Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  50. Rohwer, Axis Submarine Successes, pp. 50-72.

  51. KTB-1/SkI, 6 December 1941. Admiral Raeder had long pleaded with Hitler for permission to wage unrestricted warfare against American shipping, throughout the winter of 1940-41 and especially after Roosevelt’s “shoot on sight” order. As early as 10 October 1939, Raeder expressed his willingness to risk war with the U.S., which he thought was inevitable. “Führer Conferences,” Thursfield, ed., Brassev’s Naval Annual, 1947, pp. 46, 161, 177, 183-84, 192-93, 232-33.

  52. KTB-1/Skl, 7 December 1941. Adding to the Navy’s grief, Gneisenau, already damaged by an English mine during the Channel dash, was soon afterward bombed in the Kiel shipyard, thus rendered hors-de-combat for the rest of the war. These and other reverses of the heavy ships are described in Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, My Life (Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1960), pp. 361-74. Two advantages to having the still serviceable heavy ships in North and Norwegian Sea ports were (1) their deterrent to British amphibious operations against Norway, and (2) their use against PQ convoys to Murmansk; Jürgen Rohwer to author, 17 February 1987.

  53. Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler in History (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 70-73. The chapter, “Hitler Challenges America,” pp. 66-87, is a recent treatment of what Jäckel calls the “still unclear” reason why Hitler declared war. Cf. Bailey and Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt, pp. 238-39.

  54. KTB-BdU, 9 December 1941.

  55. Ibid., 18 December 1941. An account of Dönitz’s numerous discussions and lengthy teleprinter correspondence with OKM on this point is given in Doenitz, Memoirs, pp. 159-63.

  56. KTB-BdU, 23 December 1941.

  57. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Erinnerungen (Munich: Paul List, 1950), p. 328, cited in Weinberg, World in the Balance, p. 69. Certain of the foregoing reasons for Hitler’s declaration are drawn from Weinberg, pp. 69, 91-92.

  58. Jäckel, Hitler in History, p. 66.

  59. Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: Ideology, The Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), calls it “the greatest single mistake of his career”—“a monumental blunder” that “sealed his fate”; pp. 237, 245. Cf. Peter Loewenberg, “Nixon, Hitler, and Power: An Ego Psychological Study,” Psychoanalytical Inquiry 6, 1 (1986): 31-46. Loewenberg, a practicing psychoanalyst as well as historian, addresses what he calls Hitler’s impulsive, self-defeating, and megalomaniacal decision to declare war against the United States at just the moment when his armies were reeling in Russia: “His judgment was now impaired by grandiosity and defensive manic omnipotence in order to combat the fears of deterioration and disintegration from within.” Weinberg, however, finds that there were no oral or written dissents from this decision on the part of Germany’s political, diplomatic, or military leaders. If Hitler was “impaired,” so, it could be argued, was everybody else. “There is curious irony in a situation where the leaders of a country were united on war with the one nation they were least likely and worst equipped to defeat.” World in Balance, p. 95.

  60. Fritz Stern, New York Times Book Review, 12 May 1985, p. 7.

  4. A Fighting Machine

  1. U-boat berths for both officers and crew were four inches shorter and four inches narrower than standard berths on U.S. Navy fleet submarines of the same period.

  2. Interview with Fritz Rafalski, Bonn, West Germany, 21 December 1986. The trim dive sequence and the briefing given Tolle by Hoffmann in the foregoing pages are reconstructed from the crew interviews as well as from the war diary, standard operating procedures, and technical data about Type IXB boats.

  3. Details as minute as these are given in J-123′s unusually thorough KTB.

  4. On 1 December HMS Dorsetshire closed on Python, which scuttled herself, the crew and passengers abandoning to lifeboats.

  5. Atlantis (sometimes cited in German documents as Schiff [Ship] 16) was sunk by bombardment from Dorsetshire’s sister ship HMS Devonshire on 22 November. Her crew were first picked up or towed by U-/26 and then transferred to Python. Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 1, pp. 470, 480, 545-46.

  6. UA’s adventures on this rescue mission are recounted in KTB-BdU, 1,5, 11, 12, 16, and 24 December 1941. A synopsis of VA’s war diary is given in Mulligan, ed., U-Boat Warfare, p. 196. Tribute to the accomplishment of UA and the other rescue boats was paid by British naval historian Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 1, p. 546, who called it “a rescue for which the enemy must be given full credit.” U-/23′s sighting of UA on her outward passage is noted in KTB-/2Í, 23 December 1941.

