Dönitz: The Last Führer (17 page)

In his memoirs Dönitz described how news of the Kapp
Putsch
broke ‘to our complete amazement’; certainly there was confusion at Wilhelmshaven naval station, and officers were arrested by patrols of petty officers and men as they had been in the 1918 mutinies, but at Kiel the Station Commander, Admiral von Levetzow, acted promptly and decisively to maintain order. At first he was successful. He was unable, however, to prevent the workers in Kiel from obeying a general strike call from the government which had re-established itself in Stuttgart; the harbour and works in the town were shut down and all transport came to
a standstill. Meanwhile among the naval units deck officers hostile to the executive officer corps and radical Republicans deeply suspicious of the officers held themselves apart from loyalist elements, the most convinced of whom were gathered in von Loewenfeld’s brigade, now returned to its birthplace. Between the two extremes many basically loyal men were torn between their service duty and sympathy with family and friends supporting the strike. With such deep divisions in his own forces the situation slipped gradually from von Levetzow’s control. Dönitz recalls noon, March 10th, as the decisive moment, when from the tower of the naval signal station a white flag was hoisted, signifying the men were holding themselves neutral between the strikers and the officers.

Of all the naval crews, those in the torpedo boats were considered the most reliable; on the following day these boats were sent in to the inner harbour to watch over the other vessels gathered there, and somehow or other Dönitz was in command of one of them with the half flotilla chief embarked aboard. He made no mention of when or why he was appointed to this boat; according to his personal file his appointment as assistant to Schultze ended on March 13th, the day Kapp entered Berlin, but his official appointment to torpedo boats was dated June.
¹²

The same day, March 17th, Kapp, who had no plans or means for dealing with the general strike which paralysed the nation, resigned, leaving the lawful government in control again. In Kiel, however, communist groups stormed the naval arsenal, killing the commanding officer; others occupied parts of the harbour, and fighting broke out between them and the torpedo boats. Dönitz made no mention of this. The next day von Loewenfeld’s brigade went into action against the workers’ bands, and in the harbour the deck officers and radical sailors and stokers mutinied, ordered the white flag hoisted on all vessels and all officers arrested. The torpedo boats remained loyal, however, and to prevent them from being contaminated or trapped inside, the flotilla chiefs decided to sail out for the Baltic port of Saasnitz. On the way the mutineers’ flagship,
Strasbourg
, signalled ‘Raise the white flag. Arrest officers’.
¹³
This was not obeyed and the mutineers did not fire.

Dönitz had already experienced discipline difficulties because of the divided loyalties of his crew, and that evening his leading engineer reported that salt water had entered the fresh-water boiler feed; he could not keep the engines going for long. Dönitz had no option but to leave the flotilla and turn for the nearest port, Warnemünde. He had scarcely
entered and made fast in the dead of night when machine-gun fire was directed at the boat. Seizing his megaphone he pointed it at some dark figures he made out on the quay, shouting that he had come in from necessity to change his fresh water and he would leave again the next day. This seemed to satisfy the gunners who had assumed his boat was part of a detachment intended to ‘capture’ Warnemünde for Kapp!

He never did join the rest of the flotilla at Saasnitz, but returned to Kiel; his explanation in his memoirs was that the cause of the boiler trouble could not be ascertained, but it seems evident that the engines were either damaged deliberately by a disaffected member of the crew or he was forced by the crew to return to base. There he was relieved of his command by the mutineers under their elected Station Commander, formerly a petty officer, and probably arrested, although he says simply, ‘the officer corps of the Navy did no more duty’.
¹⁴

For the second time in two years the deck officers, petty officers and men had shown their dislike of the executive; several officers were beaten and otherwise mistreated under arrest; meanwhile new officers were elected, chiefly from non-commissioned and petty officers, by the crews of the various vessels—whereupon those executives still nominally serving the
Reichsmarine
refused duty until their position was restored. It seemed to many that this must be the end of the Navy: the 1918 mutinies were widely held responsible for the outbreak of revolution at the end of the war, now the service was deeply compromised by its support for the Kapp
Putsch
, and the men had once again shown themselves, in Tirpitz’s words, ‘rotten from the base up!’
¹⁵
Dönitz, with his passionate loyalty and personal ego to satisfy, must have felt this deeply and bitterly. No doubt the silence of his memoirs on this period is a measure of the depth of his disgust and despondency.

