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00:00The north coast of Ireland has been a huge maritime highway for centuries.
00:11And that has meant that we have one of the greatest collections of shipwrecks anywhere in the world.
00:21This is such a special place for divers.
00:24The variety of sunken shipwrecks here is unique.
00:27I mean, there literally is nowhere else that has submarines, ocean-going liners, cargo ships.
00:33You know, it's all here.
00:3620 miles of the Irish coast.
00:43A specialist team are diving into history.
00:50It's mind-blowing to the scale of everything down there.
00:53It's quite sort of scary to see these things and what they were built to do.
01:00To rediscover the lost wrecks.
01:02These are really big things and you just feel so small.
01:08Of World War II's longest and most critical battle.
01:19The Battle of the Atlantic.
01:30Up!
01:31From 1939 to 45, over 100,000 lives were lost at sea.
01:43So many bodies washed ashore that the local authorities are talking about reopening famine pits.
01:49And brought Britain to the brink of total defeat.
01:54Britain's an island.
01:55And if we can cut that off, the German High Command think, then we can starve Britain out, force her to capitulate.
02:02At the heart of the battle to defeat the U-boat killing machines of the German Kriegsmarine was a small city in Northern Ireland.
02:12The hinge of which the Battle of the Atlantic moved was actually the city of Derry.
02:1980 years after one of the most perilous conflicts of World War II, experts are re-examining the pivotal moments.
02:27We have a document here from 1940, I don't think has been in the public domain.
02:32Uncovering hidden history.
02:34The period between 1940 and 1945, I was a prisoner of war in Germany and he signed it.
02:40Revealing unsung heroes.
02:43The pilot tried to take off again but they clipped the side of the ship and they were in the Atlantic for about an hour, the three of them.
02:51And laying bare the very human cost of war.
02:56You read something and it was written by your father, which is the closest we ever came. To me it's a gift.
03:06In this deadly game of cat and mouse.
03:08The U-boats could hide themselves in the dark and attack whenever it's suited to them.
03:13The Hedgehog was the very latest and the most desperately secret weapon designed for the discomfort of U-boats.
03:19They never knew what hit them.
03:21The Allies and the Nazis were in a race against time and technology.
03:26It's not just one side winning the whole time.
03:29There's the punch and counter punch. There's the technology introduced, there's the reaction from the Allies.
03:34For both sides, the stakes couldn't have been any higher.
03:40Winning the Battle of the Atlantic did not guarantee that the Allies would win the war.
03:45Total war means there's nothing between what the Nazis called the final victory or total defeat.
03:53Losing the Battle of the Atlantic would have meant that the Allies lost the war.
03:59Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
04:00Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
04:04Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
04:07Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
04:09Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
04:16Losing the Battle of the Atlantic
04:20I'm just looking now at that river.
04:23And if that river could talk or tell you its story, it would be worth listening to, I can tell you.
04:2994-year-old Bert Worski grew up in Lissahalli village on the banks of the
04:35Foyle River, just 16 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, where war was raging.
04:40Just where the crane is now, there was 12 houses, and I lived in the middle one, number six.
04:47And our back gardens came down to the shore, to the river.
04:52And I think there's a wee fella running up and down there, you know,
04:55not knowing what we were living in. It's unbelievable.
04:59In May 1945, as a young teenager, Bert was witness to an extraordinary moment in history,
05:05when the German U-boat fleet surrendered right outside his house.
05:10Eight more U-boats crept up the waters of Loch Foyle to Londonderry,
05:14where their surrender was received by Admiral Sir Max Horton,
05:17Commander-in-Chief, Western approaches.
05:19The day they surrendered, I'll never forget it.
05:21We were out for hours waiting on them, you know,
05:23while the winter was keeping them.
05:25There was a battleship come up in front of them,
05:28and that was followed by the U-boats coming on to surrender at Lissahalli.
05:32They just drifted in quietly, nicely.
05:35Seeing submarines, as we called them, you know,
05:38they weren't U-boats to us, they were submarines.
05:41And, you know, we thought, my God, here they are now,
05:44and they're full of Germans.
05:46You know, when you looked at them, they were young lads.
05:50There were very few of them in their thirties.
05:52You know, they were all young fellas.
05:55I can see it all happening again.
05:59I can see the destroyers, I can see the submarines,
06:02I can see the activity, you know.
06:04It's in there, and it's not going to go away.
06:08The German U-boat fleet ending up in Londonderry in Northern Ireland
06:17was not mere happenstance.
06:19The port was specifically chosen by the head of the British Navy,
06:23Admiral Sir Max Horton.
06:29Horton decided that the U-boat fleet would surrender formally.
06:33And he decided that the most important base in the Battle of the Atlantic
06:38had been on the River Foyle.
06:40They would surrender at Lissa Halley.
06:44And so a token flotilla of U-boats escorted by three ships
06:49came in through Loch Foyle into the Foyle at Lissa Halley
06:54on the 14th of May, 1945.
06:58Derry's strategic importance and its vital contribution to victory
07:02was underlined by their Allied decision to stage the final,
07:06symbolic act of the battle off this coastline, Operation Deadlight.
07:12Operation Deadlight in November 1945 is designed to remove,
07:16once and for all, remove the U-boats as a threat against Great Britain
07:19and her allies.
