Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  For the moment, President Roosevelt was well aware that, having mustered margins of only thirteen votes in the Senate and eighteen in the House on 13 November to permit merchantmen to sail with armed guard detachments (Navy gun crews) into British ports, it was extremely unlikely that he would get a declaration of war through Congress if he wanted one. Still-strong isolationist feeling precluded it. Furthermore, many in the country feared that full-scale intervention on behalf of England would have the coincidental effect of saving Communist Russia, and thus of spreading communism in the wake of prevailing Soviet armies. These Americans thought that the wisest U.S. policy was to stand back and let the two totalitarian powers, Germany and Russia, destroy each other. The president was aware, too, of the provisions of the Tripartite Pact signed by the Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, on 27 September 1940, whereby each party pledged to come to the aid of the others should one of them be attacked by a power not then engaged in hostilities. By this pact Hitler was assured that Germany would not have to face alone an intervention by the United States, as had happened in World War I. What that meant for Roosevelt was that an American declaration of war against Germany would immediately involve U.S. forces in a two-ocean war, for which he thought the country unprepared. (As he would find out soon enough, the country was unprepared to take on Hitler alone in the form of Paukenschlag.) As December came the president hardened his intention to pursue for the time being the same policy of undeclared war. As December came, too, a carrier task force of one of the Axis countries was far out to sea, observing radio silence, bound for the Hawaiian Islands and about to decide things for everybody. Declarations of war were coming through the back door.

  At Naval High Command (OKM) in Berlin, Grossadmiral Raeder and his Operations Staff followed developments in the United States with a wary eye. On 6 December the staff concluded that with the latest revisions to U.S. naval and merchant ship conduct in the Atlantic, the Americans had “now reached a point where an open declaration of war cannot make any appreciable difference.” If American ships were to continue to be permitted to carry food and munitions to Britain without running any risk of U-boat attack, the chances of a successful war against Britain’s supply pipeline would diminish in the proportion that American tonnage, certain to increase in numbers, replaced that of the enemy. “Therefore the Naval Staff considers the present instructions no longer tenable under which the United States, which is in fact an active participant in the war, receives more considerate treatment than a country which is actually neutral…. The Naval Staff renews its demand for permission to wage war within the entire Pan American Security Zone …”51

  The staff, like the whole Kriegsmarine, was mindful at this juncture that among all the German naval forces available for action only the U-boat arm had permission to sortie and fight. The surface, or blue-water fleet, smaller than that of World War I, and far inferior in numbers to the British Home Fleet across the North Sea, was now little more than a fleet-in-being, effective as a menace in tying down British warships that might otherwise reinforce the Mediterranean fleets but otherwise bottled up in Breton, German, and Norwegian ports. Notable among its losses by this date were the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee (actually an armored cruiser of the Panzerschiffe class), scuttled in December 1939 off Montevideo, Uruguay, in an action that still shamed the Navy; Blücher, a heavy cruiser of the Admiral Hipper class sunk by Oslo shore batteries during the invasion of Norway in April 1940; the cruiser Karlsruhe, lost to British torpedoes off Norway the same day as Blücher; and the new heavy battleship Bismarck, which had dared to sortie from Norwegian waters on 18 May 1941 in search of Atlantic merchant tonnage and—though on her course she sank the British battle cruiser HMS Hood in twenty-four minutes—had fallen victim nine days after departure to a British combined air-sea force, going to the bottom with all but 110 of her crew of 2,000 officers and men. The losses had cast an enervating spell over Hitler. Although Raeder pressed him hard to release ships such as the new heavy battleship Tirpitz (at Kiel; after 16 January 1942, at Trondheim, Norway) and the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (at Brest, France) for forays against Atlantic commerce, the Führer remained obdurate: Capital ships must remain in port. An exception to the rule was permitted soon afterward, on 11-12 February 1942, when the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, joined by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, broke out of Brest and made a brilliant daylight run through the Strait of Dover to less-exposed harbors in the Elbe and at Wilhelmshaven. But the now-famous Channel dash was hardly offensive action.

