Dönitz: The Last Führer (48 page)

U-boat Command misread the signs completely. It is not clear from the record whether this was due to wishful thinking, lack of imagination or failure to stand up to the pressures imposed by the chief, Dönitz. These pressures must have been immense; whatever may be said about his habit of consultation before taking decisions, great strength and confidence would have been needed to withstand the combination of fire and tenacity with which he pursued his goals, and the aura of experience and success and power surrounding him in his new rank. And there is no question that he was at this time focusing all his powers on winning the Battle of the Atlantic; thus at the end of March he issued guidelines for the staff in the form of twelve ‘Commandments’:

The next four commandments also concerned the tonnage war: U-boat building was to be increased, the
Schnell
boat arm enhanced, the
Luftwaffe
and the Japanese navy co-opted for the battle against merchantmen. Finally he addressed other areas: Tunisia had to be held, protection of German convoys improved, economy in manpower striven for, bureaucracy annihilated, decentralization and individual responsibility promoted.

It is clear from the order and wording of these guidelines that the threat from the air and the allied radar was appreciated; the danger was driven home in the first days of April as U-boat packs in the former happy hunting ground of the mid-Atlantic ‘air gap’ found themselves harried round the clock by trained support groups working in co-operation with escort-carrier-based planes and long-range Liberators, all equipped with high definition radar whose beams could not be detected by U-boats’ warning sets. Still the staff at U-boat headquarters failed or refused to recognize the signs; of an HX convoy contacted by eight boats on April 4th, the war diary comment was ‘… very little success achieved, probably chiefly because of the inexperience of young Commanders’.
²¹

That Dönitz’s priorities remained unchanged is made clear by his report to Hitler on April 11th;
²²
he started by admitting that the U-boat war had become ‘difficult, losses high’—nineteen boats sunk in February, fifteen in March, six already in the present month:

He went on to say that he did not believe the enemy could stand a net loss of
100–200,000
tons a month for any length of time, and that German U-boats,
Schnell
boats and aircraft, together with Japanese forces, had to exert every possible effort to achieve this. He did not like to think that one day they might reproach themselves, ‘we could have attained the goal of bleeding the enemy if only we had tried somewhat harder in the tonnage war’. And since many more U-boats were now needed to achieve the success of one boat in 1940, it was essential to increase U-boat building to the full extent of capacity so that ‘the relationship between losses and new building will not be too unfavourable’.

It seems evident here that it is Dönitz who is putting the pressure on Hitler for increased efforts, not the other way around, and that in calling simply for more U-boats he was blinding himself to the very obvious signs that all he had feared the previous summer had now happened: air cover had been extended over the entire North Atlantic; prospects of success for U-boats
had
‘declined to an insupportable extent’.

Of course, Hitler was happy to agree with his reasoning; yet the increased construction he proposed demanded 30,000 tons of steel a month above the quota allowed, and the problem remained, he said, ‘Where can the steel be obtained? Obviously in a totalitarian state I can order the required amount to be made available, but that would mean taking it from some other arm …’

After itemizing the urgent need for more tanks, aircraft, anti-aircraft guns, he said he would discuss the matter with Speer—as a result of which the Armaments Minister and Dönitz moved closer to a joint plan for naval construction.

It is this programme that demonstrates Dönitz’s refusal to recognize
the significance of recent convoy battles. The circumstances call to mind Fürbringer’s May 1939 paper arguing that it would be irresponsible to commit valuable U-boat crews to trade war unless the boats had been rendered Asdic-immune and trained in intimate co-operation with the air arm; Dönitz’s response then had been in the form of flat assertions: ‘It is clear’ that only an attack on English sea communications could have a war-decisive effect, the U-boat was the ‘sole means’ of accomplishing this, he was confident the Asdic-immune boat
would
be developed in foreseeable time, aircraft would not play a role in the open spaces of the Atlantic, it was not necessary to develop a special torpedo for use against escorts, above all his new group tactics, by providing a ‘concentration of U-boats against the concentration of ships in a convoy’, would give the English a surprise.