War Stories III (25 page)

CHAPTER 9

WAR AT SEA 1941–1945

I
t began on 3 September 1939, a little more than eight hours after Britain declared war on Germany. At 7:30 that evening, 250 miles northwest of Ireland, the German submarine U-30 torpedoed MV
Athenia
—a British-owned passenger liner, killing 118 of the 1,400 passengers and crew. They would be the first of tens of thousands to perish in what Winston Churchill called the “Battle of the Atlantic.”

When Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939—the event that precipitated World War II in Europe—he had only fifty-seven U-boats. They were under the command of Admiral Karl Dönitz—one of the most fervent acolytes in the Nazi cause. Within the span of a year, the number of U-boats at sea and attacking Britain's Atlantic lifeline would double—as would Allied shipping losses.

On 29 November 1939, Hitler issued Führer Directive Number 9, authorizing unrestricted attacks against vessels attempting to support the economy or military of Germany's adversaries. From then until the end of the war, Britain's 4,000-ship merchant fleet—the largest in the world—would be under attack from aircraft of the Luftwaffe, surface vessels of Germany's navy, the
Kriegsmarine
(small torpedo-firing and mine-laying
E-boats), and armed merchant raiders. But the greatest threat of all came from
Unterseeboots
—U-boats.

 

The crew of the USCG cutter
Spencer
watching explosions sink a German U-175.

Hitler's goal was simple: to strangle Britain into submission. And it was not beyond the realm of possibility. The British Isles required nearly 60 million tons of imported products annually to support a peacetime economy. Food, raw materials for production, oil, non-ferrous metals, high-tensile steel, fabric for clothing, leather for boots, rubber for tires—all arrived in England via more than 10,000 shiploads per year. Karl Dönitz told the Führer that if he had 300 U-boats, Britain could be blockaded into capitulation. Hitler set out to give his loyal subordinate what he wanted.

To contend with the threat, the British first turned to the colonies of the United Kingdom—and then the United States. Even before Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, the Roosevelt administration was quietly doing what it could to help. Despite restrictive neutrality laws enacted by Congress, and just days after war began in Europe, FDR authorized the sale of munitions to Canada—though it was an open secret that Ottawa would simply transfer whatever it received to Britain.

 

U.S. convoy en route to England.

On 16 September 1939 the first large transatlantic convoy of war materiel and foodstuffs sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for England. Until the U.S. entered the war, convoys of thirty to forty ships—shepherded by four to six armed escorts and equipped with “asdic” (British-invented underwater acoustic detection gear) and depth charges—would form up off Canada to make the Atlantic transit. For the next two years, convoys of ships under every flag in the British Empire, and many others “leased” by the British from “neutral” nations for the duration of the war, had to run a gauntlet of U-boats, surface raiders, and Luftwaffe attacks in order to reach or leave England.

In November 1939, Congress amended U.S. neutrality laws to permit France and Great Britain to purchase war materiel, provided that American-flagged vessels did not transport the arms. This action made essential arms and equipment more available to the democracies standing against Hitler, but did nothing to improve the delivery of these crucial provisions to those who needed them.

The problem of getting supplies to England was exacerbated even further in June 1940 with the fall of France. By July, Dönitz established
submarine bases in both Norway and the Bay of Biscay—all but eliminating the problems of getting his U-boats out of the Baltic and significantly increasing their area of operations in the Atlantic. The French bases at Bordeaux, La Rochelle, St. Nazaire, L'Orient, and Brest—which Dönitz heavily fortified—halved the time it took for his U-boats to transit to their “hunting grounds.” At the same time, the British were forced to recall many of their surface ships and patrol aircraft to defend against the possibility of a German invasion and to fight the “Battle of Britain” against the Luftwaffe. As the number of armed escorts and protective over-flights for convoys dropped, merchant losses increased dramatically.

The announcement—on 3 September 1940—that the U.S. would transfer fifty “obsolete” American destroyers to Britain in exchange for leases on British bases in the Atlantic was a morale builder in London, but made the immediate situation even worse. Hitler responded on 6 September by declaring that
all
merchant vessels—of
any
nation—attempting to deliver
anything
to Britain would be sunk. Dönitz and his U-boats did all they could to implement the threat.

By the autumn of 1940 German U-boats deployed from France and Norway were operating in “wolf packs” of ten to fifteen U-boats against convoys to and from the British Isles. Losses of ships, cargoes, and crews exploded. In September and October 1940 more than 125 vessels—800,000 tons of shipping—went to the bottom. Had winter weather not curtailed U-boat operations in the North Atlantic, it would have been worse.

