 Right. So, welcome everybody. Welcome to the King's Maritime History Seminars, organized by the British Commission for Maritime History. It's a series of seminars organized with the support of the Society for Medical Research and Lloyd's Register, and it's a series hosted by the Lawton Legal History Unit in the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War in the Department of War Studies and King's College London. So, there are many welcomes offered to you all and of course to our speaker. I'm very pleased to be able to present Captain Rodney Brown who comes to us with a lot of practical experience of the sea itself, a lot of professional experience, with a career of many years with the maritime sector of Shell, but also academic experience as naturally an historian and an historian for the shipwrights and ivory company. And Rodney is a member of the Wellington Trust as we were just discussing a moment ago, the honorable company of master mariners and a number of others. So, we're a very good company and we are Rodney very grateful that you came to speak to the BCMH seminars for us. I'll just say in the last week we allowed people to turn on their cameras if they want, if they want to be part of a gallery, a bit of an event that's been suggested to us as an option. And as for questions we'll do as we have done in recent seminars, I will ask you to raise your electronic hand at the end and I'll invite you to unmute yourselves and to ask your questions directly but I'll monitor that. So, I don't think there's any further ado. So, with that I will hand over to you Rodney with our panelists. In that case, we are all ready to go. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very pleased to be before you. Initially, I would say that the slideshow that I present to you was made in conjunction with the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth. It was used to show it together but decided that rather than travel long distances, we would show it individually giving credit to the opposite side. So, the military side, particularly the aviation side on what was then called the Fleet Air Arm, we owe to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth. So, North Atlantic air cover for convoys in World War II. Now, the convoys we are about to talk about are the ordinary convoys, i.e., cargo ships and tankers for the day-to-day requirements of the United Kingdom. Not for troop ships and for specialized cargoes, they were much more enhanced than these were. So, off we go with the routine convoys. The Battle of the Atlantic. Starting of June 1939 to the 8th of May 1945, British Isles required a million tons of material per week. Germany and Italy were intent on preventing Britain receiving this material and there's no doubt about it, the winner would win the war. Winston Churchill's speech, I read it for you, the Battle of Atlantic was dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happened elsewhere or land at sea or in the air depended ultimately on its outcome. The enemy had the pocket battleship, the U-boat and long-range airplanes. There we have the Untersee Boot. Now, we call them subs in the UK. We have this strange factor of initialing things. We call it the U-boat but you can see why it's the U-boat but the Germans gave it its full name, Untersee Boot. Rock Wolf Convo 200 was initially a pre-war airliner but modified and used for reconnaissance directing U-boat groups towards convoys. It had a long range because pre-war before it was converted to what it's doing now, it flew from Germany all the way to New York and by not carrying the passengers but carrying inspection crews it had a lightweight capacity to go into the mid-Atlantic for quite a long period of time to try and detect convoys. Here are the two German aeroplanes that were a long range or could get at least two mid-Atlantic but to attack our ships. Now, younger than J.U.88, a manchen für uns, the German translation of that is mad for all. It so happens that I visited some time ago the RAF Museum at Duxford and was talking to the pilot of our Lancaster Bomber and he was saying when you're going to the air on this airplane the wings wobble and therefore you have to hold the joystick all the time and you have to fly this airplane full-time. There's no such thing as automatic. That's what he means when he says madchen für allies. That airplane was difficult to fly. Here is the situation. The only air cover that we could get is within the black lines. The convoys used to gather in New Jersey and in New York Harbor and when I say gather they used to gather approximately 30 to 40 ships before they would go on their convoy voyage. That would take them three to four weeks together so a convoy had to leave once per week at least so one from New Jersey, one from New York, one from New York and that's the way they did it. So you will see a bit later on there were some nice factors about that. The green dashes indicate the routes. You can see the routes that we went tended to swing northwards. Of course convoys were also coming up from the south around the Cape of Good Hope which had the same thing but were dealing with the North Atlantic ones now. The blue dots which look almost numerous were ships destroyed by the end of 