Hunt and Kill

by Theodore P. Savas

  Long before Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933 and his subsequent open renunciation of the Versailles Treaty, the leaders of Germany’s predominantly liberal and conciliatory (but no less patriotic- minded) Weimar Republic (1918-1933) took steps to ensure that military planning and technological innovation went on even if much of it was banned on paper. As early as 1922, secret diplomatic arrangements with the Soviet Union allowed for the clandestine training of German tank crews and Luftwaffe personnel on Russian soil. Civilian aviation schools at home doubled as training facilities for future combat pilots and mechanics. At the same time, experiments and improvements in German U-boat technology continued, typically disguised as consultation or third-party construction work for shipyards in foreign countries like Holland, Finland, and Turkey. Occasional protests by the Allied powers, especially neighboring France, brought few or inconclusive results. In fact, the once reasonably solid wartime coalition fell quickly apart after 1919. Its solidarity was weakened when the United States refused to sign the Versailles Treaty and drifted into renewed isolationism. At the same time, Britain was careful not to enfeeble Germany too much so as to preserve it as a counterweight to France on the continent and as a buffer against the spread of Bolshevism from the Soviet Union. Country after country followed Italy’s lead in 1922 and moved from democratic and liberal forms of government to dictatorial, typically fascist, rule. By 1939, only Britain, France, the Low Countries, Ireland, Switzerland, Poland, and most of Scandinavia remained in the democratic camp. Everywhere else authoritarianism, irrationalism, and aggressive militarism had triumphed.

  Against this backdrop of treaty restrictions, ongoing technological innovations, diplomatic realignments, and the prospect of radically different domestic and international policy aims under National Socialist leadership, Germany’s naval planners in the 1920s and early 1930s set out to find a formula that would redefine the size, composition, and overall concept of the Reichsmarine (Kriegsmarine after 1935) for the foreseeable future. Germany’s geostrategic situation was that of a continental land power with no significant allies and difficult access to the world’s oceans. Taking into consideration the fate of its High Seas Fleet in the First World War, and assuming the Anglo-Saxon powers would again emerge as Germany’s most likely adversaries at sea, the most logical and plausible conclusion would have been to create a fleet whose primary function would be massive and sophisticated commerce-raiding on a global scale, together with adequate coastal defense against bombardments or invasions and perhaps the possibility of limited offensive action against weaker neighbors.

  In the event, Germany’s strategic planners never fully embraced, let alone implemented, this clarity of purpose. Instead they favored a hybrid fleet concept that married a technologically innovative but numerically insufficient and ultimately quite useless battle fleet component with a likewise underdeveloped commerce-raiding element based on surface raiders and submarines, especially the latter.4 This early omission and failure to analyze its geostrategic strengths and weaknesses properly, and to draw clear-cut consequences from it for its naval building and training program, would cost Germany dearly and tragically. It would be an overstatement to maintain that Germany lost the Second World War in large measure because of faulty naval planning. But it is certainly a defensible claim that U-505’s cheerless mission and inglorious end in 1944, along with the even grimmer fates of many hundreds of its fellow U-boats, can be directly linked to a disastrous breakdown in strategic reasoning and planning in the inter-war period, even and especially after the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935 restored sovereignty and flexibility to its naval building program.

  How was this lapse possible? A good number of historical analysts have blamed Germany’s Commander-in-Chief of the Navy after 1928, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. He was an old-school surface fleet proponent whose apprenticeship in the Imperial Navy had equipped him neither with the mental flexibility nor with the independence of analysis to divorce his thinking from Tirpitzian illusions about German battle fleet grandeur on the high seas. In addition, the very fact the Versailles Treaty prohibited Germany from building warships of more than 10,000 tons displacement became a political challenge inasmuch as any action in defiance of this limitation translated into a reassertion of German independence, nationalism, and sovereignty. In the end Raeder remained committed to his dual-fleet concept well beyond the time when the Allies had proved it to be, just as in World War I, a costly fiasco. In early 1943, Hitler replaced Raeder belatedly, but not illogically, with Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the popular creator and leader of Germany’s U-boat arm.

