by Clay Blair
An astonishing event electrified the Mediterranean U-boat force that fall. The first of the force commanders, Ritterkreuz holder Viktor Oehrn (from November 28, 1941), reappeared, as if from the dead. He had a riveting story to tell. After Leo Kreisch had relieved Oehrn on February 1, 1942, Oehrn remained in various naval staff positions in Italy, all of them uninteresting and unimportant. On the night of July 13, 1942, while serving as a naval liaison to Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps near El Alamein, Oehrn became lost in the desert, blundered into British Commonwealth positions, and was badly shot up and captured by Australian soldiers. Taken to a British hospital in Alexandria, Oehrn hovered on the edge of death for weeks. He never fully recovered from his wounds and, as a consequence, he was repatriated on November 3, 1943, having been a POW for almost sixteen months. Two weeks later, he reported for staff duty at U-boat Control in Berlin.
British naval intelligence was apparently unaware that the former first staff officer to Karl Dönitz, U-boat “ace,” and former Mediterranean U-boat force commander was in British custody in Egypt all that time.
PATROLS TO OR IN DISTANT AREAS
In the four months from September 1 to December 31, 1943, U-boat Control mounted twenty-four war patrols to or in distant areas: thirteen to the Americas and eleven to West Africa and the Indian Ocean.
Five boats sailed to the Americas in September:
• The new XB minelayer U-220, commanded by Bruno Barber, age thirty-nine, planted an SMA minefield off St. John’s, Newfoundland, on October 9. About a week later these mines sank two medium-size freighters, the 3,400-ton American Delisle and the 3,700-ton British Penolver. Until the mines could be swept, the port was closed, with the usual shipping delays and confusion. As related, U-220 then served as a provisional refueler in the North Atlantic and was sunk on October 28.
• The veteran IXC U-155, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Adolf-Cornelius Piening, patrolled to Brazilian waters. In a cautious outing, Piening sank one freighter, the 5,400-ton Norwegian Stranger. Upon his return to France, Piening left the boat to command Combat Flotilla 7 in St. Nazaire.*
• The veteran VIID (minelayer) U-218, commanded by Richard Becker, planted an SMA minefield off Trinidad on October 27. The minefield produced no sinkings, but on November 4, Becker sank by gun a sailing vessel off the southeast coast of Trinidad. He returned to France on December 8.
• The “Hangar Queen,” U-505, commanded by Peter Zschech, finally got away from Lorient on September 18. Two days later, while en route to top off her fuel tanks, one of U-505’s diesels “froze up tight.” The crew fixed that problem, but on September 23, the important main trim pump broke and Zschech had no spare parts. He returned to Lorient on September 30, doubtless shamefaced.
• The new IXC40 U-537, commanded by Peter Schrewe, age twenty-nine, sailed to plant a sophisticated automatic weather station at Martin Bay, a bleak, deserted site on the east coast of Labrador. After Schrewe diverted temporarily to report weather himself and lost his flak gun in heavy seas, he reached Martin Bay on October 22. A scientist, Kurt Summermeyer, and Schrewe’s crew placed the station on a 170-foot hill about four hundred yards inland. It functioned for several days but was then apparently jammed. Its remains were not discovered by Canadian officials until 1981.
Aware from Enigma decrypts of £7-537’s special mission, commencing on October 29 Canadian ASW forces mounted a hunt to exhaustion (Salmon) for her. Although U-537 had a Naxos radar detector, on October 31a Hudson of Canadian Squadron 11, piloted by F. L. Burston, found her on the surface and attacked with eight rockets, none of which hit. Farther south, near Cape Race, a Canso (Catalina) of Canadian Squadron 5, escorting convoy Halifax 265, found U-537 on November 10 and attacked through flak to drop four depth charges, which fell wide. The next day, another Canso of Squadron 5, piloted by R. Duncan, attacked U-537 through flak to drop depth charges, which inflicted slight damage. The ex-American four-stack British destroyer Montgomery, an escort from convoy Halifax 265, and other Cansos came up, but again U-537 slipped away. Senior Canadian authorities judged that this Salmon hunt had been thoroughly botched. After serving briefly as a radio decoy, U-537 reached France on December 8.
Four boats sailed to West Africa or to the Indian Ocean in September and October.
