by Clay Blair
Meyer was to patrol home via the Irish Sea and North Channel, but these orders were rescinded when Control received the “spy” report of the new minefields. He reached Norway on February 8, completing a patrol of sixty days—one of the most successful of that time.
• The VIIC41 U-1172, commanded by Jürgen Kuhlmann, age twenty-four, sailed from Kristiansand on December 23. Control directed Kuhlmann to enter the Irish Sea via North Channel and patrol south to Anglesey, then return to Norway by the same route. When Control got the “spy” report of the minefields, it re scinded these orders and directed U-1172 to go southabout Ireland into St. George’s Channel, thence into the Irish Sea and return to Norway the same way.
Kuhlmann had a brief but lively patrol. On January 21 and 23, he sank two small Norwegian freighters off Anglesey: the 1,200-ton Galatea and the 1,600-ton Vigsnes. On January 27, British hunter-killer Support Group 5, composed of the American-built British destroyer escorts Bligh, Keats, and Tyler, found and sank U-1172. There were no survivors.
The U-285, commanded by Konrad Bornhaupt, sailed from Bergen for her second patrol on December 20. Like Kuhlmann in U-1172, Bornhaupt had orders to go southabout Ireland to St. George’s Channel, thence northward into the Irish Sea near Anglesey and to return to Norway via North Channel After the “spy” report of new minefields in North Channel came in, Control rescinded the orders for U-285 to return via North Channel and told Bornhaupt to come home southabout Ireland. Bornhaupt found no targets and reached Norway on January 31, a patrol of forty-three days.
The U-764, commanded by Hans-Kurt von Bremen, sailed from Bergen on the day after Christmas. She was the third of the boats that had left France in August to return to combat. Control sent her to patrol in the English Channel off Cherbourg. Von Bremen had no success and returned to Norway on February 10, a fruitless cruise of forty-seven days. The boat did not sail again until May 1.
The U-825, commanded by Gerhard Stoelker, age thirty-four, sailed from Kristiansand on December 29. Control directed Stoelker to go southabout Ireland and patrol through St. George’s Channel to Anglesey in the Irish Sea. Although the record is not clear, it is likely that while in St. George’s Channel, on January 27, he hit two ships of the inbound fast convoy Halifax 332, the 8,300-ton Norwegian tanker, Solör, which beached, a total wreck, and the 7,200-ton American Liberty Ruben Dario, which limped into port. Stoelker returned southabout Ireland to Norway on February 18, a patrol of fifty-two days. He resailed U-825 on April 3, too late to achieve anything.
The U-1051, commanded by Heinrich von Holleben, age twenty-five, also sailed from Kristiansand on December 29. Control likewise directed von Holleben to go southabout Ireland to St. George’s Channel to the Irish Sea near Anglesey. It is just possible that von Holleben in U-1051, who was close by Stoelker in U-825 on January 27, also hit Solor or Ruben Dario or both. The speculation cannot be resolved because warships of one of the six hunter-killer groups that the Admiralty deployed in this area of the Irish Sea sank U-1051 that same day with the loss of all hands. In a postwar reassessment, the Admiralty credited this kill to the American-built British destroyer escorts Alymer, Bentinck, Calder, and Manners. During the fight, von Holleben hit Manners with a T-5, but she made port.
• The VIIC41 U-1017, commanded by a new skipper, Werner Riecken, age thirty-two, also sailed from Kristiansand on December 29. Control directed the boat to patrol the English Channel off Cherbourg and the Bay of the Seine. In a busy and effective cruise, Riecken claimed sinking four freighters for about 25,000 tons plus possibly a corvette. Allied records confirmed three freighters sunk off Portsmouth and Falmouth, respectively: the 7,200-ton British Liberty ship Fort Douglas, the 5,200-ton British Everleigh, and the 5,400-ton Belgian Persier. Riecken also may have sunk the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship Sibert He returned to Norway on February 28, completing a quite successful patrol of sixty-two days.
