Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  18. Prange, At Dawn We Slept, p. 84.

  19. Quoted in Safford, “Brief History,” p. 16, with the comment that, while “the White House and State Department used this information [intelligence] with consummate skill,” “the General Staff and Naval Operations [failed] to profit from the same information.” It should be acknowledged that Safford was an interested party and had his own case to make. The same qualification should be placed on other in-house histories in the NARA SRH series.

  20. NARA, RG 457, SRH-145, Collection of Memoranda on Operations of SIS, Intercept Activities and Dissemination, 1942-1945; Captain Abraham Sinkov and First Lieutenant Leo Rosen, both of U.S. Army Signal Corps, to Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, “Report of Technical Mission to England,” 11 April 1941. The naval members of the team were Lieutenant Robert H. Weeks and Ensign Prescott H. Currier. Another account of this research trip, based on an interview with Sinkov, is given in Thomas Parrish, The Ultra Americans: The U.S. Role in Breaking the Nazi Codes (New York: Stein and Day, Publishers, 1986), pp. 61-66. Parrish errs in stating that the U.S. team was “not given any hardware to take back home in return for the Purple machine,” p. 65. Hinsley, who seems not to have been aware of the Sinkov-Rosen trip or of the Godfrey mission to Kirk’s ONI, states that Britain was reluctant to share Enigma secrets with Washington at that time; British Intelligence, vol. 2, p. 55. Hinsley’s asseveration is repeated by Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 214-15.

  21. The originals of these are preserved in bound volumes in the OA/ NHC. The ESF war diary acknowledged that, “The Admiralty was able to furnish daily reports of submarine movements to the Navy Department in Washington even before our entry into the war…. Shortly after the Axis declared war on the United States, British submarine tracking enabled Corn-inch to send warnings of probable submarine activity off the eastern coast of the United States.” ESF, July 1942, p. 27. Winn and Beesly sent out a daily noontime signal, “U-Boat Situation,” which in 1941 and 1942 “presented a fairly accurate representation of our plot in the Room”; Beesly to the writer, Lymington, 13 July 1986. The first notice of the receipt of U-boat positions at Washington appears on the USN Daily Situation Map of 25 August, OA/NHC, “Submarine Position as Estimated by Admiralty for 24 Aug. ‘41.” From at least August forward Ultra could be employed by the U.S. Navy to route convoys around known U-boat rakes. Thus, it could be argued, President Roosevelt by these means avoided rather than invited incidents. Again, one might argue that Roosevelt could safely push the Kriegsmarine in July (by King’s belligerent orders to the Atlantic Fleet) because he knew from other Ultra sources that Hitler did not want war with the United States at a time when his attention was absorbed in the Russian campaign. The writer has no hard evidence to support either of these speculations, however.

  22. An account of Washington in this period is given in David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 91.

  23. Quoted in [Admiral] Ernest Joseph King Papers [hereafter King Papers], Container 35, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress [hereafter LC].

  24. NARA, RG 80, (Records of the CNO) Headquarters COMINCH 1942, Box 59, Rear Admiral John H. Towers [Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics] to Chief of Naval Operations, 9 December 1941.

  25. ESF, 29 December 1941; Januarv 1942, p. 61.

  26. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 245, Op-20-WP, 5 December 1941. The charge of Communist was made on the slim grounds that merchant operators belonged to the American Communication Association, identified by the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas, as “more predominantly communistic than any other union.”

  27. See chapter 3.

  28. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 115-16.

  29. Quoted in Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987), p. 155.

  30. Quoted in Layton, “And I Was There,” p. 355. King’s reputation as a hard drinker and womanizer, which must have concerned FDR, is cited in Robert William Love, Jr., “Ernest Joseph King, 26 March 1942-15 December 1945,” in Love, ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operation (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1980), p. 140.

  31. LC, King Papers, Container 8, Colonel, U.S.A. (Ret.), A. T. “Mac-Duff” Rich to King, 11 December 1941.

  32. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 41.

  33. LC, King Papers, Container 35, undated; B. Mitchell Simpson III, Admiral Harold R. Stark: Architect of Victory, 1939-1945 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 126. The usual published sources for King are: Thomas B. Buell, Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980); Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1952); and Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, U.S. Navy at War, 1941-1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy (Washington, D.C.: United States Navy Department, 1946).

