World War 2: Submarine Stories: True Stories From the Underwater Battlegrounds (Submarine Warfare, World War 2, USS Barb, World War II, WW2, WWII, Grey wolf, Uboat, submarine book Book 1)

by Ryan Jenkins

  Over the course of WWI, the Allies developed counter-measures to the attacks of the German U-Boats, the most successful of which was the Convoy System

  To increase the odds of survival while crossing the Atlantic, British and other Allied merchant vessels adopted a system of grouping together in large fleets protected by destroyers and/or corvettes (known in the US as “destroyer escorts”).

  The main weapon of the escorts became the “depth charge”, which had been under development in England for a number of years, but was not deployed in numbers until 1916, when it scored a series of successful sinking of U-Boats. The depth charge, a watertight container filled with explosive, was detonated at a certain depth, which was measured and set off automatically by a pistol type device that had been activated by the water pressure of a pre-set depth. Though submarines later came in many sizes, as did depth charges, the basic principle was the same: by exploding on or near a submerged submarine, the depth charges concussive effect would damage the sub both internally and externally. In a best case scenarios, the hull of the sub would be ruptured to degree that the crew would not be able to repair their boat before the sub filled with water and sank, or was completely ripped apart.

  After the entry of the United States into the conflict in 1917, U-Boats began to sink merchant ships close to American shores. On June 2 1918, U-151 sank an astounding five ships in one day off the New Jersey coast and damaged two others. American complacency contributed to the U-Boats' success – this was to repeat itself in WWII.

  The war between the U-Boats and the surface fleets of the Allies went on until the very last days of the war, but by the end of the war, the Allies had the upper hand. They were able to construct many more vessels (both warships and merchant ships) than the Germans could construct U-Boats; they began to planes for observation in coastal waters and used massive numbers of mines, which claimed a number of U-Boats. Though the U-Boats claimed more Allied shipping with each year of the war, part of that result stemmed from the amount of shipping on the waters of the Atlantic. In a war of attrition at sea, the Allies could afford to lose merchant ships, whereas the Germans could not afford to lose their U-Boats. In 1918, sixty-nine U-Boats were sunk in the first part of the year and fleet morale was very low. In November 1918, World War I ended and by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was stripped of all of its submarines.

  Though the U-Boats and Germany were eventually defeated, the submariners of the German Navy (the “Kriegsmarine”) had illustrated the effectiveness of the new weapon. Just one boat, the U-35, under Captain Lothar Arnauld de Periere' sank nearly two hundred ships in the Mediterranean Sea during the war, and the young German submarine officers in WWI would be the submarine fleet commanders of WWII. One of these officers was a young submarine captain named Karl Dönitz, who commanded the U-68 and sank five Allied ships in the Mediterranean before losing his surfaced vessel to technical difficulties and Allied ships in the last days of the war. A prisoner of the British, Dönitz developed the new and terribly effective tactic of the “Wolfpack.”

  The Wolfpack: As a counter the convoy system, which itself was a counter-measure against lone submarines; the Germans would attack in groups. Patrolling particular areas of ocean, wolfpacks would stay in contact via radio signal while surfaced and converge on a convoy and its escorts en masse. The idea behind both the wolfpacks and the convoy are easy to imagine – imagine a pack of wolves and a herd of elk, or sharks and a school of fish.

  The basic tactic of the wolfpack was to attack on the surface on a moonless night and/or overcast night. One or two U-Boats would attack part of the convoy and attempt to lure off some or all of its escorts. While attention was being paid to these submarines, the others would attempt to get within the convoy, or find the most vulnerable or valuable (fuel tankers) to attack. In 1943, one of these wolfpacks numbered thirty-nine boats (in the United States and much of the world, submarines are usually referred to as “boats”, not “ships”).

  When WWII began, the commander of the German submarine fleet was Karl Dönitz.

