by Clay Blair
Control happily credited all of Hechler’s claims and on January 21 Dönitz awarded him a Ritterkreuz by radio.* He reached Norway on February 20 and went on to Flensburg for refit. A month later, on March 30, American bombers destroyed U-870 in Bremen.
• The IXC40 U-877, commanded by Eberhard Findeisen, age twenty-eight, sailed from Kristiansand on November 26 to relieve U-870 as the “south” weather boat. While she was outbound from Norway on the surface with escorts, Beaufighters of British Squadron 489 attacked U-877 and dropped two nearby depth charges. In the crash dive that ensued, the retractable “mattress” antenna of the boat’s Hohentwiel radar was ruined, so the boat was handicapped for the entire patrol.
For the next three weeks, U-877 crawled along, making no more than sixty to eighty miles per day. On about December 22, she reached her weather-reporting area. However, her radio failed; she could receive but could not transmit messages. It was believed she was lost, but in case she was not, Control released her from weather reporting and gave her complete freedom of movement. Upon receipt of these instructions, Findeisen chose to proceed west to the New York area.
Two days after Christmas, on December 27, the Canadian corvettes Edmundston and St. Thomas, commanded by L. P. Denny, got sonar contacts on U-877. Edmundston tracked but concluded the contact was not a U-boat. St. Thomas was of much the same mind, but persisted and finally fired her Squid. On a second deliberate pass on the contact, St. Thomas made another Squid attack. Some of these missiles hit U-877 and she plunged nose-first out of control and flooding to almost one thousand feet. In a last-ditch effort to save her, Findeisen blew all ballast tanks, and the boat rose “violently” from that great depth to the surface.
When Findeisen opened the conning-tower hatch, the built-up internal air pressure blew him and the quartermaster through the hatch onto the bridge, and they both fell to the deck with severe head injuries. After the engineer scuttled, the two corvettes rescued all fifty-five Germans and took them to England. The Admiralty credited the Canadian St. Thomas with the kill.
• The IXC40 U-869, commanded by Helmut Neuerburg, age twenty-seven, sailed from Kristiansand on December 8. By the end of the third week, December 29, the boat should have reached the Atlantic via the Iceland-Faeroes gap, but Control had not received the customary signal (“passage report”) indicating this to be the case. Several queries to the boat at the time went unanswered, causing worry at Control. Nonetheless, Control directed U-869 to proceed west and conduct anti-shipping operations off New York. This message also went unanswered, causing “considerable anxiety” at Control, per the war diary of January 3.
The U-869 was one of the boats fitted with the high-speed (“burst”) radio transmitter Kurier. She had conducted Kurier trials in the Skaggerak from November 26 to December 1 with six other boats. These trials were technically difficult and not completely successful. However, Control directed U-869, which was to serve first as a weather boat (Number 3) for the Ardennes offensive, to transmit only by Kurier. It is possible that U-869 sent her “passage report” by Kurier and Control did not receive it.
Having heard nothing from U-869 by January 6, Control was almost certain that the boat was lost. That day, however, in response to repeated queries from Control to state her position, U-869 responded that she was in grid square AK 63, about six hundred miles southwest of Iceland. This message caused further puzzlement at Control. Had the boat followed the usual route through the Iceland-Faeroes gap, the war diary stated, “she should have been considerably further southwest.” Control concluded that on the basis of fifty-five miles per day, the boat must have proceeded to the Atlantic via the Denmark Strait, an unorthodox choice. Furthermore, the absence of weather reports from her for the Ardennes offensive was a grave matter indeed.
Control was in a quandary. Assuming the long passage to the Atlantic had consumed much fuel, Control doubted she had enough left to patrol New York. It directed U-869 to report her fuel reserves immediately “so that a decision can be taken as to allocation of an operational area.” Again there was no response from U-869, “in spite of continuous queries.” Absent any messages, on January 8 Control directed U-869 to carry out a snort patrol off Gibraltar, west of grid square CG 9592, but to go no closer to the strait. Either the boat did not respond to this change of orders or it did so by a Kurier message or by a conventional message that Control did not receive. Nothing further was ever heard positively from U-869.
Control assumed the boat had complied with this change in orders. On February 18, it logged that U-869 had sent a B-bar convoy contact report and had sunk a ship off Gibraltar. Almost a month later, March 16, Control again logged that U-869 had possibly sent another B-bar message from the Gibraltar area.
