Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The operations of the following months bore out this optimism. Sinkings by U-boats rose to nearly 550,000 tons in March and to a spectacular 841,118 tons in April. The Admiralty was also encouraged by intelligence reports stressing the dire impact of the campaign on the enemy’s war effort. Supplies for the French and Italian armies were said to be badly disrupted and British sailors, livid at their own fleet’s failure to protect them, on the brink of revolt.30 The navy’s insistence on unrestricted warfare appeared to be vindicated. In fact, a close look at the figures shows precisely the opposite.31 Had the new ruthless ‘sink on sight’ tactics been the cause of success, each U-boat would have been recording a much higher average daily rate of sinkings. However, in the campaign’s first five, most successful months, this rate rose by a measly average of 54 tons per day. In the Mediterranean, the average sinkings per U-boat actually dropped. The German success was due not to the new tactics but to the much larger number of U-boats on patrol at any one time. The navy not only had more and better submarines than previously, as those ordered in 1915 came into service, but it also used them much more intensively. The order to navigate the English Channel paid dividends, for British defences proved to be largely ineffectual and the shorter route shaved six days off each mission. Less sustainably, the tempo of operations, with little time permitted for rest and repair, also increased the kill rate. The April sinkings were achieved in good part by pushing the officers and men of the submarine arm to the limits of their endurance. The success of that month was never again equalled, neither in the First World War nor, despite considerably more submarines and sophisticated equipment, in the Second World War.32

  The sleek shark-like U-boats, a triumph of early twentieth-century technology, have captured many a writer’s imagination. Yet all too often the officers and men who operated them are forgotten; the submarines are pictured coursing through the water dealing death and destruction almost of their own volition. In reality, a U-boat was only ever as good as its crew and commander. These sailors endured extremely tough conditions. One captured submariner who spent three years in the marine infantry on the Western Front before joining the Submarine Section told British interrogators that he preferred the trenches to life on the U-boats.33 Submarine service entailed an absence not so much of personal privacy as of any personal space at all. The typical U-boat of the High Seas Fleet was around 70 metres in length and just 6.5 metres at its widest point. Into these claustrophobic confines were crammed a crew of around forty and everything that they needed for a month-long cruise. The commander had a tiny cabin, while other officers shared small quarters with each other, as did warrant officers and petty officers. The men slept on bunks in the torpedo rooms, their space often restricted by extra torpedoes supplementing the U-boats’ limited standard stock of ten, twelve or at most sixteen. Equipment typically included a machine gun, searchlight and hundreds of rounds of ammunition for the deck artillery. Seven to twelve tons of drinking water were stowed.34 Food for the voyage filled any empty nook or cranny. ‘Every available corner and space is filled with provisions,’ wrote one U-boat commander. ‘The cook . . . must hunt below in every conceivable place for his vegetables and meats. The latter are stored in the coolest quarters, next to the munitions. The sausages are put close to the red grenades, the butter lies beneath one of the sailor’s bunks, and the salt and spice have been known to stray into the commander’s cabin.’35

  It was not easy to bear such living conditions, especially as the discomfort was exacerbated by the other hardships of active service. Heavy seas would cause submarines to roll violently, with ill-effects on their crews’ digestive systems. Martin Niemöller recalled how on his maiden voyage as Second Watchkeeper in U73, half the sailors were permanently seasick while the other half cleaned up after them. The buffeting might be escaped by submerging, but this brought its own problems. Ideally, the U-boat would be ventilated before diving, but often there was no time and so sailors had to work in a choking atmosphere of machine oil, cooking and sweat. Although crews were equipped with potassium compounds to soak up carbon dioxide, after several hours underwater the air became ‘very thick and foul’. Temperatures rose to an unpleasant 30°C, and to an almost unbearable 40°C in the engine room.36 The longer a voyage lasted, the greater the stink. To save water, sailors were allowed to wash only once per week, and pumice and sand made inadequate substitutes for the soap that was lacking everywhere in Germany. Many suffered from a skin complaint known as ‘petroleum disease’, which caused small sores to appear all over the body and was widely blamed on the low-quality Galician diesel used to power the vessels.37