• Wilhelm Rollmann, who won a Ritterkreuz on U-34 in 1940, embarked for the Far East in the new IXD2 U-cruiser U-848. On November 2, he sank the lone 4,600-ton British freighter Baron Semple. This sinking alerted U.S. Army and Navy ASW aircraft on Ascension Island. These included, notably, a detachment of four B-24s of U.S. Navy Squadron VB 107 from Natal, Brazil.*While out searching about three hundred miles southwest of Ascension on November 5, the crew of a Navy B-24 piloted by Charles A. Baldwin found U-848 on the surface and flashed a contact report. In two runs into massive flak, Baldwin dropped twelve depth charges and severely damaged the U-boat, which remained on the surface, trailing “a great amount” of fuel oil.
Circling beyond flak range, Baldwin homed in two other Navy B-24s. These were piloted by William R. Ford (who had sunk U-164 earlier in the year) and by William E. Hill Supported by Baldwin, who strafed the boat, Ford made two runs into heavy flak. He dropped twelve depth charges, but both salvos fell short and he returned to Ascension. Also supported by Baldwin, who made another strafing run, Hill attacked the U-boat from behind, but Rollmann’s gunners shot out one of Hill’s engines, forcing him too to return to Ascension.
Baldwin continued to circle the damaged U-boat beyond flak range. Four hours after his crew had first spotted U-848, Baldwin homed in Ford’s B-24, returning from Ascension with the same crew but a new pilot, Samuel K. Taylor. At about the same time, three Army Air Forces B-25s arrived from Ascension. These dropped 500-pound general-purpose bombs from 1,500 feet, but not surprisingly, the attacks were ineffective.
Taylor made two runs, dropping twelve depth charges. On this second attack, Taylor’s aircrew performed with consummate skill. The depth charges fell close and “the enemy broke in half and sank.” Taylor’s crew counted “twenty-five or thirty” survivors in the water and dropped three life rafts, but only one German, chief boatswain Hans Schade, survived. A month later, on December 3, the American cruiser Marblehead rescued Schade from a raft, but he was delirious and died two days later in a hospital in Recife, Brazil, where he was buried with appropriate military ceremony.
• The veteran U-68, commanded by Albert Lauzemis, patrolled in the Gulf of Guinea and off Freetown. On October 22 Lauzemis found and attacked a convoy in the gulf. After misfiring seven torpedoes, he sank the British ASW trawler Orfasay and the 5,400-ton Norwegian tanker Litiopa with his deck gun. In subsequent weeks, Lauzemis sank by torpedo two more ships, the 6,600-ton British freighter New Columbia and the 5,200-ton Free French passenger-cargo vessel Fort de Vaux. These successes raised his bag for this 107-day patrol to four ships for 17,612 tons.
• The aging IXB U-103, commanded by Gustav-Adolf Janssen, age twenty-eight, laid a minefield at Takoradi on October 23. Thereafter Janssen cautiously hunted ships in the Gulf of Guinea and off Freetown. He had no luck with mines or torpedoes. On his return voyage, Janssen refueled from the Type XB minelayer U-219, serving as a provisional tanker, then retired U-103 to the Baltic Training Command via Norway.
• Ritterkreuz holder Heinz-Otto Schultze in the new IXD2 U-cruiser U-849 embarked from Kiel for the Far East on October 2. On November 25, another U.S. Navy B-24 of the Squadron VB 107 contingent staging at Ascension Island found U-849 on the surface. The pilot, Marion Vance Dawkins, Jr., straddled U-849 with six depth charges dropped from an altitude of merely twenty-five feet. The missiles sank U-849, but a ricocheting depth-charge warhead severely damaged the horizontal and vertical tail section of the B-24, which, however, limped back to Ascension. Dawkins reported “about thirty” survivors in the water to whom he dropped life rafts, but no Germans were ever recovered.
Seven boats sailed to the Americas in October.
Departing France on October 2
, the IXC U-154, commanded by Oskar-Heinz Kusch, age twenty-five, patrolled via the Portuguese Azores, newly occupied by British ASW forces, then onward to northern Brazilian waters. Near the mouth of the Amazon on November 3, Kusch found a convoy but was prevented from attacking it by an unidentified Catalina, which he repelled, he reported. Kusch then moved north to the coast of French Guiana, where, he also reported, he was twice attacked by aircraft on the night of November 22. Low on fuel—and unable to refuel—Kusch returned to France on December 20.
During this patrol of U-154, the ideological and personality gulfs between Kusch and his first watch officer, Ulrich Abel (a doctor of laws who was six years older), widened drastically. On Christmas Day, when Kusch submitted an evaluation of Abel for commanding officer’s school, he wrote that although Abel was an “inflexible, rigid, and one-sided officer” of “average talent,” he was nonetheless suitable for U-boat command at the front.
