Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  And then it was time to take leave of treasured officer-comrades and loyal crewmen. To Admiral Dönitz, Hardegen had argued successfully that only Horst von Schroeter was qualified to command his beloved 123. To the young number one he now transferred the boat that for the past eleven months had encapsulated his life and, with Barbara, he left for his new assignment as an instructor with the Training Flotilla at Gotenhafen (née Gdynia) on the Gulf of Danzig (née Gdansk). Apparently he had been relieved from active sea duty at just the right time, since at his new station he was frequently in the hospital with stomach bleeding. His shore career took him later to Torpedo School at Flensburg-Mürwik, to Kriegsmarine headquarters (OKM) in Berlin where he worked on new acoustic and wired torpedoes, and when the Berlin facilities were destroyed by Allied bombing he moved with its staff to Neubrandenburg where he served from October 1944 to January 1945.

  In the last desperate months of the war, like other shore-based Navy officers, Hardegen was assigned to land warfare. In field gray uniform he commanded a Marine infantry unit against British troops south of Bremen. The ground forces suffered huge losses and most officers were killed. Hardegen owed his survival, so he has stated, to the fact that he was hospitalized with a severe case of diphtheria and missed the worst of the fighting. In the last days before surrender he served on Dönitz’s staff at Flensburg-Mürwik where, one night, he heard the fatal shot that felled his U-boat comrade and friend Wolfgang Liith, who had won the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds (one of only two commanders so honored): While walking home from headquarters Lüth had failed to hear a German sentry’s challenge and was shot. At the end of July, following the surrender, Hardegen was arrested and imprisoned by the British who mistook him for one Paul Hardegen, a member of the Waffen SS (Schutz Staffeln, the virulently Nazi ground divisions). Although he carried a military passport that certified to his naval service and current rank of Korvettenkapitän, the British, who apparently could not see beyond his field gray uniform, placed him in a political prison camp for SS where he remained for a year and a half. Hardegen finally was able to persuade a Dutch interrogator to write a letter to his wife, who had been found alive in November 1945 in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. She could provide photographs and news clippings proving that he was not SS but a U-boat officer. When Barbara responded with these articles Hardegen was released. The date was November 1946. No apology was ever made for the mistake, and Hardegen was obliged to report every week to an occupation officer until he was “de-Nazified,” certification of which came through after six months. Reunited with Barbara and their four children, he began a new life.52

  Afterword

  It has become common among historians to assign great lapses or errors in wartime decision making to external circumstances that envelop and overwhelm the individuals responsible. Increasingly in such discussions one speaks of the “fog of war,” or of the “confluence of individual and organizational breakdowns,” or of the surrounding “noise” of irrelevant signals and messages. Thus Samuel Eliot Mor-ison, twenty-two years after the event, decided that the defeat at Pearl Harbor resulted from the combination of divided responsibility between Army and Navy, false operational assumptions, and “noise” that “overwhelmed the message” coming in from excellent intelligence. He held no individuals as such responsible.1 Roberta Wohlstetter’s thoughtful analysis of the Pearl Harbor documents and testimony, which she published a year before Morison, drew much the same conclusion, though she gave a higher place to the importance of “noise” that caused strategists in Washington to feel secure in their own (false as it turned out) expectations of Japanese actions. Wohlstetter also was the first to stress the damage done to intelligence analysis by the internal naval rivalry that existed between Operations and Intelligence, a rivalry later (1985) examined in detail by Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, USN (Ret.), who as intelligence officer of the Pacific Fleet at the time suspected that radio intelligence (data not declassified in time for use by Morison and Wohlstetter) was disclosing Japanese intentions, and that those data were being misinterpreted and misrepresented in Washington.2

  Did “fog,” “noise,” false assumptions, divided responsibilities, or intraservice rivalry contribute significantly to command failures at the start, in January, of what this book has called the Atlantic Pearl Harbor? Were Admirals King, Ingersoll, Bristol, and Andrews perhaps to be excused for their failure to resist Paukenschlag by extraneous circumstances? Although Elting E. Morison and Kenneth A. Knowles both told the writer that when they assumed their duties in May of that year, Morison at ESF, Knowles at Main Navy, there was still much confusion and uncertainty about the best means for combating the U-boats, there is no evidence in the written record for saying that any kind of “fog” obscured the patent fact in early January 1942 that Germany was sending U-boats to the U.S. coast. The daily British submarine estimate and Captain Leighton’s daily situation maps based on the estimate plainly displayed the attacking force and its progress westward day-by-day. No “noise” obfuscated the clear intent and meaning of the incoming British intelligence, which, as recently declassified (1987) messages show, was transmitted to all pertinent commands, including those of Ingersoll, Bristol, and Andrews. Furthermore, it would be hard to say, given these clear warnings (which at the last included the sinking of Cyclops) that either Main Navy or its Atlantic sea commands was misdirected by false assumptions about the German intentions.

