Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

The time Doenitz had spent in submarines had made him a passionate advocate of them, and that passion was still warm when he came to write his memoirs nearly forty years afterward. It is something of a surprise to see it flash out amid his austere prose: “This was all that I needed to persuade me to serve on in the navy. . . . I had been fascinated by that unique characteristic of the submarine service, which requires a submariner to stand on his own feet and sets him a task in the great spaces of the oceans, the fulfillment of which demands a stout heart and ready skill; I was fascinated by that unique spirit of comradeship engendered by destiny and hardship shared in the community of a U-boat’s crew, where every man’s well-being was in the hands of all and where every single man was an indispensable part of the whole. Every submariner, I am sure, has experienced in his heart the glow of the open sea and the task entrusted to him, has felt himself to be as rich as a king and would change places with no man.”

  It would take him quite a while to return to that favored company. The Versailles Treaty allowed no submarines, and he was posted to their surface counterparts, torpedo boats. As before, he flourished, drawing the same sort of praise from his superiors that he had when the kaiser was still in business: “exemplary service outlook and fullest devotion to duty”; “full of hearty merriment at appropriate times”; “respected and popular.” It was the same story when he took a staff course under Erich Raeder in 1924: “Clever, industrious, ambitious officer,” Raeder wrote of his new student. “Of excellent general professional knowledge and clear judgment in questions of naval war leadership.” Raeder became commander in chief in 1928, and Doenitz got the Fourth Half-Flotilla—torpedo boats again, four of them, with twenty officers and six hundred men under him. In exercises he was directed to mount a night attack against a “convoy”; he found it and “destroyed” it.

  Next he was posted to shore duty in a job much vaguer than commanding torpedo boats: “My tasks included measures of protection against inner unrest [that is, within the service].” Whatever he was doing, it was “truly a time filled with hard work,” and it gained him a commendation that stands in curious contrast with the tenor of his earlier praise. It came from the sinuous, canny, unknowable William Canaris, the admiral who would take over German military intelligence in the war they were all busy hatching and be put to death for his role in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. “Very ambitious,” Canaris wrote of Doenitz, “and consequently asserts himself to obtain prestige, finding it difficult to subordinate himself and confine himself to his own work-sphere. . . . His strong temperament and inner verve frequently affected him with restlessness and, for his age, imbalance. Must therefore be brought to take things more calmly and not to set exaggerated demands, above all on himself. . . . Character is not yet fully formed.”

  Perhaps Doenitz offers a glimpse of the person Canaris saw in his account of the hours that preceded his capture, when he says the aborted meeting with the other U-boat would have been the first time submarines had ever operated in concert. It wasn’t true. Joint attacks on convoys had been going on for months; the captain of the U-boat he’d been scheduled to meet had taken part in two of them. Doenitz made the claim in a memoir written after he had been the head of his navy—and, indeed, of his nation. That he still had to assert the credit for inventing group U-boat tactics suggests the gnawing of a restless, hungry ego.

  If Canaris alone spotted this, he was an observer with experience that lay beyond the boundaries of most officers in the German naval fraternity. For Doenitz, it was back to the usual fare of high compliment: “magnificent intellectual and character gifts,” said his annual report for 1934, the year he took command of the light cruiser Emden. She was about to be sent around Africa and the Indian Ocean as a traveling emblem of Germany’s resurgence. But first, her captain was summoned to meet the new chancellor.

  Doenitz was not only of a different generation from his commander in chief, Raeder, he held very different political views (Raeder would mockingly refer to Doenitz as “Hitler Boy”—but only after the war was over). Doenitz felt no disdain for Hitler or his party, and he would warmly agree with Hitler’s policies throughout the war—save where they differed with his own about how the navy should be employed.

  Doenitz returned home in the summer of 1935 to be given a big assignment. “You, Doenitz,” Raeder told him, “are to take over the job of raising our new U-boat arm.”

