No less baffling was the fact that First Bomber Command of Brigadier General Arnold N. Krogstad did not concentrate its search aircraft on the fortieth parallel, along which the clear warnings specified the Germans were advancing and along which now the bomber crews had Norness’s sinking as direct confirmation. Even though the Army Air Force flew only in the daytime, its observations could keep a U-boat down and force it to slow its advance and consume its battery charge and air during the sunlit hours. Constant aerial reconnaissance over the harbor approaches in daylight would discourage a U-boat from presenting even the frothy feather wake of its periscope. This was the tactical doctrine that British Admiral Godfrey had impressed so strongly on U.S. Captain Kirk nine months before: constant observation and concentration of forces. Instead, Bomber Command dispersed its forces and in the face of the known German line of attack on the New York-Philadelphia sector fanned out its search planes in all directions from Oto 180 degrees. This misuse of aircraft, combined with Andrews’ failure to send so much as a subchaser to harry Rein-hard Hardegen on the 40 latitude corridor, constituted a failure of will and tactics almost as grave as the failure of Admiral Bristol’s twenty-one destroyers—of which more later.
Narrow, whale-shaped Long Island extends 105 miles eastward from New York’s Lower Bay. The waters off its southern shore present the mariner with some of the most difficult navigation on the U.S. East Coast. Off-lying banks and shoals, the broken bottom, strong and variable currents, frequency of fog, turbulence of wind and sea in thick weather, and the dense volume of waterborne traffic combine to make the approaches from Montauk Light to New York a formidable piloting challenge. Generally, there is a southwesterly set to the current, with the larger velocities found in the shoaler parts. In storms the sea breaks on spots with ten fathoms (8.9 meters, sixty feet) or less. Generally, vessels do not shoal the depth to less than fifteen fathoms, and at night they take soundings regularly in order to avoid the shore where numerous wrecks have attested the dangers of passing too close. On inbound approach a ship or boat follows a base course of 265 degrees for the sixty-eight miles between Montauk Point to Rockaway Beach and the entrance to Ambrose Channel, which was dredged to a depth of forty-five feet (13.6 meters) in the 1930s to accommodate the British Cunard liner Queen Mary. From the Ambrose Channel Lightship a vessel would follow the precise channel course through the shallow Lower Bay at 296°54’ true. Traffic outside the egress of the channel could be congested: On 10 January the British motor ship Continent, four hundred GRT, bound for Bermuda, sank after a collision five miles outside Ambrose with the tanker Byron D. Benson.12
Hardegen’s intention was to go no farther than the lightship. Inside the channel itself he could get trapped. Now, in the last dark hours of 14 January he pursued the approach. Lacking coastal charts but paralleling the lights on the Long Island shore—houses, streets, automobiles, it was impossible to know their source—he followed the general trend of the coastline at 247 degrees. In the predawn vapors, moving seaborne lights suddenly materialized to starboard. He slowed the engines to one-third and began an attack approach. Unfortunately, as he closed the target, a bright red morning sun rose behind him and silhouetted the U-boat tower to any alert lookout. He decided to stay on the surface a few minutes longer, which enabled him to distinguish two steamer lanterns and to obtain a good range and angle on the bow. At 1430 hours (0730 ET), he dived and continued the approach submerged at two-thirds speed on the amperes. The steamer’s course was 96 degrees, 123′s 0 degrees. A textbook approach, the target looming large and clear in the periscope, range closing six hundred meters … five hundred … four hundred. He could read the Plimsoll mark and now the name—Verdammt! It was neutral Spanish: Isla de Tenerife. Rafalski looked her up: 5,115 GRT. Too bad! There was a great letdown in the tower, then later elsewhere in the boat, when word of the abortive attack passed from mouth to mouth as far as the diesel machinists and maneuvering-room electricians in their permanently blind imprisonment. Hardegen decided to bottom out where he stood. It would be self-defeating to proceed farther on the brightening surface. He gave the order to flood. Eins Zwei Drei disengaged for the day. Thirty meters down the boat rocked noisily to rest on the uneven mud. Here they would stay until nightfall, hoping that no deep-draft ship would tear off their tower. The men could sleep, catch upon their tasks, or read the dog-eared magazines that passed from bunk to bunk. But first they would eat. Hannes was ready with the German version of lobscouse, the sailor’s hash. To the last of his fresh store of potatoes, which he boiled and mashed, he added cubes of corned beef, strips of cucumber pickled in spirit vinegar, and a little salt herring. He would have placed fried eggs on top but the eggs were long gone. The stewards passed through the hatches with their pails. The men ate quietly. The officers chatted about New York and the Americans. Between mouthfuls Barth listened to traffic moving overhead. Rafalski turned up the gain on his broadcast receiver and tried to make sense out of “The Goldbergs” on WOR and “Missus Goes A-Shopping” on WABC, electing finally to settle back with the Gramercy Chamber Trio on WNYC. When, at nightfall (2351 CET, 1651 ET) the boat surfaced, Rafalski’s antenna captured a shortwave broadcast from DNB, the German News Bureau in Berlin, which he handed to the Old Man on the bridge:
