by Richard Snow
Which was home now. He and his buddies would get liberty (liberty was permission to go ashore for less than forty-eight hours; any longer stretch of time was leave) and head to the Shamrock Beer Garden, which was “big enough to plant corn in and lined from one end to the other with sailors sipping suds.” Beer gardens in Norfolk “were easier to find than a traffic light.”
So were women. The chief had told them, “The girls in Norfolk can give you more grief in ten minutes than the Navy can in four years.” He held up a condom, ordered them to use one every time, “and then check in at a pro[phylactic] station. They are open all night. The pharmacist’s mate will show you what to do. If you catch VD, the navy will put you on restriction and stop your pay until you are cured. You will make up the time at the end of your cruise.”
Thus encouraged, they visited places where half-naked women chatted with them until they made a choice, paid their $2, and found themselves back on the street within half an hour. As for any more permanent arrangement, “if the Navy wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one.”
Jernigan went to a tailor and had the man run him up a set of good dress blues, despite the stern passage about this in The Bluejackets’ Manual: “Many men want ‘tailor-made’ clothes and spend large sums ashore to get them. In most cases the cloth in these clothes is not as good as in the clothes purchased from the supply officer. The pattern is usually not strictly regulation, and these men frequently get in trouble over this.” This admonition was universally ignored.
Jernigan wore his new blues when, in March, he reported to Philadelphia for duty aboard BB56, the USS Washington. She was a brand-new battleship, still under construction, and the crew at first slept in barracks ashore. “Every ship is like a city, large or small. Even a tugboat is a little town all its own,” wrote Jernigan, who had found his way to a big town, one with fifteen hundred inhabitants. It would take him months to become familiar with this town, but a lot of his neighbors were already at home there.
These knowledgeable old-timers reflected a stasis throughout the navy that turned out to be a gift in the Pandora’s box of the Depression. For years there had been scant chance of getting ahead. “You had to be perfect,” Jernigan said, “or you were called on the mat. I knew many shipmates with 12 to 15 years in service who were seamen or third class petty officers, not because they weren’t good but because the Navy didn’t advance you that fast.” These long-seasoned professionals would be the tough hide of an ever-expanding balloon filling with neophytes who needed to be taught jobs on which the survival of a nation depended. It was a good thing they were there, for that time was coming soon.
Building Hitler’s Navy
Superbattleships vs. submarines, 1933–39
Adolf Hitler didn’t much like ships. “I am a hero on land,” he said once, “but a coward at sea.” He had a wonderfully retentive mind for nautical detail, but his grasp of strategy was that of a general, not an admiral. He saw his country as historically threatened by France and Russia, and his response was to set about building a peerless army. Even his air force, powerful enough to frighten half the world in 1939, was essentially designed to support the operations of his troops in battles on the ground. Nor did his searing formative experiences in World War I make him feel more warmly toward naval matters.
By 1914 Germany had built a battle fleet that, if not as large as Great Britain’s, had better ships, better armor on them, and better shells for them to fire. And what had this superb High Seas Fleet done? Come out once in full strength, in 1916, and, at the Battle of Jutland, badly roughed up the British fleet, but then fled for home and stayed in port while the months ground by and morale corroded and, in the war’s last days, mutinied and refused to go back to sea.
Only one branch of the service had kept faith until the very end: the submarines. Indeed, they came close to putting Britain out of the war long after the surface fleet had tried and failed.
Nevertheless, despite his often-expressed scorn for battleships, Hitler was vexed by the theories of a naval officer who was not only long dead but an American. As a teacher at the Naval War College in the 1880s, Alfred Thayer Mahan had come to believe that “control of the sea was an historic factor which had never been systematically appreciated and expounded.” He wrote a book to correct this. The Influence of Sea Power upon History came out in 1890.
