Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  The Fleet without a Gun

  Admiral King remakes his command, 1943

  If it seems surprising that the obdurate King could be swayed with such relative ease by a civilian scientist, it may largely be because Bush approached him at a time when the admiral was considering a whole new way of running the Atlantic war. In March alone German submarines had sunk 627,000 tons of merchant shipping. King had been thinking this over.

  When he told Bush to have his scientists sit with Admiral Low, he wasn’t merely fobbing off a pest on a subordinate. Just a couple of weeks earlier he had made Rear Admiral Francis “Frog” (at least it’s not “Froggie”) Low his assistant chief of staff for antisubmarine warfare.

  Low had served on submarines in World War I and later worked on torpedo research. He joined King’s staff in 1940 and left two years later to command a cruiser in the Pacific. He was as tough as King, but calm and understated.* The Hungarian-born journalist Ladislas Farago, who worked with him in the war, wrote that Low was “a proper Bostonian (although he was born in Albany, New York). … A bookish-looking man with some bulk in his build and a ponderous big head, he resembles more the dean of men in an Ivy League school, or my image of Samuel Johnson, than the professional naval officer he was. He never sought the limelight and made every grade on the way up so quietly and effortlessly that his growth was hardly noticed.”

  King charged Low with studying the way the antisubmarine campaign was being conducted. He did and suggested that the various scattered commands, the sea frontiers and naval districts, all be placed under Admiral Ingersoll, Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet. King agreed with the plan, except for putting Ingersoll in charge of it.

  On May 1, 1943, King issued a statement to the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “It is† arranged to set up immediately in the Navy Department an antisubmarine command to be known as the Tenth Fleet.

  “The headquarters of the Tenth Fleet will consist of all existing anti-submarine activities of U.S. Fleet headquarters, which will be transferred intact to the Commander Tenth Fleet. … In addition”—and here are the fruits of scientists getting together with Low—“a research-statistical analysis group will be set up composed of civilian scientists headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush.”

  The fleet’s commander was “to exercise direct control over all Atlantic Sea Frontiers, using sea frontier commanders as task force commanders. He is to control allocation of antisubmarine forces to all commands in the Atlantic, and is to reallocate forces from time to time, as the situation requires.” The enumeration of powers went on to give the Tenth Fleet absolute authority over every American plane and vessel involved in the Atlantic campaign.

  King made Low chief of staff, but was slow to choose the commander who would wield such power. Days went by. Low chafed and fretted and finally cornered the admiral to tell him, “The Tenth Fleet commander should be a naval aviator.”

  King had clearly been fretting, too, and Low’s statement brought him up short. After a few seconds he said, “He is.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.” And that was that. “There were not the proper people available,” King said later, “so I wanted to keep it under myself.”

  A fleet, of course, means ships. The Tenth Fleet had no ships; indeed, the whole enterprise cost less to run than a single destroyer. It consisted in its entirety of about fifty people in a grubby Washington office building. “There never was anything like the Tenth Fleet in the U.S. Navy,” wrote Farago, who was on its intelligence staff, “nor for that matter in any navy of the world.”

  Low gathered the brightest people he could find, and he pushed them hard. Like an actual guns-and-steel fleet, Tenth Fleet worked a twenty-four-hour day.* But if he had King’s determination, he was not so grim. “Low mellowed an iron rule with the traits of his own personality,” Farago remembered. “He was always kind and considerate, urbane and cordial in his relations with his subordinates.”

  With its absolute authority to direct the Atlantic naval war, the operation he ran grabbed ships and planes as it needed them, telling them where to find U-boats, or diverting convoys far from their planned routes so the boats wouldn’t find them.

  Out in the Atlantic on his destroyer, Wirt Williams would look at little X’s drawn on a chart, each one representing a U-boat, and wonder “for the hundredth time, by what sort of intelligence men sitting at desks before map-covered walls in London and Washington could say, ‘there are so many submarines operating here,’ and make a pinpoint in the ocean. But they did … they were not infallibly right. But they were good. They were very, very good.”

