by Clay Blair
After refueling from the tanker U-488, also on November 12, the IXC40 U-530, commanded by Kurt Lange, patrolled the Caribbean Sea to Panama. On the day after Christmas, Lange hit and damaged the 10,200-ton American tanker Chapultepec off Colón. Three days later, on December 29, he attacked another American tanker, Esso Buffalo, firing three torpedoes, but they missed. Unknowingly, this tanker rammed U-530, but Lange was able to make repairs and continue the patrol. He returned to France on February 22, completing an arduous voyage of 130 days, during which he sank no confirmed ships.
Unable to refuel on the outbound leg, Max Wintermeyer in the IXC40 U-190 nevertheless patrolled to northern Brazilian waters. Cruising cautiously offshore between the mouth of the Amazon River and Fortaleza, Wintermeyer reported that he “saw nothing.” Owing to the shortage of fuel—and the uncertainty of refueling—he commenced his homebound voyage on December 12. Control directed Wintermeyer to meet and obtain the newest Naxos radar detection gear from the U-172, which was outbound to Penang, but he could not find her and continued on to France. The boat arrived on January 15, completing a barren patrol of ninety-one days.
Owing to the absence of U-tankers and other factors, only one boat patrolled to the Americas in November 1943 and none in December.
The new IXC40 U-543, commanded by Hans-Jürgen Hellriegel, who had earlier commanded the U-96 of the Atlantic force, sailed from Kiel to Newfoundland waters on November 9. En route, Hellriegel diverted temporarily to anticonvoy operations with group Coronel. Detached from Coronel on December 16, U-543 proceeded toward Newfoundland with orders to hunt ships and also to broadcast weather reports twice daily. On December 27, Hellriegel reported that he had chased the big, fast, ocean liner Acquitania in vain. Alerted to the presence of this boat by Enigma decrypts and Huff Duff, Canadian authorities mounted a massive hunt for her three hundred miles east of the coast of Newfoundland.
This hunt, carried out from December 23 to January 6, entailed a great many Canadian forces, including aircraft, escorts of nearby convoys, and a hunter-killer group. The historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, W.A.B. Douglas,*calculated that despite hideous flying weather, the Canadians completed twenty-one Br24 and seven Canso sorties. None, however, had any luck. Hellriegel shot T-5s at two “destroyers” hunting him on December 30 and January 3, and claimed both sank. Even though they could not be confirmed, Control credited these “sinkings,” and Dönitz awarded Hellriegel a Ritterkreuz after his return to France.†
The thirteen patrols mounted to the Americas in September, October, and November sank eight merchant ships for 45,700 tons plus the sailing vessel Ruby. Tillessen in U-516 accounted for about half of that number. Seven of the thirteen boats sank no ships. Probably as a result of better radio discipline in the patrol areas, the new Naxos centimetric-wavelength radar detector, and caution on the part of the skippers, no U-boats were lost.
Six attack boats sailed to West Africa and the Indian Ocean in November and December. As related, one boat, the outbound U-505, under a new skipper, Harald Lange, age thirty-nine, rescued survivors of the German torpedo boat T-25 and returned to France. The others had various adventures.
Alfred Eick in the IXC U-510, embarked for Penang, refueled from the XB minelayer U-219, serving as a provisional tanker, on November 30. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Eick shot three torpedoes at a freighter off Durban on January 13 but missed. Per plan, on January 28 he met the German tanker Charlotte Schliemann about three hundred miles south of Mauritius and refueled.
Thereafter Eick patrolled aggressively but carefully the northernmost reaches of the Arabian Sea between Oman and India in “awful” heat and humidity. On February 22, he found convoy PA 69 en route from the Persian Gulf to Aden. In two attacks, he claimed two tankers and a freighter sunk for 25,000 tons, one freighter of 7,000 tons left burning and probably sinking, and a hit on another freighter of 7,000 tons. Allied records show that in these two attacks, Eick sank the 7,400-ton British tanker San Alvaro, the 9,200-ton American freighter E. G. Seubert, and damaged the 10,000-ton Norwegian tanker Erling Brovig. In the month of March Eick claimed sinking three more freighters (two Norwegian, one American) for an aggregate of 18,000 tons plus a sailing vessel. Allied records confirmed three freighters of 14,700 tons sunk. Eick then proceeded to Penang, arriving on April 5. Two days later Berlin notified Eick that he had been awarded a Ritterkreuz.*
The IXD2 U-cruiser U-178 departed Penang on November 27 for France with about 153 tons of cargo: thirty tons of rubber, 121 tons of tin, and two tons of tungsten (wolfram). Inasmuch as Ritterkreuz holder Wilhelm Dommes, who had commanded the boat on its outward voyage, was still ill, he remained in Penang. The boat’s first watch officer, Wilhelm Spahr, age thirty-nine, who had been Prien’s quartermaster during the legendary sinking of the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow in 1939, moved up to command.