Mahan’s thesis was simple and strong. Maritime commerce is the life of a nation; choke it off and the nation will wither. The key to dominating the seas, though, is not commerce raiding—that is, attacking the ships that carry the commerce—but rather keeping a powerful battle fleet that can destroy the battle fleet of an opposing nation. This force should not be frittered away chasing after merchant ships, but should instead concentrate itself, stay together, and strike a decisive blow. Once the main force of the enemy is shattered, the rest will follow.
Of all the American books ever published, perhaps only Common Sense and Uncle Tom’s Cabin have had a comparable impact on events. Mahan’s argument was taken up everywhere. America settled upon the all-big-gun battleship as its main strategic weapon at sea and started building them. Britain not surprisingly embraced his thesis; so did Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had a copy of Influence placed aboard every German warship. Mahan played a role in the American defeat of the Spanish navy in 1898 and the Japanese annihilation of their Russian opponents at Tsushima in 1905, and in bringing the German and British fleets together at Jutland in 1916.*
Even though Hitler knew that commerce-raiding submarines had come far closer than the High Seas Fleet ever had to tipping the balance in Germany’s favor during the Great War, Mahan’s potent theory continued to influence him. So did Mahan’s disciple Erich Raeder.
In 1939 Raeder had been commander in chief of the German navy for eleven years. He was sixty-three years old, a thoroughgoing professional who had joined the service in 1894 and seen it grow into a force that could threaten Britain’s three-century command of the seas. He had fought at Jutland aboard a cruiser and had taken over the husk of his navy when it barely existed. He despised Nazism, thought it mere thuggery, but he saw in Hitler a man who could bring back the old High Seas Fleet, and then perhaps the Jutland-to-come would go the other way.
Hitler listened to Raeder, listened and was drawn as when speaking with his architect Albert Speer about the wide boulevards and colossal buildings that would transform German cities once the world was set aright. Hitler and Raeder talked of battle cruisers, of seventy-two-thousand-ton superbattleships, of aircraft carriers.
The predecessor to this dream navy had committed suicide. After Germany surrendered in the winter of 1918, the High Seas Fleet had been interned up in the Orkney Islands at the great British naval base of Scapa Flow. The next spring, when the skeleton crews of those ships learned of the terms of the Versailles Treaty, they scuttled them in protest. The peace treaty had all but abolished the German navy. The service was cut to fifteen thousand men and a handful of aging ships. These could be replaced when they got to be fifteen years old, but only with smaller counterparts. There could be no German submarines at all.
The victorious nations, looking back at the monstrous cost of the past four years, began to talk about devising disarmament agreements that would extinguish the possibility of another war. That these treaties failed in the end is not nearly so surprising as what they actually accomplished.
President Harding is generally remembered as being affable and lazily incompetent, but he certainly got what he wanted here, which was an armament reduction of radical severity. Henceforth, navies would be confined to a maximum tonnage—eventually, in capital ships (those of ten thousand tons or more with guns larger than eight inches), 500,000 tons for Great Britain and the United States, 300,000 for their recent ally Japan, 175,000 for Italy and France. These ratios would be echoed in the permissible tonnage of smaller warships. This meant not only naval self-restraint on the part of the signatories, but naval self-destruction. The United St
ates alone would have to scrap fifteen battleships and another fifteen capital ships that were still being built. Britain would be obligated to destroy nineteen of her battleships, but the Mistress of the Seas was all for the plan because it would allow her to maintain her naval superiority without the exorbitant competitive shipbuilding that had roiled the century’s first years. In 1921, at the Washington Naval Conference, England signed, America signed, and so did France and Japan and Italy. And for a while, they all played by the rules.
To be sure, a lot of haggling and bad faith continued about lesser vessels, especially cruisers and submarines. The matter didn’t get settled until 1930, when, after having veered toward the total abolition of submarines, the delegates at the London Naval Conference settled on a 52,700-ton limit per nation, and all of them signed Article 22, which in retrospect seems a most extraordinary exercise in wishful thinking: “a submarine may not sink or render incapable of navigation a merchant vessel without having first placed passengers, crew and ship’s papers in a place of safety.”
