by Clay Blair
• • •
The chief of U-boat Forces West, Hans-Rudolf Rösing, mounted eleven war patrols from France in the month of July to attack Allied invasion forces: ten by snort boats and one by the nonsnort U-333. One of the snort boats, the VIID U-214, was to lay a second minefield, this one off the south coast of England. The result was yet another catastrophe: Seven of the eleven U-boats were lost and two were forced to abort* to French ports in the English Channel. The stories of these boats, in brief:
• The snort boat U-741, commanded by Gerhard Palmgren, returned from the aborted ammo mission to Cherbourg and resailed from Brest to the Bay of the Seine on July 5. A few hours after leaving port, three Allied “destroyers” attacked U-741 and her escorts. Palmgren crash-dived and escaped, but the gunfire damaged his forward periscope. Nonetheless, he continued to the Allied landing area, hugging the south coast of England where, he reported, ASW measures were less intense.
While cruising on electric motors at 131 feet on July 12, the gear of an Allied minesweeper caught in the top hamper of U-741. This mishap carried away the U-boat’s forward and aft radio antenna lines and one tangled in the port propeller. Later that night Palmgren surfaced and cut away the line, but still later, while he was snorting to charge batteries, an Allied vessel rammed the boat and severely damaged the snort and the main periscope.
Palmgren aborted and set a course for Le Havre, where his father served in the minesweeper force. When Rösing got the word, he radioed Palmgren that Allied aircraft had demolished the dockyards at Le Havre and since the place was imperiled by further air attacks, Palmgren was to return to Brest or, failing that, put into Boulogne. The message did not arrive in time; Palmgren put into Le Havre on July 15.
• The snort boat U-212, commanded by Helmut Vogler, also returned from the aborted ammo supply mission to Cherbourg, resailed from Brest to the landing area on July 5 with U-741. When the British “destroyers” attacked the two U-boats and the escorts, the U-212 also avoided destruction.† But nothing further was ever heard from Vogler in U-212. It is believed that he reached the Allied landing area on about July 13. According to the Allied reckoning, on July 21 the British frigates Curzon and Ekins teamed up to sink U-212 with Hedgehogs and depth charges near Beachy Head on the south coast of England. There were no German survivors.
• The U-672, newly fitted with a snort and commanded by Ulf Lawaetz, age twenty-seven, sailed from St. Nazaire to the Bay of the Seine on July 6. While approaching the mouth of the English Channel a week later, on July 13, an Allied air craft detected the submerged U-672 and dropped four depth charges. They missed and caused no damage, but the pilots alerted Allied surface forces. Later that after noon, Lawaetz sighted what he took to be an American hunter-killer group comprised of four “destroyers” and “one light cruiser.” He boldly shot a T-5 at the “light cruiser” and another at a “destroyer” but both torpedoes malfunctioned or missed.
Upon learning of this action and the U-6729s position, Rösing ordered Lawaetz to patrol off the Isle of Wight. The U-672 reached that area on July 18 and lay doggo on the bottom. That same afternoon, the British frigate Balfour, commanded by C.D.B. Coventry, detected U-672 and attacked with Hedgehogs. These accurate attacks wrecked and flooded U-672.
Lawaetz soon concluded his situation was hopeless, and in the early hours of July 19 he ordered the crew to surface and scuttle. After his men had destroyed all secret papers and the Enigma, and abandoned ship in individual rubber dinghies, Lawaetz and his chief engineer, Georg Käseberg, scuttled and left the ship last. About twelve hours after the sinking, two British Spitfires reported sighting the survivors in the water. In response, air-sea rescue launches and PT boats sailed from Dartmouth and picked up all fifty-two men of the crew.
• The snort boat U-309, commanded by Hans-Gert Mahrholz, sailed from Brest for the second time to the Bay of the Seine on July 13. After reaching the Allied landing area, he attacked two convoys. From the first, on July 20, he claimed a hit on a 6,800-ton freighter. From the second, on July 24, he claimed sinking two freighters for 14,000 tons. Allied records confirmed only damage to the 7,000-ton British freighter Samneva in the second convoy. Mahrholz returned to Brest on August 2 and, owing to the chaos and lack of berths in that place, he left for La Pallice on August 7.
• The (ex-flak) snort boat U-621, commanded by Hermann Stuckmann, who sank LST 280 on his first patrol, resailed from Brest to the Bay of the Seine on July 15 and reached the Allied landing area on July 23. Two days later he found a convoy and fired two torpedoes. One misfired; the other missed. The next day Stuckmann incurred a snort breakdown that felled many of the crew and partially flooded the boat.