1943 and the red dots were the sunken U-boats not so many. The mid-Atlantic gut was known as the black hole. A boy for people who went through it it was a black hole. The Allied defense system the convoy, destroyer and frigate protection, the escort aircraft carriers, a stick which is ping-pong and finding things underneath the word. Enigma those who know it for the breaking of the code that we had broken the code to understand what was being sent in German and we had eventually some long-range airplanes were mostly flying boats. The first merchant aircraft carrier was a merchant ship converted into an aircraft carrier. Reason for that was that to put a regular Royal Naval aircraft carrier into a convoy meant that it was the prime target for the U-boat so we wanted to get away from using our prime aircraft carriers for convoy duty and therefore we had these converted merchant ships. The initial one went to the United States to the Royal Navy built in the United States and therefore that's why we call them or the Royal Navy call them the Woolworth carrier. This was HMS Searcher or another Royal Naval aircraft carrier with 25 aircraft and once as you will see later the merchant ship merchant aircraft carriers came along the two Royal Navy ones went off to do specialized convoys such as escorting crew ships and armored ships and that kind of thing. Initially we had to come. 26 merchant ships were fitted with a cuttable and an RAF hurricane fighter zoomed off. Nine combat missions, eight aircraft and one pilot loss but they did shoot down German airplanes and one was damaged. The problem was that if one of the hurricane pilots had taken off the only place he could land his airplane was on dry land and when he got if he got into a battle with the enemy he wasn't particularly looking at his watch and there were quite a number of them had to land in the sea. Fortunately landing near a ship were rescue operations would take place and most were picked up so we didn't have too many pilots lost but we had a few aircraft lost. Then came the merchant aircraft carriers. Here with are the cargo ships that were converted. The normal deck of the cargo ship is where that black deck second down is that's the normal deck and they built above it the hangar for the four airplanes and then the accommodation for the extra people that they had on board. The gray area in the middle is the engine room of the ship and of course there's a propeller shaft going through. Now the merchant aircraft carriers also carried the cargo that they were there for so when they came across the Atlantic they normally carried the dry cargo ships they normally carried grain in bulk but not always but that was the easy cargo to carry and the necessary one for us to receive over here. Here is the tanker now there was a bit of resistance at the beginning for tankers. The argument was how are we going to put the aeroplanes the aviation fuel and the engines the aeroplanes near an oil cargo some of which might be gasoline or diesel or things of that kind. So there was persuasion arm twisting and eventually HMG agreed and we converted a number of oil tankers into merchant aircraft carriers. The engine room of course is left the deck is just above where it says oil cargo the aviation fuel space which is gasoline is in the middle there and the accommodation which is a normal accommodation on the ship is either there the cruise accommodation down here aft and we built this little single pair called the bridge above the flight deck but there was one problem we could hardly make a hunger in the middle of the oil and therefore we had to keep our aeroplanes on deck all the time so when aeroplanes were landing on we pushed the parked ones up to the front and when they were taking off we pushed them to the back and there is one of the shell ships before it was converted MV Alexia built in 1935 its speed used to be 12 knots which is about 13 and a half miles per hour so the difficulty of taking an aeroplane off from a ship going at that speed wasn't as easy as the RN ones that I showed you earlier. Here is the conversion taking place you see this is the normal walkway the gangway up the deck you see the lifeboats here ready to bail out if necessary and the flight deck built on top at the height above it and here is it the flight deck of the Alexia when she was being converted the operators of the max the cargo ships Hane line Ben line and BP and shell or it was called Anglo-Saxon in those days we built them now at the time HMG was the effective owner of ships they decided what they had to do how they were converted and whatever the owners of the ship the true owners of the ship were no more than the operators doing as they were told and the government said well we want to call all the ships empire something and she'll said the change of ships name is unlucky we refuse to change ours so apart from one ship which was a new one they all retained their own names when the Germans started to move into Holland the Dutch shell fleet brought four of its ships and its mom power and some of its naval staff over to the UK and they joined in two of the ships were transferred to the British flag with British staff but two Mirolda and Gadilla remained Dutch who the Dutch ensign and we