Operation Drumbeat
Page 39
A preliminary response came in during the early morning hours of 28 January directing 123 to steer for CD 3800: FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FOLLOW. Although Hardegen would have no way of knowing it, Spreewald, a 5,083 GRT cargo-passenger motor ship of the Hamburg-American Line, was one of a sizable number of German merchant vessels that had been caught unawares in distant waters when war broke out in 1939. Most steamed to neutral countries, where they were interned. Spreewald, which was off the U.S. West Coast at the time, proceeded to Japan and thence to Manchuria, where she remained for two years. In December 1941 she was pressed into service as a “rubber transport.” Her holds were filled with desperately needed raw rubber from French Indochina, also with tin, tungsten, and quinine; and the German naval attache in Tokyo arranged to have her passenger space occupied by British merchant seamen-prisoners whose ships had been intercepted in Asian waters by the German auxiliary cruiser (Raider G) Kormoran. Several aliases and disguises were provided the ship, including the names Elg and Brittany (British). She sailed in mid-December and followed an independent course along the loneliest routes that Naval Staff in Berlin could devise. (Her chances of proceeding undetected were good: Between April 1941 and May 1942 twelve of sixteen blockade runners from the Far East arrived safely in French ports, including the Italian Cortelazzo, which made Bordeaux on the same day that 123 sunk Pan Norway with 5,238 tons of cargo, including rubber, peanuts, edible oils, fats, tea, hemp, and sisal.)
Late on the twenty-eighth (CET) Hardegen received a lengthy signal addressed to both him and Heydemann. In it he learned that Spreewald did indeed have a physician on board and that he had been advised of 123′s medical needs. The signal went on to inform the two commanders that Spreewald was adjusting her speed down from 9.8 knots in order to make point Sperber no earlier than on the morning of the thirtieth, for rendezvous on that date or on the thirty-first. It was not expected, since the position selected was in the British-U.S. “air gap,” that three vessels meeting together posed a special danger. However, if the ship and U-boats failed to meet as planned, Spreewald was to continue on her assigned course forthwith, without waiting, without searching, and without transmitting. As for Hardegen, he was not to tarry at the position any longer than 1 February. When two hundred nautical miles distant from Spreewald, taking into account the vessel’s direction of advance and speed, he was to report results of the encounter to BdU.19
At 1131 (CET) on 30 January, 123 reached the assigned point and reduced speed to steerageway. U-575 was not observed, nor was Spreewald. Hardegen waited. And waited. Almost exactly twenty-four hours later he wrote laconically in the war diary:” ‘U-Heydemann’ in sight. I approach and heave to alongside. We exchange information and ideas. He has been here for three days. Last night at 2330 he saw a wake and heard engine noises. Since I lay to at the time with engines down it could not have been I. He suspects an enemy submarine. We line up and wait for Spreewald. At 1900 an F.T. arrives announcing that Spreewald was torpedoed today in BE 7142. We take a heading to that position to hunt for survivors.”20
This stunning news left the Old Man and his officers wondering what in the world had gone wrong? Spreewald was sunk two whole marine squares away to the east-northeast! How had she ended up there? Hardegen reckoned that he could not reach that position before dawn on 4 February. And who had sunk her? A vexed BdU wanted to know the same. Rafalski handed the Old Man a signal from Lorient: REPORT AT ONCE WHO TORPEDOED A SHIP IN BE7140 AND GIVE DETAILS.21 By perverse coincidence Kptlt. Peter Cremer, commander of V-333, was at that very moment originating a proud transmission to BdU: IN BE71 14 JUST SANK A COMBINED PASSENGER AND FREIGHT STEAMER 8000 GRT WITH MY LAST STEAM TORPEDOES. TWO HITS AT 350 METERS. PROBABLY LOADED WITH AMMUNITION SINCE A BIG EXPLOSION AFTER SECOND HIT. APPEARANCE DARK GREY HULL WHITE SUPERSTRUCTURE ONE STACK TWO SLIM MASTS WITHOUT CROSS TREES. FIVE BIG HATCHES TWO BIG POLE MASTS IN FRONT OF BRIDGE. ROUND DECK. NO FLAG NO NEUTRALITY MARK. ONE CANNON ON STERN. ZIGZAGGING ON COURSE 060.22