  5. Destination New York

  1. NARA, RG 457 (National Security Agency), “German Navy/U-Boat Messages Translations and Summaries”; Box No. 7, SRGN 4774-5513, BdU to all boats, “Offizier,” 26 December 1941. This signal reported the change in A from earlier values that had ranged as high as eighty meters. Also see NARA, RG 457, SRH 201, “A Collection of German U-Boat Admonition/Experience Messages (1943-1945), OP-20-G.”

  2. Gasaway, Grey Wolf, Grey Sea, p. 73, states that the deepest dive recorded by a IXC boat (U-/26) was 750 feet. Middlebrook, Convoy, p. 69, on the basis of interviews conducted with former U-boat officers in the 1970s, places the record for a IXC at 1,020 feet.

  3. As late as early 1943 the maximum depth setting for British depth charges was 550 feet; ibid., p. 69.

  4. NARA, RG 457, Box 7, SRGN 4774-5513; BdU to all boats.

  5. This reconstruction of Hardegen’s words is based on the Hardegen interviews, on the crew interviews, on KTB-/2J, and on the account in “Auf Gefechtsstationen!”, pp. 168-70.

  6. Ibid., p. 169.

  7. Similar grid charts existed for the other world oceans. Since they were drafted to Mercator’s projection the large squares differed in size, becoming smaller as they approached the equator. The Luftwaffe had grid maps of its own but the grids did not coincide with the naval squares, leading to frequent foul-ups in attempted Air Force-Navy joint operations.

  8. KTB-BdU.Theorderof9SeptemberoccursintheKTBfollowingthe diary entry for 15 September. Prior to 9 September and as early as 16 June BdU had tried other methods of disguising its dispositions; seeF. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, 3 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979-88), vol. 2, pp. 171,681-82.

  9. For Dönitz’s assurances about shortwave transmissions see Jak. P. Mallmann Showell, U-Boats Under the Swastika (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1987), p. 59. The peculiar transmission properties of shortwaves at the time, most of whose energy was deflected upward into space, are described in Rohwer, Convoy Battles, p. 37. The Adressbuch continued in use for the remainder of the war, and a copy of the book was not obtained by the Allies until the capture of U-505 by the U.S. Navy off Cape Blanco, Africa, on 4 June 1944.

  10. KTB-BdU, 25 December 1941; also see 24 December. U-451, whose fate was not known for certain at BdU on 25 December, had been sunk on 21 December, not by ramming but by aircraft bombs, with forty-four killed and one captured. All boats reported as presumed lost at the Christmas Day briefing were in fact lost. The loss of U-567 with all hands on 21 December cost the Ubootwaf fe one of its greatest aces, Knight’s Cross holder Kptlt. Engelbert Endrass.

  11. Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 2, p. 551. Dönitz discussed the pros and cons of wireless control in Memoirs, pp. 142-43.

  12. Peter Cremer, U-Boat Commander: A Periscope View of the Battle of the Atlantic (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1985), pp. 134-36.

  13. KTB-BdU, 19 November 1941.

  14. KTB-1/Skl, 24 December 1941.

  15. KTB-BdU, 1 December 1941.

  16. This was so much the case that the British Admiralty concluded on 20 December 1941, that, “the primary object [of the Kriegsmarine] seems, at least temporarily, to be no longer the destruction of merchant shipping”; quoted in Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 2, pp. 175-76. That the German cipher had been penetrated might have occurred to
anyone who knew, as Dönitz did, that B-Dienst was reading the main Royal Navy Cypher No. 2 on a daily basis and was beginning to read the new British Naval Cypher No. 3, which carried the bulk of North Atlantic convoy information. But Dönitz never seems to have acknowledged that HYDRA itself was vulnerable, and he resisted the possibility as late as the date of his memoirs in 1958. See Doenitz, Memoirs, pp. 324-25; and Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 2, pp. 177-79. In Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939-1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), the author writes (p. 70): “Even as recently as 1973, Dönitz, in an interview with Ludovic Kennedy, was apparently still loath to accept that most of his ciphers had been consistently and thoroughly penetrated for four years of the war.” See Ludovic Kennedy, The Spectator (London), 3 January 1981.

  17. Hardegen does not recall the titles of the guidebooks referred to in the reconstruction of this scene. Hardegen was not the last military commander forced to rely on tourist guides. For the hastily mounted U.S. invasion of Grenada in October 1983 the Army 82nd Airborne and Rangers were provided tourist maps on which an improvised grid system was imprinted the night before the operation began. Wall Street Journal, 15 November 1983, p. 1; Richard A. Gabriel, Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn’t Win (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 174.’