Three Type VIIs preparing to sail on first war patrols from Norway in late 1944 did not make it. The new VIIC41 U-1276, commanded by Karl-Heinz Wendt, age twenty-four, hit a mine outside Kristiansand on November 16 and had to abort for repair. On the night of December 28-29, about two hundred aircraft of RAF Bomber Command raided Horten. Bombs hit the U-682 and U-735, commanded by Sven Thienenmann, age thirty-two, and Hans-Joachim B6rner, age twenty-six, respectively. The U-682 was severely damaged and returned to Hamburg, where in March other Allied bombers destroyed her. The U-735 was sunk with the loss of most of the crew, including skipper Börner.*
In order to deter—or eliminate—British aircraft-carrier attacks on the Norwegian naval bases and inshore waters, and possibly to add to the impact of Hitler’s upcoming December. 16 Ardennes offensive by sinking a carrier or two, Dönitz directed Control to blockade the British naval base at Scapa Flow. Eight snort boats were designated for this important “anticarrier” task, two from the Atlantic force and six from the Arctic. The upshot was another humiliating fiasco for the Kriegsmarine. In brief:
• The VIIC41 U-1020 of the Atlantic force, commanded by Otto-Emil Eberlein, age thirty-one, sailed from Kristiansand on November 24. Eberlein loitered for twenty-five days in the vicinity of Scapa Flow but saw nothing to shoot. On December 30, Control directed him to leave Scapa Flow and patrol the North Sea off northeast Scotland in Moray Firth. The next day, December 31, Eberlein hit the 1,700-ton British destroyer Zephyr but she limped into port. The U-1020 was never heard from again. Allied authorities listed the cause of her loss as “unknown.” German authorities believed she hit a mine.
• The VIIC41 U-297 of the Atlantic force, commanded by Wolfgang Aldegarmann, age twenty-four, sailed from Kristiansand on November 26. It was thought that eleven days later, on December 6, warships of British hunter-killer Support Group 19 and Sunderlands of British Squadron 201 teamed up and sank U-297 with the loss of all hands. However, in a recent reassessment, the Admiralty declared her loss to unknown causes. Unaware of the loss, on December 30 Control directed Aldegarmann to leave Scapa Flow, enter North Minch, and patrol for carriers off the British naval base at Loch Ewe!
• The Arctic boat U-739, commanded by Ernst Mangold, age twenty-seven, sailed from Trondheim on December 16. En route to Scapa Flow, the boat’s port diesel failed beyond repair, forcing Mangold to abort to Trondheim. He arrived on December 21, after merely five days at sea. He then returned the boat to the Baltic for refit and left for other duty. Refurbished, the U-739 returned to the Arctic force commanded by a new skipper.
• The Arctic boat U-737, commanded by a new skipper, Friedrich August Gréus, age twenty-three, who came from long service on the lost VIID (minelayers) U-214 and U-217. He left Narvik on December 6 and entered Trondheim on December 10. Control relieved him of the assignment to Scapa Flow because of his inexperience in command, and directed Gréus to return U-737 to Narvik. While entering that place on December 19, a German minesweeper accidentally rammed and sank U-737, Gréus and nineteen of the crew survived.
• The Arctic boat U-315, commanded by Herbert Zoller, age twenty-five, sailed from Trondheim on Christmas Day. While en route to Scapa Flow, Zoller’s starboard diesel failed and he was forced to return to Trondheim on January 6. After repairs, this Arctic boat was transferred to the Atlantic force.
• The Arctic boat U-278, commanded by the veteran Joachim Franze, age twenty-six, sailed from Trondheim on December 12. Nine days later Franze entered Bergen with a defective periscope. After repairs, he resailed to Scapa Flow on Christmas Eve. On January 14, after two arduous and luckless weeks off Scapa Flow, Franze requested permission to shift to the North Sea off northeast Scotland as far south as the Firth of Forth. Concluding that the Scapa Flow operation was futile, Control granted the request.* Franze returned U-278 to Norway on February 11.
• The Arctic boat U-313, commanded by Friedhelm Schweiger, age twenty-seven, sailed from Trondheim on December 23. After two stressful and fruitless weeks off Scapa Flow, Control also authorized Schweiger to shift to the North Sea off northeast Scotland, pat
rolling as far south as the Firth of Forth if he so desired. He sank no ships in these waters and put into Norway on February 15. After a refit he returned the boat to the Arctic force.
