Read Dönitz: The Last Führer Online
Authors: Peter Padfield
The reasons for this second ‘happy time’ are not creditable to the US Navy. The first US naval mission sent to study British experience and methods had arrived in London in July 1940, a second in March 1941; since then a great deal of co-operation had been necessary between the staffs in the allocation of air and sea escorts and spheres of protection as the US Navy took over responsibility for convoys in the western Atlantic. Yet on January 13th 1942, five weeks after the German declaration of war, and after warnings had been received from the British submarine tracking room based on Ultra decrypts and other indications that Dönitz’s boats were heading for the US coast, nothing had been done either in training, routing or command organization to take advantage of the experience the British had gained in the hardest school over three gruelling years.
It is not realized perhaps how much the US Navy, like the German, gained expansionary wind from jealousy of the Royal Navy, shading naturally in more aggressive US naval officers into active dislike of the arrogant pretensions and imperial manner of British naval officers. Whether Admiral Ernest J. King, the US C-in-C, was actively anti-British is not for debate here, but his attitude was undoubtedly that he was not going to play second string to the Royal Navy as the US Navy had in the First World War, and as Patrick Beesley puts it in his study of British operational intelligence, neither he nor his staff had anything to learn from ‘a bunch of limeys’.
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Since US naval operational intelligence was conducted rather like Raeder’s from separate command bases without centralized co-ordination and his escort Commanders and pilots were about as experienced in anti-submarine work as their British counterparts had been in 1939, this was a mistake of criminal proportions.
The results are described in Dönitz’s war diary; here is his note after the return of the first
Paukenschlag
boat, U 123:
The expectation of coming across much single-ship traffic, clumsy handling of ships, few and unpractised sea and air patrols and defences was so greatly fulfilled that the conditions have to be described as almost of peacetime standards. The single disposition of boats was, therefore, correct. The Commander found such an abundance of
opportunities for attack in the sea area south of New York to Cape Hatteras that he could not possibly use them all. At times up to ten ships were in sight sailing with lights on peacetime courses …
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Encouraged and surprised by the slow reaction of the Americans, Dönitz sent further waves of boats to take advantage of the easy pickings along the coast and as far south as the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, large Type IX’s and even Type VII’s with additional fuel drums stowed wherever space could be found; U-tankers—‘milch cows’—planned long before the war and laid down in early 1940, were sent out with them to extend their time in the operational zone.
In March sinking figures rose to over half a million tons. Dönitz was promoted full Admiral—his third advance inside two and a half years and one of the quickest sprints through the flag ranks ever achieved in the German service. The propaganda department, in need of encouraging news, made the most of the U-boat achievements, the heroic crews and their dynamic chief; an official was even granted access to one of Dönitz’s debriefing sessions. A Commander back from the US coast came into the operations room with his charts under his arm, saluted, and spread the charts on Dönitz’s desk while making his report.
Every single phase of the operation is discussed. Wireless messages and times are checked. No matter how successful the Commander has been, his operations Admiral is not satisfied before he is convinced that every torpedo and every gallon of oil was employed to the best advantage. While the Commander makes his detailed report, the staff officers are jotting down the observations the Admiral is making on this or that experience… Then the staff officers contribute from their own experiences. Finally the Admiral places his hand on the Commander’s shoulders, ‘Well done. I am glad you are one of us.’
