
vital contribution to victory
was underlined by the
Allied decision
to stage the final symbolic act of
the battle off this coastline -
Operation Deadlight.
Operation Deadlight in November 1945
is designed to remove
once and for all,
remove the U-boats
as a threat against Great Britain
and her allies.
So, the idea is the over 150 U-boats
that have been surrendered
by Germany
will be removed from service,
and some of them will be scuttled.
They do not want those things
falling back into German hands
and posing a threat in the future.
So all of the boats were shot up
by destroyers or other warships,
and some by aircraft
firing rockets at them.
Apart from a few U-boats,
all of them went to
the bottom of the sea.
This is a significant place
to scuttle these U-boats,
and there's something almost poetic
about it for the allies.
But how did this place become
the most significant location
in the fight against
the Nazi U-boat threat?
RADIO BROADCAST: This morning,
the British ambassador in Berlin
handed the German government
a final note.
Consequently, this country
is at war with Germany.
Just hours after Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain's broadcast,
the Kriegsmarine, Germany's navy,
launched their deadly campaign
in the waters of the Atlantic.
The Battle of the Atlantic breaks
out off the Rock Hall Bank
off the Donegal coast
when on the 3rd of September 1939,
when the British liner Athenia
is torpedoed by a German U-boat.
Up!
And the survivors are picked up
by a Norwegian vessel
and they're brought into Galway,
and this brings back memories
of the First World War,
when the U-boats were very active
off the southern
and eastern Irish coast.
And the U-boat is a sort of
phantasmagorical concept to many,
that people are frightened
by this notion of
the undersea raider
who comes up out of nowhere
and torpedoes ships.
Dr Axel Niestle,
an engineer by trade,
has always been fascinated
by U-boats.
He has spent a lifetime
uncovering and collecting
an extraordinary archive.
This is my private photo
collection of U-boat photographs.
In total, it's about 30,000
I collected over the years,
and they are a source of information
for my work
and also a documentation of
the U-boats
during the Second World War.
When the war broke out,
Germany had a total of 57 U-boats,
and out of these 57 U-boats,
only 48 were able to go on
war patrols at that time,
because the other ones
were either under training
or not ready for service.
And to make things even more worse
was, out of these 48,
there were just 22 U-boats able to
operate in the open Atlantic.
Admiral Karl Donitz, the head
of the Kriegsmarine U-boat fleet,
was a master strategist
who commanded his own submarine
in World War I.
He was convinced that U-boats
were not only key to victory
in the Atlantic theatre,
but the entire war itself.
He said in order to defeat Britain,
it was necessary to have a fleet
of 300 operational U-boats.
So, starting with 57
at the beginning of the war,
he was far away from this target,
but he convinced
not only the commander in chief of
the German Navy,
but even Hitler himself that U-boats
were the only means to
defeat Britain.
The Atlantic Ocean is
the second largest in the world,
stretching from the coast of Ireland
across to Canada and America.
Further south,
it separates the continents
of Africa and South America.
The main theatre of war
was centred in the North Atlantic.
80 years on from their surrender,
the biggest concentration of
U-boat wrecks in the world
can be found here,
just off the north-west coast
of Ireland.
Ha-ha! Here comes the man.
Permission to come aboard?
Good to see you again, boys.
Hey, gentlemen.
Guys, are we ready to go?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
World-renowned underwater cameraman
Rich Stevenson
is leading a team of expert divers.
Their mission -
to locate and capture footage
of some of the deadliest vessels
ever unleashed by the Kriegsmarine.
The most challenging aspect
of capturing images
is the depth of the water
that we're working in.
So, ordinarily, in shallow water,
you can go down,
you can shoot some stuff,
you can come back up, have
a quick look at it, check it's OK,
go back down again, try again -
whereas here, we have to go down.
We have to stay at that depth
for our actual dive time.
And what we get is what we get.
We cannot really influence that.
And we can't really ever be sure
how good it is
until we get back on the surface
again
after two hours of decompression.
So, then, at 50m, this is where
we need a bit of coordination.
We'll stop.
I'll set the camera up
when I feel like
I've got a good view on the wreck.
Ian, you're going to go out to a
horizontal distance away from me
to try and find something nice,
like the conning tower
would be lovely.
I always try and think about who can
bring maybe that little bit more
to a particular job.
And I found that working with people
like Ian and Barry,
because they're both really
experienced deep wreck divers,
I know that they're going to be
able to do the job
that I need them to do.
Ian Taylor is
the team's lighting technician.
It's like climbing a mountain,
innit?
Though doing this sort of diving
is sort of extreme sport,
going places where few people
have gone before.
It's what, it's in our make-up
as a person, innit?
Ian is a is a genuine workhorse,
and he's just someone
who is so comfortable in the water.
He's holding the lights
ten metres above us,
so he can only just about make out
where we are,
and he has to understand
what I'm looking at.
Richie will send me over
to a certain area,
and I've worked with Richie a lot
over the years,
and I sort of get used to working
alongside him.
So he just sort of grunts at me
underwater
and sends me off somewhere, and
I go off and do it.
With hand signals the only form
of communication below the water,
the team will rely on the expertise
of local diver Barry McGill
to guide them along the wrecks.
My role in the trip really is
to show the guys around the wrecks,
to try to pinpoint the main areas
on the wreck as well
that we want to see,
and then maybe show them
little hidden gems
every now and again of things
that maybe on the first day,
you'd swim by if you hadn't
that local knowledge.
So, there's like this
three-way empathy
between the camera operator,
the person in front of the camera
and the person who's lighting.
And if any one of those three
people basically doesn't turn up
in that very short time window,
we end up with
a load of really bad footage.
With a close eye on the weather,
marine charts will help guide
the team
to the exact location
above sunken U-boats.
But in the early months of the war,
it was almost impossible to know
when and where
these once deadly killing machines
would strike.
The U-boats could hide themselves
in the dark
and attack whenever it suited
to them.
It was a little bit difficult
for the British Navy
to accept this situation,
that there had been an aggressor,
an enemy they couldn't catch,
they couldn't sink
because it was evasive.
The Nazi strategy was as simple
as it was effective -
to attack and sink as many vessels
carrying vital supplies to the UK
as they could find.
These included shipping from Canada,
who had joined with the Allies,
but also from America,
who had not yet entered the war.
These are similar tactics
to what are employed
in the First World War.
Britain's an island
and if you can cut her off,
if you can starve her out,
that is useful.
So, Britain pre-war had been getting
a lot of supplies from Europe,
so therefore they needed supplies
from the United States and Canada.
So, the whole point of the path
through the Atlantic,
from the German point of view,
was to interrupt that supply
of food,
war materials, equipment to Britain.
"If we can cut that off,"
the German high command think,
"then we can starve Britain out
and cut her out of the war,
"force her to capitulate."
Over the first months of the war,
the German strategy
seemed to be working.
The British knew they had to protect
their vital Atlantic lifeline
at all costs.
Their counter-strategy -
a convoy system
to protect the vulnerable
merchant ships making the crossing.
The basic idea behind a convoy
is there is strength in numbers.
If you have a single ship
going across the Atlantic,
it is at huge risk of being
picked off - no protection.
But if you have 40 or 50 ships
together,
that's a much bigger group
of ships to protect one another.
So you have naval escort ships
that will surround
the merchant ships
that are carrying those
all-important supplies and people
across the ocean, and they will move
together, a predetermined route,
and their job is to see
those ships across the ocean.
They have weapons.
The merchant ships don't.
They can fire on submarines
and keep those ships safe.
Convoys may have had strength
in numbers,
but they could only move
as fast as their slowest vessel,
leaving them vulnerable.
The whole point of a convoy is that
you concentrate your resources
in one place
where you can protect it.
It sort of seems counterintuitive.
You think, OK, that means
it's a really big, juicy target.
But it also then means that you can
concentrate your escorts,
so your escorts are now
screening the convoy.
The Kriegsmarine had limited numbers
of operational U-boats
in this early phase of the campaign,
but they were preparing
a new strategy
which would ultimately
make them even deadlier.
Whenever we talk about U-boats
in the Second World War,
wolfpack tactic is not far away.
A U-boat on its own
isn't overly effective,
but in a wolfpack, it is.
So, the idea is
a single U-boat will be lurking,
it will be looking for
Allied vessels,
and when it spots a convoy,
it will call its sister U-boats,
and they will muster
on the convoy's position.
And instead of one craft
firing one torpedo,
multiple U-boats fire
multiple torpedoes into a convoy,
and that causes chaos.
There weren't enough escorts
to protect the convoys.
Also, a lot of merchantmen
were sailing independently,
which meant there were
lots of basically rich pickings.
Wolfpack then hardly had any
more than five to ten boats at all,
because there were just 20 boats
at sea at that time at maximum.
But even this small number of boats
could overwhelm the escorts
and could create great havoc
among the convoys in the Atlantic.
By June 1940, as U-boats cut a
deadly path through Allied convoys,
Germany was gaining ground
in Europe, taking France
and gaining five strategic
naval ports on the Atlantic coast.
FANFARE PLAYS
After the fall of France,
the strategic situation
in the war at sea changed completely
because formerly the Germans
were based in the North Sea
and now they had the full French
Atlantic Coast for their bases.
This had huge implications
for the battle raging at sea.