  Chapter 3: Trading Punches in European Waters

  Though the U-Boats and their commanders are by far more famous than their British counter-parts, the Royal Navy's submarines did significant damage and played a major role in the Royal Navy's campaign to help defeat the Axis Powers. Taking into account the lack of German merchant vessels in the Atlantic and their much smaller naval surface fleet and the plentiful Axis merchant ships in the Mediterranean along with the Italian Navy, the submarines of the Royal Navy sank over four hundred ships in the European Theater during WWII. Twelve of these were German U-Boats to four British submarines lost to the German submariners.

  Even taking this into account, however, we must remember that even though the German Navy was involved in a couple of very well-known surface engagements during WWII (the sinking of Graf Spee and the Bismarck), the U-Boat was the focus of the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII. These battles cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars to wage.

  When WWII began, Dönitz had but fifty-odd submarines. Before the outbreak of hostilities with Great Britain, he had told his superior, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, that if he was given three hundred U-Boats he could bring England to its knees by blockading the islands and bringing the British to terms by starving them into submission. With a limited budget/resources and an Führer who changed his mind monthly regarding warfare at sea, Dönitz was forced to make do with what he had and the small number of U-Boats in the production pipeline.

  Dönitz wasted no time. In the first days of the war, the German U-Boat captains of 1939 picked up where their predecessors left off. Just hours after the British declaration of war on Germany on September 3, the U-30 sank the liner SS Athenia with great loss of life. The Athenia was the first British ship to be sunk in WWII, and though the Germans denied sinking her until the war was over, nations the world over knew that the Atlantic was going to be a dangerous ocean to cross. In the first two weeks of the war, twenty-one British ships equaling 122,000+ tons were lost to the U-Boats.

  On September 14, the U-39, one of two German subs chasing a merchant ship in the area between the northwest coast of Scotland and Iceland, fired two torpedoes at the British aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which had responded to a distress call from the merchant vessel. Though both torpedoes missed the carrier, and the Ark Royal’s escort destroyers, the British carrier, sank the German boat would itself be the victim of U-39's sister ship, U-81, two years later.

  Three days after the abortive torpedo salvo fired at Ark Royal, the British carrier HMS Courageous became the prey of U-29, commanded by Otto Schuhart. Like the Ark Royal, Courageous was responding to the distress call of a merchant vessel. Like Ark Royal, the carrier was part of a so-called “hunter-killer” group, designed to drive U-Boats out of British waters by a combination of aerial observation /attack combined with destroyer assault.

  On the evening of the 17th, the German captain had been hunting the Courageous for hours off the Irish coast, waiting for an opportune time to strike. With two of Courageous' escorts searching for U-Boats out of range, and the carriers' planes about to take off on another anti-submarine patrol, the carrier became a sitting duck for U-29 as she turned into the wind to launch her planes. In old naval parlance, the Courageous had “crossed the T”, meaning she presented her full side profile to the submarines' bow. Of three torpedoes fired, two struck her left side. In less than a half an hour, the carrier sank, taking over five hundred of her crew and her captain with her to the bottom. Another three hundred were rescued by responding merchant vessels and a Dutch ocean liner. The U-29 evaded the Courageous' two remaining destroyer escorts and successfully returned to German, where the crew was hailed as heroes. Because of the attack on Courageous the British stopped the use of aircraft carriers in anti-submarine operations, fully relegating them to land-based planes, destroyers and corvettes. By wars' end, this meant most of the Atlantic – American,
Canadian, and British long-range bombers flying from the coasts not only of Canada, America and Great Britain/Northern Ireland, but also Iceland and Greenland as well.

