Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (33 page)

Remaining submerged almost permanently made the reception of radio messages a hit-or-miss affair. Neither U-boat Command nor the British eavesdroppers at Bletchley Park near London could ever be certain when, or even if, a specific U-boat had received the orders transmitted to it. In order to receive and send anything other than long-wave signals, a U-boat had to bring its aerials above the surface, exposing the conning tower and risking radar detection. In theory, long-wave messages were detectable while submerged if the conditions were perfect, but Schnorkel boats had a poor record of picking up long-wave transmissions.

THANKS TO THE DECRYPTION EXPERTS
at Bletchley Park, the Allies were well aware of the dispatch of Gruppe Seewolf in March 1945, and the relatively slow speed of Schnorkel boats—whether or not they were the rumored “V-1 boats”—gave the U.S. Navy time to organize a massive response, code-named Operation Teardrop. Convoys were rerouted further south with limited escorts, leaving most of the U.S. Navy assets free to concentrate on hunting down Gruppe Seewolf and the two associated boats. The U.S. Navy supposedly achieved devastating results, claiming seven sunk and two surrendered; however, until this day there remains uncertainty as to the extent of the attacks, and while the Kriegsmarine remained relatively ignorant about the extent of Allied naval radar capabilities—one of the best-kept secrets of World War II—the U-boat commanders were well aware of the dangers of radio location and recognized that maintaining radio silence was central to a U-boat’s chances of survival.

High-frequency direction finding—HF/DF, or “Huff-Duff,” introduced by the British Royal Navy—was a means of locating U-boats by taking cross bearings on the high-frequency radio transmissions they employed. Numerous long-range listening stations were built on many of the Atlantic’s coasts, and “Huff-Duff” was also installed on the warships of Allied escort and hunter-killer groups. Any transmission from a U-boat risked betraying its rough position, allowing the hunters to close in for more sensitive searches by radar and sonar. It was not necessary to understand what the U-boat commander was saying—figuring that out was a lengthier task for Bletchley Park; for the hunters, it was enough that the commander was making himself “visible” by transmitting.

In obedience to their orders, none of the Gruppe Seewolf boats transmitted any traffic after April 2, 1945. While U-boat Command sent occasional orders to the boats of patrol-line Harke, there is no actual evidence that any of them picked up these messages and acted on them. After that date, the Royal Navy’s submarine-trackers at Bletchley Park, and Western Approaches Command in the northwestern English port of Liverpool, were unable to verify the actual positions of the U-boats by using any form of direction-finding. All they had to work on was the information decrypted from
U-boat Command’s transmissions
to the boats, filtered through past experience and gut instinct, and as a result they had only a vague idea where the boats might be. The Admiralty situation report for the week ending April 2 stated that the U-boats were “
likely
to operate against convoys in mid-Atlantic but
may
tend to move along the estimated convoy routes in the general direction of the U.S. departure ports” (italics added).

THE U.S. NAVY OFFICIAL HISTORY
claims that of the nine U-boats that sailed for the Atlantic in March and April 1945—seven of them forming Gruppe Seewolf—two surrendered at sea and seven were claimed as having been sunk. However, there was no real evidence to support the destruction of four of these boats. These four were some of the last unconfirmed U-boat sinkings at sea; the few losses of Type IX boats that sailed subsequently are
well documented and correct
. From December 1944, the U.S. Navy would employ four escort-carrier groups in Operation Teardrop—the carriers USS
Mission
,
Croatan
,
Bogue
, and
Core
, with no fewer than forty-two destroyers. This largest Allied hunter-killer operation of the whole Atlantic war was undertaken in the North Atlantic’s worst weather in forty years, with high winds and mountainous seas.

Of the seven Gruppe Seewolf submarines facing this overwhelming force, only one was a confirmed kill. U-546 (Lt. Cdr. Paul Just) left Kiel, Germany, on March 11, 1945, and joined the Harke patrol line on April 14. On April 23, aircraft from USS
Bogue
spotted her; the next day the Edsall-class destroyer escort USS
Frederick C. Davis
made contact, but Paul Just got his torpedoes off first, sinking the destroyer with the loss of 115 lives. A subsequent ten-hour hunt ended with the U-boat being hit and forced to the surface; Just and thirty-two survivors were rescued and shipped to Newfoundland. It has been confirmed that both there and after being transferred to Washington, Lt. Cdr. Just, two of his officers, and five seamen were
treated with great and repeated brutality
. The reason seems to have been American fears about submarine-launched V-1 attacks—grim confirmation of the success of the misinformation plan.