This praising-with-faint-damnation endorsement evidently shocked and infuriated Abel, described as a die-hard Nazi. About three weeks later, on January 12, 1944, Abel filed a formal document accusing Kusch of sedition, and another on January 25 accusing Kusch of cowardice. The first document triggered formal legal proceedings that led to Kusch’s arrest on January 20 and confinement at the Angers (France) Military Prison. Six days later, a military trial convened at Kiel to weigh the accusations against Kusch.
Abel’s charges of sedition were backed up by two other watch officers on U-154. All three men swore that Kusch had ridiculed Hitler as insane, Utopian, megalomaniacal, pathologically ambitious, and worse. Kusch had thrown out the standard wardroom photo of Hitler with the comment: “There will be no more idol worship on this boat.” He had also predicted repeatedly that Germany would soon lose the war, one reason being that the U-boats were completely obsolescent. The constant flow of admonitions from U-boat Control to the skippers to fight on relentlessly was so much useless “whip-cracking” and “slave-driving.” On top of all that, Kusch obsessively tuned in to BBC and other Allied news broadcasts, a grave crime in the Third Reich.
The court found Kusch guilty of sedition and listening to foreign radio stations. The prosecution recommended a sentence of ten years and six months imprisonment, but the court, which included U-boat skipper Otto Westphalen, ruled on January 29 that Kusch be executed. Later Westphalen said he would have supported a petition for clemency, with probation to a fighting unit, but Kusch filed no such petition. On May 12, a firing squad in Kiel carried out the sentence.
At no time before or during the trial did Karl Dönitz see Kusch or even allow his views of the situation to be known. However, numerous Kriegsmarine officers, including his former skippers on U-103, Ritterkreuz holder Werner Winter and Gustav-Adolf Janssen, and the Ritterkreuz holder Wilhelm Franken from U-565 in the Mediterranean, leaped to defend Kusch. They and many others in the U-boat arm deeply resented the fact that neither Dönitz nor von Friedeburg nor Godt did anything at all to help this “comrade.”
In his memoir, Erich Topp wrote:
Whatever the political environment may have been, it would still have been in place here for Dönitz to speak to his commander at least once and to stand by him. Or was he so naive that he did not know what people were saying in the U-boat messes about the Party and the Gröfaz.*... If we comprehend tradition as being in touch with and continuing lofty intellectual currents, then Sub-Lieutenant Kusch undoubtedly fits into this pattern, whereas Admiral of the Fleet Dönitz does not.
In the postwar years, Topp, who became a ranking admiral in the Bundesmarine, the West German Navy, attempted to rehabilitate Kusch, but he encountered bitter opposition from Hans-Rudolf Rösing and Karl-Friedrich Merten, among others. Under an Allied occupation law that permitted the punishment of persons found guilty of war crimes, crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity, in 1949 and 1950 Kusch’s father sued members of the court, including Westphalen, for the murder of his son. Jurors or judges in three different trials acquitted the defendants.†
The IXC U-516, commanded by Hans-Rutger Tillessen, age thirty, who departed France on October 4, also patrolled via the Azores to the Caribbean. Despite the debilitating heat and strong Allied ASW measures, Tillessen found fair hunting off Colon, Panama. In four weeks, from November 11 to December 8, he sank four ships (one tanker) for about 14,500 tons, plus a sailing vessel. On the return voyage through the Caribbean toward Trinidad, Tillessen added a big American tanker to his bag, the 10,200-ton McDowell, but he missed a destroyer. Total: five ships (two tankers) for 24,700 tons and the 39-ton Colombian sailing vessel Ruby. On December 19, near Trinidad, an unidentified Allied aircraft bombed U-516, causing “considerable damage,” and Tillessen headed home, seeking fuel from any other attack boat that could provide it.
The IXC U-505, still commanded by Peter Zschech, age twenty-five, who had made countless attempts to carry out another war patrol in the ten months preceding, sailed for the Caribbean on October 9. This attempt also ended in an abort. In the midst of a depth-charge attack by unidentified Allied forces on October 24, Zschech, doubtless feeling intense pressure to perform or else, committed suicide with his pistol. The first watch officer, Paul Meyer, age twenty-six, assumed command, buried Zschech at sea, and returned U-505 to France on November 7.
