Dönitz: The Last Führer (38 page)

At all events there can be no doubt that the morale of the arm and the sense of belonging to an élite corps which had been his aim from the beginning reached full flowering in late 1940 and spring 1941. The British interrogator of the crew of U 70, rammed and sunk by a Dutch tanker in a convoy battle in February 1941, noted: ‘The morale of both officers and men was high, there was no sign of war weariness and the usual undigested propaganda was repeated
verbatim ad nauseam
.’
⁶⁸

The following month U 100 was also rammed on the surface, her ace Commander, Schepke, killed as he stood on the bridge; his surviving crew ‘showed high morale despite their shattering experiences (under depth-charge attack) and a common, unshakeable confidence in a German decisive victory this year’.
⁶⁹
In the same action the top-scoring
ace, Otto Kretschmer, was forced to the surface and captured with his crew. The interrogating officer was impressed by their morale, teamwork and proficiency; his only criticism was of their

Kretschmer himself was a more thoughtful character than some of his swaggering rivals, and better educated. He admitted to his interrogator that he had become weary of the war some time ago and latterly got no satisfaction from sinking ship after ship, and ‘his political views were less extreme Nazi than had been assumed’. Equally interesting to the interrogator was his first officer, formerly Dönitz’s Flag Lieutenant, Hans-Jochen von Knebel Döberitz, from a Junker family in East Pomerania. ‘On the surface he seemed a very thorough Nazi, but actually he was rather ashamed of many of the Nazi methods and most of their leading personalities. He maintained a façade of loyalty towards the regime whereas in reality he was only loyal to his class and country…’ The two midshipmen, who had entered the service in 1939, were both ‘typical Nazis, immovably certain of a supreme German victory in 1941, and repeated the usual propaganda when discussing any subject’.
⁷¹

That same month of March 1941 three other boats including Prien’s U 47 also failed to report and were assumed lost—although it was not until April 26th that the three stars denoting a loss were placed against U 47 and Prien’s death was admitted to the nation. He was probably Dönitz’s favourite Commander, Kretschmer was another, and the loss of three top aces in the same month was a bitter blow; it is said that Dönitz’s reserve and aloofness at this time betrayed to those close to him the depth of his feelings.

By early summer the
hubris
of the previous year was beginning to fade.

After the morning’s work and lunch with his staff, Dönitz liked to take an hour’s sleep. Then, accompanied by his adjutant and one or two staff officers he had invited, and with his young Alsatian dog acquired at the beginning of the war—named Wolf—he was driven in his Mercedes out into the countryside, where he walked for two hours or more. Striding
out across the Breton fields—for it was still safe for German officers to do so—stopping sometimes to exchange a few words with locals, he tried to clarify his ideas by talking them out and drawing arguments from his staff. They knew he wanted their real opinions and responded openly; the exchanges became keen at times and astonishingly frank. He could sink into an evil mood when things were going badly or frustration and tension drew him taut, but on average days he liked nothing better than vigorous opinions and honest debate seasoned by chaff. The staff of a
Luftwaffe
general invited to lunch one day were astonished at the free style of the U-boat men with their chief, and the riposte and banter which bounced back and forth across the table.

Viktor Oehrn, who was with Dönitz either as staff officer or U-boat Commander throughout the war, recalls:

Arriving back at the Kerneval Château, known on account of its small size for the function it performed as the ‘Sardine tin’, he would discuss new developments with the duty officer before the Atlantic chart, perhaps debating fresh dispositions with his chief of staff. Dinner, again with his staff, was at eight; the U-boat men lived on the best the French countryside and coastline provided, and Dönitz, although as disciplined in his eating and drinking as in every other aspect of his life—astonishingly as an Admiral he could still get into his midshipman’s uniform—was no exception; he drank a glass or two of a good Bordeaux every day, never too much. Promptly at ten he retired to bed; even if he was entertaining guests he would rise and bid them a good night, ‘
Amüsiert Euch noch gut—ich gehe jetzt schlafen
.’ (‘Carry on enjoying yourselves—I’m off to bed.’)
⁷³

There were exceptions to the full night’s sleep he tried to obtain if an important convoy battle were taking place; then he and all the staff would be roused by the duty officer and would appear in the operations room in pyjamas and bath robes. The other exceptions were air raids; at the sound of the alarm everyone would go down to the sleeping quarters
in a great concrete command bunker which the Todt Organization had sunk into the garden at the back of the Château. The bunker is still there, the walls of the operation room now bare and damp; open entrances without doors lead through white tiled shower and lavatory cubicles, their fittings torn away, and accommodation stripped of its original timber panelling and strewn with debris to the telephone exchange at the rear, where large copper terminals on the switchboard survive in testimony to the pre-electronic age in which this war was fought. Outside the front entrance to the bunker stand two magnificent magnolia grandiflora planted then. They are large now.

Dönitz kept as close as possible to the realities of the front in searching debriefing sessions with each Commander the day after the boat’s return. He and his staff would listen in silence as the man gave his report, interjecting only if he wanted an explanation of a point, or if he thought something was being deliberately withheld; his skill in probing behind the stated facts was legendary, and for the less resolute the debriefing, which concluded with intensive questioning by Dönitz and Godt and perhaps other staff officers present, could be almost as much of an ordeal as the cruise itself; a few found wanting were transferred to other branches of the service, those who had made a successful cruise came out elated by their chief’s satisfaction with their prowess.

