Dönitz: The Last Führer (30 page)

In his concluding remarks Dönitz reiterated the advantage of the modern U-boat over its First World War predecessor; able to receive intelligence, it did not have to wait and simply hope for a ship or convoy to turn up; it also had a new method of firing torpedoes which did not cause an upheaval of water to give away the boat’s position, and the new electric torpedoes did not leave a line of bubbles. Against this was the British Asdic. However, he looked forward to a speedy solution to this problem—on what grounds is not clear. The last letter dated October 1938 in a file on the development of non-reflective materials which might be applied to U-boats to make them immune from sound detection stressed the huge difficulties.
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He was evidently confident, nonetheless, for he wrote:

In the apparent acceptance of the inevitability of war with England, these are surely significant sentences. He concluded:

He therefore proposed the development of the U-boat arm ‘with all means’, and it is easy to read into this whole paper support for his later assertion that he foresaw the danger of war breaking out with Great Britain long before Raeder’s huge balanced fleet was ready.

During the fleet’s spring cruise that year Dönitz devised an exercise to test his group tactics for the war against trade in Atlantic conditions. It took place off the coast of Portugal and across the Bay of Biscay from the morning of May 12th to the evening of the 14th.
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‘Blue’ had fifteen U-boats, Type VII and IX as in the war game, and a surface raider represented by Dönitz’s new Führer ship,
Erwin Wassner
, aboard which was the U-boat flotilla chief for the exercise. The target was a ‘Gold’ convoy represented by a tanker and a freighter; Dönitz’s former Führer ship,
Saar
, represented the escort; she was inferior to the
Erwin Wassner
in speed, but supposed to outmatch her in artillery; during the course of the exercise the
Erwin Wassner
changed her spots to become an additional escort. The speed of the convoy was thirteen knots and the convoy Commander had complete freedom of manoeuvre provided he made good eleven knots along his intended route.

Naturally the conditions were somewhat artificial: the exercise had to be designed so that it was at least possible the convoy would be sighted or it would result in three days of fruitless cruising; so it was that the ‘convoy’ was started on a northerly course towards Ushant from 130 miles west of Lisbon and the Blue forces were placed in its path, four groups of U-boats arranged as outlined in Dönitz’s war-game paper along the direction of advance of the convoy at intervals of some 200–300 miles and the ‘commerce raider’,
Erwin Wassner
, making long search sweeps. Perhaps the balance was weighted too heavily in favour of Blue; at any rate, despite unusually poor visibility of no more than five miles the convoy was sighted by the southernmost U-boat, U 46, at 12.05, barely four hours after the start. She signalled the position, course and
speed and attacked; later she was driven off and lost touch. The other three boats in her group, acting on her message, found the convoy again at dusk, but they too lost it because of poor visibility made worse by a head sea and spray.

During the night the Blue flotilla leader ordered his second group to patrol the expected path of the convoy on the latitude of Finisterre, and soon after daybreak one of these boats, U 37, regained touch and attacked. Again, worsening visibility and sea conditions allowed the convoy to escape. The flotilla leader now ordered his third group to patrol in the Bay of Biscay in the reported direction of advance; meanwhile the
Erwin Wassner
and the seven boats of the two southernmost groups which had been passed by the convoy steered for the same position at their best speed against heavy seas.

At 3 o’clock that afternoon
Erwin Wassner
came in sight of the convoy, and she was joined by two boats of the third group, U 34 and U 32, before the
Saar
drove her off to the west and she lost contact. The westernmost of this group, however, U 35, acting on her reports, found the convoy again at 7 pm. She held touch in exemplary fashion until nightfall, then attacked, keeping touch afterwards and enabling the
Erwin Wassner
to regain contact and attack the convoy at 3.00 in the morning before the slower
Saar
arrived back with her charges. At this point the
Erwin Wassner
changed sides to become an escort, and placed herself at the stern of the convoy at the limit of visibility, finding herself in the midst of the U-boats guided by the touch-holding U 35; she was ‘repeatedly attacked with success. On the other hand the U-boats were at first forced to dive.’

By daylight on the 14th a pack of seven U-boats were either in sight of the convoy or in the close vicinity; by 7.45 am U 47 was able to attack from 500 yards, closing to 300 yards for a second attack ten minutes later. Torpedo attacks continued throughout the day; by the close of the exercise at 8.00 pm the convoy was surrounded by no less than thirteen U-boats. Dönitz commented: ‘The convoy is thus beset by a pack of U-boats; numerous attacks already in the first night hours would render it unable to defend itself any further.’
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It is interesting in this respect that most of the torpedo attacks were made from 800 out to as far as 3,000 metres; really close attacks such as U 47’s were the exception.

Naturally Dönitz drew the lesson he wanted from this highly successful demonstration:

Someone, perhaps Admiral Boehm, underlined ‘
great number
’ and wrote in pencil in the margin, ‘Don’t exaggerate!’

Dönitz’s report continued:

He admitted by implication the artificially favourable disposition of the Blue U-boats in the exercise, and pointed to the difficulties of finding convoys in the broad spaces of the Atlantic—leading him back to the necessity for great numbers of boats, far more than were available at present, also to the proposal in his previous report for large, fast boats for reconnaissance purposes.

On the question of control, he considered the system developed for the Mediterranean also suited Atlantic trade war conditions; this was for the BdU at home to organize the general disposition of the groups in the seaways in the expected track of enemy convoys, while a local flotilla chief aboard a Führer U-boat would be in tactical control of all the groups in his area, for instance the North America-England route. This was because Dönitz considered that the BdU at home would not be able to exercise tactical control ‘for want of milieu-knowledge’, above all the weather position.

