by Clay Blair
This latest misfortune reduced Drossel from nine boats to seven. This was insufficient strength to tackle a major convoy, yet U-boat Control left the boats in place, west of Cape Finisterre, to provide whatever help they could to Axis forces in Tunisia. On the evening of May 5, Drossel suffered yet another misfortune. The veteran boats U-406, commanded by Horst Dieterichs, and U-600, commanded by Bernhard Zurmühlen, also collided. No one was seriously injured, but both boats incurred “major damage” and were forced to abort to France, reducing the snake-bit group Drossel to merely five boats.
B-dienst predicted that a big convoy, Sierra Leone 128, was steaming northbound right at group Drossel’s position. Condors from Bordeaux confirmed the intelligence, reporting forty-eight ships and three escorts. On May 6, Wolf Jeschonnek, age twenty-three, who had only just inherited command of the veteran VII17-607 from Ritterkreuz holder Ernst Mengersen, found the convoy. His signals brought up the other four boats of Drossel which included the VII U-436, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Günther Seibicke. Two boats shot torpedoes. Lohmann in the VII U-89 hit and sank the 3,800-ton Greek freighter Laconikos with a torpedo fitted with a magnetic pistol. Jeschonnek in the VII U-607 fired a full bow salvo into the formation. He reported one FAT hit, but it was not confirmed.
Three of the five remaining boats of Drossel were counterattacked by the convoy escorts and land-based aircraft. Max-Martin Teichert in U-456 was severely damaged by depth charges or bombs, but after repairs, he reported he could continue his patrol. Paul Siegmann in U-230 expertly shadowed the convoy all the next day. According to his first watch officer, Herbert Werner,* the sustained air attacks U-230 endured were almost beyond belief. Owing to the weakness of Drossel, U-boat Control canceled operations against Sierra Leone 128 on May 7 and sent the remaining five boats northwestward to join groups on the North Atlantic run. As will be described, only two of these five survived and returned to France. In sum, ten of twelve Drossel boats were sunk or forced to abort. Only one VII, Lohmann in U-39, sank an Allied ship, the Greek freighter Laconikos.
THE THIRD U-CRUISER FORAY TO THE INDIAN OCEAN
Dönitz directed U-boat Control to mount a major foray of U-cruisers to the Indian Ocean in March and April,†. Seven U-cruisers (three old, four new) were to participate: the ill-engined sister ship of U-180, the IXD1 U-195, and six IXD2s. All were commanded by older, conservative skippers; five of the six by Ritterkreuz holders. Dönitz believed that with the resupply of food, water, and fuel from a victim and/or an Axis raider or tanker, the U-cruisers could remain in the Indian Ocean for a prolonged time, preying on lone or thinly escorted Allied shipping at small risk.
The first of the seven U-cruisers to sail on this extraordinary foray was the new IXD2 U-198. She was commanded by forty-year-old Werner Hartmann (crew of 1921) who had gained fame and a Ritterkreuz on the U-37 in 1939 and 1940. Since leaving U-37, Hartmann had held down several desk jobs in France and Germany, and he was pleased to return to sea as commander of an exalted U-cruiser.
Allied codebreakers in due course provided details on this seven-boat foray and the Admiralty notified appropriate naval commands. On May 4 the war diary of the British South Atlantic command recorded:
In view of the approaching U-boat threat, complete convoy system round South Africa coast reintroduced. All independent sailings suspended except fast ships. All vessels approaching Cape Town diverted to reach coastal area early.
Hartmann in U-198 rounded the Cape of Good Hope into the lower Mozambique Channel, and on May 17 he found a southbound convoy en route from Lourenço Marques to Durban (LMD 17). It was comprised of six big freighters, very thinly escorted by two ASW trawlers and one aircraft. Hartmann tracked and sank the 4,400-ton British freighter Northmoor, his first sinking in about three years.* The ASW trawlers pounded him with about fifty depth charges, he logged, and the aircraft dropped five. None did any noteworthy damage but the convoy got away.
On the following day, thirty miles east of Durban, Hartmann found and chased two freighters sailing in company. As he reached a favorable firing position, an aircraft spotted him and attacked, botching Hartmann’s setup. Thereafter, aircraft and small surface craft hounded Hartmann all day and well into the night. Hartmann held his ground and fought back. He missed a submarine chaser with two torpedoes but repelled a Catalina of RAF Squadron 262 that night with his flak guns and forced it to abort on one engine.
