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

by Clay Blair

  Sixteen U-boats sailed from France, Norway, or Germany to the Far East during this same period, January 1 to June 1, 1944, most with supplies for the German base in Penang and the boats operating from there. Nine were U-cruisers, two were VIIF torpedo-supply boats, three were IXCs, including the second gift from Hitler to Tojo, the IXC40 U-1224 or “Marco Polo II,” and one was an ex-Italian cargo conversion.

  These Far East boats sailed at a rate of four per month from January to May. The newest—and last—Type XIV “Milk Cow,” U-490, long delayed in the Baltic, joined the parade with a load of supplies as well as fuel. Allied ASW forces sank ten of the sixteen boats; only six reached bases in the Far East. The long voyage of one of the U-cruisers was to become the most notorious of the war, the single, unequivocal German atrocity in the U-boat war.

  The first of the four boats to sail was the veteran IXD2 cruiser U-177, commanded by Heinz Buchholz, age thirty-four, who left Bordeaux on January 2. About a month later, on February 6, a B-24 of U.S. Navy Bombing Squadron VB 107, based on Ascension Island, found and sank U-177 with six depth charges. The aircrew, commanded by pilot C. I. Pinnell, reported “survivors in the water.” Another Navy B-24 of YB 107 dropped a life raft and life jackets. About fifty-six hours later, the light cruiser Omaha rescued fourteen Germans who said Buchholz and about five other crew were killed in the water by three exploding depth charges during Pinnell’s second attack. U-177 sank no ships on this patrol.

  The next to sail was the new VIIF torpedo-supply boat U-1062, commanded by Karl Albrecht, age thirty-nine. He left Bergen on January 3 with a load of forty torpedoes, including five in her tubes for self-defense. Albrecht was to refuel from Charlotte Schliemann, then Brake, but after those tankers were lost, he met Lüdden in the France-bound U-188 on March 22, as related, and gave him new Enigma keys and got some fuel. Continuing on to Penang, on April 8, Albrecht linked up with Junker in the IXC40 U-532, who was aborting to Penang and took on some more fuel. The two boats entered Penang in company on April 19.

  Then sailed the new IXD2 cruiser U-852, commanded by Wilhelm Eck, age twenty-seven, who left Kiel on January 18 to conduct what became the most notorious U-boat patrol of the war. Then a Kapitänleutnant (lieutenant commander), Eck was a member of the crew of 1934, who had commanded a minesweeper from the beginning of the war to May 1942. He then volunteered for U-boats and after the required specialized schooling for officers, he made one war patrol as a watch officer on the famous U-124, commanded by young Johann Mohr, who earned the Ritterkreuz with Oak Leaves before his death in the sinking of that boat.

  Prior to Eck’s departure from Kiel, Adalbert Schnee at U-boat Control, who had won a Ritterkreuz with Oak Leaves as well, briefed him. Schnee pointed out the ominous fact that four of five preceding U-cruisers in Eck’s series—U-847, U-848, U-849, and U-850—commanded, respectively, by Ritterkreuz holders Herbert Kuppisch, Wilhelm Rollmann, Heinz-Otto Schultze, and the old hand Klaus Ewerth, had all been sunk on first cruises to the Indian Ocean,* most likely in the South Atlantic near the equator and/or Ascension Island, where the Allies had established an air base that worked in cooperation with Allied air bases in Freetown and elsewhere on the west coast of Africa, which included Navy B-24s of Squadron VB 107. Inasmuch as the U-cruisers were clumsy and slow divers, Eck was to be especially watchful, not only on the passage through the North Atlantic but also through the South Atlantic.

  After an unusually stressful voyage—submerged most of the daylight hours— on March 13 Eck reached the South Atlantic waters near the site where Hartenstein in U-156 had sunk the Laconia, Late that evening the bridge watch spotted a lone freighter, the 4,700-ton Peleus, a Greek under charter to Great Britain. Commanded by Minas Mavris, she was en route in ballast from Freetown to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a total crew of thirty-five.*

  Eck tracked Peleus until nightfall, then at about 7:50, while on the surface, he fired two torpedoes with magnetic pistols from close range. One or both hit and Peleus literally disintegrated. Except for the flotsam—and several life rafts— within three minutes there was no sign of Peleus. Probably half the crew survived the violent explosion and the rapid sinking and got in the life rafts or clung to debris. In order to ascertain the name and tonnage of his victim, Eck temporarily took on board U-852 the Greek third officer, Agis Kefalas, and a “Russian” seaman, Pierre Neumann, from whom Eck got a life ring on which the ship’s name was painted. After returning these men to their raft, Eck insisted that the lights on it and the other rafts be extinguished so that other Allied forces in the area would not find any trace of Peleus until U-852 was well clear.

