Dönitz: The Last Führer (50 page)

Enemy air forces, the remarks continued, were already able to take over escort duties over almost the whole North Atlantic and it had to be expected that the only remaining gaps would be closed in reasonable time.

After noting the increased U-boat losses to aircraft in the Biscay approach routes and the increasing number of enemy surface escorts against which ‘we as yet possess no really effective weapon’ the remarks concluded: ‘To sum up, the U-boat struggle is now harder than ever, but all departments are working full out to assist the boats in their tasks and to equip them with better weapons.’

The remarks demonstrate the failure at U-boat Command to react realistically to the crisis. It was not the fog of war and rush of events that obscured the field but emotional commitment. The U-boat was clearly recognized here as an obsolescent weapon against enemy counter-measures, ‘robbed of its most important ability to remain undetected’, its pack tactics rendered hopeless in the face of air cover. Instead of drawing the appropriate conclusions and making the strategic retreat that had been indicated for some time to enable the scientists and weapons departments to respond, more boats, more valuable, trained crews were to be hurled against the wall of the enemy defences in desperate, foredoomed attempts to find some small breach.

There can be no excuse. This was a campaign whose goal was ultimately numerical, to sink more tonnage than the enemy could build; Dönitz always expressed his aim in these terms, and avidly he studied the monthly statistics kept by the staff for trends. These trends now demonstrated that the battle could not be won with existing methods.

The vital figure was what Dönitz referred to as the ‘U-boat potential’, or the tonnage sunk per U-boat per day at sea. Since the average sea-days per boat never varied much from month to month, nor could they, given the fuel capacity of existing boats and the repair times at base, future monthly sinking totals could be predicted on just two of the variables, the number of boats and the ‘potential’. The previous year the highest ‘potential’ had been 438 tons per boat per sea-day;
³²
this had
been in June while the boats were enjoying their ‘happy time’ off the US coast and Caribbean. Over the following months as convoy systems were organized in these areas, and Dönitz had been forced to return to the sterner task of fighting the North Atlantic convoys in the ‘air gap’ the ‘potential’ had dropped sharply to 256, 260, 229, 226; it rose briefly to 329 tons in the record month of November, then fell back to 139 in December—an average over the last six months of 1942 of 240 tons sunk per boat per day at sea. In the meantime the number of boats operating in the Atlantic had risen from 93 to 149.

Over the first four months of the present year, 1943, the ‘potential’ had dropped further: 129, 148, 230, 127—an average of rather under 160 tons sunk per boat per day at sea. Even assuming no further fall—a questionable assumption in view of the war diary remarks—it would take some 325 boats in the Atlantic to achieve a sinking rate of one million tons a month, and even this was at the lower end of Dönitz’s goal; the naval staff estimate of the figure necessary to achieve victory was 1·3 million tons per month. Since all the other methods together, aircraft,
Schnell
boats, mines, Japanese and Italian forces, could not be expected to account for even 100,000 tons on present form, the U-boats had to do it virtually on their own. However, the U-boat loss rate over the past three months had averaged fifteen boats, and ten had already been lost in the first
five days
of May. Assuming that Speer managed to increase the monthly production figures to 27 as planned, a loss rate of fifteen would mean the fleet growing by only twelve boats a month and it would take between nine and ten months before the total 325 boats—necessary to sink a million tons—could be reached.

But over that nine or ten months some 140–150 boats and their now virtually irreplaceable crews would be lost. Meanwhile the enemy would be more than holding their own in shipbuilding capacity, and as a report of April 4th compiled from British sources had indicated, 87 per cent of merchant crews would be rescued from those ships that were sunk.
³³