After a frustrating and fallow week, on May 26 Hartmann found yet another convoy near Durban. It was heavily escorted by warships and aircraft. Hartmann attempted to attack, but the escorts drove him off and he lost this prize. The heavy air cover over the waters near Durban persuaded him to leave the area. He cruised about four hundred miles eastward into the Indian Ocean, where on May 29 he found and sank the lone 5,200-ton British freighter Hopetarn and captured her second mate. Two days later in the same area, Hartmann found yet another small but heavily escorted convoy. He attempted to attack, but a corvette got U-198 on sonar and forced her very deep. Later, when Hartmann surfaced, he discovered that the pressure of the depth-charge explosions had crushed one of his topside torpedo canisters.
Returning to the Durban area, Hartmann found better hunting. On June 5 he sank the 2,300-ton British freighter Dumra and captured her chief engineer. The next day he sank the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship William King and captured her captain. These two sinkings brought Hartmann’s bag in the ninety days since he had sailed from Kiel to four ships for about 19,000 tons, a modest return for the investment of time, men, and resources.
On or about June 1, U-boat Control had decided that the U-cruisers, all of which had plenty of torpedoes, should extend their patrols. It was therefore arranged that the boats were to replenish from a German tanker in the Indian Ocean, the Charlotte Schliemann. The rendezvous was to take place en masse on June 22 at a remote site about 1,800 miles due east of Durban and about six hundred miles due south of the island of Mauritius.
The second of the new U-cruisers to leave Kiel was the U-196. She was commanded by the thirty-six-year-old Eitel-Friedrich Kentrat, who had won a Ritterkreuz on U-74, operating in the North Atlantic, before taking that boat to the Mediterranean. He had not been to sea for almost exactly one year. Sixteen months had passed since he had sunk his last confirmed ship.*
Kentrat rounded the British Isles and went south down the middle of the Atlantic. He skirted the Cape of Good Hope to the south, then swung northward to an area near Durban. On May 11 he shot two torpedoes and sank the 5,000-ton British freighter Nailsea Meadow. Two long and frustrating weeks later, in this same area, Kentrat finally found a convoy and attacked, firing two electric torpedoes with Pi2 magnetic pistols. One torpedo ejected as designed, but the other hung up in the tube, its motor running and turning the propeller. The U-196 crew expected the magnetic pistol to trigger the torpedo and blow up the boat. To prevent this terrible fate, Kentrat put the bow down steeply, and the torpedo slid out of the tube. A desultory counterattack (four depth charges) by one of the escorts during this crisis was scarcely noticed.
The U-196 patrolled the waters near Durban for another week, to about June 1. Then Kentrat turned east to carry out the replenishment rendezvous with the Charlotte Schliemann. Since leaving Kiel on March 13, U-196 had sunk only one ship.
The third new U-cruiser to leave Kiel was the IXD1 U-195, commanded by thirty-four-year-old Heinz Buchholz. He had carried out a successful mine-laying mission early in the war on the duck U-15, but ever since he had been in high-level shore jobs, the last as commander of Combat Flotilla 1 in Brest. Like her sister ship U-180, the U-195 was powered by six high-performance, fuel-guzzling, and temperamental Mercedes-Benz engines, which generated nearly unbearable heat inside the boat in tropical waters.
Buchholz followed approximately the same course in the Atlantic as had Hart-mann and Kentrat. West of the Canary Islands on April 12, the U-195 found and sank the lone 7,200-ton American Liberty ship James W. Denver. After crossing the equator on May 7, Buc
hholz found and sank another 7,200-ton American Liberty ship sailing alone, Samuel Jordan Kirkwood. Five days later, off Cape Town, Buchholz encountered yet another lone American vessel, the 6,800-ton Cape Ned-dick. He hit and damaged her, but Neddick’s captain, Harry Stark, counterattacked with his guns and tried to ram U-195. Rattled by this unusual display of ferocity, Buchholz dived to avoid the shelling and shot another torpedo at Neddick, but it missed. Stark turned tail, ran at full speed, escaped, and eventually delivered his cargo of tanks, locomotives, and aviation gasoline to British forces in Egypt.
Thereafter Buchholz patrolled off Cape Town, but he found no more targets. On May 30, he not surprisingly reported severe engine problems and requested permission to abort the patrol. U-boat Control approved and Buchholz reached Bordeaux on July 23. As related, both of the failed IXD1s, U-180 and U-195, were reengined with two conventional, 1,400-horsepower diesels and converted to cargo carriers. The thirty-nine-year-old Musenberg retained command of U-180, but Buchholz left U-195 to command a IXD2 U-cruiser.
