by Clay Blair
One of four German U-boats on Arctic patrol, the newly arrived U-354, commanded by Karl-Heinz Herbschleb, detected convoy JW 51-B. Upon receiving Herbschleb’s report, Admiral Raeder directed Otto Klüber to attack JW 51-B with the “pocket” battleship Lützow, which had shifted from Narvik to Altenfiord on December 19, the heavy cruiser Hipper, and six destroyers. Maintaining radio silence, this force sailed from Altenfiord on December 30, undetected by British code-breakers or by the four British submarines that were scouting off the fjord. The force was commanded by Oskar Kummetz, the officer whom Dönitz had praised for correcting many of the defects in German torpedoes in 1940. Like the big-ship commanders preceding him in Arctic waters, Kummetz was under orders from the OKM to avoid contact with an enemy of equal or superior strength because Hitler did not wish to risk a blow to German prestige by the loss of another big ship.
Unaware of the close presence of Sheffield and Jamaica, Kummetz had conceived an unusual—and controversial—plan of action, which divided his forces. Hipper and three destroyers were to attack the convoy from the port quarter during the two and a half hours of feeble twilight before noon. Kummetz believed that Hipper and her three destroyers would draw off the fleet destroyers of the close escort and that the convoy itself would turn away, or south, right into the waiting arms of Lützow and her three destroyers.
These German and British forces met in a wild melee in the morning twilight of December 31. Per plan, Hipper and her three destroyers drew off the convoy escorts. Hipper hit three destroyers (Onslow, Obedient, and the aged Achates) and the minesweeper Bramble. Achates sank. The German destroyer Eckholdt of Hipper’s group sank the damaged Bramble. Hearing the gunfire, the cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica, with the westbound convoy RA 51, valorously came up at full speed to counterattack the larger-gunned Hipper (6” versus 8”) and her three destroyers. The British cruisers sank the destroyer Eckholdt and severely damaged Hipper. Mindful of Hitler’s orders not to risk a big-ship loss and fearful of an enemy torpedo attack in the darkness, which might cause damage and dash her planned Atlantic sortie with Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen, Lützow (six 11” guns, eight 5.9” guns, and six 4.1” guns) and her three destroyers timidly lobbed a few rounds at the convoy, slightly damaging the destroyer Obdurate and the merchant ship Calobre. Lützow then forswore a golden opportunity not only to destroy the entire convoy but also to sink Sheffield and Jamaica and perhaps the remaining five British destroyers and smaller escorts, and shamefully fled with Hipper and the five surviving German destroyers to Altenfiord. Herbschleb in U-354 twice attacked the convoy, but both times he failed. No other U-boat attempted an attack. The merchant ships of both convoys, JW 51-B and RA 51, reached their respective destinations essentially unharmed. In the battle of December 31, the British lost one old destroyer (Achates) and a minesweeper (Bramble). Hipper severely damaged the destroyer Onslow. The Germans lost one destroyer (Eckholdt) and incurred severe damage to Hipper. As a result, Hipper was forced to return (with Köln) to Germany for repairs and she did not again leave the Baltic.
Berlin gained the impression from a grossly misleading message from Herbschleb in U-354 that the Germans had achieved a great victory. While preparing a boastful New Year’s Day propaganda message, Hitler heard a radio broadcast from London, announcing that Allied convoy escorts had repulsed a determined attack by big German surface vessels and that the convoy had reached Murmansk without the loss of a single merchant ship.
Hitler was stunned. Absent any word from Kummetz, who was still maintaining radio silence and reporting via a landline to Berlin that proved to be defective, Hitler “flew into an uncontrollable rage,” Admiral Raeder wrote in his memoir, “unjustly claiming that information had been deliberately withheld from him.” Raeder continued:
He announced his intentions of immediately having all the heavy ships laid up, and recorded in the War Diary his view that the heavy ships were utterly useless— an entry made so that his opinion on the matter should be on record in black and white. He would not listen to any explanations by Vice Admiral [Theodor] Krancke, my personal representative at his headquarters, but ordered me by telephone to report to him immediately. I requested time to obtain the necessary, accurate details but … [some days elapsed] before I had the full picture of what had happened.