  When divided responsibility is considered one may find that there was division of a kind that could conceivably have encouraged false assumptions about what individual U.S. commanders might do. The semiautonomous Ingersoll, for example, could have assumed, while he organized military convoy AT-10, that Andrews had the approaching U-boats under control, though one must wonder with what forces; Bristol could have assumed, since Ingersoll gave no indication otherwise, that the U-boats were being taken under attack by someone else, so that he could leisurely dispose his destroyers for convoy AT-10 and training; Andrews could have assumed that the twenty-one destroyers amassed by King precisely for the purpose of opposing the U-boat advance were taking up battle positions under orders from Ingersoll, or Bristol, or both; and King for his part could have assumed that Ingersoll and Bristol, employing “initiative of the subordinate,” would deploy their destroyer force to stop the U-boat invasion when it came. All those assumptions are in the realm of possibility, though they are not likely.

  It is hard to credit external circumstances with altering knowledge and judgment so completely that Ingersoll would not know that destroyers assigned to home port by King expressly to resist U-boats would not be available for that duty if they were diverted to convoy AT-10. It stretches credulity to think that Bristol could not be jarringly aware of the same conflict and of the fact that someone had made a conscious decision to choose AT-10 over U-boat defense. Can Andrews truly be thought to have assumed that Ingersoll and Bristol were deploying the destroyers against Paukenschlag when many of the same destroyers were assembling in New York (Third District) water for convoy duty? An irrational foulup is theoretically possible, to be sure, but more probable is the explanation that some one person decided on the priority of the tasks that would be undertaken and on the disposition of forces that would be employed. Ingersoll comes first to mind since it was he who received COMINCH’s order to arrange escort for AT-10. But Ingersoll’s decision not to deploy any of the destroyers against the U-boats could easily have been overturned by King. All the strings ended in King’s hands. And they were not disinterested hands. As pointed out in chapter 8, King had more at stake in this decision than anyone else since it was he who had devised the destroyer defense. Thus, though no “smoking-gun” order has turned up to document the point, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if that defense was to be abandoned it would be abandoned only with King’s deliberate say-so and approval; unless, alternatively, King experienced a lapsus mentis: Lulled into inattention by the recent months’ decline in U-boat
activity, or by an underestimation of the U-boat as a naval weapon, or by an arrogant disregard of British warnings, or by a repugnance for intelligence estimates in general and for Captain Leighton’s “little toys and other play things” in particular, or by a preoccupation with the war in the Pacific, or by all of the above, King may simply have failed to act in a timely and decisive way, like a sentry asleep at his post.3 In either event, whether by commission or omission, King was the final responsible agent who allowed Drumbeat, and Hardegen in particular, to enter the nation’s gates unmolested. King it was who caused the Navy to miss the only chance it would have to bloody the German nose at the outset and to persuade Admiral Dönitz that he would pay a heavy price if he attempted to have his way with the American shoreline. Probably not since Günther Prien’s J-47 entered Scapa Flow in the Orkneys to sink the Royal Oak had a U-boat commander made himself so exposed and vulnerable to destruction as did Reinhard Hardegen on his approach to New York Harbor, coolly daring—inviting as it were—U.S. Navy ships and aircraft to attack. But King would not fight him. In the event, Dönitz, encouraged by Drumbeat’s surprising successes, took the Atlantic Coast away from the United States, and proceeded to inflict a six-month punishment that spread to the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. King’s subsequent efforts to cover for the massacre, beginning with his decision not to mention in correspondence or in print that in January he had available twenty-one destroyers with which to render a Drumbeat in reverse, did him and his service no credit.

  There was an adage in the Navy that a sea dog deserved “two bites”—two mistakes. Admiral Husband E. Kimmell, the Navy commander at Pearl Harbor, was not allowed a second. But Admiral Richmond Kelly (“Terrible”) Turner was allowed his two: first, at Main Navy, when he insisted that the Japanese would open the Pacific war by striking at Russia, and second, when by dogmatic miscalculation he presided over the Navy’s worst sea battle loss to the Japanese, at Savo Island on 9 August 1942. By contrast, Ernest J. King had at least six bites: first, when he failed to deploy the destroyer defense he himself had devised to oppose the expected U-boat offensive; second, when he refused to apply British tactical doctrine and to heed OIC and ONI intelligence; third, when he failed to take timely action to construct small antisubmarine craft, which he contemned, though they later (after the loss of much flesh and steel) made coastwise convoys possible and accounted for two of the first three U-boat kills; fourth, when he failed to establish a coastal blackout; fifth, when he rejected, until forced to it, the proffered patrol assistance from private boats and airplanes; and sixth—the reason why his excessive allowance of bites never became widely known in or out of the Navy—when he dissembled in explaining how Drumbeat and the six-months’ massacre could have happened.

  The exact form of King’s culpability might have been established had an exhaustive investigation been conducted at the time or later, similar to the Roberts Commission, Hart Inquiry, Navy Court, and congressional hearings that were convoked to explain Pearl Harbor. No such proceedings took place. The principal witnesses are now deceased. And the documentary record, already polished by King’s redaction of events, may long ago have been sifted for paper that did not substantiate the official COMINCH account. Enough paper remains, however, to suggest that the naval record for the period deserves closer scrutiny and that, absent “fog” and “noise,” one individual person must be assigned final responsibility for the U.S. Navy’s failure to prevent America’s worst-ever defeat at sea.

