The following day Bormann was in the town of Königs Wusterhausen, about twelve miles southeast of the Chancellery. He had been wounded; a shell fragment had injured his foot. He managed to commandeer a vehicle that took him to a German military first aid station for medical treatment. A young, slightly wounded SS sergeant found himself seated alongside a familiar-looking, short, heavyset man wearing a leather overcoat over a uniform stripped of insignia. The young NCO said that he was on his way to the house of his uncle, a Luftwaffe pilot who had been killed in Russia, and invited Bormann to go with him. Joined by another officer, they later walked through the dark streets to the house at Fontanestrasse 9 in the Berlin Dahme-Spreewald neighborhood.
Bormann later made it safely through the British lines by following the autobahn to the outskirts of Flensburg, where he had planned to make contact with Dönitz. Waiting for him at a safe house just outside the town was “Gestapo” Müller, who had also managed to slip through the British lines. Müller told Bormann that it would be impossible to meet Dönitz, who had by now carried out unconditional surrenders in both Reims and Berlin. The plans had to be changed; Martin Bormann headed south, for the Bavarian mountains.
Chapter 16
GRUPPE SEEWOLF
THERE WAS LITTLE OPTION but to choose a submarine as the means to carry Hitler across the Atlantic to Argentina, but it was still a high-risk plan. Since the tipping point in the Battle of the Atlantic in May 1943, the balance of power in the sea war had shifted. The Kriegsmarine had lost its French U-boat bases in the summer of 1944, making the approach voyages to possible patrol areas much longer, more difficult, and more dangerous. Allied antisubmarine naval and air forces with greatly improved equipment now dominated the North Atlantic sea-lanes and the waters around most of Europe, so Allied shipping losses were a small fraction of what they had been. In 1944, U-boat loss rates had outstripped the numbers of new boats being commissioned; consequently, the remaining crews and most of their commanders were much less experienced. From January through April 1945 alone, no fewer than 139 U-boats and their crews were lost. The chances of a successful submarine escape directly from northwest Europe to South America would have been slim; however, the odds improved significantly with Spain as the point of departure.
The only available U-boat class that had the range and capacity to carry passengers to Argentina in anything approaching comfort was the Type IXC. In March 1945, nine Type IX boats sailed for the Atlantic; this was the last major U-boat operation of the war, and the first such operation since the scattering of the failed Gruppe Preussen a year previously. Two of the boats, U-530 and U-548, were directed to operate in Canadian waters, to “annoy and defy the United States.” The other seven, designated Gruppe Seewolf—U-518, U-546, U-805, U-858, U-880, U-881 and U-1235—were to form a patrol line code-named Harke (“Rake”). It is believed, however, that in mid-April three of these boats opened sealed orders that would divert them southward on a special mission.
THIS U-BOAT TYPE was designed to be able to operate far from home support facilities. As an example of their endurance, the Type IX boats briefly patrolled off the eastern United States. Some 283 were built from 1937–44.
IT WAS NOT BY CHANCE that the word “Wolf” was used in the operation’s designation. From early in his career and throughout his life Hitler used the pseudonym Wolf. Among the most successful German operational techniques during the war were the “wolf-pack tactics” (known as Rudeltaktik, literally “pack tactics”) by which the U-boats preyed on Atlantic shipping, and the submarines themselves were lauded by the Propaganda Ministry as “Grey Wolves.”
It was typical of Bormann’s meticulous planning that three separate U-boats of Gruppe Seewolf were assigned to the escape mission to provide alternatives if needed and that the mission was concealed within a conventional Atlantic operation so as not to attract Allied curiosity. The planning for this phase of the escape had begun in 1944, when Aktion Feuerland had already been under way for more than a year. On Bormann’s instructions, navy and air force assets across the Reich had been allocated to play contingent parts in the complex and developing escape plan. One such part was a misinformation phase.