Lt. Cdr. Richard Bernadelli’s U-805 sailed from Bergen, Norway, on March 17 and also joined patrol line Harke on April 14, later surviving several attacks from aircraft and warships. After the breakup of Gruppe Seewolf, U-805 operated off Halifax, Nova Scotia, eventually surrendering at sea on May 9—five days after Adm. Dönitz transmitted his surrender order to all U-boats still on patrol. This crew were also interrogated about the supposed V-1 boats, but apparently were not roughly treated—after all, the war with Germany was now over.

Lt. Cdr. Thilo Bode’s U-858 left Horten in Norway on March 11 and was judged by the Royal Navy’s Submarine Tracking Room to have joined the patrol line on April 14. It seems not to have been detected before Bode surrendered at sea on May 14. Bode’s crew were also questioned about the alleged
V-1 launchers
.

U-881, helmed by Lt. Cdr. Dr. Karl Heinz Frischke, was late joining the line. It left Bergen belatedly on April 7 after problems with its Schnorkel. Frischke clearly did not pick up Dönitz’s surrender order of May 4, and U-881 was detected and claimed to be destroyed by the destroyer escort USS
Farquar
as it approached the carrier USS
Mission
Bay on May 6. However,
no physical evidence of its destruction
ever came to light.

Nor was there any proof of the destruction of U-1235, U-880, and U-518, all claimed as sunk during Operation Teardrop. In reality, they were nowhere near where the Submarine Tracking Room thought them “likely” to be.

U-1235 (First Lt. Franz Barsch) left Bergen on March 19 and was judged by the Submarine Tracking Room to have joined patrol line Harke on April 14. Officially, this boat was lost during the night of April 15–16 to an attack by the destroyers USS
Stanton
and
Frost
, which assumed from a violent underwater explosion that U-1235 had been destroyed—and that it had, indeed, been carrying V-weapons. No wreckage came to the surface, and no other evidence was produced to confirm this kill. In conformity with the orders of April 2 to all Gruppe Seewolf boats, U-1235 sent no radio messages at all during its last patrol. U-boat Command certainly had no idea that the submarine was “lost,” continuing to send it orders as late as April 22.

Lt. Cdr. Gerhard Schötzau’s U-880 had left Bergen on March 14, and the British tracking room plotted its arrival on the line exactly a month later. The U.S. Navy claimed that this boat, too, was “killed” in a joint attack by the destroyers
Stanton
and
Frost
on April 15–16, within an hour of the destruction of U-1235. “Several underwater explosions” were assumed to have destroyed the boat, but no wreckage came to the surface or was recovered. Again, U-boat Command kept transmitting messages to U-880 until April 22.

Finally, the veteran U-518, commanded by First Lt. Hans-Werner Offermann, left Kristiansand on March 12. U-518 was judged by the Admiralty to have joined the Harke patrol line on April 14. The official U.S. Navy description of the loss of this boat was similar to the descriptions of U-1235 and U-880. The Cannon-class destroyers USS
Carter
and
Neal A. Scott
claimed the kill on April 22, but again no wreckage came to the surface.

The Royal Navy’s brilliant Capt.
Rodger Winn
, head of the Submarine Tracking Room, highlighted the shaky nature of these claims. In a memorandum of May 20, 1945, he noted, with classic British understatement, that the outcome of these actions had been

reconsidered in an optimistic light, and as a result it is thought that possibly as many as 14 U-boats were sunk.… On this assumption it would follow since the identities of the boats in Norway are now well established that 11 remain to be accounted for. So far as is known these 11 boats are at sea but the Americans claim, possibly rightly, to have sunk 2 of them.… What the remaining boats are doing or intend to do is a fruitful and intriguing subject for speculation.

The same memorandum implicitly cast some doubt on the U.S. Navy’s claim to have sunk U-530, commanded by First Lt. Otto Wermuth. For a confirmed kill, that boat did indeed look surprisingly intact when it surfaced off Mar del Plata, Argentina, and
surrendered to the authorities
on July 10, 1945.

SEALED ORDERS MUST HAVE BEEN DELIVERED
to the commanders of U-1235, U-880, and U-518 before they sailed in March 1945, with instructions for them to be opened at a specified longitude. Drafted in Berlin on Bormann’s instructions, the contents of these orders would be known only to a select few.