Raeder met with Hitler and the Führer’s trusted military adviser Wilhelm Keitel in the evening of January 6 at Wolfschanze. Raeder briefly described the extraordinary scene:
For one whole hour Hitler, in the presence of Field Marshal Keitel, gave me a thorough dressing down.* He reiterated his complaint about getting insufficient information. He went on to attack the Navy in a vicious and impertinent way. He disparaged its founding, belittled its every role since 1804 and stated that except for the submarines the entire history of the German Navy had been one of futility. Göring’s hand and influence were evident in everything Hitler said. Heretofore the heavy ships had been Hitler’s pride and interest. Now he dammed them as being utterly worthless, needing the Air Force and the smaller ships to protect them every time they went to sea. He added, further, that in case of any Allied attack on Norway, the Air Force could be put to better use attacking the British Fleet than flying air cover for our ships.
Next, he stated that the large ships no longer had any operational value and that they should be laid up so that their guns could be put to use elsewhere—ashore, where guns were so urgently needed. Lastly he even criticized the scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow [in 1919] and attacked the spirit and morale of the Navy, which up to then he had always praised.
It was glaringly obvious that this whole diatribe against the Navy which I commanded was intended but for one thing—to insult me personally. Hitler concluded by inviting me to hand in a memorandum in which I would be permitted to explain any views to the contrary that I might have as to the role of the heavy ships. Throughout his remarks I had exerted my utmost self-control to keep silent. I felt it beneath the dignity of the senior officer of the Navy to attempt to contradict in detail such utterly prejudiced statements. When he finished speaking, I quietly asked to be allowed to speak to him by myself. Field Marshal Keitel and the two stenographers left the room.
In his meeting alone with Hitler, Raeder wrote, the time had come “for a parting of the ways.” Since Hitler in his remarks “had indicated that he was dissatisfied [and] no longer had confidence in me,” Raeder wrote that he “very quietly” asked to be relieved from the position of commander in chief of the Navy. Hitler “began to calm down” and “begged” Raeder to stay on the job, but Raeder refused, he wrote. It was finally decided that Raeder was to step down on January 30, 1943, the tenth anniversary of his service under Hitler. Asked to propose two men who were best qualified to succeed him, Raeder named fifty-seven-year-old Rolf Carls, then commanding Naval Group North, and fifty-one-year-old Karl Dönitz. Hitler chose Dönitz.
In response to Hitler’s demand that the big ships be decommissioned and scrapped, the OKM drew up a tentative schedule for 1943:
Hipper and Köln, March 1
Schleswig-Holstein, April 1
Schlesien, May 1
Scharnhorst, July 1
Tirpitz, Autumn
Admiral Raeder revealed his reassignment and the appointment of Dönitz to succeed him in three radio broadcasts on January 30, 31, and February 1. To avoid the impression that he had been summarily sacked (like so many Wehrmacht generals on the Russian front), he said that he had asked for reassignment owing to ill health, but that he would continue to serve in the less demanding post of Inspector General of the Kriegsmarine. Briefly reviewing his role in the growth of the Kriegsmarine under “our beloved Führer,” Raeder concluded:
As I have dedicated my whole life to the Navy in the past, so will I continue to serve it in the future and to take part with all my heart in its heavy battle. I know that the Navy will carry on this battle under its new Commander-in-Chief with the same obdurate determination, with the same unshakable wil
l to conquer, and with the same loyalty as heretofore. I know that each man will give all that he has in him, to the end that believing in good and trusting in our Führer, he may win the victory for our people and Reich. Long live the Führer!
Raeder’s public broadcast was followed by a message from Dönitz:
At the order of the Führer I today take over the high command of the Navy. To the U-boat arm, which I have been hitherto privileged to command, I extend my thanks for its courageous readiness to fight to the death and for its loyalty. I shall continue personally to command the U-boat war.