  Despite Doenitz’s paean to the virtues of the service, he wrote, “I cannot say I was altogether pleased.” His hesitations did not come from any doubt about the efficacy of submarines. “I believed in the fighting powers of the U-boat. I regarded it, as I had always regarded it, as a first-class weapon of offense in naval warfare and as the best possible torpedo-carrier.” Rather, he was keenly aware of the chimera of the heavy surface fleet. This view extended even to the submarine itself in the German admiralty, which wanted to build immense U-boats—U-cruisers—that could fight gun battles with big surface ships. Doenitz found this ludicrous.

  It was not a hasty judgment. He’d been thinking hard, both pragmatically and imaginatively, about U-boats, applying those “basic principles” that had been driven home to him nearly twenty years earlier while he was upside down in darkness under a drizzle of battery acid with British destroyers awaiting him on the surface if he could ever get back there.

  He believed the U-boat existed solely to deliver torpedoes. The same low freeboard that made the vessel so hard to spot in attacks—which should take place on the surface, at night, close in—made it a poor gun platform and worse reconnaissance vessel. Nor was a U-boat fast enough to work effectively with a surface fleet, although it should always cooperate with its fellows in joint attacks such as the one he’d been looking forward to the night before he’d been captured. And now that radio had come of age, these could surely be coordinated from some central command post,

  What, then, was the most desirable kind of U-boat to build? Doenitz was sure he knew, and he explained why with clarity and bite: “The submarine is the sole class of warship which is called upon only on the rarest and exceptional occasions to fight one of its own kind. The question of the strength of the corresponding type of ship possessed by a potential adversary, which plays so important a role in the design and construction of all other types of warships, is therefore of no importance whatever when it comes to deciding the size and fighting power of a submarine.” Despite the universal naval temptation to build ever-bigger ships, “many of those characteristics from which the submarine derives its own particular value as a fighting unit tend to decrease in value once a certain size is overstepped.” The bigger the submarine, the longer it takes to dive, and the harder it is to maneuver.

  Amid such considerations, what he had on hand when he took over that July were twenty-four boats either in commission or soon to be: twelve Type IIs, of 250 tons and three torpedo tubes in their bows, “a very simple and successful vessel, but very small”; two Type Is—four bow and two stern torpedo tubes, but, at 712 tons, too big to handle easily; and ten Type VIIs, “approximately 500 tons; four bow and one stern tube; surface speed 16 knots; radius of action 6,200 miles.” “An excellent type,” Doenitz concluded of this last with fond economy. Whenever he could, he would fight the Atlantic war with Type VIIs.

  But of course he needed men who knew how to handle them, and with the little two-hundred-tonners he began training them. In the wholly dedicated assiduity he brought to this task, we can see the justice of all that approbation from satisfied superiors, and perhaps catch a whiff of the zealotry that Canaris noticed.

  In September Doentiz inaugurated the Weddigen Flotilla—named for a U-boat hero of the last war—in Kiel at the Anti-Submarine School (“later,” Doenitz wrote, apparently unconscious of a kind of grim humor in the name change, “to become the Submarine School”). No group of recruits ever worked harder. “Every part of the training program was systemically, steadily and thoroughly carried out. . . . Every U-boat, for example, had to carry out 6
6 surface attacks and a like number submerged before . . . its first torpedo-firing practice.”

  The boats were at sea all the time, and Doenitz was always there aboard one or another of them, teaching the tangible (“the invisible attacks at periscope depth and with minimum use of periscope”) and the intangible (“the commander being required to try to develop a kind of sixth sense with regard to whether he had or had not been observed when on the surface”). None of Doenitz’s pupils had any prior experience with submarines, but as one of them wrote decades later, “The knowledge acquired during this single year of training, in which the crews were tested to the limits of human endeavor, was the foundation in so far as choice of types, armament and training are concerned, upon which the future structure of the U-boat arm was built.”

  By 1939 Raeder had ships and men enough to take part in an elaborate exercise that pitted fifteen U-boats against an Atlantic convoy. By the war game’s end thirteen of the boats, directed by radio, had surrounded their target. Doenitz’s report on this success spelled out briefly what he intended to do in the coming war: “The simple principle of fighting several steamers with several U-boats . . . is correct. The summoning of U-boats under the conditions of the exercise was successful. The convoy would have been destroyed.”

  To win a naval war against Britain he would need a great many U-boats: three hundred was the precise number he settled on and held to. “In arriving at this figure I assumed that at any given moment one hundred U-boats would be in port for overhaul and to give the crews a period of rest, a further hundred would be on their way to or from the theater of operations, and the remaining hundred would be actively engaged in operations against the enemy. Given this total, however, I believed that I could achieve a decisive success.”

  But now things were moving too quickly for his plans. In late April 1939 Hitler repudiated two of his treaties: the 1934 Non-Aggression Pact with Poland, and the 1935 Naval Agreement. On August 23 he signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. On September 1 he invaded Poland.

  Doenitz had already ordered his boats to sea. Still, he was clearly shocked when, on September 3, at his headquarters in Wilhelmshaven, fifteen minutes after the British ultimatum to Germany had run out, an aide gave him a telegram from German naval intelligence. The British Admiralty had broadcast the signal “Total Germany.” Doenitz wadded up the piece of paper and began to pace back and forth, muttering, “My God! So it’s war with England again!” He left the room.

  Raeder, receiving the same news in Berlin, was even more distressed. Now he was no more likely to get his superbattleships and aircraft carriers than he was to be handed Excalibur. “The surface forces,” he wrote, “are so inferior in number and strength to those of the British Fleet that, even at full strength, they can do no more than show that they know how to die gallantly.”

  Doenitz recovered himself after half an hour and came back into his office. “We know our enemy,” he calmly told his staff. “We have today the weapon and the leadership that we can face up to this enemy. The war will last a long time; but if each does his duty, we will win.”

  Still, his three hundred U-boats had vanished into impossibility along with Raeder’s carriers, and he would be bitter about those unbuilt ships to the end of his days. “The navy was like a torso without limbs,” he wrote years later. “The U-boat arm possessed in all forty-six boats ready for action [and] only twenty-two were suitable for service in the Atlantic.” Could he do more “than subject the enemy to a few odd pinpricks”?

  Very much more, the months and years to come would show.

  On the Devil’s Shovel

  U-boat life, 1939–45

  Doenitz had a single goal, and a single tool with which to achieve it. He believed that his country’s sole chance of victory lay in what he came to call a “tonnage war”—destroying freight, and sinking the ships that carried it faster than they could be replaced.

  To that end he had worked out his fleet’s tactics and helped develop the extraordinary vessel that would carry them out. If the U-boat was soon to become an object of dread to its enemies, the submarine had always been a fearfully harsh ally to the men aboard it.

  A torpedo is as complex as a fine watch, full of machinery as a sausage is of meat: the explosive charge in the head is served by intricacies of piping and gears, gyroscopes, elegant little power plants driven by steam or compressed air or electricity.

  A U-boat is a big torpedo. We may remember from pictures the high, sharp bow rising from the water, the conning tower with its cage of railing, the deck and its gun mount, but this is all a carapace and has no more to do with the heart of the boat than the hood of a car and its headlights have to do with its engine and power train. The cladding covered the pressure hull, a cigar-shaped, two-hundred-foot hermetic tube widest at its middle, and there only fifteen feet across. Inside it were two long, head-high diesel engines, standing side by side with a narrow walkway between them, an arsenal of torpedoes, fifty-ton batteries beneath deck plates, and a baffling infinity of pipes and valves and vents and gauges and generators. Foot for foot a U-boat was more complicated and expensive to build than any other warship. All this tortuously compressed hardware had to be in and functional before any thought could be given to inserting the people who had to tend it.