07:21So the idea is the over 150 U-boats that have been surrendered by Germany
07:25will be removed from service and some of them will be scuttled.
07:29They do not want those things falling back into German hands
07:34and posing a threat in the future.
07:41So all of the boats were shot up by destroyers or other warships
07:45and some by aircraft firing rockets at them.
07:49Apart from a few U-boats, all of them went to the bottom of the sea.
07:53This is a significant place to scuttle these U-boats
07:58and there's something almost poetic about it for the Allies.
08:02But how did this place become the most significant location in the fight against the Nazi U-boat threat?
08:21This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note.
08:31Consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
08:36Just hours after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's broadcast,
08:46the Kriegsmarine, Germany's navy, launched their deadly campaign in the waters of the Atlantic.
08:52The Battle of the Atlantic breaks out off the Rock Hole bank, off the Donegal coast
08:57on the 3rd of September 1939, when the British liner Athenia is torpedoed by a German U-boat.
09:04And the survivors are picked up by a Norwegian vessel and they're brought into Galway.
09:18And this brings back memories of the First World War,
09:20when the U-boats were very active off the southern and eastern Irish coast.
09:24And the U-boat is a sort of phantasmagorical concept to many,
09:28that people are frightened by this notion of the undersea raider who comes up out of nowhere
09:33and torpedo ships.
09:45Dr Axel Niesler, an engineer by trade, has always been fascinated by U-boats.
09:51He has spent a lifetime uncovering and collecting an extraordinary archive.
09:56This is my private photo collection of U-boat photographs.
10:01In total it's about 30,000 I collected over the years.
10:05And they are a source of information for my work and also a documentation of the U-boats during the Second World War.
10:13When the war broke out Germany had a total of 57 U-boats.
10:17And out of these 57 U-boats only 48 were able to go on war patrols at that time
10:23because the other ones were either under training or not ready for service.
10:28And to make things even more worse was out of these 48, there were just 22 U-boats able to operate in the open Atlantic.
10:37Admiral Carl Dunitz, the head of the Kriegsmariner U-boat fleet, was a master strategist who commanded his own submarine in World War I.
10:46He was convinced that U-boats were not only key to victory in the Atlantic theatre, but the entire war itself.
10:52He said in order to defeat Britain, it was necessary to have a fleet of 300 operational U-boats.
10:59So, starting with 57 at the beginning of the war, he was far away from this target.
11:05But he convinced not only the commander in chief of the German Navy, but even Hitler himself,
11:10that U-boats were the only means to defeat Britain.
11:17The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest in the world, stretching from the coast of Ireland across to Canada and America.
11:25Further south, it separates the continents of Africa and South America.
11:30The main theatre of war was centred in the North Atlantic.
11:35Eighty years on from their surrender, the biggest concentration of U-boat wrecks in the world can be found here,
11:42just off the northwest coast of Ireland.
11:45A-ha, here comes the man.
12:00Wishing to come aboard.
12:02Good to see us again, boys.
12:04Hi, gentlemen.
12:05Guys, are we ready to go?
12:07Yeah.
12:08Yeah, yeah.
12:09The world-renowned underwater cameraman Rich Stevenson is leading a team of expert divers.
12:22Their mission, to locate and capture footage of some of the deadliest vessels ever unleashed by the Creek's marina.
12:31The most challenging aspect of capturing images is the depth of the water that we're working in.
12:36So, ordinarily, in shallow water, you can go down, you can shoot some stuff, you can come back up, have a quick look at it, check it's okay, go back down again, try again.
12:45Whereas here, we have to go down, we have to stay at that depth for our actual dive time, and what we get is what we get.
12:52We cannot really influence that, and we can't really ever be sure how good it is until we get back on the surface again after two hours of decompression.
13:02So then at 50 metres, this is where we need a bit of coordination, we'll stop, I'll set the camera up.
13:07When I feel like I've got a good view on the wreck, Ian, you're going to go out to a horizontal distance away from me to try and find something nice, like the Conning Tower would be lovely.
13:17I always try and think about who can bring maybe that little bit more to a particular job, and I've found that working with people like Ian and Barry, because they're both really experienced deep wreck divers, I know that they're going to be able to do the job that I need them to do.
13:34Ian Taylor is the team's lighting technician.
13:38It's like climbing a mountain, isn't it? Doing this sort of diving is sort of extreme sport, going places where few people have gone before, it's in our make-up as a person, isn't it?
13:51Ian is a genuine workhorse, and he's just someone who is so comfortable in the water, he's holding the lights 10 metres above us, so he can only just about make out where we are, and he has to understand what I'm looking at.
14:06Richie will send me over to a certain area, and I've worked with Richie a lot over the years, and I sort of get used to working alongside him, so he just sort of grunts at me underwater and sends me off somewhere, and I go off and do it.
14:18With hand signals the only form of communication below the water, the team will rely on the expertise of local diver Barry McGill to guide them along the wrecks.
14:29My role on the trip really is to show the guys around the wrecks to try to pinpoint the main areas on the wreck as well that we want to see, and then maybe show them a little hidden gems every now and again of things that maybe on the first day you'd swim by if you hadn't that local knowledge.
