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

by Clay Blair

  • The IXC U-518, commanded by Friedrich-Wilhelm Wissmann, which sailed from Bordeaux on August 18. Wissmann patrolled the Old Bahama Channel to the waters off Florida. He then entered the Gulf of Mexico and patrolled westward to the Yucatan Channel. He sank no ships either. Also recalled by Control on October 11, the U-518 finally reached France on December 1, completing a barren cruise of 106 days. At this time Wissmann left the boat for other duty.

  • The veteran VIID (minelayer) U-214, commanded by Rupprecht Stock, which sailed on August 22. His assignment was to lay mines off Colon, Panama. While outbound on September 14, Stock also met Werner Hartmann in the home- bound U-cruiser U-198. He transferred an engineer to U-198, obtained some fuel, ° then proceeded to Panama, where he laid the mines on October 10. None sank a ship.

  Thereafter, Stock patrolled the Caribbean but had no luck. Control directed him to lay any remaining mines inside his exit passage from the Caribbean. After leaving that area, Stock claimed to have sunk a 7,000-ton freighter by torpedoes on October 21, but the sinking was never confirmed. On the homebound voyage, Stock was to refuel from one of the two remaining Type XIV tankers, U-488, but when an American “jeep” carrier crashed that party, Control ordered him to refuel from a provisional refueler, the IXC40 U-193. That worked out on November 7 and Stock finally reached France on November 30.

  • The IXC40 U-170, commanded by Günther Pfeffer, which sailed from Lo- rient on August 29. For reasons that are not clear, Pfeffer had to rendezvous in Biscay with the new flak boat U-621 on September 6 to pick up a Wanze radar detector. About a week later, on September 14, Pfeffer met the Type XIV tanker U-460 and refueled. Control then sent U-170 to Brazil to join Achilles in the U-161, which, however, was soon lost.

  Pfeffer reached Brazilian waters in the first week of October. Merely a week later, on October 11, Control warned him that refueling on the return leg might be iffy owing to the shortage of refuelers. However, Pfeffer remained off Rio de Janeiro where, on October 23, he sank one freighter, the 5,700-ton Brazilian Campos.

  While still in that area on November 5, Control directed Pfeffer to go at maximum speed to the assistance of the new, outbound IXD2 U-cruiser U-848, which was under heavy air attack in mid-Atlantic about one thousand miles to the northeast of U-170. Unknown to the Germans, U-848 had been sunk in this attack but Pfeffer in U-170 pressed on to the scene to pick up survivors, if any. Pfeffer combed the area of the sinking until November 12 but found no sign of U-848 or survivors and headed home, low on fuel. On November 30, he met the Type XB minelayer U-219, serving as a provisional tanker, replenished, and finally reached Lorient on December 23, completing a largely fruitless patrol of 117 days.

  • The VII U-669, commanded by Kurt Kohl, age thirty, which sailed from St. Nazaire on August 29. Control assigned Kohl to a special mission, Kiebitz (Lap wing). The task was to pick up the hero Otto Kretschmer and other U-boat POWs* who were to tunnel out of Canadian Camp 30 at Bowmanville on Lake Ontario, twenty-five miles east of Toronto, then proceed to New Brunswick on the Gulf of St. Lawrence by various means.

  On the night of September 7, a Leigh Light-equipped Wellington of Canadian Squadron 407, piloted by E. M. O’Donnell, found a U-boat, thought to be U-669, by radar and attacked her, dropping five depth charges. These supposedly destroyed U-669 with the loss of all hands, but Alex Niestlé has attributed her loss to unknown causes. Six months later O’Donnell and most of this aircrew perished in another Wellington.

  • The IXC40 U-536, commanded by Rolf Schauenburg, age thirty, which sailed from Lorient on August 29. When Control assumed correctly that Kohl in U-669 had been lost, it assigned U-536 to carry out the POW rescue mission, Kiebitz. After reaching the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Schauenburg lay off the appointed site, Pointe de Maisonette, New Brunswick, from September 24. However, Kretschmer and his cohorts were nowhere to be found.

  Allied authorities had learned of the planned escape by decrypting the simple codes embedded in POW mail and intercepting materials (maps and so on) that were mailed to the would-be escapees concealed in gift packages. At this same time, POW Wolfgang Heyda, ex-skipper of U-434, escaped independently “over the wire” and made his way to New Brunswick, but he was recaptured there by Canadian authorities. An elaborate Allied plan to seize U-536 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence miscarried.