However, he could not interview those who had the most valuable information about enemy tactics and counter-measures—those who did not come back; these simply failed to wireless in their position; the way in which they had met their end and the reasons could only be guessed from their last report and enemy announcements. As the losses continued, uncertainty gave rise to speculation about secret enemy detection devices, improved Asdic, a new and accurate system of dropping depth charges, fatal to any U-boat pinpointed by Asdic.
⁷⁴

Speculation about new detection devices was fed by the extraordinary way in which British convoys evaded U-boat patrol lines. This was remarked as early as April 1941: ‘the impression is being gained that English traffic is deliberately routed around attacking groups’. Security precautions were taken in case the positions were being given away to the enemy by spies, the circle of those with access to operational details was cut to the minimum, the daily position report to other interested commands stopped. Still, as the boats were forced further and further west across the Atlantic by increasing numbers and effectiveness of British escorts and air patrols, the convoys evaded them. All the
sightings which led to battles were made fortuitously by lone boats, not by the deliberately positioned patrol lines of closely-spaced boats across their supposed tracks. By November it was clear this was no coincidence:

The three ways they could get this information were by spies—everything had been done to exclude this possibility—or by deciphering radio messages—the experts in crypt-analysis at High Command considered this out of the question—or by ‘a combination of U-boat radio traffic and reports of sightings’. Dönitz considered it impossible to investigate the third contingency because ‘it is not known what information can be gained by the enemy from sighting reports and radio traffic (particularly the accuracy of D/F bearings).’
⁷⁶
This problem had been a staple for discussions with his staff for months, yet no satisfactory answers had been found. On November 19th, he decided that ‘perhaps closer co-operation with
B-Dienst
may help’, and requested an experienced officer from the Radio Intelligence Service to join his staff to investigate the problem of how the enemy routed his convoys.

Here we are at the nub of the extraordinary amateurishness of the German war effort: Dönitz was conducting a campaign of vital importance, which would help to determine—if not as in his own view actually
decide
—whether the overwhelming naval power of the British Empire was to strangle or be strangled by the
Reich
—literally the most important question facing Germany; yet he was attempting to do so with a staff of half a dozen young U-boat men! They had not been trained to think scientifically, indeed their education had in most cases been seriously undermined by the Nazi control of schools. But if they had been natural geniuses their routine tasks and their demanding schedule at U-boat headquarters would have precluded serious analysis of the problems of this hide-and-seek war; thrashing them out in forays across the Breton fields was no substitute for thorough scientific analysis and proper organization of intelligence. Like Hitler’s attempt to create an uneducated slave labour force of Poles and Slavs for the (to be conquered)
German East, it was an anachronism, an eighteenth-century way of war in a twentieth-century age of technology.

Dönitz was no more to blame for this than he had been in the torpedo fiasco, or in the continuing fiasco of
Luftwaffe
non co-operation. From the amateurishness at the head of the nation, chaos and corruption separated every organ of government and the armed services. It may be thought that it had taken the U-boat staff rather a long time to realize that patrol lines were not finding convoys, and for Dönitz to realize that it might ‘perhaps help’ to inject some expert analysis into the problem, yet that should not have been his job any more than it had been his job to find out what was wrong with the torpedoes. It was the system of command and analysis and co-ordination that had failed from the top as it had in Tirpitz’s day. Dönitz was left fighting his war by his fingertips with little scientific assistance.

A glance at the British organization he was facing by this time indicates the scale of the German failure. At the top was the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, chaired by Churchill himself and consisting of the War Cabinet, the chiefs of the naval and air staffs and scientific advisers; the committee normally met once a week to consider overall progress in the campaign, and obviously from its composition had the power to allocate resources.
⁷⁷
The day-to-day control of anti-submarine forces was concentrated chiefly in the Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches with his headquarters in Liverpool; here a ‘Trade Plot’ covering one huge wall of his operations room duplicated the trade plot in the Operational Intelligence Control which had moved from the underground complex below the Admiralty to a nearby ‘Citadel’; this master plot was associated with the submarine tracking room, which was fed information from the nearby D/F plotting room and from aircraft and shipping at sea, and from the secret Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.

In the early days the German Enigma machine ciphers had defeated Bletchley Park, but on May 8, 1941 an Enigma machine complete with the daily setting instructions and other secret material was captured from U 110 after she had been depth-charged to the surface by the combined attack of one of the new escort groups. It is interesting that this boat was commanded by Julius Lemp, who had sunk the
Athenia
; he was lost, but according to the British interrogation report, he was much respected and liked by his crew. Despite this, U 110 did not conform to Dönitz’s ideal; the first lieutenant, ‘narrow-minded, callous, brutal and a bully
as well as intolerant of any criticism of the [Nazi] regime which he ardently supported’ was ‘detested by the crew’, and the junior lieutenant was apparently incompetent. Although nearly all the petty officers were experienced men, ‘many of the ratings were raw and ill-trained and had been drafted into U-boats without option’. The interrogator concluded, ‘It would seem there is real difficulty in manning U-boats,’ and significantly, although morale was still high, ‘conviction of Germany’s ultimate victory was not quite so unshakeable’.
⁷⁸

In any case, capture of U 110’s cipher apparatus enabled Bletchley Park to read U-boat traffic to the end of June—when the settings expired—and thereafter they were usually able to crack new settings within 48 hours and often more quickly. The information derived from this code-breaking—known simply as ‘Ultra’ to keep it secret—explains Dönitz’s problems in locating convoys in the latter half of 1941, although not of course the earlier group failures.
⁷⁹