Dönitz: The Last Führer (14 page)

Nevertheless, when forced by immediate impending disaster to consider and adapt, the Royal Navy was able to do so; a number of officers, mostly in comparatively junior positions, had been pressing for convoy for some time and trial convoys had been organized; finally the staggering April losses convinced both Admiralty and government that unless something were done unconditional surrender stared them in the face; on April 26th the decision was taken to ‘introduce a comprehensive
scheme of convoy’.
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Coming in from June onwards, this radically altered the premises of von Holtzendorff’s calculations; strategically and tactically the system was offensive; it forced the U-boats to attack in the presence of escorts instead of diving under patrols or guardships and attacking lone merchantmen; with warships in close contact the U-boats were forced to submerge and in doing so they lost their manoeuvrability—for they could not make more than about seven knots at best on their battery driven electric motors—consequently it was difficult for them to get into position ahead for a second attack. But the most surprising result of convoy was to make the waters suddenly very empty. Instead of a stream of ships at more or less regular intervals there were days when U-boat lookouts saw nothing at all.

Convoy gave the neutrals heart, and by making more effective use of shipping space and buying new ships from abroad the allies gradually overcame the tonnage crisis. Von Holtzendorff could not, of course, overcome the deepening crisis in Germany caused by the American entry he had precipitated.

Clear as it is in retrospect that April 1917 marked the turning point, it was far from clear at the time or for several months afterwards to either side, and when Dönitz rejoined U 39 it seemed that Germany was on course for a sensational turning of the tables and no less a triumph than the awaited breakthrough to world power over the carcase of the British empire. After U 39’s next cruise few of Forstmann’s crew could have doubted it.

He had decided to strike at the very focus of allied and imperial lines of communication off Gibraltar, and after leaving the Adriatic steered directly for the Straits, steering through on the surface after dark on June 7th. The first target presented herself early the following morning; as she was some distance away Forstmann approached on the surface and engaged with the gun, Dönitz directing the firing. The steamer immediately turned away and replied with a 7·6-cm piece on her poop, but after a brief action Dönitz’s men scored a hit amidships which stopped her, and she was abandoned. Before sinking her with explosive charges Forstmann found that she was a 3,800-ton Britisher bound for Italy with munitions. In his popular account he recorded a lively scene in the U-boat’s foc’s’le after the success: ‘the gun’s crew and ammunition carriers naturally feel themselves the heroes of the hour’.
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That evening he sank two ships by torpedo, the second an 8,000-ton British steamer which brought his total for the first day outside the Straits
to 16,597 tons! He admired the ‘faultless trim and discipline’ of the survivors when he approached the group of lifeboats.

Remaining in the area outside the Straits for the next fortnight Forstmann sank a further nine vessels before starting his return passage; he arrived back on July 1st with a bag of fourteen vessels totalling 33,000 tons—as the Naval Staff noted, ‘an outstanding performance. With his success in the trade war
Kapitänleutnant
Forstmann stands as ever at the head of all U-boat Commanders’.
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What appears remarkable today is Forstmann’s success rate with torpedoes. Practically every shot was a hit, and it was all done by eye and mental calculation; there were no machine calculators as in the Second World War. Perhaps one of his secrets was the close range at which he fired.

This was very nearly his undoing on the next cruise, and came close to ending Dönitz’s story. They sailed on July 19th, passed Otranto without trouble and headed for the Straits, steering through after dark during the night of July 27th-28th; again targets started to appear immediately and by August 3rd he had destroyed six steamers totalling almost 19,000 tons. August 4th was uneventful, then on the morning of the 5th a convoy was sighted in the north-east. The day was fine; no wind disturbed the oily calm of the surface, not ideal conditions for an attack since the periscope and its tell-tale wash would be easily visible to sharp lookouts. Nevertheless, he dived and steered north to intercept, soon discovering twelve merchantmen in three columns of four ships each, a destroyer escort on the bow of the leading ship of the starboard column and an auxiliary cruiser on the quarter of the last ship in the port column. Seventy-five minutes later, soon after eleven, by which time he had made
out the leading ship in the column as an empty tanker, he set an attack course for a laden ship next astern of her. Because of the sea conditions he used his periscope sparingly; when he ran it out two minutes later to check his position it appeared that his new target ship had altered course somewhat towards him; he ran the periscope in. Two minutes later he had another look. This time there was no doubt; the ship was bearing down straight for him. ‘Because of the flatness of the sea he must have seen the periscope.’
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He ordered 20° starboard rudder, intending to sheer off and get in a stern shot on the third ship in the column. Moments afterwards at 11.10 there was a fearful concussion from starboard forward and the boat was rolled over and pushed deeper; they heard the steamer’s bottom plates grating over them.

Surfacing 90 minutes later and surveying the damage, he decided to return to base. His difficulties were not over though. Four days later off southern Italy while the crew were lying on deck sleeping or reading in the hot afternoon sun, the engineer, pacing the afterdeck, turned suddenly and ran towards the tower, calling out, ‘Two flying machines astern!’