  After doing his utmost to complete this special mission, Rolf Schauenburg in U-536 patrolled off Halifax, where he claimed sinking an American or British Liberty ship which, however, could not be confirmed. While on his homeward voyage, U-boat Control directed Schauenburg to join other U-boats that were attacking a large northbound convoy, Sierra Leone 139 combined with MKS 30, en route from the Mediterranean and Gibraltar to the British Isles (sixty-six merchant ships, massively escorted by nineteen surface escorts as well as by land-based aircraft).

  The British frigate Nene and the Canadian corvettes Calgary and Snowberry of the close escort found U-536 on November 20, blew her to the surface, and then sank her with concentrated gunfire. Thirty-eight of fifty-five crew on U-536 were lost. Ironically, Schauenburg and sixteen other German survivors eventually wound up in another POW camp in Canada.

  • The IXC U-515, commanded by Werner Henke, age thirty-five, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz that had been presented to him by Hitler on July 4 at his headquarters, Wolfschanze, in East Prussia. He sailed from Lorient on August 29 to patrol the Freetown area, where he had done so well the previous April and May. As the American archivist/historian Timothy Mulligan has related in his biography of Henke,* during his R&R at Innsbruck, Tyrol, Henke had had a run-in with the Gestapo. The cause was not earthshaking, but the Gestapo had inflated the incident to the point that Henke had sailed under a cloud.

  The U-515 had all the latest U-boat improvements: four of the faster T-5 Zaunkonig homing torpedoes, quad and twin 20mm flak arrays on a modified bridge structure, Wanze, and Aphrodite. The boat also had a new flak gun, the rapid-fire 37mm, which Hitler had encouraged. It was mounted on the main deck forward of the bridge in place of the standard 4.1M gun. In addition to all that, Henke carried six extra G7a torpedoes in topside canisters.

  Control directed Henke to top off his fuel tanks from the type XIV tanker U-460 on September 4. While proceeding to that rendezvous the following day, Henke came upon a large convoy. This was Outbound South 54 combined with KMS 25: fifty-four merchant ships and about fifteen surface escorts plus heavy aircraft patrols. Henke shadowed during the day, and that night he came up on the rear of the convoy to mount a surface attack by the dim light of a first-quarter moon.

  As Henke closed to one thousand yards, lookouts on one of the merchant ships, Gascony, spotted the U-boat. That vessel gave the alarm and opened up with her 4M gun, forcing Henke to dive. One of the escorts, the new British frigate Tavy, got the boat on sonar and commenced a close and accurate depth-charge attack that drove Henke to 820 feet. The explosion tore open an aft ballast tank, cracked most of the storage-battery cells, and smashed in all six topside torpedo canisters. Henke got U-515 back to the surface, eluded the escorts, and aborted the patrol, reaching Lorient on September 12.

  Henke’s minor altercation with the Gestapo had by that time inflated to the point that Dönitz and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg had to personally come to his defense. In a letter of apology to Heinrich Himmler on October 19, von Friedeburg stated that owing to the heavy stress of U-boat warfare, skippers such as Henke were more apt to blow off steam than other German officers. Nevertheless he and Dönitz had sharply rebuked Henke, who acknowledged and regretted his inappropriate behavior.* As biographer Mulligan wrote, Himmler accepted the apology and closed the case.

  The nine patrols Control mounted to distant waters in August resulted in the sinking of merely three Allied merchant ships for about 17,700 tons. In return, four U-boats were lost: three Type IXs (U-161, U-523, U-536) and one Type VII (U-669). Henke in the type IX U-515 was very nearly lost.

  QUADRANT, BAYTOWN, AND AVALANCHE

  T
he invasion of Sicily and the ensuing tough fight with the Germans on that rugged Mediterranean island raised anew the issue of just how much effort the Allies were to expend in the Mediterranean. Although the military chiefs had agreed on the next steps, a rapid invasion of Calabria (Baytown), the “toe” of Italy, together with a landing up the “boot” at Salerno (Avalanche), the long-term plans for the Mediterranean remained unsettled. The British had again proposed a sustained campaign in Italy to at least liberate Rome, plus an invasion of the Balkan Peninsula, what Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of the Third Reich. Secretary of War Stimson, George Marshall, Hap Arnold, and Admiral King vigorously opposed the British plan, urging instead that all the Allied effort be put behind Overlord, the invasion of Occupied France.