Dutch staff with Dutch air crew and they stay well they did of course and everyone worked together but nevertheless the Dutch did a good job by joining in where they could the advantages of the max easy conversion relatively easy but look at the cost of ships it's unbelievable isn't it the cost of a normal tanker only two hundred and thirty two thousand pounds and the cost of a mark three hundred and thirty one thousand pounds at the moment you have to pay about five or six millions for them the max always carried their cargo grain or oil and the tanker max were rigged so that they could refuel let's see the escort ships the destroyers and the frigates it's advantage they only did 12 knots so it was a bit difficult for aircraft to take off and land we'll come to that a bit later the flight length of the cargo ship was 461 because the cargo ship 413 the tanker 461 and only 62 foot wide it's meant that the aeroplanes had to be an easy liftoff aeroplane which made the swordfish couldn't be a hurricane or a spitfire it had to have rockets instead of its normal courage of torpedoes and depth charges and he had no hunger below the deck for reasons i've mentioned there it is there's the swordfish on the tanker about to take off notice under the low wings the rockets the four on each wing and notice the parked aeroplanes ready for take off the part ones are at the back of the ship but i want you to particularly notice the trip wire going across underneath the aeroplane and the little piece of metal sticking out below in order to catch the trip they lowered it to catch the trip when landing but always easy to take off and certainly not always easy to maintain when this situation came about we were a little bit concerned about how will the civilian merchant navy people get along with the raw naval people because we certainly have different systems different standards and whatever but as it turned out it all went well no difficulties whatsoever and the only the captain of the ship was in charge by law and the only person he had to take notice of was the commodore of the convoy however he didn't have the he had the sense to take notice of what the military said when we're talking about military operations were reasonably heavily armed max four inch gun two single buffers but six single earlacans now this meant that in addition to the fleet air arm pilots and air crew and engineers that were on board there were also people from various pieces of military they didn't particularly pick naval stuff to fire these guns they might come from the army or the raw marines or whatever so there was a mixture of people on board notice 52 merchant navy people with 50 naval military stuff 100 people on board compared to the Woolworths aircraft carriers which had 600 people on board and now you've got a classic case of the difference between highly amount of warship and highly amount of merchant ship but since in the law everybody on board had to be recruited as a crew member and had to be paid we paid the Royal Navy people and the military a shillena day how about that most of the uh max were on board until the war ended the least lend-end ships from the USA were returned if still operating was hms searcher class and others were returned to the united states navy but eventually became uh merchant ships the long-range aeroplanes well the short sunderland the liberator the u.s. uh made aeroplane and the cartelina they had sufficient engine power to get into the black hole and they were the aeroplanes they carried torpedoes and bombs and mines and they were the ones that destroyed most submarines the max ships their prime aim was to shoot down the condor aeroplane which is what they did when you shot down the condor aeroplane the Germans had made a major mistake by Admiral Donets sending his submarine in packs rather than individually the condor guided them to the location it had found a convoy because of the ag nigma being able to uh register what the enemy was saying this gave the navy and other forces knowledge of where the submarines were likely to be so they are able to attack them on the surface the convoy deviated once it had found the convoy aeroplane and shot it down which is what they did with those four rockets under the wings deviated so the war was won by the max but amazingly the prime win was a major mistake by admiral donets who had decided to hunt in packs guided by the condor aeroplane there's the thing the germ blockade failed so the allies won the war merchant ships lost 3,500 now that's for the entire uh Germanic war alive warships lost 175 German U-boats lost 783 and there we are 72,200 merchant navy and allied naval mariners lost and a 30,000 German U-boat men lost ladies and gentlemen that's the end of my show and any questions far away please thank you right okay uh very good uh thank you very much um i wonder well uh well people are are are gathering their thoughts i wonder if you could say something about the um uh the azores whenever i whenever i think about the you know the mid-atlantic air gap i think about the azores and i'm not i'm not so clear on um you know the um competition for control and i know i know that it helped to close the gap um but i wonder if you could say something about the German uh position