The next day awards were distributed to members of the crew, whose freshly washed and shaved appearance and clean uniforms made them barely recognizable to Hardegen. This day they wore their navy blue melton wool trousers and pullover tops. Behind their necks fell large blue collars edged with three white bands and a black silk. On the right breast they displayed the eagle and swastika national emblem in yellow cotton embroidery and on their left sleeves the rank and trade badges. A navy wool peakless cap with Kriegsmarine inscribed across the front of the tally ribbon completed their uniforms. After the ceren’.ony the men swaggered off, bedecked with red-white-black Iron Cross ribbons, to spend their accumulated francs, some to “live like a god in France” in the cafes and houses of the city or in the newly built Ubootsweiden, U-boat “pastures,” rest centers, in the countryside. Other crewmen, with leave papers, took fast trips home on the BdU Zug (headquarters train) that ran through Le Mans, Paris, and Rotterdam, where the men could find winter flowers in the station to bring home, to the German cities Bremen, Hamburg, and Flensburg. Civilian trains took them where they wanted from those stops, and most were home within two days of setting out.
Back in Lorient, Hardegen and Rafalski finished typing the final copy of the KTB. Underneath the last date, 9 February, Hardegen wrote: “Total distance: 8,277 nautical miles. Total submerged: 256.” Schulz completed his own logs, and whistled pointedly when he showed the numbers to Hardegen: “Fuel remaining: 80 liters [21 gallons].”
The Lion questioned Hardegen closely the next day at the formal debriefing, and Kapitän Godt took copious notes. After Hardegen was dismissed, the admiral appended a last sheet to the KTB that read: “A very well-planned and executed operation with excellent success. The Commander has superbly exploited our first appearance off the North American coast with his pluck and his toughness. Dönitz.”
11
Last Patrol
The weather on Thursday morning, 19 February, in Washington, D.C., was overcast, gusty, with temperatures in the low forties, as Admiral Harold S. Stark, in mufti, drove his personal car downtown to the Riggs National Bank. On the passenger seat beside him, in a nondescript black briefcase with straps and buckles, was $500,000 in high-denomination currency. There was much to think about as Stark wove through the crowded streets, including an editorial in that morning’s Washington Post warning that gasoline rationing was imminent, since “submarine warfare along our coasts” had made “alarming inroads” on eastern petroleum stocks. “The threat to our water-borne transportation of petroleum,” the paper had concluded, “is painfully immediate.”1 At Riggs the short, silver-haired, cherubic man who presented his briefcase to a bank officer was unlikely to be recognized as a chief of Naval Operations in his or any other Navy. With the not-inconsiderable deposit Stark opened a joint account in the names of F. J. Home and/or W. S. Färber with the understanding that he, Mr. Stark, might at times transfer funds from the account to other names, as indeed he now did, requesting that half the deposit be credited to three different companies:
Atik Shipping Company, E. T. Joyce
Treasurer-$100,000
Asterion Shipping Company, K. M. Beyer
Treasurer-$100,000
Eagle Fishing Company, L. F. Rogers
Master-$50,000
Stark then drove home, changed into his uniform, and took his sailor-chauffeured staff car to Main Navy. Everything was now in place for Project LQ to proceed on schedule. The project had not been the Navy’s idea, as officers were quick to point out then and later. It had been the President’s idea. But when Franklin Roosevelt gave orders, and when he sent his Naval Aide, Captain McCrea, with the cash to back the orders, the Navy had little choice but to follow through.
What did Admirals King and Stark think about Queen Ships? FDR had asked them one day, the same 19 January when V-J23 was rampaging off Cape Hatteras. Not much, the admirals confessed. Queen, or Q, ships were U-boat traps that had been employed with spectacular success by the British in World War I, but eight advanced versions commissioned by the Royal Navy in 1939 and 1940 had had no success, and two had been sunk. The principle was well known, especially to the Germans, and that was the problem. A Q ship was a freighter or tanker converted in everything but appearance to naval use. Behind collapsible false structures and tarpaulins, it hid a bristling array of heavy and light guns. The Q ship’s strategy was to deliberately lure a U-boat into making a close-in torpedo attack. To prevent the decoy ship’s sinking from the invited torpedo explosion, its holds were filled with a buoyant cargo such as pulpwood or empty drums. When the explosion settled, half the crew, forming a “panic party,” would go into lifeboats. The ruse was designed to bring the attacking U-boat to the surface in order to finish off the still-floating target with artillery. At that point the other half of the crew, standing by hidden guns, threw down the hinged bulwarks and exposed the U-boat to withering fire from four-inch barrels and machine guns.2 It was still a brilliant concept, thought FDR, and since the Navy did not seem to have anything else to throw at the U-boats he suggested that it throw Q ships. McCrea would supply the money- The project was to be shrouded in the deepest secrecy. There were to be no formal requisitions and no accounting of funds. Any absolutely necessary written records of the shipyard conversions or of the missions undertaken were to be kept in a secret safe in the CNO’s office. Every other communication was to be made by word of mouth.