Buenos Aires. For the first time on Thursday the U.S. Navy made public an announcement concerning the torpedoing of a U.S. tanker off the coast of Long Island. A notification issued by the Navy station stated that the 9577 GRT tanker “Nor-ness” was torpedoed approximately 60 miles off Point Montauk on Long Island. According to reports from New York, the Commander of the Navy station in Newport, Rear Admiral Edward C. Kalbfus, declared that an enemy U-boat had attacked the tanker, which flew the colors of Panama. The torpedoes had exploded abaft. Two crew members had been killed, the other thirty-eight had been rescued.13
Hardegen read the account with satisfaction. Though his boat was not named, 123′s American exploits were becoming known to millions in the homeland. Now he peered intently ahead as the throaty rumble of his dieseis violated the clear night air and the U-boat’s bow thrust deeper toward the Lower Bay. Rafalski received another message, this one an encrypted Offizier signal from BdU addressed to 123: ACCORDING TO REPORT FROM B-DIENST ON 14 JANUARY 1530 HOURS AN UNKNOWN TANKER SUNK IN QU CA 3770. CREW IN LIFEBOATS. ONE MINESWEEPER, ONE PATROL BOAT, ONE DESTROYER, THREE AIRCRAFT SENT TO HELP. BDU OPS.14 When shown the signal Hardegen deduced that Norness’s emergency call on forty-one meters had not been received and that the tanker’s loss had only been discovered in the following daylight. He was correct. The first notification oí Norness’s loss reached ESF at 1800 (ET) on 14 January, 16′/2 hours after the sinking.15
At 0144 still another message came in, an intercept on the six-hundred-meter band: A British steamer named Dayrose near Cape Race, Newfoundland, was sending sss—ATTACKED BY SUBMARINE. This was the work of Knight’s Cross-holder Korvettenkapitän Erich Topp in U-552 (which had sunk Reuben James), one of the Group Ziethen boats farther north off the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. On 15 January at 0138 CET Topp sank the British merchantman at 46-38N, 52-52W. It took five torpedoes to do the job, not because 4,113-ton Dayrose was that formidable but because three successive torpedoes failed from eight hundred meters out. A fourth eel wounded her and a coup de grace buried her.16 A brief signal from Topp to BdU about the sinking—DAYROSE SUNK OFF CAPE RACE X MUCH HEAVY WEATHER X LOW TEMPERATURES X TODAY TEN BELOW17—constituted the first notice that Admiral Dönitz had received about any successes of the western boats, either of Paukenschlag or Ziethen, except for the B-Dienst intercept about the “unknown tanker sunk” in CA 3770. As for Paukenschlag, Dönitz wrote in his KTB for 14 January: “The result is not yet established. Conjectures are as follows: (a) It is not known if the boats have reached their positions off the coast of the U.S.A. It is possible that they will arrive later than the estimated time because of bad weather, (b) U-552 reports bad weather south of Newfoundland so that the boats must be having difficult
y taking position, to say nothing of making attacks.”18
Actually, Ernst Kals’s Paukenschlag boat U-130, one of the two north of the U.S. seaboard, had already on 13 January sunk the second and third victims of Drumbeat, after Hardegen’s Cyclops. If Kals advised BdU of his conquests there was no acknowledgment of the fact in the KTB’s of either BdU or Naval Staff in Berlin. Hardegen’s earlier sinking of Cyclops had not been signaled home, either. Kals’s first kill came shortly after midnight (CET) on 13 January not long after having been surprised by two 250-pound charges from a Sydney-based Canadian Bolingbroke 9063 aircraft. The Norwegian steamer Frisco hove into view northeast of Scatarie Island in Cabot Strait, and Kals took her down to a fiery death with one eel forward of the bridge and a coup de grace. In his Schussmeldung (shooting report) he claimed 6,000 GRT when in fact she ran 1582, as similarly he named her a tanker when she was a freighter.19 Later in the same day at 0948 (CET) Kals sighted the Panamanian freighter Friar Rock en route to Sydney. With a good track angle from ahead of the target he stopped the vessel’s way with a first launch, suffered torpedo failure with a second, and put her underwater with a third. In this case he claimed 7,000 GRT when the real figure was 5.427.20 Moving off from that triumph to a position in close proximity to Sydney itself, Kals and his men experienced unusually cold weather (minus 15 degrees Celsius) that coated their boat with ice and chilled the bones of the ill-prepared bridge watch. There they also found intense Canadian destroyer and air coverage. Another problem was the absence of detailed navigational information: As in 123 ‘s case, Flotilla had not been able on short notice to supply 130 with sailing directions or coast charts. On 17 January BdU signaled all the Paukenschlag boats that they were free to change attack areas at their discretion: IN CASE CONDITIONS UNFAVORABLE FOR ATTACK KALS CHANGE OPERATIONS TO AREA BETWEEN HARDEGEN AND ZAPP.21 Kais decided to do just that and made revolutions south.
