Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  As they dived the sound room operator on the hydrophone called to Hardegen in the control room: “Herr Kaleu! Destroyer-closing fast!” Hardegen ordered all hands to the bow compartments so that their weight would sharpen the boat’s angle of dive. Now the destroyer was upon them with her Wabos. The first canisters exploded below the “swirl” left by their submerging, and the next pattern fell across the course the destroyer thought they had taken underwater. This Tommy captain was pretty good, Hardegen thought: He guessed well and some of his first explosions were close enough to shatter instrument glass, spray sparks, and punch the pits of a few stomachs. Now the hunter began trying to box them in, using his underwater sound-ranging device, called ASDIC.16 That apparatus, housed in a dome on the underside of the destroyer’s hull, sent out sound waves in pulses that, when they struck an underwater object such as a U-boat, returned a signal that gave the object’s range and bearing. When the pulses bounced off a U-boat’s hull they emitted within the boat a loud, piercing, and (for U-boatmen) ominous PING-ping! And that was exactly what the crew heard now as the hunter above stalked his game. Hardegen dived deeper to 150 meters, then to 200 (654 feet). Every man in the boat knew that the series of PING-pings would shortly be followed by Wabos, so as the pinging increased in intensity they reached for whatever they could hold on to to steady them against the shocks. Click-CLANG! CUck-CLANG! Each Wabo buckled the knees and jarred teeth and gums. And the bombing went on for hours. No man on board escaped the concussions that came from the explosions all around. Several times the lights shorted out, and the beams of hand-held flashlights reminded the men that they were still alive. No one broke. Discipline held. Absolute quiet prevailed within the boat. Men moved with mincing steps, and only the most necessary orders were given in whispers. While they knew that ASDIC listened to its own sound waves that echoed back from the U-boat’s hull, they were likewise aware that British destroyers were equipped with an excellent hydrophone (Horchgerät) that “homed in” on audible sounds; though it is unlikely that a hydrophone picked up voices or footsteps inside a U-boat’s thick hull. With the E motors, Hardegen tried various evasive maneuvers at great depth: “Starboard easy.” “Starboard easy,” the helmsman whispered down the pipe. Still, for the longest while they were not able to shake their foe. Schneider kept the count: fifty-three Wabos. It was a punishing ordeal and a sobering experience for everyone on board. In practicing their difficult three-dimensional art, the British had miscalculated 123′s depth, with the result that their charges exploded harmlessly overhead. (For a depth charge to damage a U-boat fatally, it had to explode within seven meters [twenty-three feet] of the pressure hull. Not until 27 August when the British captured the Type VIIC U-570 south of Iceland and subjected it to tests that demonstrated the thick hull’s diving depth to 200 meters or more—the type was shipyard-certified to 250—did British war vessels adjust the priming on their charges for significantly deeper detonations.) After nearly twelve hours, the destroyer broke off the hunt. If it had remained on station for thirty-six to forty-eight hours, when 123′s oxygen supply would have run out, the boat would have had to surface and become an easy victim. But the stalker abandoned his prey. After a prudent interval, Hardegen went to periscope depth. A quick search with the observation lens revealed an empty sea save for smoke columns far to the north. Eins Zwei Drei surfaced on the morning of 28 June to recharge batteries, even though it was daylight, and Hardegen ordered the helmsman to follow a northerly course to pursue the convoy. At the same time he radioed an update to BdU.

  Hans Seigel: It wasn’t at all like what people saw in Buchheim’s movie, Das Boot.

  Walter Lorenz: No, not at all. In the movie when the depth charges hit you see men falling all about. It was just not like that. Sure, your nerves got jangled, but falling about on each other? No, no.

  Seigel: When you heard the ASDIC, and when you heard the depth charges, you knew that you were still alive. But it’s true, when the destroyer’s propeller noises grew louder and closer, and when the pinging reverberated throughout the boat, and you heard the click of the explosives reaching their depth, sure it rattled your nerves. But there were never any screams or shouts like in the film. It just didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen—they’d locate you immediately. If just one man had shouted—

  Richard Amstein: I don’t think there was one man on board who wasn’t scared.