So ended the important Scapa Flow “anticarrier” operation. Both VIIC41s of the Atlantic force that participated (U-297’, U-1020) were lost. One of the six boats transferred from the Arctic force was rammed and lost (U-737, returning to Narvik). Three Arctic boats (U-312, U-315, U-739) aborted with mechanical difficulties. Only two boats (U-278, U-313) carried out full patrols to Scapa Flow and northeast Scotland and returned to Norway. The total damage inflicted on the Allies by these boats was minuscule: the British destroyer Zephyr damaged by Eberlein in U-1020; possibly two freighters, Bestik and Ashbury, hit by Franze in U-278 †
Nine Type VII snort boats sailing from Norway carried out other special missions. In addition to the aforementioned U-772 and U-1009, five VIIs conducted weather-reporting patrols for the benefit of the Luftwaffe and German Army. Three survived (U-245, U-396, U-1053), but two were lost:
• The new U-925, commanded by Helmut Knoke, age thirty-eight, which sailed from Kristiansand on August 24. The boat was never heard from again, German authorities believed she hit a mine on or about September 18 in the Iceland-Faeroes gap while attempting to enter the Atlantic.
• The U-248, commanded by a new skipper, Johann-Friedrich Loos, age twenty-three, which sailed from Trondheim on December 3. Initially Control directed Loos to patrol the English Channel but on December 20, it rescinded those orders and Loos went to an area northwest of the Azores to become the “south” weather reporter for the benefit of Hitler’s December 16 Ardennes offensive. When Allied codebreakers provided information on this change of mission for U-248, the American hunter-killer Support Group 62 (four destroyer escorts) sailed from the Azores to hunt her down.
The group apparently found U-248 on January 8. Loos reported that he shot at a “corvette” that day, then eluded his hunters. Stressing the vital importance of the weather reports to the Luftwaffe and German Army units in the Ardennes offensive, Control authorized Loos to shift two hundred miles to the north if the hunter-killer group remained persistent. Loos was unable to shake the group and on January 16, the warships sank U-248 with the loss of all hands and fished out “clothing, books, flesh and debris” for proof of the kill. Allied authorities gave credit for the victory to all four American destroyer escorts: Hayter, Hubbard, Otter, and Varian.
Control diverted two other experienced VIIs to special missions. These were the U-722, commanded by Hans-Heinrich Reimers, age twenty-eight, and the U-773, commanded by Hugo Baldus, age twenty-three. Both sailed from Norway in mid-October with a load of antitank weapons and ammo for the German garrison holding out at St. Nazaire. Baldus in U-773 reached that port on November 18; Reimers in U-722 on November 20.
After each boat took on fuel, 3.2 tons of valuable cargo, and four dockyard specialists, they sailed from St. Nazaire on December 7. Both returned to Bergen: Reimers in U-722 on December 29, Baldus in U-773 on January 10.
The sixty-eight Type VII snort boats that sailed for war patrols from Norway in the “new U-boat war” from July to December 1944 achieved little in meaningful damage to Allied shipping. Sixteen boats were lost, thirteen on first patrols. Eighteen starts ended in aborts. Fourteen of the fifty-one boats sank or destroyed twenty Allied ships for 98,600 tons in the last six months of 1944 and eleven ships for 53,600 tons in the early weeks of 1945. This was a total of thirty ships for 147,895 tons sunk or destroyed, including seven warships.* Thirty-seven sank no confirmed ships.
When viewed in the larger prospective, the results of the VIIs in the “new U-boat war” were virtually negligible. However, the reappearance of U-boats close to their coasts rattled the ordinarily imperturbable British. These new snort boat operations led to exaggerated fears, unfounded threat inflations, and unreasonably dire forecasts about the probable effectiveness of the impending campaign by the Type XXI and Type XXIII electro boats. In fact, the chief contribution by these Type VII snort boats was to terrorize the Admiralty, punch-drunk from almost five and a half years of naval warfare.
TYPE IX SNORT BOAT PATROLS FROM NORWAY: 1944
Seventeen Type IX snort boats sailed from Germany via Norway to the Atlantic to add impact to the “new U-boat war” from July to December 1944.† All were new boats. Some stopped in Norway briefly to repair battle damage or to make voyage repairs or top off fuel tanks. Owing to the lack of facilities in Norway, returning IXs had to go on to Germany for refits.
Inasmuch as the type IX snort boats were unsuitable for operations in British coastal waters and there were no more U-tankers to support patrols to remote waters, Control sent most of them to Canadian waters and several to the areas between Gibraltar and the Azores. One of the latter sailed only to report weather. Several reported weather while going to or returning from Canada. From September 12, Control authorized the use of the Elektra-Some “beam” navigational system, which employed seven shore-based transmitting stations, including one in “neutral” Spain.