  34. Layton, “And ¡Was There,” p. 367; Dorwart, Conflict of Duty, p. 193.

  35. Buell, Master of Sea Power, p. 175. Cf. ESF, July 1942, p. 28. Leighton went on to serve as Commandant Eighth Naval District, New Orleans, and was promoted to rear admiral on 27 June 1942. He died on 23 November 1943.

  36. Buell, Master of Sea Power, pp. 175-76.

  37. Dorwart, Conflict of Duty, pp. 189-92. Buell mentions the “animosity between the operational planners and the intelligence specialists”; Master of Sea Power, p. 175; and he concedes, “The intelligence staff seemed particularly vulnerable”; p. 231. Layton contends, “This war within a war raged on through the first half of 1942”; “And I Was There,” p. 510.

  38. LC, King Papers, Container 35, “History of Headquarters, COMINCH.”

  39. ESF, December 1941, p. 5.

  40. Ibid., p. 5.

  41. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 222, North Atlantic Naval Coastal Frontier Force Operation Order No. 5-41, 30 October 1941.

  42. NARA, RG 80, Box 50, Sec Nav/CNO Secret Correspondence, “Army and Navy Joint Control and Information Center,” 10 July 1941. The hull (Hull “A”) of Germany’s first planned carrier, Graf Zeppelin, was launched on 8 December 1938 but the vessel was never completed.

  43. After the war Thompson went on to a distinguished academic career at Princeton, which included authorship of a much-noted three-volume biography of Robert Frost. Morison, a second cousin once removed of Samuel Eliot Morison, who had interrupted his graduate education to receive his Navy commission, also went on to a distinguished career as a teacher and author at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Killian Professor of Humanities. He makes his home in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he kindly granted an interview to the writer on 17 July 1989.

  44. As late as July 1942, ESF complained toCOMINCH about the length of time, two to four hours, it was taking to decipher each day’s U-boat Estimate in the British Ultra code. Why, it asked, could the Estimate not be transmitted by Main Navy to ESF in the U.S. Mark IIECM cipher which would be handled “in about twenty minutes”? A COMINCH staffer replied that [ESF’s suggestion] “will not be done for reasons which I do not feel free to discuss”; ESF, July 1942, p. 29.

  45. LC, King Papers, Container 8, King to Andrews, USS Augusta, 17 November 1941.

  46. LC, King Papers, Container 8, Andrews to King, New York City, 19 November 1941.

  47. LC, King Papers, Container 8, King to Andrews, USS Augusta, 21 November 1941.

  48. Quoted in Larrabee, Commander in Chief, p. 177.

  49. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 208.

  50. Alexander W. Moffat, Captain USNR (Ret.), A Navy Maverick Comes of Age, 1939-1945 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), pp. 48-50.

  51. ESF, 22 December 1941.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Commander Walter Karig, USNR, et al., Battle Report: The Atlantic War (New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, Inc., 1946), p. 91.

  54. NARA, RG 38, COMINCH, Box 110, Andrews to King, 20 May 1942.

  55. NARA, RG 38, COMINCH, Box 110, Andrews to King, 27 January 1942.

  56. ESF, 31 January 1942.

  57. Farago, Tenth Fleet, p. 75. A battle of battleships and cruisers, in the Jutland tradition, would not occur until the engagement of U.S. and Japanese fleets at Surigao Strait in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, 24-25 October 1944, in which four battleships disabled at Pearl Harbor took part: California, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Maryland.

  58. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt, Washington, 18 March 1942, vol. 1, pp. 421-22. Historian Morison quotes one naval officer: “We were just plugging along to find out what sort of antisubmarine craft we wanted in case we needed them, and then all of a sudden, by God, we were in the war!” Battle of the Atlantic, p. 230.

  59. Jochen Brennecke, The Hunters and the Hunted (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1957), pp. 10-12; also Mallmann Showeil, German Navv in World War II, p. 34.

  60. LC, King Papers, Container 35, undated but after 1943.

  61. King, U.S. Navy at War, p. 80.

  62. See chapter 12 notes.

  63. Ibid.

  64. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 241, Stark to Rear Admiral William T. Tarrant, Commandant, First Naval District, 3 October 1940. The same bias against small craft surfaced forty-seven years later in 1987 when, owing to their disdain for small vessels as lacking prestige, glamour, and career advantage, another generation of admirals was embarrassed to find itself without minesweepers (seventy-six to three-hundred-forty-one feet) when those craft were desperately needed to protect U.S. and other tankers traversing the Persian Gulf.

