by Clay Blair
As planned, the U-180 and 1-29 met on April 23 at a point in the Indian Ocean about 450 miles southeast of Madagascar. The weather that day was too rough to carry out the exchanges of men and materiel, Musenberg reported, so the two boats traveled in company for several days until the waters were calm. The transfers finally took place on April 27.
Apart from the two passengers, Bose and Hasan, the Germans passed cargo to 1-29. It included a torpedo tube containing a gun barrel (of unspecified type) and ammunition; cases of documents and construction drawings for military weapons, aircraft, and submarines; and three cases containing 432 Bolde noisemakers.
The 1-29 in turn passed two men to U-1$0, plus an astounding quantity of cargo. The men were submarine commander Tetsusiro Emi and a submarine designer/engineer, Hideo Tomogaga. The cargo consisted of three 21” aerial torpedoes (Model No. 2); several cases of quinine; 1.3 tons of Japanese weaponry and drawings; over half a ton of mail, documents, and drawings from the German embassy in Tokyo; and two tons of gold ingots in 146 large cases. In all, the Japanese cargo transferred to U-180 weighed eleven tons, and it took up every inch of spare space in the boat. With it, Musenberg logged testily, came cockroaches, beetles, and all kinds of “very small mites.”
Authorized to attack loners only, Musenberg closed the coast of South Africa near East London. Two British aircraft approached U-180. The first was an unarmed twin-engine Avro Anson on a training flight, attracted by the smoke of U-750’s engines. Musenberg drove it off with flak. The second was a twin-engine Handley Page Hampden bomber, loaded for combat. It attacked U-180, Musenberg logged, but the Germans shot it down. Handicapped by smoking engines and defective engine-cooling systems, Musenberg soon gave up his antiship patrol and headed home. On the way he found and sank a second loner, the 5,200-ton Greek Boris on June 3. After refueling a second time (from the IXC 40 U-530, serving as a provisional U-tanker) west of the Canaries on June 19, Musenberg reached Bordeaux on July 3.
The meeting of U-180 and 1-29 in the Indian Ocean was an Axis submarine “first” and therefore notable. The 1-29 delivered Bose and his aide to Singapore and returned to Japan. Of course, Bose was never able to raise a nationalist army.
He became a nuisance to the Japanese until he was killed in an airplane crash in 1945. Declared unfit for combat after this one patrol, the IXD1 U-180 was decommissioned on September 30, 1943, for conversion to a cargo submarine powered by two conventional (i.e., 1,400 horsepower) diesels and capable of transporting 252 tons of goods. Musenberg went to other duty. Contrary to postwar rumors that U-180 had sunk with the two tons of gold on board near Bordeaux, all the gold reached the Japanese Embassy in Berlin safely. It was used to pay for Japanese expenses in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
FOUR
SHIFTING TIDES
When Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz assumed the post of commander in chief of the Kriegsmarine in early 1943, Adolf Hitler was fixated on the titanic struggle to conquer the Soviet Union. That struggle was slowly shifting in favor of the Red Army. After the victory at Stalingrad, Soviet ground and air forces in that area launched a massive winter offensive on a five-hundred-mile front between Orel and Rostov. On February 8 they recaptured Kursk; on February 16, Kharkov and Rostov. The Germans in turn unleashed a massive counterattack on February 20. On March 15 they retook Kharkov and laid plans to inflict a decisive defeat on the Red Army, which was holding what appeared to be a vulnerable salient at Kursk. However, the massing of German matériel and forces for this huge attack (Citadel) required weeks, partly because of an early spring thaw, which again turned the primitive roads into quagmires.
The impending battle for Kursk was a last, great gamble for Hitler. If the Germans won the battle, he believed, it might be possible to destroy the Red Army in a series of follow-up hammer blows. If the Germans lost, the consequences would be disastrous: the despised Red Army again triumphant, the German Army in ruins, Hitler humiliated, perhaps even toppled or assassinated.
In preparing for this battle, Hitler and his generals failed to appreciate the unheralded but very real growth in the fighting power of the Red Army, which numbered about six million men and women. Working at frantic speed on three shifts in defense factories that had been moved eastward into or beyond the Ural Mountains, Soviet civilians were turning out astounding numbers of heavy T-34 tanks, self-propelled and towed artillery pieces, fighters and fighter-bombers, rifles, ammunition, and other armaments. (Soviet tank production was to peak at four thousand units per month.) Fully aware of the importance of holding Kursk and the salient, Stalin deployed prodigious quantities of these armaments into that area for use by hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops massing there.
