by Clay Blair
Amid this tumult, Römer and his crew jumped overboard. Heathcote sent a boarding party to ransack U-353 for intelligence documents, but the party, commanded by P. M. Jones, had only five minutes inside the sinking boat and it found nothing of value. Fame and the Norwegian-manned corvette Acanthus picked up Römer and thirty-seven other survivors. Six Germans died in the sinking. Too badly damaged by the collision to provide further escort, Fame limped alone to the British Isles.
British interrogators discovered that Römer had previously commanded the school duck U-56. After Werner Pfeifer of U-581 and Otto Harms of U-464, Römer was the third skipper of U-56 to be captured, a record of sorts. The interrogators wrote that Römer complained bitterly about the shortage of qualified personnel to man the U-boats. His engineer was the only officer with prior experience in submarines, and that experience had been gained in a school boat. About 80 percent of the enlisted men of U-353 were raw recruits with scant training, the British reported.
The damage to Viscount and the departure of Fame left only the four Norwegian-manned corvettes to protect Slow Convoy 104. Command responsibility fell on the senior Norwegian, C. A. Monsen in Potentilla. Late in the evening of October 16, he got a radar contact at 2,800 yards and unhesitatingly turned to ram. The U-boat reversed course and came directly at Potentilla at full speed. Fearing that his corvette might be fatally damaged in a head-to-head collision with a U-boat at a combined speed of about thirty knots, Monsen veered off. As the U-boat passed close down his port side, he threw over five depth charges set for fifty to 140 feet. When the boat dived, Monsen ran at the swirl and dropped thirteen more depth charges.
No positive identification of this boat can be made. Very likely it was the U-254, which Odo Loewe commanded temporarily in place of the ill Hans Gilardone. After making contact with Slow Convoy 104, Loewe reported that escorts had forced him under three times and that he had incurred heavy depth-charge damage and was forced to abort for the second time in as many patrols.
Homebound, Loewe linked up with another battle-damaged boat, Klaus Rudloff in U-609, who provided Loewe with Metox radar-detector protection while crossing the Bay of Biscay. Upon reaching France, Loewe turned U-254 back over to Gilardone. In the meantime, his own battle-damaged boat, U-256, had been declared nonserviceable, and as a result, Loewe returned to Germany to commission a new Type VII. This was U-954f to which Dönitz’s youngest son, twenty-year-old Peter, had been assigned as a junior watch officer.
Eight Catalinas and B-24 Liberators based in Iceland flew out to provide Slow Convoy 104 with air escort on October 16 and 17. Upon learning of this saturation coverage, Dönitz canceled operations and put the boats back on the trail of Outbound North convoys.
Upon analysis of the attacks and the sinking reports on Slow Convoy 104, Dönitz had ambivalent feelings. He praised Trojer in U-221 for good tracking in foul weather and for sinking (as was believed) eight ships for 45,000 tons, making the supposed sinkings eleven out of what was erroneously believed to be a convoy of only nineteen ships. At the same time, Dönitz again went out of his way to comment bitterly that convoy battles had become “much more difficult.” It was therefore “intensely important”—even “decisive”—that new German weapons, such as search radar and improved radar detectors, heavier flak guns, and reliable torpedo pistols be developed as soon as possible. Unaware of the loss of U-353 in this action or of the heavy damage to U-254, he logged German casualties as U-661 sunk and U-607 damaged. The confirmed Allied losses from Slow Convoy 104 were eight of forty-eight ships for about 44,000 tons. The confirmed German losses were U-353 and U-661 sunk, and U-254 and U-607 damaged.
In the days following, several of the U-boats again made contact with westbound convoys. For various reasons, including foul weather, Dönitz was not able to mobilize an effective group attack on any of them. However, a half dozen boats from several different groups picked off seven ships for nearly 60,000 tons. Old hand Günther Heydemann in U-575 achieved the most notable success by sinking the 11,300-ton British troopship Abosso, which was loaded with Allied military personnel, including a number of Dutch submariners. Walter von Freyberg-Eisenberg-Allmendingen in the new U-610 and Kurt Baberg in the new U-618 each sank an American freighter, stragglers from Outbound North 137.
The U-boats also found Outbound North (Slow) 138. It was composed of forty-eight merchant ships, protected by the crack British Escort Group B-2, commanded by Donald Macintyre. The escort group consisted of three British destroyers (Hesperus, Whitehall, and Vanessa) and three British corvettes. Every warship had Type 271 centimetric-wavelength radar; Hesperus and the rescue vessel, Accrington, had Huff Duff.
