Read Dönitz: The Last Führer Online
Authors: Peter Padfield
The entry concluded that despite all, and very heavy depth-charging by
escort groups, ‘resolute, confident mood unbroken through unshakeable faith in victory’.
This is not always the picture conveyed by British interrogations of survivors. ‘A number of prisoners expressed doubts about the final success of the U-boat war’,
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one report noted. And as in the First World War the rapid increase in the number of boats had led to a tremendous dilution of experienced personnel; increasingly the ratings were raw, only briefly trained and in many cases unhappy:
There is no doubt that large numbers of them [prisoners] speak with loathing of their service in U-boats, which they find very different from what propaganda had led them to expect. Some said they would never have joined the U-boat arm if they had known what active service was going to be like. This seems to imply that crews are not always drafted without option.
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An earlier report had described the situation of men called by their divisional officer to extend their service after the original period of four and a half years for which they had signed was up:
Most did so and were more fortunate than those who did not and found the papers endorsed ‘Left the Fatherland in the hour of need’ when they took discharge at the end of the shorter period. This made it impossible to get a job. One prisoner repeatedly said, ‘Once the Navy gets you, you are finished.’
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Despite these reports the exalted status the U-boat men enjoyed as a
corps d’élite
and the real dangers and hardships of the life did shore up morale to a remarkable extent.
Of Dönitz’s own morale there was never any doubt. He used any successful operation to support his determination that the battle
could
be won, and when it seemed that the enemy’s air mastery was about to reduce his boats to impotence—as in the following war diary entry in September—he sent urgent demands for planes or weapons to deal with it.
Already on 1.9 at 0900 in AK 3726 [800 miles from England, 450 miles from Iceland] air escort appeared over the convoy. It was reinforced towards evening. By systematically forcing the boats under water it
made them lose contact at evening twilight, thus spoiling the best prospects for attack of all boats in the first four moonless hours of the night. The enemy made clever use of the boats’ loss of contact to make a sharp leg so that touch was not regained until 03.00 and then it was no longer possible to get the boats of the group (except for two) near the convoy. The convoy operation had to be broken off in the morning of 2.9 as it no longer seemed possible for boats to haul ahead in face of the expected heavy enemy air activity, and on the other hand, because of the poor visibility there was too great a risk from aircraft with radar [
Funkortung
].
As the above sketch indicates, by increasing the range of their aircraft the English have succeeded in gaining air control over a great part of the North Atlantic with land-based planes and narrowing the area in which U-boats can operate without threat from the air …
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The day was approaching, ‘BdU sees with extreme anxiety’ when this situation would spread to all parts of the North Atlantic, ‘the chief battleground of the U-boat.’ Unless suitable counter-measures were taken, ‘this would signify an unendurable reduction in prospects for success’.
As he had anticipated, U-boat losses were rising now that convoy battles had been joined again.
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To make matters worse the naval staff had reconsidered the ‘tonnage war’ in the light of US shipbuilding performance and arrived at an astonishing figure for the total amount of shipping which it was necessary to destroy each month if there was to be any chance of winning—no less than 1·3 million tons or well over double the figure in Dönitz’s May report to the Führer. Since calculations of the U-boats’ performance January to August gave an average monthly sinking rate of only 400,000 tons—actually too low—the conclusion was: ‘It is in the present state of affairs questionable whether such a high sinking rate can be achieved on a lasting basis.’
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The alternative to the pure ‘tonnage war’ Dönitz was fighting was the ‘supply war’ in which attacks would be concentrated on shipping proceeding to England or to a particular theatre; the paper concluded that the more the monthly sinking figure dropped below the required 1·3 million tons the more urgent it became to make the transition from the ‘pure tonnage war to the supplies- and freight-war’.
On the same date, September 9th, Dönitz himself made two impassioned pleas to the naval staff for help. One was by teleprinter; it listed
five episodes since June 14th in which enemy aircraft had ‘caused premature abandonment of hitherto favourable U-boat operations against convoys’.
