Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  At 0924 CET (0244 ET) on the ninth 123′s lookouts sighted a large flying boat dead ahead and coming straight at them. Hardegen dived the boat, worried about the marine phosphorescence in his wake and swirl. When nothing happened he decided that the aircraft was a commercial Pan American Clipper, since the Americans would not be using flying boats on coastwise patrols. He decided to stay underwater where he was. Daylight was a few hours off. He wanted solid darkness when he passed the Naval Section Base at Mayport on the mouth of the St. Johns River. That station was just a comparative few miles away, he saw on his charts. From the locker in his cubicle he pulled the paper-bound Handbuch, Part II, on American coastal landmarks and began studying closely the features described there: “Andere gute Landmarken sind ein roter, kegelförmiger, nicht mehr als solcher benutzter Leuchtturm bei dem Ort Mayport, PU sm westlich von St. John Point, sowie die Gebäude in den Seebädern Atlantic Beach und Jacksonville Beach, 33A und 63A sm südlich von dieser Huk…,”49

  12

  The Wavy Stirs

  By mid-March, after sixty days of tragically unnecessary blood and brine, even the imperturbable Ernest J. King was starting to panic. “The submarine situation on the east coast,” he wrote to a flag officer, “approaches the desperate.”1 The imperious Anglophobe admiral who had resisted every piece of Britain’s hard-won advice on fighting U-boats, and who ridiculed President Roosevelt’s predilection for “small boats” and “light airplanes,” was forced finally to a volte-face. It was about time, thought the exasperated British, Winston Churchill in the lead. “It is surprising indeed that during two years of the advance of total war towards the American continent more provision had not been made against this deadly onslaught,” the Prime Minister observed. Of course the naval war in the Pacific pressed hard on the resources of the U.S. Navy. “Still,” he exclaimed, “with all the information they had about the protective measures we had adopted both before and during the struggle, it is remarkable that no plans had been made for coastal convoys and for multiplying small craft.”2 Churchill had put his finger on two of the principal reasons for the U.S. failure. Others in Britain were less gentle in their expressions. Captain Brian B. Schofield, whose Admiralty Trade Division superintended British merchant shipping in all the world’s sea-lanes, found the “inadequate” state of U.S. Navy defenses in the American lanes to be “quite incomprehensible.”3 Having to count staggering losses of British-controlled shipping, particularly of tankers, as well as an enormous slaughter of human life in waters where the Admiralty’s writ did not run, Schofield found it “extremely difficult to be polite about it.”4 As Admiral Sir Percy L. H. Noble described the situation to the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound: “The Western Approaches Command finds itself in the position today [8 March] of escorting convoys safely over to the American eastern seaboard, and then … finding that many of the ships thus escorted are easy prey to the U-boats … off the American coast or in the Caribbean.”5 No doubt it jarred the Admiralty to read Bletchley Park’s decrypt of Adolf Hitler’s reaction to the massacre (as quoted in a transmission to Tokyo by Japan’s ambassador in Berlin, Baron Hiroshi Oshima): “I myself have been surprised at the successes we have met with along the American coast lately. The United States kept up the tall talk and left her coast unguarded. Now I daresay that she is quite surprised.”6 The official historian of the Royal Navy called the sinkings on the U.S. seaboard a “holocaust.”7 Patrick Beesly, who watched the holocaust day by day on the OIC plot, told the present writer that in his opinion the U.S. Navy’s delay in providing appropriate protection to coastwise merchant traffic was “criminal.”8 In a cable to Roosevelt aide and confidant Harry Hopkins on 12 March Churchill exploded: “I am most deeply concerned at the immense sinking of tankers west of the 40th meridian and in the Caribbean Sea…. The situation is so serious that drastic action of some kind is necessary….”9 Roosevelt called King to the White House to discuss the Prime Minister’s concerns and replied seven days later with what Churchill suggested might have been “a touch of strain” but more likely was the influence of King’s acid quarterdeck style: “Your interest in steps to be taken to combat the Atlantic submarine menace as indicated by your recent message to Mr. Hopkins on this subject impels me to request your particular consideration of heavy attacks on submarine bases and building and repair yards, thus checking submarine activities at their source and where submarines perforce congregate.”10 This Ciceronian attempt to turn blame back on his reprover ill became FDR, though it was quite in character with the frosty King. More to the point, it ignored the fact that where U-boat bases were concerned, as the British knew, no bomb in the Allied arsenal was capable of penetrating the seven-meter-thick carapaces of the Biscay bunkers. Churchill gallantly did order bombing raids on U-boat yards in Germany but, as the postwar data showed, they were inconsequential. The proximate and answerable causes of British losses were not to be found in Brittany or Germany. They were to be found on the American main.