  Walter Kaeding: The man who says he wasn’t scared, he’s a liar. The difference was that in a U-boat you couldn’t show your fear. So we didn’t. But in Buchheim’s film Das Boot, where the men are so scared they go in their pants, not one of us had that happen, not one.

  Karl Latislaus: Do you know that Buchheim also wrote a book? He is truly crazy. He made only one trip in a U-boat, as a photojournalist. How could he presume to write about U-boatmen? Some things are factual, but most are not. Before a mission we didn’t drink that much or go around without our shirts—

  Kaeding: We always knew where we stood. We understood from the beginning that we could be hit out there. But discussing that was taboo. Not in the family, not in the homeland, nowhere did we discuss it. We didn’t even discuss it with our shipmates.

  Seigel: Every boat was different. The commander of every boat was different. And I believe that if we had had a commander who was very tense, we wouldn’t have been so calm either. But with Hardegen we had confidence that we would make it. And we were a well-experienced crew. You could trust your life to every single man.17

  When darkness fell again, 123 with her superior surface speed was able to come up fast on the heels of the same convoy. Overnight, in fact, Hardegen got ahead of the convoy and waited for its lead elements in a bow attack position, but a Sunderland sighted them in the morning and sent them underwater with a brace of bombs, and 123 spent much of the daytime of 29 June submerged. Then, around dusk, there loomed into periscope view the same armed merchantman whose artillery had given them such grief two nights before. In the attack scope Hardegen easily read her name: Río Azul, 4,088 GRT. What looked like a white Royal Navy war ensign on the bowstaff suggested that she was a Hilfskreuzer—an armed merchant cruiser (AMC). He could not think of a more satisfying target. As she steamed into his cross hairs, he made ready a single launch from tube four. Alerted to 123′s presence by the Sunderland’s attack, Rio Azul was zigzagging on her base course. Just when Hardegen began to worry that he might not get a clean shot at her, she zagged when she should have zigged and hove before his lens at optimum range and angle. Eins Zwei Drei was right on top of her at 325 meters and twenty-one seconds torpedo running time. Los! The torpedo went straight into her belly and the resulting blast literally blew the British ship apart. The forward gun crew could not reach their station before the bow section sank. Quickly afterward the stern section stood upright in the water and then it, too, descended below the water in loud groaning noises, with its propellers churning in the air, its Union Jack flapping, and its men sliding into the sea. Only two and a half minutes had elapsed between explosion and oil slick. To BdU Hardegen sent an F.T. announcing their triumph.18

  Eins Zwei Drei got one more ship on her long African patrol, an independently steaming British freighter that she hit on the port side one night about a week after their convoy adventures. The victim was Auditor, a British freighter, 5,444 GRT, sunk on 4 July. Schneider got the prize with a single, well-placed torpedo on a UZO aim-off and they watched the crew hastily abandon ship as the vessel went down by the stern. Faster than they could have expected only the bow stood steeply above the water. Then it heaved up in one last gasp of life and sank like a stone. It was an impressive sight. Two weeks later Hardegen would learn that two of the steamer’s lifeboats, with twenty-four men aboard, successfully made Cape Verde on the African coast—a stretch of some six hundred nautical miles in an open boat, the distance. Hardegen figured, from Lake Constance to Königsberg (roughly the equivalent distance from Washington, D.C. to Chicago). He credited the survivors with excellent seamanship. Audi
tor was the U-boat’s last sinking because all the rest of the shipping they saw going in or out of Freetown in Sierra Leone was American, “neutral” shipping that U-boat commanders were not allowed to attack. From the bridge Hardegen frequently sighted smoke clouds and mast tops on the horizon but when the boat closed he saw that they belonged to ships with prominently painted U.S. flags on their hulls. Everyone on board knew that the U.S. ships were delivering contraband to the enemy. Yet the rules of engagement forbade contact. To Hardegen it was infuriating and frustrating (although he could have reflected with profit on the fact that at the same time Germany was marching troops across neutral Sweden and was refueling U-boats in neutral Spanish ports).19 Having reported to BdU that they had run out of prospects, they were ordered north, on 2 August, to waters off Gibraltar, where they patrolled, again without success and much to their grief because on two occasions, 13-14 August, British destroyers took them under depth-charging, the second time for four hours straight, and they ended up with both dieseis temporarily disabled and a serious leak of lubricating oil. Schneider counted 126 toothshakers in all, 39 of which were close enough to hurt, with the result that the crew were more than a little relieved when BdU ordered 123 home for repairs. By the time (0910 on 23 August) they tied up alongside old Isére, the crew had been at sea for sixty-eight days. After the- deck force completed their hawsers, the men raced off to the base canteen for a bottle of Beck’s. Hardegen went off for a bath and shave and a long sleep between clean sheets.