Then, in December 1940, just weeks after his re-election for an unprecedented third term, FDR set out to change the equation. Publicly proclaiming that the U.S. had to be the “Arsenal of Democracy,” he urged Congress to pass “Lend-Lease”—allowing the British to “borrow” or “buy-now-pay-later”—for arms, munitions, ships, and planes. In anticipation of congressional approval—which came in March 1941—American shipyards immediately commenced work on dozens of destroyers, destroyer-escorts, and cutters. Roosevelt also extended the U.S. “neutrality zone” east to Bermuda and all the way north to Iceland. He ordered the new U.S. Atlantic
Fleet to commence escorting convoys within this zone, thus freeing up British ships for operations closer to home.

Despite these changes, by the spring of 1941 shipping losses were again on the rise. With better weather, bigger U-boat wolf packs returned—and this time, the brand-new battleship
Bismarck
—the pride of Hitler's surface fleet—came with them.

When the British Admiralty discovered that the most powerful battleship in the world had sortied for the Atlantic, every available ship in the British Fleet was ordered to give chase, and merchant ships in eleven convoys scattered for the nearest friendly port. By the time the
Bismarck
was sent to the bottom on 27 May, the battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
had been badly damaged, the battle cruiser HMS
Hood
had sunk with all hands, and President Roosevelt had declared an Unlimited National Emergency.

In June of 1941, Hitler invaded Russia—further complicating the maritime supply situation, and bringing the U.S. ever closer to an armed confrontation. In August, the U.S. and Royal navies began escorting convoys laden with Lend-Lease supplies headed for Murmansk. On 4 September, the destroyer USS
Greer
, alerted by a British patrol plane, pursued U-652, which had been shadowing a convoy. When the U-boat fired a torpedo at its antagonist, the
Greer
responded with a depth charge attack. Then in October, the USS
Kearney
was damaged, and U-boat torpedoes sank the USS
Reuben James
. Both destroyers were defending convoys from wolf pack attacks when the attacks occurred.

By late autumn of '41, the weather in the North Atlantic once again curtailed U-boat operations. When Pearl Harbor was bombed on 7 December 1941, there were only a dozen German submarines operating along the British-Russian maritime supply routes. Though surprised by the Japanese attack, Dönitz quickly put together a plan for a massive U-boat strike against shipping lanes just off the American mainland. But on 11 December, the day Hitler declared war on the United States, he was directed by the Führer's senior staff to keep the bulk of his undersea fleet close to home.

Undeterred, Dönitz devised Operation
Palkinshlog,
or “Drumbeat”—using only five 1,100-ton, Type-9 U-boats. On the night of 23 December 1941, the five submarines deployed from L'Orient, France, for the 3,500-mile trip across the Atlantic. A week later, in a successful effort to confound Allied convoy planners, he dispatched a six-boat wolf pack of his smaller 740-ton U-boats to the waters off Newfoundland.

The operation was a stunning success—made more so by the lack of American preparedness for such an onslaught in waters off the East Coast. In just three weeks, starting in January 1942, the Drumbeat gambit sent twenty-six American vessels, 162,000 gross registered tons of shipping, and 252 American merchant seamen to a watery grave—many times within sight of land. Some called it “the Pearl Harbor of the Atlantic.” The Germans called it “Happy Time.”

For the next ten months Allied shipping losses were devastating—particularly along the U.S. East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico—where no convoys or protective procedures of any kind had ever been implemented. By April, U-boats had sunk eighty-seven ships—more than 500,000 tons. In May, Dönitz shifted south to the Gulf of Mexico, sinking another forty-one ships, mostly tankers. And though there were never more than a dozen U-boats operating along the U.S. east coast at one time, the worst was yet to come.

 

U-3008 on patrol.

The warm waters of the Gulf Stream, just east of the American mainland, offered both lucrative hunting grounds for the U-boats and a welcome respite for German submariners who had been fighting in the cold waters of the North Atlantic for better than two years. One of those Germans who saw the U.S. for the first time from the deck of a U-boat was Peter Petersen. He was a nineteen-year-old diesel machinist when he joined the crew of U-518. Petersen had grown up near the Danish border and volunteered for U-boat service after he was drafted. He made three deployments to the U.S. coast starting that spring of 1942.