Hunt and Kill

by Theodore P. Savas

  Meyer might have been in a position to make several decisions in the minutes after Lange was cut down. As it happened he made only one, but it would turn out to be important. For some reason Meyer decided to follow Lange through the conning tower hatch and out onto the open bridge. He got as far as the anti-aircraft gun in the Wintergarten before he, too, was hit. Both the captain and executive officer had been removed from the chain of command in the space of only several seconds. The boat was suddenly leaderless.

  Did Meyer do the right thing in following his captain out of the hatch? The best that can be said is that he followed standard U-Bootwaffe procedure. When a boat surfaced under normal conditions the bridge watch was always posted immediately, which meant the first watch officer and the entire four-man bridge watch followed the captain onto the bridge. Obviously normal conditions did not exist at this point: the boat was crippled and under intense enemy fire. For some reason it did not occur to Meyer that standard operating procedure may not have applied in this case and it was not a good idea to follow Lange through a hatch into what was obviously a very dangerous situation.

  Should Meyer have stayed below? He would have been much better placed in the control room, maintaining order and calm, leading the evacuation, ensuring no bottlenecks formed in the control room or in the tower, and working with the chief engineer to scuttle the boat. More important, he would have been in command, able to evaluate information and make decisions. Did his decision to follow Lange affect the course of later events? Almost certainly it did. As will be seen, his absence when a later decision was made by another officer may well have been critical in deciding the fate of U-505.

  With both Captain Lange and Meyer outside the boat and injured, a critical leadership vacuum developed below. The next officer in the line of command was reservist Kurt Brey. He did little, if anything, to help the situation. Survivors never mention Brey in their recollections of U-505’s last frantic minutes of existence. Brey seems to have disappeared during that time. His invisibility is rather unusual because at 37 he was much older than the average U-Bootwaffe junior officer. Presumably he was more seasoned as well, and should have been able to shift into a command role without too much difficulty. At the very least Brey might have been expected to bring some order and discipline to the evacuation efforts. In the end he did nothing to change the course of events—or at least he is not recorded as having done anything of substance.

  It was at this point that a form of panic set in within the narrow confines of the boat. With no one directing traffic at the foot of the tower, recalled Goebeler, “a great mob of men from the aft end of the boat suddenly stampeded through the control room to scale the ladders to the bridge.”14 Unfortunately, nobody warned them to take cover and they were raked with gunfire when they poured onto the bridge. Those still below could hear their shipmates screaming in pain, which did nothing to calm their own frayed nerves.

  And absolutely nothing was being done to carry out Lange’s order to scuttle the boat.

  The primary responsibility for scuttling U-505 belonged to her chief engineer, who was still below decks. His name was Josef Hauser.15

  Hauser is not a sympathetic character. His own engineering skills seem to have been limited—he almost managed to sink U-505 on several occasions by himself—but he got by because he was surrounded by several very capable engineering petty officers. To be fair, at 23 Hauser was very young and likely too immature for the responsible position he had been given, but by 1944 this had become regrettably commonplace. Known in Goebeler’s book only as the “raccoon” for his habit of constantly preening an inadequate beard before a mirror, Hauser was regarded by the crew as an incompetent loser and a second-rate tyrant. Like Paul Meyer, Hauser had the opportunity during the attack to make several key decisions. And like Meyer, he made only one.

  There was really only one way to sink a U-boat. Stripped of tedious mechanical detail, the idea was to get a lot of water into the boat as fast as possible. There were different methods of doing this, of course, but the three most often used in extremis were the setting of explosive charges, the opening of air valves in the diving cells, and the opening of the seacocks. Any of these methods would have the desired effect of letting water inside the boat, where sooner or later it would cause the boat to sink. All three together would ensure the best result. The frustrating problem was that when you wanted your boat to sink, she tended to be very slow about it no matter what you did.

  The quickest way was with the largest hole. Most U-boats carried demolition charges along their keels.16 U-505 had fourteen charges of five pounds each. These charges were not large enough to actually destroy a boat and were meant instead to weaken the keel and open holes in the pressure hull. They were also small and hard to find—especially in the dark. They were on timers and it took a skilled engineer to set them. It also took time to set them, which is why it was very dangerous for anyone to do so with short fuses after the boat was on the surface under enemy attack. More than once an engineer was lost setting demolition charges. Otto Kretschmer’s chief engineer, Gerd Schröder, was killed in this way after he remained to set the charges on the stricken U-99.

  The demolition charges in a U-boat were not the most reliable things in the world. “Because they usually had been in place a long time,” explained Peter Hansen, “not properly checked and serviced, they were unreliable and many officers considered them as not really dependable. Sometimes seawater had reached them and most likely caused them to be neutralized.”17 Once they went off, however, their effectiveness was very high. A breach of the pressure hull was irreparable. The explosions would have damaged many of the onboard systems, cut the electricity, set fires, and filled the boat with smoke. Under these circumstances a boat could not have been saved and no one would have attempted it. In fact, there is little doubt the existence of demolition charges prevented several boats from being captured. The possibility of explosion was a primary concern of the Pillsbury boarding party. Albert David showed supreme courage just in entering U-505, but he would not have done so if the charges had already detonated, or had begun to detonate.

