Talk:First Happy Time

Data sheet

Source (pgs)	Author	Quote
Tempest, Fire And Foe (13)	Lewis M. Andrews	The Royal Navy reacted promptly. Convoys had been very effective in the First World War and were soon reinstated, making isolated U-boat attacks hazardous for the U-boats. In addition, ASDIC or echo ranging 'pinging' equipment was installed on destroyers, limiting the surprise factor that the submerged submarines had enjoyed. Doenitz, however, developed another tactic, namely wolf packs attacking at night. Echo raning equipment was far less effective on surfaced submarines then on submerged ones. Surfaced submarines, moving at 18 knots, could dart into a convoy undetected, launch their torpedoes and retire before the escorts could engage them. The results were horrendous. Between June and October of 1940, the U-boats dispatched 1,400,000 tons of merchant shipping to the bottom. The British were losing tonnage far faster than it could be replaced. German submarine crews referred to that time frame as the "Happy Time", tremendous successes and few losses. By winter of 1940/1941, however, the Royal Navy had installed radar on many of their escorts, robbing the wolf packs of their best weapon, surprise. Rates of sinkings were cut to less then half, and U-boat losses sharply increased. Also, the British discovered that their North Sea fishing trawlers made effective anti-submarine vessels when equipped with the necessary arms and electronics. They were not nearly as good as destroyers, of course, but they were easy to build in the United Kingdom and in Canada. The situation remained bad, but not disastrous.
Torpedo Junction: U-Boat War Off America's East Coast, 1942 (3,4)	Homer H. Hickam	The first of what U-boat sailors would come to refer to as their "Happy Time" would be the summer of 1940. The British had gone to the convoy system to defend their merchant ships as they brought vital supplies from the United States and Canada. This system had worked well during World War I and, it was assumed, would be just as effective in World War II, especially with the new ASDIC "pinging" equipment that would allow defending destroyers to locate intruding submarines. Doentiz, however, had studied the convoy system and thorugh that he had found a way to defeat it. His tactic was to send his U-boats out singly but with orders to immediately radio command headquarters the moment a convoy was sighted. when this was done, other U-boats would be routed into the area and ordered to wait until night, surface, and attack. Doenitz reasoned that ASDIC would not be able to locate the U-boats on the surface and that night would allow them to get in close without being spotted by lookouts. To the dismay of the Royal Navy, this simple tactic worked spectacularly. In June, 284,000 tons of shipping were sunk, followed by 196,000 in July, 268,000 in August, 295,000 in September and a stunning 352,000 tons sent to the bottom of the ocean in October. This was the time of the U-boat aces, of Prien and Endrass and Kretchmer and Schepke. Still, despite all their swashbuckling successes, the U-boat commanders were never lone wolves, Doenitz had them all very much in control, requiring them to check in with him daily so that he could route them efficiently and effectively. The "Happy Time" did not last long. For one thing, Doenitz still did not have very many U-boats available. For another, the British started to install radar on their ships and gradually learned to fight at night. Using carefully coordinated air and ship operations, the Royal Navy was soon able to reestablish control over the convoy routes and, by January 1941, had reduced U-boat sinkings to 127,000 tons for that month.
The First U-Boat Flotilla (67)	Lawrence Paterson	This was to be the most successful period of the war for German submarines. Between July and December 1940 U-boats sank 285 merchant ships, amounting to 1,470,368 tons, for the loss of just eight U-boats. It is possible that the main reason for Britain surviving this period was simply the small number of U-boats available to Dönitz. The so-called 'Happy Time' saw Kretschmer and Schepke among others make their names household words in newspapers of both friends and foe alike. Although during this period U-boats did not have things as easy as post-war mythology would have us believe, the age of 'Aces' was born and Knight's Crosses began to adorn the throats of many commanders.