  Returning from a visit to the British Isles, Stimson pleaded with Roosevelt to renew his support of Overlord in the strongest possible terms. As a first step, Stimson said, the President should insist on an American rather than a British commander. As he wrote:

  We cannot now rationally hope to be able to cross the Channel and come to grips with our German enemy under a British commander. His Prime Minister and his Chief of Imperial Staff are frankly at variance with such a proposal [Overlord]. The shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque still hang too heavily over the imaginations of these leaders of government. Though they have rendered lip service to the [Overlord] operation, their hearts are not in it and it will require more independence, more faith, and more vigor than it is reasonable to expect we can find in any British commander to overcome the natural difficulties of such an operation carried on in such an atmosphere of his government.*

  At the suggestion of Prime Minister Churchill, he and President Roosevelt and their respective military advisers met yet again, this time in the city of Quebec. Churchill and party again crossed the Atlantic on the monster liner Queen Mary, † arriving at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on August 9. From there, Churchill went by train to visit Roosevelt at his home in Hyde Park, New York, from August 12 to 14, and returned to Quebec on August 15. Roosevelt arrived in Quebec by train on August 17, mere hours after the last Axis forces evacuated Sicily.

  The conferees at this meeting—code-named Quadrant—reaffirmed previous strategic decisions and added others. The main decisions regarding Europe were:

  • All hands, British and American alike, agreed that preparations for the cross-channel invasion of Occupied France, Overlord, were to receive the highest priority and that the invasion was to be carried out on approximately May 1, 1944. An American, probably Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, was to be named commander in chief. The Americans, however, were still not certain that the British fully supported Overlord.

  • The newly launched combined heavy-bomber offensive against Germany (Sickle/Pointblank) was to receive the highest priority as well. The British were unflagging in support of the strategic bombing of Germany.

  • Contingency plans for Allied invasions of Sardinia, Corsica, and/or the Balkans were tabled. A plan for an Allied invasion of southern France between Toulon and Marseilles (Anvil, later renamed Dragoon) to coincide with Overlord gained favor.

  • At the urging of Churchill and the British contingent, Roosevelt overrode the objections of American scientific and military advisers and entered into an extraordinary formal agreement to share all the secrets of the atomic bomb with the British.

  During the Quadrant conference, First Sea Lord Dudley Pound suffered a severe stroke that left him weak and partly paralyzed. When he and Churchill arrived in Washington by train on September 1 for further conferences at the White House, Pound informed Churchill that he could not go on and resigned his post. Pending the appointment of Mediterranean naval commander Andrew Cunningham to replace Pound, Edward Syfret held down the job.

  Churchill remained in the United States and Canada another two weeks. On September 14, he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by train and sailed home on the old battlecruiser Renown. For Churchill, it had been quite a lengthy sojourn: August 4 to September 20, forty-eight days away from London. Dudley Pound returned with the Churchill party on Renown. In London, he suffered two more severe strokes and died on Trafalgar Day, October 21.

  Meanwhile, the invasions of Italy proceeded. On September 2, Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army crossed the narrow Strait of Messina (Operation Bay-town) and landed unopposed in Calabria. It was noted that British ground forces had thus “returned to the European mainland,” one day shy of the fourth anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. As secretly arranged, Italy surrendered on September 8, one day before the Anglo-American invasion at Salerno (Avalanche). These operations, and Hitler’s determination to hold Italy at all costs, mired Allied forces in a prolonged and bloody campaign in the mountains of Italy that few senior American officials considered to be worthwhile.

  As with the French fleet, Churchill was eager to capture the Italian fleet and to turn these assets against the Kriegsmarine. In compliance with the secret arrangements, the Italians forswore a beau geste “fight to the last” or scuttling. On September 9, the first-line battleships Roma, Vittorio Veneto, and Littorio (renamed Italia), together with six light cruisers and eight destroyers, sailed from Genoa and La Spezia to surrender in Malta. While en route, Luftwaffe aircraft, employing HS 293 radio-controlled smart bombs, sank Roma with heavy loss of life and slightly damaged Littorio (Italia). All the other Italian ships reached Malta, a parade that vastly cheered the long-besieged citizenry of that island. In due course, the old battleship Cesare and the small, old, but upgraded battleships Doria and Duilio also reached Malta.* The festivities were dampened considerably on the afternoon of September 16 when Luftwaffe aircraft hit the British battleship War spite with a “smart bomb.”