  After seeing the U.S. Navy through to victory against Japan in the Pacific, where his heart and mind were always preponderantly fixed, Fleet Admiral King resigned as COMINCH and CNO effective 15 December 1945. His replacement was Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nim-itz. Various honors followed, including a gold star in lieu of a third Distinguished Service Medal from the new President Harry S. Truman, a Joint Resolution of appreciation from the 79th Congress, a similar message from the British Chiefs of Staff, and an honorary degree from Harvard. He died on 25 June 1956, at the age of seventy-eight.

  Admiral Harold R. Stark returned to Washington in 1945 after service as Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, which included the planning and supervision of the Allied seaborne invasion of Europe. Rather than finding honors awaiting him he learned that King had formally censured him for negligence in the Pearl Harbor attack and had recommended that he be relegated “to positions in which lack of superior judgment may not result in future errors.”4 King recanted a part of his censure in 1949, at which time Stark received a third Distinguished Service Medal for his service in London (for which King, inconsistently, had recommended him in 1945). Stark died at age ninety-two on 20 August 1972.

  Admiral Adolphus Andrews retired from the Navy as Commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier in November 1943. He had taken on the frontier defense when, without aid from Ingersoll, it was a near-impossible task. Except for two costly errors, failing to throw everything he had at Hardegen when the German first arrived and refusing to douse coastal lights, particularly those of resorts, he acquitted himself well in the difficult post. Upon his retirement he was immediately recalled to active duty as chairman of the Navy Manpower Survey Board at the Navy Department in Washington. He died on 19 June 1948. Admiral Ingersoll was relieved as CINCLANT in November 1944 and served as deputy CNO until his retirement in April 1946. He died on 20 May 1976. Rear Admiral Bristol, Commander Task Force Twenty-Four, formerly Task Force Four, formerly Support Force, died from a heart attack on 30 April 1942 and was succeeded by Vice Admiral R. M. Brainard.

  Deservedly, Rodger Winn, to whom Allied victory in the Atlantic may be attributed as much as to any other single individual, received at war’s end two of his country’s highest decorations as well as the American Legion of Merit. His final rank of captain was unusual recognition for a volunteer reserve officer. After demobilization he returned to the Bar and rose to the position of Lord Justice of Appeal. He died in 1972. Patrick Beesly, his Tracking Room deputy, died in 1986.

  Karl Dönitz succeeded Erich Raeder as grand admiral, commander in chief of the Kriegsmarine, in January 1943. On 30 April 1945 he succeeded Hitler, who had killed himself, as Reichspräsident. In that capacity he was arrested at Flensburg-Mürwik by British forces on 23 May 1945. His U-boats had sunk 2,775 Allied merchant ships, amounting to 14,573,000 tons. At the same time 754 U-boats had been sunk, a high 87 percent of all operational boats. Dönitz himself had lost two sons in the war at sea. At the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg in 1946 (where he contended under oath that Lemp’s U-J0 KTB was the only one that had been altered during the war) he was convicted on charges of “waging aggressive war” and committing “crimes against peace.” His ten-year sentence at Spandau prison in West Berlin might have been harsher had he been convicted on another charge—that of conducting unrestricted submarine warfare—but Fleet Admiral Nimitz, USN, in an affidavit to the tribunal testified that the U.S. Navy submarine fleet had conducted exactly the same kind of warfare in the Pacific. It was the only instance at Nürnberg where tu quoque was accepted as a valid defense. Rebecca West has written: “That submarine warfare cannot be carried on without inhumanity, and that we have found ourselves able to be inhumane … This nostra culpa of the conquerors might well be considered the most important thing that happened at Nuremberg. But it evoked no response at the time, and it has been forgotten.”5 Dönitz served his full sentence and died on 24 December 1980. Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, convicted at Nürnberg of “waging aggressive war,” was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in September 1955. He died on 6 November 1960. Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, acting for Dönitz, signed the document surrendering all German forces in northwest Germany to British General Bernard Montgomery; on 23 May 1945 he committed suicide by taking poison.

  Of the five Paukenschlag commanders only one, Ulrich Folkers, was lost in action at sea, on 6 May 1943, south of Greenland, at the hands of convoy escort HMS Vidette. All aboard U-/25 were killed. Folkers was twenty-eight years old. Hei
nrich Bleichrodt (U-/09) continued at sea until October 1942, when he was assigned to shore duty, and ended the war as Korvettenkapitän commanding the Twenty-second U-boat Flotilla at Gotenhafen/Wilhelmshaven. Ernst Kais (U-/30) and Richard Zapp (U-66) also ended the war at Korvettenkapitän rank commanding flotillas, Kals at Second Flotilla, Lorient, and Zapp at Third Flotilla, La Pallice. Bleichrodt died on 9 January 1977, aged sixty-seven; Kals on 8 November 1979, aged seventy-four; and Zapp on 17 July 1964, aged sixty. All five Paukenschlag commanders received the Knight’s Cross during their careers, Hardegen and Bleichrodt with Oak Leaves.