When Cremer’s signal arrived at Kernével, Admiral Dönitz was not impressed. Naval Staff in Berlin were furious: A tart entry in their war diary for that day read: “This loss was extremely painful and was caused by an unforgivable error, which should not have happened under any circumstances. The lost cargo of 3,365 tons of rubber and 250 tons of tin is irreplaceable, and of great consequence given the dire raw materials situation.”23 The British, too, learned of the sinking, not only from Bletchley Park’s decrypt of Cremer’s success report, but also from reception in the clear of Spreewald’s distress signal on the six hundred-meter wavelength: receivers at Land’s End were surprised to hear an unknown “British” ship named Brittany transmitting “SOS … sunk by submarine … position 45N 25W.” At sea not only V-123 and U-575 went to the scene but Lorient vectored seven other nearby boats, including Cremer’s, to search the area for survivors. Dönitz, however, specified: “Shipwrecked personnel and those in lifeboats are not to be told that a German U-boat was responsible for the sinking.”24 U-/05 found twenty-four German merchant seamen and fifty-eight British prisoners aboard three lifeboats and three rafts on 1 February. U-/23 was hampered in making the search area in time to help by her low fuel state and need to proceed no faster than seven knots economy cruise if she did not want to be towed into Lorient; and Hardegen was not about to have that kind of humiliation compromise his triumphant return to base. Subsequently he learned that most of the Spreewald crew and passengers had been rescued.25 On 3 February he could record: “Tollescondition slightly improved.” Four days later he heard on a radio broadcast that the Pan Norway survivors had been landed at Lisbon.
As for the unfortunate Cremer, when he returned to the U-boat base of La Pallice near La Rochelle on the French coast at the end of a forty-five-day patrol, he was not met with any of the usual bands, flowers, girls, or other homecoming trappings that a boat on an extended Feindfahrt had a right to expect. Instead, filthy and unshaved, KTB and wireless log in hand, he was whisked away by an official car on the long drive to Kernével, where Dönitz’s duty officer informed him that a court-martial was there assembled to try him on the charge of “disobedience in action, manslaughter, and damage to military prop-erty.” Before the court Cremer successfully argued that it was Spreewald’s fault she was sunk, not his. Before his departure on patrol he was told that he should exercise care in approaching vessels within certain naval Squares, since those were Squares used by transiting Germán blockade-runners. Square BE, however, was not among the Squares thus proscribed. Furthermore, the vessel conformed exactly to a British type, so much so that she even used an English ship name and the English language in sending a distress signal. Finally, he argued, he had learned through wireless intercepts that Spreewald was under Orders to have been in Square CD on the date she was sunk, not hundreds of miles removed in BE, So the fault lay with the blockade-runner, not with U-333. When Kptlt. Günter Hessler, Dönitz’s son-in-law, supported Cremer’s line of argument, the court voted acquittal. No explanation for Spreewald’s alteration of course and failure to rendezvous with U-123 and U-575 in Square CD has appeared.26 Cremer went on to conduct successful Operations off the Florida coast in May 1942, eventually won a Knight’s Cross, and served as Commander of Dönitz’s bodyguard battalion when the latter became head of the Germán Reich following Adolf Hitler’s suicide in 1945.
The same night (6-7 February) that “Ajax” Bleichrodt took on fuel from Kais (U-130), he scored with one hit and two misses on the 3,531-GRT Panamanian steamer Halcyon. With that action, the last torpedo launchings by the combined force of U-123, 66, 125, 109, and 130, Operation Paukenschlag came to an end. As the boats steamed home their crewmen sewed and labeled success pennants to fly from the attack periscopes when they reentered their base. Eins Zwei Drei’s crew labeled ten pennants for a total claim of 66,135 GRT. The actual number of ships put in the locker was nine, if one accepts the two “mystery” ships; Malay was damaged not sunk. The actual estimated tonnage, using the San José and Brazos numbe
rs for the two “mystery” ships, and excluding Malay, was plus or minus 53,173. U-130 (Kals) was the second most successful boat with six sinkings and 43,583 GRT claimed; the actual numbers were six and 36,993. U-66 (Zapp) sewed pennants for five ships sunk and 50,000 GRT; the actual numbers were five and 33,456.11-/09 (Bleichrodt) claimed four ships (excluding the 6,082 GRT Empire Kingfisher, which Dr. Rohwer gives him) and 29,330 GRT; the actual numbers appear to be four and 27,651 GRT. U-/25 (Folkers) returned with only one pennant, claimed tonnage 7,000, actual 5,666; 125 also had one ship damaged.
