The Other Services
HITLER WAS, first and foremost, an army man. He had served in the army during the four long years of the Great War when he lived in the trenches of the Western Front for months at a time, and the topic was never far from his mind. Even as the Russians closed in on Berlin, Hitler would treat his captive audience in the Führerbunker to long monologues on the good old days in the trenches. When he first became Führer, it was to the army that he first turned his attention. For Hitler the air force had interest only in so far as it served the army. The navy was barely of interest at all. And yet if Germany was to live up to Hitler’s pretensions to world power, it would need a navy to project that power.
The German navy had been secretly re-equipping itself for war before Hitler came to power. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the Germans were forbidden to have any submarines at all, and surface ships were restricted to 10,000 tonnes, less than a third the size considered necessary for a battleship and barely large enough for a light cruiser. The navy had no intention of being bound by these restrictions, but through the 1920s were hindered by the politicians, who feared that the building of large warships could neither be hidden nor explained away.
In 1928 Erich Raeder was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Reichsmarine and given instructions to make the navy as effective as possible within the terms of Versailles. Significantly, during the 1920s, Raeder had been writing the official history of the cruiser operations of the First World War, having served in cruisers for most of the war. It was as a cruiser man that he looked at the problem.
In drawing up plans to make the German navy an effective weapon of war, Raeder made a number of assumptions. First he reasoned that German naval operations would be limited to inshore work in support of the army in the event of a war against any likely enemy, except Britain. Second, Raeder believed that if Britain were the main enemy then Germany would have to aim to strangle Britain’s sea supply routes. Germany could attempt to take on the Royal Navy and defeat it in open battle, but this would need the construction of large battleships which Versailles forbade. Alternatively, Germany could develop a fleet of ships designed specifically to sink merchant ships and to avoid rather than defeat the Royal Navy.
The most obvious type of warship to achieve this was the U-boat, but again Germany was forbidden to have any submarines in its fleet. Nothing daunted, Raeder turned to the small team of engineers who had been recruited in 1925 by Wilhelm Canaris, the future head of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, to design U-boats in case Germany were ever allowed to own any. Under Raeder this team began building U-boats for export to Turkey and Spain. Thus, the Germans gained the equipment and expertise necessary to build and operate a U-boat fleet but without contravening Versailles.
In 1931, Raeder recruited a former German naval U-boat captain named A.D. Bräutigam who had been implementing the Japanese submarine programme. Bräutigam was put in charge of testing U-boat designs and training crews. During 1933 a proper submarine school was opened in Kiel–Wik on the Baltic coast. The school’s first course began with eight officers and 75 seamen undergoing training in torpedo firing, convoy attack tactics and methods for evading enemy destroyers.
The equipment for this course verged on the farcical. Correct navigation with a periscope, for instance, was taught by building a shed on the deck of a tug. The navigation officer was put in the shed with a mirror mounted in a tube, which served as a periscope, and told to shout steering instructions to the tug helmsman through an open window. Such methods were improved in 1935 when Finland agreed to lend a submarine for training purposes.
Although Germany was acquiring trained crews and experience in U-boat design, its navy as yet had no actual submarines. In 1934 the steel parts for twelve U-boats were made in the Ruhr under conditions of such secrecy that the different teams making the various components had no idea what the parts were for. The following year the parts were put together in heavily guarded warehouses in Kiel and on 15 June 1935 the first of the U-boats was launched. This was the U1, a small coastal craft which would be unfit for the open ocean, but could raid merchant shipping off Europe’s shores. By 1937 six U-boats were operational.
British concern at these moves were mollified by Hitler’s foreign policy adviser, Joachim Ribbentrop, who signed a British proposal outlawing the type of unrestricted submarine warfare that had caused the Royal Navy so many problems in the First World War. Germany, like many other nations, was now pledged to the policy that U-boats would torpedo ships only after giving their crews due warning and time to take to their boats. This, of course, would give any other ships in the vicinity time to escape and seriously hampered the effectiveness of the submarine as a sinker of merchant ships. Hitler had no intention of sticking to Ribbentrop’s promise if war with Britain ever came about, but it allowed him to continue to build up the undersea fleet.