14:45So there's like this three-way empathy between the camera operator, the person in front of the camera, and the person who's lighting, and if any one of those three people basically doesn't turn up in that very short time window, we end up with a load of really bad footage.
15:00With a close eye on the weather, marine charts will help guide the team to the exact location above sunken U-boats.
15:13But in the early months of the war, it was almost impossible to know when and where these once deadly killing machines would strike.
15:22The U-boats could hide themselves in the dark and attack whenever it's suited to them. It was a little bit difficult for the British Navy to accept this situation that there had been an aggressor, an enemy, they couldn't catch, they couldn't sink because it was evasive.
15:38The Nazi strategy was as simple as it was effective, to attack and sink as many vessels carrying vital supplies to the UK as they could find.
15:51These included shipping from Canada, who had joined with the Allies, but also from America, who had not yet entered the war.
15:59These are similar tactics to what are employed in the First World War. Britain's an island, and if you can cut her off, if you can starve her out, that is useful.
16:07So Britain, pre-war, had been getting a lot of supplies from Europe, so therefore they needed supplies from the United States and Canada.
16:15So the whole point of the Battle of the Atlantic from the German point of view was to interrupt that supply of food, war materials, equipment to Britain.
16:26If we can cut that off, the German High Command think, then we can starve Britain out and cut her out of the war, force her to capitulate.
16:34Over the first months of the war, the German strategy seemed to be working. The British knew they had to protect their vital Atlantic lifeline at all costs. Their counter strategy? A convoy system to protect the vulnerable merchant ships making the crossing.
16:53The basic idea behind a convoy is there is strength in numbers. If you have a single ship going across the Atlantic, it is at huge risk of being picked off. No protection.
17:03But if you have 40 or 50 ships together, that's a much bigger group of ships to protect one another.
17:10So you have naval escort ships that will surround the merchant ships that are carrying those all-important supplies and people across the ocean.
17:18And they will move together a predetermined route. And their job is to see those ships across the ocean. They have weapons. The merchant ships don't. They can fire on submarines and keep those ships safe.
17:33Convoys may have had strength in numbers, but they could only move as fast as their slowest vessel, leaving them vulnerable.
17:43The whole point of a convoy is that you concentrate your resources in one place where you can protect it.
17:49It sort of seems counterintuitive. You think, OK, that means it's a really big, juicy target.
17:54But it also then means that you can concentrate your escorts. So your escorts are now screening the convoy.
18:01The Kriegs Marina had limited numbers of operational U-boats in this early phase of the campaign.
18:06But they were preparing a new strategy, which would ultimately make them even deadlier.
18:12Whenever we talk about U-boats in the Second World War, Wolfpack tactic is not far away.
18:17A U-boat on its own isn't overly effective, but in a Wolfpack it is.
18:25So the idea is a single U-boat will be lurking. It will be looking for allied vessels.
18:30And when it spots a convoy, it will call its sister U-boats and they will muster on the convoy's position.
18:37And instead of one craft firing one torpedo, multiple U-boats fire multiple torpedoes into a convoy.
18:44And that causes chaos.
18:50There weren't enough escorts to protect the convoys.
18:53Also, a lot of merchantmen were sailing independently, which meant there were lots of, basically, rich pickings.
18:59Wolfpack then hardly had any more than five to ten boats at all,
19:03because there were just 20 boats at sea at that time, at maximum.
19:06But even the small number of boats could overhelm the escorts
19:11and could create great havoc among the convoys in the Atlantic.
19:16By June 1940, as U-boats cut a deadly path through allied convoys,
19:22Germany was gaining ground in Europe, taking France and gaining five strategic naval ports on the Atlantic coast.
19:30After the fall of France, the strategic situation in the war at sea changed completely.
19:45Because formerly, the Germans were based in the North Sea,
19:48and now they had the full French Atlantic coast for their bases.
19:53This had huge implications for the battle raging at sea.
19:57The convoys basically then had to be re-routed from the south-western approaches around the south of Ireland
20:04and up into the Bristol Channel in the Celtic Sea.
20:07And they re-routed them to come around the north-western approaches,
20:10which meant around the north of the island of Ireland.
20:13In contrast to the Nazis' new foothold along the French coast,
20:20Britain and her allies weren't able to access ports in error
20:25that would have given them vital safe harbours on the edge of the Atlantic.
20:29The Royal Navy had access to the foil, which became the big escort base,
20:35but they'd had, until just before the war, the use of three other ports on the island of Ireland.
20:42One was Lough Swilly in Donegal.
20:44The other two were Bearhaven and Cork Harbour or Queenstown, right down the south.
20:50And operationally, the use of those three ports during the war
20:55would have been very, very advantageous for the Royal Navy
20:58and for the Allies generally in the Battle of the Atlantic.
21:01Of course, when we're looking at Ireland, the island during the Second World War,
21:04we're looking at two jurisdictions, so Northern Ireland, which came into being in 1921,
21:09and the Irish Free State, Ireland, which came into being in 1922.
21:14The so-called Treaty ports had only been transferred back to Ireland in 1938,
21:1916 years after the country had won its independence from Britain.
21:24With Ireland declaring its neutrality at the outbreak of war,
21:27these ports were now agonisingly out of reach for the Allies.