Of course, this clause would not have affected Germany because she was permitted no submarines. Her little navy, reborn in 1921 and christened the Reichsmarine—the State Navy—tried to figure out a role for itself. It would most likely fight against France and Poland, the planners decided, and when it came time to replace their ships, they looked to build successors that could fill the role of the outlawed U-boats in a war of commerce: fast surface raiders. But as the decade wore on Germany more and more blatantly experimented with submarine development, too. Under a fairly transparent front company, research went forward in Holland. Boats were built in Finland and Spain and tested by German sailors dressed as tourists. A submarine school opened in Turkey.
Meanwhile, Raeder moved away from the limits imposed by Versailles. In late 1932 he got permission from his government to build six capital ships and six squadrons of destroyers, and to establish a secret submarine school on German soil. A couple of months later, Hitler came to power. He encouraged Raeder, while urging him to keep on good terms with Britain. There would never again be a war between the two countries, Hitler said; German naval planners weren’t even permitted to envision one in their exercises. In March 1935 Hitler repudiated the terms of Versailles, announcing that he would build Germany the army, air force, and navy she deserved. Three months later British and German delegates met in London, and Hitler’s new foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, offered to establish a comforting three-to-one ratio between British and German tonnage. The result was the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which also allowed parity in submarines, Germany having agreed to the Article 22 stipulation about not attacking merchant ships. In keeping with the tenor of that anxious decade, Britain was both pleased and relieved. No less a figure than David Beatty, who had been first sea lord for eight years, declared to the House of Lords, “We owe thanks to the Germans. . . . That we do not have an armament race with one nation in the world at least is something for which we must be thankful.” That same year the Reichsmarine adopted a sharp-fanged new name: the Kriegsmarine. The State Navy had become the War Navy.
The Germans kept their word for about as long as they usually did in that era. At the end of 1938, Raeder presented his Z plan to Hitler. It called for a massive expansion of the fleet. Plenty of U-boats, but also ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, nearly seventy destroyers—a million tons all told by the time the job was done, in 1948. Hitler approved, but with one change: the fleet must ready by 1946. There would be no war until then, he promised—and never one with England.
“The Simple Principle of Fighting Several Steamers with Several U-boats”
Captain Doenitz works out his strategy, 1918–39
The Z plan came as a highly unpleasant surprise not only to the British, but also to Captain Karl Doenitz. He knew very well that Germany would be at war before 1946 and that Great Britain would almost certainly be the enemy. He knew how he wanted to fight that war, too, and it had nothing to do with aircraft carriers.
Karl Doentiz, who was to be the single most important man in the Nazi navy, was born in Berlin in 1891, the son of an engineer. He joined the kaiser’s navy in 1910 and became a lieutenant three years later. Assigned to the cruiser Breslau, he quickly impressed his captain, as he would every officer he served under. After a year’s service in the Black Sea (where he met his wife-to-be, the daughter of a general), the Breslau’s skipper wrote, “Doenitz is a charming, dashing and plucky officer with first-rate character qualities.” In the fall of 1916, with Jutland fought and Germany looking more and more toward her submarine fleet, the young officer was ordered to U-boat school in Flensburg, up on the Baltic. After a three-month course, he was sent to U-39 to serve under Captain Walter Forstmann.
It was an opportune posting at an opportune time. Forstmann was one of the most celebrated and capable of all U-boat commanders, and Germany, after years of trying to keep from angering a neutral America, was soon to declare unrestricted submarine warfare.
Two days after setting sail, the U-39 sank an Italian freighter. There followed ten busy months, at the end of which Forstmann gave Doenitz as warm an assessment as any U-boat man could hope for: “Sailed and navigated the boat calmly and confidently, is reliable as watch-keeping officer and understands the management of his subordinates . . . Lively, energetic officer, who enters into each duty with diligence and enthusiasm . . . Popular comrade, tactful messmate.” These were all the main qualities necessary for success as a submariner, and not least of them was the tact: it was not just a matter of good manners, but nearly as necessary as oxygen in the claustrophobic little society of a U-boat.
