A World at Arms (74 page)

THE GERMANS VERSUS THE ALLIES AT SEA, 1942–1943

The regular surface ships of the German navy were, by 1942, concentrated in Norwegian waters and the Baltic. In the latter location, they were primarily being used to protect German shipping to and from Finland, Sweden and Norway against Soviet and British interference.
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Only those warships in Norwegian ports were potentially available for the war against shipping. The largest of them, the battleship
Tirpitz,
worried the Allies most. To make sure that it would not, like the
Bismarck,
try to go raiding into the Atlantic, the British mounted a daring commando attack on the French port of St. Nazaire to put out of commission the one dock on the German-controlled Atlantic coast where this 42,90o-ton ship could be repaired. The raid of March 28, 1942, accomplished its objective though it is most unlikely that Hitler would have allowed the
Tirpitz
ever to attempt an Atlantic operation under any circumstances.
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Because of its size and armament, the
Tirpitz
remained a focus of British attention. Along with the other German warships in Norway it forced the retention of a large surface fleet, including battleships and carriers, in British home waters to protect the convoys to
Russia, and thus precluded the use of these scarce and valuable ships in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, or the Pacific.
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Repeated attempts were therefore made to destroy the
Tirpitz
by bombs and one man torpedoes, which failed. On September 21–22, 1943, damage by a British mini–submarine put the ship out of action until March 1944.
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Hardly repaired, it was damaged again, this time by bombs, on April 3. After being out of service for three months and subjected to a long series of largely unsuccessful air attacks, the ship was finally destroyed in an air raid on November 12, 1944.
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By that time the battles involving the German surface ships in Norway had affected the war at sea in other dramatic ways.

There was an inner contradiction between the use of the German surface ships against the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union and their use against any Allied invasion of Norway which, as described in the preceding chapter, the Germans were very concerned about and was the reason for their being stationed in Norway in the first place. The same ships could not interfere with supply convoys–with the attendant risks of engagements and losses–and be available to help fight off any Allied landing attempt.

This confusion of roles contributed to a series of arguments and complications about the ships, several operations against convoys in which the German losses in destroyers off-set the sinkings of Allied ships, and two major British naval victories. The first was a botched German effort to destroy the convoys JW 51 A and B at the end of December 1942, which was half beaten off by British escorts and half called off by German command confusion.
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This defeat, clearly recognized as such by the Germans, led to the dismissal of the Commander-in-Chief of the German navy since 1928, Admiral Raeder, and his replacement by the commander of the submarines, Admiral Dönitz. Furthermore, Hitler simultaneously decided to decommission all the remaining big ships, using the crews for the submarines and small ships and their guns in coastal defense. He was eventually persuaded to reverse this order only by Dönitz himself.