I intend to command the Navy in the same firm martial spirit. From every individual I expect unqualified obedience, extreme courage, and devotion to the last breath. It is in these things that we uphold our honor. Gathered about our Führer, we will not lay down our arms until victory and peace shall have been won. Hail our Führer!*
Dönitz assumed his new responsibilities without missing a beat. He moved from Paris to Berlin, occupying an imposing residence in a suburb, Dahlem, about fifteen miles west of his birthplace, Grünau. He established U-boat headquarters in a building in Charlottenburg,† four miles north of his home, and named Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg to be commander in chief (FdU) of U-boats. The chief staffers were housed nearby in the Hotel am Steinplatz. These remained forty-two-year-old Eberhard Godt, promoted to rear admiral, and Dönitz’s son-in-law, Günther Hessler, first staff officer, or right-hand man to Godt. They were closely assisted in operations by Adalbert Schnee and Peter Cremer, the communications specialist Hans Meckel, and the engineer Gerhard Suhren, older brother of Reinhard Suhren. The thirty-seven-year-old Hans-Rudolf Rösing was promoted to the exalted post of administrative chief of the eight combat flotillas based in France.
Peter Cremer wrote in his memoir:
Every morning the new C in C Navy left his desk and turned up shortly after at our HQ in the Steinplatz . … the [U-boat] battles were fought at the legendary green baize table … [on which U-boat] positions were symbolized by little flags and plotted on the big situation charts, the oceans on paper. … There were no fixed hours of duty. We relieved one another, but individual operations [versus convoys] often lasted for days. At night our work was interrupted more and more often [by Allied heavy bomber attacks that] forced us into the air-raid shelter. The place, according to eyewitnesses, was “swarming with Knight’s Crosses.”
The Allies assumed from the Raeder-Dönitz change of command and the bellicose tone of the Dönitz broadcast that the Germans were going to wage all-out U-boat warfare to the exclusion of major big-ship operations. At first the assumption was correct. Dönitz hastened to agree with Hitler’s order to scrap all the big ships and, in turn, received the Führer’s enthusiastic approval for another substantial increase in U-boat production and Luftwaffe support in the Atlantic. On second thought, however, Dönitz concluded that if the commanders were given greater freedom to take risks, a task force consisting of Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, and Lützow, basing in Norway, might carry out effective raids against convoys in the Arctic—and possibly in the North Atlantic—thereby tying down a comparable or greater force of Allied big ships that might be used elsewhere. In one of his first sessions with Hitler—reportedly a tempestuous one—Dönitz convinced the Führer of his revised views. Accordingly, as originally planned, Scharnhorst shifted from the Baltic to Norway. Thus she, Tirpitz, and Lützow escaped Hitler’s axe, but none of the other big ships ever left the Baltic again. Some were scrapped (as was the unfinished carrier Graf Zeppelin), but some were retained as training ships.
Dönitz had promised in his broadcast to the Kriegsmarine that he was to continue “personally to command the U-boat war.” But he was hard-pressed to keep that promise. In replacing Raeder, he had assumed immense, new, and time-consuming responsibilities. Not the least of these was to establish closer personal ties to Hitler and the arms-production chief, Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders and to neutralize or diminish the influence of the Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goring, in order to gain for the Kriegsmarine a greater share of Germany’s shrinking resources for war fighting.
THREE
THE CASABLANCA CONFERENCE
The Axis suffered four defeats in January 1943 that collectively marked an unrecognized but decisive turning point in the war. From that time onward, there was not the slightest possibility that the Axis could prevail. Viz.
• STALINGRAD. The prolonged Soviet counterattack in numbing cold weather finally trapped the German forces holding the pile of rubble that was once a great city and forced them to surrender. In this first clear-cut Soviet victory of the war, the German casualties (dead, captured, missing) in the Stalingrad battle exceeded 250,000. Moreover, this devastating and humiliating defeat compelled the German forces in the Caucasus, which had reached the prized Baku oil fields on the Caspian Sea, to withdraw, relinquishing one of the main objectives of that arduous campaign.