  Other observers maintain Germany could not absolutely take for granted that England and the United States would be its principal adversaries at sea in the event of another war, but that Germany would have to guard against the possibility of war with countries like France, Poland, or the Soviet Union, as indeed would be the case after 1939. As it turned out, and as any planner worth his salary should have foreseen, major or even minor surface fleet actions would not be necessary against these powers as German land and air forces would be principally engaged in these campaigns.

  In the final analysis the most compelling explanation of Germany’s failure to embrace a fleet concept aimed uncompromisingly at the destruction of enemy commercial shipping—what Dönitz would call Tonnagekrieg, or “tonnage war,” i.e. sinking more tonnage than the enemy could replace by new construction—appears to have been the result of a lethal confluence of muddled thinking by Germany’s naval leaders, coupled with a massive attack of national hubris. This tragic affliction prompted an entire people to overestimate vastly its collective strength and resources while simultaneously belittling and undervaluing the accomplishments and potential of its likely military opponents. When Hitler and the Nazis seized control in 1933, this hubris would be taken to entirely new dimensions far beyond any realistic and rational assessment. As their notorious Z-Plan5 of 1938 indicates, Hitler and the Naval High Command envisioned the construction of both a prestigious Tirpitzian battle fleet with super battleships, battle cruisers, and even aircraft carriers in direct competition with Britain, and a commerce-raiding submarine force of hundreds of boats ready to drive the enemy into humiliating defeat and submission.

  For the purpose of the subject at hand it will be necessary to restrict to a few comments the discussion of the German surface fleet construction program that would produce before the end of the war, after Hitler’s formal renunciation of the Versailles Treaty and the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in 1935, a small sea-going surface force. Its exact mission in a possible war with Britain or under any other circumstances was never clearly thought out. Germany built two modern battleships (Bismarck and Tirpitz), two battle cruisers (Scharnhorst and Gneisenau), three heavy cruisers (Admiral Hipper, Blücher, Prinz Eugen), six light cruisers, and some forty destroyers, as well as several squadrons of torpedo boats and fast patrol craft. In addition, one aircraft carrier (Graf Zeppelin), six battleships, three battle cruisers, six light cruisers, and scores of destroyers remained on the drawing boards or were never completed and commissioned, while ultimate plans called for the construction of an even mightier fleet.6 There are two central points to this compilation: (a) the predictable futility of building a force clearly inferior to that of the most likely enemy and therefore essentially doomed to idleness, suicide missions, or peripheral operations such as the costly invasion of Norway in 1940; and (b) the tremendous waste and misdirection of resources (money, raw materials, personnel, research and development efforts, and shipyard capacity) that could and should have been rerouted from the beginning toward the development, design, construction, training, and deployment of a commerce-raiding force of perhaps a thousand submarines or more, representing the latest technology and ideally based on the Atlantic littoral for easy access to enemy shipping lanes.

  While one can ponder the might-have-beens of this proposition, Germany was not idle in addressing the commerce
-raiding aspect of its overall naval program. Among the first and in some ways most ingenious steps in this direction ranks the development and construction of three replacement “cruisers” to compensate for the retirement of obsolete pre-dreadnoughts still in the German arsenal. Under international treaty arrangements, these Panzerschiffe (literally “armored ships;” the British dubbed them “pocket battleships”) ostensibly displaced no more than 10,000 tons, but actual figures rose considerably above that limit. Lightly armored, the Deutschland, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral Graf Spee,7 laid down between 1928 and 1932, exemplified the concept of oceanic commerce raiders that could protect themselves against superior enemy warships on the principle of being “stronger-than-faster and faster-than-stronger” opponents. In other words, their main artillery of six 11-inch guns in two triple turrets fore and aft enabled them, in theory, to keep faster but more lightly armed (8-inch) Allied cruisers at a distance, while their top speed of up to 28 knots made it possible to run away at ease from more heavily armed but slower enemy battleships. Their operational range of some 10,000 nautical miles at an economical speed of 20 knots and the use of catapult-launched reconnaissance aircraft made them potent hunters of merchant vessels, especially in the open waters of the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. The operations and fate of the Graf Spee in 1939—chased into Montevideo after sustaining combat damage from British cruisers and forced to blow itself up on the River Plate—made clear both the possibilities and the limitations of these Panzerschiffe. German efforts to employ regular battleships and cruisers against enemy commercial shipping in North Atlantic and Arctic waters produced at best mixed results and were at first curtailed and later abandoned altogether following the loss of the Bismarck on such an outing.