  With U-boats, the only dependable offensive weapons, withdrawn from the Atlantic and the symbolic might of the surface fleet immobilized by order from above, the Kriegsmarine was in a state close to suspended animation. No wonder the proud Naval Staff, hearing the news of Pearl Harbor the night of 7 December and dismayed that such a decisive blow had been delivered by the Japanese instead of the German Navy, expressed itself in plaintive terms: “It is that much more painful for the Naval Staff that the German Navy cannot be the one to deal the decisive blows whose historical significance is being felt already…. The Navy is not even in a position to exploit decisively in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean the great advantage which the war in the Pacific brings.”52

  Despite the attack on Pearl Harbor by Germany’s ally Japan, despite even the numerous American provocations, it would still not appear to have been in Hitler’s interests to declare war on the United States in December 1941—just at the time when Germany needed to focus all her resources, manpower, and energies, not to mention her concentration, against the Soviet Union in the East. The Führer’s master plan required the conquest of Russia before all else. With victory in the East, an isolated England would futilely confront a continental colossus; with most of the German military might returned to stations in the West no invasion force such as the one envisioned in Navy War Plan 46 had a chance to succeed. The wisest course, it would have seemed at the time, was to let the United States exhaust her interest and energies in the Pacific war. That country’s conflict with Japan, furthermore, could be expected to draw off naval escorts from the North Atlantic. Germany could then marshal all her armed services, sea as well as land and air, in the climactic struggle with Russia. This was all-the-more pressing a need on 7 December as the Wehrmacht divisions before Moscow that day, paralyzed by minus thirty-eight degrees Celsius temperatures and two-meter snowdrifts, were being forced into their first retreat of the war, and, as one result, a crisis was erupting in the Army Supreme Command (OKW). It was hardly a propitious time for new adventures, particularly with respect to an adversary whose industrial might alone portended great trouble, and the introduction of whose arms and propaganda in 1917 had helped decide the only previous war the two nations had fought against each other. Even Hitler’s contempt for the “decadent” American military could not keep his eyes from certain of these realities.

  The Tripartite Pact concluded with Axis partners Italy and Japan in September 1940 specified only that Germany would intervene militarily if either or both the other partners were attacked by another power, assumed to be the United States. In spring 1941, Hitler made verbal promises to Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka to come in on the Japanese side if Japan initiated an attack, but those promises had not formally been signed. Hitler’s real wish had been that Japan attenuate Britain’s or Russia’s war-making power by an attack on Singapore or Vladivostok.53 In early December, however, while the Pearl Harbor attackers were approaching Hawaii, the Japanese demanded that Germany and Italy formally sign off on the Hitler-Matsuoka conversation, which would constitute a new tripartite agreement, to be kept secret until war had begun. The most important article in the agreement so far as Hitler was concerned was the one prohibiting any of the Axis powers from concluding a Sonderfriedensvertrag, a separate armistice or peace with England, the United States, or both.

  Following the events of 7 December, except for deliberations with his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hit
ler pursued his options secretly, not bothering to consult even his military advisers. The first rent in the seamless policy by which he had sought by all means to avoid war with the United States came on 9 December when, whether by impulse or design—the records are unclear—Hitler released Admiral Dönitz from all prior restrictions on naval warfare against the United States, which was henceforth to be regarded as an enemy. With a relish quite at variance with the despondent expressions of the Naval Staff, Dönitz wrote in his war diary:

  The lifting of all restrictions regarding U.S.A. ships and the so-called Pan-American Safety Zone has been ordered by the Führer. Therefore the whole area of the American coasts will become open for operations by U-boats, an area in which the assembly of ships takes place in single traffic at the few points of departure of Atlantic convoys. There is an opportunity here, therefore, of intercepting enemy merchant ships under conditions which have ceased almost completely for some time. Further, there will hardly be any question of an efficient [defensive] patrol in the American coastal area, at least of a patrol used to U-boats. Attempts must be made to utilize as quickly as possible these advantages, which will disappear very shortly, and to achieve a “spectacular success” on the American coast.54