  Above all, life on the U-boats was perilous. The seas were treacherous. Niemöller had joined U73 after its entire bridge complement was swept overboard by high waves in the North Sea, and on his own first voyage the submarine lost another man to the deep. The enemy too was dangerous. To fight in a U-boat was not just to hunt but to be hunted. To submariners, the whole sea appeared to be ‘a powder keg’. ‘Mines, nets, explosive devices, shells and sharp ship’s keels are our enemies,’ wrote one U-boat commander in 1916. ‘Any minute we could be thrown a hundred metres up in the air or a hundred metres under the water.’38 Losses can only be described as horrendous: 5,132 men, half of all who served on the U-boats, were killed during the war. The year 1916 was comparatively safe, with twenty-three U-boats sunk from a force whose monthly strength averaged sixty-seven vessels. In 1918, the most costly year, 102 were destroyed from an average monthly strength of 124 submarines. The pattern of casualties was quite distinct from that of land forces. Whereas infantry units suffered a trickle of losses punctuated by devastation in the periodic offensives, casualties in submarines were either very light or total. When a vessel sunk, its whole crew almost invariably perished.39

  Nonetheless, chances of survival were not equal for all submarine crew members. Men stationed in the conning tower had a slight advantage over their comrades trapped in the boat’s confines. The commander of UC65, Lieutenant Commander Claus Lafrenz, escaped death when his vessel was torpedoed by a British submarine because the explosion threw him out of the tower high into the air. Similarly, the three survivors from UB72, a coastal boat sunk in May 1918 by another torpedo strike, were two look-outs and an extremely lucky seaman who had come up to the conning tower to throw potato peelings overboard and had lingered for a cigarette. This man, not the watch, noticed the torpedo’s wake and jumped into the sea just before it hit. The two look-outs went down with the U-boat but were blown back to the surface in an air bubble. A bubble also saved Engine-room Petty Officer Karl Eschenberg, the sole survivor of U104, in April 1918. He wrested open a torpedo hatch as his depth-charged vessel slid into the deep and was pushed up the tube by escaping air. As his ordeal illustrates, even if sailors made it to the surface, survival was far from guaranteed. Eschenberg kicked off his clothes and had to tread water for three hours before he was picked up by a British warship. He was fortunate that it was spring, for in autumn or winter sailors pitched into the Atlantic soon succumbed to exposure and drowned.40

  The war’s most remarkable escape was probably that from UB81, which struck a mine in the English Channel on 2 December 1917. Survivors recounted how there was an explosion, the boat shook and then two sailors rushed forward shouting that the stern was flooding. The watertight doors separating the compartments were quickly shut, but the weight of the water dragged the submarine down onto the seabed. The crew tried to surface, but the aft ballast tanks were damaged, so only the bow lifted. With the stern resting on the seabed, the boat was suspended in the water diagonally, powerless to right itself. The woes of the men wedged uncomfortably inside increased as the second compartment began leaking ice-cold water, raising the air pressure and making breathing difficult.

  There was one very slim chance of escape. UB81 had been operating in shallow waters, and its commander, the popular and successful Lieutenant Reinhold Saltzwedel, reckoned that the bow might be poking above the surface. Wi
th the boat stuck at a 53° angle, the crew laboured for hours to remove a live torpedo from one of the forward tubes and, once this had been achieved, three sailors were pushed inside, one on top of the other and the tube was cautiously opened. Miraculously, they found to their delight that the bow lay a foot above the water, making it possible for those inside the tube to crawl to freedom and pull comrades out to join them. Even then, however, their problems were not over. The icy cold forced some to return to the U-boat, saying, according to one of the survivors, that ‘they would rather die down below than up above’. Those sailors who remained fired flares to attract attention, but when, finally, a British patrol boat did arrive, waves knocked it against the stricken submarine, sending the wreck to the bottom, this time permanently. Of the thirty-five-man crew, only the seven who had gone up the torpedo tube and chosen to brave the weather were rescued and one of them died of exposure before reaching port. Saltzwedel, whose idea it had been to escape through the tube and who refused to leave until all his men were off the U-boat, perished with them.41

