In the halls of the Admiralty in London’s Whitehall and in Brussels HQ, a crisis of another kind was building, one of whose consequences, if nothing was done about it, would be infinitely more terrible than those facing the Americans in Korea. The operations board told the story in cold, unemotional figures — the rate of Soviet submarines sunk in the Atlantic had fallen off drastically, and the Allied convoys from the United States and Canada devoted to maintaining the rollover necessary to resupply Allied Europe were being sunk at a rate greater than that which had occurred in the early months of the war. For NATO’s C in Cs, the danger, suspected earlier, was now being confirmed with yet another convoy of fifty ships having suffered over sixty percent losses barely a hundred miles north of the Azores. How the Russians submarines were doing it, neither Admiralty in Whitehall nor Norfolk, Virginia, knew, but the mathematical equations gave them the stark warning: If rollover faltered any further, then not only would Europe face the possibility of being starved into submission through lack of conventional munitions as well as food from America, but this lack would force the Allies to the weapons of last resort, which might be the last of everything.
But if in Whitehall the growing fear of the Allies was evident in the cold statistics on the computer screens and by the tiny models representing the growing number of convoy ships sunk, then for the Allied submarine commanders like Robert Brentwood, a thousand feet or more beneath the surface of the Atlantic, the danger took on an infinitely more palpable, if invisible, reality.