21:32Churchill was very critical of Chamberlain's government for actually handing those back
21:37and said that you're not going to be able to get these back to the United Kingdom should you need them.
21:44There are those who have argued that it did cost lives in not having the Treaty ports.
21:49It's an argument that's impossible to prove one way or the other.
21:54Whether use of the Treaty ports would have saved lives may be academic now,
21:59but in the initial months of battle, it was clear their Allies were desperate for any advantage they could find.
22:06In the summer of 1940, what the U-boat crews called the happy time,
22:17when they could sink Allied shipping at will off the Irish coast.
22:21They are wreaking havoc and millions of tons of shipping and many men are going down in the Atlantic Ocean.
22:35The casualties of war are very clearly strewn onto Irish territory.
22:40Primarily, it's bodies. Bodies washed ashore during the summer of 1940.
22:45So many bodies washed ashore in Mayo and Sligo and Donegal
22:49that the local authorities are talking about reopening famine pits.
23:12Churchill said the only thing that really worried me in the Second World War was the U-boat threat.
23:17More so than the Battle of Britain, more than anything else, that was what kept him up at night.
23:27The very thing keeping Britain's commander-in-chief awake at night
23:31was a golden opportunity for this slick Nazi propaganda machine.
23:36In the summer of 1940, it was a time when the ACES developed.
23:40That means commanding officers which would easily reach 100,000 tonnes of merchant shipping being sunk.
23:47Commanding officers like Preen, like Kretschmer, like Schepke,
23:57and the people in Germany, they were just lingering for wartime heroes.
24:02It is in all countries that wartime heroes are being presented to the public as a matter of propaganda.
24:12And so these very successful commanders were presented in the newsreels, in the radio, and even in the newspapers almost daily.
24:20These were the names which were also very much known in the British public as well, because they were on the newsreels every time.
24:30And this changed greatly in March 1941, when all three of them were sunk within a matter of weeks.
24:36Very much to the disappointment of the German Admiralty and to the U-Bodarm.
24:43But then, of course, other commanders filled their places.
24:46One of these new heroes ready to fill the propaganda vacuum was 30-year-old Adolf Piening, commander of U-155.
24:58He would become one of the most famous ACES in the German Kriegsmarine, and one of the most deadly.
25:05Today's dive is the U-155. She's a Type 9C long-range U-boat.
25:17And these were designed to cross the Atlantic. They were designed to go to the States.
25:22And this particular boat, commanded by Piening, was incredibly successful.
25:28It sank, I think, 122,000 tonnes of shipping. So a really successful boat, really historic.
25:34U-155's effectiveness wasn't just measured in tons of shipping sunk.
25:41It was responsible for nearly 1,000 deaths.
25:44At 76 metres long, U-155 was an imposing sight, compared to earlier models.
25:51Its crew of 52 men could be on long-range patrol from 7 to 10 weeks at a time.
25:58Here you have a typical example of a photograph on U-155.
26:08So it is taken at Bremen at the building yard during commissioning ceremony.
26:13On the top, we have the crew assembled on board the U-boat.
26:20Piening is here standing next to the sailor and is greeting the flag.
26:25He was just a prototype of a German U-boat commander at that time.
26:28Are you ready, Barry, yeah?
26:41I think we're ready, Michael.
26:43That's us.
26:44Yes.
26:45Yes!
26:51Hey, you are right.
26:5250th cars were sitting there as someone looking in theancies
26:57When you start to go down, you feel slightly intimidated by the size of this thing.
27:20The submarine's in about 55 metres. About 40 you could start seeing the submarine laying
27:28on the seabed. And when you can see that sort of distance going down a shot line, it's quite
27:34an impressive sight.
27:36You get to see the whole U-boat in front of you. It nearly looks more like a ship that
27:40should be on the surface as opposed to a U-boat that goes under the water.
27:46The U-155 was equipped with a maximum of 23 torpedoes. It had four torpedo tubes in the
27:53bow and two in the stern. In addition to this, it had a 10.5-centimetre deck gun, 3.7-millimetre
28:02anti-aircraft gun on the afterdeck and the normal 2-centimetre anti-aircraft gun on the so-called
28:09bandstand after the conning tower.
28:15U-155, a Type 9C boat, was one of 54 similar vessels in service. Only four would make it
28:22through the entire conflict. As such, it left a trail of devastation and human tragedy in
28:29his wake.
28:42One of my earliest memories is walking along this bank. I'm guessing that I was maybe four
28:47or five. We were in the city visiting my grandfather. I'm unsure what the motivation for our visit
28:57was, but I imagine that my mum, in the situation of being a war widow, would have been looking
29:02to her family for some support during that time.
29:06David's father, John Sydney Brew, was an apprentice in the Belfast shipyard before signing up to
29:13the Navy Reserves when war broke out. He left Northern Ireland to join a ship on the Atlantic
29:18convoys when David was only one year old.
29:21I have no emotional or visual context for my father. There wasn't a place for my father for some reason.
29:30It was never a subject which the children were introduced to. It was just a historical fact
29:38that he was lost at sea.
29:45John Sydney Brew served on HMS Avenger, a Royal Navy aircraft carrier. It was spotted in the dead
29:51of night, 120 miles northwest of Gibraltar by the lookout on U-155, commanded by Adolf Peening.