  In an extraordinary move, Britain’s proud career executive admirals dispatched the layman Commander Rodger Winn to Washington. No man, save Dönitz himself, knew more about the U-boat war than did the director of the OIC’s Submarine Tracking Room. Moreover, Winn had studied at Yale and Harvard, thus there was an assumption at the Admiralty that he knew how to deal with Americans. Winn’s specific mission, as Beesly remembered it, was to persuade the U.S. Navy to institute coastwise convoys at the earliest possible moment, to impose shoreline blackouts, and to establish a U-boat tracking room on theOIC model.11 Thusoneofthe most vital emissary responsibilities of the war was laid on the deformed shoulders of this volunteer reserve backroom operator. Arriving at Main Navy, Winn found that it took three long days of show-and-tell before he could make headway with Commander George C. Dyer, head of the ONI Information Room, a clearinghouse for strategic data. Despite the fact that Dyer’s intelligence background was minimal, in the end he recognized the sense that Winn was making and arranged for him to see Rear Admiral Richard S. Edwards, King’s deputy chief of staff, who oversaw USN antisubmarine warfare. To Winn’s earnest presentation Edwards replied that “the Americans wished to learn their own lessons and that they had plenty of ships with which to do so”—King’s doctrine in a nutshell.12 Stupefied and offended at this response, the outranked Winn remonstrated: “The trouble is, Admiral, it’s not only your bloody ships you are losing: A lot of them are ours!”13 Edwards, brought up short, grudgingly agreed that Winn had a point, and he suggested, “You had better see Admiral King.” To Winn it seemed, when he was finally led into King’s austere third-deck office, that the obdurate and forbidding Navy chief had been well briefed on the Admiralty’s line of argument and that the logic of Winn’s case had broken through, since, to his surprise, King seemed very willing to discuss the issues in an open, even friendly, way. The result was reassurances from King that he was moving forward as quickly as he could to institute coastal convoys, that he would develop with the Army a plan for darkening the coastline from Maine to the Keys, and, of most immediate importance to Winn, that he would create a Submarine Tracking Room to which all naval information of whatever kind would be directed. Winn was satisfied. He declared his mission accomplished and rushed off to New York to convert Admiral Andrews.

  In sign of COMINCH sincerity on the last point—a belated and stunning concession of Operations to Intelligence—King instructed Edwards to appoint an officer who would learn the tracking room business at Winn’s elbow in London and then become Winn’s USN counterpart in Washington. The officer Edwards selected for this critical position was not a Washington hand but Kenneth A. Knowles, a regular who had retired from active duty in 1936 because of eyesight disability but after Pearl Harbor had returned at lieutenant’s rank to serve as ROTC adviser at the University of Texas, Austin. Plucked from this obscurity in May, Knowles went to Washington, where he received two and a half stripes and was sent almost immediately to London for an intensive two-week immersion in the OIC Tracking
Room. “Winn was quite a man,” Knowles recalled to the writer. “He was a hunchback but that didn’t deter him. What impressed most was his mind. The atmosphere in the room was very controlled and businesslike. There was never any panic despite the fact that at that time there were great losses off the U.S.—the loss of bottoms being more deplored than their cargoes—and very few U-boat casualties.”14 Rather than being blinded entirely by the newly adopted U-boat Atlantic TRITON cipher, Winn and Beesly had been only sorely inconvenienced. From long acquaintance with HYDRA they knew Dönitz’s mind, the U-boat routes, the boats’ average speed of advance, their endurance at sea, the nature of their communications, and the style of their commanders. The length and position of W/T transmissions of boats to Kernével provided valuable clues as to course and destination, even if the full meaning of the transmissions escaped Bletchley Park’s wizardry, as it would continue to do until the following December.