  In the tension of the moment, Eck “lost his nerve,” as Schnee aptly put it later. He decided that to absolutely conceal evidence of the sinking, the big pieces of debris—and the life rafts—should be destroyed, even though, as he said later, the acts of destruction might cost the lives of some survivors and, if successful, would certainly deprive the crewmen of their only means of survival.† He therefore ordered that machine guns, machine pistols, and hand grenades be brought to the bridge and that the twin 20mm and the 37mm flak guns be manned.

  After summoning all officers topside, for about the next five hours—to about 1:00 A.M., March 14—Eck maneuvered U-852 through the wreckage and lifeboats, firing away by the light of the signal lamps at close range, heedless of the survivors. The first watch officer, Gerhard Kolditz, and the experienced chief engineer, Hans Richard Lenz, age twenty-seven, “objected” to the carnage, Lenz strongly. And yet, Lenz said later, he grabbed a machine gun from an enlisted man, Wolfgang Schwender, and shot at the wreckage because “Schwender, long known to many as one of the most unsatisfactory ratings on our boat, was unworthy to carry out such an order” The second watch officer, August Hoffmann, age twenty-one, said later that he engaged in the slaughter only reluctantly—and on direct orders from Eck— because during his earlier interrogation of one of the two survivors, he felt “sorry” for him and “did not want to shoot at them.” Eck even ordered the ship’s physician and his close friend, Walter Weisspfenning, age thirty-three, to shoot.

  The life rafts proved to be very difficult to sink. Finally Eck called a halt and hauled away in the darkness. Informed that his crew was disgruntled and displeased, Eck went below and addressed his men on the ship’s P.A. system. “I was under the impression that the mood on board was rather a depressing one,” Eck recalled. “On account of that I said to the crew that with a heavy heart I had finally made that decision ... to destroy the remainder of the sunk ship.”

  Four crewmen of Peleus, including the third officer, Agis Kefalas, who was badly wounded in the right arm, lived through the massacre, but Kefalas later died of his wounds. The other three men survived: two Greeks, chief officer Antonios Liossis and seaman Dimitrios Argiros, and a British stoker, Rocco Said. The Portuguese neutral Alexandre Silva found and rescued them on April 20, after forty-nine days on the raft. All three men later gave sworn affidavits to British naval authorities describing the Peleus atrocity.

  Inasmuch as Peleus had been blown to bits, there had been no opportunity for her crew to broadcast a submarine alarm or an SOS. Allied forces therefore remained ignorant of her loss and mounted no special hunt for U-852, and thus she remained undetected. Continuing south, Eck reached the Cape Town area on April 1. While submerged that day, he found and sank another lone ship, the 5,300-ton British freighter Dahomian. Eck did not surface to determine the name and nationality of this vessel or to destroy wreckage or survivors. Well away from that area on April 4, he notified U-boat Control of his two sinkings, and Control in turn authorized him to “transfer to the Indian Ocean as commander sees fit.”

  Eck entered the Indian Ocean and patrolled northward through the Mozambique Channel toward Allied Somaliland (Somalia) and the Arabian Sea. Early on the morning of May 2, a Wellington of British Squadron 621 of the Aden Command, piloted by H. Roy Mitchell, sighted U-852 on the surface near Ras Hafun, Somaliland, and attacked, dropping four well
-aimed, shallow-set depth charges. Eck crash-dived, but the explosions damaged his main induction and his batteries and caused flooding, forcing him back to the surface. For the next twelve hours Eck fought off a half dozen Wellingtons of Squadron 621 and Squadron 8, incurring seven dead, including the first watch officer, Kolditz, and about fifteen wounded. Meanwhile, a British hunter-killer group (the destroyer Raider, sloop Falmouth, frigate Parret) hastened to the scene.

  During the evening, Eck limped into a small bay to effect repairs. In so doing, he grounded fast in mud about 130 yards from shore. Concluding that he could no longer resist at sea, he gave orders to destroy secret papers, abandon ship, and blow up the boat. The survivors of U-852 swam ashore, hoping to somehow escape overland. However, armed shore parties from the three British ships, assisted by the Somaliland Camel Corps, captured all fifty-nine Germans, including Eck, and landed them at Aden on May 6. Under interrogation, disaffected enlisted men revealed the Peleus atrocity and when Allied intelligence officers confronted the chief engineer, Lenz, he confirmed the story.