The next day Admiral King sent a coded dispatch to Admiral Adolphus Andrews at Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters on Church Street in New York City: “Immediate consideration is requested as to the manning and fitting-out of Queen repeat Queen ships to be operated as an anti-submarine measure. This has been passed by hand to OpNav for action.”3 Andrews could hardly have missed the hand as being that of his old patron Roosevelt, and he loyally threw himself into the work-up of a plan. It took him, however, nine days to respond with a four-page analysis in which he argued that Q ships should succeed since the U-boats’ “most prevalent method has been a night attack on the surface from close range.” Thus, there was no need to entice a U-boat to surface: the enemy was already exposed. The best decoy, Andrews thought, was a tanker, since the enemy so far had concentrated on that type of vessel. To be consistent with its character, such a tanker should travel north in a deep condition, south in a light. Empty oil drums would make the best flotation cargo, he thought, and there should be three well-separated guns on each broadside and one astern so that a single torpedo could not knock out all that could be brought to bear on a side. The entire crew and officers should be hand picked and should wear merchant-style clothing. If those conditions were followed the plan had “a reasonable chance of success.”4 Not aware, apparently, of either the urgency or the highly secret character of the enterprise Andrews sent his report in plain language by mail.
At the Department of the Navy, Operations could not wait on Andrews, and a decision was made to invest in two old coastwise cargo vessels of the three-island type (raised forecastle, midship structure, and an enclosed superstructure at the stern) and in one Boston diesel trawler. Participating in the decision were King, Stark, and the two men for whom bank accounts had been opened, Vice Admiral Frederick J. Home, vice chief of Naval Operations, and Home’s assistant, RearAdmiral WilliamS. Färber. A staff officer, Commander Thomas J. Ryan, Jr., was directed to obtain the vessels and to supervise their conversion. On 27 January, armed with a memorandum from Stark granting him extraordinary authority, Ryan arranged for the U.S. Maritime Commission to acquire on bareboat charter two steamers, sister ships SS Carolyn and SS Evelyn, from the A.H. Bull Steamship Company in New York City. Each was thirty years old, 3,209 GRT, 318 feet in length, with a 46-foot beam. From a fishing fleet in Boston Ryan obtained the 133-foot beam trawler MS Wave. All three ships thereupon were delivered to the Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Navy Yard for conversion to AK (cargo ship) status. The two cargo vessels underwent extensive overhaul, the Evelyn having to be substantially rebuilt. Their holds were
filled with pulpwood for flotation, since steel drums were all but unobtainable. The pulpwood caused some worry since, if left dry, it could become explosive, and if kept too damp its rot might lead to fire. The old Scotch boilers delivered a maximum speed of 7.5 knots. On the deck behind false works the Navy installed on each of the two larger ships four four-inch, 50-caliber guns, four 50-caliber machine guns, six “K” guns—depth-charge throwers—and numerous small arms and grenades. The trawler received slightly less armament. All three vessels were equipped with extra Abandon Ship equipment and with the latest electronic and communications gear, although antennae had to be disguised, with the result that the transmitter range was limited even in favorable conditions.5
