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

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Hitler’s U-Boat War- The Hunted 1942-45 Page 138

by Clay Blair


  * Although the record is unclear, it is possible that Franze torpedoed two freighters: the 2,700-ton Norwegian Bestik and the 3,900-ton British Ashbury, the latter a total loss.

  † Irreparable damage to German radio security resulted from the Scapa Flow fiasco. American codebreakers reported in a memo that Control radioed one of the U-boats off northeast Scotland “instructions for deciphering a specially enciphered message” that had previously been sent to two other U-boats. That priceless information enabled the Americans “to read these two special ciphers,” and, the codebreakers concluded at that time, “it now appears that others may soon be broken.”

  * The damaged British “jeep” carrier Thane, not repaired during the war; British frigates Affleck, Bullen, Capel, Manners (damaged and not repaired), and Whitaker; British corvette Hurst Castle,

  † Not counting three new IXD2 U-cruisers, U-862, U-863, and U-871, bound for the Far East. The U-862, commanded by Heinrich Timm, age thirty-four, actually sailed from Norway on June 3, sank five ships for 28,000 tons, won a Ritterkreuz for its captain, and reached Penang on September 9. Near the Azores on September 26, a B-17 of British Squadron 220, commanded by Arthur Francis Wallace, sank the U-871, commanded by Erwin Ganzer, age, thirty-five. There were no survivors. Off Brazil on September 29, two B-24s of U.S. Navy Squadron VB 107, piloted by John T. Burton and Edward A. Krug, sank the U-863, commanded by Dietrich von der Esch, age twenty-nine. The pilots dropped life rafts to the “fifteen or twenty” Germans, but none survived.

  * In June 1993, two Bostonians, Edward Michaud and Paul Matthias, claimed with absolute certainty that they had found the wreck of U-1226 in forty-one feet of water, four miles off Cape Cod. According to these men, the media reported, U-1226 was “part of a four-submarine squadron on a spy mission,” and was sunk by a single fifty-pound bomb from an aircraft based at Hyannis. Authorities in the United States, Germany, and Canada threw cold water on this “find,” asserting that if the men had indeed found a U-boat, which was unlikely, it was certainly not U-1226.

  * At the time of the award, his confirmed sinkings, all on U-870, were three ships for 6,462 tons, including 1ST 359, the small French patrol craft L’Enjoue, and the freighter Blackheath. He also damaged two American ships, the destroyer escort Fogg and Liberty ship Henry Miller.

  * Ursula, Knowles logged, was a “new type short signal” probably used to designate U-boat operational areas and was as yet unreadable by Allied codebreakers.

  * Chatterton reports that he and his teams have meticulously avoided the human remains inside the boat.

  † The Canadian frigates Chebogue and Magog, Canadian corvette Shawinigan, Canadian minesweeper Clayoquot, American LST359, and Free French patrol craft UEnjoue.

  ‡ Fliege (Fly) covered the eight to two centimeter wavelengths out to thirty-seven miles; Mucke (Gnat), two to four centimeters. When the sets were combined in May 1944, the resulting detector was called Tunis.

  * U-877, U-1006, U-1209, U-1229.

  † See Plates 12 and 13.

  *The U-300 aborted and resailed in October. See Appendix 2.

  † The U-285 aborted and resailed in December. The U-396 aborted and resailed in October. The U-680 aborted, resailed in October, aborted again, and resailed in November.

  ‡The U-246 aborted and resailed in February 1945. The U-1200 aborted and resailed later in the month.

  §The U-1009 aborted and resailed in December.

  #The U-244 aborted and resailed in January 1945. The U-275 aborted and also resailed in Janu ary. The U-278 aborted and resailed later in the month. The U-285 aborted and resailed in March 1945. The U-312 and U-739 aborted and returned to the Arctic force. The U-905 aborted and resailed in March 1945.

  * According to Jürgen Rohwer and Gerd Hummelchen (Chronology), in January, February, and March, RAF aircraft in 720 sorties planted 3,240 mines, a menace that sank 61 ships for 137,764 tons and damaged 32 ships for 71,224 tons and caused widespread evasive action and minesweeping.

  † Ingram had officially relieved the sixty-one-year-old four-star admiral Royal Ingersoll on November 15, 1944. Ingersoll went on to a sinecure, the Western Sea Frontier. He retired on August 1, 1946, Ingram on April 1, 1947.

  ‡ While on board the Quincy, on January 30, Roosevelt celebrated his sixty-third birthday. He was the youngest of the senior American delegates. Leahy was sixty-nine, King sixty-six, Marshall sixty-four.