Overcommitted in North Africa and elsewhere around the globe, the Allied navies were reluctant or unable to sustain the flow of armaments to the Red Army via Murmansk at this time. In January and February 1943, only two convoys sailed to Murmansk.
The shrinking German U-boat force in the Arctic/Norway area had a new commander, Rudolf Peters, who assumed that duty officially on January 18, 1943. Like his predecessor, Hubert Schmundt, he maintained his headquarters on the yacht Grille, based in Narvik. On the day he took over, the Arctic/Norway U-boat force consisted of twenty boats, including two in Germany undergoing refits or overhauls (U-586, U-601) and one transferring to the Atlantic force (U-209). Two others in Norway (U-376, U-377) were to transfer directly to the Atlantic force before the end of January, leaving a net Arctic/Norway force of seventeen U-boats on February 1.
The Arctic convoys that sailed, in brief:
• Convoy JW 52, composed of fourteen merchant ships, left Loch Ewe on January 17. One merchant ship aborted but the other thirteen reached Soviet ports safely. The escorts repelled feeble German aircraft and U-boat attacks. The return convoy, RA 52, composed of eleven merchant ships, which left on January 26, was found and attacked by the weakened Arctic U-boat force. Torpedoes from Hans Benker in U-625 missed or malfunctioned, but Reinhard Reche in U-255, who had earlier sunk two small Russian freighters for 4,300 tons, hit and sank the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship Greylock. The other ten ships reached Loch Ewe safely.
• Convoy JW 53, composed of twenty-eight merchant ships left Loch Ewe on February 15. The very strong escort included the British “jeep” carrier Dasher and the cruiser Sheffield. Early in the voyage a powerful Arctic storm struck the convoy. It severely damaged Dasher, Sheffield, and six merchant ships, and forced them to abort.* Utilizing its radar, one of the distant cover ships, the battleship King George V, reassembled the convoy and the escorts, which repelled desultory German air and U-boat attacks and reached Soviet ports without losses to German forces.
The return convoy, RA 53, comprised of thirty merchant ships that left on March 1, was also found and attacked by German aircraft and U-boats. Reche in U-255 sank two American ships: the 7,200-ton Liberty ship Richard Bland and the 5,000-ton Executive† A fierce Arctic gale dispersed the convoy and broke the American J.L.M. Curry in half. Dietrich von der Esch in U-586 sank a straggler, the 6,100-ton American freighter Puerto Rican, about three hundred miles north of Iceland. One of the sixty-two men on this ship, August Wallenhaupt, survived on a raft and was rescued by the British destroyer Elistin, but he lost both legs and most of seven fingers. Counting the disabled American J. H. Latrobe, which had to be towed, twenty-six of the thirty merchant ships in RA 53 reached British ports.
Owing to the coming of some daylight hours in the Arctic in March, and the unforeseen demands of Torch and the forthcoming invasion of Sicily (Husky), the British were reluctant to sail any more convoys to Murmansk. When the Admiralty discovered from Enigma intercepts in early March that the battleship Tirpitz, the battle cruiser Scharnhorst, and the “pocket” battleship Lützow had moved forward to Narvik, then to Altenfiord to attack Murmansk convoys (per Dönitz’s plan), Churchill informed Stalin that Murmansk convoys had to be canceled. For the time being, Allied military supplies for the Soviet Union had to go the longer route via the Persian Gulf and
Iran or via the Sea of Japan to Vladivostok.
Admiral Dönitz met with the Führer four times in February and March 1943. On each occasion, Hitler and Dönitz discussed the U-boat war in detail. In February, Dönitz explained that the campaign on the decisive North Atlantic run was not succeeding for numerous reasons. Among the most important were:
• The Allies appeared to know the location of the U-boat groups and routed the convoys around them. At first Dönitz and U-boat Control again suspected that the Allies had broken naval Enigma and had demanded that the chief of Kriegsmarine communications security, Erhard Maertens, conduct another investigation. When Maertens had again assured Dönitz that Enigma was not compromised, Dönitz concluded—and U-boat Control concurred—that, as Dönitz told Hitler, the Allies must have some new long-range radar or other electronic-location device in patrol aircraft that pinpointed the U-boat groups.
