Dönitz: The Last Führer (35 page)

Equally serious was an alarming number of torpedo failures. By the 31st October a note of desperation had crept into his war diary entries on this subject:

By mid-December, after new magnetic pistols and new setting instructions had failed, the solution to the problem was as far from sight as ever; moreover defects in the boats themselves were showing up, in his opinion because he had not been allowed to dive them deeper than 50 m in peace training—added to which dockyard repairs were taking too long. ‘The dockyard periods must be shortened by rigorous organization of the work. I will not tolerate the lack of organization which causes the boats to remain days longer in the yards …’
³⁸

He took a mere four days’ leave at the end of the year, coming back to the same frustrating problems of lack of boats and a quite unacceptable rate of torpedo failures.

Despite the high percentage of failure, individual Commanders were turning in good results; in February U 44 returned flying victory pennants which added up to 38,266 tons of merchant shipping sunk, ‘the most successful patrol so far’, Dönitz noted; later U 48 came back and reported 34,950 tons sunk, bringing the Commander, Schultze’s, aggregate up to 114,510 tons, the first to top the 100,000-ton mark; he was awarded the Knight’s Cross. The legend of the ‘ace’ was back and the competition between individuals for first place amongst the aces was on.

However, because of the very few boats available, it was impossible to realize Dönitz’s dream of destroying a whole convoy by mass attack, indeed the British Admiralty anti-submarine department reported:

And the report added somewhat prematurely, ‘the U-boat has a marked antipathy against attacking convoys, preferring lone neutrals and stragglers’.

One aspect of Dönitz’s pre-war training that was paying handsome dividends was the surface attack by night; in February this accounted for almost 60 per cent of total sinkings. This was noted in the anti-submarine operations room: ‘The German aces, Prien and Schultze, are both reputed to attack during the dark and to rest during the day. This, however, has not altogether been borne out by Admiralty reconstruction of their cruises.’
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British interrogation of survivors from the U-boats destroyed also gave a somewhat different picture of Dönitz’s men from that painted by German propaganda at the time and since; for instance, although the great majority of the crews were still volunteers, a shortage of experienced petty officers had already caused numbers of key men to be drafted into the arm without option. And not all Commanders were heroes to their crews; the ‘somewhat aggressive and sullen’ captain of U 63 was ‘bitterly criticized’ by both his engineer and junior lieutenant for irresponsibility in his handling of the boat. The interrogating officer reported, ‘The officers and crew showed on the whole the usual Nazi mentality, but it was again noted that the older POs … were much less rabid than the younger men.’
⁴²

On the whole, however, there was a splendid morale in the U-boat arm, and the crews generally conformed to Dönitz’s description of them as close communities bound by consideration and comradeship; William Shirer, doing a broadcast to America from aboard a U-boat in Kiel at the end of December, had been greatly impressed by the ‘absolute lack of Prussian caste discipline. Around our table [in the boat] the officers and men seemed to be on equal footing and to like it.’
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In March the war on trade lapsed as Dönitz had to withdraw most of his boats to cover a planned invasion of Norway and Denmark. The occupation of these countries had been suggested originally by Raeder to protect the vital supplies of Scandinavian iron ore without which Germany could not continue the war; in winter when the Baltic froze, the ore was shipped from the ice-free port of Narvik down through Norwegian territorial waters. Of course, base acquisition was a factor in Raeder’s proposal which Dönitz supported enthusiastically; Narvik and Trondheim were both suitable for the location of U-boat bases which would shorten the long passage into the Atlantic around the north of Scotland.

In early January the Scandinavian situation became suddenly urgent as
Abwehr
agents caught wind of Anglo-French plans to occupy Norway under pretext of helping the Finns against a Russian assault; on January 16th Hitler cancelled his planned western offensive and ordered preparations for the Scandinavian invasion. Dönitz was called to a Naval War Staff conference on February 5th and instructed to provide U-boat screens for the surprise landings that were to be made at points along the Norwegian coast from the Skagerrak up to Narvik. It was an undertaking of immense risk, hazarding not only the seaborne troops, but virtually the entire German Navy to the superior British fleet. It was also an ideal opportunity for the U-boats to carry out the group operations against enemy surface forces for which Dönitz had been preparing them for the first four years of his command, for there was no question that the Royal Navy would be drawn in in force. For this purpose Dönitz formed two attack groups in addition to the groups screening the fjords where the landings were to take place; a northern group of six boats was to lie in wait north-east of the Shetlands on the British fleet’s assumed route towards Narvik while a group of three smaller boats waited closer in to Scapa Flow.

