Hitler’s U-Boat War- The Hunted 1942-45

by Clay Blair

  That night, January 8-9, and in the day and night following, the U-boats made contact and attacked. From Paris Dönitz exhorted: “Be hard in the attack! Help your comrades in Tunis … operate tenaciously … go after the slightest opportunity with all your energy!” All ten boats shot at targets.

  • Günther Seibicke in the VII U-436, a veteran of the Arctic, sank by torpedo and gun two British tankers: the 8,300-ton Albert L. Ellsworth and the 6,400-ton Oltenia II.

  • Herbert Schneider in the IXC U-522 also sank two tankers: the 10,000-ton Panamanian Norvik and the 6,800-ton Norwegian Minister Wedel. Schneider damaged another tanker, the 7,000-ton British Dominion.

  • Heinz Stein in the VII U-620 sank the tanker British Dominion.

  • Hans-Joachim Hesse in the VII U-442 sank the 9,800-ton British tanker Empire Lytton.

  • Fritz Schneewind, new skipper of the IXC (7-577, sank the 5,000-ton British freighter William Wilberforce, but it turned out she was not part of the convoy, merely an unlucky loner that happened by.

  The other five boats in contact with the convoy shot but missed Günther Heydemann with a bow salvo of four FATs, Only two of the nine tankers that formed the original convoy, the Norwegians Vanja and Cliona, reached Gibraltar.

  The U-boats suffered no loses and except for Rudolf Schendel in U-134, only slight battle damage or mechanical failures. Reporting “heavy” damage from a depth-charge attack, Schendel resumed his homeward voyage. Wolfgang Lüth in U-181, Günther Seibicke in U-436, Helmut Möhlmann in U-571, and Heinz Stein in U-620 reported depth-charge attacks but only minor damage. Lüth also resumed his homeward voyage. Von Pückler und Limpurg in U-381, Hesse in U-442, and Heydemann in U-575 reported repairable diesel-engine failures. The six VIIs of group Delphin replenished from the tanker U-463 on January 14. Heydemann in U-575, who had fired all twelve of his internal torpedoes in the battle, met Bleichrodt’s aborting U-109 and got five torpedoes from her, downloading two more torpedoes from his deck canisters.

  It was difficult for Dönitz and the OKM to assess the damage to convoy TM 1. In aggregate, the U-boats claimed hits on twenty-five ships and that fifteen of these ships had sunk. Although it was obvious that different U-boats claimed hitting and sinking the same ships, Dönitz and the OKM let the inflated claims stand.* In a personal message, Admiral Raeder congratulated Dönitz and the skippers of group Delphin and others for a “brilliant joint success.” German propagandists boasted that the U-boats sank fifteen ships for 142,000 tons. The confirmed score was seven of nine tankers for 56,453 tons sunk from the convoy. Adding in the hapless freighter that happened by made eight ships for 61,457 tons.†

  The battle with TM 1 significantly altered the deployment plan for many of the December U-boats. None of those headed for the Americas got there. The foray of group Delphin to Brazil was canceled, as were the patrols of U-125 and U-514 to the West Indies. Having shot off many torpedoes and used up a lot of fuel, the £7-571 and U-522 had to be deleted from group Seehund, bound for Cape Town and the Indian Ocean.* Group Delphin, enlarged to include the IXs that were drawn into the battle (U-125, U-511, U-514, and U-522) and by five VIIs that sailed in January, remained in the area near the Azores to intercept inbound or outbound Torch convoys, in effect replacing the disbanded group Westwall.

  In the early days of January 1943, Allied codebreakers had not yet mastered the four-rotor Enigma, Triton. Hence the Submarine Tracking Rooms were unable to provide Torch convoy commanders with much assistance. But from January 9 onward the codebreakers began to read Triton, sometimes with little delay. As a result, the Allies were able to route most UG and GU Torch convoys around group Delphin.