American codebreakers who decrypted these messages were likewise puzzled. Kenneth Knowles in the Submarine Tracking Room assumed from the December 29 orders from Control that U-869, identified by the bigram Oboe Item (01), was headed for New York. The codebreakers intercepted the report of January 6 from U-869 (Oboe Item) that she was in grid square AK 63, but they missed Control’s message of January 8 redirecting the boat to Gibraltar. However, on January 19, the codebreakers decrypted a message from Control to U-869 stating that she was to arrive about February 1 off the operational area of U-870, which they knew to be a boat that had been sent to Gibraltar earlier.
Knowles speculated from what he knew positively that “maybe” U-869 “had missed” an “Ursula” signal* redirecting her to Gibraltar and that she was in fact still headed for New York. Accordingly, Tenth Fleet directed two “jeep” carrier hunter-killer groups built around Core and Croatan to hunt down U-869. Neither group had any success. Nor was there ever any indication that U-869 had, in fact, reached the New York area.
Allied authorities finally concluded that U-869 had indeed received the message and had patrolled off Gibraltar and never returned. Lacking any positive evidence of her demise, they speculated that she may have been sunk by the American destroyer escort O’Toole on February 26, about 175 miles northeast of the Madeira Islands. In the final reckoning, however, the Allies concluded that U-869 had been lost while attempting to attack convoy GUS 74. The attack failed and five escorts pounced on what was later believed to be U-869: the American Coast Guard-manned frigate Knoxville; two American destroyer escorts, Fowler and Francis M. Robinson; and two ex-American patrol craft, the Free French L lndiscret and Le Résolu. The Allied assessment committee officially credited this “kill” to Fowler and Llndiscret.
This is where matters stood until September 2, 1991. That day, a group of amateur shipwreck divers, led by William Nagle and John Chatterton, dived on a wreck 230 feet down, sixty miles east of Point Pleasant, New Jersey. The wreck resembled a submarine. In two subsequent dives that fall, the divers recovered crockery bowls dated 1942 and marked with the eagle and swastika, and a dinner knife with the name “Horenburg” carved in the wooden handle. Exploring the boat at this extreme depth, one of the scuba divers, Steve Feldman, apparently passed out and was swept away.
In subsequent years, John Chatterton led further diving expeditions to the U-boat. Two more divers died in these excursions, but Chatterton and his team recovered pieces of wreckage that identified the boat as a Type IXC, built at the Deschimag shipyard in Bremen (as was U-869 remains of a snorkel head, an escape lung tested April 15, 1944, and finally, in 1997, a box with a tag marked U-869. This last, together with a sailing list showing that the owner of the knife, Martin Horenburg, was chief radioman on U-869, was convincing proof that the U-boat was indeed U-869.
What had happened? As Kenneth Knowles initially speculated, U-869 doubtless had missed Control’s message redirecting her to Gibraltar and had continued westward to the New York area. From the condition of the wreck (port side amidships blown away) Chatterton believes that U-869 shot a torpedo at a ship; the torpedo missed, malfunctioned, circled back, and struck the U-boat, not an uncommon mishap in the U-boat force. Of course, the fatal blow could have been d
elivered as a result of an Allied ASW ship or aircraft attack that has not yet come to light.*
• The last large snort boat to leave Norway in 1944 for war patrol was the IXC40 U-1233, commanded by Hans-Joachim Kuhn, age thirty-four. After two aborts, Kuhn finally got away to the Americas on Christmas Eve. He patrolled via Bermuda to the area between the Gulf of Maine and Nova Scotia. On March 4, he radioed Control a terse situation report, stated his intent to begin his homeward journey, but made no sinking claims.
Upon receipt of this message from U-1233, Control declared it to be “entirely insufficient” and demanded greater detail for the benefit of other Type IXs en route to that sector. Kuhn returned to Norway on March 28 and went on to Flensburg for refit. The boat did not. sail again on war patrol.
These seventeen Type IX patrols from Norway in the last six months of 1944 accounted for fifteen confirmed Allied ships sunk or destroyed for 57,346 tons. The victims included six warships † and nine tankers or freighters. One skipper, Ritterkreuz winner Dobratz in U-1232, sank five of the nine merchant ships. Ten U-boats (59 percent) sank no ships.