  Immediately Dönitz requested OKM to release twelve Type-IX boats for this mission. In order to make that number he advised that some boats would have to be diverted from west of Gibraltar, where the Type IX was not so well suited for operations anyway. The Type IX was more complex in design than the more maneuverable Type VIIC, because of its larger size was more easily located by British ASDIC, and was more unwieldy in maintaining precise depth. Dönitz further advised Berlin that the reassignment of the Type IXs would be balanced by a not-inconsiderable number of new Type VIICs that were on stream and could easily be allocated to Mediterranean duty. Privately Dönitz worried that, while the presence of Type IXs off Gibraltar and VIICs in the Mediterranean had been “absolutely necessary” to prevent a collapse of the Afrika Korps, now there was a real possibility that the boats he needed so badly for the American campaign “may be trapped there one day and excluded from the Battle of the Atlantic.”55 Lending credence to this worry was the fact that the British, as he knew from B-Dienst decrypts of convoy-code traffic, had detected the withdrawal of U-boats from the Atlantic and were moving their escort vessels from the Atlantic into the areas directly east and west of Gibraltar. To counter that move, as noted before, Dönitz decided to send a VIIC boat into the North Atlantic to transmit dummy messages simulating a large U-boat group.56

  Though, understandably, Japan was now pressing him forward, Adolf Hitler could well have concluded at this point that a formal declaration of war was not necessary. The Japanese actions had had the effect of blunting rather than sharpening the danger of American intervention in Europe. Certainly Hitler could now decline Japan’s invitation to wage war against the United States in the same way Japan had declined his suggestion that she attack the Soviets at Vladivostok. He was under no obligations to Japan. The conversation with Matsuoka in April had been only that, a conversation. Why declare and thus cancel out the unexpected great advantage to Germany of the Japanese attack, namely its diversion of American attention from the Atlantic to the Pacific? As for a declaration from the other side, Hitler’s embassy in Washington had informed him that Congress, its emotions directed solely at Japan, was in no mood to choose a two-ocean war. It was not too late to cancel the orders given to Admiral Dönitz. He had canceled U-boat orders before. Why should he not wait and examine later developments? A rational person might have chosen this course. Instead, though for what precise reason still remains unclear, perhaps to guarantee (if any treaty the Axis members ever signed was a guarantee) that Japan would not make a separate peace before victory had been won in Europe; perhaps for vengeance pure and simple against Roosevelt, his false neutrality, and his destroyers; perhaps because, in his view, war with the United States was inevitable anyway, so he might as well seize this moment as, if not ideal, acceptable; perhaps because he saw this action as necessary to get Japan totally committed against his key enemy, England; perhaps because he relished the prospect of huge U-boat successes against U.S. naval vessels and merchant shipping; or perhaps because he agreed with his foreign minister that “a great power does not allow itself to be declared war on, it declares war itself” 57—for whatever reason or reasons the Führer signed a revision of the Tripartite Pact that threw Germany into the war on Japan’s side and extracted a promise from the Japanese to stay the course. The date was 11 December. Hitler instructed Rib-bentrop to call in the American charge d’affaires, the ambassador having been recalled in 1938 as a protest against the anti-Jewish pogrom carried out that year. The meeting took place at 2:18 in the afternoon at the Foreign Ministry on the Wilhelmstrasse and lasted three minutes. A standing, unsmiling Ribbentrop announced that Germany regarded herself “as being at war with the United States of America as of today.”58 At the same hour the German charge in Washington delivered the identical message to the State Department. That night in Berlin the master of Europe went before the Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House and to a stamping, yelling house of deputies delivered a full-blown accusatory declaration. Here at long last the Führer vocalized his incriminating list of grievances: the “Neutrality Acts,” the destroyer deal, the shadowing of German ships, Lend-Lease, Greer, the “shoot on sight” order, Rainbow 5, and the undeclared war in general, to which he had long turned the other cheek, but no more! In the peroration of his harangue Hitler read out the terms of the new three-power agreement signed earlier that day.