  Such was the case of convoy UGS 4, inbound to Gibraltar from the United States. Fully alive to the presence of group Delphin south of the Azores, Allied authorities diverted this convoy to the north of the Azores. However, three American stragglers of the convoy failed to get the word, or elected to ignore it and went south of the Azores, directly into the Delphin patrol line. As a result, Hesse in U-442 and Auffermann in U-514 sank 7,200-ton Liberty ships, Julia Ward Howe and Charles C. Pinckney, respectively, and Heydemann in U-575 sank the 5,000-ton freighter City of Flint These successes increased the score of the expanded Delphin group to ten ships for 80,900 tons.†

  The horrific losses in British oil convoy TM 1 was a humiliating setback for London and, of course, did nothing to slow the drawdown of British oil reserves or contribute to rebuilding them. However, the two fast, heavily escorted oil convoys immediately following, TMF 1 and TMF 2, which reached Gibraltar by the end of January with no losses, did significantly help the situation. Thereafter London contributed only a slight trickle of petrol to Torch from reserves in the British Isles, most of it in cans, which were in great demand in the desert.

  ALLIED STRATEGIC BOMBING

  In three years of warfare, Prime Minister Churchill and a majority of the British War Cabinet had become resolutely convinced that the Allies could decisively erode Germany’s ability and will to fight by a massive and relentless bomber offensive against German war plants and the civilian population. The chief of the RAF, Charles Portal, and the chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, pressed this strategic concept with undiminished vigor. They stressed that it was a relatively cheap option that would also grind down the existing Luftwaffe fighter force at home, draw Luftwaffe elements from the Russian front, possibly obviate a direct, bloody confrontation between Allied ground forces and the German army on the continent, as in World War I, and, of course, exact revenge for Luftwaffe attacks on British cities. American airmen and others held similar views.

  While the senior British and American airmen agreed on the strategic need for a combined bomber offensive, they differed markedly over tactics. Lacking a long-range fighter to protect its heavy bombers and a high-altitude precision aiming device, Bomber Command had elected to conduct “area” raids on German cities at night. Unable to pinpoint the location of military installations or war plants in the dark, the main targets became by default the civilian populations. In contrast, the Americans, employing heavily armed, rugged, heavy bombers (B-17 Flying Fortresses; B-24 Liberators) equipped with the wondrous (top secret) Norden bombsights, elected to raid German cities by day, bombing visible war plants and military installations from high altitudes, sparing, to the extent possible, the civilian population.

  During the early years of the war (1939-1941) Bomber Command incurred heavy losses and, other than exacting revenge, it achieved little. By 1942, however, it had grown to the point that it could stage awesome “Thousand Plane Raids.”* Mesmerized by the propaganda and other advantages such raids promised, in the summer of 1942 Prime Minister Churchill authorized a hefty increase in the size of Bomber Command (from thirty-two to fifty squadrons) by January 1, 1943. The new heavy-bomber groups were to have greatly improved British aircraft (Lancasters and Halifaxes) and American-built Lend-Lease B-17s and B-24s.† Pathfinder aircraft, guided to the target by an electronic “beam” navigational system (Gee) and equipped with a ground-mapping centimetric-wavelength radar (H2S), were to insure greater accuracy—and devastation—by the oncoming heavy-bomber formations.

  To carry out their share of the bomber offensive, in June 1942, the Americans established the Eighth Air Force in the British Isles. Its chief was Carl Spaatz, who reported directly to Dwight Eisenhower, the newly appointed commander of all American Army and Army Air Forces units in the European Theater. Eisenhower did not share the view of the air zealots that the bomber offensive alone could defeat Germany, but in the belief that it could be a decisive factor in achieving an Allied victory, he gave it strong support.

  The Eighth Air Force commenced combat operations on Independence Day, July 4, 1942. Six American crews, flying light American-designed RAF Boston attack bombers, joined a Bomber Command raid on four German airfields in the Netherlands. (Two of the American-manned planes were lost.) On August 17, Eighth Air Force carried out its first independent operation: a B-17 raid on
the railroad yards in Rouen, France. By September, Spaatz was mounting ever larger attacks on German targets in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (but not Germany), employing as many as thirty to fifty B-17s per raid. Eisenhower commended these early operations and concurred with Spaatz that the American tactic of high-level daylight bombing using the Norden bombsight was not only valid but superior to Bomber Command’s nighttime “area” raids on German cities. British airmen continued to hold the opposite view and to urge the Americans to bomb at night.