  After the war, the British convened a military court in Hamburg on October 17, 1945, and charged five men of U-852 with committing war crimes in the Peleus sinking. The accused were Heinz Eck, second watch officer August Hoffmann, Chief Engineer Hans Richard Lenz, “helicopter” airman Wolfgang Schwender, and the physician Walter Weisspfenning. Finding all five men guilty, on November 8 the court sentenced Eck, Hoffmann, and Weisspfenning to death, Lenz to life imprisonment, and Schwender to fifteen years. At 8:40 A.M. on November 30, at Crossborsteler Chaussee in Hamburg, a British firing squad executed the three men. Subsequently British authorities reduced Lenz’s sentence from life to twenty-one years and Schwender’s from fifteen to ten years. Schwender was paroled on December 21, 1951, after seven and a half years of incarceration and Lenz on May 27, 1952, after eight years of incarceration.*

  As stated, the Peleus atrocity proved to be an aberration, the single unequivocal instance of criminal conduct by a U-boat skipper in World War II. The evidence gathered for the trial of Eck et al. was introduced with telling effect at the trial of Dönitz at Nuremberg in an attempt to prove he waged criminal warfare. Furthermore, two Kriegsmarine officers, Karl-Heinz Moehle (commander of Training Flotilla 5) and Peter Josef Heisig, a close friend of Hoffmann’s and a junior watch officer on U-877, came forward in Nuremberg to imply falsely under oath that Dönitz desired that U-boat skippers murder shipwrecked crews to prevent them from manning other ships and that Eck et al. were merely carrying out Dönitz’s unspoken—and unordered—but clearly implied desires.†

  The large, former Italian submarine Bagnolini left next with supplies for Penang.‡ Redesignated U-IT22 and commanded by Karl Wunderlich, Bagnolini sailed from Bordeaux on January 19. Allied codebreakers tracked her southward. In mid-South Atlantic on February 12, a B-24 of American Navy Squadron VB 107, based on Ascension Island, attacked the boat, dropping six depth charges in three runs. Wunderlich reported that the missiles killed one man, wrecked a periscope and fuel tank, and caused other damage. He added that although he had lost thirty-two tons of fuel from the wrecked tank he could still reach Penang without refueling, luckily for him since the Allies destroyed the Charlotte Schliemann in the Indian Ocean this same day.

  Wunderlich had on board a number of spare Naxos radar detectors, Enigma keys, and other electronics. Since Wilhelm Spahr’s U-cruiser U-178, inbound from the Indian Ocean, had no Naxos, Control directed Wunderlich to rendezvous with Spahr south of the Cape of Good Hope on or about March 11. Again acting on Enigma decrypts, British authorities laid an air-sea trap for these two boats at the meeting place. In successive depth-charge attacks on March 11, three Catalinas of British Squadron 262, piloted by the Canadian Frederick J. Roddick, E.S.S. Nash, and A. H. (“Oscar”) Surridge, sank U-IT22 with the loss of all hands. Spahr in U-178 reported a big oil slick at the rendezvous and continued on to France without Naxos. Although he was bedeviled by serious engine problems, the canny Spahr escaped another Allied trap when he met the outbound IXC40 U-843 on April 4 to get new Enigma keys and finally limped into Bordeaux on May 25, completing an unspeakably arduous and hazardous voyage of 181 days. The badly worn U-178 did not sail again.

  Next to sail was the new VIIF torpedo-supply boat U-1059, commanded by Günter Leupold. Loaded with forty torpedoes, she left Bergen on February 12, the day after Leupold’s twenty-third birthday. She was to meet the XIV “Milk Cow” tanker U-488, commanded by a new skipper, Bruno Studt, age twenty-five, west of the Cape Verdes, top off all fuel bunkers, then proceed to Penang. The U-488 sailed ten days later, on February 22, after seventy-three days of refit and upgrades at Brest.

  At this time the American “jeep” carrier Block Island and her escorts were operating in the eastern Atlantic. As related, on March 1, the group sank the VIICs U-603 and U-709. Thereafter, on March 8, the group put into Casablanca to refuel and replenish. American codebreakers provided information on the rendezvous of the XIV tanker U-488 and the VIIF U-1059, which they described as the “first refueling operation in the Atlantic” area since the previous November, when U-488, the only “Milk Cow” then left in the Atlantic U-boat force, was last at sea.

  After merely four days in port, the Block Island group sailed from Casablanca, commanded by a new skipper, Francis M. Hughes. Several days later, the Admiralty sent out the message prohibiting attacks on U-boats meeting to refuel.

