Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  Despite playing such tricks, the snorkel offered the only real chance a U-boat now had to get to sea undetected. In March 1945, seven submarines, all outfitted with it, assembled along the Norwegian coast; they would sail in two groups of three with one going alone. When they arrived off the United States, in April, their commanders were to open sealed orders and go into action.

  PAUL JUST, CAPTAIN OF the U-546, had begun his military career as a flier. Many German submarine officers had started out that way, despite the near-total difference of conditions in the two services, the endless blue acreage of the sky, and a world where sweating rivets were never more than a couple of feet from your face.

  Just had commissioned U-546, a Type IX, in June 1943 and taken the boat on two war patrols. He’d sunk no ships, but his voyages had not lacked for incident. On the first, he left Kiel in late January 1944. Two weeks later he was attacked by a British Sunderland flying boat. It killed a man in his gun crew and damaged the boat’s engines, but Just continued his patrol. Coming home across the Bay of Biscay in April, he was attacked from the air three nights running. The boat suffered no harm, shot down a B-24 Liberator bomber, and got back to base late in May.

  Two months later, with a snorkel fitted, it set out again and again got in a fight with an airplane. Neither plane nor boat was harmed, but the U-546 used up its entire store of antiaircraft ammunition in the encounter. Captain Just had to return to France to replenish the supply and fix the misbehaving snorkel. The boat went back out, attacked a carrier, and in turn got depth-charged for three hours. It was a long cruise—150 days—and it ended in Germany because the French ports had been taken. At Kiel, the now constant air raids delayed the overhaul for weeks, but the boat was ready when Doenitz’s orders for Seewolf came through.

  Every one of the men in U-546 knew what the odds were. Doenitz was taking casualties of more than 70 percent. In January 1945 he had sunk seven ships and lost six boats, an insupportable rate of exchange. “Our situation is desperate,” Just wrote later. “The commander can no longer guide us as he did during the successful group tactics of the battles of the Atlantic. The aircraft carriers and destroyer formations have been brought into combat. A single carrier group can police thousands of sea miles.”

  But if Just didn’t have much hope, he did have fourteen torpedoes, and U-546 put to sea on March 21.

  SEVEN BOATS: PERHAPS NOT much of an armada, but look what only five had accomplished in the weeks after Pearl Harbor.

  Everything had changed since then, however. Once we could be taken completely by surprise when German submarines appeared off our coast; once we had the Atik and the YP-438 and the Kitsis to throw into the breach. Now the Tenth Fleet knew what Doenitz planned, and Admiral Ingram knew what to do about it. For Operation Teardrop, the last and largest antisubmarine effort of the war, he had four escort carriers and forty-two DEs at his disposal and would, he said, “bar off the entire Eastern Seaboard of Canada and the United States to a phalanx of snorkel boats.” His cordon would consist of two “barriers.” The carriers Mission Bay and Croatan and their attendant DEs would make up the first one, the northern barrier; Core and Bogue the southern barrier.

  The Neunzer would be part of the latter. She was in Miami on April 9 when she got orders to dash north to Argentia, Newfoundland, in company with her fellow DEs Chatelain, Pillsbury, Pope, Flaherty, and Frederick C. Davis.

  The day before, my father had written my mother a relaxed, high-spirited letter that ended with “P.S. the baker gave us all a slice of delicious hot apple pie tonight which he had just taken out of the oven. The rigors of war!” Now, apparently feeling some sort of sad prescience, he dashed her off a note that concluded, “There undoubtedly will be some break in my letters after this one, dear. … Darling, I do love you so much and always will. It would make me so happy just to have your companionship once more. This is number 1 of all the important things I must forgo in these times. War is such a wretched thing—extravagant, destructive, nerve wracking—and monotonous. The wrong application of so many distinguished abilities, and so much material.”