The convoys basically
then had to be re-routed
from the south-western approaches
around the south of Ireland
and up into the Bristol Channel
and the Celtic Sea.
And they re-routed them to come
around the north-western approaches,
which meant around the north of
the island of Ireland.
In contrast to the Nazis'
new foothold along the French coast,
Britain and her allies weren't able
to access ports in Eire
that would have given them vital,
safe harbours
on the edge of the Atlantic.
The Royal Navy had access
to the Foyle,
which became the big escort base,
but they'd had until
just before the war
the use of three other ports
on the island of Ireland.
One was Loch Swilly in Donegal,
the other two were Berehaven
and Cork Harbour,
or Queenstown right down the south,
and operationally, the use
of those three ports during the war
would have been very,
very advantageous for the Royal Navy
and for the allies generally
in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Of course, when we're looking
at Ireland, the island,
during the Second World War,
we're looking at two jurisdictions.
So Northern Ireland, which came
into being in 1921,
and the Irish Free State Ireland,
which came into being in 1922.
The so-called Treaty Ports had only
been transferred back to Ireland
in 1938, 16 years after the country
had won its independence
from Britain.
With Ireland declaring its
neutrality at the outbreak of war,
these ports were now agonisingly
out of reach for the Allies.
Churchill was very critical
of Chamberlain's government
for actually handing those back,
and said that, "You're not
"going to be able to get
these back to the United Kingdom
"should you need them."
There are those who have argued
that it did cost lives in not
having the Treaty Ports.
It's an argument that's impossible
to prove one way or the other.
Whether use of the Treaty
Ports would have saved lives
may be academic now, but
in the initial months of battle,
it was clear the Allies
were desperate for any advantage
they could find.
In the summer of 1940,
what the U-boat crews called
"the happy time",
when they could sink Allied shipping
at will off the Irish coast.
They are wreaking havoc, and
millions of tonnes of shipping,
and many men are going down in the
Atlantic Ocean.
The casualties of war
are very clearly strewn
onto Irish territory.
Primarily, it's bodies,
bodies washed ashore,
during the summer of 1940.
So many bodies washed ashore in Mayo
and Sligo and Donegal that the local
authorities are talking
about reopening famine pits.
Churchill said, "The only
thing that really worried me
"in the Second World War
was the U-boat threat."
More so than the Battle of Britain,
more than anything else,
that was what kept him up at night.
The very thing keeping Britain's
Commander-in-Chief awake at night
was a golden opportunity for the
slick Nazi propaganda machine.
In the summer of 1940, it was a time
when the aces developed.
That means commanding officers
which would easily reach 100,000
tonnes of merchant shipping
being sunk.
Commanding officers like Prien,
like Kretschmer, like Schepke.
And the people in Germany,
they were just lingering
for wartime heroes.
It is in all countries that wartime
heroes are being presented
to the public as a matter
of propaganda.
And so these very successful
commanders were presented
in the newsreels, in the radio,
and even in the newspapers,
almost daily.
These were the names which were also
very much known in the British
public as well, because they were
on the newsreels every time.
And this changed greatly in March
1941, when all three of them
were sunk within a matter of weeks,
much to the disappointment
of the German Admiralty
and to the U-boat arm.
But then, of course, other
commanders filled their places.
One of these new heroes ready
to fill the propaganda vacuum
was 30-year-old Adolf Piening,
commander of U-155.
He would become one of the
most famous aces in the German
Kriegsmarine, and one
of the most deadly.
Today's dive is the U-155.
She's a type IXC long-range U-boat.
And these were designed
to cross the Atlantic,
they were designed to go
to the States, and this particular
boat, commanded by Piening,
was incredibly successful.
It sank, I think, 122,000 tonnes
of shipping.
So a really successful boat,
really historic.
U-155's effectiveness wasn't
just measured in tonnes of shipping
sunk, it was responsible
for nearly 1,000 deaths.
At 76m long,
U-155 was an imposing sight,
compared to earlier models.
Its crew of 52 men could be on
long-range patrol
from seven to ten weeks at a time.
Here you have a typical example
of a photograph on U-155.
So it is taken at Bremen,
at the building yard,
during commissioning ceremony.
On the top we have the crew
assembled onboard the U-boat.
Piening is here, standing
next to the sailor,
and he's greeting the flag.
He was just a prototype
of a German U-boat commander
at that time.
Are you ready, Barry, yeah?
I think we're ready, Michael.
Up truss!
When you start to go down, you feel
slightly intimidated by the size
of this thing.
The submarine's at about 55m.
About 40, you could start seeing the
submarine laying on the seabed.
And when you can see
at sort of distance,
going down a shot line,
it's quite an impressive sight.
You get to see the whole
U-boat in front of you.
It nearly looks more like a ship
that should be on the surface,
as opposed to a U-boat that goes
under the water.
U-155 was equipped with a maximum
of 23 torpedoes.
It had four torpedo tubes
in the bow and two in the stern.
In addition to this, it had
a 10.5cm deck gun,
3.7mm anti-aircraft gun
on the after deck, and the normal
2cm anti-aircraft gun
on the so-called bandstand
aft of the conning tower.
U-155, a type IXC boat, was one
of 54 similar vessels in service.
Only four would make it
through the entire conflict.
As such, it left a trail
of devastation and human tragedy
in its wake.
One of my earliest memories
is walking along this bank.
I'm guessing that I was maybe
four or five.
We were in the city
visiting my grandfather.
I'm unsure what the motivation
for our visit was, but I imagine
that my mum, in the situation
of being a war widow,
would have been looking
to her family for some support
during that time.
David's father, John Sidney Brew,
was an apprentice in the Belfast
shipyard before signing
up to the Navy Reserves
when war broke out.
He left Northern Ireland to join
a ship on the Atlantic convoys
when David was only one year old.
I've no emotional or visual
context for my father.
There wasn't a place for my father,
for some reason.
It was never a subject which
the children were introduced to.
It was just a historical fact
that he was lost at sea.
John Sidney Brew served
on HMS Avenger,
a Royal Navy aircraft carrier.
It was spotted in the dead of night,
120 miles north-west of Gibraltar,
by the lookout on U-155,
commanded by Adolf Piening.
He attacked one of these convoys,
which returned from the landing
grounds of the North African coast
to the United Kingdom, and in one
of these convoys he sighted
and subsequently attacked.
It was HMS Avenger, one
of the very first auxiliary aircraft
carriers employed by the Royal Navy.
Piening's war diary from the time
details the attack.
A convoy was identified at 2.55 am,
but the U-boat was spotted by
escorts and attacked.
From 4.14 am,
U-155 shoots six torpedoes
towards its target.
At 4.18, U-155 crash-dives to avoid
being hit itself.
Piening reports that he hears
the distant sound of detonations.
Sinking of an aircraft carrier
was quite an achievement
and was considered a priority
by U-boat command.
The attack was a massive
success for Germany.
Piening was lauded as a hero.
In contrast, it was a devastating
blow to the Royal Navy,
and to the British government,
who kept details of the tragedy
secret for months.
HMS Avenger sank in two minutes.
Only 12 crew survived,
514 men perished.
Among them was John Sidney Brew,
husband, and father to a young
family, including his one-year-old
son, David,
back in Northern Ireland.
We don't have anything
to remember him by.
The ship was, in my understanding,
catastrophically destroyed, so even
whatever possessions he might have
had at that time
would have been lost.
With no memories of his own,
David has spent a lifetime searching
for the father he never knew.
Much of this was a mystery to me,
so in piecing together all the bits
and pieces, the photographs,
the telegrams from the War Office,
all of these came together
to construct something approaching
a person.
This is a picture of my
sartorially challenged father
when he was working
in the shipyard.
This photograph is with his brother,
Ralph, my uncle.
They look like they were taken
about '38,
'39, possibly.
But it was only in later
years that David made
an incredible discovery.
This is a postcard from my dad.
It just came out of the blue
in tidying up my mum's affairs.
The postcard is from
Barbizon Plaza,
overlooking Central Park, New York.
And it's addressed to
Mr David John Brew.
"Dear David, how would
you like to come with me
"and bring your mother with you?
"I hope you are being a good boy
and looking after Ma."
And there's a cross, "Daddy."
John mailed this postcard just days
before boarding HMS Avenger
in New York,
never knowing it would be the last
contact with his baby son.
You read something, and it was
written by your father.
It's in his handwriting,
he has signed it.
He's addressed it to me, which is
the closest we ever came.
To me, it's a gift, you know,
it's something precious to me
because it's a personal link to him.
Adolf Piening may have been
considered a hero amongst the German
public for his wartime exploits
aboard U-155, but David Brew's story
is a reminder that the service
of these sunken relics
from the Atlantic Theater
had consequences that still
reverberate to this day.
The conning tower is one
of the boat's most vital components.
Piening, or his lookout, would
stand here and identify
targets for attack.
The conning tower, really iconic,
absolutely distinctive.
You really appreciate the size
of it when you see Barry swimming
across the deck.
The hatch was open so we could
have a peer inside there.
That human connection kind of comes
back because that's, you know,
where someone would get
in and out of that submarine,
or the crew would.
I mean, it's just an incredible
thing to consider
that these were operational
U-boat submarines.