  At Kernével, Admiral Dönitz studied Hardegen’s Kriegstagebuch (KTB), or war diary, in close detail and on 25 August commented on his new Type IXB commander in the BdU diary: “He first attacked a convoy and sank an auxiliary cruiser and three ships. Later he sank an independently sailing ship and observed heavy neutral traffic off Freetown. The commander behaved very skillfully throughout the operation and used his opportunities for attack to the utmost.”20 It was praise not lightly given by the Lion. Pointedly, Dönitz had left out mention of Hardegen’s first sinking. There was a downside to 123 ‘s KTB that could only be explained to Hardegen personally. Like every other frontline commander at the conclusion of a patrol, Hardegen presented himself on the day assigned at Dönitz’s headquarters chateau for a line-by-line analysis of his KTB by the Lion. This proved to be a daunting experience for some commanders who had little to show for their efforts or whose KTBs exhibited poor judgment, lack of aggressiveness, or incompetence. It was not unknown for commanders to be beached for flagrant or repeated failures; in one extreme instance Kptlt. Heinz Hirsacker (U-572) would be condemned to death by a court-martial in 1943 for “cowardice in the face of the enemy.” None of these faults appeared in Hardegen’s record, and Dönitz was generally complimentary, but the Lion did point out with some concern that the first ship Hardegen had sunk on the patrol—the 20 June target that required two torpedo hits and then artillery shelling to go down—was not, as Hardegen had identified her, a British vessel. She was a neutral Portuguese freighter named Ganda. And the diplomatic uproar caused by the incident had been somewhat allayed in Germany’s favor by the fact that the Portuguese decided to blame the loss on a British submarine known to have been in the vicinity. Dönitz thereupon bound Hardegen to absolute silence about the affair and directed him to alter his KTB both to expunge all mention of the sinking and to show no action of any kind on 20 June.

  This would be one of two known instances in the entire Battle of the Atlantic when Dönitz would order a U-boat commander to falsify his war diary. The other instance came in the opening days of the war with Britain, when the submerged V-30 (Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp) torpedoed and sank the British passenger liner Athenia 250 miles northwest of Ireland with the loss of 112 passengers, including 22 U.S. citizens. The sinking violated both international law governing warfare at sea and BdU’s own strict orders. The shock and outrage that followed in every part of the world caused Dönitz to order Lemp, on his return to base, to remove all reference to Athenia from his KTB entry for 3 September 1939. Subsequently Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry brazenly put out the story that Athenia had been sunk by a British submarine as a deliberate attempt to incite anti-German feelings akin to those that followed Germany’s sinking of the British liner Lusitania in 1915, an action that helped bring the United States into the First World War.