  18. The Operation Order is reconstructed from the orders transmitted subsequently by F.T. to U-123 from BdU on 28 December 1941, 2, 3, 9, and 17 January 1942; NARA, RG 457, Boxes SRGN 4774-5513, 5514-6196. The dialogue of Hardegen with his officers is based on interviews with Hardegen, May 1985 and December 1986. Gröner was the merchant fleet handbook, with silhouettes of all known merchantmen class ships of all nations, compiled by the German nautical authority Erich Gröner.

  19. Hardegen, “AufGefechtsstationen!”, pp. 125, 165, 168.

  20. NARA, RG 457, Box 39, “Admonition and Experience Messages.”

  21. Ibid. These “typical” messages are from a later date, 1943-44.

  22. Hardegen, “Auf Gefechtsstationen!”, pp. 18, 170-171. On cargo U-boats and the U-cruiser (U-Kreuzer) class boats see Eberhard Rössler, The U-Boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1981), pp. 67-87; and Bodo Herzog, 60 Jahre Deutsche Uboote 1906-1966 (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1968), p. 54. Cf. Kapitän Paul König, Die Fahrt der Deutschland: Das erste Untersee-Frachtschiff (Hew York: Hearst’s International Library Co., 1916); the writer is grateful to Robert Bartlett of the University of Chicago for this citation as well as for a copy of a personal letter carried to Baltimore via Deutschland. Cf. also Dwight R. Messimer, The Merchant U-Boat: Adventures of the Deutschland, 1916-1918 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1988); and Henry J. James, German Subs in Yankee Waters: First World War (New York: Gotham House, 1940). Most of the boats and ships sunk by the U-cruisers were schooners and steam trawlers from fishing fleets, 18 to 53 tons, together with a number of steamers, 3,875 to 7,127 tons. Cf. Hadley, U-Boats Against Canada, pp. 5-9.

  23. On the Edelweissboot V-124, where Hardegen and Rafalski served together, the crew favorite was Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band; Gasaway, Grey Wolf, Grey Sea, p. 168.

  24. KTB U-123, and NARA, RG 457, Box No. 7, SRGN 5514-6196.

  25. PRO, ADM 223/103, “F” Series, Admiralty Signal Messages, October 1941-Februarv 1942, DEFE-3 [hereafter cited PRO, DEFE-3], 2 January 1942. The decrypt erred in giving the Dimitrios position at PF 7335; the correct transmitted position was BC 4335, as found in KTB-/23, 2 January 1942.

  26. NARA, RG 457, Box No. 7, SRGN 5514-6196. Cf. Hadley, U-Boats Against Canada, p. 60. The story of Foundation Franklin’s rendezvous with Dimitrios Inglessis is given from the tug’s point of view in Farley Mowat, The Grey Seas Under (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958), pp. 235-38.

  27. KTB-/23, 3 January 1942.

  28. Ibid., 6 January 1942. The principal BdU Operations adjutant to Kapitän zur See Godt, Korvettenkapitän Victor Oehrn, wrote in the margin of Hardegen’s KTB at this point: “Fraglos richtige Überlegung”— “blameless, appropriate caution.” Hardegen believes that his caution in the Dimitrios incident belies the reputation for risk-taking attributed to him by crewmen Rafalski, Barth, and Amstein (chapter 2).

  6. Waiting for Hardegen

  1. Development, operation, and utilization of the Bombe are described in numerous sources among which may be mentioned: Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 1, Appendix I, pp. 487-99; Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War: The First Account of World War II’s Greatest Secret Based on Official Documents (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1978), passim; Peter Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), passim; Beesly, Special Intelligence, pp. 63-75; Rohwer, Convoy Battles, pp. 235-40; and Costello and Hughes, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 243-44. For Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht Enigma Huts 6 and 3 corresponded to naval Enigma’s Huts 8 and 4. By 1 January 1942, BP had acquired sixteen Bombes, of which twelve were operational. Most were not at BP, where a single bomb of another kind could wipe out BP’s entire cryptographic capability, but in various towns in the surrounding countryside.

  2. Captain Stephen W. Roskill, The Secret Capture (London: Collins, 1959); Costello and Hughes, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 153-55; Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 1, pp. 337-38; Lewin, Ultra Goes to War, pp. 205-7.

  3. By the end of 1941 BP had read 25,000 naval Enigma signals; Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra, p. 98.