  In part, those men at their desks knew where the Germans were because the Germans told them. The close hold Doenitz kept over his submarines meant a constant crackle of radio traffic between boats and shore—“They were always too goddamned chatty for their own good,” my father said—and their opponents had ways to listen in.

  A line of high-frequency direction finders—HF/DF, or Huff Duff to every sailor who ever had occasion to talk about them—rose along Atlantic coasts in the Shetlands, Greenland, Newfoundland, Africa … twenty-six of them in all. If one picked up a transmission from a U-boat at sea, it learned in which direction the submarine lay; if two or more did, the bearings could be laid over a chart and show by their intersection the boat’s exact location. Huff Duff eventually went to sea on escort vessels and got more and more precise in its findings all through the war.

  The Germans knew the Allies were using HF/DF, and the Allies knew they knew. But behind Huff Duff, behind every other intelligence tool and technique, lay one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. The British had broken the German naval code.

  In the 1920s a German inventor named Arthur Scherbius developed a coding machine. It was meant not for the military, but rather to protect confidential business messages from the nosy freemasonry of the telegraph office. It did its job far beyond what any commodities trader had the right to expect.

  The machine, called Enigma, sent no messages itself. Rather, it enciphered them. At its front was a typewriter keyboard and, directly behind that, a battery of electric lights, each bearing a letter of the alphabet and laid out identically to the keyboard. When the user pressed a key, one of the letters would light up. Much had gone on before it did, though. The current passed through an electromechanical maze whose twists involved three interchangeable rotors ringed with the alphabet, with twenty-six pins on their faces, one for each letter, and veined with internal wiring to connect them randomly with contacts on the opposite side, a “plugboard” whose scramble of wires could be shifted like those in a telephone switchboard of the era, and a reflector, which, like the rotors, contained a pattern of wires that further diverted the current. The letter punched in would be converted five times—by the three rotors, by the reflector, by the plugboard—before its corollary letter blinked on.

  To encode the message an operator set the rotors and plugs in position, typed it in, and copied down each letter that lit up. Then the resulting gibberish would be broadcast to a recipient who would key it into another Enigma machine and copy down the decrypted letters that showed up on his machine. But those letters would be decrypted only if the recipient had the same rotors and had set them and the plugs identically to those on the machine that had encoded the message.

  Though the engine itself was basically a piece of late-Victorian ingenuity, the messages it produced inhabited the last way station short of infinity. When the German navy added a fourth wheel, the machine could dispense for each of our paltry twenty-six letters 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 substitutions.

  Scherbius and his military clients, who adopted Enigma in the late 1920s, had every reason to believe its ciphers were impregnable.

  They weren’t. Poland, the object of a resurgent Germany’s most strenuous enmity, put mathematicians to work on Enigma intercepts nearly as soon as the German army started using the machine. The Poles attacked the endless wilderness of possibilities with no tools save pencil
and paper. In a feat of intellectual heroism unique in the war, and perhaps in the history of mathematics, they broke Enigma.

  They built working models of the German Enigma machines, and in the summer of 1939, suspecting their nation was on the verge of a fight it would likely lose, they gave one to Britain. By that time the Poles had moved beyond pencil and paper to build machines to sort through the possible settings. They called them bombas—bombs—but nobody knows why; perhaps because they ticked during their cogitations.

  After Poland went down, the British largely pursued the mechanical solutions. In their Code and Cipher School at a redbrick estate some fifty miles northwest of London called Bletchley Park, ten thousand staffers tended ranks of what were by then called bombes as the machines pulled coherent messages out of all the billions of permutations.