The IXC U-129, commanded by Richard von Harpe, age twenty-six, sailed on October 12 to patrol the United States East Coast from Cape Hatteras to Florida. En route, on October 26, von Harpe came upon the huge and fast ocean liner Acquitania but was unable to get off a shot. On November 12, he met the Type XIV tanker U-488 and refueled, along with the IXC40s U-193 and U-530, bound for the Gulf of Mexico and Panama, respectively. The U-193 had already given some fuel to the inbound VIID (minelayer) U-214.
The Tenth Fleet alerted Allied forces that were still pursuing U-488 to this rendezvous. A hunter-killer group built; around the “jeep” carrier Core arrived in the designated area on November 15. In the early hours of that day, von Harpe in U-129 sighted Core and fired four torpedoes at her, but they missed. All ships in the Core group felt a “heavy shock wave” and “about six lighter shocks” on their hulls—probably end-of-run torpedo explosions. Von Harpe went deep, evaded the hunting destroyers, and continued his voyage to Cape Hatteras. The other two IXs and the tanker U-488 also avoided detection. Upon learning of the presence of this carrier hunter-killer group, U-boat Control directed U-488 to cease all refueling operations and to come home immediately.
Von Harpe in U-129 found the hunting poor at Cape Hatteras. Patrolling to the southernmost limit of his zone on December 4, he came upon a convoy, KN 280, bound from Key West to Norfolk. He claimed sinking a freighter and a “destroyer” but only the freighter, the 5,400-ton Cuban Libertad, was confirmed. He had no further luck and commenced his homeward voyage, like Tillessen in U-516, seeking fuel.
In response to the urgent requests for fuel, U-boat Control directed the new IXC40 U-544, commanded by Willi Mattke, age thirty-four, to rendezvous with the homebound Tillessen in U-516 and von Harpe in U-129. When Allied code-breakers learned of the proposed meeting from Enigma decrypts, a hunter-killer group built around the new “jeep” carrier Guadalcanal, which sailed from Norfolk on January 5, was directed to the scene.
Commanded by Daniel V. Gallery, Guadalcanal launched aircraft to search for the three U-boats about five hundred miles west of the Azores on January 16. Two aircraft, piloted by Bert J. Hudson and William M. McLane, found the three boats refueling and immediately launched an unorthodox attack, firing rockets and depth charges simultaneously. Some of these hit and sank the provisional refueler, Willi Mattke’s U-544. The airmen saw “twenty to thirty-five” Germans in the water, but despite a diligent search, the Guadalcanal’s escort vessels could not find a single survivor. The U-129 and U-516 dived and escaped.*
Von Harpe in U-129 went on to France, but Tillessen in U-516, desperate for fuel, could not. Therefore U-boat Control ordered the outbound IXC40 U-539, commanded by Hans-Jürgen Lauterb
ach-Emden, age twenty-four, to rendezvous with U-516 and give her fuel.
The U-539, which had sailed from France for a patrol to the Caribbean on January 3, was the first boat of the Atlantic force to conduct a war patrol with a snorkel.* The two boats came within hailing distance on January 22, but owing to the foul weather—yet another ghastly winter storm in the North Atlantic—they were unable to carry out the refueling operations until February 5, when Tillessen in U-516 finally got enough fuel to reach France. Delayed and low on fuel, Lauterbach-Emden in U-539 patrolled to Canada rather than the distant Caribbean.
After obtaining fuel from the harassed tanker U-488 on November 12, the IXC40 U-193, commanded by the old hand Hans Pauckstadt, age thirty-seven, patrolled to the Gulf of Mexico. West of the Florida Straits on December 3, Pauckstadt sank with three torpedoes his first—and only—ship, the new 10,200-ton American tanker Touchet, loaded with 150,000 barrels of heating oil. She blew up and burst into flames. Of the eighty crewmen, ten perished, and the rest were rescued from lifeboats.
Hans Pauckstadt in U-193 was the last U-boat skipper to patrol the Gulf of Mexico in World War II. Altogether in this little-noted area, U-boats sank fifty-six ships (twenty-four tankers) and damaged fourteen other vessels.† Contrary to rumors that were rife during the war, no U-boat received any intelligence from Axis spies operating close to the seashore, nor did any boat refuel from secret supply ships in the Louisiana bayous or elsewhere, nor did any Germans go ashore in disguise to enjoy the delights of Mobile, New Orleans, Houston, or Galveston.
On the return voyage, Allied aircraft hit U-193 off Cape Finisterre. She was “thrown on the rocks” and severely damaged, but she survived this mishap and limped into El Ferrol, Spain, on February 10. After extensive makeshift repairs, she sailed on February 20 and reached Lorient five days later.