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CHAPTER 1
THE LION
Karl Dönitz was the son of a Prussian family living in the Berlin suburb of Grünau. He was born in December 1891 and took after his father — instilled with the qualities required and expected in an officer of the Imperial German Navy, which he joined as a cadet when he was eighteen. Dutiful, patriotic, loyal and efficient in his work, the young Dönitz was soon rewarded for his enthusiastic, diligent and dedicated performance, with a commission as a naval officer.
From the beginning of the First World War, Dönitz served in a naval aviation squadron as an air observer, but by 1916 he had developed an intense interest in submarines, leading to his transferring to the Navy's U-boat arm and, by March 1918, advancing to command of UB-68. In October of that year, while submerged in the Mediterranean near the Sicilian coast, his submarine developed a malfunction which caused it to involuntarily surface. The boat emerged among a British convoy of merchant vessels being shepherded by several warship escorts which immediately sank it. Dönitz and most of his crew were rescued, captured and interned. He would spend the next ten months in a remote Scottish prisoner of war camp. Finally, he was declared mentally unsound and was invalided back to Germany, having undoubtedly pretended the condition.
A clever tactician, Dönitz's enthusiasm for the submarine weapon remained strong and he had spent much of his confinement working on plans for the development and deployment of the rudel or wolfpack battle technique — a concept he had learned about during the war — in which a group of U-boats operated together in a coordinated attack. The theory had long fascinated him, and inspired him to follow it to fruition. The rudeltaktik had been devised during World War One as a new and unique method of attack, grouping several submarines into a "wolfpack" to overwhelm the protective warship escorts of an enemy convoy. The method had proven difficult to implement in that war due to limitations in the capabilities of the available radios. Since then, however, the Germans had developed a range of ultra-high frequency transmitters which they believed would place their radio communications beyond the ability of the enemy to jam them. This, together with the highly capable Enigma cipher machine, made the Germans feel secure about their U-boat capabilities. Dönitz also supported the concept of attacking convoys at night from the surface or near the surface, minimising the ability of the British sonar to detect the U-boats.
From the postwar years of the 1920s, through the 1930s, Karl Dönitz promoted the values and capabilities of the U-boats, to all who would listen within the German Navy and elsewhere. In September 1933, he was made a Fregattenkapitän (full commander) and the following year was given command of the cruiser Emden, which was then operating a training ship.
In 1935, as a result of a new Anglo-German Naval Treaty revising some of the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Conference Treaty, Germany was permitted to resume limited production of submarines, and the then German Navy Commander-in-Chief, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, placed Dönitz in charge of rebuilding the Kriegsmarine U-boat arm. Dönitz quickly went to work, dedicating himself to planning the new force around his dream rudeltaktik, based on his firm belief that Germany's primary target in a future conflict would be the vital overseas supply lines, the lifelines providing food, fuel, and other resources to Britain from around the world. He reasoned that his U-boats were the only means for Germany to conduct a war on such trade in which the British enemy would transport its supplies by ships in convoy that were escorted and protected by warships. They were accustomed to the threat of lone U-boats, but he believed intensely in the capability of his new wolfpacks to elude the convoy protection and destroy the convoy supply ships. His theory called for a fleet of at least 300 submarines ... fast, medium size, highly manoeuvrable boats of which, 100 would be on-station in the high seas, a further hundred would be either on the way to the convoys or on the way home after their patrols, and the final hundred would be back at base undergoing servicing and being reequipped.
By November 1937, Dönitz was lobbying agressively for the conversion of the German fleet to a force composed almost entirely of U-boats. His philosophy of attack was to strike only at merchant vessels, relatively soft targets. He pointed out that, for example, destroying the British oil tanker fleet would deny the Royal Navy the supplies it needed to power its ships, thus depleting its capability and eliminating it as a threat at sea.
The boat Dönitz preferred for the task was the Type VII, a vessel of about 750 tons displacement and equipped with five torpedo tubes. It was suitable for mid-Atlantic operations, unlike larger U-boats, or the smaller, 250-ton boats whose usefulness was limited to activity in the Baltic or the North Sea. The German head of state, Adolf Hitler, had a different view about preparedness for battle at sea, however. Politically, he believed that the British and the French would not go to war with Germany unless their global wealth was threatened. He projected 1945 as the date by which his navy and Ubootwaffe would have to be ready for the sort of submarine campaign that Dönitz had in mind.
