by Clay Blair
• On January 15, the ex-Borkum U-305, commanded by Rudolf Bahr, reported to Control that it could not join Rügen as ordered and was returning to France. Bahr gave no reason, but doubtless he was low on fuel and perhaps out of torpedoes. Control heard nothing more from U-305 and did not know the cause of her loss.
In his war memoir,† Reginald (“Bob”) Whinney, skipper of the old but upgraded British destroyer Wanderer, has described what he believed to be the last hours of U-305. He writes that Wanderer was assigned to a five-ship British hunter-killer group that had lost its senior vessel, Hurricane, on Christmas Eve, while supporting Card. Thereafter the outfit had been assigned to intercept surface blockade-runners and command of it had passed to the skipper of the British frigate Glenarm.
On the afternoon of January 17, Whinney continues, Wanderer got a weak sonar contact on U-305 and he immediately attacked with his Hedgehog. Like many destroyer skippers, he “disliked and distrusted” these mortars, whose bombs exploded only on contact. However, in view of new Admiralty orders to proceed at slow speed (under eight knots) to avoid making sufficient noise to attract a T-5, the Hedgehog was preferable to depth charges, which if dropped at slow speed might blow off the ship’s stern. Sonar reported a “possible” Hedgehog hit. The senior ship of the group9 the frigate Glenarm, then came up and attacked two sonar contacts at slow speed with her Hedgehog. Presently, Glenarm concluded the “contacts” were fish, left the scene, and directed all ships of the group to resume lookout for blockade-runners, Whinney states.
Convinced he had trapped a U-boat, Whinney ignored the order to leave the scene and pursued the contact alone, an act of disobedience that could have ruined his naval career. In mounting seas and gale-force winds, he made another slow-speed Hedgehog attack, but this time there was no explosion. Unable to reload the Hedgehog because of the heavy seas, Whinney speeded up to 15 knots and carried out a risky depth-charge attack. This time sonar reported “breaking-up noises”— small explosions and the creaking of grinding metal. The Admiralty’s assessment committee at first rated the U-boat as “probably slightly damaged” but later upgraded the rating to “known sunk.” It divided credit for the kill between Wanderer and Glenarm, a success that Whinney believed probably saved his career.
• The ex-Borkum U-641, commanded by Horst Rendtel, who had reported a 37mm flak gun failure during an aircraft attack on January 14, joined the southernmost end of group Rügen, but was almost immediately lost. On January 17, a Luftwaffe aircraft on a meteorological sortie reported a southbound convoy west of North Channel. Control in response directed all Rügen boats to run at maximum speed even in daylight to intercept this formation, which was convoy Outbound South 65, merged with convoy KMS 39. Follow-up Luftwaffe flights failed to find the convoy, but U-641 did on January 19, and on that day one of the convoy escorts, the British corvette Violet, commanded by C. N. Stewart, pounced on U-641 and destroyed her with the loss of all hands.
Of the eight boats assigned to group Borkum on January 3, three (U-231, U-305, U-641) were positively sunk by Allied forces and one (U-377) was lost to unknown causes, perhaps Allied forces. Three (U-270, U-382, U-758) were compelled to abort with aircraft damage and none of these sailed again until June. Only one boat (U-953), which went south to Casablanca, completed a full patrol. When she returned, she was assigned to Landwirt and did not sail again until late May.
In return for heavy casualties, the Borkum boats had sunk one British frigate, Tweed, and shot down one British B-17.
U-BOAT ACTIONS IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC: II
In compliance with Hitler’s orders to reinforce the Arctic U-boat force to thirty boats, only one new VII came out to the Atlantic U-boat force in February 1944. She was the experimental U-986, fitted with an array of antiaircraft rockets that, so far, had not measured up. Since five more VIIs of the Atlantic force were ordered to the Mediterranean in February in compliance with another Hitler order, and battle losses continued to be heavy, the shrinkage of the Atlantic force accelerated rapidly.
The five VIIs that were ordered to the Mediterranean had an arduous time. Two, U-421 and U-586, got inside, but two were sunk and one aborted with battle damage.
• On the afternoon of February 24, a swarm of aircraft patrolling the western mouth of Gibraltar Strait found the U-761, commanded by Horst Geider. Among others, these were a Ventura of U.S. Navy Squadron VB 127, piloted by Theodore M. Holmes; two Catalinas of U.S. Navy Squadron VP 63, piloted by T. Russell Woolley and Howard Jefferson (“Jeff”) Baker; and a Catalina of British Squadron 202, piloted by John Finch.