World War II (36)	Margaret J. Goldstein	... Although the situation at sea looked bad for Britian, the Germans also had a problem: too few ports with access to the Atlantic Ocean. But Germany's conquest of Norway in April 1940 and France in June 1940 gave Hitler the ports he needed. German U-boats then had much better access to the sea. From June to December 1940, German U-boats enjoyed what German sailors called the first "happy time". The new ports allowed them to stay at sea longer and attack more convoys. The British had so few escort warships that they could use only one or two to protect a convoy that might contain 30 merchant ships. During this time, Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of German U-boats, perfected his wolf pack tactics. He first used this technique against British convoy SC-7. Doenitz positioned five U-boats around the convoy. Surfacing at night, the U-boats attack from all directions—even from inside the convoy itself. The Germans sank 22 of the 34 merchant ships in SC-7. They had similar success against other convoys. By the end of 1940, Britain and its allies had lost 3,654,511 tons of merchant shipping.
War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II (103)	Nathan Miller	While the eye of the British people was fixed on the duel between the Luftwaffe and the RAF, the Battle of the Atlantic entered an even more dangerous stage. Admiral Dönitz seized the opportunity presented by the shortage of escorts to wreak havoc on British shipping. Only two days after the end of the fighting in France, he transferred the U-Boat Command from Wilhelmshaven to Lorient, on the Bay of Biscay, where he made his headquarters in a handsome chateau. The first boat to put in was Fritz Lemp's U-30, which had sunk the Athenia on the opening day of the war. The new base brought the U-boats some 450 miles closer, in sailing terms, to the enemy's vital sea lanes, almost doubling their effectiveness by extending their range of operation and time on patrol. Lorient was soon followed by Brest, Bordeaux, La Pallice, and St. Nazaire as operating bases. On August 17, recognizing an existing fact, Hitler proclaimed a total blockade on Britain. U-boat skippers called this period the "Happy Time." With the convoys all but denuded of escorts and the torpedo crisis resolved by a switch from the erratic magnetic pistols to contact detonators, morale among the submarine crews soared in proportion to the tonnage they were sending to the bottom. Over the three-month period from July to September, 153 ships were sunk, for a monthly average of 252,926 tons, while only five submarines were lost. In October, 352,407 tons, or sixty-three ships, were sunk, including the forty-two-thousand-ton Empress of Canada, the only one of Britain's great liners sunk by a U-boat during the war. With sinking by the Luftwaffe, mines, surface raiders, and S-boats added, the toll exceeded Britain's capacity to replace the lost vessels. Dönitz was still plagued, however, by the perennial shortage of boats, of which there were never more then fifteen at sea at a given time. As Jürgen Rohwer, a leading German historian of the Battle of the Atlantic has written, "[T]he high tonnage losses sustained by the British... are quite sufficient to give some idea of what could have been done... with effective long-range reconnaissance and more U-boats." ... The "gray wolves" took their toll not only from stragglers and vessels sailing independently, but from the poorly defended convoys as well. They were assisted by the ability of B-Dienst to read the British naval codes, which it had been doing since the crisis over the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. In fact, German intelligence was reading upward of 50 percent of the Royal Navy's signal traffic, which contained information about routings and timings of convoys and independent sailings. In a battlefield as large as the North Atlantic, any information about the location of enemy merchant shipping was of inestimable value. The Germans eavesdropped on this traffic until July 1943, when the British finally realized what was happening.
