Bennett, GH

Coastal Convoys: Introduction and Literature Review
Since the early 1940s academic and public understandings of the war at sea in
Europe have been dominated by the struggle for control of the Atlantic sealanes.
Images and narratives of U-boats versus the escorted, seried columns of merchant
ships in carefully controlled and closely fought convoy actions in the Atlantic
proliferate in media representations. The British Government’s belated decision in
2012 to award veterans of the Russian convoys a special campaign medal in the
form of the Arctic Star had only minimal impact on public perceptions of the
geographical confines of Britain’s sea war.
1 While within academic opinion there is a
very firm understanding that the war at sea, especially the merchant seamen’s war,
was very different in the Atlantic, as opposed to the Mediterranean, Pacific and
Arctic theatres of operation, one area of convoy operations in the Second World War
continues to be seriously overlooked by both academics and the general public: the
convoys which operated in UK coastal waters. While the Atlantic justifiably has
taken the lion’s share of public and academic attention (it was on this critical and
closely contested campaign that Britain’s survival depended from 1939 to 1945) the
significance of the coastal convoys merits greater attention than they have hitherto
received. As Richard Woodman has commented the coastal convoys remain ‘one of
the many disregarded elements in Britain’s maritime struggle’.2
 The lack of
academic inquiry into the wartime coastal convoys constitutes a surprising and very
serious gap in the literature of the Second World War, the history of the British
Merchant Navy and the narratives of many of the maritime communities along the
East Coast of the United Kingdom. Put simply the coastal convoys were equally
critical to Britain’s survival as the Atlantic convoys from 1940 to 1944. They
produced a very different set of strategic and tactical problems for both sides in the
war at sea that has not been studied in any depth. In turn, the tactical and strategic
problems of coastal convoys meant a significantly different wartime experiences for
the merchant navy crews trying to fight their ships through to destinations on the
South and East Coasts of the United Kingdom. As we try to refine and add detail to
our understanding of the merchant seamen’s experience in the Second World War,
the nature of the war at sea, and the life of seafarers in those communities that
produced the coaster crews, it is essential to interrogate and establish such
differences in substantially greater depth. The nature of the war at sea in European
waters cannot be understood without a fuller appreciation of the role and
importance of coastal convoys

Bennett, George

Plymouth Electronic Archive and Research Library

A Very Different Experience: Merchant Seamen on British Coastal Convoys 1940-45'

https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/bitstream/10026.1/12707/1/Coastal%20Convoys%20and%20Merchant%20Seamen.pdf

A Very Different Experience: Merchant Seamen on British Coastal Convoys 1940-45'

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