30:00He attacked one of these convoys which returned from the landing grounds of the North African coast
30:06to the United Kingdom, and in one of these convoys he sighted and subsequently attacked.
30:13It was HMS Avenger, one of the very first auxiliary aircraft carriers employed by the Royal Navy.
30:21Pening's war diary from the time details the attack. A convoy was identified at 2.55 AM.
30:30But the U-boat was spotted by escorts and attacked. From 4.14 AM, U-155 shoots six torpedoes towards its target.
30:41At 4.18 AM, U-155 crash dives to avoid being hit itself.
30:51Pening reports that he hears the distant sound of detonations.
30:56Thinking of an aircraft carrier was quite an achievement and was considered a priority by U-boat command.
31:02The attack was a massive success for Germany. Pening was lauded as a hero.
31:09In contrast, it was a devastating blow to the Royal Navy and to the British government,
31:14who kept details of the tragedy secret for months.
31:17HMS Avenger sank in two minutes. Only 12 crew survived. 514 men perished. Among them was John Sidney Brew.
31:31Husband and father to a young family, including his one-year-old son David back in Northern Ireland.
31:38We don't have anything to remember him by. The ship was, in my understanding, catastrophically destroyed.
31:46So even whatever possessions he might have had at that time would have been lost.
31:54With no memories of his own, David has spent a lifetime searching for the father he never knew.
32:00Much of this was a mystery to me. So in piecing together all the bits and pieces,
32:05the photographs, the telegrams from the war office.
32:08All of these came together to construct something approaching a person.
32:18This is a picture of my sartorially challenged father when he was working in the shipyard.
32:30This photograph is with his brother Ralph, my uncle.
32:34We looked like they were taken about 38, 39 possibly.
32:43But it was only in later years that David made an incredible discovery.
32:47This is a postcard from my dad.
32:51It just came out of the blue in tidying up my mum's affairs.
32:54The postcard is from Barbizon Plaza, overlooking Central Park, New York.
33:06It's addressed to Mr. David John Blue.
33:10Dear David, how would you like to come with me and bring your mother with you?
33:15Hope you are being a good boy and looking after Ma and, of course, Daddy.
33:24John mailed this postcard just days before boarding HMS Avenger in New York, never knowing it would be the last contact with his baby son.
33:35You read something and it was written by your father.
33:43It's in his handwriting.
33:45He has signed it.
33:47He's addressed it to me, which is the closest we ever came.
33:51To me it's a gift.
33:52You know, it's something precious to me because it's a personal link to him.
34:03Adolf Peening may have been considered a hero amongst the German public for his wartime exploits aboard U-155.
34:10But David Brew's story is a reminder that the service of the sunken relics from the Atlantic Theatre had consequences that still reverberate to this day.
34:28The conning tower is one of the boat's most vital components.
34:33Peening, or his lookout, would stand here and identify targets for attack.
34:37The conning tower, really iconic, absolutely distinctive.
34:44You really appreciate the size of it when you see Barry swimming across the deck.
34:49The hatch was open so we could have a pier inside there.
34:53That human connection kind of comes back because that's, you know, where someone would get in and out of that submarine, or the crew would.
35:01I mean, it's just an incredible thing to consider that these were operational U-boat submarines.
35:09Sitting in the conning tower they had a set of binoculars matched to a device called a UZO, which would allow them to take the bearing of the ship.
35:16That was then transmitted down to the control room, and those numbers, the bearing of the ship was transmitted to the torpedo room.
35:24And the torpedoes were then set to go in a particular direction.
35:28And they would then fire the torpedoes at the target.
35:30As the highest point on the ship, the conning tower was also used by commanders to show off their prowess in battle.
35:39So this is a tradition from even World War I, that right after the start of the war, individual commanders started to indicate their thinking by individual flags for each ship that had sunk or torpedoed.
35:53In this case, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight such flags indicating eight ships sunk on this patrol.
36:02In the early part of the war, most of their sinkings were carried out on the surface.
36:07They had to surface to charge their batteries, and they could go much, much faster on the surface.
36:13And that then allowed them to, when they spotted a ship, they could close at much higher speed.
36:17Generally, the most important point was to come close to the target and to attack, mostly unseen, with a torpedo.
36:26After attacking a vessel, should they then see a response, or should they then see, say, smoke, what they think might be a warship on the horizon,
36:36or there might be an aircraft, they would then go under, they would then dive.
36:40Once Canada had joined Britain in its fight against the Nazis from the beginning, it didn't have anyone near the military might and resource of its nearest neighbor.
37:03The United States, however, had resisted formally getting involved in the war.
37:08That all changed in December 1941, after the Axis attacked Pearl Harbor.
37:24But the Americans were undertaking secret preparations long before this, and they were focused on Derry.
37:30The first Americans arrived here at the end of June 1941.
37:41They came to build a naval base tagged onto the Royal Navy base at Lissa Halley.
37:46Of course, this is almost six months before the Japanese attack the Americans at Pearl Harbor.
37:52All of a sudden, there was pine trees stripped, thousands of them came to Lissa Halley.
38:02And we were wondering, well, what are these here for, you know?
38:06And then all of a sudden, CBs arrived.
38:09They were a construction battalion.
38:10And they started, they put the steel points onto the pine trees to build that jetty there.
