ABSTRACT
Collective morale within the Royal Navy – having improved with Winston Churchill back at the helm as the tireless political head of the Admiralty and in the wake of the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee – began to suffer something of a decline as the New Year unfolded, ushering in the coldest winter in forty years and bringing with it repeated successes for the Germans in their mining and Uboat offensives around British shores. Of the two, mining operations could have been even more deadly had the OKW been truly convinced that aerial minelaying might pose a decisive threat to the Royal Navy and had Hermann Göring, as the head of the Luftwaffe, sanctioned the release of sufficient aircraft to sow their stock of 22,000 magnetic mines in busy waterways around the British coast. Offensive mining operations were indeed mounted in many of the river estuaries on both the east and west coasts of Britain – the Thames, the Tyne and the Humber being especially favoured by German aircraft, torpedo boats and minelaying submarines – but the steady toll of small merchant ships or trawlers and even the occasional warship, such as the destroyer Grenville, which strayed into their path could have been far greater than it was.1