  To cope with the high risk of an unpleasant death, submariners developed a rich fund of superstitions. The first cardinal rule of the service was that a commander should never switch U-boats. This belief had some logic, as no two submarines handled alike and a commander could get more out of a vessel whose quirks he knew than one with which he was unfamiliar. The second rule, more difficult to rationalize but firmly insisted upon throughout the Submarine Section, was that it was terribly bad luck to begin a mission on a Friday. The commander who was ordered to take out U93 for its maiden voyage on Friday, 13 April 1917, had to reassure his anxious crew that the Friday and the thirteenth cancelled each other out.42 Other superstitions were specific to particular formations. The crews of the Flanders Flotilla developed a curious belief about the commander of UB40, Lieutenant Emsmann, who, although widely considered a ‘gentleman’, was also thought to bring misfortune. Any boat that left harbour on the same day as Emsmann’s vessel was believed to be doomed. To raise their chances of survival, the sailors of this flotilla took to painting eyes on their U-boats, which they convinced themselves was an oriental charm bringing good luck.43

  Whether submariners worried about the moral dilemmas of sinking merchant shipping is difficult to know. A sailor from U48 captured in November 1917 claimed that ‘a large majority of the men . . . do not like torpedoing Merchant ships’, but as he was under interrogation and may just have wanted to pacify his interviewers, his opinion should be treated with caution. Disaffected minorities may have been more likely to be genuinely critical. A Polish machine-gunner on U55 was heard by a British merchant captain held prisoner on the U-boat to condemn the campaign as ‘nothing but murder’ and whispered ‘Thank God’ when a torpedo missed its intended victim.44 Later in the campaign, men were more likely to condemn it on pragmatic grounds than from moral scruples. Sailors on UB124 criticized the campaign in July 1918 as ‘doomed to failure’ because Germany did not have sufficient U-boats.45 Commanders probably devoted more thought to moral issues; after all, it was they who ordered torpedoes to be fired into civilian vessels. Many excused their ruthless means of warfare as a response to the British blockade, a way, as one put it, ‘simply [to] pay off our account against their criminal wish to starve all our people, our women, and our children’.46

  Nonetheless, to assume commanders were all alike and morally indifferent would be wrong. Senior officers on shore urged ruthlessness. The Leader of Submarines, fearing that the terror effect on which the campaign partially depended might be undermined, strongly condemned and forbade all mercy, warning that it ‘deludes steamer crews about the seriousness of the U-boat war’.47 Some commanders took note. Lieutenant Commander Gerlach on U93, for example, refused to take prisoners on board his submarine, as they were ‘useless eaters’ who reduced the time he could spend out on operations. However, many commanders chose to ignore their leaders’ admonitions. They continued to stop neutral ships and permitted crews to disembark even after the new sink-on-sight orders of unrestricted warfare had come into force. There were cases of commanders halting their submarines in order to tell neutral sailors in lifeboats how far they were from land or even picking up men for whom there was no room in the lifeboats. Baron Edgar von Spiegel, Gerlach’s predecessor as commander of U93, stands out as positively gentlemanly by the brutal standards of twentieth-century warfare. After sinking the Danish schooner Diana on 28 April 1917, he took the crew’s lifeboat in tow to bring it closer to land. He even displayed an unusual care for the welfare of enemy sailors. When, a little later in the cruise, U93 sunk the British steamer Horsa, pity was taken on the fourteen survivors, some of whom were unclothed or badly wounded. They were brought into the cramped confines of the submarine, given medical care, and later in the day handed over to a Finnish bark.48

  In view of the hardship, danger and doubtful morality of the war they waged, why did submariners not only endure but also fight so dedicatedly? Few were volunteers; the navy found it more efficient to allocate men with proven technical skills to the Submarine Section. To judge from their conduct during prisoner interrogations, the submariners were also not overly patriotic. Many talked freely to their captors. Petty Officer Fritz Marsal, the sole survivor of UC63, sunk in October 1917, was noted as extremely unusual in having ‘expressed regret at being unable to continue to fight for his country’.49 The resilience of the U-boat crews instead rested on military factors. First, the men were very thoroughly trained, at least until 1918. In contrast to the miserable twelve weeks’ training given to infantrymen, submariners could count on at least sixteen and often as many as twenty-six weeks of instruction in seamanship, signalling, torpedoes, or electrical engineering and U-boat courses. The training of petty officers was even more thorough, lasting eight or nine months. Once these courses were completed, the new submariners were allocated as supernumerary personnel for three months to a veteran U-boat, participating in an operational cruise and in the preparatory and subsequent refits. When new U-boats were commissioned, a core of veterans was always provided in order to keep up morale and skill levels, and time was allocated to permit the new crew to train together. This considerable investment of time and resources ensured that submariners, all selected men under thirty-two years old, knew their jobs intimately and could be confident in their ability to get the best out of their U-boats on active service.50