on it or or or something um among those lines well certainly there was uh a large number of ships coming around from far east there was fairly important cargoes to be received from India and Australia however there was no attacking point for the enemy provided they kept fairly well south all the way around until they arrived roughly where the Gibraltar straits are and therefore the convoy duty going into the united kingdom from the Gibraltar states was the same as the uh North Atlantic convoy system the only difficulty was that gathering the convoy couldn't have been uh it wasn't easier because you didn't come around in convoy where it was peaceful you had to collect and wait off the Gibraltar straits the advantage of that route was that uh it was out of range of German aircraft Germany did not conquer Spain and therefore until you got within an airplane range of France then uh you you were pretty clear so it was that latter part where there was an element of defense from the air force of the united kingdom against airplanes from the uh German Hubel effort primarily concentrated in the north Atlantic the other area where you both uh operation was very serious was within the Mediterranean and of course most of it was operated by the Italian uh regime uh and it was ultra serious if you had to take cargo through to Malta which we managed to retain Malta and Malta was a prime example of how we managed to continue winning the war very good okay um and as I say I mean you know people um attendees you can uh raise your uh hands if you have any uh any questions so there's uh Jim Dingaman if you if you want to you're welcome to unmute yourself uh and even turn on your mic if you'd like to ask uh ask a question i haven't heard a question no i haven't heard either we might be uh maybe i need to allow me to talk yes yes there we are all right thank you Rodney uh Rodney uh thank you for your talk uh in retrospect what do you see as the decisive mistakes that the german navy made in waging its war against shipping in the battle of the Atlantic and the reason I ask is that when you look at the uh post war situation for example the soviet navy they of course developed a very robust submarine force obviously but the lessons learned from world war two that is that uh the germans begin the war with a inadequate number of submarines in order to really wage an aggressive strategic offensive into the Atlantic and i'm just wondering what do you see in retrospect are the key uh issues that affected the germans in not being able to do what they wanted to do well uh they they uh much of uh the reliability of maintaining ourselves in the in great britain was down to not only the united states but the whole of the americans canada and the united states but also south america so the collection the cargo from the not only were the necessary foods and etc but bringing across american equipment for the americans to fight with now the americans of course came over themselves but the tremendous amount of effort needed to bring uh united states into the second world war concentrated on the north atlantic that the germans realized this and therefore made their prime attack on the area and that's why uh that was the the concentration of the battle of the atlantic that uh and they were probably correct as i mentioned that there wasn't much opportunity for them to attack cowboys coming around from the south or formulating convoys off the dibral to streets and going in it was the primary of attack now what they did was they they built the two big u-boat pens one in france and the other in norway and they made the error of blocking all the u-boats together in one park and we broke the code of finding out where those u-boats were and we could attack the u-boats which was successful that was a mistake by the germans was going on block rather than allowing the u-boats to go off on their own to find their own words and then in fact the admiral donates uh admitted that after the war first of all can i thank grim white for the invasion of the resource suggestion the book where i can get all my answers about i want about the resource rodney can i ask you well we're waiting for others um to gather their thoughts um if i may say so i mean what you what you present is very all very positive um you know everything everything worked uh everybody cooperated um and it all worked and we know it did work right we know who won the war we know who won the battle of the atlanta i just wonder if uh you could explore maybe some of the costs involved in um in these uh and in these in these max you know converting converting merchant ships to carrier seems to me to be you know somebody who doesn't really know uh very much something best you know so you don't want to use your your your proper aircraft carriers because they become you know they're too much of a target so you use these instead then surely um a they must have remained a target just as much as as a regular aircraft carrier would have done and b it must have come at some at some cost so i just wonder if he could give a sense of a clear sense of of maybe the the the risks uh but the the the limitations in the dangers maybe uh of using these things well i i really uh i i i myself happened to be involved in a war