The fourth and last of the new U-cruisers to leave Kiel was the U-197. Her skipper was thirty-two-year-old Robert Bartels, who had commanded the new VII U-561 for sixteen months in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, laying a successful minefield in a British harbor in the latter area. On the forty-eighth day out from Kiel, Bartels found the 4,800-ton Dutch tanker Benakat sailing alone in the middle of the South Atlantic and sank her. By the time he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, it was time to proceed to the refueling rendezvous with Charlotte Schliemann. Five days shy of the rendezvous, an aircraft attacked U-197. One German was killed, but the boat survived to carry out the replenishment on June 22. In eighty-one days at sea, Bartels, like Kentrat in U-196, had sunk but one ship.
Of the three experienced U-cruisers departing Bordeaux, the first to sail was the IXD2 U-181, commanded by Wolfgang Lüth, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz. On his twentieth day at sea, April 11, Lüth spotted the lone 6,000-ton British refrigerator ship Empire Whimbrel about four hundred miles south of Freetown. Lüth fired four torpedoes at this ship and two hit. After the crew abandoned the sinking hulk, Lüth ordered a gun action to polish her off. A shell in the 37mm gun on the deck aft of the conning tower jammed in the barrel and blew up, severely wounding three men, one of whom died later in the day and was buried at sea. Lüth arranged to transfer the other two wounded the next day to the home-bound Seehund boat, U-516, commanded by Gerhard Wiebe. Lüth finally sank Empire Whimbrel with twenty rounds from his 4.1” deck gun.
Upon learning of this sinking, Dönitz arranged with Hitler to add Crossed Swords to the Oak Leaves of Lüth’s Ritterkreuz. Lüth thus became the twenty-ninth man in all the German armed forces and the fourth submariner (after Kretschmer, Topp, and Suhren) to receive this high decoration. When the news reached U-181 by an encoded radio message, the crew celebrated with beer and cognac.*
Lüth rounded the Cape of Good Hope and went north up the lower Mozambique Channel to patrol off the Portuguese harbor of Lourenço Marques, where he had had success on his first patrol to the Indian Ocean. Close inshore, he fouled his propellers on a steel fishing net. For a few anxious hours Lüth and his men believed they were goners, but one of his men, wearing a clumsy deep-sea diving suit, cut the steel wires away with an electric torch. While the diver was at this work, the crew caught and killed a big shark that posed a threat to the diver.
Lüth patrolled lower Mozambique Channel from Lourenço Marques to Durban for a full month, from May 11 to June 11. In that time he sank three more lone ships: the 5,200-ton British freighter Tinhow; the 1,600-ton Swedish neutral Sicilia (which Lüth deemed to be carrying contraband); and the small (200-ton) South African coaster Harrier, filled with ammunition. He sank Tinhow with two torpedoes and Harrier (which vaporized) with one torpedo. He first stopped the Swede with ten rounds from U-18FS 4.1” deck gun. After the Swedes abandoned the Sicilia, Lüth sank her with one torpedo fired at point-blank range.
During these actions, on May 18, U-boat Control informed Lüth that his wife had given birth to a son with this doggerel:
As far as Capetown
Be it known:
A little Lüth
Has been horn.
Now see in this,
As ever taught,
Tough guts gets
Whatever sought.
Per plan, Lüth arrived at the rendezvous with Charlotte Schliemann on June 22. In his ninety-two days at sea, he had sunk four ships for 13,000 tons, a tie with Hart-mann in U-198 in numbers of ships, but about 6,000 fewer tons. It was also a poor return on the investment of time, men, and resources.
The next experienced U-cruiser to leave Bordeaux was the IXD2 U-T77, commanded by thirty-two-year-old Ritterkreuz holder Robert Gysae. Like Lüth, this was to be Gysae’s second patrol to Cape Town and the Indian Ocean in a U-cruiser.
On this trip, Gysae’s U-177 was equipped with a new day-search device: a primitive, one-man, three-rotor, motorless helicopter, known as the Bachstelze (Wagtail). Stowed knocked-down in topside canisters, it could be assembled by three well-trained men in less than ten minutes and disassembled and restowed in five minutes. It was tethered to the U-boat by a one-thousand-foot steel cable wound on an air-powered winch. With the U-boat towing at fifteen knots, its whirling rotors could lift it to about five hundred feet altitude. Equipped with binoculars, a helmet with a two-way telephone, and a parachute, upon attaining maximum altitude the pilot could search a radius of about twenty-five miles. The helicopter was very tricky to launch, operate, and recover and, of course, it could only be utilized in areas where sudden aircraft attacks were unlikely. Otherwise, the pilot and his machine were expendable.