• NORTH AFRICA. Axis forces under Erwin Rommel, in full retreat to the west before Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, abandoned the strategic seaport of Tripoli, Libya, and finally stopped at the prewar fortifications known as the Mareth Line on the Libya-Tunisia border. The loss of Italian Libya, yet another humiliating setback for the Pact of Steel, precluded any possibility of another Axis counterstrike across Libya to threaten Egypt, the Suez Canal, or oil resources in the Persian Gulf area. The newly arrived German forces in Tunisia held Eisenhower’s lackluster Torch forces at bay and reinforced the Mareth Line, but the Allied vise was closing inexorably. It appeared to be merely a matter of weeks before all Axis forces in North Africa were evacuated or annihilated.
• SOUTHWEST PACIFIC. Allied forces on Guadalcanal and in Papua New Guinea decisively defeated Japanese forces, eliminating entirely the Axis threat to Australia and to the Allied line of communication to that continent. The unforeseen but epic six-month struggle for Guadalcanal resulted in an Allied victory in the Pacific, ranking in strategic importance with the Battle of Midway. The struggle cost the Japanese about thirty thousand killed, the Allies about seven thousand killed, including casualties at sea and in the air.*
• SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE. With the help of captured materials, a great increase in the number of bombes and other mechanical devices, and inspired mathematical and intellectual solutions, Allied codebreakers at Bletchley Park and in Washington and elsewhere slowly but steadily broke deeper into Axis military, diplomatic, and merchant-marine codes. Setbacks continued to occur but they came less frequently and were overcome more quickly. The quantity of precise information that the Allies amassed on the enemy forces and intentions in 1943 and later was without precedent in history, and it became an increasingly larger factor in Allied military decisions.
No less important, decrypts of Triton led to a growing suspicion among Allied codebreakers that B-dienst was reading Allied Atlantic convoy codes, as was the case. The clues recovered led those responsible for Allied communications security to launch an investigation that was to confirm those suspicions and cause a sweeping modification of Allied naval codes, leaving the German codebreakers at B-dienst virtually blind and deaf for the rest of the war.
As the New Year arrived, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill both felt the need for another face-to-face strategy conference—their fourth. Code-named Symbol, it was held in Casablanca, Morocco, from January 14 to 24. Because of the critical battle at Stalingrad, Joseph Stalin declined to attend. The Free French were represented by General Henri Giraud, replacing Admiral Darlan, who had been assassinated in Algiers on Christmas Eve. President Roosevelt flew via the “southern” route, Brazil to Dakar to Morocco. Churchill flew far into the Atlantic west of France to avoid German aircraft, then doubled back to Africa.
The British arrived with clear objectives and well-prepared position papers. They urged these courses of action:
• A substantial reinforcement of Allied forces in North Africa to assure an early, decisive defeat of the Axis in Tunisia.
> • Intensified military operations in the Mediterranean Basin, designed to knock Italy out of the war and to regain safe convoy routes from Gibraltar to the Suez Canal. These operations were to include invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943.
• An all-out effort to defeat the U-boats in the Atlantic, which was to include a single Allied commander of all ASW forces.
• A massive, combined bomber offensive against Germany. The Americans were to bomb by day, the British by night.
• A postponement of Overlord, the invasion of Occupied France, to May of 1944.
• Utmost matériel support for the military forces of the Soviet Union, to be shipped via Murmansk, the Persian Gulf, and Vladivostok, unless shipping losses became prohibitive.
The Americans arrived with murky or conflicting objectives and ill-prepared position papers. They urged these courses of action:
• A drastic diminution of Mediterranean operations after the defeat of the Axis in Tunisia. No invasions of Sicily or Italy.
• An all-out Allied effort to defeat the U-boats in the Atlantic, but no single, unified commander of ASW forces.
• A massive, combined bomber offensive against Germany.
• Overlord to be staged as early as possible in 1943.
• An intensification of operations in the Pacific against the Japanese, backed by a 100 percent increase in men and materiel (i.e., from about 15 percent of the Allied war effort to about 30 percent).