After repairs at sea, Stuckmann resumed his patrol and attacked two more convoys. From the first, on the night of July 29-30, he claimed sinking two freighters for 10,000 tons. Allied records confirmed the sinking of the 2,938-ton British Landing Ship Infantry (LSI) Prince Leopold and damage to the 10,000-ton British troop transport Ascanius. From the second convoy, on August 3, Stuckmann claimed sinking two freighters for 13,000 tons and reported a T-5 miss on a “destroyer.” Allied records do not confirm the sinkings.
Leaving the landing area on August 3, Stuckmann reached Brest eight days later. Generously credited with sinking five freighters for 32,000 tons on this patrol, Stuckmann was awarded a Ritterkreuz, the third to a skipper opposing Neptune forces. His confirmed score for his two patrols into the Allied landing area was two ships sunk (LST 280, LSI Prince Leopold) and one damaged (troop transport Ascanius).
• The snort boat U-275, commanded by a new skipper, Helmut Wehrkamp, age twenty-three, sailed from Brest on July 16 to patrol the waters off Plymouth. On July 22, when Wehrkamp rose to periscope depth to take a navigational bearing on the Eddystone Lighthouse, an aircraft spotted him and alerted a British hunter- killer group. The group hounded U-275 for seven hours, but Wehrkamp got away.
Having been detected, Wehrkamp left the Plymouth area to patrol the Allied landing area in the Bay of the Seine. Almost immediately upon arrival there, a hunter-killer group found U-275 and chased and depth-charged her for eight hours. The resulting damage to U-275 was severe. Thereafter, each time Wehrkamp attempted to snort, Allied “destroyers” pounced and depth-charged the boat. Unable to charge batteries, he let U-275 drift with the currents for about forty-eight hours. When finally the battery was completely exhausted, he surfaced and ran into Boulogne on diesels, arriving on August 1.
• The VIID (minelayer) snort boat U-214, commanded by a new skipper, Gerhard Conrad, age twenty-three, sailed from Brest on July 22 to plant a field of fifteen SMA mines off the southwest coast of England. Four days later, on July 26, the British frigate Cooke, commanded by L. C. Hill, sank U-214 with the loss of all hands.
• The veteran snort boat U-667, which had earlier made a seventy-three-day patrol to the Atlantic in March and April, sailed from St. Nazaire to the English Channel on July 22. She was commanded by a new skipper, Karl-Heinz Lange, age twenty-six. Rösing directed the boat to patrol the mouth of the Bristol Channel.
The salty crew of U-667 supported well its green commander. On August 8, Lange found and attacked convoy EBC 66. His first torpedoes hit the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship Ezra Weston. A convoy escort, the Canadian corvette Regina, rushed to cover the damaged American ship and directed an American LST to remove her crew and take her in tow. While this was going on, Lange torpedoed Regina, which sank “in a matter of seconds.” The American LST rescued about half the crew of Regina—sixty-six men. The damaged Ezra Weston did not reach port.
A week later on August 14, U-667 found another convoy, EBC 72, and Lange attacked, sinking what he thought were two 4,000-ton tankers or freighters. In fact, these confirmed American victims were two landing craft: the 1,653-ton LST 921 and the 246-ton LCI 99.
On August 16, Rösing ordered U-667 to return to a Biscay port. Five days later, Lange reported that he was forty-eight hours out from La Pallice and required an escort and
that he had sunk one “destroyer” and 15,000 tons of merchant shipping. Nothing further was ever heard from U-667. Allied and German authorities presumed she hit a mine off La Pallice on or about August 25 and sank with all hands.
• After her brief sortie into the Bay of Biscay on D day under the command of Ritterkreuz holder Peter Cremer, the famous old nonsnort U-333 had aborted to Lorient, and, as related, Cremer returned to Germany to commission a big electro boat, taking about half the U-333 crew. The ill-starred Hans Fiedler, who had lost U-564 and, more recently, U-998 to Allied air attacks, arrived from Norway to take command of U-333.
Deemed too old and battered to warrant a snort, U-333 finally sailed from Lori-ent on July 23 to patrol off Land’s End near the Scillies. Nothing further was ever heard from this boat. After the war, Cremer learned that on or about the day Fiedler arrived in his patrol area, July 31, the famous British Support Group 2 detected, attacked, and sank U-333, with the loss of all hands. It was Fiedler’s third—and final—command, all destroyed by Allied forces.
