Dönitz: The Last Führer (15 page)

Dönitz was forced under and bombed by an aircraft before he reached the straits, which he had hoped to negotiate on the surface after dark, and he was forced under again by another aircraft before he was out of the danger zone—as he remarked, an extraordinarily heavy air patrol for the time. Once through he made straight for Port Augusta, arriving on the morning of March 17th and lying submerged some way off surveying the harbour through his periscope. Inside was a large ship with seven double masts; he assumed with excitement that this must be his target,
Cyclops
. Waiting until late in the afternoon, he steered towards the entrance intending to find a way in by twilight, but he saw ten buoys running in a line from the fairway mark; these obviously held anti-U-boat nets and, unable to see any gaps, he steered out to sea again, intending to make another inspection in full daylight.

This he did early the following morning, the 18th; the first thing he saw was two tugs, each with two lighters in tow, steering out of the harbour between the buoys and a light-tower standing on a rock to the north of the entrance. The chart showed this passage as being a mere seven metres deep. An hour later he saw another tug with a single lighter steering out hard by the fairway buoy, between it and the first of the net buoys; here the depth was shown on his chart as twelve metres. Since the only sizeable ship in the port was the one he took to be the
Cyclops
and the traffic appeared to be solely in barges and small craft, he decided that the small gap of about fifteen metres through which the last tug had steered was the only way he could get in.
¹³⁰
This is not how he described it in his memoirs; he made no mention of the lighter traffic he observed, stating simply that near the light-tower to the north of the entrance the greatest depth of water was twelve metres; thinking that so mean a depth would be regarded as impassable by U-boats, and that in consequence no nets would be laid there, he decided to go in by this passage. Many years had passed by then, he was an old man and he made other slips of memory in his description of the voyage; yet his war diary entries had been published in the official account of the U-boat war two years before.

Having chosen his entry point by the fairway mark, he ordered the crew to don lifejackets, had the secret papers placed in a sack with an explosive charge, other charges positioned to destroy the boat itself should they be forced to the surface inside, and steered for the gap at
periscope depth at three knots—all his small boat could make under water. There was a stiff northerly breeze pushing up whitecaps on the surface and he passed the line of buoys unobserved shortly before 10 o’clock. He continued westerly, using the periscope as little and as briefly as possible to check his position and quickly scan all round to see if he had been observed, but there was nothing in sight save small sailing craft and he remained undetected. Turning to a northerly course for the inner harbour where the large ship was lying, he reached a suitable firing position at 10.49; ‘First tube away!’ He fired both bow tubes and saw explosions against the forward third of the ship throwing up high pillars of water; immediately he ordered the rudder hard over for a stern shot. Two minutes later the boat had come round and he fired the stern tube. A hit on the quarter! He steered out the way he had come in.

The steamer began to settle at once. Raising his periscope briefly at 11.00 he saw that she had taken a heavy list and her foc’s’le was under water. By 11.15 she had turned over on her side, and a minute later there was nothing of her to be seen. By this time a flying machine had appeared overhead. Three minutes later he turned east for the fairway mark and saw that the flying machine was cruising over the line of buoys and a sea-going tug had placed herself directly across the gap through which he had come in. He had no alternative but to down periscope and steer under her; this he did a quarter of an hour later, touching the bottom at eleven and a half metres, then bumping and sliding over it for some three minutes until at a depth of fifteen metres the boat came free. By 11.35 he was well outside and steering for the open sea. There had been no bombs dropped and no warships had come in sight; even the tug had been where she was by chance, he realized.

He made for Palermo and laid his mines outside the harbour on the 21st; there was little traffic though and he found no targets for his remaining two torpedoes—the boat only carried five—until he looked into the narrows of Messina. Here he found a two-funnelled steamer escorted by two destroyers. He lay in wait submerged, and fired both torpedoes at
her, diving deep immediately because of the escort and, not hearing any detonation, assumed he had missed. As the position of his boat had been given away by the turbulence caused by the discharge of the torpedoes, he was soon under depth-charge attack. It is not clear how long this lasted—such attacks were not often effective at this time because of the want of any efficient apparatus to detect a submerged U-boat’s position. Some time after it had finished he made his way up again very cautiously and ran out the periscope; there was nothing in sight.

The failure affected him deeply, as all setbacks did, and he was probably an uncomfortable man to be with on the return voyage. Then, steering in close among the Dalmatian Islands by night to avoid the minefields of the Otranto barrage, the boat ran aground, ramming her open mine hatch on the rocks so hard that no engine movements or alterations of trim could free her. He was forced to call up for assistance, which appeared the following day in the shape of an Austrian destroyer. She towed him off and he resumed course for Pola, as he lightly put it in his memoirs, with very mixed feelings, wondering ‘how amiably the Flag Officer U-boats and the flotilla chief would receive me’. Almost certainly he was sunk in deep gloom. However, he found on arrival that his exploit at Port Augusta far outweighed any errors; the Flag Officer U-boats (FdU) noted on his report: The Commander conducted the attack leading to the destruction of the valuable 9,000-ton ship with magnificent dash and great circumspection. The achievement deserves special recognition.
¹³²

The official announcement of the feat was brought to the Kaiser’s attention; he noted in the margin, ‘
Dekoration!
’ and on June 10th Dönitz was awarded the coveted Knight’s Cross of the order of the house of Hohenzollern. As it turned out the ship he had sunk was not the
Cyclops
, but a 5,000-ton Italian coaling hulk—not that this detracted from the boldness and cool precision of the exploit.