  In the first days of WWII, the British deployed one of the wars' early secrets – sonar, though it was known in England as “ASDIC” (for the “Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee” which conducted research on the concept of sonar in the latter days of WWI). Put simply, sonar/ASDIC is the detection of sounds waves that are bounced off submerged ships. This is called “active sonar”. The time it takes for sound waves emitted at a specific frequency to return tells the sender the depth of a (metal) object/submarine. “Passive sonar” essentially listens for sound waves emanating from the depths, differentiating those of ships for the ambient noises of the ocean. In the early stages of WWII, the British were the only nation to possess the detection method, but its use was limited in number and had a number of flaws. The most prevalent of which was the fact that early ASDIC systems had a “blind spot”, which was directly underneath them, and early in the war, the anti-submarine weapon of choice, the depth charge, could only be dropped straight downward. This made submarine hunting somewhat of a guessing game, and German submarine commanders quickly learned to exploit ASDIC's weaknesses whenever they could.

  One of the most famous exploits of the war was the sinking of the British battleship Royal Oak by German captain Gunther Prien and the U-47 within the main British base at Scapa Flow in the north of Scotland. This showed the British both how much work they needed to do to shore up their anti-submarine technology and defenses as well as illustrating just how daring German submarine captains were willing to be.

  However, just as the Germans moved quickly into British waters, the submariners of the Royal Navy took the fight to the coastline of Germany. One of the first Royal Navy submarines to take station near Germany was the HMS Ursula (N-59), captained by Lieutenant Commander George Chesterman (G.C) Phillips. The Ursula, a U-class submarine, sailed to the estuary of the busy Elbe River in search of German warships (each class of British submarine, and there were many, took a letter designation – and most subs of that class began their name with that letter. The “S” class had the Sea Devil; the “T” class the Tempest, etc). In those shallow waters, she sighted the light cruiser Leipzig and six destroyers returning to the port of Kiel after having been damaged by torpedoes from the submarine HMS Salmon.

  Captain Phillips, who in September had been the first British captain to fire torpedoes in anger in WWII (narrowly missing the German U-35) was there for a reason – to sink German ships, even if the odds greatly favored the enemy, and he ordered the sub to dive. Charts and soundings showed the water in the estuary just deep enough for a short steep dive and no more. Any error risked trapping the sub in the icy cold mud on the bottom of the North Sea in winter.

  The intention was for Ursula to dive underneath the escorting German destroyers and target the more valuable light cruiser, and that it what Phillips did, but when she came to periscope depth, Ursula was just hundreds of yards from the German vessel. Any closer and explosions from her own torpedoes might sink the British sub.

  The Ursula was designed with six torpedo tubes – four internal and two external – and Phillips fired all six tubes at the German light cruiser. When two of the British weapons exploded just over a minute later, the Ursula itself was rocked so badly that it appeared for a moment that she might sustain serious damage.

  When Ursula returned to periscope depth, she did not see the Leipzig, and assumed that she had been sunk. Explosions heard while the Ursula was submerged seemed to confirm this, but now, confirmation would have to wait, as what Captain Phillips saw in his periscope was more pressing at that moment. Four of the German destroyers that had been escorting Leipzig were headed straight for Ursula's position. Though the German destroyers searched for hours for the British sub, Phillips managed to slip quietly away, returning to the United Kingdom, a heroes' welcome and the Distinguished Service Order. She later went on to sink the German merchant vessel Heddernheim, the first German merchantman to be sunk in the war.

  Though it was thought that the Leipzig had been sunk, the lost German ship was the destroyer F-9, which went down with heavy loss of life.

  The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest battle of the war, and perhaps the most vital, had begun in earnest.

  Chapter 4: Statistics

  The Germans deployed a large variety of submarines during the Second World War, from small coastal patrol submarines (which weighed from two hundred fifty to five hundred tons) to the large nearly 1,700 ton Type XIV Milk-Cows (or in German, “Milch Küh”) supply submarines. These “Milch Küh” enabled faster more heavily armed subs to operate for longer periods and over longer distances.

  The two most prevalent types of German submarine were the Type VII (mainly the “C” model, though significant numbers of Type VIIA and B subs were deployed during the war) and the Type IXB.