Dönitz, felt that he could work with the Nazi regime if they could avenge the humiliation of Germany in the Versailles Treaty at the end of the First World War, and ultimately bring victory to the German Fatherland. "I am a firm adherent of the idea of ideological education. For what is it in the main? Doing his duty is a matter of course for the soldier. But the whole importance, the whole weight of duty done, are only present when the heart and spiritual conviction have a voice in the matter. The result of duty done is then quite different to what it would be if I only carried out my task literally, obediently, and faithfully. It is therefore necessary for the soldier to support the execution of his duty with all his mental, all his spiritual energy, and for this his conviction, his ideology are indispensable. It is therefore necessary for us to train the soldier uniformly, comprehensively, that he may be adjusted ideologically to our Germany. Every dualism, every dissension in this connection, or every divergence, or unpreparedness, imply a weakness in all circumstances. He in whom this grows and thrives in unison is superior to the other. Then indeed the whole importance, the whole weight of his conviction comes into play. It is also nonsense to say that the soldier or the officer must have no politics. The soldier embodies the state in which he lives; he is the representative, the articulate exponent of this state. He must therefore stand with his whole weight behind this state. We must travel this road from our deepest conviction. The Russian travels along it. We can only maintain ourselves in this war if we take part in it with holy zeal, with all our fanaticism."
He continued preparations for the possible employment of his wolfpacks by sending a selection of his best young U-boat commanders on an exercise patrol around the Shetland Islands and down to the French Atlantic coast.
With the outbreak of war in 1939, Grossadmiral Raeder assigned Dönitz the task of blockading all of Britain's UK ports. Dönitz undertook the job but was soon in the position of having to persuade Raeder of the extreme vulnerability of the U-boats to attacks by land-based aircraft in such actions, and that his boats would be far better deployed out in the Atlantic, cutting Britain's supply lifelines, and beyond reach of the aircraft. At that time, Dönitz could only muster twenty-two ocean-going submarines, with seldom more than six on station at any given point in the six months after he was given the task. The wolfpack concept would have to wait.
His crews wanted to please the Lion, as they referred to Dönitz, and despite their limited numbers, managed to locate and sink more than 300,000 tons of British merchant shipping between January and April 1940, for the loss of thirteen U-boats. The German shipyards were unable at this stage to keep pace with replacement of the submarine losses. But Dönitz, who was now BdU or Befehlshaber der U-boote, Commander-in-Chief, Submarines, was heartened by the French surrender which gave him access to key harbours on the Bay of Biscay coast and the Channel coast where slave labourers employed by the Todt organisation built several bomb-proof U-boat pen shelters. Their locations virtually halved the transit time for his boats to their Atlantic action stations.
With the development of the Biscay pens, results improved dramatically for Dönitz's Atlantic raiders. Between June and October — a period known among the Ubootwaffe as die glückliche Zeit, the happy time, the U-boats sank 274 British merchant ships for a total tonnage of nearly 1,400,000, with just six U-boats lost. The losses for Britain were significant.
In the next two years of war, the German Minister of Munitions Albert Speer managed to produce prefabricated parts in dispersed factories, enabling much faster production of U-boats. At the beginning of 1942, ninety-one U-boats had become operational, with 212 being operational by the end of the year. By April of 1943, 240 were operational. A total tonnage of more than two million was sunk (432 merchant vessels) in 1941. A combined tonnage total of more than 4,300,000 resulted for the year when the overall total of 1,299 merchant ships sunk was considered. It included sinkings caused by aircraft, surface ships, and mine fields.
Dönitz was forbidden by Hitler to act against the United States, which was providing all possible aid to Britain at that time, in spite of the U.S. position of neutrality in the war. Then, on 1 September 1941, the U.S. Navy Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Ernest King, ordered American warships to join with the British and Canadians in convoy escort duty. In the next few days the USS Greer, a destroyer bound for Iceland, received a warning from an R.A.F. aircraft that a U-boat was near the American warship. What followed was a three-hour chase by the destroyer, with depth-charges and torpedoes exchanged and nothing conclusive resulting. Dönitz believed that the Greer had taken the offensive, while President Roosevelt told the U.S. public that the U-boat commander had been guilty of piracy.
With America's entry into the war on 7 December, Dönitz's pent-up anger at the U.S. was released and he ordered five long-range Type IX U-boats and sixteen widely separated Type VIIs on the attack against American vessels. He called the operation Paukenschlag, "beat on the kettle drums", and, of the submarine attacks that ensued along the east coast of the United States, he noted: "Bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witnesses of the drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by red aureoles of blazing tankers." In the months up to June 1942, more than 300 Allied ships, including many tankers, had gone down, victims of the German torpedoes unleashed by U-boats ranging south from New York harbour to southern Florida and the Caribbean. These results prompted the U.S. Army General George Marshall to comment: "I am fearful that another month or two of this will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy in the critical theatres to exercise a determining influence on the war."