Certainly, the conning tower,
they had a set of binoculars matched
to a device called a UZO,
which would allow them to take
the bearing of the ship. That was
then transmitted down to the control
room, and those numbers, the bearing
of the ship, was transmitted
to the torpedo room, and the
torpedoes were then set to go
in a particular direction,
and they would then fire
the torpedoes at the target.
As the highest point on the ship,
the conning tower was also
used by commanders to show
off their prowess in battle.
So this is a tradition from even
World War I, that right
after the start of the war,
individual commanders started
to indicate their sinkings
by individual flags for each ship
they had sunk or torpedoed.
In this case, we have one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight
such flags, indicating eight ships
sunk on this patrol.
In the early part of the war, most
of their sinkings were carried out
on the surface.
They had to surface to charge
their batteries, and they could go
much, much faster on the surface.
And that then allowed them to,
when they spotted a ship,
they could close at much higher
speed.
Generally, the most important point
was to come close to the target
and to attack, mostly unseen,
with a torpedo.
After attacking a vessel,
should they then see a response,
or should they see, say, smoke,
what they think might be a warship
on the horizon, or there
might be an aircraft,
they would then go under,
they would then dive.
Whilst Canada had joined Britain
in its fight against the Nazis
from the beginning, it didn't
have anywhere near the military
might and resource of its nearest
neighbour.
The United States, however,
had resisted formally getting
involved in the war.
That all changed in December
1941 after the Axis
attacked Pearl Harbor.
But the Americans were undertaking
secret preparations long
before this, and they were focused
on Derry.
The first Americans arrived
here at the end of June 1941.
They came to build a naval base
tagged onto the Royal Navy
base at Lisahally.
Of course, this is almost six months
before the Japanese attack
the Americans at Pearl Harbor.
All of a sudden there was
pine trees stripped,
thousands of them came to
Lisahally, and we were wondering,
what are these here for, you know?
And then all of a sudden,
CBs arrived.
They were a construction battalion.
And they started, they put the
steel points onto the pine trees
to build that jetty there.
And they were building the jetty,
building the pumping station,
building tanks for fuel.
Lisahally just changed,
you could say, overnight.
A quiet row of houses where a young
Bert Whoriskey lived on the banks
of the Foyle River, was now
inside the perimeter
of an American Navy base,
as the United States prepared
to officially enter the war.
And, boy, was that active
after that.
It was unbelievable
from there on in, you know.
They built a lot of dockside
facilities as well along the Foyle,
in the city, just on the edge
of the city.
And by the time the base becomes
operational in 1942, there's
actually 5,000 American personnel
in the city.
No longer a tiny city
on the periphery of war,
this was now Base One Europe,
the US Navy's nerve centre
of Atlantic operations.
Derry's importance can be summed up
in the number of ocean-going ships
that were based here.
And that was at one stage of the
war, at the peak, round about 150.
And people who lived through
that time would say that you got
the impression, walking
up the quays, that you could
have walked from one side
of the river to the other
on the ships that were
berthed there.
The next two biggest bases in the UK
were the Clyde and Liverpool.
Between the two of them,
there weren't 100 escort ships.
So Derry is the main muscle,
if you like, for
the Royal Navy's escort fleet.
Derry was particularly important.
It's the first port of call, really,
whenever you're crossing
the Atlantic, it's the first place
that you're going to come to.
It has this base, essentially,
there that can be developed,
there's an infrastructure
that can be built on.
So it's incredibly important
logistically and strategically.
For the city, the changes were huge.
It's one of only two times
in the history of the city
that there's been 100% employment,
and the other time
was the First World War.
We reckon that the population
was probably round about
40,000-45,000 people.
Into that comes in the region
of 30,000-plus service personnel.
Tens of thousands of American troops
were now making the hazardous trip
across the Atlantic.
They knew that seeing Derry would
mean they had reached safe harbour.
With many having never been
outside their own country before,
the US Navy were keen to communicate
the unique circumstances
they would find themselves in.
This is the Pocket Guide
to Northern Ireland,
and this was printed by the War
and the Navy Departments.
The idea was that it would tell
you what you were going to see,
what you were going to experience.
So it tells us a little bit
in the contents pages
about what the country was like,
about the people, their customs
and their manners and about their
arguments.
But the key, particularly
in Ireland, two rules - don't talk
religion, don't talk politics.
"The Irish love to talk.
"Conversation is a highly perfected
form of entertainment.
"An argument for its own sake
is a Scots-Irish speciality."
But they're basically saying,
you know, "The Irish call themselves
"all sorts of names, accuse
each other of the most bizarre
"irregularities, indulge in wild
exaggeration and virulent personal
"abuse, and listening,
"you might be expecting a rousing
fist fight at any moment,
"so whatever you do, don't get
involved, stay out of this."
Another thing American troops
were advised to stay
out of was the Free State, Eire,
the neutral neighbour that lay
just across the Irish border.
This book, sort of under the section
Eire Border Problems, says
that American troops are not
permitted to cross the border.
And it goes on to say
you might find this strange,
but there's this idea of
the shamrock and St Patrick's Day
and the wearing of the green,
and they all belong
to Southern Ireland,
now called Eire.
They're neutral, but Northern
Ireland, and it says it,
"Treasures its union with
England above all things,"
and that there are historic
reasons for this.
The Irish border was a geographic
and political complication
the Allies had to carefully manage.
The island of Ireland had been
partitioned only two decades
previously, in 1921.
Irish leader Eamon de Valera
was determined that Ireland
would remain neutral.
NEWSREEL: Eamon de Valera,
pursuing his dream of a
self-sufficient and peaceful Eire,
has succeeded in maintaining
his nation's complete independence.
95% of Eire's people were convinced
that to enter the war on Britain's
side would have been to betray
the cause of independence
to which Ireland's heroes
devoted their lives.
Ireland, like other small states -
Belgium, Luxembourg, Afghanistan,
another neutral state - declared
their neutrality in the war.
They're neutral in a war zone,
be it the Battle of Britain,
the Battle of the Atlantic.
You're neutral until you're invaded.
The United States declared
its neutrality and gave up
its neutrality after
Pearl Harbor, and for Ireland,
it was expected to be the same.
De Valera and his senior military
officers knew that
there was every possibility
that Ireland would be invaded
by the Allies or the Axis.
Well, this is a very important
document that I have here,
and this is a meeting
that takes place between the Chief
of Staff of the Defence Forces
and the Minister for Defence,
and the two men are discussing
how Ireland will react should there
be an invasion by either
Britain or by Germany.
McKenna and Traynor decided,
"If Britain were the first
aggressor,
"do we immediately attack
her invading elements?"
And they decided, yes, but if
Britain should invade Ireland,
who would Ireland look for external
aid from?
And the two men could not decide.
That was left over for future
discussion.
However, in the event of a German
invasion, it's very different.
Same question.
"If Germany is the first
aggressor, do we immediately
"attack her invading elements?"
"Yes. But if so, is it the intention
to look for external aid
"and from whom?" And here a decision
is taken, and it's Britain.
It was a pragmatic neutrality.
De Valera was a mathematician.
And maths, I think, factored
into everything that he did
and thought.
And I think De Valera realised
that, in the long run,
Germany was not going to win.
So he maintained this facade,
if you like, of neutrality.
And yet, as a number of historians
have described it,
it was a neutrality in the favour
of the Allies.
De Valera made it very clear
on the outbreak of war,
he made it very clear to the German
minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel,
that Ireland would have a certain
consideration for Britain.
I may not like the British,
but I like the Germans even less.
One of the ways that Ireland also
helps the Allies,
a very obvious way,
is that De Valera does not stop,
or the government does not stop
Irish men and women
getting involved in the war effort.
There's about 150,000 Irish
men join the British Army.
This photograph was taken in
July 1945, but it's remarkable
because these four brothers
went to war in the sense that
Uncle Claude
went to the First World War,
survived being gassed,
and came home.
My grandfather Kendal,
he was in the Army and he fought
in the Second World War.
And then the other two brothers,
Uncle Evelyn and Uncle Paul,
who was the youngest, were both
naval officers.
So we're a very fortunate family,
fairly highly decorated as well,
but they were lucky too.
The Chavasse brothers, from County
Waterford on the southern coast
of Ireland, served in the British
forces with distinction.
Their heroic exploits have become
the stuff of legend.
At that time, there were a lot
more Protestant families down here.
There was a lot more connections
to England and to Britain.
My great-grandfather
really had decided,
"No, I'm going to be Irish.
I want an Irish family."
We're going to be brought
up here in Ireland.
And we threw our lot
in with the new country.
For the young Chavasse brothers,
growing up on the coast
between Cork and Waterford
was an idyllic childhood.
Here they all are, lined up, and
they're going to run a paper chase.
So what will happen there is
possibly the person on the horse
will ride out in front dropping bits
of paper, and the others
will then have to run along
after it.
But with the paper chase, it's not
just about how you lay the trail,
but you run false trails as well.
I would suggest that some
of the stuff that was going on
in the North Atlantic would have
been about false trails too.
This whole thing of playing
in a team and chasing,
it started at a very, very young
age. It got a lot more serious,
obviously, as the years went by, you
know?
Evelyn Chavasse left Ireland
for Naval College in England
when he was just 13 years old.
20 years later, in 1942,
he was an Atlantic escort commander
stationed out of Derry, 250 miles
away from where he was born
on the same island, but a world
away from Irish neutrality.
