13. The British Royal Navy battled the elements as well as the Germans
The North Atlantic weather was as much of an enemy to the British Navy as the Kriegsmarine. Ships assigned to escort convoys faced often terrible weather. Ships were coated with ice in winter, battered by storms year-round, and required extensive maintenance and repair. The number of ships in yards to repair storm and battle damage limited those available for escort duty. The conditions were also exhausting for the crews of the escort ships. The British absorbed the lessons learned from the heavy losses incurred from weather and the Germans and created a new training facility for ships and crews in the Hebrides. The Admiralty also took over control of the RAF’s Coastal Command, to attack U-boats in the Western Approaches.
Admiralty’s command over the battle was shifted to Liverpool. By the late spring of 1941, the British adopted a new means of escorting convoys. They established better control of the merchantmen of which they were comprised, and better asdic and radar with which to locate U-boats. In June 1941, the Admiralty decided to escort convoys all the way across the Atlantic with full escorts of destroyers and corvettes. The expanding destroyer fleet of His Majesty’s Canadian Navy made the decision possible. The United States expanded its security zone nearly to Iceland, garrisoned the island, and began to escort ships as far as the new American base.