Altogether the Drumbeat boats accounted for twenty-five ships sunk for a total actual tonnage of (probably) 156,939. Lower by one ship and 30,902 GRT than the numbers claimed, the actual figures are not only respectable—they compare favorably, for example, with the 152,000 GRT sunk by eight boats in the famous “Night of the Long Knives” in October 1940—they fully justified the characterization later made by U-boatmen of the Drumbeat operation and the American campaign launched by it as “the Second Happy Time” and “the Great American Turkey Shoot.” More than that, they established for the time being German naval supremacy over the United States Navy in that force’s home waters. The Ubootwaffe had tweaked the USN’s nose, had dared it to come out and fight, which it did not, and had destroyed masses of vital Allied war materiel often within sight of U.S. coastal cities and shoreward towns. This first strike, the beginning of America’s Atlantic Pearl Harbor, had exceeded even Dönitz’s expectations. Add to that the concurrent successes of the twelve Group Ziethen VIIC boats in Newfoundland-Canadian waters, and it was clear to Dönitz, Godt, and their BdU staff that Kernével could sustain a mass destruction network three thousand and more miles from the French bases—a network that, given enough U-boats, could conceivably take Great Britain out of the war.27
As German domestic broadcasts touted the distant successes, particularly the “spectacular sinkings off the coast of the United States,” “elation” and “great joy and surprise” over American “loss of prestige” swept the German nation, which, after the recent Wehrmacht reverses before Moscow, badly needed some good news. Buoyed by the reports, Hitler celebrated the ninth anniversary of his rule by scornfully dismissing Roosevelt as “a poor idiot.”28 Not surprisingly, the perfectionist Karl Dönitz found cause to complain and lament: “It is perfectly clear that ‘Drumbeat’ could have achieved far greater success had it been possible to make available the twelve boats for which U-boat Command asked, instead of the [five] by which the operation was carried out. Good use, it is true, was made of this unique opportunity, and the successes achieved have been very gratifying; we were, however, not able to develop to the full the chances offered us.”29
In London at month’s end Patrick Beesly was still stunned by the U.S. Navy’s abject failure to meet and repel the German invaders. “It seems inconceivable now,” he would write later, “that the Americans could have been so completely and totally unprepared as was in fact the case.” He was confident that the Navy knew precisely, day by day, that the Paukenschlag fleet was headed their way; and USN documents, declassified in 1987, fully support that confidence. “It was all the more galling,” he wrote, “because this holocaust could have been largely avoided if only the U.S. Navy had been prepared to learn from the bitter experience of the British and Canadians, gained in nearly two and a half years of war and freely and fully imparted to them since 1940. The Navy Department, however, preferred to make its own mistakes and learn in its own fashion. There seemed to be a feeling that ‘we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too, and we don’t need a bunch of Limeys to teach us how to run our war.’ “30 For his part Rodger Winn recorded the dimensions of the mounting danger in his weekly “U-Boat Situation”: “The number of U-boats in the Atlantic has now reached the record total of 53…. It is apparently intended that the far western campaign should be extended. … inspired by the not inconsiderable successes achieved notably off Cape Hatteras and Hampton Roads…. The brunt of the attack has continued to be borne by shipping off the Atlantic seaboard of U.S.A. between North Carolina and New York…. The tonnage lost in January will be found to amount to an ugly figure.”31
When presented with that “ugly figure,” as best Winn and Beesly could compute it, Prime Minister Winston Churchill transmitted an urgent cable to White House aide and Roosevelt confidant Harry L. Hopkins. Sent while 123 was still on slow cruise home, the message read: “It would be well to make sure that the President’s attention has been drawn to the very heavy sinkings by U-boats in the Western North Atlantic. Since January 12, confirmed losses are 158,208, and probable losses 83.740.”32 Churchill did not make a point of the fact that eleven of the ships lost to Paukenschlag and Ziethen were British and that two were Canadian, or that the loss of bottoms was more grievous than the loss of cargoes. FDR replied the next day: “Harry gave me your message about sinkings in the Western Atlantic. This matter is being given urgent consideration by Stark King and me.”33
The procedures for returning to base at Lorient were precisely set forth in the Operation Order. Thirty-six hours out 123 sent an Epsilon (inbound) short signal giving her location. After receiving a FT. acknowledgment and further instructions from BdU she proceeded along the approach corridor marked Tannennadel— “pine needle”—though, owing to DR errors and trouble with direction-bearing equipment, she was not, as Hardegen learned later, on course. This fact, together with the need to proceed at a creeping speed in order to conserve their rapidly dwindling fuel, caused the boat to arrive three hours late at Point L2 (47-38.15N, 03-34.3W) where a Räumboot escort was awaiting her. The rendezvous with escort and final approach were timed so that a returning boat would arrive inside La Rade de Lorient during the period two hours before to two hours after high tide. With the three-hour delay, 123 had to join her escort in a high-speed approach in order not to miss the high water—and the official reception that awaited her—which placed an unexpected burden on the fuel supply. The Old Man became concerned that 123 might have to be towed into port after all. He need not have worried. Eins Zwei Drei persevered.