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Despite the splendid results, Dönitz was experiencing much the same frustrations as in the earlier ‘happy time’ in British waters. This was not because of overall shortage of boats, for the numbers were at last rising satisfactorily—256 in service by February 1st, seventeen more commissioned that month and only two lost, bringing the total to 271 in March, of which 111 were available for operations—but because of their dispersal on other tasks ordered by Hitler or naval High Command, particularly in the Mediterranean and off Norway. Hitler expected an allied
landing in Norway to establish the ‘second front’ in Europe demanded by the Russians, and to cut his vital iron ore supplies, and he insisted on a large naval presence in the north including U-boats. Dönitz argued strenuously that this and other diversions from the ‘tonnage war’ constituted a serious misuse of the U-boats’ unique capabilities. He gave the argument pure expression in a war diary entry on April 15th when dealing with a question raised about whether it was not more important to sink tonnage proceeding to England and the Mediterranean or other war theatres, rather than sink indiscriminately in American waters:
The enemy powers’ shipping is one large whole. It is therefore immaterial where a ship is sunk—in the end it must still be replaced by a new ship. The decisive question for the long term lies in the race between sinking and new construction. However, the centre of the enemy’s new construction and armaments is in the United States while England is so to speak the picket and sally port of the enemy powers in Europe. I am therefore grasping the evil at the root if I attack supplies, especially oil, at this centre. Every ship which is sunk here counts not only as a ship sunk but at the same time damages the enemy shipbuilding and armament at its inception …
I am therefore of the opinion that tonnage must be taken where it can be destroyed most reasonably—for utilizing the boats—and most cheaply—for losses, because it is incomparably more important to sink than to reduce sinkings by making them in a prescribed area … U-boat warfare must therefore continue to be concentrated on the east coast of America as long as counter-measures and the possibilities of success remain roughly as at present.
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His anxiety to strike hard with all available force was fully justified. With the formal entry of the United States the real tonnage war had begun. Roosevelt had announced a new building programme for eight million tons of shipping in 1942, ten million tons in 1943. Added to British Empire and neutral shipbuilding it was a formidable total to have to put on the bottom every month.
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Moreover, Dönitz knew that sooner or later the US Navy would tighten up the protective system around her coasts and he would be forced back to convoy battles in the North Atlantic. Since one of the chief problems here was finding the convoys, a great number of boats were necessary. It was resolving itself into a
competition between US and German productive capacity as much as between the training and resolve of the opposing crews.
The German economy seemed hardly in a position to compete. Earlier Hitler had ordered priority to U-boat construction and an increase to 25 boats a month, but the latest demands from the Russian and North African fronts had forced him to return priority to the Army. Meanwhile there were shortages everywhere: the latest report from the U-department, naval High Command, stated that the deteriorating dockyard ‘worker situation and want of materials’ made it doubtful if the U-boat building programme could be achieved. It continued in tones indistinguishable from Dönitz’s own that today they faced a situation like that in the First World War when ‘apart from the military-political failures of direction—despite greater successes finally the U-boat war was wrecked by too few boats’.
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Dönitz was forced into the opinion that if the building programme had to be curtailed for want of materials Type VII boats should be built in lieu of the larger types for two of them could be built for one Type IX, and it was
numbers
not size that would count when it came to searching for convoys again.
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In the meantime he made the most of the continuing favourable conditions on the US coast and in the Caribbean; what he called the ‘potential’ of his boats, the average tonnage sunk per boat per day at sea, continued to rise despite the long passage to the hunting grounds; by the end of April it had almost doubled to 412 tons, and his Commanders were ‘all of the same opinion; that the American area will remain highly favourable for operations for several months’.
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Added to this was an extraordinarily low loss rate in these waters, so that his numbers built up almost as well as if the production quotas had been met. By May 1st his nominal strength was 174 ‘front-boats’; although some were still on trials, the total number of boats in commission at this time was 295.
It was perhaps because of all this that he appeared in his most optimistic form when commanded to report to Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters,
Wolfschanze
, on the afternoon of May 14th. There he repeated his conviction that the U-boat war was a war against enemy tonnage, that American and British tonnage had to be ‘regarded as one’ and that it was ‘therefore correct to sink ships wherever the greatest number of them can be sunk at the lowest cost—i.e. with the fewest losses’.
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Sinkings from January 15th, the start of the US campaign, to May 10th amounted to 303 ships of a total 2,015,252 tons.
