3
“We Are at War”
19 December 1941. Three U-boat commanders in dark blue caps, overcoats, and gray gloves stood in a tight circle outside the entrance to Second U-Boat Flotilla Headquarters on the River Scorff at Lorient. Reinhard Hardegen was explaining to his colleagues that he had just returned prematurely from leave in Italy when a Horch sedan sent by Admiral Dönitz’s headquarters at nearby Kernével pulled up in front. The officers climbed in, Hardegen sitting alongside the naval driver for the winding three-kilometer ride through Lorient’s centre de ville.
“Why did you say you came back early?” one of the officers in the rear asked Hardegen as the driver got under way. “Because of the Führer’s declaration of war against America?”
“Exactly,” Hardegen answered, turning to the officer. “I have a lot of anger toward the Americans.1 Don’t forget, two patrols ago I was off the coast of Africa, and the Americans with their hypocritical claims of neutrality made a fool of me. Time and time again I would sight smoke clouds and mast tops on the horizon only to close with them and see that they belonged to ships with large painted American flags on their hulls. So many times that happened. I knew—everyone of us on board knew—that those US ships were delivering contraband to the enemy. Yet we couldn’t touch them. But we can touch those guys now.”
From the back seat came sounds of approval, though one of the Commanders cautioned, “Don’t be so sure we’re going to America. The Lion may be sending us to Gibraltar.” Hardegen mused to himself, yes, the Lion could send them to Gibraltar, but more than likely he would not. All three officers commanded either Type IXB or IXC oceangoing boats designed for long-distance missions. The Lion’s call for the three of them to receive orders from him in person, and at the same time, had to mean something special, something different from a Gibraltar station, where their type of boats had already operated—and for too long, in Hardegen’s opinion. He guessed that the call meant an extended Feindfahrt to the coastal shipping lanes of the United States. At worst, their orders would send them to form a rake across convoy lanes south of Greenland, from which he had just returned in November. That would at least get U-boats back into the North Atlantic. But the odds favored an American patrol.
The sedan passed over the Ter River bridge onto Larmor-Plage south of the city and shortly afterward turned east on the rue du Kernével, following it to its end at the water’s edge where, looking south across the roadstead, the officers could see the battlements of the eighteenth-century stone Citadelle de Port-Louis that once guarded the harbor’s entrance. Their driver stopped to present passes at a guardhouse painted in red and white chevrons, then drove onto a gravel driveway and stopped again before the eight sweeping stone steps of a handsome chateau. Flag Lieutenant Hans Fuhrmann came rapidly down the steps to greet Hardegen and his companions as they alighted from the staff car.
“Come up to the situation room,” he said, “Kapitän zur See Godt will greet you shortly. The mate has made coffee. The admiral left word he wants you to look around. There’s no action right now. Be sure to see the ‘museum,’ as we call it—the room with our graphs and tables and tonnage tallies. Familiarize yourselves. Kapitän Godt will see you as soon as he is free.”
Hardegen and his companions entered the foyer, hung up their coats and caps, and followed the flag lieutenant through the grand salon into the situation room on the ground floor. With a wave of the hand Fuhrmann left them alone with the large wall nautical charts, the operations chart with its myriad of pins with red and blue flags atop a large green baize-covered table, and the admiral’s famed three-foot-diameter world globe. It did not take the commanders long to figure out that the blue flags stood for U-boats and the red for convoys. What was startling was that there were very few blue flags in the Atlantic sea-lanes between North America and Britain. Most were bunched up in the Mediterranean and off Gibraltar. “You see?” said one of the officers, “I bet that’s where we’re going—Gibraltar.” Har-degen shook his head. He walked over to the enlarged wall chart Nr. 1870G Nordatlantischer Ozean.
“Here,” he said, pointing, “is where we’re going—Boston, New York, Cape Hatteras, Key West. Count on it.”
The others laughed. “You’re awfully sure,” said one. Hardegen seized on the lightened mood. “See this strait, Strait of Belle Isle?” He pointed to the body of water between Newfoundland and Labrador. “That’s where I was on my last patrol in November. Now look here.” He moved his finger to the right across the Atlantic to a small island south of Lorient. “That’s Belle lie, which we passed when we stood out to sea. I told my officers when we reached the strait that our boat had just gone from Beautiful Island to Beautiful Island!” Again Hardegen’s companions chuckled at his effervescent good humor.
