He joined another survivor clinging to a floating box. She had gone down in three or four minutes.” “When I came to the surface, the ship had gone. Askeland himself jumped into the water instead. “Most of the men managed to jump into the boat,” said survivor Nils Askeland, quoted on. Randsfjord, carrying 6,740 tons of cargo including 77 tons of ammunition and six planes, was torpedoed by U-30. In the early hours of June 22, the wolf pack hit two more vessels. Its entire crew was rescued, though the ship was so damaged it sank while being towed to port. bingThe next day, the British tanker San Fernando, headed for Liverpool with a cargo of crude and fuel oil, was torpedoed by U-47. It was torpedoed by U-48 on June 20 and sank in two minutes. The first victim was the Dutch tanker Moordrecht, which had peeled off from the convoy in mid-ocean to head for its destination in Spain. This was to be the fate of that 50-ship June 1940 convoy, labelled HX-49.
If one Allied vessel was located, the U-boats moved in to pick them off. “When I came to the surface, the ship had gone.”Ĭonvoy ships travelled abreast in several long lines at the cruising speed of the slowest ship. The subs travelled in groups called wolf packs, always on the hunt. The Nazis were trying to starve Britain into submission and assigned U-boats to sink as many ships as they could. The other ships carried products for the war industry-steel, lumber, copper, zinc and scrap iron, as well as crude oil and gasoline. It was estimated that 225,000 people could be fed for a week on provisions carried by one 10,000-tonne merchant vessel. The Nazis were trying to starve Britain into submission.Ī dozen of the ships were loaded with a variety of much-needed foodstuffs-wheat, grain, cheese, meat and molasses-for civilians and military personnel. On June 13, it was joined at sea by a group of 24 vessels from the Caribbean and South America, with two escorts. The first convoy of 26 ships from Canada and the United States had left Halifax on June 9, accompanied by an armed merchant cruiser and two Royal Canadian Navy destroyers. That was the thinking that led to the merging of two Second World War convoys headed for Great Britain in June 1940. State Library of New South Wales There is safety in numbers, so the saying goes.
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