Dönitz: The Last Führer (26 page)

Both sides to the agreement showed an amateurish gullibility about the real interests of the other; of the two the greater mistake was made by the Germans; they conducted the conversations with false information and fundamental deceit.
⁹⁷
In the event they deceived themselves more dangerously than the enemy—a perception that began to surface within two years.

In Vigo, meanwhile, the
Emden
was joined by the cruiser
Karlsruhe
under
Kapitän zur See
Lütjens, and the two ships made their way home in company, arriving in the Jade off Wilhelmshaven in July. Here, according to Dönitz’s memoirs, Raeder came aboard and gave him the surprising news that he was to give up his command in order to take over the new submarine flotilla. It is difficult to believe this story. But in any case he recorded his initial reaction as unenthusiastic: he had been looking forward to the cruise to the Far East and U-boats were relatively unimportant in the new fleet plans: ‘I saw myself pushed into a siding.’
⁹⁸

It is certainly true that big-ship, big-gun men ruled at the
Marineleitung
in Berlin as they did at the British Admiralty, where it was assumed that the invention of an underwater sound detection device called ‘Asdic’ had rendered the submarine relatively harmless. However, there was a dedicated U-boat group in the German service; Dönitz certainly knew of their activities and had, according to his own account, joined the service after the war because of his enthusiasm for U-boats.

His most immediate concern on arrival was whether the
Emden
or the
Karlsruhe
would show up best at the Station Commander’s inspection. He had every confidence in his crew—but as a perfectionist he was naturally afflicted with nerves. He need not have worried: the ship’s company performed, as he recorded in his memoirs, ‘magnificently’.
⁹⁹
This is borne out in full by the Admiral’s report on him:

He started his leave almost immediately on July 17th. His sons Klaus, now fifteen, and Peter, thirteen, had written to him in January to say that as their summer holidays began at the same time as the
Emden
’s return they would all be able to spend five weeks sailing in the Baltic. Receiving the letter in Trincomalee, he had shown it to Admiral Rose, commenting that by July he would have been a year at sea and would far rather see German woods and meadows. ‘No, Captain,’ the Admiral had said, ‘you do what your boys want.’ There was nothing like a sailing holiday for experience in so many different directions. He had decided to take the advice; now he set off with the family in their yacht from Wilhelmshaven and through the Kiel Canal into the Baltic. He recorded that they were a close family; his daughter, Ursula agrees, ‘very close’.

The cruise was not as long as anticipated. Raeder had arranged for him and an engineer officer, Thedsen, who was to join him in building up the new arm, to travel to Constantinople at the end of August to visit the Turkish U-school which had been started by Fürbringer, and where one of the top U-boat war ‘aces’, Valentiner, was continuing the German connection. At the end of July the arrangements were altered, however, and the two were ordered to Berlin on August 16th to travel on the 17th. No doubt he spent a nostalgic fortnight in Turkey; the
Breslau
had been sunk in the war, but one day he was invited to a meal aboard the
Sultan Yavus Selim, ex-Goeben
.

When he returned he immersed himself in preparations for his new task.

CHAPTER FOUR

Führer der U-boote

On September 21st 1935, a week before he took over as chief of the first U-flotilla, Dönitz sent a paper to the fleet command about the organization of the new arm. He prefaced it with his idea of the function of U-boats in war:

This introduction makes it clear that he was not considering war against Great Britain at this time, but formulating his ideas in the context of the current mobilization plans for the two-front war against France and Russia—that is, the security of the Baltic and the German North Sea ports, together with offensive action against French Mediterranean warships and transports. As for his ‘group’ or ‘wolf-pack’ tactics, the paper has nothing to contribute, unless perhaps to induce a certain scepticism about his post-war claim that pack tactics sprang fully-formed from his mind on his assumption of the U-boat command.

The implication, especially of the third sentence, ‘In consequence of its low submerged- and surface-speed its tactical mobility against fast
forces is fundamentally excluded’ is that he was not thinking of pack tactics at this stage, for his targets—warships and troop transports—were ‘fast forces’. Moreover he used the singular, ‘the U-boat will be placed before enemy harbours’. In view of his usually forward, ambitious way of presenting his views, it would be odd for him not to mention setting groups of boats before enemy harbours if that is what he intended to develop. Nevertheless the paper does not exclude that possibility. Although tactical mobility would be virtually impossible for submerged boats, thus for daylight operations against warships, it would not be ruled out for night surface attack, and later in the paper he makes it clear that he intended to train his force in surface attack.