The work of conversion proceeded at the fastest possible pace, making maximum use of shifts, overtime, Sundays, and holidays. When certified seaworthy, equipped, and fully armed, the three ships were transferred to Admiral Andrews’ command. His new chief of staff, Captain Thomas R. Kurtz, USN (Ret.), consulted with Commander Ryan in the development of an Operation Plan. Meanwhile, on 5 March, the ships were formally commissioned into the U.S. Navy, Carolyn becoming USS Atik (AK101), Evelyn becoming USS Asterion (AK 100), and Wave becoming USS Eagle (AK132), thus accounting for the names of the dummy companies on the books at Riggs National Bank, used to mask the arming of the vessels. None of the commission-ings, however, was made a matter of record in the Department of the Navy.6 Atik and Asterion each received a complement of six officers and 135 enlisted men. Eagle had proportionately fewer. Originally only the commanding officers, who volunteered for the hazardous Q-ship duty, knew the nature of their missions: Lieut. Comdr. Harry L. Hicks, USN, of Atik, Lieut. Comdr. Glenn W. Legwen, USN, of Asterion, and Lieut. Comdr. L. F. Rogers, USNR, oí Eagle. Before shakedown all other officers and ranks were informed of the Q-ships’ hazardous assignments. The news could not have come as too great a surprise to the ships’ companies since numerous civilian yard workers were familiar with the conversions and, as the wife of one Atik officer reported, the ships’ purpose was the subject of common talk in several Portsmouth boardinghouses.7 Every man other than the three commanding officers was given an opportunity to decline service without prejudice to his career. None did so. It is not recorded, however, whether the crews of Atik and Asterion were told that neither ship was expected to survive at sea longer than one month after commencement of assigned duty.8
On 11 March at Admiral Andrews’ headquarters the Atik and Astcnon skippers received their orders for sailing on shakedown. Until departing Portsmouth no sign was to be given that the ships were anything other than armed vessels regularly commissioned in the Navy. Once having cleared port and beyond shore observation, their crev/Ä were to erect the false bulwarks and other concealments, remove the identification numbers from the bows, break out false merchant warrants, and take down the U.S. flags and commissioning pennants. If challenged on their course by friendly ships or aircraft they were to respond with their original commercial names, SS Carolyn or SS Evelyn. If challenged by the enemy Atik was to respond: “SS Vill Franca, Portuguese registry, call CSBT.” Asterion was to respond: “SS Generalife, Spanish registry, call EAOQ.” In the shakedown orders care had been taken to direct both ships along routes known not to have been frequented by U-boats. Commander Ryan remembered: “My memory is very clear on the fact that there was great pressure on all concerned from the highest authority [Roosevelt] to get these ships to sea on everybody from the CNO down to Ryan including the various Flag officers in between. We did not, any of us, feel that the ships were in top fighting trim when they sailed and … we hoped their sailing orders for about the first two weeks would take them clear of any enemy subs.”9 Accordingly, Atik was assigned a cruise area some 300 nautical miles east of Norfolk, Virginia and Asterion 240 miles to the south of her. The two expendables sailed at 1300 hours on 23 March. The next day an unnamed officer on Stark’s staff wrote, “It’s gone with the wind now and hoping for a windfall.”10 If he was thinking of Atik alone it was a false hope, though no one could have known that from Roosevelt down to Ryan. On 1 February the Kriegsmarine had introduced a fourth rotor to the Schlüssel M machine. Bletchley Park worked mightily to defeat it but the new TRITON code (called “Shark” at BP) proved impermeable, and it would remain so for ten long months. Rodger Winn’s OIC Tracking Room suddenly went semi-blind.11 So, too, therefore did Washington. No one in the U.S. capital could have known in the last week of March that east of Norfolk was the least safe place to be in the entire Western Atlantic. It had been chosen by BdU as the route for the return of Reinhard Hardegen.