38:22And they were building a jetty, building a pumping station, building tanks for fuel.
38:27And Lissa Halley just changed, you could say, overnight.
38:36A quiet row of houses where a young Bert Worski lived on the banks of the Foil River,
38:42was now inside the perimeter of an American Navy base, as the United States prepared to officially enter the war.
38:49And boy, was that active after that.
38:52The hit was unbelievable from there on on, you know?
39:01They built a lot of dockside facilities as well, along the foil in the city, just on the edge of the city.
39:09And by the time the base becomes operational in 1942, there's actually 5,000 American personnel in the city.
39:19No longer a tiny city on the periphery of war, this was now Base One Europe,
39:26the US Navy's nerve center of Atlantic operations.
39:33Terry's importance can be summed up in the number of ocean-going ships that were based here.
39:39And that was at one stage of the war at the peak, round about 150.
39:44And people who lived through that time would say that you got the impression walking up the quays,
39:51that you could have walked from one side of the river to the other on the ships that were berthed there.
39:57The next two biggest bases in the UK were the Clyde and Liverpool.
40:03Between the two of them, there went 100 escort ships.
40:10So Derry is the main muscle, if you like, for the Royal Navy's escort fleet.
40:16Derry was particularly important. It's the first port of call, really, whenever you're crossing the Atlantic.
40:23It's the first place that you're going to come to.
40:26It has this base, essentially, there that can be developed.
40:29There's an infrastructure that can be built on.
40:32So it's incredibly important, logistically and strategically.
40:36For the city, the changes were huge.
40:40It's one of only two times in the history of the city that there's been 100% employment.
40:46And the other time was the First World War.
40:47We reckon that the population was probably round about 40,000, 45,000 people.
40:53And to that comes, in the region of 30,000 plus service personnel.
41:04Tens of thousands of American troops were now making the hazardous trip across the Atlantic.
41:10They knew that seeing Derry would mean they had reached safe harbour.
41:18With many having never been outside their own country before,
41:22the US Navy were keen to communicate the unique circumstances they would find themselves in.
41:29This is the pocket guide to Northern Ireland.
41:32And this was printed by the war in the Navy departments.
41:37The idea was that it would tell you what you were going to see, what you were going to experience.
41:41So it tells us a little bit in the contents pages about what the country was like,
41:45about the people, their customs and their manners, and about their arguments.
41:49But the key, particularly in Ireland, two rules.
41:51Don't talk religion.
41:53Don't talk politics.
41:55The Irish love to talk.
41:57Conversation is a highly perfected form of entertainment.
42:01An argument for its own sake as a Scots-Irish speciality.
42:06But they're basically saying, you know, the Irish call themselves all sorts of names,
42:09accuse each other of the most bizarre irregularities, indulge in wild exaggeration and virulent personal abuse.
42:16And listening, you may be expecting a rising fist to fight at any moment.
42:20So whatever you do, don't get involved. Stay out of this.
42:24Another thing American troops were advised to stay out of was the Free State, ERA,
42:30the neutral neighbour that lay just across the Irish border.
42:33This book, sort of under the section ERA Border Problems, says that American troops are not permitted to cross the border.
42:40And it goes on to say, you know, you might find this strange, but there's this idea of the shamrock and St Patrick's Day and the wearing of the green,
42:47and that they all belong to Southern Ireland, now called ERA.
42:51They're neutral, but Northern Ireland, and says it treasures its union with England above all things, and that there are historic reasons for this.
43:00The Irish border was a geographic and political complication the Allies had to carefully manage.
43:06The island of Ireland had been partitioned only two decades previously in 1921.
43:12Irish leader Eamon de Valera was determined that Ireland would remain neutral.
43:17Eamon de Valera, pursuing his dream of a self-sufficient and peaceful era, has succeeded in maintaining his nation's complete independence.
43:2695% of ERA's people were convinced that to enter the war on Britain's side would have been to betray the cause of independence to which Ireland's heroes devoted their lives.
43:37Ireland, like other small states, Belgium, Luxembourg, Afghanistan, another neutral state, declared their neutrality in the war.
43:47They are neutral in a war zone, be it the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic.
43:52You're neutral until you're invaded. The United States declared its neutrality and gave up its neutrality after Pearl Harbour.
43:58And for Ireland, it was expected to be the same.
44:02De Valera and his senior military officers knew that there was every possibility that Ireland would be invaded by the Allies or the Axis.
44:10Well, this is a very important document that I have here. And this is a meeting that takes place between the Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces and the Minister for Defence.
44:23And the two men are discussing how Ireland will react should there be an invasion by either Britain or by Germany.
44:31McKenna and Traynor decided, if Britain were the first aggressor, do we immediately attack her invading elements?
44:38And they decided, yes. But if Britain should invade Ireland, who would Ireland look for external aid from?
44:45And the two men could not decide. That was left over for future discussion.
44:49However, in the event of a German invasion, it's very different.
44:55Same question. If Germany is the first aggressor, do we immediately attack her invading elements? Yes.
45:02But if so, is it the intention to look for external aid? And from whom?
45:07And here a decision is taken, and it's Britain.
45:10It was a pragmatic neutrality.
45:15Neutrality. De Valera was a mathematician.