  It would be argued later by historians that, next to Barbarossa, the 11 December declaration was Hitler’s greatest mistake.59 “Improvised and unnecessary,” it doomed his war.60 Der Würfel fiel. The die was cast. The Atlantic was now at formal issue between the two countries. And the single most destructive U-boat campaign in the war to date was about to begin.

  4

  A Fighting Machine

  23 December 1941, 1400 hours Central European Time (CET). Position: Bay of Biscay, thirty nautical miles west of Lorient, course 275. Oberleutnant (Ing.) Heinz Schulz, the LI, looked about the Zentrale, or control room, master of the narrow space he surveyed, ten paces fore and aft by five across the beam, divided in the center by the stout rotary hydraulic hoist well for the periscopes and by the thin ladder leading up to the conning tower and bridge. The nerve center of a U-boat when under water, the control room occupied the interior space of the pressure hull midship directly below the tower. At the moment U-123 was “on the march.” Through the tower hatch Schulz could see a chalky cloud cover and hear faintly the waves that slapped against the hull. From aft came the sturdy hammering of the dieseis as they drove the boat seaward. But any minute now, he knew from seeing the navigator’s dead reckoning pencil cross the forty-meter curve on the chart table behind him, either the Old Man or Hoffmann, the number one, would order a shallow dive to trim the boat. Be on the ready, he advised his machinist mates, who flexed and unflexed their wrists on the BBC hydroplane hand grips and valve wheels.

  Schulz bent and glanced forward through the hatch to the heavy green curtain that sealed the commander’s cubicle on the port side. No motion. The Old Man must be busy with his log. And no sign yet from Hoffmann on the bridge. But any moment now, mates, he said as he braced himself before the gray enameled panels, illuminated gauges, and black and red handwheels on the starboard wall. Other officers and petty officers might have their torpedoes bow and stern, their dieseis and E motors aft, their helm and periscope in the tower above, and others in the crew might share that special knowledge; but here in the control room Schulz alone was master. He alone had the knowledge. Even the Old Man conceded as much—Schulz had heard him say so—that he the commander did not know how every single gauge worked, or where every single pipe or cable led, or what every single valve controlled. But Schulz knew. He knew in excruciating detail. Before his mind the bowels of the boat spread out in perf
ect order and logical clarity. And everything required to dive and trim and surface the boat was within his reach: control buttons; large and small handwheels, facing and overhead; depth manometer; Papen-berg column; pressure gauges; trim scales; and indicators for a myriad of functions from fuel to ballast to air supply. And add to that voice pipes, loudspeakers, and telegraphs, that enabled Schulz to know, and often to orchestrate, what every other crewman on board was doing in a dive condition, planned or emergency.

  Suddenly the Old Man’s curtain stirred, then pulled to one side, and Reinhard Hardegen stepped briskly into Schulz’s domain. His Number 1 uniform now in the locker, Hardegen wore an open shirt, sweater, and trousers of unequal age and varying shades of blue and carried in his hand, as though not-quite-yet wanting to display the authority it represented, his Schirmmütze, or peaked officer’s cap, with the tropical white cover that only U-boat commanders wore—though no regulations specified or prohibited it—in order to distinguish themselves readily, particularly on a bridge at night. As he paused first to look at Kaeding’s chart on the table to port side and then at the Lotapparat, or fathometer, on the gray wall to starboard he unconsciously played his fingers across the cap’s leather peak; woven mohair band; the red, silver, and black national cockade; and the gilt eagle and swastika now green with verdigris.

  Abruptly he placed the cap on his head. “Chief,” he said, “I’m going to pull the plug. Let’s trim this boat.”