Misinterpretation of intelligence on the allied side resulted in the landings on April 8th and 9th succeeding virtually unopposed. But by an
extraordinary coincidence a British plan to mine the Norwegian inshore route along which the ore passed, then to occupy the key ports of Stavanger, Trondheim, Bergen and Narvik if necessary, to pre-empt German retaliation, had been planned for exactly the same date; thus British troops and transports were already prepared and British landings at Narvik and elsewhere followed soon after the German landings. These, together with the British naval counter-attacks on the German forces, should have provided ideal conditions for the U-boats, but bad weather, the chances of war—in this case the discovery by British naval intelligence of a chart of the U-boat dispositions—and an increasing number of torpedo failures robbed them of success. Dönitz’s angry frustration poured out into the war diary:

Prien, who had already reported failures against anchored transports from close range, now reported that he had fired two torpedoes at the
Warspite
from 900 yards, which failed to detonate. Dönitz, refusing to endanger his boats any longer in these conditions, recalled them and rang Raeder in Berlin demanding satisfaction; Raeder set up a full-scale inquiry the next day. A month later Dönitz learned its findings:

It was not only the magnetic head that was at fault, but the mechanism of the impact head was so complicated that it too was prone to failure.

So the first nine months of the U-boat war ended in something like despair.

Early in the morning of May 10th Hitler started his assault on France with a
Luftwaffe
strike destroying over 300 planes on the ground; German armoured columns, skirting the heavily fortified Maginot line, rolled through Luxembourg and the Ardennes into Piccardy, and through southern Holland into Belgium; dive bombers and artillery softened resistance along the narrow spearheads of advance; the tanks swathed deep across the flat country, scarcely halting till they reached the sea, severing allied units and all supplies and communications. Within a fortnight the Low Countries and the Pas de Calais had been overrun, the British Expeditionary Force trapped between in a pocket around Dunkirk; momentary indecision, a too-confident belief in the power of the
Luftwaffe
, allowed the British to extemporize escape on their own element, the sea, then the
Panzers
regrouped and burst south and west across the Marne and the Seine. The lightning speed and apparently irresistible force of the assault ruptured French morale, long undermined by the same kind of political tensions that had wracked Germany before National Socialism.

As the
Panzers
closed around Paris, Mussolini threw in his lot with Hitler; a week afterwards the French government asked for an armistice, and on June 22nd it was signed in the railway carriage used for the signing of the German surrender after the First World War in the same spot in the clearing in the forest of Compiègne. Hitler’s face at this moment of triumph was a study in scornful hate and exultation. By the monument there recording the downfall in 1918 of the ‘criminal pride of the German Empire’ he stood with hands on hips and legs wide apart, the picture of arrogance and contempt;
⁴⁵
afterwards the monument was razed.

A similar euphoria was evident in the naval staff in Berlin. Even before the armistice was signed they were indulging the most extravagant fantasies of a world empire ruled by a vast Teutonic fleet. Fricke, supposedly chief of the operations’ department, produced a memorandum on strategy after the ‘won war’ as early as June 3rd! All the peoples in the German-occupied countries, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France, should be made ‘
politically, economically and militarily
fully dependent on Germany’; France should be so militarily and economically destroyed and her population so reduced that she could never rise again to encourage the smaller States; overseas bases should be acquired in North and South America, Asia and Australia—and in Central Africa Germany should create a great colonial empire stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Indian Ocean; island groups in the Indian Ocean should be acquired as bases. Whether all this was in addition to the
Lebensraum
in Eastern Europe, the stated aim of Nazi policy, was not mentioned in the paper.
⁴⁶

The egregious Carls, now chief of Navy Group East, looked to a North European
Bund
of the smaller States and their colonies—Fricke added in the margin, ‘The German part of Switzerland must come into the
Reich
’—and the division of France into small demilitarized German protectorates; ‘if the war brings us decisive preponderance over Great Britain’, he envisaged partition of the British Empire, and ceding Malta to Italy, Gibraltar to Spain, making the Suez Canal an international waterway without Great Britain and France, taking all rights in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and acquiring oceanic island bases necessary to secure these possessions.
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It would be tedious to detail all the daydreams which the most senior officers of the German Navy allowed to spill out on to memoranda and at least one world map showing the greater German
Weltreich
and its tributaries in blue opposing the red areas of the Anglo-Saxon empire controlled now by the United States of America. The intent was plain; it was the old Wilhelmine dream of gaining in one bound what had taken older empires centuries to achieve. It was fantastic, and the fleet programmes soberly and painstakingly worked out to Raeder’s instructions were, like Tirpitz’s future projections of old, on the one hand so monstrous and on the other so grounded in current technology as to represent so much waste paper.

Yet they serve a purpose; dreamlike, they provide a glimpse into the soul of the German naval staff. There was one vision imprinted there—world
mastery. To this everything was subordinate: economic reality, truth, morality and not least imagination to perceive that what they were striving for was a chimera. A sense of the ridiculous would have saved them, but humour and hubris are unsatisfactory bedfellows. Raeder and his staff stand revealed as crude, simple and humourless as villains of a comic strip seized with a master plan to hold the world to ransom.