Blackett's War (20 page)

It was of course complete, cynical nonsense, as Dönitz knew full well. Two days after Hitler’s meeting with Raeder, Dönitz set down in a staff memorandum his intention to give U-boats permission to sink without warning any ship, including neutrals, running without lights. “U-boat commanders
would be informed by word of mouth and the sinking of a merchant ship must be justified in the war diary as due to possible confusion with a warship or auxiliary cruiser,” he noted.
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The very fact that Dönitz was ordering the war diary faked on this point shows he knew perfectly well that running without lights offered no valid legal basis for disregarding the protections accorded merchant vessels under international law. The laws of war made no exceptions for ships without lights, ships in escorted convoys, ships sending distress calls, even ships armed with defensive weaponry. As a matter of long-settled admiralty law, a merchant ship had a clearly recognized right to resist capture by an enemy cruiser—and it was solely at the warship’s own risk to proceed in the face of such resistance. Merchant vessels had always had the right to carry guns for self-defense and, in time of war, to use them to try to fight off an enemy cruiser or privateer. A merchant ship that persistently refused to obey the commands of a warship to halt, or that tried to defend herself by firing her guns, certainly could be fired on in return, but even that did not permit the attacker to jettison the rules of war; upon ceasing resistance, the merchantman still had to be boarded and her crew and papers removed to a place of safety before being sunk.

The legal reasoning behind this was not mysterious, though it did turn on an anomaly in the laws of war that had always treated civilians at sea differently from those on land. Enemy civilians captured on the high seas could legitimately be held as prisoners of war, for example, and their private property taken as a lawful prize even though they were not combatants; on land, civilians and their property were to be respected. Likewise, a civilian who fired on an enemy soldier on land was a franc-tireur who could be executed as an unlawful combatant; at sea, the civilian crewmen of a merchant ship had a right of self-defense that they could exercise without fear of punishment or reprisal, and without altering their status and rights as noncombatants.
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But the Nazis were masters at plausibly running roughshod over niceties of law.

At the end of September, coinciding with the last collapse of Polish resistance, Hitler had another long talk with the as yet indefatigable Birger Dahlerus. The Swede was soon on his way to London with yet another peace feeler from the Führer. “If the British actually want peace, they can have it in two weeks—without losing face,” Hitler assured Dahlerus. Simultaneously, William Shirer recalled, “the German press and radio launched a big peace offensive” echoing the Führer’s promises. After all, why should Britain and France fight any longer? Poland, “this ridiculous state … will never rise
again,” the Führer declared. He sought nothing but peace; he had no more claims to make, save for the adjustment of Germany’s overseas colonies; it was, said Shirer, “the old gramophone record being replayed for the fifth or sixth time.”

At a meeting of the War Cabinet to discuss Dahlerus’s latest message, Halifax argued that “we should not absolutely close the door” on Hitler’s latest approach. On October 12 Chamberlain did just that, with another show of the resolve that had been missing a year earlier. No reliance, he told the House, could be placed on the words “of the present German Government … acts—not words alone—must be forthcoming.”
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Hitler now had his answer whether Great Britain would “fight to the finish.” Pausing only long enough for his propagandists to muddy the waters a bit, he proceeded to make good on his promise to Raeder to remove the remaining restrictions on the U-boat force. Throughout October and November, German statements repeated again and again the assertion that by supplying deck guns to British merchant ships and instructing them to transmit signals when attacked, the British Admiralty had made the merchant marine an arm of the Royal Navy, subject to attack without warning like any other combatant. In consequence, it was simply a matter of reality that “in waters around the British Isles and in the vicinity of the French coast the safety of neutral ships can no longer be taken for granted.”
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Churchill warned Pound that “one must expect a violent reaction from Herr Hitler” to Britain’s rejection of his “peace” initiative. “Perhaps quite soon.”
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The reaction was already in train. On the night of October 13,
U-47
slipped into Scapa Flow, the main British naval base, in the Orkney Islands off the far northern coast of the Scottish mainland. Dönitz had personally selected Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, a hard-charging and experienced officer, thirty years old. His crew, told of their objective only once they were at sea, viewed it as a suicide mission. But so unprepared were the commanders of the British fleet for the possibility that a German submarine could penetrate their Gibraltar of the north that even after the first torpedo fired by
U-47
struck the battleship
Royal Oak
, causing a small explosion, they did not send their ships to battle stations, attributing the blast to spontaneous combustion in the ship’s paint locker or some other accident aboard the ship itself. Prien reloaded his torpedo tubes and thirteen minutes later fired another salvo, this time striking his target amidships. A huge orange fireball erupted from the ammunition magazine and the 29,000-ton ship was lifted into the air. Within fifteen minutes the mighty ship rolled over and sank.
Two thirds of her 1,200-man crew were killed.
U-47
returned home safely to a hero’s welcome for “the Bull of Scapa Flow” and his men.