It can be seen that the decision to carry on, if it was a decision rather than inertia or blind determination or more probably National Socialist ‘will’, was unscientific. Had the U-boat men been old-fashioned cannon-fodder, had there been a chance that, in Dönitz’s rhetoric, ‘putting forth a little more effort’ and ‘pressing home the attack’ would have resulted in a decision in foreseeable time, had the U-boats been directly defending the homeland, the decision could be defended. None of these conditions obtained. The U-boats demanded scarce resources of steel and copper
and construction workers, the U-boat men were an acknowledged élite, the mettle of a good Commander as valuable and scarce a resource as the materials of which the boats themselves were made, and there was no glimmer of hope either in the statistics or the reports from the front that the battle could be won. Throwing more boats and crews away instead of husbanding them carefully while seeking new types and tactics and a new strategy was anachronistic folly. It is at this point that the flaws in Dönitz’s qualities show up most vividly; it is at this point that we can look back to his 1938 and 1939 papers on U-boat strategy and tactics and his response to Fürbringer’s critique and see that it was all there; he had not changed. The only difference now was that he had no curbs whatever. It is at this point, therefore, that the Führer system itself stands revealed as an anachronism.

Fresh boats from home and from the Biscay bases were directed, with the survivors of the recent battles, to form a 550-mile patrol line south of Greenland to intercept two expected eastbound convoys. Both these were routed around the danger area as revealed by Enigma decrypts, but
B-Dienst
put U-boat Command back in the game with equally rapid decrypts of the new routing instructions, and one of the convoys, HX 237, was found on May 9th.

Within half an hour the reporting boat had been located by an escort and forced under and contact was lost. U-boat Command instructed her group of seven boats to push on ahead in the path of the convoy ‘with determination and on no account allow themselves to be shaken off’.
³⁴
They followed the first part to the letter but aircraft from an escort carrier with the support group prevented them from carrying out the second part, and the convoy passed undetected. More brilliant work by
B-Dienst
allowed the boats to find it for a third time on May 11th and three stragglers were sunk, but the surface and air escort beat off attacks on the main body of ships and over that day and the next destroyed three of the seven attacking boats. On the 13th the operation was called off. U-boat Command commented:

U 954, meanwhile, had refuelled from the tanker, U 119, and returned to the operational area in the icy waters below Greenland. She was assigned to a new patrol line,
Donau
1, which was positioned in the expected track of westbound convoys.

Dönitz’s other main preoccupation at this time was the Mediterranean. He had been closely involved with this theatre from the beginning of his time as C-in-C, not only because the battle for North Africa hinged on the sea supply war, but also because he had become Hitler’s trusted adviser, and the dangers threatening the southern flank had replaced the disasters on the Russian front as the Führer’s chief preoccupation.

In March he had been sent to Italy to represent Hitler’s views to Mussolini, an early indication of the confidence reposed in him. He had used the opportunity to obtain the
Duce
’s approval for the establishment of a small German staff in the Supamarina to improve the co-operation between the two Navies over the protection of North African transports, and in forceful but tactful discussions with the Italian naval chief, Admiral Riccardi, he had won a number of other important concessions; these included an agreement to supply convoy escorts with German AA guns and, the real object of this measure,
German-trained
gunners.
³⁶

The visit had seemed to mark a breakthrough in the strained relationship between the Axis Navies and he must have known as he reported back to the
Wolfschanze
that his reputation had risen with the Führer. He represented the pressing need for more aircraft since the supply battle was being lost largely as a result of allied air superiority; in the meantime he requested permission to send nine U-boats to the Mediterranean to release Italian submarines for the supply run—a remarkable change from his former attitude to diversions from the ‘war-decisive battle in the Atlantic’! Hitler had agreed.
³⁷

Since then the allies had tightened their stranglehold and on May 1st Vice Admiral Ruge, whom Dönitz had appointed to head the German staff in the Supamarina, reported that the Italians had given up hope of saving North Africa and were turning their attention to the problem of defending Italy itself from anticipated allied assaults via Sardinia or Sicily. Dönitz’s response was to tell Riccardi that the decision to hold the Tunis bridgehead was a matter for the supreme leadership; the Navy could not suddenly cease to co-operate while the other arms of the services ‘fight and hold on in desperate positions’
³⁸
and he virtually demanded the use of Italian cruisers for the supply run. When Riccardi
refused he ordered the German naval command in Italy to send U-boats across loaded with drums of benzine for the forces. Since the three immediately available boats could only carry 13,000 gallons between them, the Supreme Commander, South, Field Marshal Kesselring—thanking him for the gesture—suggested this might not be a profitable use for the boats!