  The Neunzer had a new skipper now. Captain Greenbacker had been assigned to a Pacific command, and his exec, Virgil Gex, relieved him. He took the Neunzer out of sunny Miami back into winter. “It has been a normal week aside from rough cold weather,” my father wrote, “to which we are by now accustomed, but which certainly cracked down on us with very little preparation. Now we look on cold whitecap churned water, and right now on bleak craggy mountains.” The ship left the bleak crags of Argentia to take up the barrier patrol with its fellow DEs and the carrier Bogue. These sentries had a bitter time of it. This was the April Atlantic at its worst: steady winds of forty to fifty knots, green water solid over the decks, spray and drizzle melding into a stinging gray haze that never lifted. While they were at sea, the navy lost a staunch friend. On April 12 Franklin Roosevelt died. “We had our memorial services for the President today,” my father wrote on the fifteenth. “I was on watch and couldn’t attend, but understand it was fine.”

  On that same day, destroyer escorts of the Croatan group in the northern barrier sank the first of the Seewolf submarines; the next day, two more. Then it was the southern barrier’s turn.

  April 23, 1945, found fourteen DEs combing a hundred miles of ocean between Newfoundland and the Azores. Early in the afternoon a plane from the Bogue spotted a submarine running on the surface about seventy miles from the Pillsbury, where Commander F. S. Hall was in charge of the DE Task Unit 22.7.1: DEs Pillsbury, Otterstetter, Flaherty, Pope, Keith, Chatelain, Frederick C. Davis, Neunzer, Hubbard, Varian, Otter, Hayter, Janssen, and Cockrill. Commander Hall formed a scouting line, the ships three thousand yards apart, and headed toward the place where the submarine had, predictably, submerged. As a darkening in the wind-driven murk indicated nightfall, the ships steamed along, their sonar flinging out its unceasing query. Just before midnight, my father recorded in the log, “All hands manned battle stations, proceeded to assist USS DAVIS on possible sonar contact … negative results.”

  But they’d very likely made contact with the U-546.

  “Although we try our best to conserve electricity and every man moves as little as possible,” wrote Captain Just, “after twenty-four hours of silent running we must surface, raise the mast of the snorkel, and face whatever immediate danger awaits us. For four weeks we had to alternate between creeping and snorkeling in order to avoid a carrier group in this part of the sea. Now the hydrophones register screw sounds. They swell up and down until at last they fade away.”

  Hours later, on the morning of April 24, the screw sounds returned.

  “Go to periscope depth,” ordered Just, and he took in a “quick panorama view. The wind has abated, the stormy sea has changed into a high, long swell. The view is good, there is no enemy in sight. At the horizon however stands a large dark square. I recognize the silhouette from another trip: an aircraft carrier. Its protectors, the destroyers, are nowhere to be seen, no airplanes in the sky. … It would make no sense to become targets without first having an opportunity to launch an attack ourselves. So we dive down to ninety meters. And listen.”

  The propeller noises returned. Captain Just ran up his periscope again. “It’s the protectors,” the DEs.

  “Now we can be the ones to launch a surprise attack. Another quick look over the entire horizon to determine whether any danger looms from behind. All is clear. The carrier is nowhere to be seen. The destroyers are running at full speed. They are lean and beautiful, cutting through the swells like knives. It is a magnificent, a dangerous sight.

  “Every man is stationed, all torpedoes poised to fire. Suspense. Concentration. The motor of the periscope purrs softly. … Enemy speed twenty-eight knots—distance nine hundred meters—bearing forty.”

  Just’s first watch officer put the captain’s estimates into the range calculator. “Time seems to creep, sweat beads my forehead. ‘Distance six hundred—bearing seventy.’ Waiti
ng just a few more seconds, the breath falters, the mouth is dry. …

  “Now he shows almost his entire broadside.

  “‘Tube two—GO!’

  “Slight recoil on the calmly floating boat. ‘Torpedo launched!’ It’s time to get out.”