The paper went on to put the development of ‘attacking spirit’ in the forefront of training, together with continuous sea-going to habituate commanders and crews to their proper element, particularly in the expected operational areas. This demanded that the flotilla should not be tied to its home port; he therefore asked for a support ship with the necessary equipment and accommodation for twelve U-boat crews—and ‘numerous baths’.

It is in his remarks on practices with real torpedoes that his paper comes nearest to suggesting pack tactics. However, the most probable interpretation of this section is that it was simply about the efficient use of time by having all the boats do their attack runs on the same day. He also mentions the necessity for the flotilla to unite with the fleet for exercises on occasions; but again from the context it looks as if he meant to give his boats opportunities
against
the kind of forces they would be attacking in war rather than opportunities to act
with
the fleet.

The question cannot be resolved satisfactorily from his paper. It may be that the idea of two or more boats operating together as practised in the First War and ideas of submarines operating with the fleet were in such common currency that they did not need to be stated—simply tried out. Probably all that can be said is that anyone reading Dönitz’s 1935 paper without knowing about subsequent developments would not have guessed that its author was about to develop a revolutionary new tactic. It is closely reasoned, but stictly conventional, strictly in the context of current planning.

He was congratulated on the report both by his immediate chief, Admiral Foerster, who allowed him a free hand for his training, and by Raeder. By this time eleven of the small 250-ton boats whose construction had been started in February had been completed and commissioned;
some had been allocated to the U-school, and when he took over his command of the flotilla, named after a war ace, ‘Weddigen’, on September 28th, he received the salute of only three Commanders and crews. From such small beginnings came the developments which neither Raeder nor Foerster, and certainly not Dönitz himself, could have foreseen. Three days later he stepped up to the rank of full Post Captain (
Kapitän zur See
).

As always when taking over a new command he had already worked out a systematic training programme by which each crew learned progressively more complex skills; these schedules were communicated to all hands so that all knew what they were aiming for in each of the carefully graduated training periods: ‘for instance every U-boat had to carry out 66 surface attacks and the same number of submerged attacks before proceeding in December 1935 to its first torpedo-firing practice.’
²
As always he led from the front; he and his flotilla engineer, Thedsen, the only men with operational experience in U-boats, donned the U-boat man’s leathers and divided their time between the boats, guiding Commanders and control- and engine-room hands through the drills that had to become second nature before the tactical training could begin. The pace was hot and the boats were always at sea. The Commander of U 14, which joined the flotilla in January the following year, remembers: ‘Mondays to Fridays eight attack exercises under water by day and six attack exercises on the surface by night. That was the upper limit of our physical and nervous capacity.’
³

They were young men. Dönitz used their youthful energy and idealism and won their confidence with his powerful brand of personal leadership, enthusiasm and total commitment. His aims were not narrowly technical; he sought to instil in every crew a spirit of confidence in their weapon; this has been the hallmark of most great military leaders. In his case he had the particular difficulty of overcoming a ‘recurring complex that the U-boat was, in consequence of the development of the British countermeasure, Asdic, an obsolete weapon’.
⁴
This feeling was, perhaps, a result of the training at the U-school; according to Dönitz they held Asdic in so much respect that boats were expected to fire their torpedoes from well outside the detection range of the escorts, 3,000 yards or more. Dönitz states in his memoirs that he on the other hand looked on Asdic as an unproved and overrated weapon with several limitations, and sought to develop an attitude for close attack where the chances of hitting were greater, 600 metres or so. His previously quoted paper makes it clear that
this was not his view when he took over the flotilla; in fact uncertainty about the range and effectiveness of Asdic influenced U-boat Commanders right up to the outbreak of war.

Nevertheless his own genuine belief in the power of the U-boat as an attacking weapon cannot be doubted, nor his success in communicating this to his Commanders and crews, together with ‘a spirit of selfless mission-readiness’.
⁵
An essential part of this spirit which he sought to instil from the first was the feeling of belonging to a special or élite corps within the larger brotherhood of the service; one rather theoretical manifestation was his insistence that no U-boat man shaved while at sea, even on the short passages made by the small boats of the 1st flotilla.

At the end of his first year Foerster reported that he had seized hold of his task with verve:

Foerster also recorded that Dönitz had created useful foundations for the tactical employment of the boats; he did not say what these were, but everything Dönitz wrote after the war suggested they were group tactics. From the 1957 recollections of one of his Weddigen Flotilla Commanders cited in his memoirs it appears that these grew directly out of the strategic goals he set for the boats—finding and attacking enemy warships in the restricted waters of the Baltic—and the tactical lessons of his torpedo-boat days; indeed the former Commander stated that torpedo-boat doctrine was ‘godfather’ to U-boat pack tactics.