  65. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 51, unsigned “Memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations,” 3 June 1941.

  66. ESF, December 1941, pp. 17-18.

  67. Ibid., March 1942, p. 9, Stark to Tarrant, 12 February 1942.

  68. NHC Library, CINCLANT Administrative History No. 138, MS, “Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet,” vol. 1, 1946, pp. 279-80.

  69. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 110, Vice Chief of Naval Operations [Rear Admiral Frederick J. Home] to Naval Districts, 22 April 1942.

  70. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 110, King to Home, 3 May 1942.

  71. ESF, July 1942, “Coastal Picket Operation Plan No. 11-42.”

  72. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 230. Sixteen months after war began the ESF officers would readily acknowledge, “When the U-boats hit our coast in January we were caught with our pants down through lack of antisubmarine vessels.” Captain W. A. S. Macklin, quoted in Morison, ibid., p. 254. Morison suggests: “Small craft were neglected because, it was believed, they could be improvised and rapidly produced in quantities at small shipbuilding yards. But if the President’s wishes and recommendations had been followed, the Navy would have been better prepared to meet the U-boats”; ibid., p. 230. When asked in 1938 his opinion of Roosevelt’s proposals for production and use of the 110-foot SC the then CNO Admiral William D. Leahy answered, “They weren’t worth a damn.” Robert C. Albion, “Makers of Naval Policy, 1798-1947” (ms. Harvard University Library, 1950), cited in Thomas B. Buell, et al., The Second World War: Europe and the Mediterranean (United States Military Academy; Wayne, N.J.: Avery Publishing Group, Inc., 1984), p. 217.

  73. ESF.31 January 1942. Cf. ibid., Andrews to King, New York City, 14 January 1942.

  74. Ibid., December 1941, p. 15.

  75. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 51, Stark to CINCLANT and Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), 22 December 1941.

  76. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, volume 1, Plans and Early Operations, January 1939 to August 1942 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 68.

  77. ESF, Andrews to King, 14 January 1942.

  78. ESF, December 1941, p. 17.

  79. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 245, Op-20-WP/an, 5 December 1941.

  80. Abbazia, Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy, p. 91.

  81. Radio Days, a Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Production, written and directed by Woody Allen. Copyright 1987 by Orion Pictures Corporation.

  82. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 50, Commandant U.S. Coast Guard to All District Commanders, Washington, D.C., 26 October 1940.

  83. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 50, “Air Raid Defense Bill,” 11 September 1940.

  84. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 51, Third Naval District Illumination Control Plan, 24 January 1941.

  85. OA/NHC, ESF, “Suspension of Dimout Regulations,” November 1943, pp. 28-29.

  86. Ibid., p. 29.

  87. The Montreal Daily Star, 31 January 1940, p. 1. The writer is grateful to Michael L. Hadley for a copy of this newspaper page.

  88. ESF, January 1942, p. 64.

  89. Ibid., January 1942, pp. 65-66.

  90. NARA, RG 80, COMINCH, Box 243, “Brief Joint Estimate of the Military Situation of the Associated Powers,” 20 December 1941, p. 9.

  91. WNRC, Box 108, CINCLANT, King to CNO Stark, U.S.S. Augusta, Flagship, undated but after 14 December referred to in the message and before 30 December when King left Augusta to become COMINCH.

  92. Vice Admiral Sir Arthur Hezlet, The Electron and Sea Power (London: Peter Davies, 1975), p. 212.

  93. The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 20: The War. A Fleet in Being (New York: AMS Press, 1970), p. 211.

  94. OA/NHC, Command File World War II, Daily Location of Ships and Aircraft, 13 January 1942. By ports the DDs were stationed as follows: At Casco Bay—Ludlow, Lansdale, Ingraham, and Hilary P. Jones; at Boston—Monssen, Charles F. Hughes, Lea, Dupont, Bernadou, MacLeish, Gwin, Dallas, Upshur, Cleaves, and Kearny; at Newport, Rhode Island—Ellyson and Roe; at New York—Livermore and Bristol; at Norfolk—O ‘Brien, Mustin, Trippe, Wain-wright, Mayrant, and Rowan. The list does not include three additional DDs at Charleston (Jouetl, Somers, Moffett); thirteen submarines at New London, Connecticut, three at Philadelphia; three battleships (Texas at New York, Idaho and New York at Norfolk); six cruisers (four at New York, two at Norfolk); or the carrier Wasp at Norfolk, which was thought effective enough as a deterrent that she was dispatched the next day (14 January) on antisubmarine escort-of-convoy (A-10) but far from the present danger (see chapter 8). Destroyers bore names of distinguished officers and enlisted men of the Navy and Marine Corps, of secretaries of the Navy, and of a few civilians who helped the Navy. Where two or more bore the same surname first names and initials were used and places in the alphabetical listing of a class were determined by the first names.