The convoy had sailed from Liverpool on October 11 and was almost immediately scattered in a raging storm. A week later Macintyre finally got the ships into proper formation. Three days later, on October 21—Trafalgar Day—the weather cleared beautifully and the escorts refueled from a tanker in the convoy, a technique the British had only just begun to master. On the night of October 23, British land-based Huff Duff picked up the now familiar urgent beginning of a U-boat convoy-contact report (“Beta Beta,” colloquially dubbed “B-bar”), and Macintyre girded for a pack attack.
The destroyers Hesperus and Vanessa ran out a Huff Duff bearing but found nothing. For the next several days, Macintyre wrote,* all three destroyers responded to local Huff Duff contacts by running down bearings, and by this means and by radical changes of course by the convoy, prevented a full-scale U-boat assembly. The underway refueling and a shift to a “more southerly” convoy course (for New York) also helped. The result was that no U-boat attacked any ship in Outbound North (Slow) 138.
At about this time, a boat of the Puma group, the new U-443, commanded by Konstantin von Puttkamer, age twenty-five, found convoy Outbound North 139. This was an odd-numbered “fast” formation, the reverse of the fast Halifax convoys; therefore it was more difficult to bring up U-boats for a mass attack.
In view of that fact, Dönitz had recently made an important change in convoy-attack doctrine: If the convoy speed of advance was eleven knots or more, the U-boat first making contact was authorized to shoot after sending a contact report. Von Puttkamer reported and shot, sinking two big British ships: a 9,800-ton freighter and the 8,000-ton tanker Donax. Escorts promptly counterattacked with depth charges and held U-443 down until the convoy escaped. Over the next several days six other Puma boats made contact, but none had any success.
During this same period, land-based aircraft assigned to Coastal Command inflicted further heavy losses on the Atlantic U-boat force: four boats sunk, two severely damaged. Two were accounted for by Coastal Command Squadron 224, based in southern England and newly equipped with twelve B-24 Liberators.†
• On October 20, a B-24 Liberator of Squadron 224, piloted by D. M. Sleep, sank the new type VIID (minelayer) U-216, commanded by Karl-Otto Schultz, directly west of the Bay of Biscay.‡ There were no survivors. The debris from the exploding U-boat severely damaged the aircraft, which crashed while attempting an emergency landing at a base.
• On October 22, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of Squadron 179, piloted by A.D.S. Martin, sank the new Type VII U-412, commanded by Walter Jahrmärker, age twenty-five, as she entered the Atlantic northeast of the Faeroes, six days out from Kiel. There were no survivors.
• On October 24, another B-24 of Squadron 224, piloted by B. P. Liddington, sank the new Type VII U-599, commanded by Wolfgang Breithaupt, directly west of the Bay of Biscay. There were no survivors.
• On October 24, an unidentified land-based aircraft hit and severely damaged the new U-620, commanded by Heinz Stein, who was pursuing Outbound North 139. The boat aborted and, on orders from Dönitz, withdrew from the North Atlantic to the quiet Gulf of Cadiz.
• On October 27, one of the newly assigned B-17 Flying Fortress of Squadron 206, piloted by R. L. Cowey, sank the new U-627, commanded by Robert Kindelbacher, age twenty-seven, south of Iceland, shortly after she entered the A
tlantic. There were no survivors.
• On November 1, a Catalina of U.S. Navy Squadron VP 84, newly arrived in Iceland and piloted by R. C. Child, hit the new U-664, commanded by Adolf Graef, age twenty-six, with depth charges, four of which exploded nearby and caused severe damage. Only thirteen days out of Kiel, Graef was forced to jettison his two stern torpedoes and abort to France.
A recent transfer from the Arctic assigned to group Puma in the North Atlantic, the U-436, commanded by Günther Seibicke, came upon a fast eastbound convoy on October 26. This was Halifax 212, protected by Paul Heineman’s American Escort Group A-3, consisting of the big Coast Guard cutter Campbell the four-stack destroyer Badger, and six corvettes—five Canadian and one British. Three of the Canadian corvettes were en route to the British Isles for assignment to Torch forces. One of the latter, Summerside, had Type 271 centimetric-wavelength radar, but most of the other escorts lacked modern electronic-detection gear.