While Paukenschlag continued along the U.S. east coast, the great Atlantic convoys of the Allies proceeded practically unmolested, so savage and intensive was the Dönitz campaign against the Americans. He sat in his chateau at Kernéval near the massive U-boat facility in the inner harbour of Lorient, giving orders to his submarines by radio, moving them like chess pieces, telling his commanders to keep him apprised of their positions and to give him descriptions of the weather they where they were. He plotted their positions on the grid of the huge wall map in his elegant headquarters and directed their attacks, mustering them into packs in response to their convoy sightings. He anxiously anticipated their action reports of the sinkings they achieved and the estimated tonnages they had accumulated. It was quite a time for the Lion of Lorient. A substantial amount of this radio traffic was overheard by the British, however, and was soon deciphered by their code breakers at Bletchley Park.
Dönitz was convinced that if his U-boats could attain a monthly average of at least 800,000 tons of enemy shipping sunk, it would starve Britain and choke off her ability to wage war. As it was, his boats were accounting for a monthly average of 650,000 tons sunk, imposing a devastating effect on the British. In one of the ironies of that war, Admiral King, who was anything but an Anglophile and had little regard for the Royal Navy in particular, was involved in a long-standing feud with General Henry 'Hap' Arnold, head of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Their feud though, was easily matched on the other side by that of Dönitz and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe chief.
In a major event for the German Navy, on 30 January 1943 Hitler replaced Grossadmiral Raeder with Karl Dönitz as Commander-in-Chief. Hitler had been greatly disappointed with the performance of his pocket battleship Lutzow and heavy cruiser Hipper when, going against a Russian convoy off Norway on 31 December 1942, they had been held off by five Royal Navy destroyers, and finally driven off by two RN cruisers, without sinking a single ship. He ordered that the two warships be paid off as of no further use to the Reich, reprimanded Raeder and sacked him. This resulted in new prestige for the U-boat arm of the Kriegsmarine but, to some extent, weakened the operational relationship between the head and the U-boat commanders at sea, when operational command and control passed to Dönitz's Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral Eberhardt Godt, who, while enthusiastic and zealous, lacked the Lion's touch. In this climate of command change, seventeen new U-boats were being commissioned each month and Dönitz was pressing Speer for more. In April 1943, more than 400 U-boats were operational and it seemed that a German victory in the Atlantic was near.
Then, in what may have been the only significant tactical error committed by Admiral Dönitz in the course of the war, he ordered his boat commanders to sail on the surface when running to and from their battle stations and engage in combat with enemy aircraft if they were attacked. His decision was based on the logic that the boats would make the transit much faster on the surface, and the deck-watch lookouts would be more efficient and reliable than the Metox detector, which was largely ineffective at warning of the Allies' latest airborne radar. But now it seemed that the hostile aircraft of the Allies were everywhere. The Catalinas, Sunderlands, and Liberators of the Allied maritime air commands had extended their reach further into the Atlantic, and carrier-borne aircraft, released from their role in support of the Allied campaign in North Africa, were suddenly available in support of convoys all the way to their destinations. The cost: twenty-eight U-boats were sunk by the aircraft and fifty-seven Allied planes were brought down. It spelled the end of 'happy times' for the Ubootwaffe and the turning of the tide in the Atlantic war. In May, forty-one U-boats were sunk with the loss of most of their crewmen, including Peter Dönitz, younger son of the Admiral. It was a time of great concern for the German submarine service, with losses becoming unsustainably high. Admiral Godt now gave serious consideration to recalling all of the U-boats to base, but it would appear to be an open admission of defeat. Besides, there was only sufficient berthing for 110 boats in the Biscay pens. Godt and Dönitz instead opted for a strategic redeployment, withdrawing the wolfpacks to the relative safety of the Azores.
Dönitz now clung to the promise of new and impressive advances coming to the Ubootwaffe — improved sonar, the electronic compression of radio transmission, the snorkel, wire-guided torpedoes, and the new generation Type XXI and XXIII submarines. When these innovations were available he would take them back to the Atlantic and continue the battle. In the meantime, he tried to sell Hitler on putting his boats to work landing storm troops on the North African coasts, or mining the main Egyptian ports. The enraged leader reacted furiously to the admiral's suggestions: "The Atlantic is Germany's first line of defence in the West. The enemy forces tied up by our U-boats are tremendous, even though the losses we inflict are no longer great. I cannot afford to release those forces by discontinuing our U-boat operations." When the U-boats did begin returning to the Atlantic, often as not they were the hunted. More and more, they were on the defensive. The impressive technical innovations awaited impatiently by the Lion arrived in due course, but by the time they did, the Allies had already developed the means of defeating them. The merchant vessels of the Allied convoys were arriving safely in ever greater numbers and it was becoming clear to both sides that Germany was losing.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Grey Wolves"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Philip Kaplan.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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