“What did you find in your Beautiful Island strait when you got there?” asked one.
“Nothing,” Hardegen answered. “Absolutely nothing, except fog. I spent six days looking at nothing but a milky white wall. And there was no hunting at all. I was really angry at being given such a poor station.”2
His companions smiled indulgently. It was hard for them to imagine this man with the big smile being angry.
Richard Zapp (U-66), short, thickset, with deeply etched features, hada success record of five ships, 26,130 tons, sunk off Africa in the preceding June, July, and September. Redheaded Ernst Kals (U-VJ0), slender as a ship’s colors, had just returned to Lorient from sinking three ships, 14,971 tons, in the North Atlantic—his first kills as a commander. They knew Hardegen as spontaneous, audacious, and irrepressibly good-humored. They also knew from word passed by his officers and crew that it was a real scare to ride in his boat. He took chances that few other commanders would dream of taking. But audacity had won him seven ships claimed, nearly forty thousand tons. It was hard for some to reconcile Hardegen’s aggressiveness with his delicate features and physical impairments, including a shortened right leg—result of the plane crash in 1936—that he managed successfully to camouflage. It was an open secret that the same crash had left him with a continuously bleeding stomach and a diarrhetic condition, and that on board his boat the cook regularly fed him a special bland diet. Two things could be said for certain about Hardegen, however: No officer or crewman asked to be transferred off U-/23 to another boat as naval regulations freely permitted. And, in a service where the only respected commanders were those who sank ships, Hardegen was greatly respected.
However, neither his leg nor his stomach was on the mind of U-723′s commander as he paced Dönitz’s situation room and paused to gaze out the broad east window at Keroman I and II, the huge nearly finished U-boat bunkers that squatted directly opposite on the Ter. Thousands of workmen continued to swarm over the gray, windowless monoliths in an attempt to bring the project to completion by the end of December. Already the refit facilities at the waterline were in operation. From his vantage point Hardegen could easily make out the cavelike bays, including bay B6 where his own boat was nearing the end of refit. This was the first time his boat had been readied for combat under the newly opened shelter. In a matter of hours, he hoped, she would be ready for loading and provisioning. But first he needed Admiral Dönitz’s orders. He wondered how long he would have to wait.
The admiral was doing what he always did at this time in the afternoon. He was walking his Alsatian, Wolf, across the brown countryside near Quiberon in company with his A-4 (communications officer), Korvettenkapitän Hans Meckel. It was an idyllic hour in the twenty-four, despite the December chill. Dönitz’s days were precisely ordered. He awoke each morning at seven and appeared in the situation room promptly at nine where his six-man staff under Kapitän zur See Eberhard Godt, chief of operations (BdU-Ops), briefed him on the overnight situation. The dapper, sad-eyed Godt was every inch Dönitz’s alter ego, and, more than anyone outside of headquarters realized at the time, the master manager of the convoy battles. From Godt’s deputy, designated A-l, first operations officer, Dönitz learned the curre
nt disposition of all U-boats and of all convoys. A-1 would also describe actions taken during the night. If a major convoy battle had occurred, Dönitz would already have known about it in detail since he and Godt would have directed the strategy throughout from the green baize table. The A-l report would close with an account of U-boats going to and returning from patrol, boats in various state of refit at all the Atlantic U-boat bases of Brest (First and Ninth Flotillas), Lorient (Second), Saint-Nazaire (Sixth and Seventh), La Pallice/La Rochelle (Third), and Bordeaux (Twelfth), and the construction progress of new boats on stream from the major German shipyards of Kiel, Hamburg, and Bremen.
