Dönitz: The Last Führer (59 page)

Burnett followed, sending shadowing reports to Fraser, who ordered the convoy to steer due north.
B-Dienst
intercepted the signal and although they could not immediately decipher those from Fraser, they were recognized as operational instructions. Shortly before 10 am, Bey reported that he was under fire from supposed cruisers using radar. By this time the terrible suspicion had formed at ‘Koralle’, Kiel and Narvik that the operational instructions were from the Commander of the heavy covering force that had been feared. As the morning wore on and Burnett left the
Scharnhorst
in order to join the convoy, then found her
again, and Fraser, still steering to cover the battlecruiser’s route home, continued to direct operations, the suspicion hardened; after 1 o’clock it became virtual certainty as an aerial reconnaissance report was received of one large and several smaller units some 200 miles south-west of the
Scharnhorst
and her shadows. This could only be the distant heavy support group steering to cut Bey off from his base.

Dönitz’s feelings may be imagined. Earlier intimations of disaster must have taken root now and he must have felt it very personally; he bore a very personal responsibility. He could only hope that Bey, who had reported a heavy unit amongst the cruisers engaging him and had therefore set course for home at full speed, would be able to shake off his followers. But as further
B-Dienst
intercepts came in it became clear that he was not doing so. Dönitz was spared nothing. It was not like the end of a U-boat which simply failed to report; throughout the afternoon he was able to follow the chase in detail through the intercepts of the enemy’s signals and Bey’s own signals down to its shattering climax.

Directed to the quarry by the cruisers, the
Duke of York
first picked up the
Scharnhorst
on her radar at 26 miles at 4.17 pm; Bey was still not using his radar and was quite unaware of the battleship as Fraser closed to six miles, then at 4.50 fired star shells and opened fire. Bey, caught by surprise for the third time that day, immediately turned away and the final stage of the chase continued easterly, the
Scharnhorst
gradually opening the range but suffering from the greater accuracy and weight of the radar-directed fire of the battleship. After a while her speed was reduced by underwater damage and Fraser’s destroyers closed and scored several torpedo hits, further reducing her speed and ensuring her end. She continued the unequal contest as Fraser’s forces closed for the kill, and proved again that German capital ships and German crews could endure fearful punishment. At 6.19 she signalled that she was surrounded by heavy units firing by radar-direction, and a few minutes later came Bey’s last message, ‘We shall fight to the last shell.
Heil
Hitler!’

Less than an hour later
B-Dienst
intercepted Fraser’s signal to two cruisers to finish her off with torpedoes. Dönitz knew the worst.

The scenes as the blazing hulk of the battlecruiser finally slid below the seas at about 7.45 provided vivid demonstration that his call for fanatical loyalty had not gone unheeded. Hurrahs and shouts of ‘
Heil
our Führer!’ sounded defiantly amongst the wreckage in the icy darkness as the British closed to rescue survivors—only 36 of whom out of a complement of nearly 2,000 were eventually saved.

The immediate consequence of the loss of the
Scharnhorst
was recognition that the enemy advances in radar technology had put paid to the big ships’ chances of success just as they had put paid to the U-boats’ surface tactics—a belated recognition, revealing again the essential amateurishness of the German naval staff, particularly, perhaps, of Dönitz and Meisel. Dönitz, Hansen-Nootbar recalls, felt the disaster ‘extraordinarily deeply’; he made it his business nonetheless to slough off his personal responsibility.

With Hitler this was not difficult; from the initial reports of the action it was already clear that Bey had made a grave error in mistaking Burnett’s cruisers for heavy ships. Dönitz was happy to reinforce this impression: It had been a ‘tragic error’. Actually the position had been one for which the High Command had always striven: the battleship (
Scharnhorst
) had come up with the weaker cruiser escort.
Scharnhorst
had not been able to utilize the favourable situation, however, on account of the misjudgement of the position. Had she engaged the cruisers it was ‘absolutely possible that the first phase would have gone in our favour’.
¹²²

He then appeared to contradict himself by pointing out the superiority of the enemy radar which ‘enables the enemy to fight with success in the dark’. Hitler disregarded this; at all events he returned to a familiar theme: was not the real cause of the failures of the big ships, starting with the
Graf Spee
, the fact that they had sought escape rather than battle? Dönitz produced his trump card: in his orders to the
Scharnhorst
he had expressly stated that battle was to be pressed home, ‘not ended with half success’, and he followed this up with a typical piece of meaningless optimism: ‘if the
Scharnhorst
had smashed the cruisers the whole operation would have proceeded more favourably, and she might perhaps have been able to get up to the convoy afterwards. Then the battleship
Duke of York
would very probably have come up too late to protect the convoy.’ Then returning to his original proposition, the ‘tragedy’ came about through the false judgement aboard the
Scharnhorst
; it was ‘especially tragic that the
Scharnhorst
actually came close to the target, the convoy, and was unable to use the favourable situation’.

He developed this theme later; since it had been proved that surface ships could not perform their primary function of preventing enemy landings because they could not operate without fighter cover, ‘the idea of using the
Scharnhorst
during the Arctic night was basically correct’.
¹²³
And since it was important to maintain strength in the north for strategic
reasons, he suggested transferring the heavy cruiser,
Prince Eugen
, to Battle Group North.

