Hitler, Donitz, and the Baltic Sea (37 page)

The following month it was Hitler’s turn to panic. Upon receiving reports of the presence of Soviet submarines in the Pomeranian port of Stolpmünde, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to attack these submarines, even if this meant postponing other tasks. Upon further investigation the “Soviet submarines” turned out to be sunken German vessels.
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At this time Second Army was fighting for its life around Danzig and Gdynia, but Hitler considered the destruction of suspected enemy submarines in the central Baltic more important. The first Type XXIIIs were then already operating off the coast of England, and Dönitz had promised that the Type XXIs would be ready any day.

As its naval bases in eastern Germany fell to the Soviets one after another, the German Navy still scanned the horizon for the Russian fleet. In mid-March Kummetz stated his intention to leave strong fleet units in the eastern Baltic to oppose Soviet warships. On 13 April the Army of East Prussia reported that enemy motor torpedo boats had been spotted in the Bay of Danzig.
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But by this time there was little Dönitz could do. Most of Germany’s fleet had been destroyed, and the few vessels that remained had no fuel. Nonetheless, and despite his fears, not even a single Soviet destroyer had entered the Baltic.

To the Germans the inactivity of the Soviet fleet was incomprehensible. Kummetz in particular was perplexed, claiming that Russian destroyers could have greatly aided the Red Army by disrupting Courland’s supply. Kummetz assumed that Stalin wished to preserve his navy and preferred not to risk a battle with the German fleet.
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The complete inactivity of the Soviet Baltic Fleet’s heavy surface vessels is indeed puzzling. The Russians recognized well enough the danger from German submarines to the Arctic convoys that brought them food and equipment. Yet they failed to grasp that the best chance of countering this threat lay in disrupting the delivery of combat-ready U-boats. In fact, the Soviets protested that British mining of the central Baltic threatened their own submarine operations. Even the Baltic Fleet’s air arm failed to concentrate on naval targets, flying far more sorties to support the land front. Soviet submarines, although occasionally sinking crowded refugee ships with great loss of life, torpedoed only a tiny percentage of the German vessels sailing in the Baltic. Soviet sources account for this poor performance by claiming that submarine commanders lacked experience in conducting night attacks; the Germans normally kept their vessels in port during daylight hours and sailed only under cover of darkness. Furthermore, Russian torpedo fire control systems and target-location equipment were rather primitive at that time. Soviet reports also contend that the mine situation in the Gulf of Finland remained too precarious to risk action by the Baltic Fleet.
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Another possible explanation for the Baltic Fleet’s inactivity was lack of manpower. In the initial phase of the war the Soviet Navy provided 346,750 sailors to fight on land.
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The sailors withdrawn from the Baltic Fleet for Leningrad’s defense in the summer and autumn of 1941 probably suffered heavy casualties during the bitter fighting of that period. The loss of experienced seamen and the fleet’s inability to train throughout the almost three-year blockade would have been a formidable, although not insurmountable, obstacle. If Stalin had ordered the Baltic Fleet to sail, it would have done so, regardless of the cost.

Another theory is that Hitler’s invasion caught the Soviet Navy in a period of transition. During the 1920s and 1930s the navy had considered England its most likely foe. Due to numerical inferiority to the British fleet, Soviet naval strategists focused upon active defense, intending to fight only under the most favorable conditions. Such propitious conditions would be somewhat rare in wartime, and in effect this limited the fleet to coastal defense and support of the army’s flanks along Russia’s coast. In the years preceding the war a strategy of command of the seas began to gain acceptance. The German invasion, however, brought an end to the construction of
capital ships, catching the Soviet Navy in the midst of transition from a “young school” to an “old school” strategy,
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and bereft of its most capable officers as a result of the purges. The Russian navy revealed itself unwilling to adjust, or incapable of adjusting, to the combination of strategic defense and tactical offense that the situation now required.
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Yet again, if Stalin had ordered the Baltic Fleet to attack, the navy would have adjusted its strategy accordingly. This explanation also fails to account for the success and aggressiveness of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in comparison to the Baltic Fleet.