Evelyn Henry Chavasse was a regular
Royal Navy officer.
Very, very professional, as the
Royal Navy's officers were.
He's brought into, if you like, the
escort service of the Royal Navy.
Evelyn's unpublished memoir,
detailing his time as an escort
commander on the Atlantic convoys,
is a precious family heirloom.
It gives a first-hand account
of what happened at sea.
"If I had any clue where a U-boat or
a pack of U-boats might be lurking,
"my first concern was to dodge
them - run away, in fact -
"instead of charging straight
at them.
"And as we much so wanted to do."
So they want to go and do that.
But in fact, their thing
was they were escorts.
They had to step away
from the fight.
They weren't to get involved
in the fight.
The guiding light for an RN officer
is Nelson's last signal
at Trafalgar, which was
engage the enemy more closely.
Now, for a convoy escort commander,
your principle was to get
the convoy safely to port.
In other words, you were obliged
to avoid the enemy
as much as you possibly could.
He understood,
"I have to get this cargo
"whether it is oil supplies, food
supplies, whether it's armaments,
"whether it's men, I have to get it
safely across the Atlantic.
"That's all I have to do."
But the reality of war
in the Atlantic Theater
meant that escort naval commanders
sometimes had no choice
but to invoke the spirit of Nelson
and engage the enemy
at close quarters.
"Place - North Atlantic.
"Westbound convoy under attack
by a pack of U-boats.
"My escort group was whizzing
around like maddened blue bottles,
"keeping the devils down -
successfully so far. Nobody sunk.
"Two supporting aircraft
had depth charged a U-boat
"and blown her to the surface."
"One of my ships, which had been
having fun and games with another
"U-boat astern of the convoy, raced
up to rejoin and passed close
"to the first U-boat, obviously
in distress and about to sink,
"with her crew on deck, waving
frantically to be rescued.
"Our chap promptly signalled me by
R/T asking my permission
"to pick up the Germans.
"This was the second or perhaps
third most ghastly moment
"of my life. I had clear evidence of
a further U-boat threat
"ahead of the convoy, and the safety
of the convoy was my job.
"I needed all my escorts
around the convoy.
"I deliberately condemned those
Germans to death and said no."
This has been written
in the early 1980s.
He's a Christian, so I think
he's looking back on his life
and is concerned about some
of those decisions
that he had to make.
Like many sailors then and since,
Psalm 107 held a special meaning
for Evelyn Chavasse.
"They that go down to the sea
in ships:
"And occupy their business
in great waters,
"These men see the works
of the Lord:
"And his wonders in the deep."
For men on the convoys,
faith was a powerful thing
to keep hold of.
The same must have been true
for the Germans
who found themselves
onboard U-boats.
One wonders how the men felt being
recruited into the Kriegsmarine
and then being allocated to U-boats.
And you know that you've
probably got
a one in three chance of survival.
They ain't great odds.
75% of the U-boat force is killed.
That is the highest rate of loss
in the entire German military
in the Second World War.
They have an average survival
prediction of about 60 days,
and the average age of a U-boat crew
member is about 20 years old.
It's a very tough environment
to be in.
As the deadly cat and mouse
game continued to play out
in the Atlantic Theater, both sides
were desperate to develop
new strategies which might give
them an advantage.
So we'll all jump in as a three,
assess the current.
First five minutes,
just shoot some nice
big wides if we can.
The team's next dive is on an
incredibly rare Type VIID U-boat,
which was adapted
from existing designs in an attempt
to make it even deadlier
to allied shipping.
This is the U-218,
and they were built to mine
around the British Isles.
I haven't done this one before,
so naturally I'm interested to see
what it's like.
It's a lovely dive.
A typical Type VII. Five mine
chutes, which are big enough
to swim through the 1.3m across
just after the conning tower.
That's the distinctive feature.
Before the start of the war,
Admiral Donitz and the Kriegsmarine
focused on two different
types of U-boats.
One was the so-called Type VII -
a small boat, about 500 tonnes -
specifically designed to attack
shipping in the open Atlantic.
It was very, very fast, comparable.
It was very well-equipped
with five torpedo tubes,
and it was very mobile.
When the Germans designed these
Type VII boats, they shortly
afterwards found that they were
needing a kind of a mining U-boat,
which they had been used
in the First World War
with great success on all fronts.
So they used the basic Type VII
design, just lengthened it
by one section which housed the
mining shafts.
U-218 lies at a depth of 60m.
As it comes into view, the sheer
scale of its specially adapted
weaponry becomes apparent.
When you see a tube that's
1.5m in diameter,
the enormity of the size
of these mines
that they would be laying
comes home to you.
So having Barry in that
to demonstrate the size
of those chutes I think
was really useful
but also quitequite daunting
as well, or quite I don't know
what the word is, but it's quite
sort of scary to see these things
and what they were built to do.
These deep shafts were designed
to hold an explosive cargo of mines
which could be laid in coastal
waters, where they posed a deadly
threat to ships coming and going
from British harbours.
When they built the U-218
as a minelayer, the Germans
were harking back to a very,
very successful minelaying campaign,
submarine minelaying campaign
for the First World War.
Only six of these specialist
vessels, which could also operate
as normal torpedo boats, were built.
But they soon found the British
coastline heavily protected,
making them easy targets.
Mining was very complicated
because you have to enter
in these very heavily patrolled
areas under the coast,
and the U-boat commanders
didn't like that at all.
Five of the six boats in operation
were sunk with the loss of 241 men.
U-218 itself was attacked and
damaged on at least five separate
occasions, but somehow it made
it through the war.
Allied surface forces and aircraft
had now shut down coastal waters.
They had enough They had enough
air power and sea power
to ensure that the U-boats
could no longer operate.
By the end of 1942, coastal waters
around the UK were inhospitable
to U-boats, but that wasn't the case
for vast areas of the open Atlantic,
where they operated almost
unhindered.
The Allies were struggling to keep
their vital supply lines open.
So there was a dangerous area that
was called the Black Pit by some
merchant mariners, where simply
they had no aerial protection.
This huge piece of the Atlantic,
south of Iceland,
into which basically Allied
aircraft can't reach.
There was a sheer number of U-boats
now deployed, and there was hardly
any chance to escape the search
lines, which were spanning
all across the Atlantic.
So sooner or later, any convoy
would be located by a U-boat.
As the battle reaches its most
critical phase
You have Wrens in here
who have brothers and cousins
and friends on those ships.
And they're looking at this map,
and they are willing those people
to stay alive,
and it's a very heavy place to work.
..both sides race to develop
deadly new technology.
So once U-boats were able to stay
submerged with the help
of the snorkel, chances
to be located by enemy aircraft
was almost nil.
Every time there was an advance
by one side,
the other sought to counter it.
They have the hedgehog,
which is this new weapon
that they can use against
submarines.
With the fate of Europe
on a knife edge
This was the most important project
of the German War Navy.
It was designed to produce one boat
every two and a half days.
..it was clear the Nazis would stop
at nothing in order to win.
There were around 10,000 people
who were forced to work.
He kept his accent right
up to his dying day.
Very proud Derry man.
It was really like a
concentration camp system.
The north coast of Ireland
has been a huge maritime highway
for centuries.
And that has meant that we have
one of the greatest collections
of shipwrecks anywhere in the world.
This is such a special place
for divers.
The variety of sunken shipwrecks
here is unique.
I mean, there literally is
nowhere else that has submarines,
ocean-going liners, cargo ships.
You know, it's all here.
20 miles off the Irish coast
..a specialist team
are diving into history
It's mind-blowing, the scale
of everything down there.
It's quite sort of scary
to see these things
and what they were built to do.
..to rediscover the lost wrecks
These are really big things,
and you just feel
..so small.
..of World War Two's
longest and most critical battle
..the Battle of the Atlantic.
RAID SIREN BLARES
Up!
From 1939 to '45,
over 100,000 lives were lost
at sea
So many bodies washed ashore
that the local authorities
are talking about reopening
famine pits.
..and brought Britain to the brink
of total defeat.
"Britain's an island,
and if we can cut that off,"
the German high command think,
"then we can starve Britain out,
force her to capitulate."
At the heart of the battle to defeat
the U-boat killing machines
of the German Kriegsmarine
was a small city in
Northern Ireland.
The hinge on which
the Battle of the Atlantic moved
was actually the City of Derry.
80 years after one of the most
perilous conflicts of World War II,
experts are re-examining
the pivotal moments.
We have a document here from 1940
I don't think has been
in the public domain.
Uncovering hidden history
"The period between 1940 and 1945,
"I was a prisoner of war in
Germany."
And he signed it.
..revealing unsung heroes
The pilot tried to take off again,
but they clipped
the side of the ship
and they were in the Atlantic
for about an hour,
the three of them.
..and laying bare
the very human cost of war.
You read something
and it was written by your father,
which is the closest we ever came.
To me, it's a gift.
In this deadly game of
cat and mouse
The U-boats could hide themselves
in the dark
and attack whenever it suited
to them.
"The Hedgehog was the very latest
"and the most desperately
secret weapon
"designed for the discomfort
of U-boats.
"They never knew what hit them."
..the allies and the Nazis
were in a race
against time and technology.
It's not just one side winning
the whole time.
There's the punch and counter-punch.
There's the technology introduced.
There's the reaction
from the allies.
For both sides, the stakes
couldn't have been any higher.