  The Americans either failed to receive this message or chose to ignore it, probably the latter. The Block Island group steamed west at best speed, determined to make every possible effort to sink the two valuable supply boats, the XIV tanker U-488 and the VIIF U-1059 torpedo carrier.

  On the afternoon of March 16, a U-boat bound for West African waters surfaced to air the boat and to conduct much-needed gunnery practice. This was the IXC40 U-801, commanded by Hans-Joachim Brans, age twenty-eight, embarked on her second war patrol. By pure happenstance, U-801 had surfaced in the air search path of the Block Island group. A Wildcat-Avenger team, piloted by Paul Sorenson and C. A. Wooddell, respectively, sighted and immediately attacked U-801. In two strafing runs, Sorenson in the Wildcat killed one German and wounded nine, including the skipper, Brans. As U-801 crash-dived, Wooddell in the Avenger dropped two well-aimed depth charges and sonobuoys, but the U-boat got away.

  Hughes in Block Island perhaps believed he had prematurely happened upon the rendezvous of U-488 and U-1059. Whatever the case, he directed the group to hunt the U-boat to exhaustion. When Brans surfaced U-801 that night to bury the dead crewman, he set up a rendezvous with the “Milk Cow” U-488, which had a doctor who could treat him and his wounded. The Block Island group DFed this transmission and sent out night-flying, MAO-equipped Avengers to track U-80L These planes and others, which arrived after dawn on March 17, dropped sonobuoys and depth charges, some of which severely damaged U-801 and drove her down to 984 feet.

  The Block Island aircraft homed in two ships of the hunter-killer group: the veteran destroyer Corry and the new but battle-tested destroyer escort Bronstein, which on March 1 had killed U-603 and assisted in the kill of U-709. Corry and Bronstein, commanded by George D. Hoffmann and Sheldon H. Kinney, respectively, got sonar contacts and carried out eight depth-charge and Hedgehog attacks. These wrecked U-801 and brought her to the surface to abandon ship and scuttle, whereupon Corry opened up with her four 4” guns and one 3” gun and Bronstein with her three 3” guns. The American intelligence report stated:

  A scene of the most appalling disorganization and devastation ensued. Within the boat the order to abandon ship never reached the bow compartment where members of the crew only realized that the end had come when they saw telegraphists destroying their secret equipment. Brans was the first on the bridge and after him were hoisted the wounded. The Quartermaster followed with two line officers after him. The surface craft immediately opened a very accurate fire and as the first of the men reached the bridge they saw Brans hanging like a corpse over the night f
iring stand. The Quartermaster, lying at his feet, was a ghastly headless figure.

  The engineer, Franz Schumann, assumed command, scuttled, and elected to go down with the boat. Ten Germans perished; Corry and Bronstein recovered forty-seven.

  Proceeding south westward on March 19, another Wildcat-Avenger team from Block Island discovered Leupold’s VIIF torpedo carrier U-1059 on the surface. Like U-801, she was casually disposed. The pilots, William H. Cole and Norman T. Dowty, noted that about eighteen crewmen were in the water for a swim, a perfect setup for the Americans. Cole in the Wildcat strafed. Dowty in the Avenger dropped two perfectly aimed depth charges, which destroyed U-1059 in mere seconds. At about the same time, flak damage forced Dowty to ditch. He and his radioman perished, but his rear gunner, Mark E. Fitzgerald (an ensign), got out. Eight Germans survived the sinking of U-1059. Three, including skipper Leupold, joined Fitzgerald in his and another life raft. About two hours later, the destroyer Corry of Block Island’s group rescued Fitzgerald, Leupold, and seven other Germans, all of whom were wounded or injured.

  American intelligence officers who interrogated the garrulous anti-Nazi Leupold and some other Germans, wrote:

  Prior to the departure of U-1059 from Kiel, Leupold had an interview with Korvettenkapitän Oskar Moehle, commanding officer of the 5th U-boat [training] Flotilla. In the course of issuing orders for the patrol, Moehle transmitted to Leupold specific oral orders from the admiral commanding U-boats [Godt] that if any ships were sunk all survivors were to be exterminated. When the commanding officer of U-1059 expressed surprise and indignation at such an order, Moehle told him that this was a positive order from the commander-in-chief [Dönitz] and was a part of the total war that was now being waged. Before leaving, Leupold had occasion to discuss this order with other U-boat commanders, who all stated that, order or no order, they had no intention of complying.*