  THE FREDERICK C. DAVIS was a veteran; she had beaten off air attacks in the Mediterranean, taken part in the invasion of southern France, won the Navy Unit Citation for her work during the Anzio invasion. Her men called her the Fightin’ Freddie, and this was not just bumptious alliterative provincialism: sailors aboard other ships also used the nickname. (The men of the Neunzer liked to call DE-150 the Mighty Buck-and-a-Half, but it is unlikely this usage ever spread beyond the ship’s own crew.)

  Dawn came up on the twenty-fourth to show everything as it should be, the Hayter three thousand yards to starboard, the Neunzer three thousand yards to port. The Davis’s men were at breakfast.

  At 0829 the soundman got a contact, “very sharp and clear,” he reported. The ship rode over it as Lieutenant Robert Minerd, the JOOD, called the captain, J. R. Crosby, in the wardroom where he was still with his eggs and coffee, to tell him, while the OOD ordered “right standard rudder.” “Am investigating possible contact,” the Davis reported. Five minutes later she picked up the contact again. At 0840 the submarine—if that’s what it was—lay only 650 yards away.

  The Davis knew her job as well as any ship in the navy. Perhaps the crew’s seasoned expertise had made them all a little casual. Afterward, my father heard that the Davis hadn’t really buttoned itself up for action, hadn’t gone to general quarters.

  The torpedo killed everyone in the wardroom in one red second. Bulkheads and decks tore apart. The engine room was a roiling molten pool—two men made it out, neither lived long—and the mainmast fell. Some men escaped from their quarters up a ladder whose rungs were so hot they glowed. Lieutenant Minerd made his way out of the smoke-filled pilothouse, past a lookout hanging dead from a belaying pin on the signal bridge. The executive officer, wearing no life jacket, jumped off the bridge and disappeared forever. Seawater shorted out the service generators, which killed the pressure on the bilge pumps and the fire hoses. That didn’t make any difference, though. The Davis’s back was broken, and she split in half. Some of the crew tried to man their battle stations, but it was too late.

  Seven minutes after she’d regained that promising sonar contact, the Davis was gone. A few minutes later, her depth charges exploded; some had been set on safety, but some couldn’t be reached. The explosions were violent enough to knock out the Flaherty’s sound gear as she steered into the spreading oil slick to pick up survivors. She couldn’t launch a boat—the seas were too high—but her men threw lines over the sides, and Davis crewmen on a raft had just reached one when the Flaherty’s sonarman, who had his equipment running again, said he’d picked up a submarine. That’s the sinking Davis you’re getting, an officer told him. No, said the sonarman, he had the Davis and the submarine both, “positive submarine, very deep.” The captain knew the priorities of the situation. He ordered the rescue lines cut and went after the submarine. The Hayter was sent to help the survivors. “The HAYTER commenced a circular sweep,” her action report reads, “around the outside of the area where the survivors were located. Individual survivors were first brought to the side of HAYTER by members of the HAYTER crew who thoughtless of their own life or injury jumped from the side of the ship into rough and shark infested waters.” The Hayer got a boat launched, and it returned to the ship nearly foundering, with only six inches of freeboard showing. It took an hour and a half to gather in sixty-six survivors and eleven corpses. “Shock, chills and acute anxiety greatly predominated and obscured practically all other symptoms until they diminished. About one third were in good shape and needed no treatment other than dry clothes. About one third were shaking so badly that they couldn’t undress. About one third were unconscious or semiconscious.” Most of them “snapped back to normal with amazing rapidity under warm blankets with a dose of brandy” administered by the crewmen who “rendered emergency aid with alacrity and wisdom and nursed the patients with tenderness and a rough good will that played a large role in restoring the boys’ morale as well as their bodies to normal.”

  THE DAVIS’S DEATH WAS identical to many so prodigally dispensed by the Kriegsmarine since the distant summer of 1939. What happened afterward was not. The U.S. navy had been fighting U-boats for a long time now, and the action that followed has come to be seen as a sort of final exam that ratified the service’s long and costly education.