  * The plane was a sister ship of Roosevelt’s famous “Sacred Cow,” on which Harry Hopkins had flown to London. In the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur had another, “Bataan.”

  † Hadley, U-boats Against Canada (1985), cites newspaper articles depicting an oncoming wave of two hundred to three hundred “Nazi subs” that could remain submerged for up to thirty days at a speed of 10 knots.

  ‡ On January 12, American Army troops captured approximately twenty stern sections of type XXI electro boats at a shipyard in Strasbourg on the upper Rhine River. These stern compartments could not be duplicated or replaced. This heretofore unrecorded capture was therefore as crippling to type XXI production as were all the Allied air raids and the capture of the Danzig shipyards by Soviet troops.

  * Older brother of Reinhard Suhren, who wore Oak Leaves on his Ritterkreuz and commanded the Arctic and Central Group U-boat forces.

  † U-2323, U-2331, U-2342.

  * See Plate 10.

  * Coastal Command still included U.S. Navy Fleet Air Wing 7. In January and February 1945, it consisted of five full B-24 squadrons: VB 103, VB 105, VB 107, VB 110, and VB 112; six “searchlight” B-24s of VB 114; and four MAD Catalinas of VP 63. Total aircraft: seventy. In 1944, the wing flew 7,732 ASW missions, covering six million statute miles in 35,580 hours of flight. During these missions, the aircraft attacked forty-five U-boats or presumed U-boats. A B-24 of VB 103 sank the VII U-27L A B-24 of VB 105 shared credit for the kill of the VII U-243.

  † Churchill wrote that Roosevelt was “frail” and that he had only “a slender contact with life?’

  * As related, by the time of the Yalta meeting, Soviet armies were poised at the Oder River, fifty miles from Berlin.

  * From U-300, U-1018, and U-1199.

  * A new production aircraft replacing the Wellingtons.

  † From U-399, U-681, U-1003, and U-1195.

  * Niestle” writes that on April 30, the famous British destroyers Havelock and Hesperus depth-charged the wreck of U-246 and brought up the personal effects of the crew, which led to the mistaken belief that this ship sank the U-242, which, in fact, hit a British mine on April 5 and sank with all hands.

  † As Rohwer points out (Successes), U-246 and U-399, both subsequently lost on these patrols, were nearby that night and it is difficult to know which boat hit the ship.

  * From U-1024 and U-1063.

  † Presumably useful Enigma documents and/or short-signal books, and so on. They have not yet been described.

  * At the time of the award, Thomsen’s confirmed score was one ship for 7,200 tons.

  † Schroeteler remained a POW until 1948. After his return to Germany, he graduated magna cum laude as a doctor of philosophy. A gifted sculptor, he remained close to the Dönitz family in the postwar years. At the request of the family, Schroeteler sculpted monuments for the graves of Peter and Klaus Dönitz, who were killed in the war, and for their mother, Ingeborg Dönitz.

  * Franks (1995) and Niestle” (1998) doubt that Smith sank U-905. He had earlier sunk U-478 and won a DFC, but the evidence in the case of U-905 is not conclusive. Niestle- attributes the loss of U-905 to depth charges of the American-built British destroyer Conn, commanded by T. D. Williams on March 27 off North Minch.

  * Sunk unassisted: U-271, U-326, U-681, and U-1107. Shared credit: U-243, and U-966.

  † Squadrons VB 103, VB 105, VB 107, VB 110, VB 112, and VP 63.

  * In 1945, four type VII snort boats had preceded U-1206 to this dangerous area: U-309, U-714, U-778, and VIIC41 U-1274. Only U-778, which had aborted when her
sonar failed, survived.

  * Presumably by providing electrical power for bombed-out cities.

  † Watch officers Karl Reiser and Albert Kahn, engineer Dietrich Wiese.

  * In a book, U-boat 977 (1952). In part, Schäffer said, he” published his book to refute the many newspaper stories and a book published in Argentina (Hitler Is Alive) alleging that U-977 had brought Hitler to Argentina. The rumors continued. In the fictional Adolf Hitler and the Secrets of the Holy Lance (1988), Buechner and Bernhart state that U-977 carried a “funeral urn” containing the ashes of Hitler and Eva Braun and other Nazi treasures to a prearranged site in an ice cave in Antarctica, which one of Dönitz’s U-boat crews had built in 1943.

  † Topp first commanded the XXI U-3010, but it was badly damaged in an air raid on Bremen. His engineer on U-3010 and U-2513 was Gerhard Bielig, who had won a Ritterkreuz on the IXD2 U-cruiser U-177. As related in the Foreword to Volume I, the U-2513, which did not sail on patrol, became a war prize of the United States.

