Dönitz: The Last Führer (36 page)

There were, of course, reasons for their mood of super-confidence; most of the territory Heye had argued as necessary for oceanic strategy had been occupied; a huge arc of coast from North Norway down to the Atlantic coast of France was now available, and the Brittany ports especially were ideal for the war on communications since they lay so close to the western approaches to the English Channel. The only thing yet lacking was a fleet or the armaments capacity to construct one, for Hitler was now looking at his mortal enemy, Russia, and his priorities were for the tanks and aircraft necessary to strike
east
.

There were, however, U-boats. Dönitz lost no time in making a personal survey of the Biscay harbours to pick those most suitable for his boats and decide on a base. Lorient was his first choice, and just outside at Kerneval on the north bank of the river serving the port, hard by one of the eighteenth-century stone forts which guard the river entrance, he found a splendid château which he determined to convert into a command post. Work started immediately on the provision of fuel, supply and U-boat repair facilities at the port.

Meanwhile he had recommenced the attack on merchant shipping, at first with a single boat commanded by his first staff officer, Victor Oehrn, and once Oehrn had proved the new percussion pistols with a string of sinkings, he sent out a wave of thirteen boats. He formed these into two groups, ‘Prien’ and ‘Rösing’, and directed them against convoys reported by the Radio Intelligence Service,
B-Dienst
, which had cracked British operational ciphers before the war and was able to provide up-to-date information on rendezvous positions, courses and speeds. Thus on June 12th he had been able to position Group Prien on a Halifax convoy steering east at eight knots for a rendezvous five days later with its escort for the final leg home.

At the same time he had distributed Group Rösing across the likely course of an important convoy of fast passenger ships, including the
Queen Mary
with 26,000 Australian and New Zealand troops, which was steering northwards up the West African coast.

Both these determined efforts to operate concentration tactics failed since the rendezvous position for the Halifax convoy was shifted and the fast passenger ships’ exact route was never known. Despite these failures, stragglers and independents were picked off, individual boats attacked other convoys sighted, and sinkings that June rose to the highest monthly total of the war, 58 ships totalling 284,113 tons, of which Prien himself claimed 66,587 tons. Over 100,000 tons more were sunk by the
Luftwaffe
; mines, surface raiders and fast torpedo boats operating in the Channel and up the east coast of England brought the total to almost 600,000 tons,
⁴⁹
the figure that von Holtzendorff in the First War had estimated would bring about the collapse of Great Britain inside five months; the estimate remained valid. As in the spring of 1917, it seemed that Britain stood close to disaster.

This was clearly perceived in the White House in Washington. Roosevelt was in a similar position with regard to majority US opinion as Churchill before Munich with majority British opinion. He realized that if Hitler made himself master of Europe and the British Empire fell, the United States would be the next target; already he had compromised American neutrality by supplying war material including escort destroyers which were on their way to England; now he declared his policy to be ‘all aid short of war’; he could not move too far ahead of public opinion.

The first boat to take advantage of the supply facilities at Lorient was Lemp’s U 30, which put in on July 7th. Others followed in the succeeding weeks, gaining something like a fortnight’s extra time in the operational area by cutting out the long passage home and out around Scotland, thereby making up for the losses which were still exceeding new boats coming into service. The British reacted by re-routing convoys away from the south-west approaches and up to the North Channel between
Northern Ireland and Scotland. Dönitz moved the U-boats north in response. He also organized air reconnaissance from Brest with the local
Luftwaffe
Commander, but there were few suitable aircraft available and those could not venture across enemy air space to the northern approaches—besides which all the difficulties of co-operation, particularly the navigational ones which had been suggested in the few pre-war exercises, recurred and rendered the little assistance almost valueless. U-boat sinkings fell to just over 200,000 tons, the total from all causes to under 400,000 tons.
⁵⁰

Early in August U-boat facilities at Lorient were completed, and the number of available boats was boosted by a flotilla from the Italian Navy—for whom a base was prepared at Bordeaux. These were administered by Italian officers but came under U-boat HO for operations; as they lacked experience Dönitz started them off in less patrolled areas such as the Azores. Then on the 15th of the month the unrestricted campaign which had been going on for months was at last given official expression by the proclamation of a complete blockade of the British Isles and a warning to neutrals that any vessel in the zone ran the risk of destruction.

Meanwhile the Propaganda Ministry had discovered another hero in
Kapitänleutnant
Otto Kretschmer, Commander of U 99; he had sailed into Lorient the previous week flying seven victory pennants representing 65,137 tons, the largest haul so far from a single cruise; in fact British Admiralty records credited him with under 40,000 tons—the discrepancy due in part to the fact that three of his victims were tankers in ballast and did not sink. Raeder flew to Brittany to confer on him the Knight’s Cross.

Although Kretschmer claimed four victims from a convoy which he had followed westward until the escorts had left to rendezvous with inward bound ships, the problem of finding convoys remained the major difficulty of U-boat operations with such a small number of boats. Here is Dönitz’s war diary entry for August 20th:

Raeder was busy at this time with rushed and extraordinarily amateur preparations for an invasion of England code-named ‘Sea Lion’; as the chief of Hitler’s operations staff, General Jodl, said scornfully to his interrogating officer after the war, these ‘were equivalent to those made by Julius Caesar’.
⁵¹
Whether Hitler ever took the preparations seriously is doubtful; according to his naval adjutant, von Puttkamer, he was half-hearted from the start, largely because of his constitutional horror of the sea, over which the operation had to be conducted.
⁵²
Besides this was the question of Russia; both his crusade against Bolshevism and very natural fears for his chief sources of oil supply from the fields around the Black Sea diverted the major share of his attention east. Raeder knew this as well as anyone. At the end of July he had his operations staff draw up a memorandum on the question, and this paved the way to his acknowledgement that the question of oil supply was decisive, hence to his agreement to settle the question of England
via Moscow
.
⁵³

Despite this, and despite the total disruption of his building programme, Raeder loyally carried out Hitler’s instructions to prepare for ‘Sea Lion’. Part of the overall plan was for the U-boats to provide a screen to prevent Royal Naval forces entering the invasion crossing area, and to facilitate control Dönitz moved his headquarters to Paris; his was probably the only branch of the armed services and officialdom which had not set up shop there long since.

