by Clay Blair
Acting on Münnich’s contact report, U-boat Control reinforced the thirteen boats of group Pfeil with seven more: five from group Haudegen and two that had been chasing Halifax 224. In the late afternoon of February 4, four Pfeil boats reported contact. Three, including Siegfried von Forstner in U-402, were experienced skippers, the other, U-267, commanded by Otto Tinschert, age twenty-seven, was a new boat three weeks out from Kiel. All reported that the strong, aggressive escort and foul weather (snow, hail, high winds, heavy seas) made shadowing difficult. No boat was able to mount an effective attack on the convoy during the night of February 4-5.
Over the next twenty-four hours, Klaus Rudloff in U-609 made contact and shadowed tenaciously. During that time, three boats attacked the convoy. Heinz Franke in the U-262, making his second patrol, claimed that he sank a 12,000-ton tanker with three hits, but the sinking was never confirmed,, In a second attack, Franke claimed sinking another tanker of 9,000 tons and possible hits on a third tanker. In all likelihood he sank only the 2,900-ton Polish freighter Zagloba. Gustav Poel in the U-413, also on his second patrol, sank a straggler, the 5,400-ton American freighter West Portal. Rolf von Jessen in the new U-266 sank another straggler, the 4,100-ton Greek Polyktor and captured the captain and chief engineer.
By the evening of February 5, Slow Convoy 118 had reached a point about seven hundred miles from Iceland. One escort, the British destroyer Witch, had run short of fuel and had left. However, that night three escorts from Iceland joined the convoy: the big Treasury-class Coast Guard cutter Ingham (with defective sonar) and two American four-stack destroyers, Babbitt and Schenck. This increased the surface escort to eleven warships: live destroyers, two Treasury-class Coast Guard cutters, and the four corvettes. Although Rudloff in U-609 held on, sending contact reports for which he received high praise, no U-boats got through the screen that night, prompting testy exhortations from U-boat Control: “At ’em! Operate ruthlessly to relieve the Eastern Front!”
Long-range aircraft from Iceland and/or Northern Ireland provided air escort on the morning of February 6. Working closely with the eleven surface escorts, the aircraft scattered the U-boats and drove them under. Five VIIs reported battle damage by destroyers or aircraft or both, and aborted to France: Franke in U-262 (who was out of torpedoes anyway); Otto Tinschert in the new U-267; Rudolf Franzius in U-438; Heinz Wolf in U-465; and Karl-Ernst Schroeter in 17-752. Two B-24s of British Squadron 120, piloted by Desmond J. Isted and Donald C. Fleming-Williams, carried out close attacks on U-boats that afternoon, possibly on Wolf’s U-465, but the U-boat survived.
In response to the exhortations from Berlin, a half dozen boats risked all to attack Slow Convoy 118 on February 7. Two VIIs met with disaster. The Free French corvette Lobelia, commanded by Pierre de Morsier, got Rudloff’s U-609 on radar, chased her under with gunfire, then destroyed her with depth charges. A B-17 Flying Fortress of British Squadron 220, piloted by G. Roberson, sank with seven depth charges U-624, commanded by Ulrich Von Soden-Fraunhofen. There were no survivors from either U-boat.
Two boats evaded the escorts and closed the convoy that night: Siegfried von Forstner in the veteran U-402 and Wolfgang Sträter in the new U-614. In a classic four-hour attack, von Forstner sank five confirmed ships for about 28,000 tons and damaged the 9,300-ton Norwegian tanker Daghild. During the same four hours, Sträter in U-614 sank one 5,700-ton British freighter and later hit Daghild, which still refused to sink.* In the chaos von Forstner’ created, the merchant ship Samuel Huntington rammed and disabled the Greek freighter Adamas, which had veered out of her assigned column. While attempting to sink Adamas with her guns, the Free French corvette Lobelia disabled herself, and Vimy had to tow her to the British Isles.
Two of the ships von Forstner sank resulted in heavy loss of life. The first was the valiant 1,600-ton rescue ship Toward. Of the seventy-four men on board, fifty- eight were killed or died in the icy water. The Second was the 6,100-ton American vessel Henry R. Mallory, serving as a troopship. Although she went down slowly, the abandon-ship procedure was marked by the usual panic and ineptitude. As a result, 228 of the 495 men on board perished. Valorously ignoring the danger of a U-boat attack, Roy Raney in the Coast Guard cutter Bibb launched a rescue of Mallory’s 267 survivors.