The two American Catalinas were fitted with Magnetic Airborne Detector (MAD) gear and twenty-four Mark VI retrorockets that exploded only on contact. They attacked U-761, as did the U.S. Navy Ventura and the British Catalina. The latter developed a fuel leak and had to abort, but the two American Catalinas remained close by. Meanwhile, two British destroyers on ASW patrol, Anthony and Wishart, came up and threw over thirty depth charges, which savaged U-761 and forced her to surface. When she popped up, the destroyers riddled her bridge with gunfire, which proved to be the coup de grace. The U-76Vs chief engineer, Karl Lendle, and eight other Germans died in the sinking. Anthony and Wishart picked up Geider and forty-eight other Germans, one of whom died in a Gibraltar hospital. All the commanders of the American and British aircraft got DFCs; all the American enlisted men, Air Medals.
• In the early morning hours of March 16, a Catalina of U.S. Navy Squadron VP 63, piloted by Ralph C. Spears, found by MAD gear the U-392, commanded by Henning Schumann. Spears dropped floating flares and sonobuoys* and flashed an alarm to two other M ADC ATS of Squadron 63, then attacked with twenty-four contact retrorockets in three salvos of eight, per current doctrine. Two other Catalinas, piloted by Van A. T. Lingle and Matthias J. Vopatek, arrived to assist. Lingle attacked with thirty contact retrorockets in three salvos of ten; Vopatek stood by at a distance. Allied authorities credited Spears and Lingle with three and two hits, respectively, which damaged U-392. Two British warships, the destroyer Vanoc and frigate Affleck, rushed up and pounded U-392 with depth charges and Hedgehogs, and finally destroyed her. There were no German survivors.
• During the week of March 19 to March 25, unidentified Allied air and surface ASW forces patrolling the western entrance to the strait hunted and harassed the U-618, commanded by Kurt Baberg. After incurring heavy damage, Baberg was compelled to abort, arriving at St. Nazaire on April 8. Having commanded U-618 for two years and sunk three confirmed freighters for 15,788 tons, Baberg left the boat for other duty.
Apart from the boats on temporary weather reporting tasks, six VIIs sailing from France in February carried out special missions.
• Two boats went to Icelandic waters to report the sailing of Murmansk convoys or other naval forces and to sink shipping. These were the U-448, commanded by Helmut Dauter, age twenty-four, and the U-744, commanded by Heinz Blischke, also age twenty-four. Both were lost.
Six days out from Brest, on March 2, Blischke in U-744 encountered the combined northbound convoys MKS 40 and Sierra Leone 149. He boldly attacked this big, heavily escorted formation, claiming a destroyer and three very small (1,000-ton) “tankers” sunk. In reality, no destroyer was hit and the “tankers” turned out to be British 1,600-ton LSTs, shifting from the Mediterranean to England for Overlord. Allied records show that Blischke sank one, the LST 362, but missed the other two.
Having expended five of his eleven internal torpedoes, Blischke aborted his mission to Iceland and patrolled the main convoy routes. At first the decision appeared to be correct for on the morning of March 5, he came upon the fast convoy Halifax 280, guarded by a close escort group and also by C-2, a mixed group of Canadian and British warships under British command serving as a support group ahead of the convoy. Upon sighting a “destroyer,” Blischke fired a T-5, but it missed and the noise of the attack alerted the warships of C-2.
The C-2 Support Group was composed of seven vessels: three destroyers (
the veteran British Icarus, the Canadian Chaudière and Gatineau), a Canadian frigate (St. Catherines), two Canadian corvettes (Chilliwack and Fennel), and a British corvette (Kenilworth Castle), All seven vessels pounced on U-744 for a relentless hunt. Over the next thirty-one hours the ships let loose about 350 depth charges, numerous Hedgehogs, and—for the first time against an enemy—three salvos from a British Squid forward-firing mortar* fitted on the new British corvette Kenilworth Castle. On the afternoon of March 6, Blischke was finally forced to surface into the waiting arms of five of the seven warships, all of which opened fire with all weapons that could safely bear. In the ensuing finale, Blischke was killed on the bridge, but forty of his crew survived.