Near the Maldives, Spahr sank the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship Jose Navarro, then met Eick in U-510 and the tanker Charlotte Schliemann south of Mauritius on January 28. He topped off his fuel tanks, took aboard nineteen more tons of rubber, got Enigma keys (for June) from U-510, then headed southwest for Cape Town.
Following his temporary attachment to group Schill, during which he hit the British sloop Chanticleer and was in turn heavily damaged, Werner Henke in the IXC U-515, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz, made repairs and patrolled to Freetown. In the week from December 17 to December 24, Henke sank three British freighters for 20,900 tons: Kingswood, Phemius, and Dumana. These together with the single freighter sunk in the Bahamas by von Harpe in U-129 were the only successes by the Germans against merchant ships in the whole of the Atlantic Ocean in December.
While homebound, heavy seas and engine vibration opened up a temporary weld on one of U-515’s aft buoyancy tanks. For the second time on this patrol, Henke stopped off the deserted shore of a remote island to make repairs—this time in the Cape Verdes. Later, while approaching Lorient on January 16, he repelled two RAF twin-engine Mosquito bombers with his flak guns. He claimed sinking four ships for 22,000 tons (including the sloop Chanticleer), which closely matched the confirmed figures. Henke might well have requested a safe shore job, but in hopes of winning more fame and awards, he elected to retain command of U-515.
After an extensive overhaul and an upgrade in flak guns, the IXC U-172 sailed from France to Penang on November 22 commanded by a new skipper, Hermann Hoffmann, her former second and first watch officer. Only twenty-two years old, Hoffmann was the youngest officer in the Atlantic U-boat force yet to be promoted to command. While U-172 was outbound in the Bay of Biscay, an unidentified Coastal Command land-based bomber detected her on the night of December 3, dropped six depth charges, then strafed the boat with machine-gun fire, but she escaped.
Hoffmann met the XB minelayer U-219, serving as a provisional tanker, on about December 10 and filled U-172’s fuel tanks. When Allied codebreakers provided reliable advanced information on this rendezvous, a hunter-killer group built around the “jeep” carrier Bogue left her convoy, GUS 23, and rushed to the area. The aircraft were unable to locate the U-boats during the meeting but shortly after sunrise on December 12, Avenger pilot Elisha C. Gaylord found U-172 on the surface and drove her under. He summoned help and dropped a Fido that apparently missed, and Hoffmann went deep.
The skipper of Bogue, Joseph B. Dunn, ordered a “hunt to exhaustion.” For the next twenty-seven hours, Bogue’s aircraft and her screen, the four-stackers George E. Badger, Clemson, Du Pont, and Osmond Ingram, hunted and blasted U-172 with bombs, depth charges, Hedgehogs, and Fidos. Finally, at about 10 A.M. on December 13, the savaged U-172 surfaced to fight it out. Manning a machine gun, Hoffmann killed one American and injured six others on Osmond Ingram. In return, Badger, Clemson, Du Pont, and Osmond Ingram raked U-172 with intense fire of all kinds, killing thirteen Germans and forcing the survivors, including Hoffmann, to leap into the sea. The destroyers fished out Hoffmann and forty-five other Germans and took them on to Norfolk.
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The new IXD2 U-cruiser U-850 sailed from Kiel to Penang on November 18, commanded by the renowned submariner Klaus Ewerth, age thirty-six. A member of the crew of 1925, Ewerth had attended the first Kriegsmarine submarine-school class (1933) and was chosen to commission the first submarine, the duck U-l, in 1935. Subsequently he had commanded the Type VIIs U-35 and U-36, and the Type 1 U-26 that he took on two war patrols in the early months of the war. After a long stint in the Training Command, Ewerth had commissioned U-850 in April 1943.
On the afternoon of December 20, U-boat Control signaled Ewerth the good news that his wife had given birth to their fifth child and all was well. A mere twenty minutes later, an Avenger from Bogue, piloted by Wallace A. LaFleur, sighted U-850 running on the surface. LaFleur gave the alarm, then attacked. His depth charges failed to release on the first pass and fell short on the second. Four other aircraft (two Wildcats, two Avengers) arrived from Bogue to help. In the ensuing exchange of fire, the aircraft drove U-850 under. Pilots LaFleur and Harold G. Bradshaw then launched Fidos that hit and sank U-850. The destroyers Badger and Du Pont picked up pieces of wood and clothing and “dismembered bodies” but could find no survivors.
