Dönitz: The Last Führer (29 page)

Time was something Hitler entirely lacked; his war economy was leading inevitably to war: only thus could he rescue himself from the internal effects of the declining living standards and economic crisis about to become manifest, only by aggression could he secure the raw materials and production facilities the war economy devoured. Recognition of this apparently caused a few of the naval staff officers to harbour the kind of rebellious thoughts about Hitler and the regime that were apparent among more intelligent Army officers like the Chief of the General Staff, Beck. Whether this was ever much more than frustration at the insoluble problems caused by the new orientation of policy and revulsion at Germany’s tarnished image in the world after fearful events like
Kristallnacht
in November, when Party members went on street rampages against Jews and Jewish property, is not clear. All that is certain is that Raeder co-operated actively and enthusiastically with the new anti-British policy as embodied in the ‘Z-Plan’. This implies a severe attack of Utopian thinking worthy of his model, Tirpitz, or the kind of moral cowardice which had characterized the successive retreats of the Army leadership before Hitler and the National Socialist Party. Or perhaps it was the old blindness of ambition, combined with national hubris and renewed faith in the Führer after the western powers climbed down at Munich at the end of September that year and delivered Czechoslovakia ‘bloodlessly’ to the
Reich
.

Dönitz’s views at this time are not known, but it may be assumed from all that he did and wrote that he was a good deal closer to Carls’ than to Heye’s position so far as faith in the Führer was concerned. Also there is no doubt that he saw the advantages of the new naval strategy for his own arm of the service. U-boats were quicker to build, used less raw material and were far cheaper than the huge ‘balanced fleet’ Raeder proposed; moreover they were the only class of vessel able to beat the British blockade before the Army reached the Atlantic. From now on he turned his energies and considerable force of personality and persuasion to bring these points to attention and change naval policy.

Besides his official efforts in this direction, he wrote a book that winter called
Die U-bootswaffe (The U-boat Arm)
; it was published in early 1939. He was careful not to drop a hint of his development of group tactics for war on convoys, yet his remarks on U-boats working with the surface forces, taken together with a long section on commerce warfare, might have alerted anyone thinking about Britain’s vulnerable merchant shipping routes. He started the section ‘Employment of U-boats in Trade Warfare’ thus: ‘The destruction of the enemy trade, the attack on the enemy sea communications is the proper purpose of sea warfare …’
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Whether an inspired leap could have been made between these remarks and his later section on tactical co-operation between U-boats and surface forces, his section on night surface attack could not have been plainer; he spelled out in detail why the U-boat with its small silhouette was ideal for surprise torpedo attack by night and how rigorously his own arm had been trained in this tactic.

More interesting now is the insight the book provides into Dönitz’s total commitment to the U-boat arm and to the warrior ethic of the service and current propaganda. The descriptive passages are written in heroic style foreshadowing his later Nazi speeches. The political and military-political views in and between the lines are naïve. On the World War, for instance, the U-boat campaign had ‘brought England to the edge of the precipice’ but had not been able to achieve decisive success because ‘the homeland had become Marxist and capitulated’.
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Many passages are so over-written—to English eyes—as to suggest he had fallen completely under the mood of national hysteria provoked by Goebbels; his section on the U-boat’s crew exemplifies what has been called the ‘all male collective’ of the Nazi movement with its cult of comradeship fostering ‘a pervasive, though naturally unacknowledged
form of homosexuality’.
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U-boat comradeship was described in idyllic terms, and one has the impression that the brotherhood found in a crew was to him a pure example of the larger brotherhood of the German
Volk
. Nothing could be more worthwhile than to be inside the charmed circle—working for the destruction of the hateful forces outside! Whether it was the noxious influence of the Party or suppressed feelings of inadequacy resulting from his experience with UB 68, or simply his own natural tendency to extremes, passages from the book suggest that Dönitz was more than a very competent U-boat leader by this time; he was a fanatic, as dangerous to his enemies as the fanatical Nelson had been to the French in a previous century. This would perhaps have been the most important message for any Englishman to have drawn in 1939. Naval Intelligence did not obtain a copy of the book until 1942, by which time the point had been made.

In the intervals of work and authorship, Dönitz found time to become a grandfather. Ursula produced a son who was named Peter. He was very tickled about this, and the fact that he was only 47 years old.

