Russian Convoy Escort's Song

DESCRIPTION: Cumulative song. "The first day from Iceland old AC-IC said to me, There's a Whitley up a gum tree." And so through ten days, adding various weapons, e.g. "Two Blohm and Voss," "Three Fokke-Wulfs," ending with "Ten Captains driving."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1946 (Gundry, according to Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy)
KEYWORDS: navy war cumulative derivative Russia
FOUND IN: Britain
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy, pp. 90-91, "Russian Convoy Escort's Song" (1 text, tune referenced)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Twelve Days of Christmas" (tune)
cf. "The Kola Run" (subject of convoys to Russia in World War II)
cf. "The 23rd Flotilla" (subject: of convoys to Russia in World War II and the hard life of convoy escorts) and references there
NOTES [1159 words]: There was nowhere in the Atlantic where British ships were entirely safe from attacks by U-boats, but perhaps no ships were in greater danger than those on the run from Britain to Murmansk and Archangel in Russia. "During the winter the Arctic ice barrier moves so far south as to leave a navigable stretch of water barely 200 miles wide between it and Cape North. Convoys were in fact sailing past the Germans' doorstep while at the same time struggling to overcome extraordinary navigational hazards" (Pearce, p. 29). The Russian convoy route would come to be known as the "Gateway to Hell" (Pearce, p. 159).
Surprisingly, the first seven convoys to Russia all avoided attack. It was only with convoy PQ8, which sailed in January 1942, that one of the convoys faced the enemy.
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy offers two explanations for "AC-IC": "Admiral Commanding Iceland Convoys" or an aircraft identification officer. Given that not everything the ships in the song encounter is an airplane, I would incline to the former identification.
The aircraft listed weren't even all German. The Whitely, mentioned on day one, was (as you might guess from the name) a British plane made by Armstrong Whitworth. It was a two-engined bomber that was produced from August 1939 to June 1943 (Gunston, p. 328). It's an odd aircraft to mention; total production was relatively small (just 1737, according to Gunston, p. 329), and while they did some combat bombing and anti-submarine patrol, a lot of their work was in transport. They were also used for reconnaissance (Munson, p. 25); I'd speculate that that is why the plane is mentioned in the song, and why there is just one.
The mention of "two Blohm and Voss" is a little peculiar. Blohm und Voss was a major German industrial concern (e.g. their shipyard at Hamburg built the battleship Bismarck), but Munson, p. 31, reports that the Blohm und Voss Bv 138, a strange two-engine design nicknamed "The Flying Shoe," was "the only Blohm und Voss [aircraft] design to achieve quantity production status during the Second World War" -- and even so, only 276 were built, so it wasn't something you saw every day. On the other hand, "Its variety of duties included long range reconnaissance, convoy patrol and U-boat co-operation," so it wasn't good news for a convoy if one was spotted.
The "Three Fokke-Wulfs" were probably not the famous fighter the Fokke-Wulf 190 but rather the Fokke-Wulf 200 "Condor," a four-engined long-range aircraft: "Although originally a commercial aircraft, converted to military use, it was as a maritime patrol bomber that the FW 200 Condor made its mark.... In this capacity, acting in co-operation with U-boat packs, it formed one of the most effective Luftwaffe combinations of the way, and many a convoy was to rue the moment it first spied a Condor above the horizon" (Munson, p. 81). It was not fast -- top speed 240 miles per hour -- but it had a range of nearly 4000 miles, so it could do a lot of searching! Supposedly only 276 were manufactured (Gunston, p. 385), but six different Norwegian bases hosted the aircraft (Pearce, pp. 23-24).
"The "Four Eighty-eights" clearly refer to the Junkers Ju 88, a twin engined light bomber, (night) fighter, and reconnaissnce plane (Munson, p. 102). This was one of the best German planes; they manufactured more than 15,000 of them during the war (Munson, p. 103). "Parallel with the development of the Junkers Ju 88 as a medium bomber, the type was also being adapted to a variety of other roles, particularly those of night fighter, close support, and reconnaissance" (Munson, p. 103). They were deployed in the north of Norway; there was a squadron of Stukas and Ju 88s at Banak (Pearce, p. 23).
The "six Heinkels" are presumably one or another variant of the Heinkel 111 (a plane that is the subject of "I Was Chasing One-Elevens"). An two-engined plane with a very large glass nose, which in some models was asymmetric, "the first HE 111 was a graceful machine with elliptical wings and tail, secretly flown as a bomber but revealed to the world a year later as a civil airliner.... In February 1937 operations began with the Legion Kondor in Spain, with considerable success.... To a considerable degree the success of the early elliptical winged HE 111 bombers in Spain misled the Luftwaffe into considering that nothing could withstand the onslaught of their huge fleets of medium bombers" (Gunston, p. 400). But by the time of the Battle of Britain, "the He 111 was hacked down with ease, its only defence being its toughness and ability to come back after being shot to pieces. The inevitable result was that more and more defensive guns were added, needing a fifth or even a sixth crew-member. Coupled with incessant growth in equipment and armour the result was deteriorating , so that the record-breaker of 1936-1938 was the sitting duck of 1942-1945" (Gunston, p. 401).
Despite this, the Germans were unable to replace the Heinkel; they never developed a better alternative or a successful four-engined bomber. "By the middle of the war the He 111 was obsolescent, but the lack of success of its potential replacements... necessitated keeping it in production well into 1944" (Munson, p. 95). It was more popular for fighting against ships than ground targets, and the Norway defense forces had an "Air Torpedo Group of Heinkel 111 and 115 torpedo bombers" at Barduloss (Pearce, p. 23. The Heinkel 115, according to Munson, p. 96, was another two-engine plane, used mostly at sea; originally developed for the Scandinavian countries, the German air force acquired only about 300, so most Heinkel torpedo bombers were 111s).
The "seven merchantmen sinking" is, sadly, not an unreasonable number; "During the 1942-1943 period alone, over sixty-three Allied ships" were sunk on the Russian run (Pearce, p. 24). 1942 -- the year many of the "O" class destroyers were working in the arctic -- was particularly bad; Pope's Appendix 3 (p. 314) shows that convoy PQ 18, in late 1942, lost 13 of 40 ships. The convoy before that, PQ 17, was the worst of all, losing 22 of 33 ships (Pope, pp. 27-28), although this was due in part to British mismanagement.
"Eight U-boats strafing" is sort of half-right. There were many U-boats based in northern Norway -- Pearce, p. 24, says there were more than fifty. And they could operate in conditions that were hopeless for aircraft, and they could stay on-station day and night. They would not normally strafe convoys, however -- while most U-boats had guns (and often machine guns good for strafing), a U-boat on the surface invited destroyer attacks; indeed, even a merchant vessel could ram and sink a submarine. So the subs didn't strafe; they used their torpedoes.
Gundry, who collected the text used by Tawney, says this came from one of the "O" class destroyers, which seems likely, as they served extensively on the Russian convoy route; see the notes to "The Kola Run." - RBW
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File: Tawn068

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