During the final days of the return voyage the crew had completed the success pennants and run them up the periscope standard. In addition, at the Old Man’s suggestion, they had painted appropriate emblems and numbers on the conning tower: on the sides two representations of the Knight’s Cross, one for Möhle who earlier had won his on this boat, the second for the Old Man; a large kettledrum with a stick; and the total tonnage claim of both commanders: 224,865. For old times’ sake they had mounted atop the fairwater the fins of a shark that the men had caught off Freetown the year before. Now, as the cranes over Keroman materialized in the eastern haze, Hardegen donned his blue uniform and ordered the petty officers to form up the crew on the deck at parade rest. Soon Hardegen could make out the ocher battlements of the venerable Fort Saint Louis and the harbor itself, with red-sailed fishing boats working the outrunning tide, and a half hour afterward he was passing to his port the admiral’s headquarters chateau at Kernével and the cavernous, dark bunker openings of Keroman II. Slowing down to harbor speed, and leaving behind the escort whose crew stood at the rails waving and cheering this first of the Paukenschlag boats to return, Hardegen conned 123 up the Scorff River to old ¡sere. As the pontoon boat came into view the bridge could clearly hear the welcoming martial strains of the Eng-landlied. A huge crowd of U-boatmen and base and dockyard workers had assembled, overflowing ¡sere’s deck to cover most of the quay to either side. Hardegen had stood at dockside himself witnessing the arrival of new Knight’s Cross winners. Now he maintained the conn and brought the boat in himself. If this was to be the end of his last patrol in U-boats he was determined to relish command to the very last. Deliberately, then, he averted his gaze from the ramrod figure of the admiral, who stood in the foremost position before the banks of naval officers on Isere and kept to the business of bringing 123′s manila lines into position to throw. When the engines were shut down
and the brow was put across, Hardegen and his officers descended the outside ladder and walked to the foot of the brow where they came to rigid attention, faced the Lion, and saluted smartly: “Heil, Herr Admiral! I respectfully report Eins Zwei Drei back from action against the enemy!” Dönitz responded, “Heil, Eins Zwei Drei,” and came across the brow to shake Hardegen’s hand and place around his neck an authentic Ritterkreuz, making him forty-fifth wearer of the award in the Kriegsmarine. Hardegen would write later: “It was a proud and unforgettable moment.”34 The Lion spoke privately with him a few moments, shook the hands of the other officers, and then informally walked the pallid, haggard, filthy ranks assembled on the scarred aft deck, speaking at least a word to each man and tousling the long hair of one. Then he led the happy, bearded U-boat officers across to Isere. The ratings followed and fell in smartly on the quay. Meanwhile, base medical corpsmen gently lifted Tolle through the forward hatch, placed him on a stretcher, and carried him to a waiting ambulance.
The newsreels taken that day show 123′s officers surrounded by women base workers in bright white aprons thrusting huge bouquets of flowers into their hands and placing a boutonniere in Hardegen’s left lapel, then Hardegen in uniform and tall sea boots reviewing his crew with a wide, proud smile. In the background a military band energetically clashed and boomed, but it was not from the Paten-bataillon; that unit had been sent to the Eastern Front while 123 was at sea. When the ceremonies ended and the cheering ceased and the band packed up their instruments, the officers and ratings were led into the Flotilla canteen, where both groups enjoyed their first mail and Beck’s in forty-eight days. Hoffmann asked Hardegen if he wished to share what the Lion had said to him after presenting the Knight’s Cross. Hardegen looked around and said quietly: “He told me not to lose my mental edge. That he needed me for one more patrol. That we would have a fast maintenance turnaround. And that he would tell more when he went over my KTB.” The officers smiled. “Back to America!” whispered Schulz. “I would think so,” said Hardegen. They raised their steins. “Back to America!”