Wolf Pack: The Story Of The U-Boat In World War II (201)	Gordon Williamson, Ian Palmer, Darko Pavlovic	Between January and May of 1940, 126 Allied ships were sunk, totalling over 500,000 tons. Once again, the majority of these victims had been travelling independently. Very few specific anti-shipping operations were carried out in March and April, with the bulk of the available U-boat number being allocated to Operation Wesserübung, the invasion of Norway. U-boats were to patrol the entrances to Norway's fjords to prevent an Allied incursions. In the event, although many choice targets appeared before the waiting U-boats, torpedo problems meant that a substantial number of potential sinkings were lost. ... With the successful conclusion of the campaign in the west, the Kriegsmarine now had at its disposal a number of captured French naval installations which provided ideal locations for U-boat bases, giving them direct access to the Atlantic without having to pass through waters heavily patrolled by the Royal Navy. The considerable saving in journey time also gave the U-boats a much greater operational range, allowing them to patrol much further out into the Atlantic. Bases were also established in Norway giving direct access to the North Sea and faster access to the North Atlantic and the North-West Approaches. ...The period between summer and the end of 1940 became known to the Germans as the first 'Happy Time'. Between June and December 1940, over 360 enemy ships were sunk, accounting for almost 2,000,000 tons. U-boats were ranging well out into the Atlantic, well beyond the areas in which air cover could be provided, and were wreaking havoc amongst poorly protected convoys. ... [Details on specific convoy attacks]... 1941 In order to compensate for the still relatively slow rate of new builds coming from Germany's shipyards, in August 1940 the Italian Navy was invited to base some of its submarines in German-occupied French ports for operations into the Atlantic. These Italian submarines were never particularly successful. In just under three years, the 30 or so Italian submarines which had operated out of Bordeaux sank just 105 Allied vessels and lost 16 of their own number. The Italians were allocated their own area of responsibility in which German U-boats thereafter did not operate, Dönitz having no interest in seeing these boats come under his command. The year began well. On the night of 23 February, Convoy OB288 was attacked by a pack consisting of four U-boats, U-69 (Metzler), U-73 (Rosenbaum), U-95 (Schreiber) and U-96 (Lehmann-Willenbrock), supported by the Italian submarine Bianchi. Eight ships totalling nearly 44,000 tons were sunk and a 9,000-tonner seriously damaged. However, this so called 'Happy Time' came to an abrupt end in March 1941 when, after a spell of remarkably low losses, three top aces, Prien Schepke and Kretschmer, were lost in convoy attacks. Prien in U-47 was lost on 7/9 March when attacking OB293 and both Schepke and Kretschmer on 16/17 March during attacks on HX112. Kretschmer and most of his crew were picked up and six survivors from U-100 were saved but Prien's U-47 was lost with all hands. ...[Use of aircraft to recon and attack]... What was unknown to the Germans was that the British had beguon to take advantage of the installation of radar on their escort ships, this being one of the reasons the lost aces had been detected by the British during their attacks in March. Until now, U-boats running on the surface had avoided detection by Asdic and, being so small, were difficult to detect by sight. Dönitz, though aware of the decline in successes, was unaware that the British were now making use of radar. Some Germans believed that the problem lay with British interception of German radio traffic, the enemy intercepting signals directing the U-baots towards their targets. ... The use of land-based high-frequency signal-detecting equipment in various locations, however, allowed triangulation on the chatter of signals between U-boats and BdU as the 'wolves' prepared to attack. Even without being breaking the codes, the Allies could detect the presence of U-boats in a particular area and route the convoy away from danger. In the spring of 1941, U-boats which had been operating well out into the Atlantic were recalled to eastern waters when a number of tankers which broke out into the Atlantic with the battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen were tracked down as a result of interception of German radio signals, and sunk. It was intended that, as well as servicing the warships, the tankers would also be used to refuel these U-boats.

Convoys

• Convoy HX-48
• Convoy SC-2
• Convoy HX-72
• Convoy SC-7
• Convoy HX-79
• Convoy HX-84
• Convoy HX-90
• Convoy HX-106
• Convoy HX-112
• Convoy OB-293

Other

• Karl Dönitz was a Rear admiral at the start, became a Vice Admiral on Sep 1, 1940
• From July 1940 to the end of October, 282 Allied ships were sunk off of the north-west approaches of Ireland for a loss of 1,489,795 tons of merchant shipping.

• Various dates and reasons for the end of the First Happy Time include:
  • March 1941, with the German loss of three prominent u-boat aces: Günther Prien, Joachim Schepke and Otto Kretschmer.

References