In September 1935 the growing U boat flotilla was put under the command of Captain Karl Dönitz. Unlike most other naval officers, Dönitz was to become close to Hitler and had a reputation for being able to placate the Führer even when he was in one of his most dangerous temper fits. In 1945, Hitler was to appoint Dönitz as his successor as Führer, over the heads of many other Nazi or military figures.
Born in 1891, Dönitz was a career naval officer who served in cruisers at the start of World War I. In 1916, however, he transferred to the command of U68 and pioneered the tactic of coordinating attacks on convoys with two or more U-boats. In October 1918, his U-boat was sunk in the course of just such an attack. He was held prisoner by the British until 1919 and while in prison he further developed his concept of joint attack. He remained an officer in the much reduced German navy of the 1920s and by the time he took command of the new U-boat flotilla he had fully developed the attack strategy that was dubbed ‘the wolf pack’.
Admirals Dönitz and Raeder confer
Dönitz believed that U-boats should operate in groups up to a dozen strong. They would lie scattered across a wide area of ocean until one of them found a convoy. This U-boat would promptly dive and follow the convoy unseen. At night it would surface and radio the other U-boats in the pack to gather ahead of the convoy. Dönitz knew that the British had ASDIC, a method of using sound waves to locate a U-boat underwater. But he also knew it was ineffective if the U-boat was on the surface. Dönitz therefore instructed his captains to attack on the surface at night when they would be virtually invisible to the eye and undetected by ASDIC.
By the time war broke out Dönitz had 55 operational U-boats under his command. He was blunt in his appraisal that to defeat Britain he would need 300, but he never got them.
While Dönitz was developing the U-boat service, Raeder had been closely studying the provisions of the Versailles Treaty regarding surface ships. He realised that although the total size of individual ships was limited, Versailles said nothing about their weaponry or other features. Raeder ordered the design of warships equipped with massive, battleship-sized guns mounted on a hull able to outrun the main Royal Navy battlefleet and small enough to be legal under Versailles. With these ships Raeder hoped to be able to destroy British merchant shipping while avoiding a full scale battle.
The first of these ships, dubbed ‘pocket-battleships’, was the Deutschland, laid down in 1929. She displaced 11,700 tonnes, though Raeder claimed it was only 9,800 tonnes, and carried six 11 inch guns together with eight 5.9 inch guns, torpedoes and anti aircraft guns. Equipped with eight enormous diesel engines, she could steam at 28 knots for sustained periods. By 1931 three such ships were under construction, entering service in 1933 and 1935 as Deutschland, Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee.
By the time the pocket-battleships were in service, Raeder had moved on to bigger and better things. When Hitler came to power in 1933 he made it very clear he expected the navy to be able to defeat the French and the British naval power. In response, Raeder put forward what he called ‘Plan Z’. Announced in 1935, this ten year plan envisaged the constructio
n of six battleships of 56,000 tonnes, four battleships of 42,000 tonnes, three battle-cruisers of 31,000 tonnes, two aircraft carriers and a vast supporting fleet of cruisers and destroyers and 267 U-boats. Plan Z shifted the balance in the types of warships because the main naval enemy was seen now as France, not Britain. While Britain could be strangled by the sinking of merchant ships, France would only be defeated if her mighty battleships were destroyed.
The battle cruisers were laid down in 1935 and two of them were completed by the outbreak of war in 1939. These were the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, both of 32,000 tonnes and equipped with nine 11 inch guns, twelve 6 inch guns and a variety of anti-aircraft guns. Hitler intervened in the construction of these ships. Raeder had wanted 14 inch guns for the main armament, but Hitler knew the British would view such massive guns on fast, well-armoured warships as a direct challenge to the Royal Navy, and Hitler wanted to remain on amicable terms with Britain.
In 1935 Hitler had signed the Anglo-German Naval Treaty which allowed Germany a fleet of about a third the size of the Royal Navy. Not only was this a major increase in the German navy compared to the rules of the Versailles Treaty, but it also meant the two fleets would not be too different in size in European waters, as much of the Royal Navy was scattered about the Empire. Hitler, pleased with this treaty, thought Britain was proving very friendly. He instructed Raeder to use the smaller guns on the battle cruisers and to save the big guns for the battleships.