  * U-boats also sank four empty freighters returning from Kola Inlet to the British Isles, all in RA convoys: two American Liberty ships, William S. Thayer and Edward H. Crockett, and two British vessels, the Liberty ship Samsuva and the 7,000-ton freighter Empire Tourist

  † One of three 14,000-ton, 17-knot escort carriers built by the British. The others were Nairana (1943) and Vindex (1943). Each carried eighteen aircraft, usually American-built TBF Avengers and F4F Wildcats, which the British called Tartans and Martlets, respectively.

  * That night, the nonsnort U-995, commanded by Hans-Georg Hess, age twenty-one (the youngest skipper in the U-bOat force), making his second Arctic patrol, slipped into the harbor at Kirkenes, then in Soviet hands. He set up and fired at the 6,000-ton Norwegian freighter Idefjord, which was moored at a pier. Hess claimed a sinking, but in actuality, he missed. For this bold stroke and later daring, Dönitz awarded Hess a Ritterkreuz.

  * At the time of the award, his confirmed score was two sloops, Lark and Lapwing, a Norwegian tanker, and two American Liberty ships.

  † The Bushnell popped into the news in December 1997, when the late American Ambassador to Switzerland, M. Larry Lawrence, was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. Lawrence had earlier and falsely claimed that he was a crewman on the Bushnell, and as a result of the torpedo hit he had been “thrown overboard into frigid Arctic waters and suffered serious head injuries, which required many months of convalespence.” When this false claim came to light, authorities ordered the removal of his body and tombstone, and he was reburied in less hallowed ground.

  ‡ After the war, the Allies allotted U-995 to the Norwegian Navy, which renamed her Kaura, Owing to the untiring efforts of her last German commander, Hans-Georg Hess, she was returned to the Bundesmarine and on March 13, 1972, she was mounted on an outdoor cradle at the German Naval Memorial at Laboe, a suburb of Kiel. Preserved as a museum, the U-995 is the only existing VIIC U-boat.

  * These were the last German submariners captured at sea. Grand total: about 5,004.

  * U-boats in 1945 sank one empty American Liberty ship, Thomas Scott, from returning RA convoys.

  † Assuming severf sinkings by U-boats in PQ 17. See B. B. Schofield (1964), pp. 215-21 and Appendix 1; Rohwer, Axis Submarine Successes.

  ‡ The heavy cruiser Edinburg, Battle-class or 7n£a/-class destroyers Mahratta, Matabele, Somali, fleet destroyer Hardy, sloops Kite, Lapwing, Lark, destroyer escorts Bickerton and Goodall, corvettes Bluebell and Denbigh Castle, minesweeper Leda.

  § See B, B. Schofield (1964), Appendix Z, which is based on official American and British Lend-Lease records.

  * From the IXC40 U-546.

  † Payton-Smith, Oil (1971), p. 431.

  * OSS information from NARA documents, courtesy of Paul M. Cole.

  † “Operation Teardrop Revisited ,” in Runyan and Copes (1994).

  ‡ NSA History Collection, NARA, RG 457, Box 625.

  § A paraphrase from documents at NARA: RG 457, SRH 008, p. 228 and SRMN 037, p. 597.

  * Sport divers with scuba gear routinely visit the hulk of U-853.

  * One of the sixty-six survivors was Lieutenant Philip K. Lundeberg, who became an aide to and researcher for naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison on his Volume X, The Atlantic Battle Won. This research also earned Lundeberg a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University.

  † Tenth Fleet split credit for the kill among eight warships: Chatelain, Flaherty, Hubbard, Janssen, Keith, Neunzer, Pillsbury, and Varian.

  ‡ Worn Seeflieger zum Uboot-Fahrer (1979), p. 192fT.

  § Vol X: The Atlantic Battle Won (1956), p. 355. Morison, of course, meant the U.S. Navy brig. Philip Lundeberg believes that the beating and torture of Paul Just and his crewmen amounted to a singular POW atrocity arising from the acute desire of the Americans to get information on the supposed V-l and V-2 attacks as quickly as possible.

  * “Wilhelm Bemhart,” coauthor of a preposterous novel, Adolf Hitler and the Secrets of the Holy Lance (1988), self-described as a member of the U-530 crew, wrote that before arriving in Argentina U-530 carried “six bronze lead-lined boxes” containing “selected treasures” of the Third Reich, and placed them in an ice cave in Antarctica. Supporting these assertions, the American author Ladislaus Farago (Tenth Fleet, Patton, etc.) stated in 1973 that Bormann had fled Germany “in a submarine” and was living in Argentina. The Farago claim is included in the otherwise quite responsible book Hitler’s Elite (1989), by Louis Snyder, Distinguished Professor of History at Columbia and City College of New York.