Churchill acknowledged this “feat of arms” by the enemy. That was one of those chivalrous turns of phrase he had a fondness for, and which would soon become anachronistic in naval warfare. Seizing the moment to press the case with Hitler, Raeder on October 16 presented an “Economic Warfare Plan” that the naval staff had prepared to make the maximal case for unrestrained U-boat warfare:

Hitler agreed. The same day he approved torpedoing any merchant ship “definitely recognized” as British or French without warning, as well as passenger ships in convoy “a short while after notice has been given of the intention to do so.” A few days later the area where any darkened ships could be attacked without warning was extended to 20
°
west longitude, a meridian even with Iceland. On November 10 Raeder proposed lifting all remaining restrictions on torpedoing enemy passenger liners; an order to that effect was issued a few days later. And in late November or early December Dönitz issued standing order No. 154, which instructed U-boat commanders to put aside any remaining compunctions over the fate of the crews and passengers of the ships they torpedoed:

As British reaction to the
Athenia
sinking showed, there was little surprise in the discovery that Hitler’s Germany would be no less brutal than
the Kaiser’s; the only wonder was that anyone could have thought otherwise. The Nazi Party’s nihilistic glorification of brutality as part of its cult of power had been evident from its very beginnings, with storm trooper brawls on the streets of Munich. The only thing that had changed since the First World War in Germany’s plans for unrestricted submarine warfare was Hitler’s greater skill in manipulating world public opinion.

