93. KTB-/23, 12 April 1942.
94. The attack on Leslie is recorded in KTB-/23, 13 April 1942; BFZ, Schussmeldung U-/23, 13 April 1942, No. 5657, p. 6; OA/NHC, “Summary of Statements bv Survivors, SS ‘Leslie,’” 29 April 1942; OA/NHC, GSF, 13-14 April 1942.
95. Interview with Rafalski; see n. 87.
96. The attack on Korsholm is recorded in KTB-/23, 13 April 1942; OA/ NHC, “Summary of Statements bv Survivors, MV KORSHOLM,” 5 Mav 1942; OA/NHC, GSF, 13-14 April 1942. In May the Florida waters would be visited successfully by two commanders mentioned previously in this narrative, Bleichrodt (U-/09) and Cremer (U-333), as well as by Reinhard “Teddy” Suhren (V-564), whose four Florida sinkings would help win him Diamonds to his Oak Leaves.
97. KTB-/23, 13 April 1942.
98. Ibid.
13. Final Reckoning
1. Farago, The Tenth Fleet, pp. 69-70. For his part, Winston Churchill was also not above creating and inflating U-boat sinkings; see William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, volume 2, Alone, 1932-1940 (Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), pp. 565, 574.
2. Dönitz is quoted in Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 157. See Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 77th Congress Second Session, vol. 88, part 4, May 25, 1942, to June 30, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942), p. 5332, 30 April 1942.
3. See, e.g., Eugene Rachlis, They Came to Kill: The Story of Eight Nazi Saboteurs in America (New York: Random House, 1961); Leon O. Prior, “Nazi Invasion of Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly (October 1970), pp. 129—39.
4. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 127.
5. OA/NHC, “War Record of the Fifth Naval District, 1942,” pp. 12-14, 460.
6. OA/NHC, “War Diary of the Operational Intelligence Branch of the District Intelligence Office, Fifth Naval District,” pp. 14-17.
7. Roper’s attack on U-S5 is described in ESF, April 1942, pp. 320-23. The trawler Bedfordshire would be sunk by U-55Son 11 May; Royal Navy crews had remained on board the trawlers despite Admiral King’s intention to replace them with USN personnel.
8. Ibid., May 1942, chapter 3, pp. 8-14. A fuller account of the sinking, with U-352 crew list and record of interrogations, is given in OA/NHC, Microfilm, NRS 1973-106, “U-352 Sunk 9 May 1942.”
9. An account of the desperate plight of V-701′s survivors is given in ESF, July 1942, chapter 9.
10. An additional boat, U-/66, would be sunk in U.S. waters during the remainder of 1942. On 1 August a Coast Guard aircraft from Houma, Louisiana, made the kill in the Gulf of Mexico. As late as 4 September one last German boat, U-171, was operating in the Gulf. It had entered the Gulf sometime before 26 July when it sank its first vessel off the Mississippi. On its return through the Bay of Biscay it struck a mine and sank on 9 October.
11. Abbazia describes the low readiness state of ASW crews that was noted in prewar maneuvers; Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy, pp. 18-21. For ASW advances see ESF, May 1942, chapter 2.
12. NHC, Rare Books, United States Naval Administrative History No. 138, Manuscript, “Commander in Chief, U.S.Atlantic Fleet,” vol. 1 (bound in 2 vols.), 1946, pp. 279-80.
13. Ibid., pp. 290-91.
14. ESF, Februarv 1942, p. 142.
15. Ibid., pp. 141, 144-45.
16. Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 2, p. 97; Love, “King,” in Love, ed., Chiefs of Naval Operation, p. 154.
17. Terraine, U-Boat Wars, p. 413. Terraine demonstrates that in this respect the U.S. Navy ignored the wisdom of one of its own, Rear Admiral William Sowden Sims, USN, who had persuaded Britain to adopt the convoy for antisubmarine warfare in World War I; pp. 92, 413. Cf. Rear Admiral William Sowden Sims, U.S. Navy, The Victory at Sea (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1921), chapter 3, “The Adoption of the Convoy,” pp. 88-117. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 200, laid responsibility for the original lack of small craft solely at the feet of the admirals: “Blame cannot justly be imputed to Congress, for Congress had never been asked to provide a fleet of subchasers and small escort vessels; nor to the people at large, because they looked to the Navy for leadership. Nor can it be shifted to President Roosevelt, who on sundry occasions prompted the Bureau of Ships and the General Board of the Navy to adopt a small craft program; …” The 1940 volume of James about German U-boats in World War I, German Subs in Yankee Waters, pointedly warned that Germany again could send a fleet of U-boats to U.S. shores at the outbreak of a war, and added: “Those who cry for peace when there is no peace and bemoan the enormous expenditures for capital ships to be used offensively, could have little grievance toward a naval program that provided for the construction of fleets of destroyers, subchasers, patrol boats and mine-sweepers, which could be used solely for defensive purposes,” p. 187.
18. Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 2, p. 97.
19. John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare (New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1989), pp. 218-19. Love, “King,” in Love, ed., Chiefs of Naval Operation noted that independently steaming merchantmen made faster time than weakly escorted convoys could have made in the months of January and following; hence, he theorized, “premature introduction of coastal convoys in 1942 would have reduced gross carrying capacity far beyond the tonnage losses inflicted in the spring by the U-boats” (p. 154 and n. 46). Yet he went on to state that the coastal convoy system, once instituted using small patrol craft, “was an immediate success” (pp. 154-55). Love attributed the theory’s origin to King, but gave no citation for the source. The midshipman on whose statistics Love relied for his “proof” of King’s theory made no use of these statistics himself when, three years later, he published his own study of the merchantmen losses: Lieut, (jg) Thomas J. Belke USN, “Roll of Drums,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings (April 1983), pp. 59-64.
20. ESF, March 1942, pp. 307, 311, 313.
21. Ibid., March 1942, pp. 249-53.
22. Ibid., May 1942, chapter 4; June 1942, chapters 1,3; Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 252-65.
23. ESF, June 1942, chapter 2.
24. KTB-BdU, 19 July 1942. Anticipating these developments, the ESF war diary for June expressed its “hope that the most disastrous period of submarine warfare on this coast is now over”; chapter 1, p. 6, June 1942. Ironically, Dönitz’s withdrawal occurred in a period when he was receiving thirty new boats on operational status per month, a new high, and all the more striking an increase in view of the fact that he had lost only twenty-six boats in the previous six months; Terraine, U-Boat Wars, p. 459.
25. King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, p. 457.
26. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the United States Naval Operations in World War Two, vol. 3, Revised Edition, The Rising Sun in the Pacific (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954), p. 132; Edward L. Beach, Captain, USN (Ret.), The United States Navv: 200 Years (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986), p. 447; Layton, “And! Was There,” pp. 498, 507. Admiral of the Fleet the Lord Hill-Norton and John Dekker, Sea Power (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1982), pp. 51-52. Admiral Nimitz told Gordon W. Prange: “It was God’s mercy that our fleet was in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941”; Prange et al., Miracle at Midway (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982), p. 9.
27. Quoted in King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, pp. 455-56. The original of Marshall’s memorandum can be found in the George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia, Marshall Papers, Box 73, Folder 12, “King, Ernest J. 1942 May-1942 August,” 19 June 1942.
28. Ibid., p. 456. King’s former deputy chief of staff Admiral Richards. Edwards wrote to King on 19 November 1951: “I like the antisubmarine chapter of your book, particularly the inclusion of your correspondence with Marshall”; LC, King Papers, Container 31.
29. King, U.S. Navy at War, p. 80.
30. Robert H. Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981), p. 50. Upon rereading this entry after the war Eisenhower commented: “In justice I would say that
all through the war, whenever I called on him for assistance, he supported me fully and instantly”; ibid., p. 403.
31. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the United States Naval Operations in World War Two, vol. 10, The Atlantic Battle Won, May 1943-May 1945 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), p. 32, n. 3; King and Whitehall, Fleet Admiral King, pp. 445-48.
32. KTB-BdU, 21 August 1942. Cf. Middlebrook, Convoy, pp. 310-15; Roskill, War at Sea, vol. 2, pp. 362-64; Costello and Hughes, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 240-41; Dan van der Vat, The Atlantic Campaign: World War H’s Great Struggle at Sea (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), p. 326.
33. Morison, Atlantic Battle Won, p. 362 and n. 21.
34. Simpson III, Harold R. Stark, pp. 150-51.
35. Richard M. Leighton, “OVERLORD versus the Mediterranean at the Cairo-Tehran Conferences (1943),” Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959), p. 185 and n. 2.