Although the snort offered good concealment from Allied aircraft and all skippers used radio transmitters sparingly or the Kurier “burst” system, and some of the boats had Hohentwiel (Owl) Search radar and Fliege and Mücke radar detectors,‡ German losses were no fewer. Seven of the seventeen boats failed to return, a casualty rate of 41 percent. British land-based aircraft got two (U-865, U-867); aircraft of the “jeep” carrier Bogue got one (U-1229); Canadian surface forces got one (U-877); one (U-855) probably hit a mine; and two were lost to unknown causes: U-869 and U-1226, the last most likely to a catastrophic snort failure. There were seventy-three survivors from the approximately 350 men on these seven boats, all captured.
Altogether, in the “new U-boat war,” from July to December 1944, Control mounted eighty-five war patrols from Norway: sixty-eight by VIIs, seventeen by IXs. Only about one-quarter of the patrols (twenty-two) produced sinkings or destruction of shipping: fourteen by VIIs, eight by IXs. The confirmed sinkings in these twenty-two successful patrols came to forty-six ships for 205,893 tons: thirteen warships and thirty-three merchantmen. In return, twenty-two U-boats were lost: sixteen VIIs and six IXs. This was an “exchange rate” of about one U-Boat lost for every two merchant ships sunk. About one thousand German submariners were lost in these boats; 169 were captured from four.*
Except for the terror and consternation they caused and the Allied forces they tied down, these snort boats had no significant impact on Allied maritime assets, which continued to swell at an awesome rate. During the same period, July to December 1944, American shipbuilders alone turned out 867 new vessels for about 6 million gross tons, or about thirty times more new tonnage than was lost to U-boats. In all of 1944, U-boats sank only sixteen of the 18,856 Allied-controlled ships that sailed in North and Middle Atlantic convoys.†
NINE
ARGONAUT
Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, launched on December 16, split the American and British ground forces and threatened briefly to reach Antwerp, its first major geographical objective. Within thirty days, however, Allied forces recovered from the blow, counterattacked, and severed the German salient at Houffalize. Little more than one week later, on January 28, five American corps, comprising twenty-one divisions, launched a major offensive eastward toward Germany in freezing cold and deep snow. Despite the weather and other obstacles, by the early days of March, American forces had reached the Rhine River and captured a bridge at Remagen.
Meanwhile, on January 12, the Red Army launched a massive offensive westward toward Germany. By February 1, Soviet troops were firmly entrenched at the Oder River, merely fifty miles from Berlin. Behind them, German enclaves at Danzig and Königsberg held out in order to buy time to evacuate finished and partly finished Type XXI electro boats, other new U-boats in workup or older ones in school flotillas, as well as torpedoes, submarine personnel, and hundreds of thousands of German refugees.
Countless Kriegsmarine vessels of all sizes and types carried out the evacuation by sea. German naval records reveal that German ships evacuated 2,116,500 persons, 1,668,000 refugees and 448,500 military personnel. Owing to Allied air attacks, British aerial minelaying,* and Soviet submarine attacks, scores of German ships were damaged or sunk. Soviet submarines sank three big German troop transports loaded with troops and refugees. The loss of life was the worst of the war at sea: 6,200 on the 5,200-ton Goya; 5,500 on the 25,500-ton Wilhelm Gust-loff; and 2,700 on the 15,000-ton General Steuben.
The war in Europe was rushing to a conclusion. The impending end of this unprecedented horror raised scores of military and political questions. Would the Soviet Union at last enter the war against Japan? If so, when and at what price? How would the Allies divide areas of responsibility and influence in postwar Europe?
As the Battle of the Bulge slowly and agonizingly turned in favor of the Allies, Prime Minister Winston Churchill urged another “Big Three” meeting (Argonaut) between President Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and himself to settle some of the many unresolved wartime and postwar issues. At Stalin’s insistence, they agreed to meet in early February at Yalta, a Black Sea resort in the Crimea, where long ago the Czars had summered.
At Norfolk on January 23, President Roosevelt and his personal staff boarded the new (1943) heavy cruiser Quincy, which had participated with distinction in both the Neptune and Dragoon invasions. The sailing arrangements to Malta were personally supervised by the new commander of the Atlantic Fleet, fifty-eight-year-old Admiral Jonas Ingram, a close friend of Admiral King’s. A football star at the Naval Academy (1907), Ingram had dutifully commanded the unglamorous but necessary U.S. Navy Fourth Fleet based in Natal, Brazil, for two years † and was in line for four stars. Among other tactful steps, Ingram included the old light cruiser Savannah in the presidential escort. Admiral King’s son, Ernest Joseph, Jr., served on the Savannah.