This was developed in countless exercises using different formations of reconnaissance lines and supporting groups until tactics fitting the characteristics of U-boats were developed. This description dovetails
neatly into the documentary evidence; it fits Dönitz’s goals as described in his September 1935 paper, and also his first description of group tactics in a long paper he wrote in November 1937.
⁸
It is also the way that most ‘inventions’ or advances take place—a lateral jump by the prepared mind—serendipity—followed by unrelenting work. Others had made the lateral jump before Dönitz; that had been in the different context of trade war, however, and there are no documents to prove—or to disprove—Dönitz’s claim in his memoirs that he came to the U-boat arm determined to try out group tactics.

One thing is certain:
his
pack tactic was not developed for war against trade: at the end of 1936 Dönitz still held to all his views expressed in the 1935 paper,
⁹
and when asked about U-boat types for the future he based his replies on a belief that the Mediterranean would be the centre of gravity for the U-boat war; since they were restricted in total tonnage by the naval treaty with England, he suggested the smallest boat suitable for the Mediterranean in order to get the largest
number
of them. These were the 626-ton Type VII which in an enlarged form for greater action radius was predominant in the Battle of the Atlantic. It is clear, therefore, that both the
Rudel
tactic and the boats that used it to such devastating effect were designed for quite different campaigns in different waters.

The first of the Type VIIs were already in service by the autumn of 1936 and Dönitz, who was given the title of
Führer der U-boote
(FdU) on October 1st, had begun training the nucleus of this 2nd flotilla alongside the Weddigen boats.

He had his chief holidays in the winter now, probably because this was the least suitable period for practical work in the Baltic. He had taken up skiing in the early ’30s, travelling by himself to resorts in the South Tyrol; by this time he could afford to stay at good hotels.

Both his boys, who accepted without question that they would follow their father into the Navy, were now members of the
Hitler Jugend
; their elder sister, Ursula, who had been in the girls’ equivalent, the
Bund Deutscher Mädchen
, during her final year at school had left directly after her
Abitur
; she recalls that she thought it all rather silly. Her mother was not a member of the Party, nor of course was Dönitz, for he was a member of the ‘unpolitical’ armed forces. The family, Ursula recalls, were about average in their allegiance to the National Socialist regime; they were like most other people in Germany.
¹⁰

By this time she had met and become engaged to a naval officer,
Günther Hessler, whom she married in November 1937; her father heartily approved.

Hessler had served aboard the
Grille
, a support ship that had been used for clandestine training and testing functions, doubling as an official yacht. In this capacity Hitler had been a guest aboard. In general wardroom talk he had impressed Hessler enormously, not simply by his astounding command of technical naval detail, but by his breadth of reading and apparently effortless ability to speak knowledgeably on any subject that came up. Hessler’s admiration for the Führer was not surprising. It was the general attitude throughout the service, particularly amongst the younger officers. When the
Reichsmarine
ensign was replaced by the swastika flag of the Third Reich in 1935 a week before Dönitz took command of the flotilla Weddigen, it was the occasion of fervent celebration.

By 1937 Hitler was hoist on the inexorable, hard logic of his policy. Immediately after taking power in 1933 he had electrified his service chiefs and a few days later his cabinet with the simple formula that for the next four or five years every measure was to be judged on whether it augmented the arms-bearing capacity of the German
Volk
. It was to be ‘everything for the
Wehrmacht
. Germany’s position in the world will be absolutely conditional on the German armed forces. The position of the German economy in the world also depends upon them.’
¹¹
Economists might have told him that this reversed the conditions in the real world. His listeners, however, shared his beliefs; like him they had been brought up on power
Politik
, and it was only when practical difficulties crowded in after the first miracle years that doubt and argument surfaced. By this time he had consolidated his position through the Führer principle and it was too late to challenge his ‘unalterable’ decisions.

The economic facts he flouted were that single-minded concentration on rearmament sucked materials into the country and prevented the production of sufficient exports to pay for them, while reliance on public borrowing to finance inproductive war-spending laid the foundations for another bout of inflation. The problem was aggravated by the anarchy at the top: each of the three fighting services pursued its own programme in competition with the other two without co-ordination or consideration for the others’ aims—indeed scarcely comprehending them.