IN JULY 1944, NEWS AGENCIES REPORTED that Hitler had approved a plan for an imminent attack on New York, with “robot bombs” launched from submarines in the Atlantic. On August 20, the Type IXC boat U-1229 (Cdr. Armin Zinke) was attacked and forced to surface off Newfoundland on the Canadian east coast, and among the captured survivors was a German agent, Oskar Mantel. Under interrogation by the FBI, he revealed that a wave of U-boats equipped with V-1 flying bombs was being readied to attack the United States. In November 1944, U-1230 landed two agents off the Maine coast; they were spotted coming ashore and arrested. During their interrogation, Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh (an American defector) corroborated Mantel’s story. This also seemed to be supported by the prediction in a radio broadcast by the Reich armaments minister, Albert Speer, that V-missiles “would fall on New York by February 1, 1945.”
On December 10, 1944, New York’s mayor Fiorello La Guardia broke the story to an astonished American public. On January 8, 1945, Adm. Jonas H. Ingram, commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, announced that a new wave of U-boats approaching the United States might be fitted with V-1 rockets to attack the eastern seaboard. The Nazis might launch “robots from submarine, airplane or surface ship” against targets ranging from Maine to Florida, but the U.S. Navy was fully prepared to meet the threat. Many Americans took this V-1 scare seriously. The British dismissed it as propaganda, and—with the grim experience of four years’ bombardment and some 60,000 civilian deaths behind them, about 10 percent caused by V-1s—believed that even if such attacks occurred they would not cause a great deal of damage. After all, Hitler’s Operation Polar Bear had succeeded in hitting London with 2,515 V-1s (about one-quarter of those launched), so the handful that might be fired by a few U-boats seemed negligible. On February 16, 1945, a British Admiralty cable to the U.S. Navy chief of operations, Adm. Ernest J. King, played down the threat, while conceding that it was possible for U-boats to store and launch V-1 flying bombs. (The Germans had indeed tested a submarine-towed launch platform with some success, but were nowhere near any operational capability. There was even an embryo project, Prüfstand XII, to launch the much larger V-2 ballistic missile at sea from a sealed container, which would be flooded at the base to swing it upright.) However, the planted misinformation achieved its purpose. It would focus American attention toward any detected pack of U-boats, such as the majority of Gruppe Seewolf, thus drawing USN and USAAF assets in the Atlantic eastward and northward—away from the latitudes between Spain’s southern territories and Argentina.
CENTRAL TO THE ESCAPE PLAN was the use of the Schnorkel, a combination of air intake and exhaust pipe for a submarine’s diesel engines, which became widely available from spring 1944. This allowed a U-boat to cruise (very slowly) on diesel power a few feet below the surface, while simultaneously recharging the batteries for the electric motors that had to be used for cruising at any depth. Using the Schnorkel limited a boat’s range to about 100 miles per day; it was normally raised at night, and in daylight hours the boat cruised submerged (again, very slowly) on electric power. While the theoretical ability to remain underwater twenty-four hours a day was a lifesaver for many U-boats, using the Schnorkel was noisy, difficult, and sometimes dangerous, especially in choppy seas. The low speed it imposed robbed the boats of their tactical flexibility on patrol, and remaining submerged made navigation difficult. While no transits to Argentina could have been contemplated without the concealment offered by the Schnorkel, it also worsened the U-boats’ communication problems.
Remaining submerged almost permanently made the reception of radio messages a hit-or-miss affair. Neither U-boat Command nor the British eavesdroppers at Bletchley Park near London could ever be certain when, or even if, a specific U-boat had received the orders transmitted to it. In order to receive and send anythi
ng other than long-wave signals, a U-boat had to bring its aerials above the surface, exposing the conning tower and risking radar detection. In theory, long-wave messages were detectable while submerged if the conditions were perfect, but Schnorkel boats had a poor record of picking up long-wave transmissions.
THANKS TO THE DECRYPTION EXPERTS at Bletchley Park, the Allies were well aware of the dispatch of Gruppe Seewolf in March 1945, and the relatively slow speed of Schnorkel boats—whether or not they were the rumored “V-1 boats”—gave the U.S. Navy time to organize a massive response, code-named Operation Teardrop. Convoys were rerouted further south with limited escorts, leaving most of the U.S. Navy assets free to concentrate on hunting down Gruppe Seewolf and the two associated boats. The U.S. Navy supposedly achieved devastating results, claiming seven sunk and two surrendered; however, until this day there remains uncertainty as to the extent of the attacks, and while the Kriegsmarine remained relatively ignorant about the extent of Allied naval radar capabilities—one of the best-kept secrets of World War II—the U-boat commanders were well aware of the dangers of radio location and recognized that maintaining radio silence was central to a U-boat’s chances of survival.