  Hardegen complied with Dönitz’s second order to fake a KTB, though his effort at deception was transparent to any discriminating eye. In order to remove what must have been an elaborate account of Gandas sinking Hardegen retyped four entire pages. Instead of the tight single-spaced narrative found elsewhere in the diary, he double-spaced routine navigational data across the gap. Where the gloss failed again was in the use of a different typewriter and ribbon, four new diary-entry pages with modern typeface headings instead of Gothic as in the rest of the diary, and hand-drawn page numerals instead of typed numerals as found elsewhere. Five copies of the doctored KTB were then distributed to appropriate offices in Lorient and Germany as well as one to Hardegen’s own file in V-123. Where the subterfuge particularly collapsed was in the Schussmeldungen, the shooting reports, on the Ganda sinking that no one thought to change. In them Hardegen provided all the technical data of the torpedo launches and gun action of his attack. Inadvertently those documents went without change to Torpedokommando (Torpedo Command) in Germany, where, if anyone was curious, the data they contained could be matched exactly with what was known of Gandas sinking. Notwithstanding the other talents of Dönitz the Lion and Hardegen the warrior, it cannot be concluded that they were adept at dissembling.21 (At the Nürnberg War Crimes Tribunal in 1945, Dönitz testified under oath that Lemp’s U-30 KTB after Athenia was the only case of counterfeiting a war diary that had occurred during the war.22)

  When 123 finally came out of the yard in mid-October, her Wabo-twisted skin and innards made new and her crew rested to the point of boredom, Hardegen put out to sea again. It was the boat’s sixth war cruise, his second as her commander. After passing 20 degrees longitude, he broke his sealed Operation Order and learned that 123 was to join a patrol line, or “rake,” of U-boats interdicting the convoy lanes between Newfoundland and Greenland. Gone were those warm currents the crew had enjoyed under the Southern Cross, where their steel shell rose and fell in gentle waters. Now they were back bucketing through the northern high seas with cold green water in their faces. For five days they followed a generally westward course until, on 20 October, in the longitudes of Iceland, they received an F.T. from BdU alerting them to the presence of a fast-moving military convoy, probably troop transports, south of their position on an east-northeast course to England. Hardegen decrypted the report, which had originated with a contact U-boat, plotted it on the chart, and saw that 123 was already past the convoy’s base course. Too bad. The more he played with the data, though, the more he thought that if he reversed course at full speed he could still intercept the convoy. Some other boats at sea that received the same message might be closer and thus better able to attack, but, he wondered, suppose there were none? Suppose 123 was the only boat in the area with a chance to attack, should he not give it a try? Against that option were the strict orders that he had received from BdU on departure to make his assigned station at fuel-saving cruising speed. Could he justify disregarding those orders and expending valuable fuel on reverse track to seek out a convoy there was no certainty of reaching? His instincts said yes. Hesitation did not win wars, he told himself. It was sometimes better to make lightning decisions based on animallike instincts than to think a problem to death. Admiral Dönitz held his U-boat men to the motto: Angreifen! Ran! Versenken!—Attack! Advance! Sink! Hardegen was sure that in these circumstances the Lion would agree with his decision. He turned away from the plotting board to tell Schneider: “Now, new course one zero zero, both ahead full.”

  It was near midnight Central European Time (CET) when they made their turn on the surface and fixed the boat on reverse heading. The dieseis charged like knights’ steeds goi
ng to battle. The boat pitched and plunged as it breasted the swells and the spray it created filled the bridge with foam. The crew were in a high state of excitement. No one could sleep. Schneider ran ignition tests on the torpedoes. Every man looked to his assignment and readied himself for combat. Two more wireless signals about the convoy came in from BdU. The second reported that the contact U-boat had lost sight of the convoy, it was traveling so fast. Again Hardegen studied the chart. According to his calculations 123 would reach the convoy in fewer than four hours—or not at all. And there was no point in aborting now when he had already bled the fuel bunkers this far. Then, shockingly, he received a fresh signal from BdU: Any boats west of the convoy were to break off the chase and head to their originally assigned stations at fuel-saving speeds. What to do now? A commander should not lightly disobey orders from above, not if he wanted to remain a commander. Yet neither should he disavow gut feelings that had stood him well in the past. Furthermore, if he stopped now he would have used his fuel in vain. He ordered Schneider: “Continue, both ahead full, same course, until 0400 hours.” It was the most difficult order he had ever given for it constituted flat refusal to obey a legitimate command from the highest authority. He looked again at the BdU signal in his hand:

  CONVOY OPERATIONS TO BE HALTED IMMEDIATELY. CONTINUE NAVIGATION WITH LOW FUEL CONSUMPTION. MORE LATER.23