Seibicke in U-436 shadowed and brought up other Puma boats. During the night of October 27-28, three boats attacked. Shooting first, Seibicke fired a full salvo of five torpedoes. He claimed sinking a 5,000-ton freighter and a 10,000-ton tanker and damage to three freighters for 18,000 tons. In reality, he sank the 10,000-ton British tanker Sourabaya and damaged two other tankers, the 7,400-ton Norwegian Frontenac, which reached port, and the 8,200-ton American Gurney E. Newlin. Horst Schnemann, age twenty-eight, in the new U-621, shot two torpedoes at two freighters and claimed two hits, but the hits could not be verified. Hans Döhler, new skipper of U-606, which had been diverted to the Arctic for one patrol, sank the damaged Gurney E. Newlin and damaged the big 17,000-ton Norwegian whale factory ship, Kosmos II.
In a second attack on the following night, three skippers had successes. In spite of five misses, Ulrich von Soden-Fraunhafen, age twenty-nine, in the new U-624, sank the damaged Kosmos II, as well as the 7,700-ton American tanker Pan New York. Günther Seibicke in U-436 sank a 5,000-ton British freighter that had fallen back to assist Kosmos II. Hans Karl Kosbadt, age twenty-four, in the new boat U-224, sank a 4,000-ton Canadian freighter.
By the morning of October 29, Halifax 212 was close enough to Iceland to get B-24 support. Upon learning this, Dönitz canceled operations. He logged that ten of the twelve boats of Puma made contact and sank nine ships for 68,500 tons and damaged three other ships. The confirmed score was six ships (including four tankers) for 52,000 tons sunk and one tanker damaged.*
Three new Type IXCs sailed directly from the Baltic to patrol the Gulf of St. Lawrence before the cold weather shut down shipping operations. One skipper, Klaus Bargsten in U-521, had previously commanded the Type VII U-563, which was badly wrecked in December 1941 when Bargsten attempted to slip into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar. He sailed from Kiel on October 3. The other two skippers, Volkmar Schwartzkopff, age twenty-eight, in U-520 and Herbert Schneider, age twenty-seven, in U-522, were new to command of oceangoing boats. They sailed from Kiel on October 3 and 8, respectively.
Near Cape Race, Newfoundland, on October 29, Schneider in U-522 spotted smoke on the horizon. This was Slow Convoy 107, comprised of forty-two ships, twenty from New York and twenty-two from Sydney and Halifax. The convoy was protected by an ad hoc Canadian escort group, C-4: one modern Canadian destroyer, Restigouche, commanded by Desmond W. Piers, and five corvettes—four Canadian and one British.† One Canadian corvette, Regina, aborted with engine problems. Another, Moosejaw, sailed to take her place. Restigouche had the older Type 286 meter-wavelength radar; the British corvette Celandine had the newer Type 271 centimetric-wavelength radar, but it broke down. Restigouche and the rescue ship Stockport had Huff Duff.
Upon receiving the contact report from Schneider in U-522, Dönitz directed the fourteen U-boats of group Veilchen to home on his signals. Allied land-based direction-finding stations and Huff Duff sets in the convoy picked up the heavy German radio traffic. As a result, Canadian authorities intensified ASW sea and air patrols. The four-stack Canadian destroyer Columbia (of the local escort group) found U-522 tailing the convoy and attempted to attack, but Schneider dived and drove her away with two torpedoes, which missed. The British destroyer Walker (also of the local escort) briefly extended her stay with the convoy.
Canadian Air Force aircraft supporting Slow Convoy 107 achieved two remarkable victories that went largely unheralded at the time:
• On October 30, while sweeping ahead of the convoy, E. L. Robinson, the pilot of one of two Hudsons of Squadron 145 supporting the convoy, saw a U-boat on the surface two miles off. This was the Type VII Veilchen boat U-658, commanded by Hans Senkel, making his second patrol. Robinson ran in and dropped four 250-pound Mark VIII depth charges, set at twenty-five feet. These straddled U-658 and blasted her to bits. There were no survivors.
• Eight hours later, a Digby of Squadron 10, homebound after providing escort to convoy Outbound North (Slow) 140, also saw a U-boat on the surface. This was one of the three new Type IXCs, U-520, commanded by Volkmar Schwartzkopff, racing up to join the Veilchen group. Attacking from 3,200 feet, the pilot, D. F. Raymes, dropped four 450-pound Mark VII depth charges on U-520. Nothing further was ever heard from that boat.
• On the day following, October 31, one of four Hudsons of Squadron 145 supporting Slow Convoy 107 found and attacked Klaus Bargsten in U-521, but he got away with minor damage.