‘However,’ he went on, ‘U-boat operations in the American area are also right from the point of view that the sinkings of the U-boat war are a race with merchant ship new construction. The American is the greatest enemy shipbuilder. His shipbuilding industries lie in the eastern States. Shipbuilding and ancillary industries depend mainly on oil fuel. The most important American oilfields lie on the Gulf of Mexico. Consequently the greater part of American tanker tonnage is in the coastal traffic from the oil area to the industrial area. In the period (15.1–10.5, 1942) we sank 112 tankers of a total 927,000 tons. With every tanker sunk the American loses not only the ship for transporting oil, but he experiences immediate damage to his
new
construction …’
And he concluded from the experience to date, ‘I believe the race between the enemy new building and U-boat sinkings is in no way hopeless.’
His argument was that on the stated American figures it would be necessary to sink 700,000 tons a month to keep up with new construction, ‘but we are already sinking these 700,000 tons per month now’—‘we’ meaning German, Italian, Japanese U-boats, airforces and mines. ‘There is, therefore, already now an absolute decline taking place in the enemy tonnage. Moreover the building figures quoted are the maximum amounts ever mentioned by enemy propaganda. Our experts doubt if this goal can be achieved and consider that the enemy can only build about five million tons in 1942. Then merely 4–500,000 tons per month need to be sunk in order to prevent any increase. Anything above that cuts into the tonnage’. So Dönitz arrived back close to the 600,000 tons a month requirement of von Holtzendorff in the First World War. The experts’ scepticism about American claims appears to have been based on tonnage launched in the first two months of the programme.
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He intended continuing operations in American water, he went on. ‘One of these days the situation will change. Already there are signs that the Americans are making strenuous efforts to master the large sinking figures. They have raised a considerable air defence and are using destroyers and patrol craft around the coast. However, all these are inexperienced and do not present a serious threat at present. In any case the boats with their greater war experience are superior to the defence. The American fliers see nothing. The destroyers and patrol craft are mostly travelling too fast to locate the U-boats or they are not persistent enough with depth charges …’
He described how easily the situation could be changed if convoy were
instituted; when that happened he intended to resume operations in the Atlantic against the ocean convoys, but he believed this would be easier in the future because of the greater number of boats coming on line. ‘Formerly the most difficult part of this warfare was locating [the enemy].’
His optimism stands in marked contrast to British assessments. Horrified as they were by the unnecessary losses off America, Wynn and the experts at the tracking room in the ‘Citadel’ were clear that, once instituted, convoy would ‘master the menace in the Western Atlantic as it has done elsewhere and reduce our losses to a tolerable figure’.
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Directly this situation was reached and U-boat losses started to rise ‘we can definitely expect another change of strategy’; although it was impossible to predict exactly where Dönitz would strike, the answer to the threat was convoy with surface and air escorts equipped with radar.
It may be said that with an adequate and efficient air escort wolf pack tactics on a convoy should be impossible … we hope to achieve this beyond the reach of land-based aircraft by auxiliary carriers with the convoys.
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Dönitz, in his report to the Führer, was clear that losses would rise once they were forced back into convoy battles but did not appreciate that his group tactics were actually doomed if the enemy succeeded in providing full air cover; for one thing he didn’t know that radar had been developed for aircraft—or for that matter for surface escorts. Suspicions were forming that some kind of location device was in use, but just what was not clear. This failure to read the signs of the last convoy battles of the old year and the ever-extending allied air cover can be seen in retrospect as the turning point of the U-boat war. For this was the time that the U-boat arm should have been striving for an improved U-boat with an underwater speed sufficient to catch up with convoys and reach an attacking position
after being forced under by aircraft sightings
. The pointers were all there; from 1940 onwards U-boats had been forced further and further out into the Atlantic by air reconnaissance and escort; on the basis of this experience it should have been plain that if the enemy found themselves in trouble in the mid-Atlantic gap still not covered by aircraft and if this were to result in the kind of monthly sinkings Dönitz needed, they would take the most strenuous efforts to rectify the situation.