45:19And maths, I think, factored into everything that he did and thought.
45:24And I think De Valera realised that in the long run, Germany was not going to win.
45:31So he maintained this facade, if you like, of neutrality.
45:35And yet, as a number of historians have described it, it was a neutrality in the favour of the Allies.
45:43De Valera made it very clear on the outbreak of war, he made it very clear to the German minister in Dublin, Edward Hempel, that Ireland would have a certain consideration for Britain.
45:52I may not like the British, but I like the Germans even less.
45:57One of the ways that Ireland also helps the Allies, a very obvious way, is that De Valera does not stop, or the government does not stop, Irish men and women getting involved in the war effort.
46:08There's about 150,000 Irish men join the British Army.
46:15This photograph was taken in July 1945, but it's remarkable because these four brothers went to war in the sense that Uncle Claude went to the First World War, survived being gassed and came home.
46:39My grandfather, Kendall, he was in the army, and he fought in the Second World War, and then the other two brothers, Uncle Evelyn and Uncle Paul, who was the youngest, were both naval officers.
46:51So we're a very fortunate family, fairly highly decorated as well, but they were lucky too.
46:56The Shavas brothers from County Waterford on the southern coast of Ireland served in the British forces with distinction. Their heroic exploits have become the stuff of legend.
47:11At that time, there were a lot more Protestant families down here, there was a lot more connections to England and to Britain.
47:17My great-grandfather really had decided, no, I'm going to be Irish, I want an Irish family, we're going to be brought up here in Ireland, and we threw our lot in with the new country.
47:26For the young Shavas brothers, growing up on the coast between Cork and Waterford was an idyllic childhood.
47:32Here they all are lined up, and they're going to run a paper chase. So what will happen there is possibly the person on the horse will ride out in front, dropping bits of paper, and the others will then have to run along after it.
47:44But with the paper chase, it's not just about how you lay the trail, but you run false trails as well.
47:50I would suggest that some of the stuff that was going on in the North Atlantic would have been about false trails too.
47:56This whole thing of playing in a team and chasing, it started at a very, very young age.
48:02It got a lot more serious, obviously, as the years went by, you know.
48:08Evelyn Shavas left Ireland for Naval College in England when he was just 13 years old.
48:1320 years later in 1942, he was an Atlantic escort commander, stationed out of Derry, 250 miles away from where he was born on the same island, but a world away from Irish neutrality.
48:29Evelyn Henry Shavas was a regular Royal Navy officer, very, very professional as the Royal Navy's officers were.
48:38He's brought into, if you like, the escort service of the Royal Navy.
48:43Evelyn's unpublished memoir, detailing his time as an escort commander on the Atlantic convoys, is a precious family heirloom.
48:52It gives a first-hand account of what happened at sea.
48:55If I had any clue where a U-boat or a pack of U-boats might be lurking, my first concern was to dodge them, run away in fact, instead of charging straight at them.
49:06And as we much so wanted to do, so they'd want to go and do that, but in fact, their thing was, they were escorts.
49:12They had to step away from the fight, they weren't to get involved in the fight.
49:15The guiding light for an RN officer is Nelson's last signal at Trafalgar, which was, engage the enemy more closely.
49:25Now, for a convoy escort commander, your principle was to get the convoy safely to port.
49:34In other words, you were obliged to avoid the enemy as much as you possibly could.
49:40He understood, I have to get this cargo, whether it is oil, it's supplies, food supplies, whether it's armaments, whether it's men, I have to get it safely across the Atlantic.
49:49That's all I have to do.
49:51But the reality of war in the Atlantic theatre meant that escort naval commanders sometimes had no choice but to invoke the spirit of Nelson and engage the enemy at close quarters.
50:04Place North Atlantic, westbound convoy under attack by a pack of U-boats.
50:09My escort group was whizzing around like maddened bluebottles, keeping the devils down.
50:14Successfully so far, nobody sunk.
50:17Two supporting aircraft had depth charged a U-boat and blown her to the surface.
50:22One of my ships, which had been having fun and games with another U-boat astern of the convoy, raced up to rejoin and passed close to the first U-boat, obviously in distress and about to sink.
50:38With her crew on deck waving frantically to be rescued.
50:41Our chap promptly signalling me by RT asking my permission to pick up the Germans.
50:47This was the second or perhaps third most ghastly moment of my life.
50:51I had clear evidence of a further U-boat threat ahead of the convoy and the safety of the convoy was my job.
50:57I needed all my escorts around the convoy.
51:00I deliberately condemned those Germans to death and said no.
51:08This is being written in the early 1980s.
51:10He's a Christian, so I think he's looking back on his life and is concerned about some of those decisions that he had to make.
51:16Like many sailors then and since, Psalm 107 held a special meaning for Evelyn Shavas.
51:25They that go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters.
51:30These men see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.
51:35For men on the convoys, faith was a powerful thing to keep hold of.
51:45The same must have been true for the Germans who found themselves on board U-boats.
51:50One wonders how the men felt, you know, being recruited into the Kriegsmarine and then been allocated to U-boats.
51:57And you know that you've probably got a one in three chance of survival.
52:01They ain't great odds.
52:0375% of the U-boat force is killed.
52:07That is the highest rate of loss in the entire German military in the Second World War.