Dönitz persisted nonetheless, and on May 5th ordered both Ruge at the Supamarina and the German naval command to use all available forces ‘without regard for future operations’ to support the fighting soldiers and enable them to gain ‘supremacy over the exhausted troops of the enemy’.
³⁹
In isolation this order appears a remarkable misjudgement; viewed alongside his parallel misjudgement in the Atlantic battle and his precisely similar response it can be seen that Dönitz was not fighting with his head, but with his blood, behaving not as a rational Commander but as a National Socialist, convinced like Hitler that will-power and fanaticism would make up for numerical or technical inferiority.

This might be interpreted as the result of exposure to the atmosphere at Hitler’s court, where since the shocking setbacks of the winter a new mood for extreme or ‘radical’ solutions had been evident. Goebbels and Speer were at the centre of the drive, the one using all the weapons of propaganda to whip up a ‘backs to the wall’ mood of fanatic defiance in the people, the other setting in motion a ‘total war’ economy. Dönitz’s rhetoric on taking office—‘Our life belongs to the State… The question for us is winning the war. We have to pursue this goal with fanatical devotion …’—was in the idiom of Goebbels’ notorious public performance at the
Sportpalast
in Berlin on February 18th. Speer, who was present, called it the most effective arousal of an audience to fanaticism he had ever seen—as well he might, for the film of the audience’s reaction shows him jumping up and leading the frenzy! ‘Fanaticism’, ‘Total War’, ‘Victory despite …’ were the codewords of the hour. Dönitz faithfully reflected them in every word and deed. Yet it is apparent from his service reports that he had been travelling a similar extreme, selfless, goal-oriented path and had held to it with ‘indestructible toughness’ throughout his career. He was not simply reflecting the new mood, he was part of it, and it seems evident that Raeder’s dismissal and his succession were in fact manifestations of the new radicalism—as was his agreement with Speer in the teeth of the professionals of the old Navy to merge naval construction into the Ministry of Armaments.

The rise of the new spirit coincided with a dramatic decline in Hitler’s health; this is not surprising since both stemmed from the same cause—defeat. The Führer had retired from his command headquarters on his doctors’ advice to his mountain lair, the
Berghof
above Berchtesgaden. He had been suffering frightful headaches, stomach spasms and flatulence as well as a recurrence of trembling in his left arm and leg which had last affected him after his arrest and imprisonment in 1923. No doubt constant work and anxiety, sleeplessness and lack of exercise—for he believed he had a heart complaint and that physical exertion would prove fatal—and the drugs he was taking all played their part.
⁴⁰
But underlying all the physical and personality changes noted by observers from this period was surely the overwhelming knowledge that he had lost control of events. He never admitted it, perhaps to himself least of all, and in the conscious exercise of his will against the material odds besetting the
Reich
he became more immovable in resolve, more suspicious, more impervious to argument, more subject to violent changes of mood, gloomily taciturn or overflowing with denunciations of his generals, his troops, his allies—never of his own cosmic misjudgements.

In this atmosphere no one who brought rational and analytical judgement to bear could have survived. It is a measure of Dönitz’s natural affinities with the irrational nature of National Socialism that he not only survived, he prospered and grew to become Hitler’s chief military and strategic anchor. It is significant too that after their preliminary skirmish over the usefulness of the big ships, Hitler never, so far as can be known, sought to interfere in the conduct of naval operations. Dönitz seemed to have given him every chance to do so by appointing a liaison officer at Führer headquarters whose task was to give detailed briefings on the everyday conduct of the war at sea—not simply highlights or disasters as in Raeder’s time—but Hitler failed to take advantage of this opportunity to meddle as he meddled with his generals.