the saigon war where britain wasn't involved but i happened to be uh carrying cargo up to saigon uh and of course the americans were fighting them and there's a strange war because uh ahead of us was an american gunboat behind an american gunboat which were attacked the the river outside on his for each other's a marshland area with moss on either side and coming through with bullets at the american gunboats and then they stopped when we went past and we thought well we must be supplying fuel for both sides that uh it's it's very difficult to say that uh it is it is difficult to say what the outcome of any world war is or any war of any kind they're always very different and the logic of the people deciding to wage them they're not very easy to follow you remind me to say one thing mind you but the the germans are nice people they have one item which causes the problem they do as they're told they really are dedicated as doing as they're told and because of the uh the problems in 1932 about economy and the fuzzish got in line there and became the germans did as they were told according to the fuzzish but the germans themselves admiral donitz issued an order to all his ships if there is no risk to your personnel and there is no risk to your ship you have to rescue the people whose ship you have sunk and treat them cordially no it so happens that the shell company had a ship called the sarnia that was sunk by the gruff spade battleship and they were rescued by the gruff spade and treated very very cordially on board but then they were handed over as prisoners of war to the Gestapo the Gestapo is a different game altogether and that is where the fuzzish regime came in the gentleman who went through this experience was the radio officer of the ship called the sarnia and he recorded everything that happened to him and that recording is in the british museum and tells you a working great difference between the Gestapo and the ordinary german the german unfortunately always do as i told maybe we should do that in england occasionally okay thanks i guess um that's that's uh interesting i i i guess you know i was interested maybe in in um uh more of the the limitations you know the actual practical limitations and you know and and how that was very perceived by these these converted carriers that's that's grand there's a question in the q&a box which i'm sure that you can you can see with a little red number one can i invite you around me to open that and to and to read it and respond to it you know yourself sorry i'll miss them from kevin from kevin's stall or if kevin is still there indeed maybe he'd like to um ask the question directly that might be easier kevin if you're if you're still there i will allow you to talk to us there we are yeah can you uh yes i'm just wondering why the uh the uh braiders who carried the catapult planes didn't use sea planes like the american navy did pre-war war two well the sea planes were used the uh the three that i showed you were the prime aeroplanes is one of which is an american one uh but uh the uh the range of them extended from about 1941-42 onwards but there weren't that many and the difficulty was that uh they had to be told where they were going they didn't have advanced methods of finding out where the enemy was and that was primarily done by the detection of the messages the fact that we had broken their code so that the message sent from the kondor aeroplane to the germans was picked up by uh the code breakers and therefore we knew where the enemy submarines were now if you know where ships are you can send out our aeroplanes to your katalina uh flying boat that was a very valuable aeroplane that did quite a lot of uh attacking systems some of them was mainly a mine laying type of aeroplane variation in all different aeroplanes i helped restore one of those uh for a local aviation museum in alaska but no i meant the uh the catapult launched uh planes that were kept on the decks on the rails of uh the freighters that you talked about you showed a picture of them the ones that had to fly the land had to fly to land on land uh well i think there was nine and eight were lost and one pilot killed oh uh yes uh i don't know when we sorry when we uh when i asked you to take a look at the uh tripwire and the uh catching hooks hope lifted a little bit of time plus the parking up on the tanker max the only accident that occurred was that uh the last of the three aeroplanes to land on the miraldo it was uh two of the aeroplanes were parked up on the bow and the landing airplane failed to pick up the tripwire and therefore couldn't stop and smashed into the two aeroplanes on the bow of the ship and they all went over the bow all three aeroplanes and of course the pilot and the navigator or the gunman navigator they were both killed the ship of course was going ahead and run over the the aerosol there's no no hope of rescuing them so the only accident that occurred for all the max during the entire war just two men killed and three aeroplanes lost well i think this is further back and you talk uh you're talking about uh ships that had their own planes on them not an aircraft carrier they take off from the ship and then they had to go to land and find land in order to uh come down