Blackett's War (45 page)

To extend the time the U-boats could operate at sea and to minimize their repeated passages through the bay, Dönitz had ordered construction of a dedicated fleet of U-boats that carried large fuel tanks—the “milk cows”—that could refuel the operational boats at sea. Signals specifying rendezvous points were radioed up to two weeks ahead of time. Low argued vigorously for putting this intelligence bonanza to use. Knocking out the tankers, he thought, would be a huge leverage point; each one sunk would pay off in multiples of reduced U-boat days at sea for the entire fleet. There was the chance as well of catching several U-boats in one spot.

The Admiralty sought to veto the plan, fearing that it was too risky: since the actual rendezvous were carried out in radio silence, a successful attack would surely put the Germans on notice that the Enigma had been compromised. Low went ahead anyway. In June, July, and August 1943 the U.S. Navy’s escort carriers, now operating in independent task forces, carried out a series of crushing attacks on the tanker rendezvous around the Azores and elsewhere in the Atlantic, sinking 3 of the milk cows and 11 operational U-boats.
⁶⁰
For the first time in the war the number of operational U-boats at sea fell, dropping by almost half from an average of 120 in May to 60 in August. More important, the effectiveness of each boat plummeted: even when they did operate they accomplished almost nothing. For the rest of the war Dönitz’s U-boat fleet barely managed to sink 0.1 merchant vessel per month for each U-boat at sea, down from a peak of forty times that at the height of their prowess. The plots of the Atlantic showing the location of every merchant ship sunk that had been clouds of dark smears covering the Western Approaches of Britain, the east coast of the United States, the ominous “air gap” halfway across the North Atlantic, gave way to a few scattered dots barely noticeable amid a sea of tranquil emptiness: the German submarines, Admiral King announced, had been reduced from a “menace” to a “problem.”
⁶¹

“Probably the anti-submarine campaign in 1943 was waged under closer scientific control than any other campaign in the history of the British Armed Forces,” Blackett would write later in an appreciation of E. J. Williams.
⁶²
It was, as Churchill had warned, a bitter war “of groping and drowning … of ambuscade and stratagem”; but suffusing it all was a war of science. The Allies outfought the Germans at sea: but most of all they outwitted them.

ONCE AGAIN
a file of U-boats meekly made their way to British ports. Again the sinister silhouettes of an elusive and loathed predator resolved themselves into the contours of a domestic creature, almost pathetic in their helplessness as they chugged along at half speed, wallowing through the waves.

Three weeks before the German surrender on May 8, 1945, the British commander-in-chief, Western Approaches, anticipating the end of five and a half years of gnawing sleepless nights and anxiety-ridden days, sent orders to the fleet specifying procedures to be followed:

Instructions to Allied ships and aircraft directed that they were not to take any offensive actions against a sighted U-boat except if it “is seen to commit a hostile act or shows signs of treachery, for example by diving or failing to comply with the orders.”

The cease-fire went into effect at midnight May 8 Central European Time and nine hours later, just after sunup the next morning in the United Kingdom, the first radio signal from a U-boat reporting its location was picked up by Coastal Command. A Sunderland flying boat was immediately diverted to its reported position, about 100 miles northwest of the Irish coast. A little after noon the aircrew sighted a surfaced U-boat, flying a blue and white flag from the conning tower. The crew was crowded on the deck “waving madly and giving the ‘thumbs up’ sign,” the British plane reported. Over the next week 173 more German submarines surrendered. Defiant to the end, 221 German commanders scuttled their boats rather than allow them to fall into Allied hands. Two made it to Argentina.
²

Dönitz remained unshakable in his loyalty to Hitler to the end. The Kriegsmarine’s sole duty, Dönitz declared, was “to stand fanatically behind the National Socialist State … each deviation from this is a laxness and a crime.” In February 1945, as Germany’s military position was collapsing on all fronts, Albert Speer, Hitler’s confidant and master planner, drew Dönitz aside after one conference with the Führer and appealed to him desperately that something had to be done to save Germany from complete catastrophe. The Grossadmiral snapped back, “The Führer knows what he is doing.”
³