High-frequency direction finding—HF/DF, or “Huff-Duff,” introduced by the British Royal Navy—was a means of locating U-boats by taking cross bearings on the high-frequency radio transmissions they employed. Numerous long-range listening stations were built on many of the Atlantic’s coasts, and “Huff-Duff” was also installed on the warships of Allied escort and hunter-killer groups. Any transmission from a U-boat risked betraying its rough position, allowing the hunters to close in for more sensitive searches by radar and sonar. It was not necessary to understand what the U-boat commander was saying—figuring that out was a lengthier task for Bletchley Park; for the hunters, it was enough that the commander was making himself “visible” by transmitting.
In obedience to their orders, none of the Gruppe Seewolf boats transmitted any traffic after April 2, 1945. While U-boat Command sent occasional orders to the boats of patrol-line Harke, there is no actual evidence that any of them picked up these messages and acted on them. After that date, the Royal Navy’s submarine-trackers at Bletchley Park, and Western Approaches Command in the northwestern English port of Liverpool, were unable to verify the actual positions of the U-boats by using any form of direction-finding. All they had to work on was the information decrypted from U-boat Command’s transmissions to the boats, filtered through past experience and gut instinct, and as a result they had only a vague idea where the boats might be. The Admiralty situation report for the week ending April 2 stated that the U-boats were “likely to operate against convoys in mid-Atlantic but may tend to move along the estimated convoy routes in the general direction of the U.S. departure ports” (italics added).
THE U.S. NAVY OFFICIAL HISTORY claims that of the nine U-boats that sailed for the Atlantic in March and April 1945—seven of them forming Gruppe Seewolf—two surrendered at sea and seven were claimed as having been sunk. However, there was no real evidence to support the destruction of four of these boats. These four were some of the last unconfirmed U-boat sinkings at sea; the few losses of Type IX boats that sailed subsequently are well documented and correct. From December 1944, the U.S. Navy would employ four escort-carrier groups in Operation Teardrop—the carriers USS Mission, Croatan, Bogue, and Core, with no fewer than forty-two destroyers. This largest Allied hunter-killer operation of the whole Atlantic war was undertaken in the North Atlantic’s worst weather in forty years, with high winds and mountainous seas.
Of the seven Gruppe Seewolf submarines facing this overwhelming force, only one was a confirmed kill. U-546 (Lt. Cdr. Paul Just) left Kiel, Germany, on March 11, 1945, and joined the Harke patrol line on April 14. On April 23, aircraft from USS Bogue spotted her; the next day the Edsall-class destroyer escort USS Frederick C. Davis made contact, but Paul Just got his torpedoes off first, sinking the destroyer with the loss of 115 lives. A subsequent ten-hour hunt ended with the U-boat being hit and forced to the surface; Just and thirty-two survivors were rescued and shipped to Newfoundland. It has been confirmed that both there and after being transferred to Washington, Lt. Cdr. Just, two of his officers, and five seamen were treated with great and repeated brutality. The reason seems to have been American fears about submarine-launched V-1 attacks—grim confirmation of the success of the misinformation plan.
Lt. Cdr. Richard Bernadelli’s U-805 sailed from Bergen, Norway, on March 17 and also joined patrol line Harke on April 14, later surviving several attacks from aircraft and warships. After the breakup of Gruppe Seewolf, U-805 operated off Halifax, Nova Scotia, eventually surrendering at sea on May 9—five days after Adm. Dönitz transmitted his surrender order to all U-boats still on patrol. This crew were also interrogated about the supposed V-1 boats, but apparently were not roughly treated—after all, the war with Germany was now over.
Lt. Cdr. Thilo Bode’s U-858 left Horten in Norway on March 11 and was judged by the Royal Navy’s Submarine Tracking Room to have joined the patrol line on April 14. It seems not to have been detected before Bode surrendered at sea on May 14. Bode’s crew were also questioned about the alleged V-1 launchers.