Instead of taking a winter skiing holiday early in 1939 Dönitz occupied himself with a war game based on supposed conditions in 1943—the year before which Hitler had assured Raeder on many occasions there would be no war with England. The purposes of the game: ‘Atlantic war operations with U-boats, including combined operations between surface commerce raiders and aircraft with U-boats; employment of artillery—and fleet-U-boats.’
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The forces stipulated by the naval High Command were, on the ‘Red’ side, considerable detachments from the British Home and Mediterranean fleets and American and African station squadrons, twelve battleships and heavy cruisers, five aircraft carriers, 27 light cruisers and 100 destroyers, in support of five convoys—obviously British—two from Cape Town, one from the River Plate, one from the West Indies and one from Canada; on the ‘Blue’ side were fifteen torpedo U-boats, Type VII and Type IX (1,000 tons), two large fleet U-boats, two huge artillery U-boats, a minelaying U-boat and an armoured commerce raider with supply ship. This was a remarkably small force to try conclusions with convoys protected by the greater part of the Royal Navy and, according to the staff rules, the Royal Air Force when the ships came within range of bases in North Africa, France and the British Isles. The conditions were so unrealistic in view of the ‘Z-Plan’ building programme to 1943 that one wonders how the staff arrived at them. The real interest lies in the tactics employed by the ‘Blue’, German side and the conclusions Dönitz drew from their inevitable failure to cause much damage.

The ‘Blue’ Commander arranged his torpedo U-boats in five groups of three, the northernmost group, together with the armoured cruiser, in mid-Atlantic on the Canada-Ireland shipping route and three groups about the Azores and Canaries to intercept the Cape Town and River Plate convoys. They were spread out in this way because the patrols expected around the British Isles, particularly air reconnaissance, were considered likely to restrict the boats’ movements if they waited close in at the focal points of trade as in the First War. As a result the boats were spread too thin; three convoys got through without being sighted and only the second Cape Town convoy, which had joined the River Plate ships west of Cape Verde, was intercepted; the single U-boat which found these vessels kept radio silence so as not to give away her position before attacking, then called up the other two boats of her group; these were destroyed by the escort and the other groups were too far away to reach the spot. Dönitz commented, ‘ “Blue’s” failure was not grounded in false dispositions but in the emptiness of the sea and the small numbers of boats, [and] in the low mobility and small reconnaissance area of the boats.’
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Despite the poor results, Dönitz managed to draw very positive conclusions. They were in fact a direct transposition to the war against trade of the lessons he had drawn from three years of training and exercises against warship targets. He pointed first to the altered conditions since the World War when no concentration of U-boats had been possible against the concentration of ships represented by a convoy, since radio had not been sufficiently developed. This was not true; W/T communication between U-boats acting together had been practised successfully in the Mediterranean and the English Channel in 1918;
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perhaps he meant that no
shore
direction had been possible. In any case he continued with what was to become the
leitmotif
of his reports, ‘
concentration against concentration
’, this was the necessity that had caused the young U-boat arm to practise ‘co-operative working’ since its inception. And he went on:

a)   At least three boats form a group. Disposition of the boats in a breadth of some 50 and a depth of 100–200 miles.

b)   Further groups—according to the number of operational boats ready—disposed in the direction of the reported steamer way at some 200–300 miles.

c)   Leadership of all groups basically through BdU [C-in-C U-boats] at home.

d)   Enemy report by one of the boats of a group and all boats of this group attack the reported enemy independently without further orders.

e)   Disposition of further groups on to this enemy through BdU.
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He went on to discuss co-operation between U-boats and surface forces and with the German Air Force in the eastern Atlantic, although the navigational and range difficulties here were enormous. If no surface forces were available he suggested that fast fleet U-boats would provide suitable reconnaissance for the groups. Nevertheless:

This figure of 300 boats necessary to bring the Battle of the Atlantic to a successful conclusion is quoted in most books about the Second World War. It is hard to see how Dönitz arrived at it; the conditions under which the war game was played and the almost complete lack of success of the Blue (German) side allowed no valid conclusions to be drawn, and for all the explanation in the paper itself the figure might have been drawn out of a hat. The arc covered by the U-boats in the game covered over 2,000 miles in extent; assuming three boats to a group, thus 30 groups to make up the 90 operational boats he wanted, and each boat in
the group some 100–200 miles apart, they might have been expected to extend over the whole area, but not in the in-depth arrangement along the routes detailed in the paper.

It may simply be that 300 was a number he thought he might get away with; it was rather larger than the figure decided on by the ‘Z-Plan’ committee, but not extravagantly so!

He offered a crumb to the ‘cruiser U-boat’ enthusiasts in Berlin by suggesting that large artillery types had value for distant operations, proposing three operating in the South Atlantic and three in the Indian Ocean—thus a total of eighteen boats necessary to keep these six operational—together with three—thus altogether nine—large minelaying boats, and ten operational fast ‘fleet’ U-boats of 2,000 tons, Type XII; these were both to work with surface forces and in reconnaissance off United States harbours. The idea here was for them to locate and hold touch with convoys bound from US ports to the British Isles and lead the groups waiting in mid-Atlantic to them. Whether Dönitz discussed the possible political consequences of this is not clear; there had been much earnest discussion since at least 1935 on the reasons why the United States had entered the World War.
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