  The Kriegsmarine’s second and considerably more promising initiative aimed at high seas commerce-raiding involved converted and armed merchant vessels. They were relatively fast (up to 18 knots) with virtually unlimited endurance. They were also deceptively camouflaged to resemble genuine Allied merchantmen and sported disguised weaponry that could subdue an unsuspecting enemy vessel in minutes. Nine such raiders enjoyed a charmed existence in the southern oceans in the early phases of the war. They destroyed or captured no fewer than 136 enemy freighters and tankers until, by 1943, they were either hunted down or otherwise eliminated. Their successes compared favorably with the 60 Allied merchantmen bagged by German Panzerschiffe and capital ships in the North Atlantic. Famous raiders such as Atlantis, Orion, Thor, Pinguin, Komet, and Kormoran refueled and reprovisioned from captured enemy ships. Occasionally they entered Japanese ports for maintenance and repairs. Not unlike the pocket battleships, these raiders amounted to a compromise and improvisation whose effectiveness depended in large measure on the Allies’ inability to extend the convoy system significantly beyond the North Atlantic routes. Improved aerial surveillance, more sophisticated intelligence gathering, and the detachment of major Allied fleet units for search-and-destroy missions permanently ended their effectiveness.8

  U-boats were the most menacing counterforce against the Allied struggle to keep the British Isles (and later the Soviet Union) properly supplied, to build up forces in Britain and North Africa for the invasion and destruction of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe,” and to secure shipping lanes worldwide for the safe and uninterrupted movement and transfer of people and material. Germany had mounted a formidable effort in the First World War to force Britain to its knees. Within the self-imposed limitations indicated above, it would endeavor to do so again in the Second World War.

  There exist two common myths regarding the German U-boat campaign of World War II—myths even today cheerfully promoted by bad popular fiction and equally shallow Hollywood movies. The first one holds that all German submarines were created equal and looked alike; invariably moved and attacked in wolfpacks; could remain submerged for days without surfacing; always suffered interminable depth charge pursuits after firing their torpedoes; eluded or shot down most of the aircraft sent out to find and sink them; and their brave crews under gruff but coldly competent skippers came within a hair’s breadth of deciding the war in Germany’s favor. Only last minute Allied heroism, technological sophistication, plentiful resources, and worthy patriots like “Rosie the Riveter” turned matters around and won the day for freedom and democracy. The second myth suggests all Allied merchant vessels traveled in convoys; were almost immediately picked up by prowling U-boats and tracked meticulously and accurately on huge charts at U-Boat Headquarters; incurred terrible losses whenever German wolfpacks sent off their lethal “eels” at night from submerged positions with every torpedo a sure hit; abandoned all shipwrecked survivors in invariably freezing, burning, or shark-infested waters because convoys could not afford to stop for fear of inviting even greater carnage; and at the conclusion of their travails, limped into port to lick their wounds only to receive orders for another voyage through hell after a short respite for their crews.

  Of all the popular misconceptions suggested above, the most serious and misleading relate to the supposedly uniform German U-boat design and ubiquitous use of convoys throughout the war. In fact, German naval architects and engineers produced a range of different submarine types, each intended for specific tactical or strategic purposes, each with its particular strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and limitations. Convoys were in use only in the North Atlantic, Arctic, and Mediterranean, and to a lesser extent, the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and along certain stretches of the South American and South African coastlines. Everywhere else, especially in the Central and South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, Allied and neutral vessels typically sailed without armed escorts and without air cover because not enough escort vessels existed in the Allied arsenals to extend the convoy system to regions where attacks by Axis forces were relatively rare.