The twenty-three patrols to the Americas, West Africa, and to or in the Indian Ocean mounted in the last four months of 1943 produced a bag of twenty-four Allied merchant ships (including four tankers) for about 134,500 tons, plus the sloop Chanticleer and two sailing vessels. This made small impact on Allied maritime assets, but it was sufficient damage to ensure a continuation of convoying in those remote areas and the deployment of numerous Allied aircraft and surface ships on ASW patrols.
The Germans paid a stiff price for these twenty-four merchant-ship sinkings: four of the twenty-three U-boats sunk, including the famous IXC U-172 and three new IXD2 U-cruisers, U-848, U-849, and U-850. The approximately 160 dead submariners included three of the four skippers: Ritterkreuz holders Wilhelm Rollmann and Heinz-Otto Schultze, and Klaus Ewerth.
THE. ARCTIC: TIRPITZ CRIPPLED, SCHARNHORST SUNK
Midway between the Baywatch and Avalanche landings in Italy, on September 6 the German battleship Tirpitz and battle cruiser Scharnhorst, screened by ten destroyers, sailed from Altenfiord in northern Norway. This task force ran north in the Barents Sea to the island of Spitzbergen, bombarded the provisional British base there, then dashed back to Altenfiord. The official British naval historian noted that this minor operation was the only time in her twenty-one months in the Arctic that Tirpitz had fired her main battery at the enemy.
The British Home Fleet, reinforced by the old American carrier Ranger, two American cruisers, Augusta and Tuscaloosa, and five American destroyers, belatedly sailed to intercept the Germans but to no avail. Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, as well as the “pocket” battleship Lützow, remained moored in Altenfiord, serving in the role of “fleet in being” to tie down Allied warships and threaten Murmansk convoys.
The Tirpitz sortie rattled the Admiralty and persuaded it to approve a bold but chancy operation (Source), long in the making: a midget-submarine raid on the three big German warships in Altenfiord.
The British had built six midget subs specifically for this task. Known as “X-craft” (X-5 to X-10), they were forty-eight feet long and displaced thirty-nine tons. Manned by four volunteers, each X-craft was armed with two 4, 000-pound Amatol detachable charges, designed to be released to the sea bottom beneath the hull of a moored vessel and triggered by a timed fuse. During extensive trials and drills, the X-craft had performed as designed, although they were not exempt from the inherent shortcomings of all midget submarines.
Six full-size “parent” submarines*sailed from Loch Cairnbawn, northwest Scotland, on September 11 and 12, each towing an X-craft. Three midgets (X-5, X-6, X-7) were to attack Tirpitz, two (X-9, X-10) were to attack Scharnhorst, and one (X-8) was to attack Lutzow. However, two midgets (X-8, X-9) were lost or scuttled en route, leaving the three for Tirpitz but only one (X-10) for Scharnhorst and none for Lutzow.
The parent submarines launched the four midgets on the evening of September 20 at a site about 150 miles from Altenfiord. One, X-5, was lost; another, X-70, could not find Scharnhorst, aborted to her parent submarine, and was lost while returning to Scotland. On September 22, two midgets, X-6 and X-7, commanded by Donald Cameron and Basil Charles Godfrey Place, respectively, reached Tirpitz and released charges (four in all for 16,000 pounds), which blew up and damaged all three sets of the battleship’s main turbines. This remarkable feat put Tirpitz completely out of action in Altenfiord until April 1944. Both midgets were lost in the operation; two of the eight crewmen of X-6 and X-7 were killed, six were captured.*
On the day after the British disabled Tirpitz, September 23, the “pocket” battleship Liitzow sailed for the Baltic. Alerted to this departure, the British attempted to intercept Lützow with land-based RAF and fleet aircraft, but failed. She reached Danzig on October 1 and never again left the Baltic.
The damage to Tirpitz and the departure of Lützow left only the Scharnhorst and her screen in northern Norway to threaten Murmansk convoys. Therefore the commander in chief, Home Fleet,† Bruce Fraser, judged that these politically desirable convoys could resume sailing in the Arctic darkness of November. Churchill informed Stalin that the Admiralty intended to sail one convoy of forty merchant ships per month in November, December, January, and February, altogether 160 vessels plus escorts. However, when Fraser, like his predecessor John Tovey, objected strenuously to such large convoys, Churchill accepted Fraser’s alternative plan to sail convoys of half that size (about twenty ships) every two weeks.