One of the Veilchen boats, the new 11-381, commanded by Wilhelm-Heinrich von Pückler und Limpurg, age twenty-nine, made contact with Slow Convoy 107 on November 1 in deteriorating weather and shadowed. During the afternoon and evening, the Veilchen boats, as well as the two surviving IXCs, U-521 and U-522, closed on the convoy. That night and the next morning, November 1-2, the two IXCs and four VIIs of the Veilchen group attacked. The shadower, U-381, fired a spread at Restigouche, but missed.
The experienced Siegfried von Forstner in U-402, who had incurred heavy battle damage off Cape Hatteras on his prior patrol, closed to shoot. In three separate night-surface attacks over six hours, von Forstner claimed sinking six freighters for 40,000 tons and damage to one of 7,000 tons. His impressive confirmed score was four freighters sunk for about 20,000 tons and half credit for the 7,500-ton British freighter Empire Sunrise, which was sunk three hours later by the veteran Horst Uphoff in U-84.
The five corvettes raced hither and yon, firing guns at various U-boats and dropping depth charges. Star shells and flaming ships lit the seascape. The two Type IXs attacked next. Schneider in U-522 sank two freighters, a 5,800-ton Britisher and a 5,700-ton Greek, and damaged another 5,500-ton Britisher. Klaus Bargsten in U-521 claimed a possible hit on a corvette and the sinking of a stopped freighter. In actuality he missed the corvette Moosejaw and hit the 5,500-ton British freighter Hartington, which was sunk later by Herbert Schneider in U-522 and Rudolf Franzius in U-438, to share credit three ways.
Both sides ordered reinforcements into the battle during November 2. The Allies directed four warships to join Slow Convoy 107: the British destroyer Vanessa, which was escorting Halifax 213 astern of Slow Convoy 107; the American four-stack destroyers Leary and Schenck; and the Treasury-class Coast Guard cutter Ingham, from Iceland. Dönitz in turn directed a newly formed group, Natter, composed of a dozen boats, to join Veilchen.
On the second and third nights of the battle, November 2-3 and 3-4, seven U-boats attacked Slow Convoy 107. The experienced Dietrich Lohmann in U-89 sank two British freighters, the 5,300-ton Jeypore, serving as the convoy commodore’s flagship, and the 4,600-ton Daleby. Another experienced hand, Ernst Vogelsang in U-132, sank two ships, the 5,500-ton Dutch tanker Hobbema and a 6,400-ton British freighter, and damaged the 6,700-ton British freighter Hatimura. Soon after, Hans-Joachim Hesse, age thirty-six, in the new boat U-442, also hit the Hatimura, which blew up in a thunderous explosion. Later, it was postulated that the explosion of Hatimura most likely destroyed Vogelsang’s U-132.* Herbert Schneider in the Type IXC U-522 claimed sinking two more freighters for 6,200 tons, bringing
his claimed bag on this patrol to nine ships sunk for 51,665 tons, but only a 3,200-ton Greek could be confirmed. Klaus Bargsten in the Type IXC U-521 claimed sinking a tanker and a freighter for 11,115 tons, but only the 6,900-ton American tanker Hahira could be confirmed.
The rescue ship Stockport fished out 350 survivors from the ships that went down. When she reported she had no more space, the American Navy seagoing tugs Uncas and Pessacus were pressed into service and collected 240 more survivors. Late on the evening of November 4, the two Navy tugs and the American Navy oiler Gauger, escorted by two corvettes, left the convoy to land about six hundred survivors in Iceland. Still later, eight of the surviving merchant ships, escorted by the destroyers Leary and Schenck and the Coast Guard cutter Ingham, also put into Iceland.
By the morning of November 5, B-24s and Catalinas from Iceland arrived to provide an air umbrella for Slow Convoy 107. Upon learning this, Dönitz canceled operations for the seven boats of group Veilchen and redirected the thirteen boats of group Natter to yet another Outbound North convoy. He was very well pleased with the destruction in Slow Convoy 107. Based on flash reports, he logged that the U-boats had sunk twenty-three merchant ships for 136,115 tons and damaged a destroyer, a corvette, and four other freighters. The confirmed score—the fourth most successful North Atlantic convoy attack of the war—was fifteen ships sunk for about 83,000 tons. Three boats were lost: the Type VIIs U-132 and U-658, and the Type IXC U-520. Severely depth-charged by Terence Bulloch in a B-24, Lohmann in U-89 was disabled and forced to abort to France.
It had become standard operating procedure at Western Approaches to denigrate the performance of Canadian escort groups, not to say Canadians in general. The after-action report of Slow Convoy 107 drew the usual negative endorsements. Furthermore, an inspector from Coastal Command, then in Newfoundland, concluded his visit with a damning indictment of Canadian Air Force ASW operations.