Off the Cape of Good Hope on May 28, Gysae came upon a convoy en route from Cape Town to Durban, designated CD 20. It was composed of sixteen merchant ships, thinly escorted by seven warships of dubious value: a South African gunboat, Vereeniging, two Indian minesweepers lacking sonar, three British ASW trawlers, and a British tugboat for rescues. Gysae fired numerous torpedoes at the mass of merchant ships and sank two: the 6,700-ton American freighter Agwinonte and the 7,900-ton Norwegian tanker Storaas. On June 1, Dönitz radioed Gysae congratulations and the news that Hitler had awarded him Oak Leaves to his Ritterkreuz.*
At the suggestion of U-boat Control, Gysae doubled back to Saldanha, on the lower west coast of Africa. In the week following, he found a convoy and commenced tracking it in foggy weather. On June 6, the fog suddenly lifted and Gysae found himself completely exposed on the surface in the “middle” of the convoy. All ships that could bring guns to bear without hitting a friendly ship opened fire, and a Catalina arrived to drop three depth charges. Gysae escaped by a very thin margin. Thereafter he met Buchholz’s aborting IXD1 U-195 and transferred to her one of his crewmen who was ill. He then set off for the rendezvous with Charlotte Schliemann, arriving a day late on June 23. In his eighty-three days at sea, he had sunk two ships for 14,600 tons, second in tonnage after Hartmann in U-198, but also not nearly enough to justify the expenditure of time, men, and resources. Often launched, the helicopter (Bachstelze) had not yet produced.
The third and last experienced U-cruiser of this foray to sail from France was the IXD2 U-178. It was to be her second cruise to the Indian Ocean but she had a new skipper. He was thirty-six-year-old Wilhelm Dommes, who had commanded the VII U-431 in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, winning a Ritterkreuz in the latter area.
Dommes reached Cape Town waters in early May. Thereupon the boat developed an oil leak so serious that he was forced to pull far away to make repairs. While returning to the coast on May 24, he found a small convoy. He pursued but a Catalina manned by a Dutch crew attacked U-178 with depth charges. Dommes returned fire but when a second aircraft appeared, he dived and lost the convoy.
In the last days of May, Dommes heard Gysae in U-177 report the convoy en route from Cape Town to Durban. As he was not far away, Dommes set a course to intercept this formation and found it cruising clos
e to shore about sixty miles south of Durban. Despite the surface escorts and Catalinas, Dommes attacked on June 1 and hit the 6,600-ton Dutch freighter Salabangka. The convoy’s tug took the damaged ship in tow, but a storm arose and she broke up and sank.
Dommes patrolled the lower Mozambique Channel for several more days, then turned east to rendezvous with the Charlotte Schliemann. He arrived on the eighty-seventh day of his patrol, June 22. Like Kentrat in U-196 and Bartels in U-197, in all that time Dommes had sunk only one ship.
To this point in the U-cruiser foray, the returns from the seven boats were thin. They had sunk fifteen ships for 77,400 tons, an overall average of two ships for 11,000 tons per U-boat in about three months at sea. One boat, U-195, had aborted, leaving six to carry on the mission.
The skippers of the six U-cruisers replenishing at Charlotte Schliemann visited back and forth, exchanging experiences. All topped off fuel, water, and lube-oil tanks, but all were disappointed at the “Japanese” food provided by the German tanker. Beyond that, Lüth logged, none of the U-boats really got sufficient quantities of food.
U-boat Control issued new orders to the six U-cruisers. They were to remain in the Indian Ocean and mount a simultaneous surprise attack on Allied shipping in a variety of areas. Lüth in U-181, who left his three POWs with Charlotte Schliemann, was to go to the island of Mauritius. Hartmann in U-198 was to go to Lourenço Marques. Kentrat in U-196 was to sweep north to south down the Mozambique Channel while Dommes in U-178 swept south to north. Gysae in U-177 was to patrol south of Madagascar. Bartels in U-197 was to patrol close inshore in the area between Lourenço Marques and Durban.
Sporting shiny new Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz Gysae in U-177 patrolled well south of Madagascar, where it was safer to operate the helicopter. In the period from July 5 to July 10, he carried out attacks on three lone freighters. In the first, he missed with two torpedoes and the ship got away. In the second, he sank the 7,200-ton Canadian Jasper Park with three torpedoes. In the third, closer to Madagascar, he sank the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship Alice E Palmer with two torpedoes and ninety-nine rounds from his 4.1” deck gun.