Enemy No. 1

The sketchy story of a violent, running battle early in December between U-boat packs and a great United Nations convoy was released last week by London. Escorting warships of the British, Polish and Norwegian navies sighted the submarines first in mid-Atlantic and for four days, in light and darkness, fought off the raiders with gunfire and depth charges. U.S. Navy and British Coastal Command planes patrolled the skies, swooping down on any sub bold enough to surface. Two submarines were probably destroyed. "Some" cargo carriers were sunk. The rest of the convoy, part of it probably destined for Russia, reached England intact.

But day after day survivors of torpedoed ships straggled into harbors along the Allies' far-flung ocean supply lines. Stories of vessels sunk, of seamen drifting for weeks on winter seas, had become a dreary and bitter routine. Into Boston last week came the crew of a Panama freighter. Missing were an engineer, a gunner and the chief cook. Five hundred monkeys, part of the cargo, had drowned when the Panamanian was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean.

Patently, since his only hope of winning the war is to choke the Allies' flow of supplies, Hitler was throwing his strength and all his ingenuity into his U-boat campaign. South Africa reported huge German craft clustered thickly around Portuguese Lourengo Marques, sinking Allied ships with a frequency that shook South African morale. From Stockholm came a German writer's story of a new wrinkle: submersible barges towed by cargo-carrying subs to refuel and supply U-boats far from home.

Whether this was fact or propaganda, there was no doubt about the crippling effect of the U-boat campaign. The Associated Press's unofficial tally of Allied shipping losses in the western Atlantic alone reached 587 this week.* The success of anti-U-boat operations, about which the Navy kept mum, might be judged in part by the success the Japanese have had against U.S. submarines about which the Navy had more to say. Against a record of hits on more than 150 Jap vessels, only three U.S. submarines have been reported overdue and presumably lost.

Said Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander: "We are in the difficult, serious stage of war at sea."

Said Admiral Harold R. Stark, commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe: "The greatest enemy is the submarine. Our losses are something to be very uncomfortable about."

* Far below the actual up-to-date figures because sinkings are seldom officially announced until many weeks later.

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