The Murmansk convoys recommenced sailing on November 1. On that day a return convoy, RA 54A (thirteen empty ships) left Kola Inlet and reached the British Isles with no losses. On November 15 and 22, eastbound convoys JW 54A (eighteen loaded ships) and JW 54B (fourteen loaded ships) left Loch Ewe for Kola Inlet. Both arrived with no losses. Another return convoy, RA 54B (eight empty ships) sailed from Kola Inlet on November 27 and also arrived in the British Isles with no losses.
During the hiatus in Murmansk convoys over the summer and into the fall of 1943, Dönitz allowed the Arctic U-boat force to remain at about a dozen boats. Except for a very few inconsequential Soviet ships, these U-boats sank nothing from March to November 1943, a waste of assets that Dönitz repeatedly deplored. However, U-boat losses in the Arctic area in this period were likewise inconsequential compared with other areas: only the U-639 commanded by Walter Wichman, which was sunk by a Soviet submarine, 5-707, in the Kara Sea while planting a minefield.
The Germans became aware belatedly that the Murmansk convoys had resumed in November. Humiliated by the X-craft attack on Tirpitz and the abject failure of the U-boats in the North and Middle Atlantic, Dönitz and his staff became determined to achieve a naval victory that would especially and directly help the embattled German forces in the Soviet Union. Therefore Dönitz directed his protégé, Oskar Kummetz, commander of the Scharnhorst task force, which included five destroyers, to prepare for a surface-ship assault on the Murmansk convoy that was to sail in December. At the same time, he directed the Arctic U-boat force to deploy patrol lines to intercept, shadow, and attack these convoys in conjunction with Scharnhorst and whatever Luftwaffe forces could be brought to bear.
British codebreakers provided exceptionally good information on the German plans and movements. When the next convoy, JW 55A (nineteen loaded ships), sailed from Loch Ewe for Kola Inlet on December 12, Fraser was very much alive to the possibility of a Scharnhorst sortie. He lent the convoy strong distant cover with two task forces that went all the way to Kola Inlet. One force consisted of his flagship, the new battleship Duke of York, the heavy cruiser Jamaica, and four destroyers. The other was made up of three cruisers, Norfolk, Sheffield, and the Belfast, the latter severely damaged early in the war by a mine planted by the duck U-21. Convoy JW 55 A arrived in Kola Inlet with no losses. The Duke of York task force remained in Russia for two days, then sailed for
home on December 18.
As Christmas approached, two more Murmansk convoys set sail. On December 20, JW 55B (nineteen loaded ships) left Loch Ewe for Kola Inlet. On December 23 a return convoy, RA 55A (twenty-two empty ships) left Kola Inlet, accompanied by the task force of three British heavy cruisers. By this time a U-boat patrol line, Eisenbart, consisting of eight boats, had taken up positions in the waters between Bear Island and northern Norway. The Luftwaffe provided a few reconnaissance aircraft, but all except a handful of the dive-bombers and torpedo-planes had been transferred from Norway to other theaters.
Admiral Dönitz met with Hitler at Wolfschanze on December 19 and 20. Among the topics discussed was the Arctic situation. According to the stenographer’s notes, Dönitz said that the Allies possibly had resumed the Murmansk convoys and that “if a successful operation seems assured,” Scharnhorst and five destroyers would attack the next one bound to Russia. The standing doctrine for big-ship sorties would be adhered to: If the enemy posed a threat to Scharnhorst with his big ships, she was to avoid an engagement and return to Altenfiord, thereby denying the enemy a propaganda as well as a material victory. Moreover, Dönitz said, he had diverted five more new U-boats to reinforce the diminished Arctic force*and if the Allies had indeed resumed Murmansk convoys on a regular basis, he would send yet more U-boats to the Arctic.
Dönitz returned to Berlin briefly, then set off for Brest to spend Christmas Eve with U-boat crews. While he was en route, a Luftwaffe aircraft sighted convoy JW 55B bound for Kola Inlet. Dönitz canceled his visit to Brest and stopped in Paris. He put the Scharnhorst task force on three-hour notice and persuaded the Luftwaffe to mount increased surveillance for the convoy and to look for distant covering forces. On Christmas Day, he returned to Berlin, where he authorized the Scharnhorst task force commander, Erich Bey (temporarily replacing Oskar Kummetz, who was ill), to sail. Owing to very heavy seas that restricted movements of his five destroyers, and the lack of Luftwaffe support, Bey, hero of the battle of Narvik in April 1940, was reluctant to go, but go he did, that evening.