  4. Interview with Patrick Beesly, Lymington, England, 9 July ¡986; Beesly, Special Intelligence, pp. 57-61, 102-5.

  5. This description of the Tracking Room comes from the interview cited above, fn. 4; and to a lesser extent from a telephone interview with Kenneth A. Knowles (Captain, USN, Ret.), 12 July 1986, who served a two-week stint in Winn’s Tracking Room in May 1942.

  6. This is the same Hinsley as F. H. Hinsley, co-author of the three-volume British Intelligence in the Second World War that has been cited in these pages. See Richard Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F. H. Hinsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  7. Five hundred-tonner and 740-tonner (standard displacements) were the terms used in the OIC to designate the Type VIIC and IX boats, respectively. The U.S. Navy used the same terminology, with slight variations, for example, 517 and 750.

  8. These new departures were twelve VIIC boats (U-84, 86, 87, 135, 203, 333, 552, 553, 582, 654, 701, 754) that would form Gruppe Ziethen on the Newfoundland Bank and off Nova Scotia.

  9. Dönitz’s persistent fear that French chambermaids, prostitutes, and dock workers were feeding vital operational data to London was generally ill founded. What CX information did reach London had little operational value because of the time delay. Of far greater value to London were CX data on technical matters, for example, new-type antennae, diving depths, repair and maintenance schedules, and so on. POW interrogations were another prime source of technical data.

  10. This briefing sequence has been reconstructed primarily from the interview with Beesly; also from PRO ADM 223/92, No. O.I.C./S.I./40, U/Boat Situation, Week ending 20 December 1941; ADM 223/15, No. OI.C./S.I./5, U/Boat Situation, Week ending 27 December 1941; KTB-BdU, 2, 3, January 1942; The Times (London), 3 January 1942, pp. 110-11. The first orders from BdU to the ruse boat, V-653, designed to camouflage the transit of Operation Drumbeat, were intercepted on 24 December. Decrypted by BP, they read in part: “Task is to carry out according to a pre-arranged plan a W/T ruse in order to mislead the enemy into assuming the appearance and operation of numerous boats in that particular area. Instructions for carrying out this plan will follow separately every day.” PRO, DEFE-3, 24 December 1941.

  11. Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk, Oral History Transcript, Oral History Office, Low Library, Columbia University, p. 183.

  12. Commander Arthur H. McCollum, Far East section chief, quoted in Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton USN (Ret.), with Captain Roger Pineau U
SNR (Ret.), and John Costello, “And I Was There”: Pearl Harbor and Midway-Breaking the Secrets (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1985), p. 98. Cf. the account of the same conflict in Dorwart, Conflict of Duty, pp. 157-61.

  13. Quoted in Dorwart, ibid., p. 181; see also pp. 187-88. See Layton, “And I Was There,” pp. 20, 96-100, 142. Dorwart contends that Turner had performed creditably in intelligence-gathering in the Philippines, Japan, and along the China coast in the 1920s; p. 157. From Washington, Turner went on to direction of Pacific amphibious operations from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima; Kirk to decorated command of naval forces in Normandy invasions; Wilkinson, relieved six months after Pearl Harbor, resumed sea duty and as vice admiral commanded the Third Amphibious Force in the recapture of the Philippines.

  14. Ibid., passim. Lay ton’s is the most revealing study of ONI at the time of Pearl Harbor and Midway. Its orientation is strictly to the Pacific. For various interpretations of the Pearl Harbor attack and its causes the Library of Congress lists more than one hundred book titles.

  15. NARA, RG 457, SRH 149, Laurence F. Safford, “A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States,” March 1952; SRH 305, Safford, “History of Radio Intelligence: The Undeclared War,” November 1943. For U.S. Navy HF/DF capability in June 1942 see OA/NHC, War Diary, Eastern Sea Frontier [hereafter ESF], July 1942, p. 30.

  16. Safford, “Brief History,” p. 16. On 4 October 1940, the day he learned of Friedman’s achievement, Safford wrote: “Army did a swell job.” NARA, RG 457, SRH 355, Part I, Captain J. S. Holtwick, Jr., USN (Ret.), “Naval Security Group History to World War II,” June 1971, p. 401.

  17. This is the argument, for example, of Layton, “And I Was There,” pp. 137, 140-41, 160, 218. See Gordon W. Prange, et al., At Dawn We Slept (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981), p. 82, for a different view. On the general role of “Magic” see Ronald Lewin, The American Magic: Codes and Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982). When Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., made the posthumous award of a Distinguished Service Medal to Rochefort it was on the strength of evidence amassed in Layton’s book; Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene 4, 6 (December 1985): 4.