After UC 25 had been repaired Dönitz took her out for another cruise in July, laying mines before Corfu, then making torpedo attacks on four ships, one of which was beached on Malta and the other three presumed destroyed. This was a good result since two of the ships were under strong escort. His flotilla chief noted on his report:

UC 25 was paid off after this cruise and Dönitz was appointed to a larger, faster command, UB 68, then undergoing a refit in Pola after having made three Mediterranean cruises since her arrival from the North Sea in January. In his memoirs Dönitz wrote that the longitudinal stability of these UB boats was delicate; when diving at more than four to six degrees inclination the deck area tended to act as a sheer plane forcing the boats to a deeper angle and unless vigorous action was taken they eventually stood on their heads. He suggested that the tendency was perhaps exaggerated in UB 68 during her refit when her original 8·8-cm gun was replaced by a 10·5-cm piece and to compensate a lead weight was attached to her keel, and additional buoyancy tanks were soldered to her upper deck. How important these factors were in subsequent events is impossible to say.

Probably far more important, although not mentioned at all by Dönitz, was the inexperience of her crew. Due to the steady if unspectacular loss of U-boats during the course of the war and the desperate efforts the naval command was now making to overcome the convoy system by throwing as many boats into the fray as they could possibly fit out, crews were diluted with increasing numbers of raw entrants who had received a shorter training than hitherto. The crew of UB 68 was an extreme example of this, as the British interrogation report on her survivors makes clear:

UB 68 sailed on her one and only voyage under Dönitz’s command on September 25th, practising diving every day on the way down the Adriatic without accidents or alarms. The Otranto barrage, which had by now been increased to the theoretically formidable combination of nets, minefields and patrol lines in depth involving over 200 vessels equipped with hydrophones, kite balloons and depth charges, and 72 aircraft, was passed without difficulty on the surface at night. As another U-boat Commander expressed it when interrogated, this way of getting through
the barrage was ‘only an ordinary war risk; I could always sight patrol craft long before they saw me’.
¹³⁵

Once through the Straits, Dönitz steered for a position 50 miles south-east of Cape Passero—the southern corner of Sicily—about equidistant from Grand Harbour, Malta, on the latitude of the convoy route. In Pola he had arranged to meet another U-boat Commander here on the evening of October 3rd for joint night attacks on convoys during the new moon period. What he did not mention in his memoirs was that such a strategy of joint attack had been adopted by the FdU, Mediterranean, in response to the increasing number of flying machines appearing over the focal points of trade and making it unsafe for U-boats to operate in these areas, which had been their chief hunting grounds. ‘Under these circumstances,’ Dönitz’s Flotilla chief,
Fregattenkapitän
Otto Schultze, wrote in 1927, ‘it was necessary to adapt the tactics of the torpedo U-boats to the common employment of several U-boats in the same sea area. Attempts in this direction were started by the FdU in the second half of 1918.’
¹³⁶

Nor did Dönitz mention that his partner on this occasion,
Kapitänleutnant
Steinbauer of U 48, an experienced Commander and Knight of the
Pour le Mérite
, had already carried out two operations in concert with other boats, the first as early as January, 1918, with the ‘ace’, von Mellenthin, who on the basis of his own experiences had already made a proposal for ‘group tactics’ by U-boats against merchantmen.
¹³⁷
Dönitz did not mention these things since it would have prejudiced his own claims as originator of group tactics.

On this occasion his partner, Steinbauer, was not at the rendezvous; he had been held up for repairs. Dönitz remained on the surface that night, steering easterly to judge by his subsequent position. At about one o’clock in the morning (October 4th) some 150 miles east of Malta, the navigating warrant officer who had the middle watch sighted the shapes of a convoy heading towards them on a northwesterly course; he called Dönitz who steered for an attack position. According to Dönitz’s memoirs, things now happened very quickly; thrusting through the outer destroyer screen, still on the surface, he found the steamers turning towards him on one leg of a zig zag so that he was now inside the columns. He loosed a torpedo at the nearest ship and saw ‘a gigantic bright water-column’, which was followed by a detonation; just avoiding the stern of the second ship in the column he saw a destroyer coming at him ‘at high speed with a white bow wave’.
¹³⁸
He dived and made away under
water. Surfacing again after a quarter of an hour, he made out the shapes of the ships in the west and chased after them at full speed, only gradually overhauling since wind and sea were against him, and by the time he was in position ahead for another attack it had begun to grow light; he had to submerge for a torpedo attack.

The story as told to the interrogating officers by UB 68’s navigating warrant officer is less dramatic; it does not mention penetrating the escort screen, nor the zig zag, nor getting in amongst the columns, nor nearly bumping the second ship; he merely said:

Dönitz’s official report supports this version as it mentions two unsuccessful torpedo attacks made on the surface between 2.30 and 3.30 after the first attack—which had resulted in the sinking of the 3,883-ton British steamer
Oopack
. This report was in print in the official account of the U-boat war two years before Dönitz wrote the second volume of his memoirs—both volumes contained slightly differing accounts of the attack—and it must be assumed that, like the account of his proceedings before Port Augusta, the inaccuracies were intended to enhance the impression of danger and his own prowess, and in this case hide the fact that he fired either one or two torpedoes which missed—an unnecessary conceit, one would have thought, in the light of his proven daring in
entering Port Augusta, and his subsequent record and rise to the rare height of Grand Admiral; for that reason the embroidery is particularly revealing.