  Based on successful World War I boats, on more recent concepts developed clandestinely in the interwar period, or by the 1940s on revolutionary new ideas derived from wartime experience, between 1928 and 1945 the Construction Bureau of the German Navy created on its drawing boards no fewer than thirty-six different U-boat models.9 Neatly numbered in Roman numerals from I to XXXVI, and usually consisting of a basic design (lettered Type IA, Type IIA, etc.) as well as more refined or specialized subversions (e.g. Types IIB, IIC, IID), six of these projects would be fully developed and mass produced. In other cases a prototype or two was built and tested, but most models never matured beyond the planning stage, or remained mere ideas sketched on paper.

  The earliest and smallest class was designated Type II, which consisted of forty-eight coastal boats with limited range, endurance, and weaponry. Nicknamed “Einbäume” (Dug-outs) by their crews and displacing a mere 250 tons, they participated in operations around the British Isles, in the Baltic Sea and, after transfer by way of the Danube, in the Black Sea. Few were built after 1940. As the war grew old those not decommissioned, scrapped, or cannibalized for parts ended up in the various training commands.

  With no fewer than 695 commissioned boats, the Type VII design in its several variations comprised the most numerous class of submarines Germany built and deployed in World War II. Its sleek lines and salient features were made famous in Wolfgang Petersen’s motion picture Das Boot, which was based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s novel of the same title. Sometimes called “Atlantic boats” of about 850 tons displacement when submerged, Type VII boats carried up to fourteen torpedoes, anti-aircraft artillery and a ship-ship deck gun, enjoyed a surface range of 6,500 to 9,500 nautical miles, a top surface speed of 17 knots, and a crew of some forty-four officers and men. A total of fifteen different German shipyards along the North and Baltic Seas were pressed into service to produce them. They were the U-Boat Command’s true workhorses: dependable, resilient, maneuverable, quick divers, and overall well suited for either independent assignments or wolf-pack warfare west and north of the British Isles, along the great-circle convoy routes from the New World to the Old, in the Arctic Ocean, and in the Medite
rranean. Refueled and reprovisioned at sea, and economically handled, they could and did operate against shipping as far away as the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Canada, and occasionally even in the Caribbean. Men like Günther Prien, Otto Kretschmer, Jochen Schepke, Erich Topp and many other aces grew to master this weapon to perfection. Their principal forward bases were Brest (1st and 9th Flotillas), La Pallice/La Rochelle (3rd), and St. Nazaire (6th and 7th), all in France; Bergen (11th), Trondheim (13th), and Narvik (14th), all in Norway; and Salamis (23rd) and La Spezia/Toulon (29th) in the Mediterranean.

  Leaving aside for the moment submarines of the Type IX class to which U-505 belonged, and which will be discussed in more detail below, three other designs reached the stage of full development, if not necessarily large-scale wartime deployment. The ten commissioned boats of Type XIV, all built in Kiel, were large and rather ungainly boats of almost 2,000 tons displacement when submerged and intended exclusively for the mid-ocean resupply of other German submarines for the purpose of extending their range and length of operations. Invariably dubbed “Milchkühe” (Dairy Cows) because of their appearance and strategic purpose, they became available for frontline assignments by 1942 and played a not insubstantial role in projecting sustained German submarine activities into waters ordinarily beyond the range of Type VII and Type IX boats. Attached to the 12th U-Boat Flotilla in Bordeaux in southwestern France, these Milchkühe carried no armament except anti-aircraft artillery for self-defense, were slow divers and somewhat difficult to handle even on the surface. Still, their payload of more than 600 tons of diesel and lubrication oil, large store of provisions, spare parts, four extra torpedoes, a medical staff, and even replacement personnel, made them a welcome mid-ocean sight for Germany’s attack submarines low on fuel, ammunition, and foodstuffs. Type XIV boats rendezvoused with their beneficiaries in relatively remote locations away from well-traveled sea lanes because the transfer of fuel and stores (and especially torpedoes) required hours of uncomfortable exposure on the surface that rendered both supplier and recipient vulnerable to surprise attacks by enemy planes and submarines. German efforts proved ineffective when a combination of sophisticated Allied code-breaking, high-frequency direction finding techniques, and increased aerial surveillance all over the Atlantic, helped along by a considerable degree of German carelessness, dispatched every Milchkuh to a watery grave by the time U-505 met its own fate in June 1944.10