Winning the Battle of the Atlantic
did not guarantee that the Allies
would win the war.
Total war means there's nothing
between what the Nazis called
the final victory or total defeat.
Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
would have meant that the Allies
lost the war.
I'm just looking now at that river.
And if that river could talk,
I'd tell you its story.
It would be worth listening to,
I can tell you.
94-year-old Bert Whoriskey
grew up in Lisahally village
on the banks of the Foyle River,
just 16 miles
from the Atlantic Ocean,
where war was raging.
Just where the crane is now,
there was 12 houses,
and I lived in the middle one -
number six.
And our back gardens came
down to the shore, to the river.
And I think as a wee fella running
up and down there, you know,
not knowing what we were living in,
it's unbelievable.
In May 1945, as a young teenager,
Bert was witness to
an extraordinary moment in history
when the German U-boat fleet
surrendered right outside his house.
NEWSREEL: Eight more U-boats
crept up the waters
of Loch Foyle to Londonderry,
where their surrender was received
by Admiral Sir Max Horton, Commander
in Chief, Western Approaches.
The day they surrendered,
I'll never forget it.
We were out for hours waiting
on them, you know,
wondering what was keeping them.
Were a battleship come up
in front of them,
and that was followed by the U-boats
coming in to surrender at Lisahally.
They just drifted in quietly
and nicely.
Seeing submarines,
as we called them -
you know, they weren't U-boats
to us, those were submarines -
and we thought,
well, here they are now,
and they're full of Germans.
I know when you looked at them,
they were young lads.
They were very few of them
in their 30s, you know,
they were all young fellas.
I can see it all happening again.
I can see the destroyers,
I can see the submarines,
I can see the activity.
You know, it's in there
and it's not going to go away.
The German U-boat fleet ending up in
Londonderry in Northern Ireland
was not mere happenstance.
The port was specifically chosen
by the head of the British Navy,
Admiral Sir Max Horton.
Horton decided that the U-boat fleet
would surrender formally.
And he decided that
the most important base
in the Battle of the Atlantic
had been on the River Foyle.
They would surrender at Lisahally.
And so a token flotilla of U-boats
escorted by three ships
came in through Loch Foyle
into the Foyle at Lisahally
on the 14th of May 1945.
Derry's strategic importance and its
vital contribution to victory
was underlined by the
Allied decision
to stage the final symbolic act of
the battle off this coastline -
Operation Deadlight.
Operation Deadlight in November 1945
is designed to remove
once and for all,
remove the U-boats
as a threat against Great Britain
and her allies.
So, the idea is the over 150 U-boats
that have been surrendered
by Germany
will be removed from service,
and some of them will be scuttled.
They do not want those things
falling back into German hands
and posing a threat in the future.
So all of the boats were shot up
by destroyers or other warships,
and some by aircraft
firing rockets at them.
Apart from a few U-boats,
all of them went to
the bottom of the sea.
This is a significant place
to scuttle these U-boats,
and there's something almost poetic
about it for the allies.
But how did this place become
the most significant location
in the fight against
the Nazi U-boat threat?
RADIO BROADCAST: This morning,
the British ambassador in Berlin
handed the German government
a final note.
Consequently, this country
is at war with Germany.
Just hours after Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain's broadcast,
the Kriegsmarine, Germany's navy,
launched their deadly campaign
in the waters of the Atlantic.
The Battle of the Atlantic breaks
out off the Rock Hall Bank
off the Donegal coast
when on the 3rd of September 1939,
when the British liner Athenia
is torpedoed by a German U-boat.
Up!
And the survivors are picked up
by a Norwegian vessel
and they're brought into Galway,
and this brings back memories
of the First World War,
when the U-boats were very active
off the southern
and eastern Irish coast.
And the U-boat is a sort of
phantasmagorical concept to many,
that people are frightened
by this notion of
the undersea raider
who comes up out of nowhere
and torpedoes ships.
Dr Axel Niestle,
an engineer by trade,
has always been fascinated
by U-boats.
He has spent a lifetime
uncovering and collecting
an extraordinary archive.
This is my private photo
collection of U-boat photographs.
In total, it's about 30,000
I collected over the years,
and they are a source of information
for my work
and also a documentation of
the U-boats
during the Second World War.
When the war broke out,
Germany had a total of 57 U-boats,
and out of these 57 U-boats,
only 48 were able to go on
war patrols at that time,
because the other ones
were either under training
or not ready for service.
And to make things even more worse
was, out of these 48,
there were just 22 U-boats able to
operate in the open Atlantic.
Admiral Karl Donitz, the head
of the Kriegsmarine U-boat fleet,
was a master strategist
who commanded his own submarine
in World War I.
He was convinced that U-boats
were not only key to victory
in the Atlantic theatre,
but the entire war itself.
He said in order to defeat Britain,
it was necessary to have a fleet
of 300 operational U-boats.
So, starting with 57
at the beginning of the war,
he was far away from this target,
but he convinced
not only the commander in chief of
the German Navy,
but even Hitler himself that U-boats
were the only means to
defeat Britain.
The Atlantic Ocean is
the second largest in the world,
stretching from the coast of Ireland
across to Canada and America.
Further south,
it separates the continents
of Africa and South America.
The main theatre of war
was centred in the North Atlantic.
80 years on from their surrender,
the biggest concentration of
U-boat wrecks in the world
can be found here,
just off the north-west coast
of Ireland.
Ha-ha! Here comes the man.
Permission to come aboard?
Good to see you again, boys.
Hey, gentlemen.
Guys, are we ready to go?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
World-renowned underwater cameraman
Rich Stevenson
is leading a team of expert divers.
Their mission -
to locate and capture footage
of some of the deadliest vessels
ever unleashed by the Kriegsmarine.
The most challenging aspect
of capturing images
is the depth of the water
that we're working in.
So, ordinarily, in shallow water,
you can go down,
you can shoot some stuff,
you can come back up, have
a quick look at it, check it's OK,
go back down again, try again -
whereas here, we have to go down.
We have to stay at that depth
for our actual dive time.
And what we get is what we get.
We cannot really influence that.
And we can't really ever be sure
how good it is
until we get back on the surface
again
after two hours of decompression.
So, then, at 50m, this is where
we need a bit of coordination.
We'll stop.
I'll set the camera up
when I feel like
I've got a good view on the wreck.
Ian, you're going to go out to a
horizontal distance away from me
to try and find something nice,
like the conning tower
would be lovely.
I always try and think about who can
bring maybe that little bit more
to a particular job.
And I found that working with people
like Ian and Barry,
because they're both really
experienced deep wreck divers,
I know that they're going to be
able to do the job
that I need them to do.
Ian Taylor is
the team's lighting technician.
It's like climbing a mountain,
innit?
Though doing this sort of diving
is sort of extreme sport,
going places where few people
have gone before.
It's what, it's in our make-up
as a person, innit?
Ian is a is a genuine workhorse,
and he's just someone
who is so comfortable in the water.
He's holding the lights
ten metres above us,
so he can only just about make out
where we are,
and he has to understand
what I'm looking at.
Richie will send me over
to a certain area,
and I've worked with Richie a lot
over the years,
and I sort of get used to working
alongside him.
So he just sort of grunts at me
underwater
and sends me off somewhere, and
I go off and do it.
With hand signals the only form
of communication below the water,
the team will rely on the expertise
of local diver Barry McGill
to guide them along the wrecks.
My role in the trip really is
to show the guys around the wrecks,
to try to pinpoint the main areas
on the wreck as well
that we want to see,
and then maybe show them
little hidden gems
every now and again of things
that maybe on the first day,
you'd swim by if you hadn't
that local knowledge.
So, there's like this
three-way empathy
between the camera operator,
the person in front of the camera
and the person who's lighting.
And if any one of those three
people basically doesn't turn up
in that very short time window,
we end up with
a load of really bad footage.
With a close eye on the weather,
marine charts will help guide
the team
to the exact location
above sunken U-boats.
But in the early months of the war,
it was almost impossible to know
when and where
these once deadly killing machines
would strike.
The U-boats could hide themselves
in the dark
and attack whenever it suited
to them.
It was a little bit difficult
for the British Navy
to accept this situation,
that there had been an aggressor,
an enemy they couldn't catch,
they couldn't sink
because it was evasive.
The Nazi strategy was as simple
as it was effective -
to attack and sink as many vessels
carrying vital supplies to the UK
as they could find.
These included shipping from Canada,
who had joined with the Allies,
but also from America,
who had not yet entered the war.
These are similar tactics
to what are employed
in the First World War.
Britain's an island
and if you can cut her off,
if you can starve her out,
that is useful.
So, Britain pre-war had been getting
a lot of supplies from Europe,
so therefore they needed supplies
from the United States and Canada.
So, the whole point of the path
through the Atlantic,
from the German point of view,
was to interrupt that supply
of food,
war materials, equipment to Britain.
"If we can cut that off,"
the German high command think,
"then we can starve Britain out
and cut her out of the war,
"force her to capitulate."
Over the first months of the war,
the German strategy
seemed to be working.
The British knew they had to protect
their vital Atlantic lifeline
at all costs.
Their counter-strategy -
a convoy system
to protect the vulnerable
merchant ships making the crossing.
The basic idea behind a convoy
is there is strength in numbers.