  * Two other IXC40s, U-804 and U-843, were to join the westward voyages, but on April 9 they were caught and sunk in the Skagerrak by a swarm of RAF Mosquitos of Squadrons 143,235, and 248. These Mosquitos also sank the VIIC41 U-1065.

  * Contrary to rumors, historian Lundeberg does not believe that the American jailers beat or tortured Steinhoff. They may have slapped his face once to snap him out of a deep depression.

  * After U-168 and U-537, the U-183 was the third German U-boat sunk by Allied forces in the Far East, all off Surabaya. The Dutch submarine Zwaardvisch sank U-168 and the American fleet submarine Flounder sank U-537.

  * Sufficient fuel bunkerage for such a journey was obtained by using the aft torpedo compartment (two tubes) for fuel storage. To compensate for that weight, a small bow compartment was flooded with water.

  † The “uranium-oxide” ore was contained in ten cube-shaped metal cases about nine inches on a side. These were stored in the six vertical mine shafts forward.

  * The Story of a U-boat NCO, 1940-1946 (1996).

  * This and quotations following are distilled and/or excerpted from NSA Enigma decrypts in NARA: RG 457, SRMN-032, and SRMN 037.

  * This order to “trample” out “ruthlessly” and “summarily” the “dangers which may injure fighting morale” and presumed acts of sabotage without legal proceedings, such as a court-martial, was not introduced at Dönitz’s trial at Nuremberg, perhaps because it came from a highly classified Enigma decrypt known to only a few.

  * No indisputable evidence has come to light to substantiate the rumors that Martin Bormann survived his eleventh-hour escape from the Fiihrerbunker in Berlin.

  * See Appendices 18 and 19 for lists of U-boats that were scuttled or surrendered.

  † When Allied authorities arrested Dönitz, yon Friedeburg, and others on May 23, von Friedeburg committed suicide.

  * The Nuremberg Trial (1984).

  * The documents, comprising the entire German naval archives dating to about 1850, had been removed from Berlin to Tambach Castle for safekeeping and, at the insistence of Dönitz, were not destroyed. The documents included the massive, meticulous daily war diaries of the OKM and U-boat Control and all U-boat patrol reports.

  † “No attempt of any kind must be made at rescuing members of ships sunk and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats and handing over food and w
ater. Rescue runs counter to the rudimentary demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews.”

  ‡ And, as related, Moehle was tried for war crimes and convicted, but served only five years in prison.

  * This synopsis of the complex Dönitz trial is limited to the main issues, the Laconia Order and the Peleus incident. As has been related in part, during the course of the trial, the prosecution team presented numerous other charges against Dönitz, but it did not pursue these as vigorously or with the same conviction.

  * Includes round-trips of the IXC40s U-868 and U-878 to France, taking supplies to the cut-off U-boat bases at Lorient and La Pallice. Also, the IXC U-516, which embarked from Norway on a similar supply mission, but did not reach France before the war ended.

  † All from the Far East.

  ‡ One to the Far East.

  §One to the Far East; one from the Far East.

  #Accidents, air raids, and other calamities continued to plague U-boats in the Baltic and in Danish and Norwegian waters. A Soviet patrol craft sank the VII U-679 in the Baltic. The VIIs U-676 and U-745 hit mines and sank in the Gulf of Finland. The VII U-923 hit a mine in the Baltic and sank. The VII 11-1053 failed to surface after her prepatrol deep-dive test. Entering Horten, the new VIIC41 U-1273 hit a mine and sank with the loss of fifty-seven of her sixty-five crew and passengers. TheVII U-367 hit a mine in the Baltic off Hela and sank. Thinking the VII U-235 was a Soviet submarine, a German PT boat depth-charged and destroyed her. Allied alrcraft at Kiel sank the VIIs U-236 and U-237. The XXIIl electro boat U-2344 collided with the XXIII U-2336 and sank. Allied aircraft destroyed the XXIIIs U-2340 and U-4708 at Hamburg and Kiel, respectively. The XXI electro boat U-3520 hit a mine off Kiel and sank. Allied aircraft destroyed the XXIs U-2509, U-2514, U-2515, U-2516, U-2523, U-2530, hl-2532, U-2537, U-2542, U-3003, 17-3007, U-3508, U-3512. And so on.

 

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