Dönitz thus remained ignorant of the two most important Allied U-boat location tools in the war: penetration of four-rotor naval Enigma and shore-base and shipboard high-frequency direction finding, Huff Duff.
• In spite of long-standing and repeated requests from Dönitz, the Luftwaffe had not yet provided the Atlantic U-boat force with adequate support. That force urgently required very-long-range aircraft to locate the evading convoys and to shoot down the radar-equipped long- and very-long-range Allied aircraft that apparently were pinpointing the U-boat groups. It also urgently required many air craft, such as JU-88s, to base in western France to repel Coastal Command aircraft carrying out the intensified ASW patrols in the Bay of Biscay.
Hitler expressed doubt that very-long-range aircraft could be produced in time to be of help to the U-boat force, but he promised to find out if three big Blohm & Voss BV-222 flying boats* were available for convoy locating. Also, despite the urgent needs on the Eastern Front, he promised to base more JU-88s in western France, and did.
• There were still not enough U-boats. To find and sink Allied convoys, Dönitz asserted that he needed an increase in U-boat production to twenty-seven attack boats (VIIs and IXs) per month for the second half of 1943 and for all of 1944 and 1945. This would amount to an awesome 810 U-boats to be built in thirty months, requiring about forty thousand submariners to arm and man them and an appropriate number of new looping and homing torpedoes.
Hitler readily approved this grandiose plan and again assured Dönitz that sufficient steel and other scarce metals (e.g., copper) would be made available to meet the increased goals. He also promised he would again issue a directive prohibiting the mindless drafting of shipwrights into the army, in order to ensure that the existing labor shortages in the U-boat yards and subsidiary factories (twenty-seven thousand men) could be filled and the new labor needed for the increase in U-boat production (fourteen thousand men) could be met. Albert Speer, who admired Dönitz, promised to do everything possible to meet these new production goals.
• In view of the drastic curtailment of the Allied Murmansk convoys and the Baltic ice and Arctic darkness, Dönitz persuaded Hitler to allow a delay in the re placement of the half dozen Arctic/Norway VIIs that had transferred to the Atlantic force from December 1942 to February 1943.* Hitler agreed that the replacement boats need not report until April, when the Baltic thawed and daylight returned to the Arctic. As a consequence, on March 1, 1943, the Arctic/Norway force at sea on war patrols fell to merely four boats.
During these four meetings, Hitler and Dönitz discussed several matters regarding submarines in the Italian and Japanese navies.
First, Dönitz proposed that, in view of the losses suffered by the German surface-ship blockade-runners, the ten big Italian submarines operating in the Atlantic (to small purpose) be converted to cargo submarines. They could meet Axis surface-ship blockade-runners in the western Indian Ocean and take aboard rubber, tin, wolfram, quinine, and so on, and carry it north in mid-Atlantic to Bordeaux more safely than surface ships.
For reasons not clear, Hitler at first objected to this proposal. But after Dönitz flew to Rome to confer with the dictator Benito Mussolini and with his naval counterpart, Commander in Chief Arturo Riccardi,† and returned to Berlin with Italian approval, Hitler also approved. The Italians agreed to convert nine of the ten Bordeaux-based submarines, sparing the only surviving 1,700-ton Italian U-cruiser, Cagni*In return, Dönitz agreed to give the Italians ten Type VIIs and train the Italian crews in the Baltic.†
The Italian cargo submarines, Dönitz stated, could in time be replaced by a fleet of German cargo submarines, to operate over the complete route between France and the Far East. As a result of an earlier demand by Hitler for a fleet of U-boats to be used in a scheme to capture—and hold—Iceland as a German air base to attack Allied convoys, the design for a German cargo U-boat was already in hand. Designated Type XX, the “U-cargo” was to be a 253-foot vessel, displacing 2,700 tons, and capable of cruising thirteen thousand miles at 12 knots with a cargo of about eight hundred tons. On March 15, Hitler approved the building of thirty such U-boats (U-1601 to U-1615 and U-1701 to U-1715), the first to be delivered in August 1944, and three per month thereafter, raising the approved U-boat construction plan to thirty boats per month.‡ In the interim, four Type VIICs (U-1059 to U-1062, designated Type VIIF) that had been converted to torpedo-supply boats by the addition of a thirty-three-foot storage compartment and were to be commissioned within several months could be used on the Far East cargo run.