If you have a single ship
going across the Atlantic,
it is at huge risk of being
picked off - no protection.
But if you have 40 or 50 ships
together,
that's a much bigger group
of ships to protect one another.
So you have naval escort ships
that will surround
the merchant ships
that are carrying those
all-important supplies and people
across the ocean, and they will move
together, a predetermined route,
and their job is to see
those ships across the ocean.
They have weapons.
The merchant ships don't.
They can fire on submarines
and keep those ships safe.
Convoys may have had strength
in numbers,
but they could only move
as fast as their slowest vessel,
leaving them vulnerable.
The whole point of a convoy is that
you concentrate your resources
in one place
where you can protect it.
It sort of seems counterintuitive.
You think, OK, that means
it's a really big, juicy target.
But it also then means that you can
concentrate your escorts,
so your escorts are now
screening the convoy.
The Kriegsmarine had limited numbers
of operational U-boats
in this early phase of the campaign,
but they were preparing
a new strategy
which would ultimately
make them even deadlier.
Whenever we talk about U-boats
in the Second World War,
wolfpack tactic is not far away.
A U-boat on its own
isn't overly effective,
but in a wolfpack, it is.
So, the idea is
a single U-boat will be lurking,
it will be looking for
Allied vessels,
and when it spots a convoy,
it will call its sister U-boats,
and they will muster
on the convoy's position.
And instead of one craft
firing one torpedo,
multiple U-boats fire
multiple torpedoes into a convoy,
and that causes chaos.
There weren't enough escorts
to protect the convoys.
Also, a lot of merchantmen
were sailing independently,
which meant there were
lots of basically rich pickings.
Wolfpack then hardly had any
more than five to ten boats at all,
because there were just 20 boats
at sea at that time at maximum.
But even this small number of boats
could overwhelm the escorts
and could create great havoc
among the convoys in the Atlantic.
By June 1940, as U-boats cut a
deadly path through Allied convoys,
Germany was gaining ground
in Europe, taking France
and gaining five strategic
naval ports on the Atlantic coast.
FANFARE PLAYS
After the fall of France,
the strategic situation
in the war at sea changed completely
because formerly the Germans
were based in the North Sea
and now they had the full French
Atlantic Coast for their bases.
This had huge implications
for the battle raging at sea.
The convoys basically
then had to be re-routed
from the south-western approaches
around the south of Ireland
and up into the Bristol Channel
and the Celtic Sea.
And they re-routed them to come
around the north-western approaches,
which meant around the north of
the island of Ireland.
In contrast to the Nazis'
new foothold along the French coast,
Britain and her allies weren't able
to access ports in Eire
that would have given them vital,
safe harbours
on the edge of the Atlantic.
The Royal Navy had access
to the Foyle,
which became the big escort base,
but they'd had until
just before the war
the use of three other ports
on the island of Ireland.
One was Loch Swilly in Donegal,
the other two were Berehaven
and Cork Harbour,
or Queenstown right down the south,
and operationally, the use
of those three ports during the war
would have been very,
very advantageous for the Royal Navy
and for the allies generally
in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Of course, when we're looking
at Ireland, the island,
during the Second World War,
we're looking at two jurisdictions.
So Northern Ireland, which came
into being in 1921,
and the Irish Free State Ireland,
which came into being in 1922.
The so-called Treaty Ports had only
been transferred back to Ireland
in 1938, 16 years after the country
had won its independence
from Britain.
With Ireland declaring its
neutrality at the outbreak of war,
these ports were now agonisingly
out of reach for the Allies.
Churchill was very critical
of Chamberlain's government
for actually handing those back,
and said that, "You're not
"going to be able to get
these back to the United Kingdom
"should you need them."
There are those who have argued
that it did cost lives in not
having the Treaty Ports.
It's an argument that's impossible
to prove one way or the other.
Whether use of the Treaty
Ports would have saved lives
may be academic now, but
in the initial months of battle,
it was clear the Allies
were desperate for any advantage
they could find.
In the summer of 1940,
what the U-boat crews called
"the happy time",
when they could sink Allied shipping
at will off the Irish coast.
They are wreaking havoc, and
millions of tonnes of shipping,
and many men are going down in the
Atlantic Ocean.
The casualties of war
are very clearly strewn
onto Irish territory.
Primarily, it's bodies,
bodies washed ashore,
during the summer of 1940.
So many bodies washed ashore in Mayo
and Sligo and Donegal that the local
authorities are talking
about reopening famine pits.
Churchill said, "The only
thing that really worried me
"in the Second World War
was the U-boat threat."
More so than the Battle of Britain,
more than anything else,
that was what kept him up at night.
The very thing keeping Britain's
Commander-in-Chief awake at night
was a golden opportunity for the
slick Nazi propaganda machine.
In the summer of 1940, it was a time
when the aces developed.
That means commanding officers
which would easily reach 100,000
tonnes of merchant shipping
being sunk.
Commanding officers like Prien,
like Kretschmer, like Schepke.
And the people in Germany,
they were just lingering
for wartime heroes.
It is in all countries that wartime
heroes are being presented
to the public as a matter
of propaganda.
And so these very successful
commanders were presented
in the newsreels, in the radio,
and even in the newspapers,
almost daily.
These were the names which were also
very much known in the British
public as well, because they were
on the newsreels every time.
And this changed greatly in March
1941, when all three of them
were sunk within a matter of weeks,
much to the disappointment
of the German Admiralty
and to the U-boat arm.
But then, of course, other
commanders filled their places.
One of these new heroes ready
to fill the propaganda vacuum
was 30-year-old Adolf Piening,
commander of U-155.
He would become one of the
most famous aces in the German
Kriegsmarine, and one
of the most deadly.
Today's dive is the U-155.
She's a type IXC long-range U-boat.
And these were designed
to cross the Atlantic,
they were designed to go
to the States, and this particular
boat, commanded by Piening,
was incredibly successful.
It sank, I think, 122,000 tonnes
of shipping.
So a really successful boat,
really historic.
U-155's effectiveness wasn't
just measured in tonnes of shipping
sunk, it was responsible
for nearly 1,000 deaths.
At 76m long,
U-155 was an imposing sight,
compared to earlier models.
Its crew of 52 men could be on
long-range patrol
from seven to ten weeks at a time.
Here you have a typical example
of a photograph on U-155.
So it is taken at Bremen,
at the building yard,
during commissioning ceremony.
On the top we have the crew
assembled onboard the U-boat.
Piening is here, standing
next to the sailor,
and he's greeting the flag.
He was just a prototype
of a German U-boat commander
at that time.
Are you ready, Barry, yeah?
I think we're ready, Michael.
Up truss!
When you start to go down, you feel
slightly intimidated by the size
of this thing.
The submarine's at about 55m.
About 40, you could start seeing the
submarine laying on the seabed.
And when you can see
at sort of distance,
going down a shot line,
it's quite an impressive sight.
You get to see the whole
U-boat in front of you.
It nearly looks more like a ship
that should be on the surface,
as opposed to a U-boat that goes
under the water.
U-155 was equipped with a maximum
of 23 torpedoes.
It had four torpedo tubes
in the bow and two in the stern.
In addition to this, it had
a 10.5cm deck gun,
3.7mm anti-aircraft gun
on the after deck, and the normal
2cm anti-aircraft gun
on the so-called bandstand
aft of the conning tower.
U-155, a type IXC boat, was one
of 54 similar vessels in service.
Only four would make it
through the entire conflict.
As such, it left a trail
of devastation and human tragedy
in its wake.
One of my earliest memories
is walking along this bank.
I'm guessing that I was maybe
four or five.
We were in the city
visiting my grandfather.
I'm unsure what the motivation
for our visit was, but I imagine
that my mum, in the situation
of being a war widow,
would have been looking
to her family for some support
during that time.
David's father, John Sidney Brew,
was an apprentice in the Belfast
shipyard before signing
up to the Navy Reserves
when war broke out.
He left Northern Ireland to join
a ship on the Atlantic convoys
when David was only one year old.
I've no emotional or visual
context for my father.
There wasn't a place for my father,
for some reason.
It was never a subject which
the children were introduced to.
It was just a historical fact
that he was lost at sea.
John Sidney Brew served
on HMS Avenger,
a Royal Navy aircraft carrier.
It was spotted in the dead of night,
120 miles north-west of Gibraltar,
by the lookout on U-155,
commanded by Adolf Piening.
He attacked one of these convoys,
which returned from the landing
grounds of the North African coast
to the United Kingdom, and in one
of these convoys he sighted
and subsequently attacked.
It was HMS Avenger, one
of the very first auxiliary aircraft
carriers employed by the Royal Navy.
Piening's war diary from the time
details the attack.
A convoy was identified at 2.55 am,
but the U-boat was spotted by
escorts and attacked.
From 4.14 am,
U-155 shoots six torpedoes
towards its target.
At 4.18, U-155 crash-dives to avoid
being hit itself.
Piening reports that he hears
the distant sound of detonations.
Sinking of an aircraft carrier
was quite an achievement
and was considered a priority
by U-boat command.
The attack was a massive
success for Germany.
Piening was lauded as a hero.
In contrast, it was a devastating
blow to the Royal Navy,
and to the British government,
who kept details of the tragedy
secret for months.
HMS Avenger sank in two minutes.
Only 12 crew survived,
514 men perished.