The U-744 did not sink right away. Sensing the possibility for a capture, the captains of the Canadian vessels Chilliwack and St. Catherines, C. R. Coughlin and H.C.R. Davis, respectively, put over boarding parties. The Chilliwack party got to U-744 first. Signalman J. R. Starr ran up a white ensign, while lieutenants Atherton and Hearn and artificer Longbottom raced below. These three men, the Canadian naval historian Joseph Schull wrote, snatched up a “precious haul of code books, signal publications and mechanical equipment.” † However, efforts to take U-744 in tow failed and the Icarus finally had to sink her with a torpedo.
The other boat, Helmut Dauter in U-448, patrolled off the west coast of Iceland. He reported “no traffic” and concluded (somewhat rashly) that those waters were “of no importance for the enemy at the moment” and left for home. On April 14, Canadian Support Group 9 (three frigates, one upgraded corvette) and the British sloop Pelican, on ASW patrol west of the Bay of Biscay, found U-448 and forced her to the surface with Hedgehogs and depth charges, then riddled her with gunfire. The warships rescued Dauter and forty-one other Germans. One of the ten Germans who died in the sinking was the ship’s doctor, Martin Lange, an “elderly man” who had a fatal heart attack in the water, the British reported. The Admiralty gave credit for the kill to the Canadian frigate Swansea (C. A. King) and the sloop Pelican (John S. Dallison).
• Three VIIs patrolled very close to shore in waters off the British Isles, primarily to report news of departing convoys and to ferret out new Allied ASW gear but also to sink shipping when conditions appeared favorable. These were the U-333, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Peter Cremer, and the U-413 and U-621, commanded by Gustav Poel and Max Kruschka, respectively. Cremer was to patrol off the North Channel; Kruschka was to patrol North Channel to North Minch; Poel was to patrol near the Scillies.
Allied codebreakers supplied decrypts of the Enigma orders to these three boats. In response, British air and surface hunter-killer groups put to sea specifically to destroy them. On February 10, Poel in U-413 reported a convoy but an unidentified aircraft escort drove him off. Denys A. Ray nor in the 1,100-ton destroyer Warwick with another destroyer, Scimitar, in company, sailed from Plymouth to an area west of Land’s End to hunt Poel. As it turned out, Poel saw Warwick first and hit her with a FAT (looping) torpedo that blew away her stern and sank her with heavy loss of life. When Poel returned to France on March 21, Dönitz awarded him a Ritterkreuz.* It was the second of two such awards bestowed on U-boat skippers in the Atlantic force during the first five months of 1944.
Max Kruschka in U-621 spent most of his time off North Minch. He claimed that in very poor visibility on March 20 he fired a T-5 at an unidentified target “with a searchlight” and assumed the torpedo hit and sank the ship, but it could not be confirmed. Owing to “the state of the battery,” Kruschka reported on March 30, he set a course for France. He also reported that the automatic loading mechanism of his 37mm flak gun was broken.
All three of these boats got back to France. In his memoir, Ritterkreuz holder Peter Cremer wrote that after an aircraft spotted him on March 21, Johnny Walker’s hunter-killer Support Group 2, en route from Liverpool to Scapa Flow (see below), hunted him relentlessly. Cremer escaped by lying doggo on a muddy bottom at 131 feet for ten hours. The boat stuck fast in the mud and it appeared to Cremer that he might not be able to break loose, but ten men sallied ship bow to stern and she finally rose. While inbound in Biscay on April 11, Kruschka in U-621 came upon a hunter-killer group and shot a T-5 at a “destroyer,” which missed. He then fired Bolde sonar decoys and escaped.
• One boat laid a minefield. She was the VIID U-214, commanded by Rupprecht Stock. In late March he planted SMA mines off Casablanca. Allied ships triggered four on April 3 and 12, but none caused any significant damage. The U-214 then proceeded to a rendezvous with the outbound U-68 to get new Enigma keys, another disastrous meet, as will be described. On April 29, Stock returned U-214 to Brest, where technicians commenced installation of a snort.
As in January, the primary task of the U-boats sailing in February was to man the single, loose group widely deployed in the eastern Atlantic, about two hundred miles off the west coast of the British Isles. Formerly named Rügen, that group was split in late January into two subgroups, Hinein and Stürmer, but only a few days later, on February 3, Control consolidated the subgroups into a new, loosely deployed, single group, Igel (Hedgehog).
Mere hours after Igel had been formed, one of the newly arrived boats, the VII U-764, commanded by Hans-Kurt von Bremen, came upon convoy Outbound North 222. It was composed of fifty-one merchant ships in ballast protected by eleven escorts, mostly Canadian: two destroyers, three frigates, five corvettes, and a MAC ship. Von Bremen reported the convoy, then dived. A section of it passed overhead but he did not shoot, then or later. The ex-flak boat VIIs U-441 and U-963, plus four other VIIs, attempted to join U-764, but it was a case of too little too late and none of these seven boats was able to mount a proper attack.* An unidentified aircraft hit U-953, but the damage was not crippling.