  All this insight into Ubootwaffe stratagem and ambuscade Winn and Beesly passed on to Knowles, as they also instructed him in the use of conventional sources of intelligence and of two extremely valuable technical tools that still remained: D/F fixes and the TETIS cipher. D/F (Huff-Duff) readings were still less accurate and dependable on the American side than they were on the British, but the OIC D/F staff taught Knowles how to interpret the “cuts” he would get from USN W/T intercept stations at Winter Harbor, Maine; Amagan-sett, Long Island; Cheltenham, Maryland; Poyners Hill, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Jupiter, Florida; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. TETIS, on the other hand, was a cipher long since penetrated by BP and still in use by U-boats training in the Baltic. Through TETIS Winn and Beesly could track a boat from first commissioning through work-up and training until it finally departed for an operational base. At the Biscay bases R-boat escorts that accompanied outward- and inward-bound U-boats through the swept channels still employed HYDRA (an unaccountable German oversight), thus the Tracking Room could deduce when a new boat came into service as well as assess the number of boats at sea and their probable distribution. Pledging to share all these data with Knowles when he got set up, Winn and Beesly suggested that if access to the Atlantic cipher had to be lost, this was the best possible time for it to happen, when everybody knew where the boats were proceeding anyway—at, to, or from the U.S., Canadian, and Caribbean shorelines; when there was little regular BdU-to-boats wireless to monitor; and when, in the Western Atlantic, at least, there were no rakes around which to divert shipping.

  On his return to Washington, Knowles organized an Atlantic Section, Intelligence Center (OP-20-G, later F-21) on the sixth wing of Main Navy that operated as an exact clone of Winn’s Tracking Room and exchanged all its data with the parent organization. The start-up marked the beginning of a transfer of U-boat tracking from a frontier (local) to an Atlantic scale. Even King came to appreciate the value of what he had belatedly set in motion. As one admiral recalled (from a later date, when there was also an F-211, or “Secret Room”): “I had a particularly outstanding lieutenant commander who would brief King every morning at 0900. He emphasized the locations of the various German submarines as if he knew exactly where they were, as I think he usually did.”15 The American Winn, like his mentor, would finish the war as a captain.

  If Britain’s dander was up, so, too, was that of the oil industry. On 4 March in Washington worried members of the Tanker Committee of the Petroleum Industry War Council met with service representatives from the Navy and War departments. By that date sixty-five ships had been sunk in Maine-Florida and Caribbean waters, twenty-seven of them tankers. If the sinkings continued at the same rate throughout the remainder of 1942, the industry spokesman argued, by the following January 125 of the 320 tankers available on the coast would be destroyed. (Their fears were well-founded: During March vessels of all kinds went down at an average of more than one a day, and during April the East Coast was, as the ESF war diary described it, “the most dangerous area for merchant shipping in the entire world.”16 Insuranee companies ceased writing policies on merchant vessels.) Unless the U-boat attacks were checked, the spokesman said, the supply of oil would sink to levels “intolerable” both for the domestic economy and for any projected continuation of the war effort, by the United States or its Allies. Furthermore, the lives of three thousand seamen would be lost.17 Daunted by the appalling losses of the past seven weeks, merchant seamen who in the first weeks of war had proved eager to sign on for new sailings after being torpedoed were now increasingly demoralized by the sinkings, especially engine room men on tankers, who were leaving in troubling numbers. In the past chief mates complained about men who got drunk in port or were hard to handle; now they complained about not finding enough men to make a crew. One master reported that on reaching home port thirteen of a crew of thirty disappeared. Aggravating the problems of deteriorating morale and crew shortages was the belief of some Navy and shipping officials that certain crewmen were Axis sympathizers who had been induced by enemy agents in various New York and Brooklyn bars (Highway Tavern, the Old Hamburg, and Schmidt’s being named) to divulge sailing times. But most Navy officials dismissed this possibility as irrelevant since, as one said, “The submarines could lie off focal points up and down the coast and await the arrival of ships without having any previous knowledge of sailing times.”18