Among them was John Sidney Brew,
husband, and father to a young
family, including his one-year-old
son, David,
back in Northern Ireland.
We don't have anything
to remember him by.
The ship was, in my understanding,
catastrophically destroyed, so even
whatever possessions he might have
had at that time
would have been lost.
With no memories of his own,
David has spent a lifetime searching
for the father he never knew.
Much of this was a mystery to me,
so in piecing together all the bits
and pieces, the photographs,
the telegrams from the War Office,
all of these came together
to construct something approaching
a person.
This is a picture of my
sartorially challenged father
when he was working
in the shipyard.
This photograph is with his brother,
Ralph, my uncle.
They look like they were taken
about '38,
'39, possibly.
But it was only in later
years that David made
an incredible discovery.
This is a postcard from my dad.
It just came out of the blue
in tidying up my mum's affairs.
The postcard is from
Barbizon Plaza,
overlooking Central Park, New York.
And it's addressed to
Mr David John Brew.
"Dear David, how would
you like to come with me
"and bring your mother with you?
"I hope you are being a good boy
and looking after Ma."
And there's a cross, "Daddy."
John mailed this postcard just days
before boarding HMS Avenger
in New York,
never knowing it would be the last
contact with his baby son.
You read something, and it was
written by your father.
It's in his handwriting,
he has signed it.
He's addressed it to me, which is
the closest we ever came.
To me, it's a gift, you know,
it's something precious to me
because it's a personal link to him.
Adolf Piening may have been
considered a hero amongst the German
public for his wartime exploits
aboard U-155, but David Brew's story
is a reminder that the service
of these sunken relics
from the Atlantic Theater
had consequences that still
reverberate to this day.
The conning tower is one
of the boat's most vital components.
Piening, or his lookout, would
stand here and identify
targets for attack.
The conning tower, really iconic,
absolutely distinctive.
You really appreciate the size
of it when you see Barry swimming
across the deck.
The hatch was open so we could
have a peer inside there.
That human connection kind of comes
back because that's, you know,
where someone would get
in and out of that submarine,
or the crew would.
I mean, it's just an incredible
thing to consider
that these were operational
U-boat submarines.
Certainly, the conning tower,
they had a set of binoculars matched
to a device called a UZO,
which would allow them to take
the bearing of the ship. That was
then transmitted down to the control
room, and those numbers, the bearing
of the ship, was transmitted
to the torpedo room, and the
torpedoes were then set to go
in a particular direction,
and they would then fire
the torpedoes at the target.
As the highest point on the ship,
the conning tower was also
used by commanders to show
off their prowess in battle.
So this is a tradition from even
World War I, that right
after the start of the war,
individual commanders started
to indicate their sinkings
by individual flags for each ship
they had sunk or torpedoed.
In this case, we have one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight
such flags, indicating eight ships
sunk on this patrol.
In the early part of the war, most
of their sinkings were carried out
on the surface.
They had to surface to charge
their batteries, and they could go
much, much faster on the surface.
And that then allowed them to,
when they spotted a ship,
they could close at much higher
speed.
Generally, the most important point
was to come close to the target
and to attack, mostly unseen,
with a torpedo.
After attacking a vessel,
should they then see a response,
or should they see, say, smoke,
what they think might be a warship
on the horizon, or there
might be an aircraft,
they would then go under,
they would then dive.
Whilst Canada had joined Britain
in its fight against the Nazis
from the beginning, it didn't
have anywhere near the military
might and resource of its nearest
neighbour.
The United States, however,
had resisted formally getting
involved in the war.
That all changed in December
1941 after the Axis
attacked Pearl Harbor.
But the Americans were undertaking
secret preparations long
before this, and they were focused
on Derry.
The first Americans arrived
here at the end of June 1941.
They came to build a naval base
tagged onto the Royal Navy
base at Lisahally.
Of course, this is almost six months
before the Japanese attack
the Americans at Pearl Harbor.
All of a sudden there was
pine trees stripped,
thousands of them came to
Lisahally, and we were wondering,
what are these here for, you know?
And then all of a sudden,
CBs arrived.
They were a construction battalion.
And they started, they put the
steel points onto the pine trees
to build that jetty there.
And they were building the jetty,
building the pumping station,
building tanks for fuel.
Lisahally just changed,
you could say, overnight.
A quiet row of houses where a young
Bert Whoriskey lived on the banks
of the Foyle River, was now
inside the perimeter
of an American Navy base,
as the United States prepared
to officially enter the war.
And, boy, was that active
after that.
It was unbelievable
from there on in, you know.
They built a lot of dockside
facilities as well along the Foyle,
in the city, just on the edge
of the city.
And by the time the base becomes
operational in 1942, there's
actually 5,000 American personnel
in the city.
No longer a tiny city
on the periphery of war,
this was now Base One Europe,
the US Navy's nerve centre
of Atlantic operations.
Derry's importance can be summed up
in the number of ocean-going ships
that were based here.
And that was at one stage of the
war, at the peak, round about 150.
And people who lived through
that time would say that you got
the impression, walking
up the quays, that you could
have walked from one side
of the river to the other
on the ships that were
berthed there.
The next two biggest bases in the UK
were the Clyde and Liverpool.
Between the two of them,
there weren't 100 escort ships.
So Derry is the main muscle,
if you like, for
the Royal Navy's escort fleet.
Derry was particularly important.
It's the first port of call, really,
whenever you're crossing
the Atlantic, it's the first place
that you're going to come to.
It has this base, essentially,
there that can be developed,
there's an infrastructure
that can be built on.
So it's incredibly important
logistically and strategically.
For the city, the changes were huge.
It's one of only two times
in the history of the city
that there's been 100% employment,
and the other time
was the First World War.
We reckon that the population
was probably round about
40,000-45,000 people.
Into that comes in the region
of 30,000-plus service personnel.
Tens of thousands of American troops
were now making the hazardous trip
across the Atlantic.
They knew that seeing Derry would
mean they had reached safe harbour.
With many having never been
outside their own country before,
the US Navy were keen to communicate
the unique circumstances
they would find themselves in.
This is the Pocket Guide
to Northern Ireland,
and this was printed by the War
and the Navy Departments.
The idea was that it would tell
you what you were going to see,
what you were going to experience.
So it tells us a little bit
in the contents pages
about what the country was like,
about the people, their customs
and their manners and about their
arguments.
But the key, particularly
in Ireland, two rules - don't talk
religion, don't talk politics.
"The Irish love to talk.
"Conversation is a highly perfected
form of entertainment.
"An argument for its own sake
is a Scots-Irish speciality."
But they're basically saying,
you know, "The Irish call themselves
"all sorts of names, accuse
each other of the most bizarre
"irregularities, indulge in wild
exaggeration and virulent personal
"abuse, and listening,
"you might be expecting a rousing
fist fight at any moment,
"so whatever you do, don't get
involved, stay out of this."
Another thing American troops
were advised to stay
out of was the Free State, Eire,
the neutral neighbour that lay
just across the Irish border.
This book, sort of under the section
Eire Border Problems, says
that American troops are not
permitted to cross the border.
And it goes on to say
you might find this strange,
but there's this idea of
the shamrock and St Patrick's Day
and the wearing of the green,
and they all belong
to Southern Ireland,
now called Eire.
They're neutral, but Northern
Ireland, and it says it,
"Treasures its union with
England above all things,"
and that there are historic
reasons for this.
The Irish border was a geographic
and political complication
the Allies had to carefully manage.
The island of Ireland had been
partitioned only two decades
previously, in 1921.
Irish leader Eamon de Valera
was determined that Ireland
would remain neutral.
NEWSREEL: Eamon de Valera,
pursuing his dream of a
self-sufficient and peaceful Eire,
has succeeded in maintaining
his nation's complete independence.
95% of Eire's people were convinced
that to enter the war on Britain's
side would have been to betray
the cause of independence
to which Ireland's heroes
devoted their lives.
Ireland, like other small states -
Belgium, Luxembourg, Afghanistan,
another neutral state - declared
their neutrality in the war.
They're neutral in a war zone,
be it the Battle of Britain,
the Battle of the Atlantic.
You're neutral until you're invaded.
The United States declared
its neutrality and gave up
its neutrality after
Pearl Harbor, and for Ireland,
it was expected to be the same.
De Valera and his senior military
officers knew that
there was every possibility
that Ireland would be invaded
by the Allies or the Axis.
Well, this is a very important
document that I have here,
and this is a meeting
that takes place between the Chief
of Staff of the Defence Forces
and the Minister for Defence,
and the two men are discussing
how Ireland will react should there
be an invasion by either
Britain or by Germany.
McKenna and Traynor decided,
"If Britain were the first
aggressor,
"do we immediately attack
her invading elements?"
And they decided, yes, but if
Britain should invade Ireland,
who would Ireland look for external
aid from?
And the two men could not decide.
That was left over for future
discussion.
However, in the event of a German
invasion, it's very different.
Same question.
"If Germany is the first
aggressor, do we immediately
"attack her invading elements?"
"Yes. But if so, is it the intention
to look for external aid
"and from whom?" And here a decision
is taken, and it's Britain.
It was a pragmatic neutrality.
De Valera was a mathematician.
And maths, I think, factored
into everything that he did
and thought.
And I think De Valera realised
that, in the long run,
Germany was not going to win.