The officer designated A-2 would then report on the escort of U-boats by R-boats (motor minesweepers) as they sortied or returned through the complicated mine fields on the approaches to the various bases. The A-3, intelligence officer, presented a graphic display of convoy routes based on B-Dienst intercepts and decrypts of convoy radio traffic. The B-Dienst accomplishments in cracking British naval ciphers and codes had been persistently brilliant. While the Royal Navy tactical ciphers remained for the most part impenetrable the convoy traffic had long ago been compromised and its data on composition, course, and speed of convoys proved of inestimable value—except when, as now, Dönitz had almost none of his boats in the sea lanes that counted. A-3 also reported on other intelligence data received overnight from agents in neutral countries, Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights, and sea-level sightings of warships and merchantmen. A-4, Meckel, reviewed nighttime radio shortwave communications with surfaced U-boats at sea which were transmitted and received by his staff in the large white former residency building next to the chateau. From Kernével his operators keyed directly by land lines the powerful transmitters and receivers southeast of Paris that had formed the Compagnie Radio-France, which until its seizure by the Germans had been used by the French government for communications with France’s far-flung colonies; the transmitters were at Sainte-Assise and the receivers at Villecresnes. Similarly, Meckel reported on longwave messages transmitted to boats in all areas, which could receive them underwater to a depth of twenty-five meters via Goliath, the enormous antenna array at Calbe, forty-three kilometers south of Magdeburg in the heart of Germany, which was also connected to Kernével by cable.3
A-5 and A-6 presented miscellaneous data dealing with personnel and logistics. It was A-5′s unhappy duty, when a U-boat was reported lost or missing, to place a star beside the commander’s name on the first receipt of a casualty report and a second star if no positive response came from the boat after several days of radio transmissions. After that the commander’s name was “put on file.” Among the names “on file” by this December were Prien, Kretschmer (captured though presumed dead at Kernével), Schepke, Lemp, and Endrass. Finally, Dönitz and staff prepared a “U-Boat Disposition Chart,” based on the decrypted British Western Approaches daily bulletin on “U-Boat Dispositions”—as Britain believed them to be—as well as on what staff thought the enemy might have deduced about U-boat intentions from known torpedo actions, high-frequency direction-finding technology, and sightings. Dönitz and staff then asked themselves how, in the enemy’s place, they would react to these data. U-boat rakes could then be deployed to ambush convoys that London thought it had safely steered from harm’s way. Following the morning’s work and a light lunch, Dönitz would sleep for an hour in order to build a reserve of alertness that he might have to call on during the night ahead. Upon awakening he and Wolf, with a staffer (on this particular day, Meckel), would climb into his gray Mercedes command car and, escorted front and back by naval motorcycle guards, drive the short distance from Kernével into the countryside.
On this 19 December afternoon Dönitz walked the rolling Breton landscape with more than his usual pace and energy. The shadow war with America was over. He could now think about hostilities with the United States in the clear light of day. In the 1920s, as a young officer engaged in the theoretical naval studies known as Winterarbeiten, he had studied the detailed contingency plan that had been prepared by the German Admiralty Staff in 1899 for a joint Navy-Army invasion of the United States. The plan called for a direct assault on New York Harbor including the initial landing of two to three battalions of infantry and one battalion of engineers on Long Island. From New York the combined naval and land forces would spread north to Boston and south to Norfolk. The plan presumed 33.3 percent naval superiority. It also presumed complete surprise. On the latter point the plan foundered, since few navy staffers thought that a large Atlantic invasion fleet could escape detection over three thousand miles of crossing. An alternate plan calling for a preliminary seizure of Puerto Rico was considered for a time, but gave way in 1900 to a Marschplan (plan of advance) that called for a German armada out of Wilhelmshaven to descend on either New York or Boston through Provincetown as a Stützpunkt (base of operations). The revised plan envisioned a landing force of one hundred thousand men that would have to be transported to the Cape Cod peninsula. The magnitude of the operation gave pause to many in the Admiralty and Prussian General Staff, particularly since even the large force assigned to the capture of coastal forts and cities would not be sufficient to operate in the interior of the United States. Though the Marschplan against America would never come up as an action item on either the Kaiser’s or the Fiihrer’s agenda, it continued to fascinate naval officers of strategic mind like Dönitz.4