and that if uh they they they were primarily used against the uh condors i thought it didn't really mention who they were used against the the big advantage of the uh the uh our our twin wing aeroplanes the the shooting down with the rockets it occurred by almost by accident when the uh max were designed big difficulty was you know in fact this was one of the arguments against doing the max they're not going to be able to carry the normal load that the uh the airplane carries we'd used to carry a torpedo or a mine underneath and that's what those airplanes were primarily for when they were originally designed but they were all rockets under each wing you could see them on this photograph before you just under the middle of the wings uh four of each now essentially the airplane was quite light it had more power once in the air than it normally had to use only carrying these lightweight rockets instead of a torpedo so that meant he could go up and reach the height of the condor passenger aeroplane and go above it and come down and shoot it and therefore uh shooting the condor was the essence of that these aeroplanes made the major contribution to winning the Battle of the Atlantic yeah a look of the draw in a way but certainly valiant effort by the pilot and the co-pilot of these airplanes but I'm surprised they didn't try using dirgeable uh farther in in the black hole in the black hole yeah yeah because they uh the u.s navy did use dirgeable around the city where the convoys were leaving from and there was even one instance where they were successful the convoy the convoys gathered gotta remember that ships can't time themselves for loading cargo and one let's say coming up from Buenos Aires and the other one coming from New York to New Jersey they had to collect and they used to take them about two weeks to collect a convoy so the convoy from New Jersey was set off while the convoy in New York Harbor was gathering and that's that's the case of all convoys and that was the difficulty with coming round the Cape of Good Hope collecting off the Mediterranean Sea so that these are routine convoys when you got specialized convoys where you've got a troop ship or armor or something valuable to the fighting forces then that's then that's a different convoy system all together there you'll have Royal Naval aircraft carriers and superb armament such as when we went to rescue Malta at Operation Pedestal at the different convoys than the routine once every two weeks and the other thing that happened was you didn't have a convoy going back because if you hung around the United Kingdom you'd get bombed out of nowhere so they used to have to go and set off if there happened to be a Royal Naval frigate and you could persuade the captain instead of doing his normal 25 knots to come along with you at 12 months and he might come along and keep you accompanied that was not much of his most of the time. Yes thank you I mean I too was intrigued by a photo I guess it was earlier on which showed a catapult plane leaving by that means not being able to land back on the deck. Okay are there any further questions now's your chance if anybody has anything they need to want to learn about convoys and the air gap and so on now's your chance I think it might be something that's been written there are two now Jeremy Rudds you have a written question here and I'm happy to read it out I've just allowed you to talk if you prefer to read it or ask it yourself well it's a comment rather than a question. No it's okay I'll have to talk yeah just maybe I can help out regarding the question about why did we use catapult ships rather than sea planes it's simply that the sea conditions in the North Atlantic are very very different to say the South Pacific yeah the Americans the Japanese and the South Pacific use sea planes so did some of the German disguised raiders in the Indian Ocean but if you think about sea conditions in the North Atlantic it's very very rare that you will be able to land or take off with a sea plane and in fact one of the earliest catapult ships slightly predating the merchant catapult ships was HMS Pegasus flying naval former fighters and that in fact was converted from a sea plane carrier have been a sea plane carrier but they converged it to a catapult ship so yeah hopefully uh hopefully that answers the gentleman's question right okay something else I just add to you about an earlier question you have to remember of course the United States came into the war primarily because what happened from the Japanese attack uh in the Pacific and the concentration on effort had to be out there rapidly so America of course is a boom nation once they decide to do something and boy did they get on with it so they did provide Europe with tremendous amount of stuff however they had to concentrate on the Pacific initially rather than the Atlantic so the Americans didn't operate cowboy systems guarded by American ships were used for fighting forces rather than just protective units no blame culture or not the Americans took a pounding in the Japanese and they hadn't have taken over then there was a lot of difficulty I think the sea planes on the American ships though were kind of an out of date uh feature because uh usually the larger ships