  Captain Just knew what was coming: “Hell awaits us.” He ordered every man not on watch to his bunk, to conserve air, and moved away at one knot. “The instinct to flee makes us wish we could take off at full speed … but a slowly turning screw is almost inaudible.” He had gone half a mile when the radioman reported, “Five strong points of sound can be heard. What is happening above us is unmistakable. The five destroyers are separating and positioning themselves in formation. Their screws are switching on and the hunt for us begins.”

  The destroyer escorts followed him, lost him, picked him up again. They attacked with depth charges and hedgehogs.

  Just took his boat as deep as it could go, to nearly six hundred feet. “Here and there the wood of the inner lining crackles. It sounds creepy in the breathless silence. Nineteen atmospheres of water press together the iron pipes in which we live.

  “Crashes envelop us. Six heavy bombs very near. The entire boat is shaken, glass clinks, objects fly through the rooms, the lights go out.”

  As planes from the Bogue circled in the gray sky, the DEs went in on creeping attacks, a tactic developed by the British in which one ship keeps sonar contact, guiding the other when the crash of exploding depth charges briefly deafens the ship that dropped them. Here is a fragment of the group’s battle report:

  1254: VARIAN reported a large air bubble.

  1255: DE NEUNZER was ordered to the scene of contact.

  1259: HUBBARD reported indications that U-boat was at depth of 600 feet.

  1314: Another creeping attack delivered.

  1320: JANSSEN relieved by FLAHERTY at scene of contact.

  1341: Creeping attack delivered.

  1346: DE CHATELAIN ordered to scene of attack.

  1418: ComtCortDiv 62, in OTTER, and DE HAYTER left scene of DAVIS torpedoing to deliver survivors to escort carriers CORE and BOGUE. DE OTTERSTETTER remained on scene of torpedoing to continue search for any remaining survivors.

  1515: VARIAN reported depth indication that U-boat was at depth of 580 feet.

  1516: Another depth-charge attack delivered.

  1545: DE COCKRILL ordered to scene of contact.

  1549: Creeping attack delivered by NEUNZER, VARIAN, and HUBBARD, with CHATELAIN as directing ship.

  And so the long day wore on.

  Despite all the spaciousness of sky above them, the men aboard the destroyer escorts felt something of the cramped anxiety the German crew below experienced in having to do everything for hour after hour, always slowly. The DEs were tied to the speed of the submarine as they took turns dropping depth charges and everyone stood at his battle station, cold and tense and remembering what had happened to the Davis.

  It was worse for the men they were hunting.

  “The deathblow threatens us once more,” wrote Just. “The screw sounds become clearer. One wants to close one’s ears, to scream, to wish oneself away. … Like a terrible storm it thunders down upon us. Five bombs arrive hard and so damn close that the boat rolls and shakes. … Water leaks are reported everywhere. The rudder is stuck hard a-port. But no matter; we are more or less trapped in place anyway. The inside of the boat is devastated.”

  The 546’s crew worked in the faint, dying shine of the emergency lights. “The eyes of the men hang on me. Another attack. Again the thundering and cracking breaks down upon us. ‘Large water leak in the engine room!’ Now it is serious. … No longer does a jet of w
ater stream in; it is an unbelievable amount, an avalanche of white water. … In no time the weight presses into the boat by the ton. The bilge, the room under the floorboards fills up in minutes. U-546 is sinking.”

  1700: As VARIAN fires Hedgehog on his target, HUBBARD starts in for Hedgehog run, NEUNZER holding contact also.

  1718: VARIAN commences dropping, NEUNZER still holding contact.

  “The destruction and devastation on the boat are indescribable,” wrote Just. “Inch-thick screw joints have been severed from the steel walls. Big electronic devices have been torn free and hang from the ceiling by their cables. All of the lockers have burst; clothes, shoes, and kitchenware are heaped together in chaotic disarray.”

  His chief engineer, who had been on thirteen war patrols, told the captain, “I’ve been through a lot, but I’ve never been banged up as badly as this.” Seawater was mixing with the hydrochloric acid in the broken batteries, and a lethal tang of chlorine gas added itself to all the other reeks in the thick, spent air.