  The Italian surrender led to awkward complications in the Axis submarine commands. At home in the Baltic, the Germans took back the ten Type VIIs that had been given to Italy in exchange for the conversion of big Italian submarines to cargo carriers. The Germans interned the Italian crews that were in training on those boats. The Germans also seized the five remaining Italian cargo submarines and their crews: Finzi and Bagnolini in Bordeaux; Torelli Cappellini, and Giuliani in the Far East. These were commissioned in the Kriegsmarine as U-IT21 to U-IT25, but not one completed a successful voyage under German command. In due course three were sunk or destroyed. The remaining two, Cappellini (U-IT24) and Torelli (U-IT25), ultimately fell into Japanese hands in the Far East and were redesignated 1-503 and 1-504, respectively.

  The rapid Allied advances into Sicily and Italy imperiled the German Mediterranean U-boat force, reduced to thirteen U-boats. Operations in the Mediterranean, teeming with Allied ships and aircraft, which had always been hazardous, now became almost impossibly so. Besides that, the German submariners were harassed by sporadic Allied air bombardment of the flotilla headquarters in Toulon. Even so, Hitler insisted that this German U-boat flotilla be reinforced. In response, on September 17, Control ordered seven VIIs to slip through the Strait of Gibraltar as soon as possible.

  Four VIIs led the way. The U-223, commanded by Karl-Jürgen Wachter, age twenty-seven, which had sailed from France three days before the order was issued, got through the strait in spite of heavy air attacks on the night of September 26, a dark period of new moon. Radar-equipped Allied ASW forces thwarted the other three: U-264, U-455, and U-667. After breaking off the attempts to get through the strait, the U-455 and U-264 sailed to the North Atlantic run; the U-667 aborted to France with battle damage.

  The return of the last named, U-667, commanded by Heinrich Schroeteler, age twenty-seven, was a memorable saga. On the night of September 24-25, two Leigh Light-equipped Wellingtons of Gibraltar-based British Squadron 179, piloted by A. Chiltern and D. J. McMahon, found and attacked U-667, each dropping six depth charges. The next day another Wellington of that squadron, piloted by S. H. Nicholson, attacked the damaged boat, dropping six more depth charges. Thereafter a Hudson of British Squadron 233, piloted by A.
G. Frandson, and another Hudson of British Squadron 48 arrived at the scene. Each Hudson fired eight rockets at the boat in salvos of two, two, and four.

  Somehow Schroeteler escaped these five (possibly six) aircraft. On September 29, he reported that he had withstood altogether eight separate aircraft attacks but had incurred “extensive damage” and was aborting. He added—significantly—that his Wanze radar detector had not warned of radar use in any of these aircraft. Finally he reached France on October 11.

  By that time the Germans were finally persuaded that the Allies had developed miniaturized centimetric-wavelength radar for aircraft. Therefore, as Control logged with the greatest restraint on September 26, the new FuMB, or Wanze radar detector, was useless and the difficulty experienced by the boats attempting the Strait of Gibraltar was ample proof of that. Fortunately, Control went on, German engineers had already developed a centimetric-wavelength radar detector known as Naxos. It was “shortly” to be installed on all U-boats in place of Wanze, Control concluded. Until then no boat should attempt to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar.

  During the Allied invasion of Calabria (Baytown) and Salerno (Avalanche) in early September, the Mediterranean U-boat force, thirteen boats, failed to inflict any decisive setback to Allied naval forces. The notable overclaimer Albrecht Brandi in U-617, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz, actually sank a British warship, confirmed in Allied records, on September 6. She was the 1,000-ton British Hunt-class destroyer Puckeridge, which went down forty miles east of Gibraltar. Brandi claimed sinking another “destroyer” in the same area on September 11, but it was never confirmed. Off the Salerno-Naples battleground, Ritterkreuz holder Gerd Kelbling in U-593 sank two American vessels. The first, on September 21, was the 7,200-ton Liberty ship William W. Gerhard. The other, on September 25, was the 800-ton Navy minesweeper Skill. Off the coast of Algeria, near Bone, Horst-Arno Fenski in the U-410 sank two more 7,200-ton Liberty ships, the British Fort Howe and the Norwegian Christian Michelsen, plus the 3,700-ton British tanker Empire Commerce. For these and past successes and claims, Fenski won a Ritterkreuz*