When the British escort commander, F. B. Proudfoot on Vanessa, realized that Bibb had lagged behind to rescue survivors, he repeatedly ordered Raney to cease and desist and to rejoin the convoy at once. Raney ignored those orders and launched whaleboats, determined to rescue every American soldier and sailor he could possibly find. Under the direction of a deck officer, Henry C. Keene, Jr., over the next several hours Raney’s men picked up 202 of the 267 Mallory survivors, plus the cook’s dog, “Rickey,” found all alone on a raft. Raney then rescued thirty- three survivors of the Greek Kalliopi (sunk by on Forstner in U-402)—altogether 235 men, of whom three later died.†
Puzzled and angry that so few of the twenty U-boats had reported contact, U-boat Control exhorted the skippers to press’ the killing and pointedly radioed congratulations to von Forstner in U-402 and Franke in U-262 for their aggressive attacks and to the lost Klaus Rudloff in U-609 for his dogged shadowing. Notwithstanding the heavy air and surface escorts, von; Forstner got in again and sank yet another freighter, a 5,000-ton Greek. This sinking raised von Forstner’s claims in Slow Convoy 118 to seven ships for 62,200 tons, which earned him personal congratulations from Dönitz and a Ritterkreuz, one of the very few awarded to skippers on the North Atlantic run in the winter of 1942-1943.*
Coastal Command was able to provide Slow Convoy 118 with saturation air cover, and U-boat Control was forced to cancel operations by February 9. The Germans claimed sinking fourteen merchant ships for 109,000 tons. The actual score was eleven ships for about 60,000 tons (over half of that sunk by von Forstner) plus the Greek Adamas, lost in collision as a result of the battle. Allied forces sank three U-boats: the IXC £7-787, and the VIIs U-609, U-624.
British aircraft very nearly sank three more U-boats of this group. On February 8, a B-24 of British Squadron 120, piloted by New Zealander Bryan W. Turnbull, hit the U-135, commanded by Heinz Schütt. The next day a B-17 Flying Fortress of British Squadron 206, piloted by R. C. Patrick, hit the U-614, commanded by Wolfgang Sträter. On February 10, a B-24 of American Squadron 2, piloted by William L. Sanford, hit the aborting U-752, commanded by Karl-Ernst Schroeter.† Schütt in U-135 repaired his damage and continued operations, but Sträter in U-614, who reported “severe” damage, aborted to France, and Schroeter in U-752 continued his homeward voyage.
That the twenty U-boats assigned to Slow Convoy 118 had not achieved greater success led to disappointment, displeasure, and concern in Berlin. Godt explained in the war diary that “only experienced boats could succeed” against such a heavily escorted convoy. Increasingly that observation applied to all heavily escorted Allied convoys. Only rarely could green boats get by the escorts to shoot.
Too late to help Slow Convoy 118 evade the U-boat groups, Allied codebreakers recovered naval Enigma on February 5 and, as related, read it steadily to the last day of the month. The information thus gained enabled the Allies to route the many ships and escorts of eastbound convoys Halifax 225 and 226 and Slow Convoys 119 and 120 around U-boat patrol lines without any losses to the Germans.
Patrolling off fogbound Newfoundland in search of eastbound convoys, group Haudegen, reduced to nine boats by February 9, reorganized. The five boats of Haudegen that were detached to form group Nortstrum, northeast of Newfoundland, were returned to Haudegen, except for Ernst Heydemann in the new U-268, who was low on fuel and had to return to France. While he was inbound to Brest, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of British Squadron 172, piloted by G. D. Lundon, caught the boat and savaged her with four close depth charges. In response to Heydemann’s final, desperate request for help, U-boat Control sent out aircraft and patrol boats, but they could find no sign of U-268. The boat and all hands had perished.
The reorga
nization of Haudegen increased; the group to thirteen boats. Other than local ASW vessels, in the next seven days only one boat saw a target. She was the VII U-607, commanded by the Ritterkreuz holder Ernst Mengersen. He came upon a lone American tanker on February 15. She was the fast 11,400-ton Atlantic Sun (of Sun Oil Company) en route from Iceland to join convoy Outbound North (Slow) 165, but she had not yet caught up. At |about midday, Mengersen attacked submerged and exploded the ship with three torpedoes. As she broke into pieces, the sixty-six men on board (including a nineteen-man naval armed-guard crew) scrambled for the lifeboats and rafts. Mengersen captured a twenty-three-year-old merchant seaman, William Golobich, but the other sixty-five men perished.
Golobich falsely told Mengersen that the tanker was a straggler from a “fast convoy,” probably the eastbound Halifax 225 for which group Haudegen was lying in wait. The news that the convoy had apparently slipped by, plus the realization that many of the boats were critically low on fuel, led U-boat Control to disband the luckless Haudegen. Eight of the thirteen boats set sail for France; five with adequate fuel remained off Newfoundland to cadre a new group, Taifun (Typhoon).