  The bombes made the work possible. It was still excruciatingly repetitive, always intense and frustrating, often baffling. The codebreakers got considerable help in their work in the spring of 1941, when the U-110 torpedoed two ships in a westbound convoy. A corvette immediately set upon the submarine and forced it to the surface with depth charges. The crew abandoned the boat as soon as it broke water and were picked up by the corvette. A Royal Navy destroyer arrived on the scene, saw the submarine still afloat, and sent over a boarding party. The British sailors found the U-boat deserted and made a hasty, skillful search. Before it sank, they took off a sheaf of papers and an oblong wooden box.

  When the destroyer made port, this harvest was handed over to waiting Naval Intelligence officers. One of them exclaimed, “What! This …? And this …? We’ve waited a long time for one of these.” It was an Enigma machine, all its settings just as they had been when the first depth charge exploded.

  Everyone kept quiet about this capture for decades. The British official history, The War at Sea, published in 1954, came no closer to explaining its significance than that mention of “one of these,” and quoting the first sea lord’s congratulations, which ended, “The petals of your flower are of rare beauty.”

  The man who had inadvertently made those petals available to his enemies disappeared with the U-110. He was Captain Fritz-Julius Lemp, who had opened the long fight by sinking the Athenia.

  The British named the information gained from their Enigma decryptions Ultra. Although they’d been openhanded with their magnetron, they didn’t tell the Americans they’d cracked Enigma until after Pearl Harbor. Throughout the war they used the shrewdest gambler’s instincts in playing the cards Ultra dealt them. Any move too obviously spurred by knowledge gleaned from orders enciphered by Enigma could have let the Germans know that someone had learned how to listen to them.

  King was less cautious about the information flowing into the Tenth Fleet than his British colleagues thought he should be. He wanted to take after the Milchkühe. These were Type XIV U-boats, nicknamed “milk cows” because they dispensed liquid sustenance. They were big submarine tankers, carrying provisions and ammunition and, most important, diesel oil. A Type VII could take on enough fuel from one to double the length of its war patrols. By the time the Tenth Fleet began its operations, the Type XIVs had met and refueled some four hundred U-boats, and ten of them were at sea.

  King intended to use what he’d learned from Ultra to destroy them. The keepers of the oracle said the operation would be too risky. King wrote the first sea lord, “While I am equally concerned with you as to security of [Enigma] information it is my belief that we are not deriving from it fullest value. The refueling submarine is the key to high speed, long range U-boat operations. To deprive the enemy of refuelers would at once decrease the effectiveness and radius of entire U-boat deployment. With careful preparations it seems not unlikely that their destruction might be accomplished without trace.”

  As usual, King got his way, saying that he’d disguise the true source of the whereabouts of the U-tankers by sending over planes. The Germans would think they’d been caught solely by air reconnaissance. By midsummer, only three of the tankers were left, and two of them were in home ports being overhauled. The U-boats got hungrier, their patrols shorter.

  The air ruse worked; the Germans never did discover that Enigma had been penetrated. Doenitz thought something was wrong, though. His boats seemed increasingly to be chasing convoys that evaded them and attacked by enemies that couldn’t have found them with radar alone.

  His own country’s intelligence service was superb, almost always able to supply the sailing date and destination of a convoy. Still, the convoys somehow disappeared between making sail and making port. German Naval Intelligence—which was more meticulous than that of the country’s army or air force—insisted its system could not have been compromised. There had to be an agent, albeit a supernaturally good one, somewhere in the Kriegsmarine. Erhard Martens, who ran Naval Intelligence, conducted an investigation so thorough that only Doentiz himself and his chief of staff for submarines, Admiral Eberhardt Godt, were spared its scrutiny. When Martens reported that there was no possible leak, Doenitz made what seems to be the only joke ever attributed to him. Turning to his chief of staff, as loyal and dutiful a lieutenant as any commander could wish, Doenitz said gravely, “Now it can be only you or me.”

  The bombes ticked away in Bletchley, still, always, unheard in Berlin. In 1943 Ultra revealed that the Germans had developed a torpedo that could follow the sound of propellers. All the U-boat captain had to do was fire one in the direction of a ship, and the eel would take care of the rest. Tenth Fleet got the news and, among many other measures, sent the Neunzer, still on her shakedown cruise in Bermuda, to help.