The same problems afflicted “Ajax” Bleichrodt, whose V-109 would reach station southeast of Halifax on the sixteenth, when temperatures were minus ten degrees Celsius and navigation with inadequate charts and data was equally dangerous. Bleichrodt would not find a target to aim at until the nineteenth, when off Seal Island below the main body of Nova Scotia he encountered a dead-in-the-water freighter, 4,000-5,000 GRT he estimated, waiting in 55 meters depth to enter Yarmouth harbor. In a can’t-miss attack situation the Knight’s Cross ace expended five torpedoes without experiencing a single hit. The night sky was overcast with seas force 5-6, winds west southwest at force 6, visibility “hazy” but with a good view of the target. Bleichrodt led with a G7e from 800 meters at 0453 (CET). When that eel failed to explode he tried another from the same range, then a third from five hundred meters, and a fourth from fifteen hundred utilizing the UZO only, at a fixed angle, without the Vorhaltrechner. When that eel, too, miscarried he pointed the bow of the boat at the target from 500 meters and used the jumping wire (net guard) as a cross hair. When that torpedo also foundered Bleichrodt gave up in disgust and withdrew.22 He had wasted two hours and five eels. And his torpedo woes were not over. Two days later, off Shelburne, Nova Scotia (BB 7744), he would have yet another dud attacking a six-thousand GRT freighter from eight hundred meters.23 To Bleichrodt it must have seemed like the Norway debacle all over again.
During Germany’s invasion of Norway in spring 1940, forty-two U-boats engaged British and Norwegian warships and transports from the Skagerrak to Narvik. Because of torpedo malfunctions-including premature detonations, pistol misfires, and eels running too deep, thus passing beneath their targets to explode without effect on the other side—no fewer than thirty attacks failed. The reports of returning commanders were filled with frustration and anger. J-48, which had had 50 percent duds the previous October (the “torpedo crisis” had loomed as early as the second month of the war), launched a textbook salvo from close range against the British battleship War-spite with no result. Two days afterward the redoubtable Günther Prien in U-47 took aim at “a wall of ships,” launched four eels submerged, then another four surfaced, and had not a single Treffer, or hit, among them; as he pulled back, Warspite came into view and, as though to test the fates, Prien launched two torpedoes, one of which detonated prematurely and the other beyond range. Understandably, on his return to base, the Bull of Scapa Flow railed against the quality of his weapons. To Dönitz he complained that he was being asked “to fight with a wooden gun.” Other commanders made similar complaints, all of which Dönitz indignantly passed up to Admiral Raeder in Berlin, who to the U-boatmen’s bitter satisfaction convoked a court-martial of the vice admiral commanding and two subordinates of the Torpedo Test Establishment at Eckernförde. The subsequent six weeks-long investigation revealed a number of uncorrected deficiencies in the G7 types. The first of these was the tendency of the G7s to run deeper than they were set for. The variable, sometimes quite high, air pressure that developed in submerged U-boats was found to throw the sensitive depth mechanism out of calibration. Trials Command had not taken any special pains to correct this because the G7a was equipped with a magnetic as well as a contact pistol: When the magnetic pistol was elected (which could be done while the torpedo was in its tube) the weapon was intended to run beneath its target and to explode under the thin, and in warships unarmored, bottom, thus breaking the vessel’s back and causing rapid flooding. The magnetic proximity detonator was designed to be activated by the target ship’s magnetic field. It was a brilliant concept that theoretically made possible “down the throat” launches when the U-boat was presented with a zero angle on the bow. The problems with the magnetic exploder were many, however. For one thing all the testing on it had been done in German latitudes and low sea states unlike those frequently encountered on operational patrols. For another, the magnetic pistol tended to respond to the natural magnetism of the ocean floor; this was particularly true during the Norwegian Campaign, in which the U-boats operated above deposits of iron ore close to the North Pole. A third problem was the growing British practice of degaussing, an operation by which the permanent magnetism of steel ship hulls was neutralized. Following the court-martial analysis of these findings the magnetic pistol was abandoned and would not be reintroduced until 1944.