The long-timea advocate of concentration on submarines had come to recognize the utility of the big ships for defense against an invasion of Norway if it did come, the training of naval crews, renewed attacks on the convoys to Russia, and, perhaps most important, as a way of forcing the British to maintain major fleet units in home waters instead of presenting them with a gratuitous naval victory, a victory which would provide Britain with relief at home and the prospect of sending the fleet to take part in the war against Japan.
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In practice, however, the German surface units were unable to do more than restrict the allocation of
British surface ships until in a second major defeat, that of Christmas 1943, the battleship
Scharnhorst
was sunk when sent out by Dönitz in what objective observers must call a useless suicide mission for the ship and the 1900 men who went down with her.
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The other main type of surface ship utilized by the Germans in the war against Allied shipping was the auxiliary cruiser. These fast converted merchant ships were designed to fool Allied and neutral ships by sailing alone, in disguise, with false flags and concealed guns, until the last moment when they revealed their true nationality and character. In the first years of the war, they enjoyed considerable success in the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific, but during 1942 and 1943 they were caught one by one by the Allies. Admiral Raeder himself had been a major promoter of this project, which certainly inflicted substantial losses on the Allies and caused added dispersion of their escort vessels; but in October 1943 the last one was sunk by an American submarine.
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The Germans also had a substantial number of very fine E-Boats, as the Allies called them, small but fast torpedo boats utilized for scouting, for escorting German coastal shipping, and for attacks on Allied warships as well as merchant ships in the Channel, the North and Baltic Seas and the Mediterranean. During the course of the war they sank over 225,000 tons of ships. Their most spectacular feat was probably the sinking, on April 28, 1944, of two large LST’s (Landing Ships for Tanks) during a major landing exercise, code-named “Tiger,” on the south coast of England, in which over 700 American soldiers were killed, an event hushed up by the Allies at the time.
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At the other extreme in size of warships, the Germans long tried to get their first aircraft carrier ready for use, but this project was eventually abandoned early in 1943.
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The German use of long-range airplanes, especially the FW-200, against Allied shipping has already been mentioned. Planes continued to play a role in attacks on shipping from bases in France, but the main contribution of the Luftwaffe was from Norwegian bases in the campaign against the Arctic convoys to Russia. Here, unlike elsewhere, Göring was prepared to devote substantial resources to the struggle for the sea lanes and occasionally with considerable effect. As the other demands on the air force grew, however, the units in Norway were not provided with adequate replacements, so that by 1944 the air attacks on the route to Murmansk became less and less significant. It had been in the Mediterranean that the air force had made its major contribution in 1941–42 to the war at sea; thereafter the pressures of the Eastern Front, the need to defend German-controlled Europe against air attacks, and efforts to strike directly at England again assumed priority.

Two other aspects of the war at sea must be mentioned before the
German submarine campaign is examined. By plane, by small surface ships, and by submarines the Germans, Italians, and Japanese laid mines which contributed a small addition to the losses caused with other means.
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An additional major source of losses was that of “marine casualty,” that is, ships that had worn out, that collided, that ran aground, capsized at sea, or were lost in other kinds of marine accidents. In part because of the constant use of available shipping, the need to move in all kinds of weather and on dangerous routes, less experienced shipyard workers and crews, and similar factors, such losses were quite substantial, usually exceeding those from aircraft, surface ships, and mines combined. The sailors drowned and the ships lost were as much casualties of war as those due to acts of combat–and they too were missing from the rosters of the Allies.

By far the greatest losses inflicted by the Axis and suffered by the Allies were the result of submarine action. The submarines of World War II were not at all the under–water ships of popular imagination. They were so slow when submerged–the most commonly employed German submarine (Type VIIC) could go at 7.5 knots and only for a limited time–that they could be outrun by most ships. Only by staying on the surface–where they could go at 17.7 knots–for a large part of the time was there any prospect of moving in time to designated areas and getting into position to attack. This was, until the last stages of the war, a characteristic shared in basic essentials by the submarines of all belligerents, and it meant that just forcing them to stay under the surface for long periods of time deprived them of most opportunities for attack.

The Germans had decided before the war that the most effective way to use their submarines would be to send them out in groups to try to locate Allied ships, which it was assumed would probably be in convoys, and to attack them at night while on the surface with the members of each group, referred to as wolf–packs by the Allies, summoned by whichever submarine first located the convoy. The German navy had practically no reconnaissance airplanes of its own, the air force refused to provide substantial numbers for the submarine war, and the submarines, unlike some Japanese ones, did not carry small float planes, that could be stowed inside and launched and recovered, to search for possible targets.
^a
The only practical approach to the problem of finding Allied ships, therefore, appeared to be a skirmish line of submarines directed from headquarters on land to an area considered most promising, there
followed by a call from the first submarine to sight the enemy and a constant series of locator calls thereafter.