The sloop Starling and frigate Loch Killin, which was fitted with the powerful new Squid forward-firing ASW mortar, carried out the attack and received joint credit for the kill, the first by Squid. The much-decorated commander of Support Group 2, forty-eight-year-old Johnny Walker in the sloop Starling, was not present to celebrate this victory. In Liverpool on July 9 he had died of a stroke, thought to have been brought on by overwork and stress.
• After its emergency abort to Boulogne on July 5, the new snort boat U-671, commanded by Wolfgang Hegewald, sailed on July 26 to patrol the Isle of Wight. Merely one day out, the snort broke, flooding the boat and forcing Hegewald back into Boulogne for repairs. He resailed in the early hours of August 1, but the snort again malfunctioned. When the chief engineer, Robert Schroter, age twenty-three, advised Hegewald that the snort could not be repaired at sea—and that four tons of seawater would enter the boat each time the snort was raised—Hegewald aborted the patrol and once again shaped course for Boulogne.
In the late hours of August 4, two British warships, the destroyer Wensleydale and the frigate Stayner, which were escorting four PT boats on patrol off Le Havre, detected the submerged U-671. Gaining sonar contact first, Stayner carried out five depth-charge and three Hedgehog attacks. Hegewald counterattacked with two T-5s, but they malfunctioned or missed. After Wensleydale came up to assist, Stayner conducted three more attacks and Wensleydale four.
These fifteen attacks wrecked and bottomed U-671. Twenty of her fifty-two-man crew, including Hegewald and engineer Schroter, gathered in the conning tower and escaped with breathing apparatus. The British fished out six of these twenty Germans, but one died. The five survivors included engineer Schroter; a watch officer, Hans Schaefer, age twenty-two; and three enlisted men, but not Hegewald.
• The U-984, commanded by the newest Ritterkreuz holder, Heinz Sieder, sailed from Brest for the second time to the Bay of the Seine on July 26. On Au gust 16, Control ordered her to abort her patrol and return to a Biscay port. The boat was never heard from again. Allied authorities credited her kill to three de stroyers of Canadian Support Group 11 in the Bay of Biscay, Chaudiere, Kootenay, and Ottawa II, on August 20. There were no German survivors.
The eleven U-boat patrols mounted in July from French bases*
against the Allied invasion forces resulted in the sinking of four Allied warships and one freighter for about 14,000 tons (four ships by Lange in the U-667) and damage to two freighters for 17,000 tons. In return, Allied forces sank six snort boats and the nonsnort U-333. They forced two snort boats, U-275 and U-741, to abort. About 350 more German submariners were lost (fifty-one captured), enough to man another eight big electro boats.
The convoys on the North Atlantic run supporting Overlord continued to grow in size and complexity and met no opposition from U-boats. The largest convoy of the war, Halifax Slow 300, sailed from New York on July 17. Initially it consisted of 109 merchant ships. Proceeding northeastward, it was joined by thirty-one ships from Halifax, twenty-four from Sydney, and three from St. John’s, Newfoundland, for a total of 167 vessels *
All but one ship, a straggler, of Halifax Slow 300 reached the British Isles by August 3. Altogether the ships delivered one million tons of weaponry, war materiel, and food. The tonnage by category:†
Oil 307,874
Food and Foodstuffs 254,176
Military Equipment 251,297
General Cargo 80,699
Vehicles and Tanks 53,490
Iron and Steel 36,705
Lumber 35.588
1,019,829
THE ALLIED BREAKOUT IN FRANCE
For months a cabal of dissident German Army officers sought to overthrow the Nazi regime by assassinating Hitler, Goring, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler. On July 20, one of the conspirators, a thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel, Count Glaus von Stauffenberg, planted a time bomb in Hitler’s war room at Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair) at Rastenberg, East Prussia. The bomb exploded, killing or fatally wounding four men, but Hitler survived the blast and immediately initiated a roundup of the plotters.
That same day, Admiral Dönitz flew to Wolfschanze where, by coincidence, Benito Mussolini had arrived for a conference. In a meeting with Hitler and Mussolini that afternoon, Dönitz pledged his loyalty to Hitler, as did retired Admiral Raeder later. In the early evening, Dönitz issued a statement to all hands in the Kriegsmarine:
The treacherous attempt to assassinate the Führer fills each and everyone of us with holy wrath and bitter rage toward our criminal enemies and their hirelings. Divine providence spared the German people and its Armed Forces this inconceivable misfortune. In the miraculous escape of our Fuhrer we see additional proof of the righteousness of our cause. Let us now more than ever rally around our Fuhrer and fight with all our strength until victory is ours.
About an hour later, Dönitz issued an amplifying message to all commands of the Kriegsmarine:
The attempt on the Fuhrer’s life was brought about by the clique of generals who were undertaking a military coup. The heads of this clique are General Fromm, General Hoepner, and Field Marshal General von Witzleben.
In place of General Fromm, Reich Fuhrer of the Elite Guard [SS] Himmler will take over the Reserve Army as Commander in Chief. The Navy will institute a state of readiness at once. In this connection, orders to the Navy will come only from the Commander in Chief of the Navy. Orders from Army officers are not to be followed. Orders and instructions of the Reich Fuhrer of the Elite Guard are to be obeyed. See that all Navy officers are informed at once.
Long live the Fuhrer!
Later that same night, Hitler went on the radio to tell the German people about the conspiracy and its failure and to promise revenge in the manner to which the Nazis were accustomed, as he put it. Admiral Dönitz followed the Fuhrer on the air to give the widest possible circulation of his pledge of loyalty to Hitler and to repeat his earlier message to the Kriegsmarine. Historian William L. Shirer wrote that as a result of this failed revolt, the Nazi regime probably executed about five thousand men, most of them German army officers. Among the victims were three senior generals in France who were encouraged to commit suicide: Erwin Rommel, Günther Hans Kluge, and Karl von Stülpnagel. In due course, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, onetime chief of the Abwehr, was among those hanged.
Five days after the failed assassination, General Omar N. Bradley’s First Army achieved its famous breakout (Cobra) through German defenses at Saint-L6. Several days thereafter, General George S. Patton’s Third Army raced through the Saint-L6 gap to Avranches, posing a threat to all of German-occupied Brittany, which had been stripped of most German Army units to fight the battles in Normandy.
Promoted to command the 12th Army Group, composed of the American First, Third, and Ninth Armies, Bradley directed Patton to wheel west and capture St. Malo, Brest, Lorient, and St. Nazaire. Inasmuch as the restoration of Cherbourg as a major Allied unloading facility was badly lagging and Bradley
was concerned that a storm might wreck the temporary facilities in the Normandy beachhead, he needed to capture those Brittany ports so men and materiel could be shipped directly from the States to his armies. Depriving the Germans of U-boat bases in France figured in Bradley’s thinking, but only to a minor degree.
Sensing the possibility of capturing all German forces in Normandy west of the Seine River in a giant wheeling maneuver, Bradley soon canceled his orders to Patton to clear Brittany and directed him to rush the majority of his forces to the east. In this revised plan, only the VIII Corps (three divisions) of the Third Army, commanded by Troy H. Middleton, was to lay siege to the Brittany ports.
When Middleton’s VIII Corps arrived in Brittany in early August, the thin German forces there fell back on the seaports and constructed strong defensive networks. To save the Kriegsmarine bases for as long as possible so that an orderly evacuation of the U-boats, the technicians, and some U-boat gear could be mounted, Hitler ordered the German soldiers to yield no ground and fight to the last man. However, there were not enough German troops to hold all five U-boat bases. Therefore, when the Allies invaded southern France on August 15 (Dragoon), posing an imminent threat to Bordeaux, that southernmost base had to be abandoned by August 25. Nearly four weeks later, on September 19, the northernmost base, Brest, was likewise abandoned.*
The Germans thus consolidated defenses at the three center naval bases: Lorient, St. Nazaire, and La Pallice. Due to the need to press eastward at the utmost speed with all possible ground forces, Eisenhower informed Bradley on September 9 that it was unnecessary to capture those three ports. The German garrisons at those places were therefore to be bypassed, isolated, and contained. Remarkably, these three seaports remained in German hands until the end of the war in Europe.
The Allied pressure on the U-boat bases in August triggered sixteen U-boat transfers among the bases. From Brest, six U-boats retreated to La Pallice and one, U-766, to Bordeaux; the latter then went from Bordeaux to La Pallice. From Lorient, five U-boats shifted to La Pallice. From St. Nazaire, two U-boats went to La Pallice. Two Type VIIs carried ammo from La Pallice to Lorient.†