During the investigation, problems were also discovered with the contact pistol, which seemed to work well against a sheer surface like the flat side of a hull, but, as the TVA had not tested for, it failed to impact against a curved surface such as the rounded underside of a hull.24 In its study of this failure, which Dönitz styled “criminal,” BdU tested its contact pistols against a simpler and more effective design copied from a British twenty-one-inch (530-mm.) Whitehead-ty pe torpedo from the captured minelaying submarine HMS Seal. The court-martial found the TVA officers guilty of negligence and sentenced them to six months’ imprisonment, after which they were allowed to return to armament duties. Dönitz meanwhile made personal visits to as many U-boat crews as he could in order to restore morale and confidence. (When the U.S. Navy submarine fleet entered the war it would experience all the same problems with its Mark XIV torpedo, which tended to run eleven feet [3.3 meters] too deep, and with its Mark VI magnetic exploder which failed to detonate on so many attacks that, as their Pearl Harbor commander wrote, “Submarine captains returned from patrol ready to turn in their suits.”25 Rather than discard the exploder as the Germans had done, however, the USN clung to it “like grim death to a dead cat” for many months.26 Only the Japanese torpedo worked consistently well during World War II.) None of this history was of any help now to “Ajax” Bleichrodt as, unaccountably, his new and improved eels and pistols failed one after the other. Aware of continued failures in the Atlantic and elsewhere BdU sent an advisory to all boats: “When fitting the pistol it is important to be careful that the pistol is not pressed in. The pistol is properly set when the hairlines on the pistol and the nose [Greifnase] match in line.”27 The advisory must have been read by Kptlt. Gerhard Bigalk, whose VIIC U-75/ would arrive off Newfoundland at the end
of the month and also experience six torpedo failures. Reinhard Har-degen was lucky: As of 14 January he had had only two duds, both against Norness.
At 0309 15 January (CET) Hardegen sighted a bright light ahead. Was it a lightship? It could not be Ambrose, which was still some miles away. According to the tourist guide they were off Long Beach, approximately. Hardegen moved toward the light, whatever it was. “Starboard ten.” From below a call came from Kaeding, who was reading the fathometer: “20 meters under the keel!” Then: “fifteen meters … ten meters!” Hardegen, who should have been grateful for the warning, yelled down the tube: “Which idiot is depth-sounding? They can hear us on land!” He also worried that the roar from the diesel exhausts and the odor of their fumes might betray the boat’s presence to a knowledgeable person on shore. What he failed to understand was just how close he was coming to that shore itself. “That’s a lightship, not Ambrose, but a lightship ahead,” he replied to a worried Kaeding.
“That’s not a lightship, Herr Kaleu,” Kaeding responded.
“Better get up here!” Hardegen ordered.
Kaeding, who had been wearing red goggles in anticipation of this order, bounded up the ladder. “Herr Kaleu,” he said when he reached the bridge, “the DR line shows we’re headed toward the beach. That’s a light on land. We’re going to ground on the beach!” Hardegen could not believe it and maintained his heading for five more minutes until, just ahead of him, he saw the white foam of breaking combers.
“Both back emergency full!”
Kaeding breathed a gasp of relief. They had almost beached. As the boat’s way shuddered to a stop, he himself quivered from delayed fear as he stared at what appeared to be a hotel, shore lights, and sand dunes backed by low, dark woods. “You just imagine to yourself, America—and there it is.”28 He sank against the periscope housing.
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