  95. OA/NHC, Box CINCLANT (Oct 1941-Dec 1942), Operation Plan 8-41, Serial 00311, 20 December 1941.

  7. Beat on the Kettledrum

  1. All operations of U-123 described in this chapter are drawn from the KTB, the Schussmeldungen (shooting reports), Hardegen’s “Auf Gefechtsstationen!”, Kaeding’s chart overlays from the Bundesarchiv/ Militärchiv in Freiburg; and from interviews with the commander and crew. Technical details are drawn from: OA/NHC, U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Europe, Technical Report No. 307-45, “Living Conditions and Accommodations Aboard German Submarines,” August 1945; OA/NHC, U.S. Naval Technical Mission in Europe, Technical Report No. 303-45, “Submarine Main Propulsion Equipment and Arrangement,” August 1945; also, from Rössler, The U-Boat, passim; and The Story of the U-505 (Chicago: Museum of Science and Industry, 1981), pp. 20-21. The dialogue has been reconstructed by the present writer.

  2. Hardegen, “Auf Gefechtsstationen.’”, p. 93.

  3. NARA, RG 457, SRMN-054 (Part 2), OP-20-GI, Special Studies Relating to U-boat Activity, 1943-1945, pp. 33-46. Again, the dialogue has been reconstructed by the present writer.

  4. This decrypt is found both in PRO, DEFE-3, “Intelligence from Enemy Radio Communications 1939-1945” [hereafter DEFE-3] 10 January 1942, and in NARA, RG 457 (National Security Agency), “German Navy/ U-Boat Messages Translations and Summaries,” Box No. 7, SRGN 5514-6196, 9 January 1942. The KTB-BdU, under date 9 January, provide
s the actual grid identifiers represented on the U-boat charts by Roman numerals: “Distribution of attack areas off the American coast: U-66—CA 79 and 87 and DC 12-13; U-123-CA 28, 29, 52, 53; U-125-CA 38, 39, 62, 63; U-109-area between points BA9633-CB 1577-BB 7355-BB 8575; U-130-BB51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58.” A key to these assignments is given in the KTB-BdU two days later, where the “enemy situation” reports include “heavy single ship movements” off U.S. coasts and “at the assembly points on the Halifax-Sydney Line.”.

  5. The dialogue of Winn and Beesly has been reconstructed from the interview with Beesly; also from PRO, DEFE-3, 10 January 1942; PRO, ADM, 223/15, No. O.I.C./S.I./57, U/Boat Situation, Week ending 12 January 1942; KTB-BdU, 10-11 January 1942; J. RohwerandG. Hummelchen, trans. Derek Masters, Chronology of the War At Sea, 1939-1945, volume 1: 1939-1942 (New York: Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1972), pp. 177 ff.; Rohwer, Ax/5 Submarine Successes, p. 73; and the London Times, 10 January 1942. The codeword “Ziethen” appeared jointly with “Paukenschlag” in an Enigma signal from BdU intercepted on 7 January: “To ‘Ziethen’ and ‘Paukenschlag’ Groups. Offizier Cypher. Remember these new regulations concerning offensive action. Merchant vessels are considered to be darkened even when, although travelling with steaming lights showing, neutral markings are not clearly lit up.” PRO, DEFE-3, 7 January 1942.

  6. Hadley, U-Boats Against Canada, pp. 58-59.

  7. Abbazia, Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy, pp. 379-80.

  8. Hardegen, “Auf Gefechtsstationen!”, p. 172. When this stormline reached Iceland on 11-17 January, it carried winds as high as 120 knots. Much damage was done to U.S. aircraft and to ships, a number of which, dragging anchors, collided with each other in the harbor. Remembered in the Navy as “the famous blow,” the storm was the worst in Iceland since 1925. NHC Library, Administrative History No. 138, p. 276.