The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

attention to Hartlepool. Because of the increased speed, the ship was
shaking and the bridge rattling loudly so that Captain Rogerson never heard
the S-boats stealing towards them. But suddenly the Second Officer called
out, ‘Here’s one for us!’ It struck at the stern of the ship, blowing off her
propeller. Now with no more torpedoes to fire, S20 raked the lifeboats and
Hartlepool with machine-gun fire before opening her engines and
disappearing into the night.
‘The assault of 1st S-boat Flotilla was a complete success,’ noted
Kapitän Bütow proudly. Bobby Fimmen in S26 had claimed Elmbank, and
Götz von Mirbach in S20, British Corporal and Hartlepool, a total of nearly
13,500 tonnes. No wonder they were feeling pleased with themselves.
Von Mirbach could have been forgiven for thinking he had sunk both
vessels; after all, they had been hit and men were seen abandoning their
ships. However, both had survived. Captain Rogerson had been loath to
abandon ship, despite being repeatedly told to do so by the naval escorts
that had arrived by first light. His judgement had been proved right,
however. Both Hartlepool and British Corporal were towed back to
Weymouth later that morning, where they were beached. They had
somehow survived, but that was hardly the point; not only were they
severely damaged, their cargoes would not be reaching Nova Scotia.
Winston Churchill was not the most patient of men at the best of times, but
particularly not when there were urgent war matters to attend to. To ensure
that key matters were dealt with as a matter of extreme urgency, he would
mark ‘Action This Day’ on the top of certain memos. He wrote these three
words on to a note he sent on 5 July to the Vice-Chief and Assistant Chief
of the Naval Staff, in which he wanted to know, on a simple piece of paper,
what they were planning to do about Channel convoys now that the
Germans were along the French coast. ‘The attacks on the convoy
yesterday,’ he wrote, ‘both from the air and by E-boats, 7 were very serious.’
Sixteen ships from OA178 had been sunk or damaged and would never
reach their destination. Three of those had been caused by just four S-boats;
the rest had been hit by many more Stuka Ju 87s and Me 110 Zerstörers,
whose hit ratio had not been anything like so high. For all the wailing of
sirens, crashing of bombs and rattle of machine-gun fire, Oskar Dinort and
the Stuka pilots were still finding it very difficult to actually hit and sink
moving ships, even ones crawling along at under ten knots.