U-881, helmed by Lt. Cdr. Dr. Karl Heinz Frischke, was late joining the line. It left Bergen belatedly on April 7 after problems with its Schnorkel. Frischke clearly did not pick up Dönitz’s surrender order of May 4, and U-881 was detected and claimed to be destroyed by the destroyer escort USS Farquar as it approached the carrier USS Mission Bay on May 6. However, no physical evidence of its destruction ever came to light.
Nor was there any proof of the destruction of U-1235, U-880, and U-518, all claimed as sunk during Operation Teardrop. In reality, they were nowhere near where the Submarine Tracking Room thought them “likely” to be.
U-1235 (First Lt. Franz Barsch) left Bergen on March 19 and was judged by the Submarine Tracking Room to have joined patrol line Harke on April 14. Officially, this boat was lost during the night of April 15–16 to an attack by the destroyers USS Stanton and Frost, which assumed from a violent underwater explosion that U-1235 had been destroyed—and that it had, indeed, been carrying V-weapons. No wreckage came to the surface, and no other evidence was produced to confirm this kill. In conformity with the orders of April 2 to all Gruppe Seewolf boats, U-1235 sent no radio messages at all during its last patrol. U-boat Command certainly had no idea that the submarine was “lost,” continuing to send it orders as late as April 22.
Lt. Cdr. Gerhard Schötzau’s U-880 had left Bergen on March 14, and the British tracking room plotted its arrival on the line exactly a month later. The U.S. Navy claimed that this boat, too, was “killed” in a joint attack by the destroyers Stanton and Frost on April 15–16, within an hour of the destruction of U-1235. “Several underwater explosions” were assumed to have destroyed the boat, but no wreckage came to the surface or was recovered. Again, U-boat Command kept transmitting messages to U-880 until April 22.
Finally, the veteran U-518, commanded by First Lt. Hans-Werner Offermann, left Kristiansand on March 12. U-518 was judged by the Admiralty to have joined the Harke patrol line on April 14. The official U.S. Navy description of the loss of this boat was similar to the descriptions of U-1235 and U-880. The Cannon-class destroyers USS Carter and Neal A. Scott claimed the kill on April 22, but again no wreckage came to the surface.
The Royal Navy’s brilliant Capt. Rodger Winn, head of the Submarine Tracking Room, highlighted the shaky nature of these claims. In a memorandum of May 20, 1945, he noted, with classic British understatement, that the outcome of these actions had been
reconsidered in an optimistic light, and as a result it is thought that possibly as many as 14 U-boats were sunk.… On this assumption it would follow since the identities of the boats in Norway are now well established that 11 remain to be accounted for. So far as is known these 11 boats are at sea but the Americans claim, possibly rightly, to have sunk 2 of them.… What t
he remaining boats are doing or intend to do is a fruitful and intriguing subject for speculation.
The same memorandum implicitly cast some doubt on the U.S. Navy’s claim to have sunk U-530, commanded by First Lt. Otto Wermuth. For a confirmed kill, that boat did indeed look surprisingly intact when it surfaced off Mar del Plata, Argentina, and surrendered to the authorities on July 10, 1945.
SEALED ORDERS MUST HAVE BEEN DELIVERED to the commanders of U-1235, U-880, and U-518 before they sailed in March 1945, with instructions for them to be opened at a specified longitude. Drafted in Berlin on Bormann’s instructions, the contents of these orders would be known only to a select few.
The specified longitude was reached before the formation of the Harke patrol line on April 14; the orders instructed the three commanders to break away from Gruppe Seewolf at a time that would allow them to rendezvous on April 28 at Fuerteventura in Spain’s Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. They were to maintain complete radio silence, while monitoring reception in the Thrasher cipher over their Siemens & Halske T43 encryption machines, and were to ignore all orders destined for the Gruppe as a whole. The British Admiralty’s daily war diary for April 15 stated that an independent Liberty-class merchant ship, SS Samoland, saw a surfaced U-boat in the approximate position where U-518 could have been. It was steering a course of 101 degrees, back across the Atlantic in the direction of the Canary Islands—1,300 miles away, and thirteen days’ submerged cruising with Schnorkel assistance.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler Page 21