Hitler's Commanders (45 page)

As a staff officer in the 1920s, Doenitz proved to be a painstaking and self-critical perfectionist and very much a workaholic. He pushed himself and his subordinates to their limits—and sometimes beyond. He also dabbled in the navy’s circumvention of the Treaty of Versailles. In August 1927, the navy’s secret violations were exposed in the newspapers, in the so-called Lohmann Scandal. How much Doenitz knew about them or was involved in them was never made clear: the tight-lipped Doenitz would never say. In any event, he was sent back to sea duty in the Baltic as the navigator of the cruiser
Nymphe
in 1928. The scandal did not retard his advancement, however. He was promoted to
Korvettenkaepitan
(lieutenant commander) in November and simultaneously named commander of the 4th Torpedo Boat Half-Flotilla, which included four boats, 20 officers, and 600 men. Here Doenitz worked harder than ever, practicing maneuvers that would later be strongly resembled by the U-boat night surface attacks of World War II. He distinguished himself by “destroying” an enemy convoy in the 1929 autumn maneuvers, and his activities were monitored by Rear Admiral Walter Gladisch, the officer in charge of secret U-boat preparations.

From the fall of 1930 until 1934, he was assigned to the staff of the North Sea Naval District in Wilhelmshaven, where his duties again dealt with inner-service security—especially suppressing Communist activities. Considered a brilliant up-and-coming officer, he was rewarded in early 1933 with a special grant to allow him to travel and widen his knowledge of the outside world. He sailed to the Dutch and British colonies in the east, traveling to Malta, the Red Sea, southern India, Ceylon, Batavia, Java, Bali, and Singapore. He returned to duty in June 1933 and was promoted to
Fregattenkapitaen
(commander) in October. In 1934, he took a “language leave” to England and, in the fall, assumed command of the light cruiser
Emden
.

Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany. On February 1, 1935, he ordered the secret construction of the first U-boats to begin and six weeks later renounced the military restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. Not surprisingly, on June 6, 1935, Commander Karl Doenitz was appointed
Fuehrer der U-boote
(FdU) and commander of the 1st U-boat Flotilla. By the time he took charge at the end of September, Germany had 11 small (250-ton) U-boats. On October 1 Doenitz was promoted to Kapitaen zur See. Karl Doenitz was in the position destiny had created for him. The High Command in Berlin was dominated by “big ship” men who thought that the U-boat (defeated in World War I) was obsolete or at least of marginal value. Doenitz, who realized how much submarine technology had changed since 1918, was allowed to develop “his” branch with little interference (or help) from OKM. He quickly won over his men with his enthusiasm, dedication, and total commitment. By 1938 he was practicing group attack tactics and calling for 626-ton (Type VII) U-boats, which could operate in the Atlantic. The German Admiralty was thinking more in terms of 2,000-ton submarines, which would have greater endurance. Doenitz, however, wanted smaller boats, because they would be easier to handle, would be less vulnerable to detection and depth charges, and would require fewer raw materials per boat to construct—which meant more of them could be built. Despite his junior rank, the dedicated and hard-driving Doenitz was allowed to have his way on this issue. During World War II, he was proven right beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Admiral Rolf Carls, the fleet commander in the mid-1930s, was both impressed by and supportive of the U-boat Fuehrer. Unfortunately for Doenitz, Admiral Raeder planned to wage a “cruiser war” against Great Britain and gave U-boat development and construction a low priority. Doenitz, in turn, bombarded Raeder with memoranda and requests for more U-boats. Three hundred of them, he said, could win a war against Britain for Germany. Raeder always listened politely, as if to humor the FdU, but his answer was always no.

Unlike Raeder, Doenitz believed that war would come before 1944. Unlike Raeder and Hitler, he did not believe that the Polish campaign would be a limited one. When Great Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany on September 3, 1939, Karl Doenitz was already at his command post—a collection of wooden huts built on the outskirts of Wilhelmshaven. He greeted the announcement with a profane oath. At that time he had only 56 U-boats. Of these, only 22 were large enough to operate in the Atlantic—and he needed 300. Nevertheless, thanks to Doenitz, these were already on patrol and/or laying mines around Britain, and on September 4th Lieutenant Herbert Schultze of
U-48
reported sinking the
Royal Sceptre
off the coast of Scotland.
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It was the first of 2,603 Allied ships to be destroyed by U-boats during the war. By the end of the month, Doenitz’s boats had sunk 175,000 tons of enemy shipping—proving that the U-boat was definitely not an obsolete weapon. All the same, German U-boat production remained stable at two new boats per month.

Doenitz planned and ordered the Scapa Flow operation, which was executed by
U-47
under Lieutenant Guenther Prien on the night of October 13–14 (see later discussion). When it was over, the British battleship
Royal Oak
was gone, along with 832 of her crew. When
U-47
returned, Raeder was there to greet it. He also promoted Doenitz to Konteradmiral on the spot.

The new rear admiral was unable to keep up the pace of sinkings, however. When his Atlantic U-boats came back from their first patrols, he had nothing with which to replace them. Also, November brought the usual winter storms to the North Atlantic, making hunting very difficult. Tonnage sunk by U-boats declined from 175,000 in September to 125,000 in October; just over 80,000 in November; and 125,000 in December. From January 1 to March 31, 1940, U-boats sank only 108 merchantmen, totaling 343,610 tons. For Great Britain, these losses were well within the tolerance range. She had some 24 million tons of shipping when the war began, and new construction (200,000 tons per month) easily exceeded losses.

Karl Doenitz hoped to have his submarines back on the Atlantic shipping lanes in the spring of 1940, but instead Raeder ordered them committed to supporting the invasion of Norway. The FdU protested but was overruled, as usual. For Doenitz, April 1940, was probably the most frustrating month of the war. He committed 42 U-boats to Norwegian waters, and they fired tube after tube into Allied vessels, but almost all their torpedoes were duds. Worse, some exploded prematurely, revealing the U-boat’s position to the enemy. When Prien fired two torpedoes into the battleship
Warspite
on April 19 and both bounced off without detonating, a furious Doenitz recalled the entire pack and called for an investigation, which grew into a scandal (as discussed earlier). According to Doenitz, the defective torpedoes cost Germany the sinking of the
Warspite
, seven cruisers, seven destroyers, and five troop transports. The U-boats sank only 20 ships, totaling a little more than 80,00) tons—the lowest losses to submarines since the war began.

The torpedo crisis was partially mastered by June 1940, when the fall of France gave Doenitz new bases that were much closer to the Allied shipping lanes, extending the time the U-boats could stay on patrol. It was the first “happy time” for the submarine arm, the day of the U-boat ace. Britain lost 58 ships (284,113 tons) to U-boats alone in June, 38 more in July (195,825 tons), 56 in August (267,618 tons), 59 in September (295,335 tons), and 63 in October (352,407 tons). Due to weather, sinkings leveled off in November and December (32 ships/146,613 tons, and 37 ships/212,590 tons, respectively), but the figures were nevertheless disastrous for Great Britain. In seven months, she had lost 343 ships, totaling 1,754,501 tons. Sinkings were exceeding production despite the aid sent from Churchill’s “cousin” in the White House. October was a particularly alarming month, when U-boats sank an average of 920 tons of shipping every day. Churchill said after the war that the Battle of the Atlantic was the only time he felt that Great Britain was truly threatened.

What is truly remarkable about these German successes is the small number of U-boats that Doenitz deployed in these operations. On September 1, 1940, he had 57 U-boats—exactly the same number he’d had at the start of the war. Operational strength had declined from 39 to 27, however, due to necessary maintenance, damage repair (especially from ice and depth charges), and the necessity to transfer several boats to training duties. Only toward the end of 1940 did U-boat construction rise from two per month to six. Although Admiral Raeder had at least increased the allocation of raw materials to the U-boat construction sites, the submarine construction program was handicapped by bottlenecks in skilled labor and materials (especially copper), by continued construction of capital ships, and by the fact that Hermann Goering was in charge of resource allocation for the German war effort. Karl Doenitz and his crews were fighting a “poor man’s war” during the critical phases of the Battle of the Atlantic.