During this anxious time, on May 14th, Ingeborg had her second child, a boy; he was christened Klaus.

At the end of the month there was a resolution of the crisis for the officer corps. A special committee of the
Reichstag
had been set up to investigage the Navy’s complicity in the Kapp
Putsch
and some 172 officers, including von Trotha, either retired or were discharged during the course of the proceedings,
¹⁶
but on May 31st, anniversary of the battle of Skaggerak (Jutland), those officers deemed to have taken no part in the affair were formally reinstated—at the expense of the deck officers who were struck from the Navy list as a class. This was a significant moment for the Navy and the nation; the government had
graphic warning of where the true loyalty of the officers lay, and it was not with the Republic, yet they reinstated the corps almost
en bloc
. No doubt a part of the reason was, as before, that the Communists, still resisting in the industrial cities of the Ruhr and being suppressed without quarter by
Freikorps
units, were regarded as the greater immediate danger. Another part of the reason was that the Republicans had been unable or unwilling to weed out the old monarchist elements from official posts and big business. Everywhere, despite the democratic Republican form of government, the old guard still held positions of power and influence.

So far as the Army and Navy were concerned, the abject failure of the
Putsch
had demonstrated the impossibility of a purely military take-over without broad backing from the people; it was a lesson the officers took to heart, and from now both services held themselves independent or above politics—at least above party politics as played in the
Reichstag
. In a more fundamental sense they were deeply political, the self-appointed guardians of the Fatherland and of the ancient virtues they had been brought up to venerate. Since these were anti-democratic, anti-liberal, bellicose and now vengeful as well, they formed a cancer in the body of the Republic or, as a Socialist deputy put it some years later, ‘a state within a state’.

Dönitz, from May 31st again a serving officer, was appointed to command torpedo boat T 157 of the first half flotilla at Swinemünde on the coast of Pomerania. The first real task of the flotilla was to re-establish discipline and rapport with the men. This was easier in Swinemünde than in Kiel where the old resentments smouldered on, much easier in small craft than in the more formal atmosphere of a cruiser or battleship; to judge by his report at the end of the year, Dönitz succeeded very well.

This was not always apparent to him; he was self-critical, ever straining for better results, pushing himself and his men to the limits. By the autumn his exertions, together no doubt with the strain of the early summer in Kiel on top of his continuous war service, had affected his health and with it his state of mind. Again he contemplated leaving the service. Whether this was entirely due to his health and self-critical feelings, as he seems to imply in his memoirs, or whether it had something to do with the continuing attrition between workers and Navy in Kiel, or a schism that had appeared between the fanatically loyal
ex-Freikorps
officers and men, now back in naval service, and those who
had not fought ashore—or whether it was also concerned with the difficulty of supporting a family on his poor service pay, is not clear.

In October, T 157 had four weeks in dock at Stettin, where his father-in-law was Commander in Chief of the northern area Army Command. He brought Ingeborg and the two children, Ursula, now three and a half, and the five-months-old Klaus to stay with his parents-in-law and again sought the General’s advice on whether he should remain in the service or seek a civilian job, as he put it ‘solely to earn money’. Once again General Weber told him where his duty lay and again he accepted the advice, which no doubt reinforced his real inclinations.

So the critical year of 1920 passed. In January 1921 he was stepped up in rank from
Oberleutnant
to
Kapitänleutnant
—lieutenant commander. He took a house in Swinemünde, again a substantial villa with two children’s bedrooms and a maid’s room.