After a year with Forstmann, Doenitz got his own command, of a mine-laying submarine, and did so well that after just two cruises he became captain of a better boat, the UB-68. During his time at sea, he had thought a great deal about submarines and how they should best be used. “Up till now the U-boats had always waged war alone,” he wrote years later. “They set forth and ranged the seas alone, they battled alone against the antisubmarine defenses, and they sought out and fought the enemy alone.”
The evening of October 3, 1918, found the UB-68 lying motionless under a fingernail of moon fifty miles off the southeast corner of Sicily. Doenitz was waiting for two things: a British convoy bound westward from the Suez Canal and, what was probably a more exciting prospect to him just then, the arrival of another U-boat. This operation, he wrote, would be “the first ever undertaken by two U-boats together.” The other U-boat never showed; engine trouble had kept it in port. The convoy did, though. At about 1:00 a.m. Doenitz’s lookout spotted a British destroyer. “Soon more shadows loomed up in the darkness, first more destroyers and escort vessels, and finally the great solid silhouettes of the merchantmen themselves—a convoy of heavily laden ships from the East, from India and China and bound for Malta and the West.”
He took the UB-68 in unseen past the guarding destroyers and got between two lines of merchantmen. He went after one in the farther line and had the satisfaction of seeing “a gigantic, brightly illuminated column of water” rise beside it, “followed by a mighty explosion.” As a destroyer came pelting toward him, Doenitz took his boat down and slipped away from the convoy.
When he cautiously surfaced, he saw the lines of ships moving away to the west, and followed them. He always preferred to attack on the surface, “but dawn came too soon; as I came up on the convoy, it became so light that I was compelled to submerge. I then decided to try and attack, submerged at periscope depth. Things worked out very differently, however.”
The dive to periscope depth came close to being his last. Perhaps he made a mistake, perhaps his engineer did, or perhaps the crew was not sufficiently trained. The result was that “we suddenly found ourselves submerged and standing on our heads. The batteries spilled over and the lights went out.” He ordered all tanks blown—the water in them replaced with buoying air—and could then only sweat it out, watching his first lieutenant play a flas
hlight on the depth gauge while a thousand fathoms of water drew his boat down. The hull could stand up to a dive of 180 feet, perhaps 200. Under the lieutenant’s light the unforgiving needle dropped steadily past 170, past 200; it went by 220 and 230 without pausing; 250; 260. Somewhere beyond 270 it began to quiver, stopped, and then rose from 300 feet even more swiftly than it had gotten there. The submarine rocketed to the surface and burst up into full daylight in the middle of the convoy, having over the past few hours provided a succinct working demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of this capricious weapon.
“All the ships, destroyers and merchantmen alike, were flying signal flags, sirens were howling all round us. The merchant ships turned away and opened fire with the guns they had mounted on their sterns, and the destroyers, firing furiously, came tearing down upon me. A fine situation!”
Doenitz had no choice. “I gave the order, ‘All hands, abandon ship.’”
The UB-68 sank. Doenitz lost seven of his crew. “That was the end of my seagoing career in a U-boat in the First World War. That last night, however, had taught me a lesson as regards basic principles.”
He had time to mull over those principles while a prisoner of war for the next ten months. Then he returned to the naval base at Kiel, a ghost town now with the fleet that had once occupied it rusting on the bottom of another harbor and a few remaining submarines going under the wrecker’s torch. Still, this was headquarters of the new navy. It was permitted just fifteen hundred officers, but Doenitz’s reputation made him an obvious choice. The director of personnel asked “whether I would like to remain in the service.”
Doenitz replied with a question: “Do you think we shall soon have U-boats again?”
“I’m sure we shall. Things won’t always be like this.”