  Steaming as Before

  The essence of Atlantic duty, 1943–45

  An assignment to sail around off Bermuda sounds like soft duty, but it wasn’t. From 0545, when the bosun’s pipe, made even less dulcet by the ship’s loudspeakers, and followed by the bosun’s voice—“Now reveille! Now reveille! Up all hands! Mess cooks down to the galley!”—woke the crew, the days were at once densely eventful and monotonous, filled with repetitive rehearsals for any ill fortune that might befall the ship: man overboard, collision, fire, steering gone, fire again. … In between the drills, more drills: gunnery practice, and torpedo launches, the costly missiles shot from their tubes amidships and set so that at the end of their run they would bob to the surface to be collected. Every day brought the ancient order “Sweepers, man your brooms,” and the eternal chipping away at the rust that would silently and ceaselessly attack the ship for the rest of her life. All this activity culminated with the captain in charge of the Bermuda training group coming aboard for a final inspection, with formalities such as side boys and saluting and a solemnly exacting tour of the ship while officers and seamen alike stood nervously waiting for the judgment. “The ship passed a big inspection Monday,” my father wrote in relief, “for which we were really beautifully scrubbed up.” The Neunzer was deemed ready to fight the war.

  But first she went north, out of the coddling mildness of the Gulf Stream and into the stiff, black-green waves off Quonset Point, Rhode Island, in Narragansett Bay. Here, in late November, the log gets cryptic: “Underway pursuant to orders to run measured mile and assist Mr. Burgess in research project.” That was the torpedoes.

  The British had gotten it wrong when they thought Ultra had told them the Germans were building an acoustic homing torpedo. The Kriegsmarine was about to deploy a “curly” torpedo, which, toward the end of its run, would start speeding around in circles. It couldn’t hear, but its final flurry greatly increased its chances of hitting a ship in the close ranks of a convoy. The error turned out be fortunate for the Allies, however, because when the Germans did begin building actual homing torpedoes, work on how to defeat them was well along.

  In Narragansett Bay the Neunzer helped develop ways to outfox the torpedoes. Given the technological sophistication of the attack, the defense was almost absurdly simple. While he was on this duty, my father made a drawing showing a DE towing a calliope moun
ted on an ornate little swan boat. An officer is pounding away at a keyboard on the fantail while torpedoes gambol about the organ like happy dolphins as a convoy steams safely past. This whimsy (which was so well received by his shipmates and then his superiors that it eventually found its way to FDR’s desk) was not all that wide of the mark. What the navy scientists came up with was nothing more than a length of line towing metal rods that clanged together just under the surface a few hundred feet astern of the ship. The British called it foxer, the Americans FXR, and the Germans the buzz saw, because, they claimed, it made ten to a hundred times the noise of a ship. However loud it was, it did the job.

  The torpedoes successfully beguiled, the Neunzer set off on the work she’d been designed to do. On New Year’s Day 1944, at Norfolk, she joined up with TF (Task Force) 62, headed with a large convoy for the Mediterranean.

  Here was the essence of the Atlantic War: convoy work, dull, trying, and anxious. The routine is reflected in thousands of Neunzer log entries. On January 5, ending his watch at 1800, my father opened his report with the universal prefatory phrase “Steaming as before,” followed by “1721 convoy changed course to 116o T speed increased to 8 kts.” What a world of potential disaster lies in that “changed course.” Following a preset zigzag pattern, the vessels in a convoy would turn in one direction, steam in it for a while, then in unison turn again and continue on a new course. Dozens of ships, not one showing a light, swinging around together, trying to keep track of their neighbors on the firefly glow of the radar screen, each a potential danger to the next, a vast choreography of two-, six-, and ten-thousand-ton machines, all toyed with by the wind and the set of the sea and human inattention, struggling to maintain an intricate pattern in the winter dusk.