As for the possibility of the enemy taking bearings of the continuing wireless traffic necessary between the boats at sea, he had doubts about the accuracy they would obtain and also doubted the possibility of the convoys being able to call up reinforcements to meet the threat since the area of attack would be outside the range of coastal aircraft. He thought that the result would be attacks on the touch-keeping U-boat to drive it away. ‘The FdU does not see this disadvantage as important; the military
advantage of setting
several
boats on to one convoy is on the other hand so great that it justifies breaking radio silence.’
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Passing to tactics, he considered that the exercise had proved that it was possible for U-boats to hold touch at the borders of sight in Atlantic conditions, and pointed to the mast rangefinders on (war)ships as the greatest enemy of the touch-keeping U-boat. This is a significant remark in view of the developments on the way, and one wonders how much knowledge he had of secret German Navy radar experiments; certainly he became aware of them that summer of 1939 for he was involved in discussions about fitting two U-boats with a primitive radar (‘
Dete
-apparatus’). The scheme was overtaken by events.
⁴⁰

It is interesting that in his report Dönitz foreshadowed exactly the tactics which convoys in the battle of the Atlantic would adopt, namely a sweep by escorts at dusk to shake off the touch-keeper, followed by a sharp alteration of course immediately after dark. He thought, however, that the ‘sweeper’ would be in grave danger from torpedo attack.

His conclusions were unequivocal:

In contrast to his unbridled optimism, a memorandum from one of the leading U-boat experts in the German service, Rear Admiral Fürbringer, sounded a thoroughly pessimistic note at the time the exercise was in progress. He started with the premise that against the Royal Navy’s material superiority only operational surprise would have any chance of success. In the World War the surprise had come too late—a reference to the unrestricted U-boat campaign; since then England had mastered that method with Asdic and today a U-boat war against England depended above all on whether it was possible to make U-boats Asdic-immune. All attempts to date had been unsuccessful. But
if they were not made immune there was no prospect of success, hence no purpose in even beginning a U-boat war against trade, indeed it was ‘irresponsible to commit the valuable U-boat crews’ to such a war.

Short of the Asdic-immune boat, the only way of waging a successful campaign would be to destroy the convoy escorts, either with special torpedoes developed for the purpose or, since German surface forces were totally insufficient for the task, by employing a ‘specially suitable weapon—the naval air arm’. And for success in war the foundations would have to be laid by the development of the right machines and tactical co-operation in peace. ‘In a future war the tasks of the Navy and the naval air arm will be so interwoven that both must be welded into a unity by the outbreak of war if heavy failures are not to result.’
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In the light of history, this critique, both of U-boat and general naval policy, is rather more prescient than the optimistic determination that Dönitz as a capable and strong-minded ‘Front Commander’ indulged. Of course both mentalities have their place in any war machine; Raeder’s machine failed under the severe pressures and huge difficulties imposed by the amateur in command of the
Wehrmacht
—Adolf Hitler—either to pay sufficient heed to the Fürbringers or sufficiently to control the Dönitzs. And Raeder, like Tirpitz before him, cannot escape a major share of the blame for allowing the bungling at the top; that indeed was the bargain that he, like Tirpitz, had struck for the sake of a greater and greater Navy.

Dönitz’s answer to the bombshell was contained in a letter to Fürbringer’s chief on the naval staff, Admiral Schniewind. It was in his tersest style:

This flat assertion was followed by all his usual arguments—the U-boat as the sole effective blockade runner in and out of the North Sea, the concentration of U-boats as the simple principle to combat the concentration of ships in convoys—‘Then the English would experience the surprise demanded by Fürbringer!’—as, he went on, he had just demonstrated successfully in exercises in the Bay of Biscay!

He disagreed about the usefulness of the naval air arm in the open spaces of the Atlantic and thought that for the U-boats to carry special anti-escort torpedoes would be to limit their proper task, the elimination of merchantmen. He agreed that the Asdic-immune U-boat had not yet
been developed, but was confident that it
would
be in foreseeable time; the solution to this problem was of immense military importance. However, it is apparent that Fürbringer’s ideas had not caused him to change his own views in any way at all, and one can deduce from the tone of the letter, and perhaps from the rounded signature and less violent crossing of the ‘T’, that he was extremely pleased with himself over the success of his ‘pack’ of U-boats in the exercise and more confident than ever.

The confidence was about to be tested, for Hitler had already lit the short fuse to war. On April 11th he had issued the directive for ‘Case White’, an attack on Poland at any time from September 1st ‘to destroy Polish military strength and create a situation in the East which satisfies the requirements of defence’.
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His stated policy was to limit the conflict to Poland, and he justified the practicality of this by the ‘internal crisis in France’ and the consequent restraint imposed on England. Perhaps this was a misjudgement on Hitler’s part caused by his inflated opinion of himself after his series of easy victories over the western appeasers and the plaudits these had earned from the circle of admirers he had selected for his entourage. If this is the explanation it caused him to make a monumental psychological blunder; for it was just this series of easy victories and the lies which he had told on each occasion which ensured that the western powers could not give way again. If he did not perceive this his self-delusion was limitless. It is true that he was reported by a member of the German resistance to believe England ‘degenerate, weak, timid’ and ‘without the guts to resist any of his plans’,
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but this is typical of the blustering tone with which he often concealed feelings of nervousness or inferiority; his actions do not bear it out.