September 5, 1941 2143 East of Greenland
Two destroyers and six corvettes prowled around the edges of the convoy. Three corvettes had joined the convoy that afternoon from their training exercises as shore based intelligence indicated that there was a large wolf pack along the path. An American aircraft carrier and two destroyers were steaming towards the convoy but they were six hundred miles away.
The full moon was shining and lighting up the sea through the low clouds. Every ship had double lookouts stationed as the next thirty three hours were the times of maximum danger. The convoy in front of them had passed without loss. That convoy had only two ships damaged, one by torpedo and one by weather, but they had managed to make it to Iceland for repairs.
MV Empire Springbuck heaved suddenly. Moments later, her central hold full of explosives erupted. U-81 had scored with a pair of torpedoes. The old freighter broke into two pieces. The forward third of the ship was steady enough for the men lucky enough to be there to enter and launch a lifeboat. Most of the crew were not as lucky as the remaining two thirds of the ship went under within ninety seconds of the torpedo. Two men managed to jump into the water. One man was rescued within minutes while the other froze to death.
The escorts responded quickly. Both destroyers began to run down at high speed towards the probable launch location of the torpedoes. Skeena’s forward guns fired at a surface U-boat. The shells splashed wide and over but the U-boat dove as the water erupted around it in a concentric circle of depth charges. She handed off the target to the four stacker destroyer HMCS St. Clair and the corvette Alberni as lookouts had spotted another pair of U-boats on the surface.
Deck guns were firing from the larger merchant ships. The naval gun crews could scare the U-boats but the unstabilized guns with lightly trained crews who seldom had the ammunition allocated for live fire exercises had little success except to highlight where the escorts needed to hunt. Four escorts converged on the shell pocked datums and began to ping and depth charge contacts.
As three quarters of the escorts were attempting to drive down or drive off the sighted U-boats, another two hunters pounced. Three more ships were torpedoed shortly before two in the morning. The largest was only 3,000 GRT and none of them were built stoutly enough to survive the damage. Sally Maersk was a crippled hulk whose broken body survived until daylight when her survivors were rescued by the escort. The other two ships went under before lifeboats could be launched.
An hour before dawn, the escort had success. Two corvettes had been hounding a contact and the depth charge runs were getting closer and closer. An oil slick had appeared on the surface after another pattern had been dropped for 125 feet. As Alberni was preparing for her next run, U-85 surfaced. Both corvettes started to sweep the U-boat’s deck with machine gun and anti-aircraft gun fire. Twenty seconds later as the first shells started to hit the submarine instead of the ocean, a white bed sheet emerged from the conning tower’s hatch. Seventeen sailors jumped into the sea before the u-boat sank. Sixteen of the sailors were rescued and taken prisoner.
Even with this success, dawn could not come fast enough. The predators lamed a small Norwegian freighter minutes after dawn. She straggled throughout the morning before being abandoned.
The convoy continued throughout the day at a steady eight knots. The bosun on Skeena controlled the frequency of turns as he had the best dice aboard the escort commander’s ship. He would roll two dice at the skipper’s request. The first, red dice, told him when the next roll had to happen. The second, black dice, told him what turn to make. Odd numbers were to port and even numbers were to starboard. An hour before daylight departed, the lookouts sighted a single dive bomber circle the forward edge of the convoy’s path. The haze gray painted bomber only loitered for twenty minutes but he was the promise that help was nearby. The convoy just had to survive the night.