Eastbound Atlantic convoy HX 79 assembled at the Canadian port of Halifax in Nova Scotia in the first week of October 1940, heading for Liverpool some 2,900 nautical miles away.
Despite the HX series nominally being regarded as fast convoys, a handful of slower ships amongst the 50 vessels meant the journey would last around 15 days at an average speed of around ten knots at best, and despite the size of the group there would be a bare minimum of protection from escort vessels – the best being a handful of destroyers and an armed merchant cruiser (AMC), most of which had departed by the latter stages of the crossing.
The convoy sailed on 8 October under the overall command of convoy commodore Rear Admiral MacKenzie in the general freighter Salacia, with a very mixed bag of cargoes amongst the merchant ships.
The 9,000-ton Athelmonarch was transporting molasses, Baron Carnegie, with half the displacement, carried pit props (as did five other ships, including the tiny 1,600-ton Erna III, though he returned to Halifax before the convoy was attacked); the 12,000-ton tanker Cadillac was something of a floating bomb, loaded as she was with petroleum and paraffin, as were the 10,000-ton Norwegian tankers Egda and Sandanger – all three survived the crossing.
Other goods included pig iron, scrap iron, sugar, wheat, wool and lumber.
Accompanying the convoy from Canada were Canadian armed yachts HMC Ships French, Reindeer and HMCS Husky, Halcyon-class minesweeper HMS Jason and Canadian River-class destroyer HMCS Saguenay, all of which turned back after a couple of days, and AMC HMS Montclare and Dutch submarine HMNLS O-14, which remained with the convoy for at least a week.
The first ten days of the voyage had been pretty uneventful, although sailors in every ship were alert to the fact that a German torpedo could strike at any second, and they also had to contend with a typically stormy autumn Atlantic crossing.
On 19 October, four days out of Liverpool and entering the Western Approaches, HX 79 had the misfortune to catch up with convoy SC 7 – a slow convoy on the same route, which had left Nova Scotia on 5 October and struggled to average six knots across the ocean
Misfortune because SC 7 had fallen foul of a German wolf pack the day before, which had sunk 20 of the 35 ships in the convoy with the loss of more than 140 lives – the worst massacre of a convoy in the Atlantic campaign.
The arrival of HX 79 presented new large targets for the five prowling U-boats, and in an overnight action on 19-20 October the Germans accounted for another 12 ships – a total of 28 Allied vessels lost in 48 hours, for the loss of no German U-boats, by far the worst two days for losses in the entire Battle of the Atlantic.
As the action was at night the Germans attacked on the surface – their preferred method – and in six hours 13 ships were torpedoed, six by U-boat ace Gunther Prien’s U-47 (four of which sank).
Ten ships were lost in the convoy itself, and two further stragglers were picked off later in the day – at the time of the attack there were no escorting warships, as Montclare and O-14 had departed the day before.
A number of escorts were sent from the UK to the convoy’s aid on 19 October, including destroyers HM Ships Sardonyx, Sturdy and Whitehall, and a number of anti-submarine trawlers and Flower-class corvettes, but were too late and disorganised to make much difference.
They arrived in dribs and drabs, with no overall plan for how to deal with a wolf pack, and command of the escorts changed frequently as more senior officers arrived in their ships. Communication between the escorts was also patchy, and orders had to be passed round the 11 warships by signal lamp – a time-consuming and laborious business.
The survivors of HX 79 limped into Liverpool around 23 October.
The ineffective response to the attacks on SC 7 and HX 79 led to immediate improvements in escort procedures, the main one being the formation of permanent escort groups, working and training together under one designated leader.
This led to a far more co-ordinated engagement with convoys and U-boats, with familiar tactics and teamwork resulting in a much more serious threat to German commanders.
Today’s image from the Imperial War Museum collection (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections) is of Flower-class corvette HMS Hibiscus, pictured in October 1941. Hibiscus was one of the escort vessels sent out to help convoy HX 79 when it was attacked by a U-boat wolf-pack in the Western Approaches on 19-20 October 1940 (© IWM A 6090)
This series is by no means a comprehensive review of the Battle of the Atlantic, which was a colossal clash – in terms of casualties alone more than 100,000 men are thought to have died as a direct result to the battle, and more than 4,000 vessels were sunk, while many times more those numbers were involved.
Instead, we have picked out some of the more important or thought-provoking features of the campaign, and would encourage you to read further on individual aspects such as eye-witness accounts from escort ships (both fiction and non-fiction) and the role of Enigma.