Somewhat less speculative, the commander in chief U-boats was aware, were current plans for a Luftwaffe bomber offensive against American coastal cities. The plans had been under serious consideration by Hitler since at least 22 May 1941 when as Naval Staff minutes of a Hitler conference recorded in italics: “Führer seeks the occupation of [the Azores] in order to deploy long-range bombers against the United States.”5 Major planning for a war with the United States had begun in 1937 and as early as 20 October 1940 Hitler had proposed occupying the Azores “with an eye to the future war with America.”6 In Hitler’s mind Azores-based bombers should attack U.S. military installations and industrial centers and thus force the United States to invest millions of dollars in antiaircraft systems that might otherwise be shipped to Britain. Unfortunately for the Fiihrer’s plan, the aircraft being designed for the purpose, the four-engine Messerschmitt Me-264, popularly called the America-Bomber, with a range of nine thousand miles and a four-thousand-pound bomb load, did not fly until a year after Pearl Harbor, and only one was ever built.7
An early U-boat assault against the United States had also been proposed well before Pearl Harbor when it became clear to German strategists that the United States was an armed belligerent in everything but name. In February 1941, Hitler directed the Naval Staff to study the feasibility of a surprise U-boat assault on major U.S. navy bases and anchorages on the East Coast: Boston, New London, Newport, New York, and Hampton Roads. Such a pre-Pearl Harbor strike would have constituted a clear act of war, from which Dönitz did not shrink, angry as he was at Washington’s near-total involvement with Britain’s war effort, and knowing as he did that Hitler intended from the beginning to make war on the United States once he had disposed of Russia and Britain. In the event, Naval Staff concluded that such an attack was not feasible owing to the known or presumed presence of antisubmarine nets and shore batteries, and to the requirement that a U-boat attacking fleet proceed submerged at a great distance from land in order to avoid detection, which would have put an unacceptable strain on batteries.8 Dönitz and Godt thought that the conclusion was pusillanimous. They did not share the same high regard for U.S. defenses. Dönitz in particular thought that the U.S. Navy home installations were in such a poor state of readiness that a U-boat could steam directly into the throat of New York Harbor, on the surface, at night, without being challenged. As for nets and shore batteries, he doubted their effectiveness, if they even existed. But the decision had been made and now, after Pearl Harbor, it was U.S. coastal merchant shipping that he was given permission to strike. Hitler had formally approved of t
he seaborne blitzkrieg on 12 December. And that was going to have to be enough.
Fifty-year-old Karl Dönitz had been a naval officer for twenty-nine years, nine of them in U-boats. Born near Berlin to a Prussian family that imbued him with the overarching values of patriotism, duty, and obedience, he entered the Navy as a sea cadet in 1910 and finished thirty-ninth in his class at the Naval Academy at Flensburg-Mürwik. His first posting was to the new cruiser Breslau. When World War I broke out in 1914, Breslau was in near-continuous operations against superior Russian forces in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In 1915, Dönitz both learned to fly and won the hand of Sister Ingeborg Weber, a military nurse, daughter of a German general. In 1916, married, he underwent training back in Germany for service in U-boats, and subsequently became IWO on U-J9 under Kptlt. Walter Forstmann, already an established ace. Returning to southern waters off Gibraltar and in the Adriatic, Dönitz learned from Forstmann how to sink fourteen vessels by eye and mind alone, without the aid of a Vorhältrechner (electromechanical calculator)—part of the equipment of U-boats a quarter century later. He also learned from Forstmann how to be “hard in war”: When U-39 sank an Italian troop ship with the loss of all one thousand infantrymen on board, Forstmann stated, “Every soft-hearted act of mercy to the enemy would be foul treason to our own striving people.”9 In a similar statement about enemy losses in an earlier sinking, Forstmann wrote, “One must energetically put aside all sympathy, all pity and every other feeling of the kind, for there is no doubt that their influence tends to weakness. The object of war is to annihilate the armed forces of the enemy whether it be on the battlefield or in a fight at sea.”10 To judge from Dönitz’s actions and commands to U-boats twenty-five years later, he was an adept pupil of Forstmanns “hard war” school. The U-boat, because of its small size and vulnerable skin, was in a naval class by itself: Unlike most surface ships, it could not pick up survivors. In 1940 Dönitz would give U-boat commanders the order: “Do not rescue any men, do not take them along, and do not take care of any boats from the ship. Weather conditions and the proximity of land are of no consequence. Concern yourself only with the safety of your own boat and with the efforts to achieve additional successes as soon as possible. We must be hard in this war.”11 U.S. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz would testify at Dönitz’s Nürnberg trial in 1945 that U.S. submarines in the Pacific also practiced unrestricted warfare and that after Pearl Harbor their procedures regarding survivors were generally the same as Dönitz’s. British submarines followed the same policy in the Skagerrak (an arm of the North Sea between Denmark and Norway) from May 1940 on. In the Atlantic, U.S. policy toward crewmen survivors of sunken U-boats would be expressed as follows: “The question of a small ship picking up a large number of survivors presents itself. The Commanding Officer should be able to judge for himself. At no time should he sacrifice his ship to get survivors…. A life raft or small boat with food may be provided for them and their recovery effected at a later date.”12
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