In 1936 the first two of the big battleships were laid down, though they were not to be completed until 1940. These were Bismarck and Tirpitz, the two great ships that would dominate the thinking of the admirals while the actual fighting was largely left to the U-boats and smaller ships. These huge warships displaced 42,000 tonnes and were equipped with the mighty 15 inch guns, eight on each ship, as well as a variety of smaller guns and anti-aircraft weapons. The armour on these ships was formidable. There was one armoured deck 2 inches thick, backed by a second 5 inches thick, while the gun turrets were encased in 14 inches of steel and the command bridge in 8 inches.
When war actually broke out in 1939, Raeder and the Kriegsmarine, as the war navy was by then known, were not even half way through their rearmament programme. In the event, Raeder was never called upon to sink the French battleships as the army crushed France before the naval war got underway. The naval enemy was now Britain, as had been envisaged in the days before Plan Z. Painfully aware that his fleet was unable to compete with Britain’s, Raeder persuaded Hitler to occupy the Atlantic coast of France to give his ships and U-boats forward bases from which to operate. The unequal fight against the Royal Navy was about to begin.
The sea war had got off to a fair start for Germany. In September 1939 a U-boat torpedoed and sank the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous and in October the battleship HMS Royal Oak also went to the bottom. In November the German heavy cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau broke out into the Atlantic, sank the cruiser HMS Rawalpindi and got home again safely. In the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic the pocket battleship Graf Spee was sinking British merchant ships with ease.
Then, on 13 December 1939, the Graf Spee encountered three British cruisers, one from New Zealand. In the fight that followed all four ships were damaged and the Graf Spee put into the neutral harbour of Montevideo for repairs. Convinced that a large British fleet was waiting just over the horizon, Admiral Langsdorf scuttled his ship, then committed suicide. Hitler was unimpressed. From his point of view, he had been persuaded to spend large sums of money on the navy by Raeder, money which could have been spent on panzers, and now the navy sank itself.
The U-boats were, however, doing better. By the end of 1939 they had sunk over 100 British merchant ships. When the U-boats began to operate out of ports in western France the kill rate went up considerably. Between June and December 1940 they sank 3 million tonnes of British shipping. In November the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer broke into the Atlantic sinking 16 ships and causing the complete disruption of British convoys for two weeks before she returned to port. In December the trick was repeated by the cruiser Hipper.
In February 1941 Hitler stepped in to intervene. He ordered the U-boats to go to the Mediterranean to protect the transport of the Afrika Korps to Tripoli. Although Raeder protested and complained, Hitler insisted that several U-boats stay in the Mediterranean to protect supplies to Rommel. He did not authorise an increase in U-boat production nor crew training to take account of these increased responsibilities. That would have drained resources from the build up for the coming war with Russia.
Raeder was furious. He and his U-boat commander Karl Dönitz estimated they needed 300 U-boats in the Atlantic to starve Britain into surrender by the end of the year. They had only 30. In May 1941 Raeder persuaded Hitler to let loose the biggest weapon in the German navy, the battleship Bismarck.
The Bismarck was laid down in 1936 at a time when Raeder had been ordered to build a navy able to crush the French fleet in battle. Although built for battle, the Bismarck was a fast, heavily armed ship suitable for mounting decisive long range raids on merchant ships. She could sink any British convoy protection ships with ease, and was vulnerable to only the largest British battleships. Raeder estimated that with the Bismarck at large in the Atlantic, the British would have to cancel all convoys. This was almost as good as sinking them for it meant Britain would be starved of food.
On 21 May the Bismarck put to sea with the cruiser Prinz Eugen and headed for the North Atlantic. The two ships were spotted and shadowed by a pair of British cruisers, which called in the battleship Prince of Wales and heavy battlecruiser Hood to confront the Germans. With eight 15 inch guns on the Hood and ten 14 inch guns on the Prince of Wales, the British had a clear advantage over the Germans, with eight 15 inch guns on the Bismarck and only eight 8 inch guns on the Prinz Eugen. But when battle commenced at dawn on 24 May the Prince of Wales was badly damaged and the Hood blew up, sinking in seconds.