  The oil industry committee made numerous positive suggestions for improving the situation, chief among which were: (1) swinging guns aboard all tankers, as the British had done, and crewing them with highly trained USN Armed Guards; (2) engaging the services of the Civil Air Patrol, private pilots with their own light airplanes, to force down U-boats in the sea-lanes (an idea endorsed by Admiral Andrews); and (3) suppressing bright shore lights showing to seaward against which it was obvious U-boats silhouetted their targets. (These eminently sensible recommendations, be it noted, came from laymen.) For the Navy’s part COMINCH agreed to look into the question of Armed Guards. One of the first tankers to be so equipped was the Gulf Oil Corporation’s just-launched SS Gulfamerica. As she took on ninety thousand barrels of fuel oil at Port Arthur, Texas, for her maiden voyage to New York at the beginning of April the deck aft presented one four-inch 50 SP Mark IX Mod. gun and bridge nests held two 50-caliber Browning Mark II machine guns. Seven Naval Armed Guard crewmen officered by a reserve ensign manned the weapons. As for private pilots and light planes encroaching on the Navy’s airspace King would have none of it xfor now), answering that the idea had too many “operational difficulties.”19 The Army, whose aircraft dominated offshore search operations, had no objection to civilian help.

  Where coastal blackouts were concerned the two services vacillated, despite the fact that since the President’s Executive Order 9066 of 19 February the services had authority “to assume control over all lighting on the seacoast so as to prevent the silhouetting of ships and their consequent destruction by enemy submarines.”20 Their reluctance to take action came principally as a result of intense pressure exerted by coastal business interests such as beach resort operators who did not want to “inconvenience tourists.” In the meeting of 4 March it was decided by the military representatives that control of coastal lights was “a Navy function.”21 Accordingly, five days later—and two months after the date when, it might be argued, he should already have acted decisively and on his own initiative—Admiral King sent out a halfhearted “request” to Andrews in New York: “It is requested that the Commander Eastern Sea Frontier take such steps as may be within his province to control the brilliant illumination of Eastern Seaboard amusement parks and beaches in order that ships passing close to shore be not silhouetted and thereby more easily exposed to submarine attack from seaward.”22 An additional five days later, on 14 March, King made it clear that what he was requesting was not a blackout but a “dimout”; blackouts “were not considered necessary” since only the glare of the brightest lights posed a danger to shipping. This tragic misjudgment, repeating an error that Andrews had made on 10 February (see c
hapter 5), would lead by omission to further loss of lives and treasure.

  On the very day that King was rejecting blackouts, the 7,610-GRT American freighter SS Lemuel Burrows was torpedoed and sunk by U-404 (Korvettenkapitän Otto von Bülow) off Atlantic City, New Jersey. Twenty crewmen died. The second engineer, who arguably had a better picture of the situation from his lifeboat than King had from his desk, reported that the lights of a New Jersey beach resort doomed his vessel and that they would “continue to cause daily torpedoings until a blackout is ordered along the coast.” The engineer added: “We might as well run with our lights on. The lights were like Coney Island. It was lit up like daylight all along the beach.… We’re going to lose boats every day if they don’t do something about it.”23 On 19 March Third Naval District advised the Commanding General, Second Corps Area, U.S. Army, that even with dimout vessels were silhouetted as much as ten miles out to sea against the sky glow cast from ground light on haze or low-lying cloud banks. It recommended “a complete blackout of all communities within approximately five miles of the coastline,” but this would never be done.24 Tests at sea in April found that patrol boats twenty-five miles out could discern the New York glow even with dimout.25 In May, Army studies concluded that dimout was still so dangerous to shipping that “like targets in a shooting gallery our ships are moving in off a backdrop of hazy light.”26 And as late as 7 July when the 8,141 -GRT British freighter Umtata, under tow, was torpedoed and sunk off the south Florida coast (at 25-35N, 80-02W) by V-571 (Kptlt. Helmut Möhlmann), the Umtata’s second officer blamed the sky glow of Miami ten miles to the northwest. “We could see the loom of Miami 35 miles out to sea,” he reported. “The glow of light is just what those subs want.”27 The glow came from street and automobile lights, resort and house windows, dog tracks and other amusement areas. On 8 July the Miami Herald reported that motorists on the Overseas Highway between Homestead and Key West were driving with high beam lights, and, in a related story, cited the experience of a U.S. naval vessel that found the loom of Key West so clearly visible from thirty-one miles at sea that it silhouetted any ship that passed before it.28