  The combined Anglo-American bomber offensive had only just begun when Torch shut it down. First, the British and the Americans transferred a substantial number of heavy bombers from the British Isles to the Mediterranean—the Americans to flesh out the newly formed Twelfth Air Force. Second, Dwight Eisenhower, concerned for the safety of the many Torch convoys, directed Eighth Air Force commander Carl Spaatz to throw most of the remaining weight of his outfit against the U-boat pens in western France.

  ‘T want you to know,” Eisenhower wrote Spaatz in explanation, “that I consider the defeat of the submarine to be one of the basic requirements of the winning of the war.” Eisenhower appreciated the need to bomb Germany—and to draw Luftwaffe fighter elements from the Russian front and grind them down—but none of these air missions, he insisted, “should rank above the effort to defeat the German submarine.”

  The American airmen were not overjoyed at Eisenhower’s directive, yet they, as well as the British airmen, conceded the necessity of protecting Torch convoys and of curtailing shipping losses by U-boats iii all waters to the fullest possible extent. Meeting on October 14, Portal, Spaatz, Harris, and other senior Allied airmen agreed that Axis “submarines should be first priority targets at this time.” Bomber Command was to concentrate its night bombing raids on German cities known to have U-boat building yards.* In compliance With Eisenhower’s orders, the Eighth Air Force was to focus on the submarine pens at Lorient, St. Nazaire, La Pallice, and Brest.

  Owing to the transfers of heavy bombers to the Twelfth Air Force in support of Torch, Spaatz was hard-pressed to mount “mass” attacks on the U-boat pens. Nonetheless, on October 21, a force of ninety heavy bombers (of which seventeen carried out diversionary sorties) left bases in the British Isles with about 231 tons of bombs. Meeting unexpectedly strong, skilled, radar-directed Luftwaffe fighters and heavy flak, only fifteen of the ninety bombers actually attacked Lorient. The aircrews claimed to have dropped thirty tons of bombs on the target. Based on photo reconnaissance, air intelligence concluded that only about half of the bombs dropped (fifteen tons) hit the target. No bomb penetrated the thick (twelve-to fourteen-foot) reinforced concrete roofs of the U-boat pens, but, as related, the IXB U-124, commanded by the Ritterkreuz holder Johann Mohr, caught in the open while shifting berths, was damaged and thus delayed in departing on patrol. Three American bombers were lost.

  The Eighth Air Force conducted only that one raid in October, but during the initial Torch operations, from November 7 to 23, it attacked the U-boat pens seven more times. The November campaign comprised 411 sorties, of which fifty-five were diversionary. Two hundred and thirty-four sorties actually attacked the targets (Lorient, St. Nazaire, La Pallice, Brest) dropping 575 tons of bombs. Air intelligence estimated that about sixty tons of bombs hit the targets, but no bomb did any appreciable damage to any pen or U-boat. The Americans lost twelve heavy bombers in the seven raids in November.

  In early December, Eisenhower summoned Spaatz to Algeria to temporarily direct Torch air operations. Spaatz’s deputy, Ira C. Eaker (soon promoted to command the Eighth Air Force), assumed responsibility for continuing the raids on the U-boat pens. However, the shortage of available aircraft, terrible flying weather, and other factors restricted Eaker to merely one raid during the month of December. Seventy-seven aircraft, carrying about 146 tons of bombs, flew at the target (Lorient, for the fourth time). Forty of the seventy-seven aircraft actually attacked Lorient, dropping about eighty tons of bombs, but air intelligence calculated that only nine tons hit the target. The city of Lorient was flattened, but none of the bombs did any appreciable damage to the pens or the U-boats. Three bombers were lost.*

  First Sea Lord Dudley Pound dutifully and graciously thanked Eaker and his aircrews for the November offensive against the pens, but all concerned suspected (correctly) that the raids were a failure, that at most they had only slightly inconvenienced the U-boat force. The Admiralty concluded that the raids could be truly effective only if Eighth Air Force mounted them in irregular order twice daily, employing not less than fifty heavy bombers in each attack. However, in view of the atrocious winter weather, which aborted takeoffs and obscured or hid the targets, it was not practical to attempt daylight raids on anything like that scale with any hope of success. Nonetheless, Allied authorities ruled that the raids on the U-boat pens were to continue indefinitely, with the greatest possible intensity, and that commencing in January 1943, RAF Bomber Command was to assist Eighth Air Force with those targets.