  “Most of us control room mates stayed at our posts, to make sure the scuttling order was carried out,” wrote Goebeler. “We kept looking around for the chief engineering officer because we needed to know if he had set the demolition charges.”18 They need not have bothered, for the chief engineer was not even in the boat. His decision was to break and run up the ladder and out of the conning tower soon after Lange and Meyer, “leaving his position in the control room against orders and contrary to naval regulations.”19

  Hauser’s departure was a major complication to an already confused situation. It was the custom (if not a requirement) that the chief engineer be the last person out of a boat, not one of the first. His absence precluded the option of setting demolition charges because the three officers authorized to set them were no longer below decks. Hauser was the senior engineer and presumably the most knowledgeable about the location and condition of the charges. His absence made the implementation of other scuttling options that much more difficult. He did not wait to ensure the engineering petty officers in his charge left the boat safely (chief machinist’s mate Otto Fricke assumed that responsibility). It is also fair to conclude Hauser did nothing to help the general disarray at the bottom of the conning tower ladder.

  Hauser, who survived the U-505 debacle, maintained thereafter that he believed the boat was sinking when he left, and thus did not see the need to set the timers on the scuttling charges (or do anything else to ensure her sinking). Exactly why he believed this is a mystery. The boat was clearly severely injured and making water, but she was still solidly afloat. As her chief engineer, Hauser should have known this was the case. His youth and inexperience is a mitigating factor only to a point; it excuses his belief the boat was sinking, but it cannot excuse his decision to leave his post when he did.

  What would have happened if Hauser had not shirked his duty? What
if he had stayed below, set the demolition charges, and then assisted in flooding the boat? “It is our impression,” explained Oesten (speaking for himself and his own chief), “that the chief engineer is to be blamed for the confusion and there was no serious intention to sink the boat.”20 Perhaps this is so. But Hauser was not the only man who knew how to set those charges, and his past performance suggests he might have failed anyway. At least his decision removed him from the command equation so others could try something without his interference.

  It is at this point in the story when Meyer’s earlier decision comes into play so dramatically. With both Lange and Meyer on the bridge, there was no effective leadership below decks at a critical time in the sequence of events. If Meyer had remained below, Lange’s order to scuttle would have been Meyer’s to execute, and not the chief engineer’s. Meyer might not have been able to stop Hauser from leaving the boat, but he could have set the demolition charges himself.

  At this point there was very little time left for anyone to do anything that would have changed the ultimate course of events. The quickest and most effective option—the demolition charges—was eliminated primarily because there was no one left in the boat to set them. The captain, the first watch officer, and the chief engineer were all topside. The location and condition of the second watch officer (Kurt Brey) is unknown. If anyone left inside the boat was going to make a decision, it would have to be a member of the crew. As it turns out, members of the crew made the last two important decisions aboard the boat before it was captured.

  The crew of U-505 is often seen as typical of the time: young, inexperienced, “thrown together.” More than that, an unlucky streak of bad officers, mechanical difficulties, and outright sabotage, followed by the voodoo-like curse of Zschech’s suicide in the boat made them, in some minds, incompetent. Oesten, for example, believes the loss of U-505 was caused not by the mistakes of the day but by the long term effect of the war. “My guess is that such a blunder would not have happened on a good boat,” explained the former ace. “The three commanders were not brought up in the U-boat trade, but they were crash-trained during the war. The crew had to carry a mental burden and might not have had enough stamina to compensate the lack of experience of the commander.”21

  It is a fair observation. Compared with U-boat crews of 1939 or 1940, who were the beneficiaries of years of training and imbued with tremendous morale and the sure knowledge of victory, the U-boat crew of 1944 was a less than perfect bunch. Their training was limited, their prospects grim. They had few illusions and the best they could hope for—and it was a small hope—was a safe return. By 1944 they had lost even that. Compared with the young crews of Pillsbury, or Guadalcanal, who were well-armed, well-fed, supported at home and apparently limitless in number, the crewmen of U-505 were weary, cynical, fatalistic, and afraid; their morale was shot and their senses dulled by years of fighting.

  At least that is the conventional thinking. According to Hans Goebeler, however, conventional thinking is wrong. “Lange never had a doubt that we were a well-trained and able crew, and was happy that he had us instead of a newly-assembled crew,” wrote Goebeler.22 Paul Meyer had been offered the chance to attend Commanding Officer’s School before he became first watch officer on U-505. He turned it down because he liked his chances of survival with U-505’s crew. While this says something about Meyer, it says more about the men who served under him. Few things would have inspired a U-Bootwaffe officer to forego his own command.