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Noting that all these cases had occurred within the range of the Heinkel 177, he asked that the first squadron of these planes—which so far as he knew was in Germany and not at the Russian front—be sent to the Air Commander, Atlantic, to work with the U-boats.
The other was a paper drafted that week on the development of weapons for U-boats; he suggested that rockets being developed at Peenemünde should be adapted for his arm—specifically for submerged, remote-controlled firing against convoy escorts. More interesting than the proposal itself was the state of mind, the loneliness and agitation revealed by the paper:
The U-boat arm today completes the third year of uninterrupted battle missions. It has remained in all the changes of the war always the chief weapon in the sea war, in the first line on grounds of its battle characteristics which allow it, not only to hit the enemy successfully, but also to exist in the face of a superiority in numbers and strength. If all forces are not used in the
first line
in order to keep the battle strength of the U-boats in the highest possible condition, the danger is clear that one day the U-boat will be crushed and eliminated by the defence forces.
The German sea war direction will thereby have the only weapon which it can set effectively against the great sea powers struck from its hand. The BdU therefore requests anew that the question of the co-operation of the weapons departments of the High Command with the BdU be carefully examined and all possibilities for improvement of the armament of U-boats exploited.
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Such was the desperate situation of the U-boat arm—despite rapidly rising numbers—when Hitler commanded Dönitz to report to him on the position on September 13th. He was directing an unusual rescue operation when he received the summons. He had sent four large Type IX boats to probe for a soft spot off Cape Town, and on the way, just within the limits he had set for attacks—so as to preserve secrecy—one of these had sunk the British troop transport,
Laconia
. The U-boat Commander then discovered that the ship had been carrying 1,800 Italian prisoners of war, and he radioed U-boat Command for instructions. Dönitz was
confronted with a difficult choice—this was in the early hours of the 13th and one can imagine him and his staff officers hastily summoned in bath robes—to abandon the operation or to abandon the ally’s men. Although there was obviously a strong political element in the choice, he claims in his memoirs that he made the decision himself—ordering all the Cape Town-bound boats and others in the area to break off their operations and proceed immediately to the rescue. Raeder approved his action and the naval staff arranged for Vichy French vessels to head for a rendezvous with the boats to take off survivors. Hitler was also informed; his naval adjutant, von Puttkamer, told Dönitz the Führer did not wish to see the Cape Town operation prejudiced, and the U-boats were under no circumstances to allow themselves to be endangered in the rescue operations.
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Hitler was at his Ukraine headquarters,
Werwolf
, at this time, personally directing the assault on Stalingrad which his generals, so he believed, had botched; he was furious with them all, demanding wholesale resignations and not on speaking terms with his two principal staff officers, Keitel and Jodl. Evidently the
Laconia
episode jerked him away from these immediate preoccupations, for it was that afternoon that von Puttkamer sent the wire summoning Dönitz to report on the U-boat situation.
Three days later a four-engined US Liberator aircraft from Ascension Island sighted U 156, the boat which had sunk the
Laconia
, towing four of the ship’s lifeboats filled with survivors; in further demonstration of his mercy mission U 156’s Commander displayed a two-metres-square Red Cross flag from the bridge. After circling awhile the aircraft made off. An hour later a second US Liberator appeared; she flew in low from the bow and dropped two bombs; while the lifeboats were hurriedly being cast off a third bomb landed in their midst and shortly afterwards a fourth bomb was dropped. By then another US aircraft had appeared, which also attacked, one of its bombs exploding deep immediately below the control room and causing damage. The boat was able to dive, however, and carry out repairs. Later she surfaced and radioed a report.
This message was received at U-boat headquarters shortly after eleven that night; again one can imagine Dönitz in pyjamas and bathrobe, with his staff officers—maybe they were still drinking nightcaps when they received the summons to the operations room. According to Dönitz’s account a warm (
temperamentvollen
) discussion developed, in which his staff argued that continuing the rescue operation was wholly unjustifiable.