The sailors jumped down the forward hatch as the alarm sounded; from the bridge the lookouts and watch officer tumbled down the ladder almost on top of each other, Forstmann following, closing the hatch over his head and locking it. Immediately the tanks were flooded and the hydroplanes set for a crash dive. As the sea washed over the foredeck and up the tower Forstmann heard a desperate banging on the hatch-cover above his head. He shouted down to the control room to blow the forward tanks, and reached up to unfasten the cover. Directly he pushed it up a badly-scared stoker named Hausolte came falling in with a rush of
sea water. Pulling him down, Forstmann caught a glimpse of the two flying machines only 50 metres away; he shouted for a crash dive as he closed and locked the hatch again. They had reached eight metres when the first bomb landed some distance away, and fifteen metres when they heard a second, also wide.

It turned out the man had been fast asleep and had not heard the alarm. He had been woken by the engines of the flying machines and, seeing the sea coming up over the foredeck and no one about, realized they were diving, rushed up to the bridge and banged on the conning-tower hatch with his boot: ‘The water rose up to my waist, sir. I just clutched hold of the periscope and thought my last hour had come.’

Forstmann did not record his feelings, nor did Dönitz in any published account, but a manuscript he wrote in 1935, almost certainly intended for publication, does contain a tribute to Forstmann’s presence of mind on this occasion—without, however, mentioning him by name!

It seems from the account that Dönitz thoroughly approved of this split-second decision to rescue Hausolte at the risk of the boat and the rest of the crew. In the Second World War he would not have done, but by then the flying machine had become the U-boat’s most feared enemy.

Three days later U 39 was safely in the Bay of Cattaro; from there she sailed for Pola for repairs, during which time it seems probable that Dönitz went home for a spell of leave and Forstmann wrote up his account for popular consumption; it is notable that although he told the
story of Stoker Hausolte and the flying machines he made no mention whatever of being rammed and damaged, or even of attacking a convoy.

The next cruise of U 39 was from September 18th to October 14th, during which Forstmann sank six steamers of around 24,000 tons. The Flag Officer U-boats noted it as a ‘model undertaking’ which had brought Forstmann’s personal total up to 411,000 tons of shipping destroyed. ‘He has handed over his command as at present the most successful U-boat Commander.’
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Forstmann reported well on Dönitz. Under ‘Appearance and figure’, he wrote ‘very good military appearance, socially very deft’. Under ‘General Remarks’:

Years later Dönitz replied to a letter from Forstmann: ‘U 39 was a
prima
school and time! Ever your grateful Dönitz.’
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Ordered to a month’s gunnery training course for U-boat Commanders in Kiel in December, Dönitz also left U 39 at this time. And after the course, at which he was described as confident and determined, he was given a command of his own, UC 25, a combined minelayer and torpedo attack boat of some 417 tons.

‘I felt as mighty as a king.’
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By now the springtime of confidence in U-boats had faded. It was not admitted that the unrestricted campaign had failed; indeed the officially released figures for sinkings were more wildly optimistic than before and tended to disguise it. But nothing could disguise the fact that Great Britain had not been forced to her knees, and as von Holtzendorff had made a public boast that five months would suffice to bring her to that position public confidence was shaken and morale in the U-boat service had deteriorated—although not to the same extent as in the surface fleet.

In retrospect it is clear that the campaign had been defeated. It was not yet entirely clear to the British Admiralty: sinkings were still high, new construction had not caught up yet, and the destruction of U-boats was
depressingly low and only just beginning to catch up with German construction. The losses in the last three months of 1917 (German estimates in brackets) were:
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These still high figures concealed the fact that the U-boats had been forced to shift their operations away from the ocean routes where convoy had been adopted and into coastal waters where the traffic was still largely independent; a further significant proportion of losses had come from the Mediterranean where the convoy system had not really come in until November—as Forstmann’s cruises indicate. The actual loss rate of ships in convoy was only 1·2 per cent or one twentieth of the rate in the worst April days at the beginning of the campaign, and it was this fact, not improved measures to sink U-boats or improved results in that direction—still only 5·7 per cent of operational boats sunk against 4 per cent at the beginning of the war
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—that indicated the defeat of the unrestricted campaign.

Dönitz, determined nonetheless to pour his all into his new command and win reputation, sailed from Pola on his first cruise at the end of February; his instructions were to lay mines before Palermo and conduct trade war in the adjacent waters, but as intelligence came in that the British repair ship,
Cyclops
, was in Port Augusta on the east coast of Sicily, he was directed to attack her with torpedoes or lay mines to bar her passage out. In his account of the cruise in his memoirs he made much of the risks of passing the Straits of Otranto. It is true that a conference on February 8–9th had decided on a tremendous increase in the numbers and extent of guardship lines, nets, mines and aircraft in the straits at the expense of convoy—since the new British Commander Adriatic did not believe in convoy!—but these extra measures could not be brought in immediately and even after completion the barrage proved no more effective than before. U-boats could always dive under the nets and avoid the surface patrols, which they did with impunity. Only one boat was caught in the nets and two at the most destroyed by surface craft. Nevertheless the possibility of mines and depth charges was ever
present while negotiating this bottleneck, and steady nerves were required.