While homebound, one of the ex-Haudegen boats, the U-69, commanded by Ulrich Gräf, discovered convoy Outbound North (Slow) 165 on February 17. Gräf got off a B-bar contact report and set up a beacon for other homebound Haudegen boats. The signals brought up U-201, commanded by Günther Rosenberg. Warships of British Escort Group B-6, commanded by R. Heathcote, detected the gathering U-boats on Huff Duff and radar. Heathcote’s two veteran destroyers, Fame and Viscount, ran down the bearings, firing and dropping depth charges. Fame sank 17-69, which had gained renown under Ritterkreuz holder Jost Metzler for her pioneering voyage in 1941 to Freetown and Takorodi.* Viscount sank U-201, which had gained renown under Adalbert Schnee, Who won the Ritterkreuz with Oak Leaves on her. There were no survivors from either U-boat.
Several other boats made contact with Outbound North (Slow) 165 in foul weather. Three of these were homebound and low on fuel: Rolf von lessen in U-266; Heinz-Ehlert Clausen in U-403; and Ritterkreuz holder Ernst Mengersen in U-607. Neither Jessen nor Mengersen had a chance to shoot, but Clausen sank a 6,000-ton Greek. Hans-Joachim Drewitz, age thirty-five, in the new IXC40 U-525, assigned to the newly formed group Taifun, sank a 3,500-ton British freighter. While U-525 was homebound in Biscay on March 3, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of British Squadron 172, piloted by J. W. Tweddle, bombed and severely damaged her. Drewitz limped into Lorient, escorted by two JU-88s and several small vessels. The boat was out of action until April.
By the middle of February, U-boat Control had deployed three new groups on the North Atlantic run between Greenland and Iceland. These were Ritter (Knight), Knappen (Shieldbearer), and Neptun, comprising in all thirty-two boats.
Allied codebreakers were aware of the positions of these new groups. Perhaps as a consequence, group Ritter lost two of eleven boats on the same day, February 15. One was the new IXC 40 U-529, commanded by Georg-Werner Fraatz, the skipper who had commanded U-652 in her historic engagement with the American destroyer Greer in the Denmark Strait on September 4, 1941. Subsequently, Fraatz had sunk two British destroyers (Heythrop, Jaguar) in the Mediterranean before Allied aircraft savaged his U-652 so badly that she had to be sunk by U-81, who rescued Fraatz and his crew, many of whom remained with him to commission U-529. The other boat lost that day was the VII U-225, commanded by Wolfgang Leimkühler, out from France on his second patrol with group Ritter. There were no survivors from either boat.*
A Focke-Wulf FW-200 Condor reported a westbound convoy well to the east of these three groups on February 18. For the purpose of intercepting this convoy, U-boat Control split off five of the ten boats of group Knappen to cadre a new group, Burggraf (Fortress Chief). The remaining five boats of group Knappen were then attached to group Ritter, extending its line southeast. Three boats newly sailed from France joined the Burggraf cadre, raising its strength to eight boats.
One of the Knappen boats, U-604, commanded by Horst Höltring, reported a westbound convoy on the morning of February 20. This was the fast Outbound North 166, composed of about sixty merchant ships. The convoy was guarded by the American Escort Group A-3, commanded by the veteran Paul Heineman. His group consisted of seven warships: two Treasury-class Coast Guard cutters, Campbell and Spencer, both equipped with centimetric-wavelength radar and Huff Duff, four Canadian corvettes, and one British corvette, all with centimetric-wavelength radar. The rescue ship, Stockport, was equipped with Huff Duff.
Groups Knappen and Ritter combined consisted of fourteen boats. U-boat Control ordered all but one, U-377, commanded by Otto Kohler, who was too far to the east, to close on the convoy. In addition, Control directed six boats of the Newfoundland group Taifun, which were refueling from the XIV “Milk Cow” tanker U-460, to come northeast and join the attack. These orders were to put nineteen boats into the battle with Outbound North 166, one of the largest U-boat operations of the war.
During the night of February 20-21, while Höltring in U-604 shadowed, the boats gathered. In the early hours of February 21, two VIIs of group Ritter, Eberhard Hüttemann in U-332 and Hans Joachim Bertelsmann in U-603, and one VII of Knappen, Adolf Oelrich in U-92, got inside the screen and attacked. Hüttemann and Bertelsmann both claimed sinking 6,000-ton freighters, but as it turned out, they had hit the same ship, the 6,000-ton Norwegian tanker Stigstad, which sank. Hüttemann in U-332 later reported that a corvette hunted him for thirteen hours. In his attack, Oelrich in U-92 damaged the 10,000-ton British freighter Empire Trader. The escort commander, Paul Heineman, directed the Canadian corvette Dauphin to escort this big, valuable ship to the Azores. Subsequently the Admiralty countermanded these orders and directed Dauphin to sink Empire Trader by gun and rejoin the besieged convoy as soon as possible.