  On his small surface ship my father, as a lieutenant, would get his own stateroom, which he shared with another officer. A U-boat had no stateroom. The captain alone enjoyed the luxury of a padded bench about the width of a soda-fountain counter to sleep on, and a curtain to pull across it.

  At sea, nobody could move aboard a U-boat without having to squeeze around jutting equipment or another crewman. There were two toilets, but only one was available at the beginning of a war cruise because the other would be filled with food—as would be the rest of the boat. Cans of condensed milk clinked against the torpedo tubes, and crates of cabbages colonized the tiny wardroom, where the officers used the table alternately for plotting courses and eating meals.

  Those toilets were problematic even when free of provisions because they were extremely tricky to flush and couldn’t be worked at all if the boat was submerged beyond eighty feet. Flushing required a dozen separate actions with pumps and levers, and if the proper sequence wasn’t followed, the consequences could be disproportionately severe. In at least one instance, mishandling of the flushing (in U-1206, by no less a figure than the captain) led to the destruction of the boat. In good weather the crew preferred to use the “outside” toilet, a wooden ring mounted on the deck.

  This was often accessible because U-boats were not submarines as we know them today, vessels that can stay submerged for weeks at a time. U-boats ran underwater with electric engines powered by those enormous batteries, but not for long: perhaps sixty miles at six miles per hour. The big diesels could push them far faster, but only if they were on the surface. Running submerged on diesel power would asphyxiate the crew in minutes.

  Nevertheless, submarines had to spend a great deal of time below the surface. In the coming war against America, they would loiter on the bottom the whole day off the Carolinas or Massachusetts, rising as the sun set to track their quarry. Those were long days for the crews. Everything dripped, everything stank. Clothing was always damp and soon dirty. The men wore what they called “whore’s undies,” boxer shorts dyed black to make less evident their increasing filthiness. The captain—who lived on top of his men in an intimacy unknown to any other service—would encourage any number of stationary diversions: cards (although that wonderful wellspring of ill feeling, gambling for money, was largely forbidden), chess, painting, reading of course, although the dim lights required to preserve the batteries often made this more pain than pleasure. At regular intervals meals would emerge from the two-burner stove in the galley—which was no more a “galley” than the wardroom was a “room”—to be enjoyed in a close pungency of aging vegetables, piss, fuel oil, much-breathed air, and the real but less definable smells of boredom an
d tension. Bomber crews endured the same thing, but they were back home after a few hours. Submariners lived on what some called “the devil’s shovel” for three months straight.

  The preparations for a war cruise reflected the boat’s uniquely inhospitable soul.

  The stay in a home port was never brief. Routine maintenance was done during a U-boat mission, but not as the term was understood in the surface navies. There, sailors got a sense of the least enticing aspects of eternity by chipping paint down to what was hopefully called “clean bright metal,” laying on primer, then new paint, then chipping again close by, and chipping, and chipping some more. Nobody chipped paint in a U-boat, where the most mundane operations required constant attention to the craft’s endlessly complex innards. Each return to port meant an overhaul of the entire boat.

  This was good for the crew, who got long leaves, and every possible support to help enjoy them. The realities of the service had combined with years of recruitment propaganda to make submariners even more highly regarded in Germany than Luftwaffe pilots. At the end of a cruise, special trains would be standing by to take them to their hometowns—or, if they preferred, to requisitioned châteaus turned into lavish resorts.

  As the time for the next mission approached, the seamen would return to their bases and put up in shoreside barracks for the next few days, or on ocean liners converted into floating dormitories. No man spent a night more than he had to aboard a U-boat.

  The overhaul completed, the boat would begin taking on supplies. Torpedoes first—fourteen for the Type VII boats, twenty-two for the IXs. The latter were roomier vessels, but the additional matériel crammed inside them made the experience of serving aboard identical. The U-boat existed solely to carry torpedoes, and these were stowed everywhere: winched up to a forty-five-degree angle and slid into the pressure hull to lie beneath the flooring of the bow room, and in the stern, and of course in the tubes. Others went between the pressure hull and the outer cladding.