52:12They have an average survival prediction of about 60 days.
52:16And the average age of a U-boat crew member is about 20 years old.
52:20It's a very tough environment to be in.
52:22As the deadly cat and mouse game continued to play out in the Atlantic theatre,
52:26both sides were desperate to develop new strategies which might give them an advantage.
52:32So we'll all jump in as a three, assess the current.
52:35First five minutes just shoot some nice big wides if we can.
52:38The team's next dive is on an incredibly rare Type 7D U-boat,
52:42which was adapted from existing designs in an attempt to make it even deadlier to Allied shipping.
52:49This is the U-218, and they were built to mine around the British Isles.
52:53I haven't done this one before, so naturally I'm interested to see what it's like.
52:58It's a lovely dive, typical Type 7, five mine chutes,
53:02which are big enough to swim through the 1.3 metres across just after the Conning Tower.
53:06That's the distinctive feature.
53:09Before the start of the war, Admiral Dönitz and the Kriegsmarine
53:13focused on two different types of U-boats.
53:16One was a so-called Type 7, a small boat, about 500 tons,
53:20specifically designed to attack shipping in the open Atlantic.
53:24It was very, very fast comparable.
53:27It was very well equipped with five torpedo tubes, and it was very mobile.
53:33When the Germans designed these Type 7 boats,
53:36they shortly afterwards found that they were needing a kind of a mining U-boat,
53:41which they had been used in the First World War with great success on all fronts.
53:47So they used the basic Type 7 design,
53:51just lengthened it by one section, which housed the mining shafts.
53:55U-218 lies at a depth of 60 metres. As it comes into view, the sheer scale of its specially adapted weaponry becomes apparent.
54:13When you see a tube that's one and a half metres in diameter,
54:17the enormity of the size of these mines that they would be laying comes home to you.
54:23So having Barry in that to demonstrate the size of those chutes, I think, was really useful,
54:30but also quite daunting as well, or quite, I don't know what the word is,
54:33but it's quite sort of scary to see these things and what they were built to do.
54:42These deep shafts were designed to hold an explosive cargo of mines,
54:47which could be laid in coastal waters where they posed a deadly threat to ships coming and going from British harbours.
54:54When they built the U-218 as a mine layer, the Germans were harking back to a very, very successful mine laying campaign,
55:05submarine mine laying campaign for the First World War.
55:09Only six of these specialist vessels, which could also operate as normal torpedo boats, were built.
55:15But they soon find the British coastline heavily protected, making them easy targets.
55:21Mining was very complicated because you have to enter in these very heavily patrolled areas under the coast,
55:29and the U-wood commanders didn't like that at all.
55:34Five of the six boats in operation were sunk with the loss of 241 men.
55:39U-218 itself was attacked and damaged on at least five separate occasions,
55:45but somehow it made it through the war.
55:48Allied surface forces and aircraft had now shut down coastal waters.
55:52They had enough air power and sea power to ensure that the U-boats could no longer operate.
55:58By the end of 1942, coastal waters around the UK were inhospitable to U-boats.
56:05But that wasn't the case for vast areas of the open Atlantic, where they operated almost unhindered.
56:12The Allies were struggling to keep their vital supply lines open.
56:17So there was a dangerous area that was called the Black Pit by some merchant mariners,
56:23where simply they had no aerial protection.
56:26This huge piece of the Atlantic, south of Iceland, into which basically Allied aircraft can't reach.
56:33There was a sheer number of U-boats now deployed, and there was hardly any chance to escape the search lines,
56:40which were spanning all across the Atlantic.
56:43So sooner or later, any convoy would be located by U-boat.
56:47As the battle reaches its most critical phase...
56:56You have Wrens in here who have brothers and cousins and friends on those ships,
57:00and they're looking at this map, and they are willing those people to stay alive,
57:04and it's a very heavy place to work.
57:06Both sides raced to develop deadly new technology.
57:16So once U-boats were able to stay submerged with the help of the snorkel,
57:20chances to be located by enemy aircraft was almost nil.
57:25Every time it was advanced by one side, the other sought to counter it.
57:30They have the hedgehog, which is this new weapon that they can use against submarines.
57:41With the fate of Europe on a knife edge.
57:44This was the most important project of the German war navy.
57:48It was designed to produce one boat every two and a half days.
57:52It was clear the Nazis would stop at nothing in order to win.
58:02There were around 10,000 people who were forced to work.
58:11He kept his accent right up to his dying day.
58:14Very proud dairy man.
58:16It was really like a concentration camp system.
58:18It was really like a concentration camp system.
58:46I put in the fruit of Europe.
58:48I made a decision with the people to make help.
58:50I did the whole thing.
58:51When the word was raised.
58:53Why am I looking at the people to make a human being?
58:55The people to take a home.
58:56That's not your heart.
58:57It was really like a history.
58:58It was really like a history of the seminars.
58:59The people to come from the Divinity Center,
59:01they set together.
59:02The people to come from the July 1st.
59:04Thank you very much.
59:05It was really a time that they may have had walked away.
59:07You wanted to want to leave.
59:08To come by you nil.
59:09This time you were very large.
59:10You get back to your долларов.
59:11You were lucky.
59:12You may have to make a hail of a grave.