The stores of the French capital glittered like an Aladdin’s cave after Germany with its shortages and rationing, and since the exchange rate for the occupation forces was fixed at the very favourable rate of 20 Francs to the
Reichsmark
, three Francs over the rate quoted on the Berlin Exchange, they could buy a surfeit of luxuries not seen in the
Reich
for many years and send them to their families. No doubt Dönitz took the opportunity; Ingeborg remained at home when he moved.

The block he took over for his staff quarters and operating centre was on the Boulevard Suchet, whose windows commanded a view of the Bois de Boulogne, a far cry from the timber hut overlooking the meadows outside Wilhelmshaven. Albert Speer, who visited him at another Paris headquarters he took over later in the war, described the refreshing lack
of ostentation he found there compared with the extravagant style assumed by many of the conquerors; nevertheless it seems that Dönitz was not above corruption: thus one U-boat rating captured by the British in 1941 told his interrogator that Dönitz commandeered a hotel in Paris and requisitioned everything including 100,000 bottles of champagne, which were sold to his officers at about l/6d a bottle and to non-U-boat personnel at 6/- a bottle. There were also unofficial sales to ratings, one of whom told his interrogator that he had celebrated his engagement by buying 20 bottles of champagne and sending them to his family, together with 40 pairs of silk stockings.
⁵⁴

Perhaps it was at this time that Dönitz conceived the idea of putting together a collection of sea paintings by old masters; certainly he acquired a collection during his time in France, as well as adding to his collection of carpets and engravings.

However Dönitz may have exploited the beaten enemy or turned a benevolent eye on his officers, particularly his commissariat officers, who did so, his self-discipline, attention to work and will to achieve resounding success with the U-boat arm remained unimpaired.

Every morning he rose early and stepped into his operations room promptly at 9 o’clock, where the staff under Godt waited for him before a large wall chart of the Atlantic operations area. The chart was brought up to date at 8 o’clock every morning; pins with coloured flags marked the positions of all U-boats; different-coloured flags marked the Italian boats, and the convoys were marked in another colour. After studying the positions for a moment, he would hear a report on the night’s events, signals received, action taken, from the first staff officer; the second staff officer, A 2, would report on minesweeping and patrols along the routes used by the U-boats for leaving and returning to port; A 3 on intelligence received, virtually a record of
B-Dienst
interceptions of British traffic, although these were becoming progressively less useful since the British had woken up to the fact that their ciphers had been cracked, and had changed them; it was still possible to decrypt most messages but it took longer, rendering much of the information out of date and useful only for clues to the general British responses and routing patterns. Apart from these there were occasional reports from
Luftwaffe
reconnaissance flights, but the positions and courses were often inaccurate. Reports from agents in neutral countries were scarcely ever specific enough to be of use—in effect the intelligence department consisted of his own boats’ sighting reports and the telephone line to
B-Dienst
.

Two other staff officers, A 4—communications—and A 5—statistics of successes and losses and odd questions not dealt with by the others—were heard, following which Dönitz and Godt considered the dispositions to be ordered for the day. With so few boats, each with such a small area of visibility and these few driven by aircraft patrols from the focal area off the North Channel it was impossible to provide anything like a complete survey of the approaches and it was usually a matter of trying to guess what the enemy would do next. Often during the day Dönitz could be seen sitting at his desk which faced the great wall chart, his glasses on his nose, staring up at the coloured symbols, deep in thought.

The same guessing game was being played in the U-boat tracking room in the complex below the Admiralty building in London. Here all U-boat sightings from ships and aerial reconnaissance, reports of ships sunk by U-boat and bearings of U-boat wireless transmissions obtained from the direction-finding (D/F) chain were plotted and analysed, Dönitz’s intentions pondered, and predictions sent to the ‘Trade Plot’ nearby, where the evasive routing of convoys was planned. So far results had not been good; the German ‘Enigma’ ciphers had not been broken, the D/F chain, starved of funds before the war, was not yet sufficiently widespread to produce good ‘fixes’, the inter-war neglect of aerial reconnaissance training over the sea—like a similar neglect to develop effective weapons to destroy submarines from the air, or even a suitable aircraft for the purpose—was having the same effect that Dönitz was experiencing with
Luftwaffe
co-operation.
⁵⁵

Of the mistakes on both sides, British complacency since the development of Asdic, neglect of merchant shipping protection and inter-service in-fighting like that which bedevilled Hitler’s High Command, was the more serious. It was proved that autumn as the U-boats suddenly got in amongst the convoys and Dönitz’s training in group tactics brought its first rewards. The surprise he had hoped for was complete; for the U-boat men it was ‘the happy time’; a growing list of aces vied with one another for highest place in the ‘tonnage war’, chief amongst them Kretschmer, ‘the tonnage king’ in U 99, Prien ‘the bull of Scapa’ in U 47 and their crew comrade Schepke in U 100.