In August 1940, Doenitz moved his command post to Paris, but this was still too far from his boats, so he relocated to a chateau at Kerneval, on the French coast outside Lorient, in September. (Later he moved back to Paris, due to the danger of raids by Allied commandoes.) Even in the French capital his headquarters was noted for its lack of ostentation—Doenitz’s Spartan sense of self-discipline would not permit anything else. He never ate or drank too much and went to bed by 10 p.m. (unless duty intervened), although he did not mind if his men drank all night and painted the town red, which they frequently did. He still met almost every boat that came back, attended the graduation parade from every training course, set up special rest camps (commandeered holiday resorts) for U-boat men not on patrol or leave, and made sure his camps were well stocked with fine food and wine, which were sold well below cost. He did everything he could to relieve the enormous strain involved in underwater combat service, and his submariners loved him for it. There was not one who did not feel that he knew Doenitz, for they all had seen him at close quarters. Behind his back they called him “Vater Karl” or “Der Loewe” (the lion). Undoubtedly he had the respect and admiration of his branch, at least at this point of the war.

As Doenitz (recently promoted to vice admiral) expected they would, the British gradually improved their convoy procedures and submarine detection and attack techniques. In March 1941 alone he lost five boats, and with them some of his best commanders. Also, the RAF Coastal Command now had longer-range bombers that could attack U-boats far out to sea. Doenitz reacted by moving the operational zone farther west. Between the RAF bases in Iceland, Britain, and Canada there was a “gap” that could not yet be covered by aircraft. When this gap was eliminated, the days of the U-boat’s successes would be over.

Doenitz’s strategy in the U-boat war was simple: sink as much enemy tonnage as possible, as rapidly as possible. This could best be done in the North Atlantic. If his submarines could sink merchant ships more rapidly than the British could construct them, Britain could be brought to her knees. He was extremely annoyed and frustrated in August 1941, when Hitler decided to send 20 U-boats to the Mediterranean to help break the stranglehold the British had on the Axis supply lines to North Africa. Doenitz knew that once a submarine entered the Mediterranean it could never come back, due to the strong westerly Gibraltar currents. He had managed to talk Hitler out of similar decisions in April and June, but this time the Fuehrer’s mind was made up. Doenitz did manage to get the number reduced, but he had no choice but to dispatch a dozen U-boats to the Mediterranean in September and October. This constituted a loss of 50 percent of his oceangoing operational capabilities and forced Doenitz to virtually give up the battle in the North Atlantic, at least temporarily. Nevertheless, until December 7, Doenitz could not view the year 1941 as a bad one. The Allies had lost 1,299 ships, displacing 4,328,558 tons—that was 240 ships and 340,000 tons more than in 1940—and about half these had been sunk by submarines. Admiral Raeder’s staff estimated that British and Canadian shipyards alone produced 1,600,000 tons annually. Thus it was clear that Germany was winning the Battle of the North Atlantic.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed all that. Hitler foolishly followed his ally’s lead and declared war on the United States on December 11. Now the huge production capacity of the American shipyards was fully thrown into the balance against Germany, and they, according to OKM estimates, could produce more than 5,000,000 tons per year. Roosevelt wanted more, however, and announced that America would produce 8,000,000 tons of shipping in 1942 and 10,000,000 in 1943. The American entry into the war doomed the U-boats to eventual defeat.

Unlike Hitler, Goering, and most of the admirals, Karl Doenitz was not one who underestimated the vast potential of the American war machine or America’s ability to project power overseas. Still, the Americans were unprepared and inexperienced, and their home front was basically still at peace. Also, the U.S. Navy under the anti-British Admiral Ernest J. King was extremely slow at taking advantage of the experience the British had acquired in fighting U-boats. As a result, American ships sailed singly, with all lights blazing, without escort, and there were virtually no sea or air patrols out looking for U-boats.

The second and final “happy time” for the U-boats began on January 15, 1942, when Doenitz unleashed them against shipping off the American coast. In January alone, 62 ships totaling 327,357 tons were sunk. By May 10 the German submarines had sunk 303 ships—a total of 2,015,252 tons. Even so, it would be July before the Americans began to travel in escorted convoys, and the second “happy time” came to an end.

The American losses would have been even greater had not Hitler and Raeder interfered—again. On January 22, the Fuehrer and OKM decided Norway was in danger of invasion and ordered all U-boats to this sector to act as a reconnaissance force against the expected invasion. Doenitz was beside himself with fury. Fortunately for him, he was able to point to the first reports of successes from U.S. waters and convince Hitler to suspend this order; however, on February 1, OKM ordered 20 boats posted to the sector between Iceland and Norway. This left an average of only 10 to 12 operational U-boats in American waters at any one time.
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Doenitz was filled with a feeling of impotence and frustration, but there was nothing he could do about it. Perhaps to partially console him, Hitler had Doenitz promoted to full admiral in March 1942.