A third possibility is that the Soviets did not recognize the potential of their navy. In view of Russian activity in the Baltic theater, it appears that the Soviets regarded the sea primarily as a convenient chopping block, with which they could split up German armies on the land front.
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Soviet armies in this theater never captured a major port in initial attacks. Instead, they veered from centers of resistance and broke through to the coast in lightly defended sectors. Had Russian troops seized Libau in their initial drive to the Baltic in early October 1944, German forces in Courland almost certainly would have been doomed due to lack of supplies. Without Libau as a supply port, Army Group North probably would have been forced to try to break through to East Prussia, a risky operation in view of Soviet troop concentrations in the area. Similarly, the appearance of Soviet warships off Courland’s coast would have caused major disruptions in the army group’s supply. A raid by a few Russian destroyers at critical periods, such as in the midst of the Third Kurland Battle, could have temporarily thrown German supply efforts into disarray. The importance of Baltic ports to the Germans seems to have been a factor the Soviets simply failed to comprehend.

Dönitz had no way of knowing this. Based on German experiences in the Black Sea, where Russian naval forces had proved quite active, Dönitz had to anticipate offensive action by Soviet warships in the Baltic. Since the German Navy’s primary goal was to revive the U-boat war, the Baltic represented a much more vital area than the Black Sea. For this reason Dönitz had advised Voss in August 1943 not to object too strenuously to proposals to retreat from the Kuban but to protest vigorously any suggestion to withdraw from the Leningrad area. Throughout 1944 and 1945 Dönitz apprehensively awaited reports that the Soviet fleet had sailed from Kronstadt, but his fears never materialized.

Norway

H
ITLER
’
S REFUSAL TO ABANDON
Norway in the war’s final months is another subject that has long puzzled historians. Along with his demands to evacuate
Courland, Guderian also repeatedly urged Hitler to withdraw forces from Norway in order to provide troops for the Eastern Front. But the Baltic was not the only area Dönitz considered vital for the U-boat war. The invasion of Scandinavia in April 1940 took place at the navy’s behest. Raeder had frequently warned Hitler of dire consequences if the British occupied Norway and pointed out the great advantages that would accrue from German possession of that country.
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Yet the Nazi occupation of Norway did not ease Hitler’s concern, because after the Norwegian campaign he still feared a British invasion in Scandinavia.
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In September 1941 he mentioned to Raeder the possibility of moving part of the surface fleet from France to protect Norway, citing the danger from air raids to warships in Brest. His anxiety increased, and at the end of December he ordered Raeder to move all battleships and pocket battleships to Norway.
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The battle cruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
and the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen
carried out the “Channel dash” in mid-February 1942. The transfer of these vessels under Britain’s nose was a great propaganda coup, but strategically it signified the German fleet’s assumption of defensive tasks, leaving only the U-boat arm and occasional air sorties to disrupt shipping to the British Isles.
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In January 1942 Hitler maintained that intelligence pointed to an imminent invasion of northern Norway, and he warned that a successful Allied landing could decisively influence the course of the war. Allied control of Scandinavia would jeopardize Germany’s domination of the Baltic and its supply of Swedish iron ore and Finnish nickel. He also believed that the Soviets’ ability to resist depended upon supplies shipped to Murmansk and Archangel; an Allied landing on Norway’s Arctic coast would greatly reduce the threat to convoys to Russia. Hitler commanded the army and Luftwaffe to reinforce their units in the north; also, in an extraordinary display of anxiety, he ordered all U-boats transferred to Norwegian waters, to give advance warning of an invasion. A few days later Hitler again demonstrated his distress, insisting to Wagner that every warship not off Norway was in the wrong place.
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Hitler’s concern for Scandinavia persisted. Throughout 1943 he considered a landing in Norway likely, especially since the North African invasion in November 1942 indicated an Allied strategy of striking at the Reich’s periphery. At the turn of the year Hitler again pointed out the danger of an Allied landing and instructed the navy to deploy sixty to eighty submarines in Norwegian waters. Yet another invasion scare occurred shortly after the Allies landed in Normandy.
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In the autumn of 1943 Denmark joined the list of areas Hitler considered likely targets for an Allied invasion, and he began to strengthen its coastal defenses and build up reserves there in October. At the end of the year the
Germans had six divisions, with about 130,000 troops, in Denmark and over thirteen divisions, with 314,000 men, in Norway.
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Finland’s withdrawal from the war in September 1944 also had ramifications for Norway’s defense. Although Hitler originally planned to retain part of northern Finland for its nickel deposits, on 3 October he ordered Twentieth Mountain Army to continue its withdrawal to Norway. Rendulic, then commander of Twentieth Mountain Army, received instructions to retreat to the Lyngen Position, a line across northern Norway from Lyngen Fjord to the northern tip of Sweden. Several factors influenced Hitler’s decision to withdraw from Finland. Perhaps most important, Speer had reported that Germany possessed sufficient stockpiles of nickel, so there was no need to hold Finland’s nickel mines. Twentieth Mountain Army’s withdrawal would also provide reinforcements against a feared British landing in Norway, strengthen the Narvik area against a possible Swedish attack, and ease the strain on coastal shipping supplying units in the far north. Under difficult Arctic conditions, Twentieth Mountain Army completed its retreat to the Lyngen Position at the end of January 1945.
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In the course of this withdrawal Hitler feared the Allies would attack Norway to trap Twentieth Mountain Army between an Anglo-American invasion force and pursuing Soviet troops.