  It is a credit, then, to U-505’s crewmen—and gives some proof to Goebeler’s words—that at such a critical stage and without the chief engineer they attempted to sink the boat themselves. After Oesten made his observations about the crew he provided an example of what a better crew might have done under the same circumstances: “I could not have done anything better than Lange did,” he wrote. But once Lange and the other officers were gone, “a member of the crew, petty officer or so, might have taken the initiative. I agree this is an odd guess or maybe wishful thinking. Or what I would have expected from my men (more than 55 years ago).”23 And that is exactly what one of U-505’s machinist’s mates, a man named Alfred-Karl Holdenried, did.

  Unable to set the demolition charges, Holdenried decided to attempt the next most favorable option: flooding the boat’s seven large diving cells. In the panic of the moment he stayed put, gathered a few men around him in the control room, and began the operation of opening the valves at the top of each cell, one by one.

  The diving cells were essentially huge tanks located outside the pressure hull and open to the sea at the bottom. The air in the cells kept a boat afloat. A surfaced Type IX boat required at least three flooded diving cells to maintain proper trim and a minimum of excess freeboard. This number increased as fuel was burned and the boat became lighter. All remaining empty cells were flooded when the order was given to dive. There was an additional emergency cell of thirty tons used only in crash dive situations. This cell was flooded when the boat had to dive quickly, but it was blown again as soon as she reached a safe depth.

  The diving cells were located along the pressure hull and were numbered from aft to forward. The hydraulic levers to open and close them were located in the control room. In order to dive, the levers were pulled and the valves opened, allowing air to escape from the top of the cells and seawater to enter from the bottom. To surface, the valves were closed and compressed air was pumped into the tanks, forcing water out from the open bottoms. It was always possible to dive but it was only possible to come up again if there was enough compressed air in the tanks. (Many boats were lost because they did not have enough compressed air to clear the cells of water.) One of the first things a crew did when a boat surfaced was start the air compressor.24

  To dive the boat under normal circumstances, the air valves were opened slowly while the boat was underway. A slight downward inclination of the diving planes, along with slow loss of buoyancy in the diving cells, allowed a boat to slip gracefully beneath the water. An emergency (or “crash”) dive was nothing more than a normal dive made as fast as possible without killing anyone. A surfaced boat with no way on could be made to sink vertically if the valves were opened (and a submerged boat would come up in a similar fashion), but since there is no water moving over the diving planes, some element of control is lost and the boat will tend to sink or rise out of control. This leads to the familiar effect of a prow shooting out of the water like a whale. It can also lead to wallowing and overturning while sinking.

  According to Jürgen Oesten, the best and most efficient way to sink a U-boat was to take her into an emergency dive with all the hatches open. While the crew climbed out through the hatches, the chief engineer would open the valves from the control room that let the air out of the cells. He would then follow the crew out through the tower hatch. Such a dive could normally be done in about thirty seconds, although this depended on the size of the boat, her fuel load, weight, and several other factors. The time it took to get the bridge coaming under water was slightly less than this, and if the hatches were left open the weight of the water pouring into the boat would make her sinking a certainty. An efficient dive, however, depended upon a well-trained crew, good leadership, working equipment, and a moving boat. The faster the boat is moving the faster it will go under water. Performing an emergency dive while simultaneously evacuating the crew would take longer, but Oesten estimates a boat sunk in this manner would go down in as little as one minute.

  This maneuver presented special problems in U-505’s case. She was moving through the water and her diving planes were jammed in a downward position, which was good. The problem was she was not moving properly for a dive. She was making no headway but was instead steaming in a tight circle because of her jammed rudder. This meant she could not propel herself underwater as she could in a normal dive, but instead would have to drill herself below the surface in a kind of corkscrew motion. In addition to this, she was running on her electric motors rather than he
r main diesel engines (which were not started up after the boat surfaced). Observers aboard Pillsbury estimate she was making only six knots through the water as she turned, which was not enough to execute a proper crash dive. Given these circumstances, U-505 would have sunk more like a boat stopped in the water (i.e., slower) than like a boat making headway.

  Nevertheless taking her into a dive with open hatches was still the best thing to do. There is no mention of the order in which the hydraulic levers were pulled. It probably did not matter anyway. Most of them worked, which would have caused a noticeable settling in the boat, but two of them did not. The levers for the largest two cells, numbers 6 and 7, both forward, were jammed and could not be moved, and the valves at the top of each cell remained closed. Holdenried’s men tried to do everything they could to fix the levers, and even tried pulling on the shafts connecting the levers to the valves, but they were stuck solid. It was a critical failure. Both 6 and 7 held huge amounts of air and retained considerable buoyancy. Since they were located forward they had the effect of keeping the bow up, which would have slowed the boat’s movement through the water and prevented the planes from driving her below.

  Hans Goebeler believes the air in tanks 6 and 7 kept the boat from sinking, but there may have been more to it than that. If the valves for cells 1 through 5 had been opened properly, explained Jürgen Oesten, and the after torpedo room was flooded, the boat would not have retained the buoyancy she needed to stay afloat. Oesten’s chief engineer agrees with this assessment. It is entirely possible the valve on another cell failed also, without any indication in the control room, or else there was less water in the boat already than anyone suspected.25