  The extent to which Allied strategic bombing contributed to the defeat of the Third Reich was, and still is, moot, and will probably remain unresolved forever. What is indisputable, however, is that had the War Cabinet assigned more of Bomber Command’s four-engine, long-range, radar-equipped, land-based aircraft to Coastal Command from the summer of 1942 on, the “U-boat peril” could have been reduced dramatically that year. Given the loss of Allied shipping to U-boats in 1942, the failure to take that step (as Admiral King repeatedly urged) was yet another painful lapse by Prime Minister Churchill and others in London who were bedazzled and blinded by the enticing doctrines of the airmen, who promised a cheap, easy victory over Germany through airpower alone.

  HITLER SACKS RAEDER AND PROMOTES DÖNITZ

  With the winding down of Torch naval operations and the onset of twenty-four-hour darkness in the Arctic, which worked to the disadvantage of German aircraft and submarines, the Allies resumed convoys to Murmansk in December 1942. Inasmuch as naval aviators had not yet fully mastered night landings on carriers and the Germans had transferred most of their aircraft from Norway to the Russian or Mediterranean theaters, the Royal Navy’s “jeep” carriers were not included in the escort.

  At this time the roster of big German ships in Norwegian waters had altered somewhat. The battleship Tirpitz, the heavy cruiser Hipper, and the light cruisers Köln and Nuremberg were present but the “pocket” battleship Admiral Scheer had returned to the Baltic for repairs, replaced by her sister ship Lützow (ex-Deutschland). The latter was to remain in Norwegian waters until early January when, it was planned, she was to join the battle cruiser Scharnhorst and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen (both still in the Baltic) for a foray into the Atlantic, provided Hitler approved. Hipper and Köln were based in Altenfiord for possible attacks on Murmansk convoys.

  British codebreakers, reading Luftwaffe Red and the three-rotor naval Enigma still in use on naval nets in Norway, provided good information on most of the big-ship movements as well as the German decision to provisionally transfer U-boats from the Arctic force to the Atlantic force. The codebreakers reported that Hipper and Köln were in Altenfiord and that Lützow arrived in Narvik on December 12.

  The Admiralty, which was responsible for Murmansk convoys, decided to sail the December convoy (PQ 19) in two sections of about fifteen ships each. The first section, designated by new coding procedures as JW 51-A and composed of fifteen ships plus an oiler for the escorts, sailed from Loch Ewe, Scotland, on December 15.* It was closely escorted by seven fleet destroyers and four smaller vessels plus the cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica and two more destroyers to screen the cruisers. A force from the Home Fleet, comprised of the battleship King George V, the heavy cruiser Berwick, and three more destroyers, provided distant cover. Four British submarines laid off Altenfiord to watch for movements by Hipper and Köln.

  The German admiral commanding Arctic operations, Otto Klüber, who had only three U-boats and no aircraft on patrol, fa
iled to detect JW 51-A. Under cover of Arctic darkness, the convoy reached Kola Inlet, the waterway to Murmansk, on Christmas Day with no enemy encounters. Five cargo ships went on to Molotovsk, near icebound Archangel. Two days later, the opposite-sailing convoy, redesignated RA 51, with its close escort plus the cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica and their two-destroyer screen sailed from Kola Inlet. Since there were seven destroyers with JW 51-A and seven with RA 51, the two destroyers in RA 51 serving as screens for the cruisers were detached and proceeded independently to Iceland.

  The second section of the convoy to Murmansk, JW 51-B, sailed from Loch Ewe on December 22. Comprised of fourteen merchant ships, it was escorted by six fleet destroyers and five other smaller vessels—two corvettes, a minesweeper (Bramble), and two ASW trawlers. The battleship Anson, the heavy cruiser Cumberland, and destroyer screens of the Home Fleet provided distant cover. On the fifth day out, December 27, this convoy ran into a heavy storm. In the dark, heavy seas and howling Arctic wind, five merchant ships and two escorts separated from the main body. Later three ships rejoined and one ship, escorted by the destroyer Oribi, proceeded independently to Kola Inlet. The other ship, escorted by an ASW trawler, sought to rejoin the convoy.