A B-24 Liberator of British Squadron 120, piloted by Desmond J. Isted, found the VII U-623 on the surface on the afternoon of February 21. Commanded by Hermann Schröder, U-623 was making her second Atlantic patrol. Isted dived out of a cloud and dropped six shallow-set depth charges in a close straddle. Nothing further was ever heard from U-623* Three other VIIs reported aircraft had forced them down: the Knappen boats U-91, commanded by Heinz Walkerling, and U-604, commanded by Horst Höltring; and the U-454, an ex-Arctic VII commanded by Burkhard Hackländer in group Ritter. Walkerling in U-91 later reported that a rain of aircraft bombs and depth charged from surface escorts caused such damage to the boat that he had to withdraw temporarily for repairs. He later resumed the chase, but he did not again make contact with this convoy.
In view of the large numbers of U-boats converging on Outbound North 166, and the temporary absence of the corvette Dauphin, Western Approaches ordered the ex-French, Polish-manned destroyer Buna, commanded by Franciszek Pitulko, of group B-3, escorting the oncoming convoy Outbound North (Slow) 167, to run ahead and reinforce the American escort group. Until she arrived and Dauphin rejoined, Heineman, with merely six escorts, had his hands full. Nonetheless, that night, Heineman believed, the escort evened the score. The Treasury-class Coast Guard cutter Spencer, commanded! by the aptly named sailor Harold Sloop Berdine, chased down and, it was thought, sank one U-boat, identified later in official records as the U-225, commanded by Wolfgang Leimkühler.†
Three U-boats evaded the screen and attacked the convoy on the night of February 22. The first two were Oelrich in the Knappen boat U-92 and Alfred Manhardt von Mannstein in the Ritter boat U-753. Oelrich claimed sinking two freighters for 11,000 tons and possible hits on a third ship. In fact, he hit only the big 9,300-ton Norwegian freighter N.T Nielsen Alonso with two FATs. Manhardt von Mannstein in U-753 also hit the Alonso, leaving her a floating wreck. The big Coast Guard cutter Campbell removed Alonso’s fifty-man crew, then the destroyer Burza put the hulk under by gunfire. Meanwhile Campbell found U-753 and depth-charged the boat so savagely that von Mannstein was compelled to withdraw from the battle. Upon learning of his damage (both periscopes
and one diesel out), U-boat Control directed von Mannstein to head’ homeward and, if feasible, join a group preparing to attack the oncoming convoy, Outbound North (Slow) 167.
The third boat to attack that night was the first VII to arrive from group Taifun, the U-606, commanded by twenty-five-year-old Hans Döhler. He sank the 5,700-ton American freighter Chattanooga City, and damaged the 5,000-ton American freighter Expositor and the 6,600-ton British freighter Empire Redshank. The Canadian corvette Trillium put the Redshank under with her gun, but was unable to do the same with the hulk of Expositor. The second Taifun VII to arrive, the new U-303, commanded by Karl-Franz Heine, age twenty-seven, sank Expositor with a finishing shot.
Three escorts counterattacked Döhler in U-606: the Canadian corvette Chilliwack, the Polish destroyer Burza, and the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Campbell. Franciszek Pitulko in Burza carried the weight of the initial attack, doggedly holding the sonar contact and firing about forty depth charges. These charges drove U-606 to the scary depth of 787 feet and caused so much external and internal damage that U-606’s chief engineer insisted that Döhler surface to escape or to scuttle.
When U-606 popped up, the cutter Campbell got her on radar at 4,600 yards. The skipper, James A. Hirschfield, who was accidentally wounded by his own gunners, ran down the bearing firing every weapon that could bear, then, as he was throwing over two shallow-set depth charges, he unintentionally rammed U-606. The U-boat dragged down the side of Campbell, cutting a fifteen-foot gash in her plating and flooding the engine room. When the ships separated, Campbell fixed U-606 in her searchlight and again raked her with every possible weapon. Thereupon the flooding caused Campbell’s power to fail and, like U-606, she lay helpless, drifting with the currents.
There was chaos on U-606. The gunfire from Campbell wrecked the boat and killed most of the Germans who got topside, including Döhler. Many survivors jumped overboard to escape the gunfire, drifted off, and drowned. Campbell sent a whaler to the sinking U-boat to take off survivors, but only five of them got in the boat. Later in the night Burza found U-606, decks awash but still afloat, with eight Germans on board. These Germans opened the last vents to sink U-606, then jumped into the water and swam to Burza. One survivor failed to make it, leaving the Germans captured alive from U-606 at only twelve.*