  Second, the submariners’ treatment helped to instil in them the sense of being an elite. The men were not only thoroughly trained but also very well looked after. The rations they received were far better than those of soldiers and, even more so, of sailors on the battleships, whom they looked down upon as ‘swabbing coolies’.51 By the end of 1917, they were almost uniquely privileged in still receiving an issue of real coffee. Leave too was relatively generous. Even after the unrestricted campaign began, with all its attendant pressures, submariners generally managed to get away once every six to eight months. The men also appreciated their good wages, which were swollen by numerous allowances. On top of specialist bonuses, there were supplements for price inflation and for constricted living conditions. In harbour, the sailors were given extra for carrying out work on their vessel and at sea they earned ‘diving pay’ of 1.50 marks for each day that the U-boat submerged.52 No less valuable was the prestige of service on a submarine. Decorations were lavished on the crews. Every man on U58, for example, possessed the Iron Cross First or Second Class.53 The personnel were also wildly popular among the public. The so-called U-Boot-Spende – an appeal for submariners and their families issued in February 1917 – raised over 20 million marks by the war’s end.54 The most successful commanders stood on a par with flying aces as hero-celebrities who, like their counterparts in the air, wore the Reich’s highest distinction, the Pour le Mérite. Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, the war’s highest scorer with 453,716 tons of shipping sunk, was no less famous at the time than the better remembered fighter pilots Oswald Boelcke or Manfred von Richt
hofen. He and his submarine, the U35, even starred in a feature film, The Magic Girdle, which followed their exploits in the Mediterranean.55

  A final key reason for the resilience of the U-boat service was its crews’ tight cohesion. Submarine complements enjoyed a high degree of stability; the nature of the fighting meant that there was less of the gradual erosion or need to rebuild after heavy casualties so typical in military units. The long periods spent together in training, boat maintenance and operations fostered mutual trust and confidence among the crews, which in turn promoted individual motivation and harmonious teamwork. Moreover, in stark contrast to the antagonistic relations between ranks prevailing on the big surface ships of the German navy by 1917, U-boat men and their officers were generally on good terms. It was a mark of the section’s esprit that many commanders were known by affectionate nicknames: ‘The Kid’ in U34, ‘Sea Boot’ in UB103 and ‘Hein Schniefelig’, a moniker suggesting dubious personal hygiene, in UC77. Submariners frequently praised their officers as friendly and caring. The commander of U104, for example, was characterized as ‘a man of feeling’, while his counterpart on UB72, Lieutenant Traeger, was said to be ‘very popular with his men, as he treated them with consideration and kindness and did not stand upon his dignity’.56 As befitted an elite arm, crews judged their leaders not only on their paternalistic care but also on their skill and aggression in battle. As the crew of U103 put it, a ‘Draufgänger’ – an aggressive and spirited leader – was much preferred over a nervous or mediocre commander. Traeger’s popularity on UB72 was not harmed by his overconfidence, although it ultimately played a part in the loss of his boat and life. Sailors from U48 and UB85, by contrast, expressed frustration at their commanders’ poor aim with torpedoes. The navy too placed a premium on skill and aggression among its submarine commanders, who if they failed to notch up sufficient sinkings could expect to lose their positions. In the competitive culture of the Submarine Section, where U-boats vied in the amount of tonnage they destroyed, the thorough training of its sailors, the prestige and privileges that they garnered, and the good officer–men relations, which in part rested on the close contact and teamwork demanded by their working conditions, all contributed to its success and endurance.57