Dönitz, however, was determined to finish what he had started, and he eventually closed the discussion with the words, ‘I cannot put the people in the water now, I shall carry on.’
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By ‘the people’ he meant the Italians, not the British; orders were sent that only Italians were to be retained aboard the boats, which were to proceed towards their rendezvous with the Vichy French ships while taking every possible precaution against enemy counter-measures.
The war diary entry on the episode on the 16th concludes:
As shown by the report from U 156 the Commander did not believe the enemy would attack when he saw the Red Cross flag and the rescue attempts. This opinion is impossible to understand. It must be assumed that he was influenced by seeing hundreds of survivors fighting for their lives.
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So much for the facts; behind them, in the discussion at U-boat headquarters that midnight continuing into the early hours of the 17th, lies the largest question mark over the U-boat war and Dönitz’s claim to have fought cleanly; the details will probably never be known; only certain results emerge from
Nacht und Nebel
to feed conjecture.
Dönitz’s own account is notable for its silence on whether he was in touch with Raeder or Hitler during that night; it leaves the impression, probably intentionally, that all the orders were issued on his own authority and discussion was confined to his own staff. It is inconceivable, however, that naval High Command was not informed, and in view of Hitler’s earlier involvement and his anxiety that the U-boats should not be hazarded it is difficult to imagine that Führer headquarters was not also put in the picture. Hitler’s nocturnal habits and love of diversions enabling him to work off a head of destructive emotion and take an active part make it easy to imagine him coming on the line personally to Dönitz—not difficult in that case to guess his mood or the trend of his instructions.
He had been wanting an excuse to attack survivors of torpedoed ships for the dual purpose of terrorism to deter neutral and American sailors and to cut down the numbers available to man new construction since at least January, when he had disclosed his ideas to the Japanese Ambassador. Fresh life had been breathed into the subject by the apparent gunning down of the survivors from the
Ulm
and the interim results of the investigations and analysis instituted then had just come to hand,
dated September 14th. These showed three cases when survivors of German destroyers disabled or sunk at Narvik during the Norwegian campaign had been fired on by the British as they attempted to reach the land, and numerous cases of the German survivors of transports off Crete being fired at and killed in the water during that campaign; one incident detailed was when a British submarine Commander allowed the Greek crew of a motor sailer,
Osia Paraskivi
, to take to the lifeboats:
… and had then opened fire with aimed shots from short range at the remaining German officer and three other German soldiers in the water after they had abandoned ship until all four were hit and killed.
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The paper did point out that it was easy for survivors in the water to mistake shots at other targets for an attack on themselves, and in no case had any written or oral order to attack shipwrecked survivors been traced. It suggested therefore that before any retaliatory measures it should be considered whether these would not affect their own people more than the enemy; ‘if the existence of such a German order became known the enemy propaganda would exploit it in a way, the consequences of which can hardly be estimated.’
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To suggest from Hitler’s current preoccupation with shooting up survivors that the attack by US Liberators on boats involved in rescuing the
Laconia
survivors gave him just the opportunity he wanted, and that he immediately instructed Dönitz by telephone to issue orders to that effect is speculation; there is no documentary evidence or direct testimony. Nevertheless, the orders issued by Dönitz on September 17th make it probable that something like that happened.
Dönitz could not of course issue instructions to shoot survivors in lifeboats for the very reason given in the naval staff analysis: if discovered they would be a gift to enemy propaganda, and might redound on their own men captured. Apart from this there was the morale of his own forces, many of whom, despite the intense hate-propaganda to which they had been subjected, would have been shaken by such a cold-blooded instruction against accepted codes of sea war. Moreover, if the enemy then started reprisals the advantage would lie inevitably with them since they virtually controlled the seas and the sky above. And if U-boat crews were to expect that in addition to the increasing hazards of
depth-charge and air attack they would be subject to execution if captured it would be impossible to preserve their commitment to attack.