Hitler insisted that the British wanted to keep the Soviets out of Norway and could accomplish this only by occupying the country themselves.
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At this time Dönitz was not as concerned with Norway, regarding Denmark as a more likely site for an invasion. Dönitz ordered coastal batteries erected on Jutland’s east coast and on the islands of Seeland and Fünen and warned against withdrawing too many troops from Denmark. He feared that the Royal Navy would attempt to break through the Skagerrak and stage a landing. This would prove disastrous, cutting off Norway completely and crippling the U-boat war by blocking submarines’ entrance and exit routes to the Atlantic.
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At the same time Dönitz insisted that the Danish ports of Aalborg and Aarhus were indispensable, both for the U-boat war and to maintaining supply shipments to Norway. At the end of January 1945 Dönitz pointed out that Allied occupation of Seeland would almost totally seal off entrances to the Baltic.
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In the summer of 1944 Norway’s importance to the navy vastly increased. The Allied invasion of France radically undercut the foundations of the U-boat war. As early as 13 June Meisel declared that the navy had to prepare additional submarine bases in Norway. Dönitz, at this time in his period of despair, glumly responded that bunkers required a great deal of time and effort to build and that he could not count on Norway with
certainty. In August Meisel again advocated the preparation of more U-boat berths in Norway. Dönitz still believed that maintenance of Norwegian bases posed too many problems and declared that the U-boat war would continue from German ports, in order to concentrate all resources in one area.
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Meisel refused to give up. At the end of August he informed assembled naval commanders that in the future the U-boat war would continue from bases in Germany and Norway. For this reason it was vital for the navy to keep open sea routes in the Baltic and the North Sea. Meisel declared this a task of the first order. He again emphasized this point early the next month, recalling that Dönitz had repeatedly maintained that the revival of the U-boat war was the navy’s foremost goal. With the loss of French bases, Norway would serve as the staging area from which to launch the new U-boat offensive.

Adm. Eberhard Godt, head of the U-boat operations section, also recognized the increased importance of Norwegian ports for submarine operations.
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The two officers convinced Dönitz of Norway’s significance, and as a result the grand admiral opposed the decision to evacuate all German forces from Norway north of the Lyngen Position. He suggested leaving troops to protect coastal artillery batteries at Hammerfest and Alta Fjord, claiming that these important areas should not simply be handed over to the enemy. Hitler agreed, and Twentieth Mountain Army left small detachments at Hammerfest and Alta. The Germans did not evacuate Hammerfest until mid-February 1945.
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