CHURCHILL TURNED
the elegant library on the top floor of Admiralty House into his war room, and so that he could be at his post at all times he had the attics above converted into a flat, which he moved into at once. Installed in an office next door to the war room was Lindemann, the first lord’s “tame scientist,” as one fellow cabinet member sarcastically termed him.
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The scientific folie à deux of Churchill and Lindemann if anything grew worse. Churchill now had a whole ministry at his beck and call to carry out his enthusiasms, which became a source of despair to those who had to obey his whims. “Anything unusual or odd or dramatic intrigued him … deception, sabotage, and no doubt influenced by Professor Lindemann, the application of novel scientific methods,” lamented Rear Admiral J. H. Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence and one of the more capable and scientific-minded men in the navy’s senior ranks. Churchill immediately ordered full-scale development of the aerial mine-curtain scheme that the Tizard Committee had repeatedly vetoed as scientifically impractical. The device had now evolved into a contraption with multiple rocket launchers that would send a projectile up to 2,000 feet and release a curtain of long wires, each with a parachute at the top end and a bomblet at the bottom. The idea was that an attacking enemy plane would snare one of the wires with its wing; the drag from the parachute would then yank the wire back until the bomb contacted the front edge of the wing, when it would detonate. Churchill dubbed it the “UP Weapon.” UP stood for “unrotated projectile,” a name intended to fool the Germans as to its true brilliant nature. He ordered forty of the devices built and had them installed on warships even though, as one admiral bluntly observed, the gadget “was considered by everyone except Winston as plain crazy.” It was in fact worthless, less than worthless even: the rockets were slow to fire, the wires were plainly visible in the air and easily avoided by enemy aircraft, and the unexploded
mines even endangered the ships that fired them when they drifted back down. The launchers took up deck space that would have been far better given to guns or other weapons that worked.
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Churchill tried to galvanize research to counter the U-boats with more of his amateur inventions. “I wondered whether it would not be possible, when U-boats are suspected of being sunk in fifty or sixty fathoms,” he wrote the vice chief of the naval staff in February 1940, “to let down a cable with a magnet attached, which magnet would be attracted to the steel mass lying on the bottom and would prove that something lay there. I asked Professor Lindemann for a note on this. Perhaps one could have an apparatus which fired a charge or made a signal.”
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Churchill also had Lindemann, “my old friend and confidant of so many years” he called him in his memoirs, create a sort of personal statistics department within the Admiralty to provide him “my own sure, steady source of information.” The need was undeniable: there was no overall government statistical organization and Churchill rightly understood and appreciated the importance of getting the numbers and having them presented in clear tables and graphs. But even here Churchill’s overreliance on a single trusted protégé as the arbiter of all scientific and mathematical wisdom at times misfired. In preparing statistics on the loss rates of ships traveling in convoys versus those traveling independently, Lindemann arbitrarily ruled that ships which had been in convoy but were sunk after they dispersed and traveled independently on the final leg of the outbound voyage should still be counted as a loss-in-convoy. “This statistical error prevented for a long time a true comparison,” noted Captain B. B. Schofield, who took over the Admiralty’s Trade Division in March 1941; it encouraged advocates of independent sailings in their mistaken belief that the costs of convoying (in delaying the movement of goods) did not outweigh the benefits (in lower loss rates). As Schofield would note, a more complete statistical analysis subsequently left no doubt that only the very few extremely fast cargo liners capable of speeds greater than 20 knots were better off going it alone across the Atlantic.
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But even those driven to distraction by Churchill’s brainstorms tended to view them as a sort of transaction cost; they were just the price one had to pay for Churchill’s “demonic energy and extraordinary imagination,” as Godfrey put it. Occasionally they hit the jackpot. A Churchill-Lindemann scheme for defeating magnetic mines by “degaussing” the metal hulls of warships, wrapping them with coils of electrical wire to form a giant electromagnet
that countered the magnetism of their steel, was a brilliant success. Churchill’s diversion of scarce warships to “hunter groups” was a grievous blunder, but he also fully understood the urgent need for convoy escorts. In a few swift strokes Churchill ordered construction to begin at once of small escort vessels that could quickly make up the shortfall. He revived the old names
corvettes
and
frigates
, with their dashing associations of the age of sail, to designate these new types, which were about two thirds the size and displacement of a regular destroyer. The first, he hoped, could be ready in twelve or even eight months.
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Churchill had also fully grasped the revolutionary import of radar when much of the Admiralty had not. Here was an instance where his belief that navies always had to be dragged into the modern world against their will had more than a little merit. Tizard’s committee had tried to bring the Admiralty in on radar from the start, and had met almost comical opposition. Not long after the first radar experiments in February 1935 Tizard realized that however important radar was to the air force it must be as important or even more so for the navy. “Full of this,” he recalled, “I sought an early interview with a naval expert.” He told him about the work, explained its significance, pointed out that radar could in principle make it possible to locate and accurately direct gunfire on an enemy ship even beyond visible range, a development with truly revolutionary implications for naval warfare. “He listened to me patiently,” Tizard remembered, “then he said, ‘May I ask if you have ever seen a warship?’ I said, ‘Yes, many times.’ ‘And have you observed the aerials?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you had observed them closely enough you would know that there was no room on them for any more.’ ” Tizard replied that perhaps some of them might be removed.
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