Hitler made no objection. Undoubtedly he had won his wager over the usefulness of the big ships, but he made no reference to it now or later, and was content for Dönitz to dispose of the remaining heavy units as he wished. The fact was he needed Dönitz; he needed the support he invariably gave him over the strategy of holding on everywhere until… He needed the hopes he embodied of a renewed U-boat offensive with the new types of boat, and he needed the personal loyalty he brought to all questions. The conference in the wake of the
Scharnhorst
’s loss demonstrates above all that success was not a factor in Hitler’s judgement of his Commanders, nor analysis, nor rational argument; the only things he looked for were unquestioned loyalty to his person and optimism; as he remarked when discussing another supreme optimist, Field Marshal Kesselring, ‘my view is that without optimism you cannot be a military Commander’.
¹²⁴

It was more difficult for Dönitz to escape criticism from within the service, although this could not be open and could scarcely come from Meisel and other staff officers who had seemed equally eager to send the
Scharnhorst
out to prove the value of the big ships; they also had psychological reasons for shifting the blame. Nevertheless Dönitz trod warily. Bey, the obvious, indeed the only possible scapegoat, had died a hero’s death fighting the ship to the end; he could not be blamed directly. Instead Dönitz blamed himself, not for sending Bey out on a fool’s mission on insufficient intelligence with conflicting instructions to the evident disagreement of those most closely involved in Group North, but for not recalling Kummetz from leave. He had, he told a staff meeting on January 4th 1944, discussed the possibilities of such an operation with Kummetz and knew his intentions and knew that he would seize any opportunities with great energy. It would not have been necessary to issue him with directives—‘for instance about breaking off the operation’. Later he laid stress on a passage in a report by Schniewind pointing to the fleet’s lack of opportunity for sea-training as a cause of the failure.
¹²⁵

These oblique attempts to shift the blame reveal Dönitz once again as a man whose tough outer casing concealed terrible insecurity.

The year 1943 had been a hard one for Dönitz, as for Germany; one of his sons had been lost, his hopes in the Battle of the Atlantic twice dashed,
his victory in preserving the big ships turned sour by the latest revelation of the Anglo-American technological lead which precluded offensive action by any of his forces except in remote peripheral areas. In contrast to the confident directives he had issued on taking office he could only hope now for new types of U-boats yet to be produced by Minister Speer; all he could offer his men to make up for lack of success and loss of initiative was increased fervour. On January 1st 1944 he issued an Order of the Day:

He spent the first three days of the New Year at the
Wolfschanze
, as he noted in the war diary ‘taking part in many discussions on the course of the war with some of the leading personalities as well as discussions in private with the Führer personally’.
¹²⁷
One of the leading personalities was Albert Speer, and it was during these three days that Speer and Dönitz between them persuaded Göring that all radar research should be concentrated in Speer’s Ministry—another sign of the close alliance between these two new men in the power struggle around the Führer. It would be too simple to suggest that the outcome of the war and the fate of the German people took second place to their manoeuvring for position, but there is no doubt that the worse the situation of the
Reich
became, the more Dönitz and Speer—and also Himmler—usurped the position of the old guard. Thus locked into the system, their reaction to the external and internal threats became more extreme as the danger increased. In Dönitz’s case this meant binding himself and his service into the system as tightly as Himmler and the SS were already. This in turn meant tying the Navy to belief in the Führer’s genius and ability to lead Germany to victory, however irrational both concepts had begun to seem.

It meant again rationalizing the irrational, cutting out all complexities, all divergencies, with ideological blinkers. On the material plane it meant knowing that this was an economic war and that the enemy’s resources and potential were overwhelmingly superior, on the spiritual plane that crimes so unimaginable that they were not at first credited in the outside world were being perpetrated in the name of Germany—Jewry systematically exterminated, industry employing slave labour on a scale and with a pitiless, mindless cruelty not witnessed since the Pharaohs. Dönitz was aware of these things, yet by concentrating on the goal and the task he was able to prevent them from impinging at the level where decisions had to be taken.

The more they threatened to impinge—and it is ridiculous to suppose that anyone with the basic intelligence and sensitivity that Dönitz possessed was unaware of the strategic and moral impasse into which the
Reich
had been driven—the more Dönitz leant on his war-father, the pitiful wreck in the
Wolfschanze
, stooping even lower now under the unbearable weight of failure, his unhealthy face etched with the ravages of self-will, his left arm and leg shaking uncontrollably, disguising strategic impotence with calls to his Commanders to fight with ‘bitter hatred’
¹²⁸
against the enemies seeking to annihilate Germany. Thus Dönitz’s New Year message in the wake of the
Scharnhorst
disaster, ‘The Führer shows us the way and the goal. We follow him with body and soul …’

In February he called another
Tagung
for his Flag Officers, a sign of the dissatisfaction within the service; it was expressed on the day in a ‘huge number of complaints’ from the assembled officers. In his own concluding speech in which, he said, he came before them ‘as always as a plain man’, he did not attempt to deny that Germany stood on the defensive everywhere, but pointed to his Programme 43 which would provide a fleet of light forces ‘in greater style than hitherto’ and promised that the Navy would not always be on the defensive; for the service possessed the ‘sole offensive means of our entire war direction’; this was, of course, the new type of U-boat; it would take the offensive to the enemy in a renewed ‘tonnage war’.
¹²⁹

He went on to defend the Führer’s policy of not giving an inch of ground in the east against those ‘clever strategists’ who thought they knew better, then came to the nub of his message, not the material but the spiritually important realities, the unity of the nation behind the Führer: