by Richard Snow
Years afterward, Winston Churchill wrote of his feelings when he heard about the Pearl Harbor attack. “No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France … after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war … after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war.”
Churchill had been having dinner with several guests at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat. He was gloomy and distracted that evening, and paid little attention when his valet came in with a $15 portable radio (a gift from Harry Hopkins) so the company could hear the nine-o’clock news. It took a moment for the import to register on Churchill, then he jumped up, slammed shut the lid of the radio, and started from the room saying, “We shall declare war on Japan.” John Winant, the American ambassador, hurried after him, saying, “Good God, you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” Winant persuaded the prime minister instead to call America, and soon Churchill was speaking with Roosevelt, who told him, “It’s quite true. They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”
Not quite the same boat, though. Boiling with plans for the new alliance, Churchill said he was going to leave for Washington at once. His foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, cautioned against it, saying “he was not sure that the Americans would want him so soon.”
Eden saw the possible problems that might be raised by the arrival of this ebullient man who had worked so hard to bring America into a European war when it was Asia that had struck the grievous blow. The foreign secretary had read the situation correctly. In the whirling days that followed the seventh, Roosevelt found the time to write two letters asking Churchill not to come—and the tact to send neither of them.
In a radio address two days after the air raid, FDR linked the dictatorships of Germany and Japan—“We must realize, for example, that the Japanese successes against the United States in the Pacific are helpful to German operatives in Libya”—but one of them had attacked America, and one of them hadn’t. On the evening of the seventh, Admiral Stark began to get the full picture of the calamity over the phone from Rear Admiral Claude C. Bloch, commandant of the naval district in Hawaii: the battleships Nevada, California, and West Virginia were on fire; the Oklahoma and the Arizona were gone. “Did our patrol planes get them before they hit us?” Stark asked. “No,” said Bloch. “The first word that we had was that a destroyer was torpedoed by a sub, and ten minutes later the Japs came in a flock and that is what did the damage.” Then Stark asked a revealing question: was the submarine German?
It most certainly wasn’t. The Japanese attack came as much of a surprise to Hitler as it had to Roosevelt and Churchill. Like Roosevelt and Churchill, Hitler had believed war between America and Japan was imminent, but had no sense of where or when it would begin. He had also assumed since as early as the 1920s that Germany would again fight the United States. On the eve of his invasion of Russia he met with the Japanese foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, to urge on him the advantages of attacking Singapore at once. It would devastate the British and keep America out of the war until Germany was finished with Russia. Hitler was at his most stridently persuasive, but Matsuoka was cool to the idea.* Hitler left the talk not only dissatisfied but disgusted; Matsuoka, he said, combined “the hypocrisy of an American Bible missionary with the cunning of a Japanese Asiatic.”
So Singapore got a few more months of peace while the German armies advanced into Russia, quickly at first, then more slowly, and then, on December 2, with the towers of Moscow in sight and the temperature standing at thirty-two degrees below zero, not at all. Three days later a hundred Soviet divisions counterattacked, and two days after that the reports of Pearl Harbor reached Hitler.
He was delighted. This, he said, “drops like a present into our lap.” He told his generals, “We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in three thousand years.”
For ally she would be. Although the Tri-Partite Act mandated that Germany support Japan only if the nation was attacked, Hitler wanted this war. “I don’t see much future for the Americans,” he said shortly afterward. “It’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problems, and the problem of social inequalities. … My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. … Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a state like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar.”
The muzzle Hitler had placed on his submarines in the Atlantic had been meant to keep America out of the war until Russia was defeated. Now there was no further need for such restraint. “Through the outbreak of war between Japan and the USA,” said his lieutenant Joseph Goebbels, “a complete shift in the general world picture has taken place. The United States will scarcely now be in a position to transport worthwhile matériel to England, let alone the Soviet Union.”
On December 9 Hitler ordered his U-boats to attack all American shipping, but he did not immediately declare war. He wanted time to prepare a speech that would put the business in the best possible light for the German people.
On the afternoon of Thursday, December 11, Hitler went before the Reichstag and spoke for an hour and a half, declaring the assault against Russia a triumph, then moving on to a long denunciation of Roosevelt, who was set on destroying the Third Reich, and sustained in his determination by the “entire satanic insidiousness” of the Jews. Now was the time to act. Any hesitation would only allow the American enemy to grow in strength and malice. Hours before, he had given the American chargé d’affaires a formal declaration of war.
Churchill started out for America at once. So did the German navy. Not, however, nearly as much of the German navy as Admiral Doenitz would have liked.
Five Boats against America
The East Coast submarine offensive, 1942
Doenitz had been eager to attack the eastern United States for months. He knew and respected the increasing strength of the Atlantic convoys that were putting to use all the hard-won lessons of the naval war. He also knew that there had been no lessons, hard-won or otherwise, along some of the world’s richest sea-lanes.