Raeder proudly passed the news on to Hitler. The Führer was delighted at the sinking of Britain’s largest and most famous warship and sent a personal message of congratulations to the Bismarck crew. In panic the British rerouted or cancelled all convoys and called in almost their entire fleet to track down the Bismarck. Fortunately for the British it turned out that the Bismarck’s steering control had been damaged. She was cornered by an overwhelmingly superior British force. After a bitter fight, the Bismarck was sunk.
This event had a profound effect on Hitler. Never very interested in the navy, Hitler now refused to allow the building of any new large ships. The battleship Tirpitz, a sister to the Bismarck, was the last capital ship the Germans built during the war. Nor would Hitler allow the few ships he did have to go out on extended raiding voyages. Tirpitz was kept in a succession of docks and fjords in Norway from which it occasionally put to sea to attack convoys between Britain and Russia.
On 29 December 1942 a powerful German fleet led by the pocket battleship Lützow and the heavy cruiser Hipper set out from Norway to attack the British convoy JW51B heading for Russia. They struck at dawn on 31 December, but found the convoy protected by a stronger escort than expected. In a confused fight two British warships were sunk and others badly damaged, while the Germans lost one destroyer and sustained serious damage to the Hipper. Not a single merchant ship had been hit.
When he heard the news, Hitler was furious and gave vent to one of his towering rages. He summoned Raeder and gave him a direct order to decommission the large warships as they were a complete waste of money and manpower. Raeder objected, but Hitler’s anger knew no limits and Raeder was subjected to a vicious stream of insults and abuse. He resigned and played no further part in the war, reappearing only at the Nuremberg trials, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Hitler refused to hear his name spoken again.
The new head of the Kriegsmarine was the head of U-boats, Karl Dönitz. Ironically, Dönitz’s first achievement was to persuade Hitler to keep the big warships in commi
ssion. They were to be kept in heavily defended ports and not to be sent to sea. In this role they tied down large numbers of British warships, which were therefore not escorting the convoys, leaving them open to attack by U-boats.
Hitler told Dönitz to concentrate on the U-boat campaign and finally agreed to increase the production of submarines. The output of U-boats was increased to 40 per month and a new, long range model was authorised for service. It was, however, already too late. By 1943 the British had long range air cover over most of the Atlantic together with greatly improved location devices and depth charges. By May Dönitz had lost 87 U-boats, so he pulled his fleet out of the main convoy routes. In July Hitler took a break from concentrating on Russia to realise what had happened and ordered Dönitz back to the attack. In the first 30 days of the renewed U-boat war 64 German submarines were sunk. Dönitz pulled them out of action once again.
Finally, Britain was safe. Victory in the Battle of Britain had meant she could not be invaded. Now the defeat of the U-boats meant she could not be starved. There can be no doubt that Hitler himself was primarily responsible for these failures of the Wehrmacht. He had not believed Britain would refuse to make peace and so had made no plans for either a quick invasion or for a long naval war.
Just as conventional armed units were being built up in the 1930s, so was the murkier world of the spy and intelligence services. The infamous secret police organisation, the Gestapo, is well known for its brutal suppression of political dissidence, but was then rather too well known to be a spy organisation. That task was left largely with the Abwehr, or military intelligence, which was based in an anonymous office block in the Tirpitz Ufer side street of Berlin. The office was known as the Fuchsbau, or Fox Lair, to those who worked there and their task was dubbed the Game of Foxes.
The chief of the foxes was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who had an exemplary record as a fighting seaman in the First World War. After the war ended, Canaris continued in the navy as a key player in the secret moves to gain modern weapons and training contrary to the Versailles Treaty. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Canaris welcomed the move for he had forged contacts with several key Nazis. On 1 January 1935 Canaris became the head of the Abwehr.
Hitler: Military Commander Page 3