So he maintained this facade,
if you like, of neutrality.
And yet, as a number of historians
have described it,
it was a neutrality in the favour
of the Allies.
De Valera made it very clear
on the outbreak of war,
he made it very clear to the German
minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel,
that Ireland would have a certain
consideration for Britain.
I may not like the British,
but I like the Germans even less.
One of the ways that Ireland also
helps the Allies,
a very obvious way,
is that De Valera does not stop,
or the government does not stop
Irish men and women
getting involved in the war effort.
There's about 150,000 Irish
men join the British Army.
This photograph was taken in
July 1945, but it's remarkable
because these four brothers
went to war in the sense that
Uncle Claude
went to the First World War,
survived being gassed,
and came home.
My grandfather Kendal,
he was in the Army and he fought
in the Second World War.
And then the other two brothers,
Uncle Evelyn and Uncle Paul,
who was the youngest, were both
naval officers.
So we're a very fortunate family,
fairly highly decorated as well,
but they were lucky too.
The Chavasse brothers, from County
Waterford on the southern coast
of Ireland, served in the British
forces with distinction.
Their heroic exploits have become
the stuff of legend.
At that time, there were a lot
more Protestant families down here.
There was a lot more connections
to England and to Britain.
My great-grandfather
really had decided,
"No, I'm going to be Irish.
I want an Irish family."
We're going to be brought
up here in Ireland.
And we threw our lot
in with the new country.
For the young Chavasse brothers,
growing up on the coast
between Cork and Waterford
was an idyllic childhood.
Here they all are, lined up, and
they're going to run a paper chase.
So what will happen there is
possibly the person on the horse
will ride out in front dropping bits
of paper, and the others
will then have to run along
after it.
But with the paper chase, it's not
just about how you lay the trail,
but you run false trails as well.
I would suggest that some
of the stuff that was going on
in the North Atlantic would have
been about false trails too.
This whole thing of playing
in a team and chasing,
it started at a very, very young
age. It got a lot more serious,
obviously, as the years went by, you
know?
Evelyn Chavasse left Ireland
for Naval College in England
when he was just 13 years old.
20 years later, in 1942,
he was an Atlantic escort commander
stationed out of Derry, 250 miles
away from where he was born
on the same island, but a world
away from Irish neutrality.
Evelyn Henry Chavasse was a regular
Royal Navy officer.
Very, very professional, as the
Royal Navy's officers were.
He's brought into, if you like, the
escort service of the Royal Navy.
Evelyn's unpublished memoir,
detailing his time as an escort
commander on the Atlantic convoys,
is a precious family heirloom.
It gives a first-hand account
of what happened at sea.
"If I had any clue where a U-boat or
a pack of U-boats might be lurking,
"my first concern was to dodge
them - run away, in fact -
"instead of charging straight
at them.
"And as we much so wanted to do."
So they want to go and do that.
But in fact, their thing
was they were escorts.
They had to step away
from the fight.
They weren't to get involved
in the fight.
The guiding light for an RN officer
is Nelson's last signal
at Trafalgar, which was
engage the enemy more closely.
Now, for a convoy escort commander,
your principle was to get
the convoy safely to port.
In other words, you were obliged
to avoid the enemy
as much as you possibly could.
He understood,
"I have to get this cargo
"whether it is oil supplies, food
supplies, whether it's armaments,
"whether it's men, I have to get it
safely across the Atlantic.
"That's all I have to do."
But the reality of war
in the Atlantic Theater
meant that escort naval commanders
sometimes had no choice
but to invoke the spirit of Nelson
and engage the enemy
at close quarters.
"Place - North Atlantic.
"Westbound convoy under attack
by a pack of U-boats.
"My escort group was whizzing
around like maddened blue bottles,
"keeping the devils down -
successfully so far. Nobody sunk.
"Two supporting aircraft
had depth charged a U-boat
"and blown her to the surface."
"One of my ships, which had been
having fun and games with another
"U-boat astern of the convoy, raced
up to rejoin and passed close
"to the first U-boat, obviously
in distress and about to sink,
"with her crew on deck, waving
frantically to be rescued.
"Our chap promptly signalled me by
R/T asking my permission
"to pick up the Germans.
"This was the second or perhaps
third most ghastly moment
"of my life. I had clear evidence of
a further U-boat threat
"ahead of the convoy, and the safety
of the convoy was my job.
"I needed all my escorts
around the convoy.
"I deliberately condemned those
Germans to death and said no."
This has been written
in the early 1980s.
He's a Christian, so I think
he's looking back on his life
and is concerned about some
of those decisions
that he had to make.
Like many sailors then and since,
Psalm 107 held a special meaning
for Evelyn Chavasse.
"They that go down to the sea
in ships:
"And occupy their business
in great waters,
"These men see the works
of the Lord:
"And his wonders in the deep."
For men on the convoys,
faith was a powerful thing
to keep hold of.
The same must have been true
for the Germans
who found themselves
onboard U-boats.
One wonders how the men felt being
recruited into the Kriegsmarine
and then being allocated to U-boats.
And you know that you've
probably got
a one in three chance of survival.
They ain't great odds.
75% of the U-boat force is killed.
That is the highest rate of loss
in the entire German military
in the Second World War.
They have an average survival
prediction of about 60 days,
and the average age of a U-boat crew
member is about 20 years old.
It's a very tough environment
to be in.
As the deadly cat and mouse
game continued to play out
in the Atlantic Theater, both sides
were desperate to develop
new strategies which might give
them an advantage.
So we'll all jump in as a three,
assess the current.
First five minutes,
just shoot some nice
big wides if we can.
The team's next dive is on an
incredibly rare Type VIID U-boat,
which was adapted
from existing designs in an attempt
to make it even deadlier
to allied shipping.
This is the U-218,
and they were built to mine
around the British Isles.
I haven't done this one before,
so naturally I'm interested to see
what it's like.
It's a lovely dive.
A typical Type VII. Five mine
chutes, which are big enough
to swim through the 1.3m across
just after the conning tower.
That's the distinctive feature.
Before the start of the war,
Admiral Donitz and the Kriegsmarine
focused on two different
types of U-boats.
One was the so-called Type VII -
a small boat, about 500 tonnes -
specifically designed to attack
shipping in the open Atlantic.
It was very, very fast, comparable.
It was very well-equipped
with five torpedo tubes,
and it was very mobile.
When the Germans designed these
Type VII boats, they shortly
afterwards found that they were
needing a kind of a mining U-boat,
which they had been used
in the First World War
with great success on all fronts.
So they used the basic Type VII
design, just lengthened it
by one section which housed the
mining shafts.
U-218 lies at a depth of 60m.
As it comes into view, the sheer
scale of its specially adapted
weaponry becomes apparent.
When you see a tube that's
1.5m in diameter,
the enormity of the size
of these mines
that they would be laying
comes home to you.
So having Barry in that
to demonstrate the size
of those chutes I think
was really useful
but also quitequite daunting
as well, or quite I don't know
what the word is, but it's quite
sort of scary to see these things
and what they were built to do.
These deep shafts were designed
to hold an explosive cargo of mines
which could be laid in coastal
waters, where they posed a deadly
threat to ships coming and going
from British harbours.
When they built the U-218
as a minelayer, the Germans
were harking back to a very,
very successful minelaying campaign,
submarine minelaying campaign
for the First World War.
Only six of these specialist
vessels, which could also operate
as normal torpedo boats, were built.
But they soon found the British
coastline heavily protected,
making them easy targets.
Mining was very complicated
because you have to enter
in these very heavily patrolled
areas under the coast,
and the U-boat commanders
didn't like that at all.
Five of the six boats in operation
were sunk with the loss of 241 men.
U-218 itself was attacked and
damaged on at least five separate
occasions, but somehow it made
it through the war.
Allied surface forces and aircraft
had now shut down coastal waters.
They had enough They had enough
air power and sea power
to ensure that the U-boats
could no longer operate.
By the end of 1942, coastal waters
around the UK were inhospitable
to U-boats, but that wasn't the case
for vast areas of the open Atlantic,
where they operated almost
unhindered.
The Allies were struggling to keep
their vital supply lines open.
So there was a dangerous area that
was called the Black Pit by some
merchant mariners, where simply
they had no aerial protection.
This huge piece of the Atlantic,
south of Iceland,
into which basically Allied
aircraft can't reach.
There was a sheer number of U-boats
now deployed, and there was hardly
any chance to escape the search
lines, which were spanning
all across the Atlantic.
So sooner or later, any convoy
would be located by a U-boat.
As the battle reaches its most
critical phase
You have Wrens in here
who have brothers and cousins
and friends on those ships.
And they're looking at this map,
and they are willing those people
to stay alive,
and it's a very heavy place to work.
..both sides race to develop
deadly new technology.
So once U-boats were able to stay
submerged with the help
of the snorkel, chances
to be located by enemy aircraft
was almost nil.
Every time there was an advance
by one side,
the other sought to counter it.
They have the hedgehog,
which is this new weapon
that they can use against
submarines.
With the fate of Europe
on a knife edge
This was the most important project
of the German War Navy.
It was designed to produce one boat
every two and a half days.
..it was clear the Nazis would stop
at nothing in order to win.
There were around 10,000 people
who were forced to work.
He kept his accent right
up to his dying day.
Very proud Derry man.
It was really like a
concentration camp system.