36. Hugh P. Willmott, Sea Warfare: Weapons, Tactics, and Strategy (Strettington, Chichester, England: A. Bird, 1981), cited in Keegan, Price of Admiralty, p. 210.
37. Middlebrook, Convov, pp. 302-4 and passim.
38. Roskill, War At Sea, vol. 2, pp. 367, 371.
39. Doenitz, Memoirs, p. 341.
40. Costello and Hughes, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 302.
41. Morison, Atlantic Battle Won, p. 361.
42. NARA, RG 457, Box No. 15, K. A. Knowles, “Memorandum for the Director of Naval History [3 pp.],” 23 October 1945.
43. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. xiii.
44. Hinslev, British Intelligence, vol. 2, p. 549.
45. KTB-/2J, 14 April 1942.
46. Ibid., 17 April 1942.
47. OA/NHC, War Record of the Fifth Naval District, 1942, “S/S Alcoa Guide Shelled and Sunk, April 16, 1942”; ESF, Enemy Action Diary, 16, 19 April 1942; NARA, RG 38, CNO, Armed Guard Files, “Alcoa Guide” [no armed guard was aboard]; Moore, A Careless Word, “SS Alcoa Guide,” n.p. When he read this survivor’s account in the present manuscript Hardegen commented: “It was terrible for me to read the fate of Souza and his comrades.” Hardegen to the writer, Bremen-Oberneuland, West Germany, 20 September 1989.
48. U-/07(Kptlt. Harald Gelhaus) would sink six ships on this patrol in the Caribbean, Gulf, and mid-Atlantic; Rohwer, Axis Submarine Successes, pp. 99-106.
49. KTB-/23, p. 38, undated.
50. KTB-/23, Besondere Erfahrungen, pp. 36-37.
51. Hardegen interviews with the writer. The minutes of Hitler’s conference with Grossadmiral Raeder at Rastenburg on 13-14 May 1942, record: “The Fuehrer expresses his belief that it is impossible to build up a naval air force during the war.” Fuehrer Conferences on Matters Dealing with the German Navy, 1941-1942, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Naval Intelligence, Navy Department, 1947), entries of 13, 14, and 16 May 1942.
52. Reinhard and Barbara Hardegen’s children, all still living at the date of this writing, are: Klaus-Reinhard, born 5 April 1939; Jörg, born 28 January 1941; Ingeborg, born 31 January 1944; and Detlev, born 23 October 1945. Barbara, maiden name Petersen, was born in Kiel on 18 October 1915.
Afterword
1. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963), pp. 71-75.
2. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962), pp. 386-96; Layton, And I Was There, passim.
3. There is not sufficient evidence for deciding to what extent in January King’s mind was fixed on Jutland-type fleet actions that he expected in the Pacific, or to what measure he may have forgotten that one of the principal functions of a navy is to protect the nation’s trade and communications. Fifteen years afterward Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war during the entire conflict, complained about King’s priorities: “With rare exceptions antisubmarine warfare received only the partial attention of the first-rate officers, while actual operations were left to commanders not always chosen from the top drawer”; Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), p. 515. This contention was rebutted “in toto” as a “slur” by Navy loyalist Morison in Atlantic Battle Won, p. 30. King was promoted to the five-star rank of fleet admiral in December 1944.
4. Simpson, Stark, p. 268.
5. Rebecca West, A Train of Powder (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 49.
6. Winston Churchill, Hinge of Fate, p. 125.
7. Mikkelsen, Familiebladet Hjemmet, 5 January 1982, pp. 28 ff.
8. Emory Holloway, ed., Inclusive Edition, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962), pp. 221-22.
APPENDIX C Operation of the Schlüssel M (Enigma) Machine
Operation of the three-rotor Schlüssel M is described in F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 2, pp. 163, 170, 487; Lewin, Ultra Goes to War, pp. 31-33, 206-7; Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra, pp. 26-33, 54-55; Rohwer, Convoy Battles, pp. 232-35; Ralph Bennett, Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign 1944-45 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979), pp. 2-5; Beesly, Special Intelligence, pp. 64-68; and (the most technical account) Gordon Welchman, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982), pp. 38-52. The Schlüssel M, commonly called in English language literature the “Enigma M” machine, was a cryptographic device of German invention and manufacture, dating from a design by Dr. Arthur Scherbius in 1923. Its development is recounted in Lewin, Ultra Goes to War, pp. 25 ff.
Operation Drumbeat Page 67