As the ice broke in the spring of 1921, the torpedo boat flotilla began tactical exercises off Rügen Island. Undoubtedly this was an important period in the development of his own tactical appreciation, and as it was to turn out in the development of U-boat tactics; there is even a possibility that some of the exercises were actually designed to study the problem of U-boat surface attack. No direct evidence to support this has appeared, but several of the torpedo boat Commanders had been U-boat captains and the Navy had already begun clandestine preparations to rebuild the U-boat arm; there was a U-department concealed in the Torpedo and Mines Inspectorate at Kiel; German U-boat plans were on their way to Japan to assist that former enemy power to build a cruiser U-boat fleet and they were followed by German engineers and constructors who were thus enabled to keep abreast of the technology. Other U-boat experts either travelled or took up positions abroad as advisers to governments which it was hoped might buy German-designed boats.

Then in the winter of that year three of the theoretical studies by German naval officers, known as
Winterarbeiten
, dealt with U-boat topics; one of these by the wartime U-boat commander, Marschall, dealt with U-boat surface attack. After pointing out that the introduction of convoys had forced U-boats to adopt different tactics, Marschall listed the many advantages of night surface attack. ‘The coming war’, he wrote (!) may or may not involve war against merchant shipping’, nevertheless U-boat officers must be trained to attack convoys since a warship squadron was itself a convoy.

More interesting than the study itself are the remarks appended to it by the Baltic fleet chief—thus overall Commander of Dönitz’s flotilla—Admiral von Rosenberg: ‘… especially noteworthy are the arguments about night surface attack. They are valuable and of interest not only for the U-boat officer, but also for the torpedo boat officer.’
¹⁷

The year this was penned, 1922, three German shipbuilders formed a Dutch company,
Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw
—known as IvS—to continue U-boat design work by German experts outside Germany.

The drive to circumvent the Versailles ban was on, and the need for U-boats was evident in the task guiding the Navy’s planning. This was to counter a Polish attack on East Prussia—which had been isolated from Germany by a ‘Polish corridor’ up to the port of Danzig—and prevent Poland’s ally, France, from intervening. U-boats were ideal to stop French battle-squadrons getting through the Danish Belts into the Baltic, and to combat a blockade of the German North Sea ports.

But whether any of the torpedo boat exercises were designed to investigate submarine surface attack or not, a surfaced submarine
is
a torpedo boat and since both surface night attack and combined operation between two or more U-boats were ideas with which all U-boat Commanders were familiar, the operation of a flotilla of torpedo boats against a battle-squadron could hardly fail to spark off analogies in the minds of the former U-boat Commanders—especially as all the emphasis in training was on night attack because this was the only possible form of action for the German service, reduced by the peace treaty to virtual impotence in capital ships.

The boats were trained to surprise the enemy under cover of darkness, fire their torpedoes and escape rapidly; for this they had to find the enemy by day, hang on to him at the borders of visibility without themselves being seen, and approach gradually as visibility drew in with twilight. This tactic of finding and holding touch with the enemy until the attack could be launched at night was the principal feature of the U-boat ‘pack’ tactics with which Dönitz’s name is associated. It seems therefore that it was born in these years immediately after the First World War—and not in Dönitz’s head alone.

Kapitänleutnant
Wassner, for instance, of the
Wehrabteilung
, naval High Command in Berlin, wrote a paper in July 1922, suggesting that in his war experience U-boat surface attacks had been the most successful and that since lone U-boat operations were uneconomic against convoys
‘in future it will be essential for convoys to be hunted by sizeable numbers of U-boats acting together’.
¹⁸

At all events, during his time in torpedo boats Dönitz impressed his flotilla chief,
Kapitänleutnant
Densch with both his seamanship and his officer-like qualities. Densch’s first report on him in August 1921 described his ‘exemplary service outlook and fullest devotion to duty’. He handled his subordinates ‘very sharply and militarily; despite this he is respected and popular with them’. And despite a serious outlook on life, he was a good comrade ‘full of hearty merriment at appropriate times’.
¹⁹