had access to carriers in their groups and so uh the average uh American uh capital ship didn't need a sea plane any longer for scouting purposes uh well I'm not too sure about the sea plane but the the mark ships didn't have a sea plane they had normally uh normal landing points the uh the flying boats that we referred to the Sunderland and the uh Catalina they didn't go out into the Atlantic and land in the Atlantic they did their job there and they had sufficient uh range to be able to get back to reasonably calm waters to land but obviously you can't land an airplane a sea it's the airplane in rough seas of any kind okay um shall we shall we move on thanks uh for that um there's a question from uh Ian Stafford but before before that there's a comment from uh Ian uh Lister um who I'm going to allow to talk uh if you'd like to uh Ian to your comment about convoys and and and uh and any or I'm happy to read it out now you're muted I think if you read it out please okay all right so so the point is this that the convoys were sometimes not alerted to the presence of you boats right because that would reveal that the enigma code had been broken this is like this is the comment so convoys were uh alerted and so could change course if a plane had actually cited a u-boat or boats on the surface when it was known through enigma that a u-boat pack was was going to attack plane uh we're going to attack planes we then sent out search for u-boats on the surface but the pilots were not informed uh that we already knew where the u-boats uh were so that's an interesting um observation not wanting to to reveal uh this success of of of an enigma which might be about response to that right well that that's correct of course that uh number of ships merchant ships lost mainly from u-boat attack uh indicates that uh the convoys system uh wasn't perfect that uh that the the if had the germans continued its initial policy of allowing u-boats to roam free it would have been even worse uh there was no guarantee that the uh swordfish airplanes on the convo duty would uh find the condor and shoot it down and no guarantee that once the information was passed that they could get out of the way of the attacking u-boat group however the fact of the matter is that none of the max were attacked or sunk and they must have been prime observed targets from a u-boat conventar that uh the fact that they weren't sunk would indicate that generally speaking they were successful no attack was ever made on a mac and they all came through the war apart from the accident i mentioned with three lost airplanes no no casualties at all they all including the royal navy ones they all survived so something must have gone right however the fact of the matter is there was a large number of merchant ships sunk by u-boats during the war and oh there's no denying that okay well maybe we can wrap it up by inviting uh ian stafford to ask uh one last uh question hey can you hear me yes i can excellent um a bit of a uh a detailed question but um presumably the uh these ships carrying the uh the aircraft um were perhaps a prize to be sunk or um attacked so i was wondering how you arranged the convoy where where where was the best place to put these um carriers in relation to the box of the convoy in the in the center oh the the carriers were always placed in the center they obviously on the on the usually they were four or five rows of ships the outer two were frigates usually sometimes destroyers but normally frigates from the royal navy then there would be three rows of cargo ships and the commodore ship would always be the central ship usually a slightly larger ship than the rest semi passenger cargo carry not carrying passengers but in times as few might carry say 20 passengers as opposed to a normal passenger liner and uh then the mac uh ships had to have uh space to maneuver because obviously when the airplanes had to take off they the ship had to point into the wind uh and vice versa were landing so that that gives you some idea they were placed in the center because the center was the most difficult place for the you woke to attack you know the idea was if you're going to sink a ship sink one on the outside you know it's a bit hard to say but that's the way things were thought about at the time good okay well thank you very much and i you know i wish i'm doing this at work and i wish i had a glass of wine with which to toast you run me and with which therefore to express our our gratitude and our and our thanks for that very interesting talk and that insight into a particular feature of the uh of the convoys um and uh we can't do a normal round of applause but uh if you would just please imagine our gratitude um and um thank you uh thank you very much okay thank you everybody my pleasure and uh uh certainly merchant and royal navy today they're doing a good job uh trying very hard to doing to the green activity necessary for the future launch has two distinct meanings as a noun it means an act of launching something i was going to say that that was a wonderful moment to stop and then we get we got interrupted by um by some robot but it remains an excellent uh way to end uh and so uh i thank everybody and thank you again uh very much bye everybody bye good you