Several boats that were low on fuel returned to France in early February. One was the new U-763, commanded by Ernst Cordes, age thirty. She was the first Atlantic boat to be fitted with Hohentwiel search radar, † Fearing that Allied aircraft might detect its radiation, Cordes did not use the gear in the two most dangerous areas, the Iceland-Faeroes gap and the Bay of Biscay. One result was that while he relied solely on the Naxos radar detector, three separate British aircraft hit the boat in Biscay on February 4 and 5.
Although Cordes shot down two of the aircraft,‡ officers at flotilla headquarters were incensed at his decision not to use Hohentwiel in danger areas. Enemy aircraft were not equipped with FuMB (radar detectors), Control emphasized in an admonition to all boats (citing Cordes by name), so they could not detect Hohentwiel radiations. Hence a U-boat fitted with Hohentwiel could safely detect an enemy plane at six or seven miles by radar before the plane detected the U-boat on its radar.
Aware from Enigma decrypts of Igel deployments, the Allies flooded the area west of the British Isles with an unprecedented number of ASW warships and aircraft. Apart from the usual heavy close escorts for convoys, the Admiralty assigned “jeep” carriers* to all convoys as well as hunter-killer groups. The Americans provided the “jeep” carrier Block Island.
One of the British hunter-killer units operating in that area during February was Johnny Walker’s famous Support Group 2, five sloops plus the “jeep” carriers Nairana and Activity. As related, this group had sunk the U-592 on January 31 with all hands. In a remarkable series of actions from February 6 to February 19, the group sank by depth charges and Hedgehog five more U-boats, making a total of six kills in a single twenty-eight-day cruise. In brief:
• The sloops Woodpecker and Wild Goose sank the new U-762, commanded by Walter Pietschmann, age twenty-four, on February 6. There were no survivors.
• The sloops Starling, Magpie, and Kite got the U-238, commanded by Horst Hepp, age twenty-six, on February 9. No survivors.
• The sloops Starling and Wild Goose got the U-734, commanded by Hans-Jörg Blauert, age twenty-five, on February 9. No survivors.
• The sloops Wild Goose and Woodpecker got the U-424, commanded by Günter Luders, age twenty-three, on F
ebruary 11. No survivors.
• The sloops Starling and Woodpecker sank the U-264, commanded by Hartwig Looks, age twenty-six, on February 19.
This boat, merely fifteen days out from France, was embarked on the first war patrol of a Type VII equipped with a snort. Walker’s sloops rescued Looks and fifty other Germans, some of whom revealed a great deal about snort technology, operations, limitations, and risks:
During Walker’s attack on U-264, Wilhelm Brauel, age twenty-nine, in the ex-flak boat U-256 came up and hit the sloop Woodpecker with a T-5. After rescuing the crew of U-264, Walker in Starling attempted to tow Woodpecker to England, but owing to inadequate gear and heavy seas, he turned over the task to the Royal Navy tug Storm King. On the seventh day, Woodpecker capsized and sank, but her salvage crew was saved. The other four sloops returned triumphantly to Liverpool on February 25 to well-deserved cheers from First Lord of the Admiralty Albert Alexander, Western Approaches commander Max Horton, and about two thousand others.
The badly damaged IXC U-516, homebound from the Caribbean, came upon the fast convoy Halifax 277 in mid-Atlantic on February 7. Owing to the damage to that U-boat, Control advised her skipper, Hans-Rutger Tillessen, not to attack or to shadow. At the same time, Control alerted the boats of group Igel to prepare to intercept this rich target on about February 10. For this purpose, Control organized Igel into two subgroups, Igel 1 and Igel 2, the former near Rockall Bank, the latter farther south, and directed the Luftwaffe to prepare for reconnaissance flights, weather permitting.
As it happened, the merged inbound convoys MKS 38 and Sierra Leone 147 were not far from Halifax 277. Some of the southernmost Igel boats mistook these formations for the intended target, Halifax 277, and attacked by a full moon. By that time, Johnny Walker’s Support Group 2 had attached itself to these convoys. It was then—February 6 to 11—that, as related, the Walker group sank four Igel U-boats (U-762, U-238, U-734, and U-424).