The specified longitude was reached before the formation of the Harke patrol line on April 14; the orders instructed the three commanders to break away from Gruppe Seewolf at a time that would allow them to rendezvous on April 28 at Fuerteventura in Spain’s Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. They were to maintain complete radio silence, while monitoring reception in the Thrasher cipher over their Siemens & Halske T43 encryption machines, and were to ignore all orders destined for the Gruppe as a whole. The British Admiralty’s daily war diary for April 15 stated that an independent Liberty-class merchant ship, SS
Samoland
, saw a surfaced U-boat in the approximate position where U-518 could have been. It was steering a course of 101 degrees, back across the Atlantic in the direction of the Canary Islands—1,300 miles away, and thirteen days’ submerged cruising with Schnorkel assistance.

THE STORY OF THE CODE-BREAKERS
and computer pioneers of Bletchley Park, the sixty-acre facility fifty miles northwest of London where the British government’s Code and Cypher School—Station X—was installed in August 1939, has been told at length elsewhere. The bare essentials are that in January 1940, British specialists, building upon invaluable prewar Polish research, managed to crack the encrypted German Army transmissions generated by the Enigma machine (see
Chapter 1
). Decryption of the Luftwaffe’s transmissions soon followed; however, the Kriegsmarine’s encryptions for message traffic between Adm. Dönitz’s U-boat Command and his boats at sea remained unbroken.

The huge toll of Allied and neutral shipping that the U-boats were taking in 1940 made solving this mystery a priority. It became even more urgent from September 1940, when Dönitz successfully pioneered his wolf-pack tactics, using encrypted communications to vector multiple boats into the path of a sighted convoy. Lt. Cdr. Ian Fleming of British naval intelligence concocted a scheme to crash-land a captured German aircraft in the English Channel, wait for rescue by a German patrol boat, overpower its crew, and capture an Enigma machine. The men and the aircraft for this Operation Ruthless got as far as Dover before the plan was canceled, on the sensible grounds that none of the vessels operated by the Germans in the Channel at night was a suitable target (and that there was no guarantee that the ditched plane would float long enough for its crew to be rescued).

On May 9, 1941, U-110 was attacking convoy CB318 in the North Atlantic, south of Iceland, when Royal Navy escorts forced it to the surface by a depth-charge attack. The U-boat crew abandoned ship after setting scuttling charges, but these failed to detonate; the British apparently shot the submarine’s captain, the U-boat ace Lt. Cdr. Fritz Julius Lemp, when he tried to return to the vessel to finish the job. Royal Navy sublieutenant David Balme of HMS
Bulldog
led a boarding party across, risked going down the hatch, and
recovered the Enigma machine
and its priceless accompanying instruction books—a success that the British went to great lengths to conceal from the captured crew. Constant radio intercepts and ceaseless work to keep up with the changing settings of the naval Enigma machines were still necessary to maintain the flow of Ultra intelligence, and (as mentioned in
Chapter 1
) the introduction of the Schlüssel M four-rotor Enigma machine defeated Bletchley Park from February to December 1942 and continued to hamper the decrypters until September 1943. Nevertheless, Ultra gave the Allies a
massive intelligence-gathering advantage
; concealing the Allies’ knowledge of Enigma transmissions—their greatest secret “weapon”—from the Germans was a matter of life and death.

THE GERMANS NEVER DID DISCOVER
that the Enigma codes had been broken, but in February 1945, a new sort of traffic was coming over the radio speakers in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park—traffic that nobody had ever encountered before and that nobody had the slightest idea how to break (see
Chapter 11
). The British gave the names “Tunny” and “Thrasher” to these two latest weapons in Germany’s cryptographic arsenal; neither seemed to be generated using the now relatively familiar Enigma systems. In time, a stupendous effort and the use of the
Colossus
computer would allow Tunny, produced by the Lorenz SZ42 machine, to be read (at least intermittently), but Bormann’s communications network based on the Siemens & Halske T43 machine remained secure. On April 23, 1945, Adm. Karl-Jesco von Puttkamer, Hitler’s navy adjutant (and another survivor of the July 20, 1944, bomb attempt), was sent to the Berghof in Bavaria to destroy Hitler’s private papers there. Puttkamer had three T43 machines in mobile radio trucks in an underground garage at
Berchtesgaden
, guarded by forty SS troops, and on April 25 the machines began transmitting. They continued to communicate with a variety of stations until May 1, and many of the messages were for German agents in South America.