  There were five hundred sixty-eight Type VIIC's commissioned during the war, the most of any German sub. With some variation, the subs weighed 769 tons and were 221 feet long. Their width (“beam”) was just over 20 feet outside, with an inner hull width of 15.5 feet. The Type VIIC was powered by two large 6 cylinder engines which could generate anywhere from 2800 to 3200 horsepower. Her batteries could generate between 2100 and 2400 kilowatts. Top speed submerged was just under 8 knots and surfaced just fewer than 18 knots – stealth versus speed was many times the captains' dilemma. At an average speed of 12 knots, the Type VIIC had a range of approximately 6500 miles. Her maximum depth was approximately 825-970 feet – depending on atmospheric conditions at depth and at the construction of the individual sub. The water pressure in the deep ocean, which will literally implode the submarine, is crushing one of the submariners’ greatest fears.

  Her weapons were fourteen 21 inch high-powered torpedoes that could be fired from four bow tubes and two stern tubes. The Type VII's also carried a variety of mines, and as a deck weapon, the naval version of the fearsome 88mm gun, which was more frequently used in combat than more people would imagine from watching Hollywood versions of U-Boat combat.

  US Navy:

  There were a number of classes of submarine that saw duty for the United States in World War II, including many that were commissioned before the war actually began. The last class of pre-war US subs was the Gato class. The first Gato class boat, USS Drum, was commissioned in September 1940 and the last in the spring of 1944. The classes produced during the war were the Balao and Tench class, both of which continued production for a short period after the war.

  The Gato class carried six officers and fifty-four crewmembers on cruises lasting to seventy-five days or a bit more. Their range was nearly 12,000 miles and they could reach a top speed of twenty-one knots surfaced and nine knots submerged, spending two days underwater if need be. US submarines were designed for greater range than German submarines overall, as action in the Pacific required it.

  The depth at which the hull was tested was three hundred feet, but many commanders pushed that to close to four hundred or a bit more in emergencies. The later Balao class, which was essentially the Gato class with modifications, was tested to four hundred feet but also could be pushed a bit deeper.

  American boats were typically more heavily armed than their German counter-parts. In addition to 10 21-inch torpedoes fired from six forward and four aft tubes, Gato class carried a 3-inch naval gun on her deck and 40 and 20mm anti-aircraft cannons, which were also used against merchant shipping.

  The Gato class measured just over a football field long (300') was nearly 30 feet wide, displaced 1500+ tons surfaced, and 2400+ submerged.

  Both Balao and Tench classes made improvements in diving ability and carried larger crews. Upgrades included larger deck guns and in the Balao class, a larger engine capable of higher speeds and greater range. These three classes of sub were the boats that would reduce Japan's merchant fleet to small sailboats by the time t
he war ended in August 1945.

  Ships lost to German U-boat Fleet Battle of the Atlantic (source: US Merchant Marine)

  1939: 50

  1940: 225

  1941: 288

  1942: 452

  1943: 203

  1944: 67

  1945: 30

  Killed at sea: 22, 898

  U-Boats lost during WWII: 785 of 1,158 (65%, the highest casualty rate of the war per service). U-boat crews perished: circa. 28,000 (source: “Results of the German and American Submarine Campaigns of WWII”, Commander Thomas Poirier, United States Navy, 10/99)

  As one might surmise from the statistics above, U-Boat kills increased with the entry of the United States into the war in late 1941/early 1942. When war broke out, it took months for the Americans to adopt the methods of the British with any success. For the first few months, the Germans enjoyed what they called “The Second Happy Time” (the first being outbreak of the war/through part of 1941). American coastal cities did not enforce blackout restrictions and US merchant vessels plying the waters of the American coast were silhouetted against the lights of New York, Charleston and other cities. Bathers at New Jersey beaches in 1942 regularly encountered debris from ships that might even still be smoking on the horizon.

  There were four keys to the Allied victory at sea: production, intelligence, and weaponry/technology. All four of these topics can be and are, the subject of many books, but for our purposes in this introductory e-book, suffice it to say that: