The next day he attacked the Empire Bison and sent her to the bottom.
An ocean tug with a yellow stack and one mast was the object of a prolonged chase on November 6. The U-boat sighted her and gave chase, but she suddenly altered course and disappeared.
Schulz dived to listen, then set out toward the sound of her screws. The tug came in sight again briefly, but again slipped away as the U-boat tried to close in.
The last trace of her was an intercepted radio signal, "Submarine appeared again," followed by a position report which precisely located U-124. The tug had escaped.
At last, fuel and supplies almost exhausted, Schulz set his course for Lorient. Boat and crew had acquitted themselves well and they turned toward their base in a holiday mood. Little flags, each bearing the name and tonnage of a ship they had sunk, were sewn and made ready to fly in triumph when they entered port.
The commander slaved over his war diary and patrol reports while his officers diligently struggled with their own paperwork. No one wanted to risk so much as a minute's delay in leaving the boat, so nothing was left to chance.
Upon reaching a pre-arranged point, Schulz signaled headquarters, then proceeded to the rendezvous point where he would be met by a mine sweeper to escort him through the German mine fields.
The boat had almost reached her pick-up point, traveling submerged because of frequent British air patrols. An air of well-being pervaded the boat. The patrol had been successful; they were safe and almost home. The usual games of skat and chess were in full swing.
Suddenly a metallic clang came from the bow of the boat. The crew was used to a thousand noises a day, of infinite variety, and took no notice of them. This sound was different. It was metal striking the outside of the hull, and it froze every man in his tracks.
The ace of spades dropped from Hagemann's nerveless fingers and fell unnoticed to the deck. The cutthroat skat game in progress between him, Leo Raudzis, and Arthur Piepenhagen was suddenly a million miles away.
In the wardroom, Hardegen's elaborate chess strategy was forgotten and he gripped the bishop in his hand until his knuckles were white. When he started to put it down later, he would have no notion where it had been nor what move he had planned to make with it.
Hannes Wiegand, startled into forgetting one of the first lessons he had learned on U-boats months ago, sat bolt upright in his bunk, dealing himself such a blow on the head that he would wonder next day how he had gotten such a knot.
Werner Böhme, a torpedo mixer, was pouring himself a cup of hot coffee. It overflowed the cup onto his hand. He did not even feel the burn until later.
The unspoken word was like a shriek through the length of the boat: MINE!
The cable scraped slowly along the boat's steel hull. God in Heaven—to be blown up by a mine only hours from port! Cold sweat broke out on faces turned toward the invisible rasping sound. Men did not dare to breathe. Any second the mine would blast them into eternity. Any second now—
The horrible grating moved aft, every second of its progress interminable, unendurable. And suddenly it was gone. Silence. A timorous, questioning whisper through the boat—safe? Then the wild exultation that swept through her entire length—SAFE!
1 A equals 80 meters; thus 2A plus 60 is 220 meters.
Chapter Five
Admiral Karl Dönitz, while still a watch officer on U-boats in World War I, had seen with prophetic insight the immense potential of a powerful submarine force in controlling the seas.
Contrary to the general belief that asdic had spelled the doom of the undersea raider, Dönitz was convinced that the real age of the submarine was yet to come. Asdic and the convoy system had defeated the U-boats of World War I, but neither one was foolproof, and his nimble mind had already concocted ways to get around both.
Asdic was unquestionably a danger, but he did not believe it was more than a match for a good U-boat, skillfully handled. Variations in temperature and salinity of the strata of water tended to distort the asdic impulses, and it was not easy for a searcher to pinpoint a U-boat's position precisely. A depth charge had to explode within a few feet of a boat to rupture the pressure hull.
And as a destroyer made her run, there was a short space ahead of her which was dead for her asdic; thus contact was lost during this last crucial moment.
In this short time, if a U-boat skipper had judged it correctly, he might make a sudden evasion that could not be detected on board the hunter above him.
Furthermore, and most important, asdic was useful only for detecting a submerged boat. As long as she remained on the surface, a boat was safe from this device, and the observant watch officer in World War I had already discovered that a U-boat on the surface at night is practically invisible, even at close range.
The tactics he devised were based on the surfaced night attack. He trained his commanders to stay on the surface, safe from the escorts' asdic, and wait for their chance to slip by them into the main body of the convoy. Once inside, they could choose their targets and fire from close range at several ships in rapid succession. A few boats thus attacking the same convoy could do enormous damage while remaining comparatively safe themselves on the surface in the midst of the merchant ships.
Even the brilliant "star shells" fired by the convoy ships did not always reveal the U-boats, since the fitful shadows on the moving water did as much to conceal the low-lying boats as the harsh light did to expose them.
His strategy was culminated in the devastatingly effective group attacks in which a handful of boats could cut a convoy to ribbons, leaving the escorts helpless against the savagery of their onslaught.
Each boat in a wolf pack would be given the code name of his group, so that he might decipher all messages addressed to the group as well as to him individually, for the pack was controlled by the BdU (Befeblshaber des U-Bootes—commander in chief of U-boats: Dönitz) from his headquarters.
The B-Service, Naval Cryptographic Service, succeeded in breaking several British codes, and this proved an effective aid in locating convoys. Whenever the B-Service reported a convoy to Dönitz, he would study the operational map which covered one wall and on which the position of each U-boat at sea was represented by a pin. He would indicate on the map the expected course of the convoy, and then deploy the nearest wolf pack into a reconnaissance line across it. He would try to place the boats so they would intercept the convoy during the daylight hours to minimize the chance of its slipping through undetected in the dark. The boats were positioned too far apart to see each other, but close enough so the convoy could not pass between them without being seen.
Should the convoy not be sighted soon after the expected time, the BdU would re-deploy the group to find it. Sometimes it was necessary for him to spread his net of U-boats four or five times before making a catch, and success depended upon absolute accuracy in the form of navigation and position reports on the part of the boats, since even a slight error would leave a gap large enough for the convoy to slip through.
It was an effective system for Dönitz's highly trained and thoroughly disciplined grey wolves, who could hunt for days with such precision and teamwork, and then fight like demons for several more when the convoy was located.
The commander might well be dead on his feet from lack of sleep, and his crew as frazzled as himself, but exhausted minds and bodies had to work at top efficiency if a wolf pack were to fight effectively. It was this remarkable stamina and capacity for endurance under absolutely any conditions that made the German wolf packs the terror of the convoy lanes.
When a boat made contact with a convoy, her commander was not allowed to attack immediately, but must first notify headquarters, giving the position, speed, and course of the convoy. This report, in case it had not already been picked up by the other boats in the group, was then signaled to them, and all of them set their courses to intercept.
The boat making initial contact had to keep shadowing the convoy, staying on the surface and out of sight,
reporting all changes, but not attacking until at least one other boat reported contact. This ensured that all the boats should be able to find the convoy, preferably before the first attack was launched. In the event that the first boat to attack might be driven deep and so lose contact, there would always be at least one boat to give the position and guide the others in. This was especially important if the convoy altered course after the first attack.
Once the signal to attack was given, all control from headquarters ceased and each commander was on his own. His only concern with the other boats in the group was to avoid colliding with them.
A group might thus haunt a convoy for days, shadowing and exchanging signals with each other by day, and returning with the darkness to rip the night apart with the ferocity of a wolf pack attack.
This, in brief, was the famous "Rudeltaktik" developed by Dönitz and brilliantly carried out by the handful of men he had so meticulously trained. Their success was phenomenal.
In the convoy battle that came to be known as the "Night of the Long Knives," the 34-ship convoy, SC 7, homeward bound from Nova Scotia, was intercepted northwest of Rockall Bank, some 250 miles from Ireland. Initial contact had been made by U-48 (Korvettenkapitän Bleichrodt) on the night of October 16-17, 1940, but he lost contact when he was attacked with depth charges by one of the escorts.
Dönitz then ordered the other boats in the group into a line across the presumed course of the convoy, and contact was regained on the afternoon of October 19. The pack of seven boats closed in and attacked soon after dark, sinking 17 ships during the night.
The following night, five boats sank 14 ships out of Convoy HX 79, and then met Convoy HX 79A, sinking seven more merchantmen. In all, the eight German U-boats that delivered these surfaced night attacks sank 38 ships out of three different convoys in a three-day battle. Not a U-boat was lost.
From the beginning, when Dönitz was ordered to build and command a U-boat arm for the German Navy, he had foreseen that in any future war, Germany would fight against England. And he knew that as long as Britain ruled the waves, she could not be beaten. He recognized the U-boat as the one weapon that could give Germany the means to deny Britain control of the seas, and he set 300 operational boats as the absolute minimum with which to begin a war against Britain. With this number, he could have 100 boats in their operational areas at all times, allowing one third of the total to be in ports and dockyards, and a further third on their way to and from their operational areas.
When war broke out, he had exactly 57 boats, 46 of which were operational. And of these, only 22 were the Type VII or Type IX ocean-going boats, the rest being the "Einbäume," coastal boats of 250 tons.
Twenty-eight boats were lost during the first year, and 28 more commissioned, leaving the total number the same. But Germany began the second year of the war with only 27 boats available for operations, since some were on shakedown cruises, and it was necessary to hold back some of the available boats for training purposes.
During the war, a total of 863 German U-boats became operational. Seven hundred fifty-three were sunk, with the overwhelming loss of 32,000 officers and men out of a total strength of 39,000. They sank 148 Allied warships and damaged a further 45, and destroyed a total of 2,759 merchantmen with an aggregate of 14,119,413 gross register tons.1
Although the U-boat branch began the war woefully short of numbers, the weapon they had was excellent, and the men were superbly trained.
With the establishment of bases on the Bay of Biscay, the U-boats hit their stride and the first "Golden Age" was launched. The British, alarmed at their mounting losses, began sending most of their ships in convoys now, and the U-boats attacked them with skill, determination, and ferocity, both in packs and alone.
Along with U-95, Schulz took his boat out from Lorient on her third war cruise on December 16. Her operational area was to be west of the Hebrides in the North Atlantic, and this time she was to be part of a wolf pack.
By the time she reached her station, she had come into the full fury of the storms that would rage for weeks on end and make this winter the worst in years. Plans for fighting as a group were abandoned in the face of the fierce storms, and the boats were turned loose to hunt as best they could alone.
There had been another change in the wardroom on this trip. Hein Hirsacker had been relieved as I.WO by the radiant and brilliant Jochen Mohr. Young and irrepressibly gay, Mohr had already proved himself an extraordinarily gifted officer. During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he had at the age of 19 carried out a highly successful secret mission when he was sent in civilian clothes from the battleship Deutschland to spirit a group of German diplomats out of Tenerife.
Soon after this, when a similar mission was contemplated, Mohr was deemed the logical choice for it, and a request was forwarded to the Deutschland's captain asking for his release. The request was answered with a curt refusal: "Vein, der Mohr tut nicht seiner Schuldigkeit getan." (Mohr has not finished his duties.) It was a message Mohr would meet again, in slightly different form, under vastly different circumstances.
He had served as flag lieutenant under Admiral Marschall on both the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau until 1940, when he went to Norway to U-boat school. From then on, Mohr was a submariner, heart and soul. A born leader, he seemed to possess every special quality called for in a U-boat officer, and from the moment he set foot on board U-124, his life was inextricably bound to hers.
The U-124 men were used to the discomforts provided by a U-boat in the wintry North Atlantic. Without a heating or air-conditioning system, the temperature inside the boat was roughly that of the water outside. The running diesels did not noticeably warm the boat in cold waters, although in the tropics they combined with the merciless sun pounding down on the steel hull to shoot the temperature up past 140 degrees.
The eternally soggy air inside kept everything green with mold, and imparted its share to the distinctive smell of a U-boat, a malevolent odor compounded in part of cooking smells, diesel oil, sweaty bodies, bilges, the infamous Tube 7, and a gagging dash of "colibri," the wicked-smelling cologne the men used to wash the salt spray off their hands and faces.
These things were daily annoyances they had learned to cope with by alternately ignoring them or joking about them. Now with heavy seas and freezing gale winds, life became unbearable aboard the U-boat. She rolled and pitched like a wild thing so that the men had to hold on constantly to keep from being flung willy-nilly about the boat. It was impossible to cook regular meals, and they ate their cold sandwiches with one hand while they held on with the other.
Visibility was so poor that reconnaissance was all but impossible. Thirty-foot waves and winds reaching Force 7 kept visibility down to less than five miles during the seven to eight hours of daylight, and absolutely nil during the dark.
And as the days dragged into weeks without even a chance to fire a torpedo, the weariness and strain began to leave its mark on all of them. Bitter cold gales lashed the men on bridge watch with stinging sprays of icy salt water, and frequently whole waves would wash over the conning tower. The men were kept from being swept overboard only by the safety belts which fastened them to the bridge. And when their watch was finally over and they stumbled below, half-frozen and spent, all they had seen was the relentless North Atlantic storm.
Even during their watch-free hours, rest was impossible on the tossing, plunging boat as she swung like a demented pendulum. It was difficult to wedge oneself into a bunk securely enough to doze off, and once asleep, if a man's muscles ever completely relaxed, he was promptly slammed either into the bulkhead or onto the deck. In spite of heavy guard rails on the bunks, sleeping men were tossed out of them, even sometimes thrown out of a top bunk on one side to land in the bottom bunk on the opposite side.
Nerves and tempers were frayed beyond endurance as they battled against the savage seas and the aching weariness that numbed their bodies and spirits. Ordinary conversations among close friends suddenly e
rupted into violent and bitter quarrels, and they would be pulled apart just before the fists began to fly. They would then retire muttering to their own bunks, to lie facing the clammy steel walls, cursing dispiritedly.
Normally considerate and friendly officers and petty officers snapped at each other and at their men and grew more edgy with each endless day that passed. The jokes and wit that had always laced every situation on board disappeared altogether and no laughter echoed through the boat as each man bent all his efforts to simply getting through each moment as it came. Even the sunny Jochen Mohr grew silent, his high spirits finally cut down by the brutal storms that turned a happy boat into a steel purgatory.
The commander held his crew together with his own stamina and iron self-discipline. He appeared to regard the relentless fury of the storm as an irritating but unavoidable nuisance, no more. He carried out his daily routine, both in the boat and on the bridge, sharply and competently, and forced everyone else to do the same. His superb bearing was a constant example to them all and his unshaken morale bolstered theirs.
Only once did Kesselheim, who in addition to his regular dudes served as the commander's batman, see him with his guard down. He had entered Schulz's cabin to find him sitting on the edge of his bunk, shoulders drooping and head bowed, his hands over his face. When Kesselheim spoke to him, Schulz looked up, all the strain and exhaustion and despair of these hellish weeks at sea plainly written on his face.
He had succeeded so well in masking his own feelings that until this moment, it had never occurred to Kesselheim that the commander had been really affected by the pressures of this patrol.
Now he knew with startling clarity that it was the commander who had borne the brunt of all their misery, and for an unforgettable instant the 20-year-old boy glimpsed something of the weight and loneliness of command and the strength of the man who carried it.
No one knew better than Schulz the exhaustion and frustration of his crew, and he prayed for a ship to come along. Even one small victory would pep them up he thought, and give them a reason for what they had to endure. It would be unbearably cruel to bring them home without having sunk a single ship to compensate for it. But he knew that under these impossible conditions only blind luck could bring about even sighting, to say nothing of sinking, a ship.
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