These were arduous and stressful patrols, very hard on the crews. The boats had first to travel from Kiel to Wilhelmshaven to Norway, dodging enemy mines and enduring saturation Allied air coverage. As related, Allied aircraft damaged one of the seventeen IXs, U-865, which had aborted three times in July and August. The facilities in Norway were still limited, and all were the targets of Allied air raids. Another RAF Bomber Command raid on Bergen on the night of October 28-29 by fifty-one Lancasters left the dockyards “a total loss,” Control logged. Some IXs had to conduct further snort training in Norwegian waters. Snort accidents and failures remained commonplace.
Upon leaving Norway for the North Atlantic, the IXs cruised on batteries and the snort for about 1,500 miles to an area south-southwest of Iceland that was safer from air attack. Generally during that leg, the skippers ran submerged on batteries during the twenty hours of “daytime” and snorted during the four hours of semi-darkness or darkness, making good about fifty or sixty miles a day. Hence the voyages to and from safer open Atlantic waters took three weeks or longer. Those boats proceeding to Canadian waters had to resume this crawling pace when they approached the Newfoundland Bank, so that the one-way four-thousand-mile transatlantic voyage from Bergen, Norway, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, might take six weeks or longer.
Later in the fall, those boats making the voyage to Canada bucked the usual hostile and stormy weather in the North Atlantic. By October it was again freezing cold not only topside but also belowdecks. The boats encountered ice and snow storms. Never reliable at best, the snorts in Canadian waters iced up severely, adding new challenges. Communications with Control were poor.
The seventeen patrols, in brief:
• The IXC40 U-855, commanded by Prosper Ohlsen, age twenty-six, sailed on July 3 to relieve a weather boat, the new IXC40 U-858, In addition to weather reports, both boats had orders to provide fuel to two Type IXs returning to Norway from the Caribbean, U-516 and U-539. The Allies decrypted Enigma and DFed radio messages relating to the refueling rendezvous and put “jeep” carrier hunter-killer groups on the scent, but they had no luck. After refueling U-539, the returning weather boat U-858, commanded by Thilo Bode, age twenty-six, set a course for German waters to refit. On September 19, unidentified Allied aircraft hit her hard but she managed to limp into Flensburg on October 4. After refueling U-516, Ohlsen in U-855 also set a course for home waters, but on about September 18, the boat possibly hit a mine and sank with the loss of all hands.
• The IXC40 U-1229, commanded by Armin Zinke, age thirty-six, sailed from Kiel on July 13. Zinke had embarked a forty-two-year-old Abwehr agent, Oskar Mantel, whom he was to land on the coast of the United States, probably in Maine or Massachusetts. After that “special task” had been completed, he was to conduct an antishipping patrol in Canadian waters. Zinke topped off his fuel tanks in Norway and sailed from there on July 17, but a serious snort failure forced the boat into Trondhei
m on July 20. A week later she finally snorted off for Canada.
Allied U-boat trackers DFed the position of U-1229 on August 8 and put the “jeep” carrier Bogue hunter-killer group on her trail. About noon, on August 20, an Avenger from Bogue, piloted by Alex X. Brokas, found U-1229 on the surface and attacked with rockets. These missed but Brokas dropped two close depth charges that hurled five flak gunners overboard and forced Zinke to crash dive. He remained submerged for two hours, but the explosions had wrecked thirty-five battery cells and he ran out of power and had to surface. Six aircraft from Bogue were waiting and attacked immediately with machine guns and depth charges, a wild melee that probably killed Zinke and his first watch officer. The engineer, Willy Büttner, scuttled the boat. Bogue escorts rescued forty-one of the fifty-nine Germans and took them to Argentia. One died en route.
The agent, Oskar Mantel, wearing a Kriegsmarine uniform and wounded in three places, was among the forty German survivors. When he was identified, the FBI found an old file on him and J. Edgar Hoover requested that the Navy turn him over to his agency so that his American “contacts” could be ascertained and arrested. Concerned that Hoover would publicize the capture of this “spy” and that American POWs might be turned over to the Gestapo in reprisal, the Navy kept Mantel unpublicized and treated him like other POWs until 1947, when he was repatriated. He was never tried for being a German “spy,” and therefore the purposes of his mission so late in the war have never come to light.
• The IXC40 sister ships U-1221 and U-1223, commanded by Paul Acker mann, age twenty-four, and Albert Kneip, age twenty-three, respectively, sailed on antishipping patrols to Canadian waters on August 20 and 28, respectively. When Allied codebreakers alerted Tenth Fleet to the threat, the “jeep” carrier Core hunter-killer group searched doggedly but failed to find either boat.