By the beginning of March, when U-123 had been refitted, reprovi-sioned, and rearmed for her next Feindfahrt, Admiral Dönitz had a fairly accurate picture of conditions on the U.S. East Coast. The data had come from the five Paukenschlag commanders and by wireless from the replacement boats that were on station during February from the Gulf of Maine to Florida (U-/0J, 106, 107, 108, 128, 432, 504, 564, 578, 653). Amazingly, four of those boats (U-432, 564, 578, 653) were Type VIIC, which had not previously been thought capable of such extended missions. But their commanders, eager to participate in the “second happy time,” had persuaded Dönitz that by filling various auxiliary tanks with fuel and by cruising at seven knots on one diesel they could make the distant coast, maneuver, and return. Most succeeded in reaching the United States with twenty tons of fuel for use in operations, thereby far exceeding the Type’s theoretical radius of action. Dönitz did worry, however, about the enthusiasm of some crews, which gave up some of their drinking-water tanks to the dieseis’ thirst. The first four VIICs sank five ships. BdU also had good information by this date about defensive measures in waters farther to the south, where the U.S. Navy protected a Caribbean Sea Frontier so extensive it had to be divided into East and West divisions. Rear Admiral John H. Hoover commanded the CSF from headquarters in San Juan, Puerto Rico. During February BdU had five IXC boats (U-67, 129, 156, 161, 502) in the vicinity of the oil- and gas-rich Dutch islands of Curasao and Aruba or off the harbors of Port of Spain, Trinidad, where the bauxite trade and other South American shipping passed. During February in the waters guarded by the two frontiers, Eastern Sea and Caribbean, U-boats sank a total of forty-eight vessels, nearly half of them tankers, amounting to 281,661 CRT, 68 percent in the ESF. In addition, seven ships were damaged.12 U-156 (Kptlt. Werner Hartenstein) shelled the Lago Refinery on Aruba, but without serious effect.
From all reports received at Kernével by the close of February it was clear that the U.S. Navy had tightened up shoreline and island defenses. Destroyers no longer sailed on patrol schedules so regular that U-boats could predict and discount them. Small patrol craft were more visible. Air activity was up all along the U.S. littoral, and blimps could be observed at numerous high-traffic points. In all other respects the Americans were continuing to act as though there was no war: The beaches and towns were still a blaze of lights; lighthouses and buoys still operated as in peacetime, though some were dimmed; shipping moved singly instead of in escorted convoys; traffic traveled straight ahead from point to point rather than follow zigzag courses on sheltered sea-lanes; merchantmen used their wireless without discipline, particularly on the six-hundred-meter distress wavelength; many proceeded with lanterns lit; and U.S. Navy and Army antisubmarine air forces, through inexperience and poor training, still failed to follow up initial attacks, with the result that in shoal water, where they stood a good chance of succeeding, they abandoned their attacks too early and withdrew. By contrast, the Canadians to the north had learned from the British example and never let up on the pressure. Kais in U-/30 had been so bedeviled by constant air and destroyer surveillance in Cabot Strait—surveillance as intense as any that he had experienced in the English Channel—that he moved south into U.S. waters.13 Bleichrodt, too, off Halifax, had been frustrated by the same relentless coverage.14
If U.S. defenses posed no serious threat as yet to U-boats grazing in the western pastures, the same canno
t be said for threats in the other direction, as the story of one of the ships lost in February demonstrates. In the early morning of 28 February the Mckes-class flush-decker destroyer USS Jacob Jones (DD 130) was proceeding south from New York on patrol about five miles off the line of lighted buoys. Jacob Jones was the size warship that ESFhad long pleaded for. To Admiral Andrews’ delight CINCLANT had loaned her to coastal duty for an unspecified period. During February several other destroyers had been permitted to serve ESF patrol functions if they happened to be within frontier limits on escort duty or for repair and overhaul, but Jacob Jones was the first to be assigned on a regular basis. The old (1919) DD was the namesake of a U.S. destroyer that had been torpedoed by a U-boat in the Western Approaches to the British Isles in 1917. On that occasion numerous survivors in the water had been killed by depth charges that exploded as the destroyer sank. At 0500 on the twenty-eighth the “new” Jacob Jones was off the Delaware Capes, making fifteen knots in a calm sea under a full moon, when two torpedoes, arriving almost simultaneously, blew apart everything forward of a point just aft of the bri ‘ge and carried away the after part of the vessel above the keel plates and shafts. On the center section, which remained afloat, the twenty-five men who survived the blasts tried vainly to break the boats out of their cradles. With the deck and lines slippery from spilled oil it was impossible to get purchase, and they resorted to the rafts. As the parts of Jacob Jones sank, the depth charges exploded and some of the men on the rafts were killed by the concussions. Five hours after the attack a Navy observation plane sighted twelve survivors and vectored USS Eagle 56 to pick them up and take them into Cape May. One more crewman died on the way. Jacob Jones was the first man-of-war sunk by enemy action in American coastal waters.15 The trophy belonged to Korvettenkapitän Ernst-August Rehwinkel in the VIIC U-578.
Operation Drumbeat Page 40