The national arsenal and factory that had prospered so spectacularly supplying his enemies needed every kind of raw matériel, and a great deal of it came by sea—bauxite, from which airplane aluminum was conjured, from Brazil; sugar and coffee and rubber. Even products mined or grown on American soil moved by water: oil from the Gulf ports, lumber and coal and iron ore—the rail and highway systems could carry only a fraction of it. By 1941, 95 percent of the oil sent to the East Coast from the fields of Louisiana and Texas got there aboard tankers plying routes where shipping had never been disturbed and where, Doenitz strongly suspected, nobody had the least idea how to protect it.
As far back as September he had asked Hitler that, should the Führer ever decide to lift his prohibition against attacking American ships, “I should like to be given timely warning, in order to have my forces in position off the American coast before war was actually declared.”
Because the Japanese and not Hitler set the agenda for America’s entry into the war, Doenitz didn’t get his timely warning. On December 7, 1941, he wrote, “There was not a single German U-boat in American waters.”
Taking stock of what he had at his disposal, he again had occasion to resent the hegemony of the battleship. “We had, all told, ninety-one operational U-boats. Of these, twenty-three … were in the Mediterranean and three more were under orders from Naval High Command to proceed there; six were stationed west of Gibraltar, and four were deployed along the Norwegian
coast. Of the remaining fifty-five available, 60 percent were in dockyard hands. …
“There were only twenty-two boats at sea and about half of these were en route to or from their operational base areas. Thus … after two and a half years of war there were never more than ten or twelve boats actively and simultaneously engaged in our most important task, the war on shipping.”
Planning his foray to a distant coast, he wanted to use Type IX boats, considerably larger than the dependable VIIs, and thus with more fuel to burn in American waters; they had a cruising range of eighty-seven hundred miles. On December 9 he asked for twelve of them. High Command told him he could have six, and one of these wouldn’t be ready to sail for weeks.
So, five boats against America. He weighed how to use them to greatest effect. Not in one of his wolf packs this time, yet working in close enough concert as to seem a more formidable force than they in fact were. He would deploy them along the coast between the St. Lawrence and Cape Hatteras, and then “the five boats would receive from me by radio the time and date at which they could simultaneously go into action.” He named his operation Paukenschlag, a word meaning “drumbeat” or “drumroll,” but which has harsher connotations to it, something like “thunderbolt.”
As the last days of 1941 ran out, the five boats crossed the Bay of Biscay.
One of the first to sail was U-123—Ein Zwei Drei to her crew—under Reinhard Hardegan. He was vain and enough of a braggart to annoy his fellow U-boat skippers, but superbly competent. He was tough, too. He’d been a naval aviator before he joined the boats and had in 1936 come out of a crash with a shortened right leg and intermittent stomach bleeding. The injuries were severe enough to get him declared “not fit for service in U-boats.” Yet he had always contrived to keep a jump ahead of his medical records, and here he was, in command of U-123, heading toward the new American war.
He didn’t know that, though. His orders were sealed and not to be opened until the boat reached twenty degrees west longitude. In the meantime, Christmas came. Hardegan had smuggled a fir tree aboard, and it went up in the control room; no candles, but the boat’s electricians had improvised passable substitutes, and although Hardegan ran a strictly dry ship, this one time his men had wine punch.
Two days later 123 crossed twenty degrees west, which was satisfying for everyone aboard for more than one reason. The sailors would find out what their mission was, and they were now on a Frontboot—that is, a warship officially operating in enemy waters—and thus entitled to combat pay. Hardegan broke the seals on his orders and learned that he was part of Operation Paukenschlag, then was briefly mystified to find a guidebook to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. War had come so quickly that this was the best High Command could provide in the way of New York City Harbor charts.
It wasn’t bad. It showed the busy shoreline in considerable detail. The orders mandated that when Hardegan got the word, he would begin operations off New York, then range four hundred miles south to Cape Hatteras. He was to go only after big targets, ten thousand tons or more.
On January 9 the signal came through: commence attacking on the thirteenth. On the eleventh, though, late in the afternoon, U-123’s lookouts spotted a steamer. Hardegan had come up on the bridge at the first sighting and now called for the Groener, a book by a maritime expert of that name containing the profiles of every known merchant vessel. This one, with its near-vertical stack higher than its masts, belonged to the Alfred Holt Shipping Company, the Blue Funnel line. British.
Hardegan swung his boat around and ran beside the ship, slowly closing with her. He asked for the UZO, and up to the bridge came the Uboot-Zieloptik, huge-eyed, fourteen-pound Zeiss binoculars that, once locked to the bridge’s UZO post not only showed the target but allowed the user to draw a bead on it, controlling the torpedo settings as the glasses moved. The captain edged his boat forward until the range had narrowed sufficiently, turned over the UZO to Rudolf Hoffmann, his first watch officer (the IWO; on an American warship, the executive officer), and ordered one of the four forward torpedo tubes flooded.
“Folgen?” called Hoffmann, asking if all the calculations necessary for one moving object to put a missile into another hundreds of yards away—bearing, range, angle—were being properly transmitted from the UZO to the calculator in the conning tower, thence to the forward torpedo room. Hoffmann decided on a depth setting and pressed the launch button. “Los!” he yelled, and the torpedo was on its way.
It had nearly a mile to run—a greater range than Hardegan liked—and he and Hoffmann began counting the seconds. They had reached ninety-seven when yellow flame bloomed just aft of the target’s funnel.
The U-boat’s radioman reported that the freighter immediately began signaling “S-S-S”—“I am struck by a torpedo”—and Hardegan circled until he was standing off the ship’s port bow, then fired a second torpedo from a stern tube. This one took only thirty-one seconds to reach its goal. Five minutes later the ship was gone.
Hardegan turned and headed for New York; he’d have to push to get there on time.
He left behind him, three hundred miles off Cape Cod, fragments of the thirty-eight-year-old, twin screw steamer Cyclops, out of Liverpool. She had been heading from Panama to Halifax with 181 people aboard. At 9,076 tons she was smaller than Doenitz’s preferred targets, but not by much. In the last moments of her life, Cyclops’s radioman had raised Thomaston, Maine, which alerted Halifax, which sent two minesweepers to help.
They couldn’t get there quickly enough to spare the survivors a night in the winter Atlantic. U-123’s attack had killed only two men outright—the ship’s doctor and a gunner—but by the time the minesweeper Red Deer arrived, only 83 were left to save.
Early on the morning of the fourteenth the 123’s lookouts saw the white pulse of the Montauk Point light on the tip of the south shore of Long Island. Mariners had known for three centuries that this coast was perilous—strong, tricky currents, abrupt shallows—and Hardegan made his way along it with care, although close enough in that at least one of his officers worried someone ashore would hear the engines and catch the blunt, hollow smell of diesel exhaust and know what it meant. For his part, the captain watched with growing wonder. Running on the surface, he saw automobile headlights pass and bright geometries of streetlights behind them. Closer to him, marker buoys dipped and shone. Didn’t the creators of this smug efflorescence know they were at war?
Dawn put an end to the show, and Hardegan took U-123 down to the seabed for the day to rest on the rich mulch of crockery and tires and gun carriages and pipestems and rum bottles and bones that all the generations of commerce had sown there.
At dusk the boat rose and continued west, into the bottom of New York Harbor. The lookouts stopped their ceaseless scanning to gape. A couple of months later German movie houses would be showing newsreels of dancing couples and elevated trains purportedly taken from the deck of 123. They were frauds, but the truth was striking enough: a great pleated, silver sail of light, shining and shifting like the aurora borealis, stoked by Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building and a million cars, lifted halfway up the sky. In the distance, the lamps of the Rockaways added a horizontal counterpoint. Closer by, off the starboard bow, a low stretch of beach carried a structure Hardegan recognized at once—a large Ferris wheel—and, just to its left, one he would have understood only had he studied the World’s Fair guidebook with unusual care: the tall, slender mushroom with umbrella-like ribs of ironwork was the Parachute Jump, a popular attraction moved from Flushing Meadows when the fair closed. January wasn’t a big month for Coney Island, but the place was never wholly dark. Hardegan would have seen the bulge of neon-charged haze that, year-round, rode Nathan’s long-famous hot dog stand, which was running full tilt even at this dark, late, cold hour.
Hardegan let his men look at the heedless shore for a long time. “I cannot describe the feeling with words,” he wrote, “but it was unbelievably beautiful and great. I would have given a
way a kingdom for this moment if I had had one. We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out on the coast of the USA.”
Hardegan headed back east and later that night found the British tanker Coimbra, fat with eighty thousand barrels of oil. He fired two torpedoes and split it in three pieces. The captain and thirty-five of the crew burned to death. Long Island citizens called police stations in Quogue and Hampton Bays to report the fire they could see from their homes.
TEN DAYS LATER, HARDEGAN headed home; his colleagues soon followed. They’d used up all their torpedoes and left twenty-five ships dead along the Eastern seabeds. The five boats had been responsible for 70 percent of the Allied shipping sunk that month. Doenitz followed the venerable military axiom of reinforcing success, dispatching more boats as they became available. “The hub of big shipbuilding and the production of armaments lies in the United States,” he wrote. “If, therefore, I go to the hub, and particularly the oil supplies, I am getting to the root of the evil.” Every day England consumed four tankers’ worth of oil and gasoline. The admiral may not have known the exact figure, but he knew what would happen if those tankers didn’t get there.
Dozens of merchant ships were lost along American shores, then hundreds, each one representing a blow to the Allied effort equivalent to a successful bombing raid on a manufacturing city.
That dignified, closed phrase were lost masks a thousand terrible, small epics of suffering and courage. In March, for instance, U-71 hit the Dixie Arrow off Cape Hatteras. The tanker was carrying ninety-six thousand barrels of crude oil and thirty-three men. She was a happy ship: good captain, good food. Crude oil doesn’t burn easily, but a torpedo is more than enough to ignite it, and the ship became a sort of tray for a great liquid-fed torch. Able Seamen Oscar Chappell had the helm. Standing in the furnace heat, he looked about the ship and saw that the crew were huddling at the bow. He told the five other sailors on the bridge to join them, then took the wheel again and turned the Dixie Arrow into the wind. This drove the flames away from the bow and toward Seaman Chappell. He had just enough time to lock the wheel before he died beside it. Because of him, twenty-two men of the Dixie Arrow survived.