Two aspects of this tactic must be noted. It made it possible for Dönitz to utilize the latest intelligence available to him to direct his submarines out in the Atlantic by radio to the most profitable targets, to alter directives as necessary, and to send them to the next position as appropriate; but it also meant a stream of radio signals which could provide material for code-breakers. Whatever the Germans sent, others could hear, even if special devices were utilized to transmit the messages with extreme speed. A second danger was inherent in the wolf-pack’s constant sending of location signals so that all could follow and attack the same convoy. The Germans assumed that Allied direction finders on land could locate the general area of the U-Boats, but they would know that from the moment of the initial attack on a convoy anyway. What the Germans did
not
understand was that the Allies were developing and placing on board ships direction finders that could locate the submarines by their radio transmissions from the escorts of the attacked convoy. This equipment, called “Huff-Duff’ from the abbreviation HF/DF for High-Frequency Direction Finders, began to be placed on ships in the summer of 1942 and came to play a major role in the eventual victory of the Allies in the war against the submarines. The Germans never caught on to this device and ascribed all Allied ability to locate U-Boats running on the surface to their use of radar. While radar (especially the radar carried by planes) certainly played an important part in the campaign, the convoy escorts more frequently located submarines on the surface by the Huff-Duff device.
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When the submarines were submerged, they could not (except at periscope depth) send or receive radio messages and hence could not be located by either land or sea based radio direction finding. Already in World War I the Allies had developed a device, called asdic by the British and sonar by the Americans, which could hear submarine propellers and also send signals through the water bringing back echoes when they bounced off something, sounds and echoes which skilled interpreters could use to locate a submarine at least approximately.
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Once located under water, the submarine might be damaged or sunk by the explosion of depth charges and later other explosives dropped and fired by the escorts. On the surface, a submarine could be attacked by the guns of warships and those mounted on most merchant ships, or it could be rammed, while airplanes dropped special bombs and could also use machine guns and cannon fire (using a special form of searchlight, called “Leigh” lights after their inventor, in the second half of the war). The submarine used torpedoes and, for smaller ships, often relied on its guns
when on the surface. At the beginning of the war, the German torpedoes were defective, but this was largely remedied by 1941. The Americans also had defective torpedoes until well into 1942 and even 1943, but the Japanese had excellent torpedoes from the beginning of the war while the British and Italian ones were generally satisfactory.

Two political aspects of the submarine campaign also have to be reviewed. The Germans had to decide in World War II as in World War I whose ships they would sink and whose they would try to spare. Naturally they tried to avoid sinking those of their allies as well as their own, though occasionally mistakes were made. While hoping to postpone war with the United States until a big navy could be built, Hitler had also restrained the enthusiasm of the German navy for sinking American ships; but as soon as Japan attacked the United States, he ordered all ships of the United States, seven Central American countries and Uruguay to be sunk on sight.
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Hoping to keep Argentina out of the war, the Germans did try to avoid sinking Argentine ships, and took some steps to smooth out any problems which arose when this did happen anyway.
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This self–restraint did not, however, apply to others. After several Mexican ships were sunk, she entered the war in May, 1942. Assuming that what defense cooperation existed between the United States and Brazil amounted to effective Brazilian participation, Hitler ordered his submarines to stage systematic attacks on Brazilian ships and drew that country–the largest and most populous in Latin America-into the war on August 22, 1942.
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This attack on Brazil did for her internal debates what Pearl Harbor had done for the arguments within the United States; a united country was now fully at war.

Another aspect of drawing countries into the war was that of using their territory for bases. For the Germans, the critical country in this regard was certainly Spain. German spies in Spanish towns near Gibraltar regularly observed and took pictures of Allied ships passing through the straits in and out of the Mediterranean.
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Most useful was the repairing and refueling of German submarines by clandestine operations organized by the navy with the knowledge and support of the Franco regime.
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These activities took place primarily in 1941 but continued at least until the fall of 1942 when Allied pressure obligated Franco to be more cautious and the Germans to restrict themselves to Spanish coastal waters for travel thereafter.
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