It was agreed that Roosevelt and Churchill and their military staffs would first meet on the Mediterranean island of Malta (Cricket) to resolve any differences, so that at Yalta (Magneto), they could present Stalin with a united front. Admiral William D. Leahy, Chairman of the U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, accompanied Roosevelt on the Quincy‡ Admiral King flew via Bermuda to Casablanca (where he met with Dan Gallery, who had captured U-505), thence by plane to Malta. General Marshall flew via the Azores to Marseilles, France, where he met with General Eisenhower on January 28, the day of the momentous Allied counterattack in the Battle of the Bulge. The next day Marshall flew on to Malta. The chief of the Army Air Forces, Hap Arnold, was ill and could not make the trip.
The Churchill party departed London on January 29 in three aircraft, Churchill in a plush four-engine, American-built Douglas C-54 Skymaster (the military version of the DC-4 airliner), a gift from Hap Arnold.* As the aircraft neared Malta, one of them developed serious problems and crashed near the island of Pantelleria. “Only three of the crew and two passengers survived,” Churchill wrote. “Such are the strange ways of fate.”
When the Americans and British delegates convened in Malta to discuss military operations, the main—and most contentious—subjects were Allied ground and air command and operations in the European and Mediterranean theaters and the Pacific. Nonetheless, the U-boat menace in the Atlantic Ocean was not neglected.
And with good reason. By January 1945, the Allies were deeply concerned about a renewed U-boat offensive that might seriously imperil the ground offensive toward Germany from the west. President Roosevelt in his State of the Union address on January 6 had stressed the possibility of a renewed U-boat offensive. Three days later, Roosevelt and Churchill issued a joint communiqué on the same theme. The media on both sides of the Atlantic had published and broadcast alarmist stories reflecting these dire forecasts.†
The lugubrious forecasts were based on faulty or incomplete Allied intelligence and—whether sincere or calculated—on a classic instance of threat infl
ation. Although the Allied intelligence failure did not appreciably influence the course of the war, as did the failures in the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler’s December 16 Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge), it is worth noting.
Some of the factors that led to the intelligence failure were:
• The assumption that on January 1, 1945, there were eighty-seven big Type XXI electro boats fitting out or in workup and another fifty-two under construction, and that by March 1, fifty Type XXIs were to be ready in all respects to launch the new offensive.
This estimate vastly overcredited the ability of the Germans to build, debug, and work up Type XXIs in the face of intensified Allied air raids on U-boat yards and bases, the heavy mining of training areas in the Baltic, adverse winter weather and ice in the Baltic, not to mention the widespread chaos throughout besieged Germany. ‡ Moreover, Allied intelligence apparently failed altogether to discover promptly that the Type XXIs were crippled by the failures of the engine supercharger scheme, the hydraulic systems, and other defects.
In reality, no Type XXI was anywhere near ready for operations on March 1.
Only one—repeat one—Type XXI was far enough along to leave the Baltic in March for further workup in Horten, Norway. That was the show boat U-2511, commanded by Adalbert Schnee, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz, and who had Ritterkreuz holder Gerhard Suhren for his chief engineer.* The boat sailed from Kiel on March 18 and arrived in Horten on March 23, at which time Schnee and Suhren requested that experts be sent there to fix the periscope, which oscillated badly, even at the slowest speed. The U-2511 sailed from Bergen on April 18, but diesel-engine defects forced her to return on April 21. She finally resailed on April 30—about which more later.
• A similar miscalculation about the readiness of the duck-size Type XXIII electro boats. On January 1, 1945, Allied intelligence estimated there were forty- three Type XXIIIs fitting out or in workup and eighteen under construction in Kiel and Hamburg and that those yards had a combined production rate of ten boats per month. In reality, the commissioning rate of the Type XXIIIs from June to December 1944 averaged 4.4 boats per month. Less three losses during workup † by January 1, there were twenty-eight Type XXIIIs in commission. Only twenty more were to be commissioned by war’s end, a total of fifty-one.