The nine Italian boats§ designated as cargo carriers fared poorly. As related, two U.S. Navy Catalinas of Squadron VP 83 sank Archimede 350 miles east of Natal, Brazil, on April 15. As also related, Allied forces sank Da Vinci on May 23, inbound from her maiden patrol to Cape Town. Cappellini, commanded by Walter Auconi, which sailed on May 11, was the first to reach the Far East. She carried 150 tons of “precious” German war materiel, documents, and so on, for the Japanese. Tazzoli, Giuliani, Torelli, and Barbarigo sailed between May 16 and June 15. The Allies sank Tazzoli and Barbarigo, but Giuliani and Torelli reached the Far East with German cargoes for the Japanese.
After the Italian submarine situation had been resolved, Hitler revealed that the Imperial Japanese Navy had requested the gift of two U-boats through its naval attaché in Berlin, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura (the phony “peace negotiator” in Washington when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor). Ostensibly the Japanese were to copy and mass-produce these U-boats for use in the Pacific against American naval forces. Dönitz objected to the gift on the grounds that the Japanese were incapable of mass-producing German-designed U-boats in time to influence the war. However, Hitler insisted that Dönitz turn over at least one boat as a gesture of friendship and compensation for the enormous quantities of tin, rubber, and other raw materials the Japanese had generously provided the German blockade-runners.
The U-boat chosen for transfer to Japan was the IXC U-511, commanded by Fritz Schneewind and redesignated “Marco Polo I.” Schneewind sailed in U-511 on May 10 with cargo and six passengers, including Admiral Nomura. After refueling from the XIV tanker U-460, the boat reached the island of Penang, Malaysia, on July 17. There Nomura left the boat and flew on to Japan. Schneewind took aboard a Japanese officer to serve as pilot and communicator and reached Japan on September 16.* Subsequently Schneewind and his crew returned by surface ship to Penang, where the Germans were in the process of establishing a U-boat base to accommodate Italian cargo and German attack and cargo submarines.
THE ATLANTIC CONVOY CONFERENCE: MARCH 1-12, 1945
For a variety of expressed and unexpressed motives, the Allies convened in Washington on March 1 what would prove to be a historic meeting that came to be known as “the Atlantic Convoy Conference.” Some of the motives were:
• The British wished to raise anew the issue of a single ASW command structure for the entire Atlantic, to be controlled by Max Horton at Western Approaches in Liverpool. The British also wished to have Washington navalists reaffirm Roosevelt’s promise of a minimum of twenty-seven million tons o
f imports to the British Isles in 1943, the Lend-Lease gift to the British of “15 to 20” new cargo ships per month for ten months (150 to 200 vessels), as well as a buildup of British oil stocks, depleted by Torch. To press the importance and urgency of these issues, Churchill sent the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, to confer directly with President Roosevelt.
• The Canadians, long treated dismissively by both London and Washington, but who then bore about half of the large burden of cargo convoy escort on the North Atlantic run, wished to close down the U.S. Navy convoy-escort command structures at Argentia, Newfoundland, Task Force 24, and to establish an all-Canadian “Northwest Atlantic” command in its place. They also wanted the return of the three MOEF escort groups (C-l, C-2, C-4) that had been withdrawn to the British Isles for training and the fourteen surviving corvettes assigned to Torch.†
• The Americans, who bore sole responsibility for the escort of the transatlantic fast and slow UG-GU convoys, as well as the CU-UC and OT-TO tanker convoys and the huge “Interlocking Convoy System” in the Western Hemisphere, wanted to withdraw from convoy-escort responsibilities on the North Atlantic run provided they were satisfied that the Canadians and British could do the job.
• Unanimous in the belief that an increase in the number of B-24 Liberators in very-long-range (VLR) configurations was necessary to protect Atlantic convoys and kill U-boats, London, Washington, and Ottawa were nonetheless still at sixes and sevens over the allocation of these aircraft between strategic bombing and ASW and between the various branches of the armed forces of the three nations. Since all hands wished to have a larger and larger share of these aircraft, it was necessary to formulate a systematic division of them among nations and air forces and theaters of war.
• After years in development, construction, and workup, American and British “jeep” carrier hunter-killer groups (support groups), as well as the destroyer escorts (or frigates), were finally ready for ASW duty in the Atlantic. Like the B-24 bombers, these ASW assets had to be allocated among the three nations for use in specific operating areas and on convoy routes in the Atlantic.