Hitler rewarded his naval commander’s loyalty by naming him his successor. Even in the last days of the Reich, Dönitz issued mad orders to fight on. He issued a secret decree to the naval police, who were even more dreaded than the SS for their summary executions of suspected deserters, to show no mercy to those who failed to do their duty:

Succeeding Hitler as the Reich’s last Führer on April 30, Dönitz went on the air the next day to exhort the German people to resist not only the Russians on the Eastern Front but the “Anglo-Americans” as well—who, he explained, were now fighting “not for their own peoples but solely for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.” After the surrender, Dönitz even more improbably imagined the Allies would let him stay in charge of postwar Germany; he wrote Eisenhower on May 15 declaring his intention to hold trials in German courts for those responsible for the concentration camps—which he vehemently insisted no one in the armed forces had known of. Eisenhower did not write back. A week later Dönitz was under arrest. By then he had decided that all the reports about the camps had been “largely exaggerated and were propaganda.”
⁵

At Nuremberg he and Raeder were tried for war crimes and the prosecution devoted much of its case attempting to prove that Dönitz had issued orders to the U-boat crews to fire on survivors in lifeboats and in the water. The evidence for that was admittedly circumstantial, based on some disputed hearsay and the ambiguities in his written order instructing U-boat commanders to “be severe.” The less disputable fact that Dönitz had violated the laws of war by ordering his U-boats to torpedo merchant vessels without warning and not to rescue survivors was effectively countered by the testimony of American officers who acknowledged that U.S. Navy submariners had done exactly the same in the Pacific against Japanese freighters and their crews. Dönitz received a sentence of ten years imprisonment, the lightest punishment imposed by the court.

Dönitz’s insistence that his U-boat men had fought “a heroic struggle,” from which they emerged “unbroken and unbesmirched,” as he declared in a final message radioed to the U-boats just before the surrender, would be echoed by his apologists over the years; they have included more than a few American naval officers who felt their opposing commander had been railroaded at Nuremberg.
⁶
That sentiment would more disturbingly appear in the latter-day hero worship of U-boat “aces” among a cult of history hobbyists fascinated with everything related to the Third Reich.

Yet even if there were nothing criminal in the German navy’s U-boat war—a highly debatable proposition in itself—there was nothing heroic about it at all. It was a squalid and pitiless fight that sent 2,800 ships to the bottom of the cold Atlantic and took the lives of tens of thousands of civilian seamen. On the German side, it was little more than suicide dressed up in Nazi propaganda of sacrifice for the Fatherland. Over the course of the
war 830 U-boats took part in operations; 784 of them—94 percent—were lost. Of the 40,000 men who served on U-boats, 26,000 were killed and 5,000 taken prisoner.
⁷

The only other theater that offered similarly appalling odds was the Allied bomber offensive against Germany, which cost the United States and Britain 8,000 large aircraft apiece and took the lives of 76,000 Allied airmen. It also killed an estimated 600,000 German civilians. It was the final irony of the modern industrialized slaughter of the Second World War that the two fronts about which so much romantic and heroic nonsense would be spilled were the most barbaric and pitiless, for the men who fought upon them and their victims alike.
⁸

BLACKETT,
Zuckerman, Bernal, Watson-Watt, Gordon, and others on the scientific left briefly entertained great expectations that their wartime triumphs had opened the door to the scientifically planned society they had long dreamed of, one in which central planning would organize industry and the economy for the benefit of all. Bernal exultantly proclaimed that the harnessing of science to the war effort had proved everything he had been saying for years: “All that I had thought and written about the possibilities of the ordered utilization of science, I now saw enacted in practice, and I saw that where I had erred was not in overestimating, but in underestimating the constructive power of science,” he wrote right after the war.

The key now was to keep that same institutional foothold within government with the return to peace. Bernal thought that science, as it had been employed in the war, would help make socialism palatable by “removing the arbitrary and despotic elements which many persons of genuine liberal feeling imagine to be inherent in all planning.” The Association of Scientific Workers enthusiastically issued a report urging the marshaling of production for social needs in peacetime; just as scientific management had supplied the armed services the material they had needed during the war, so “in peace time we shall require the same techniques to study the most efficient ways of utilising the country’s resources for the satisfaction of the consumer’s needs and desires.”
⁹
At the 1947 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a session on “Operational Research in War and Peace” featured Watson-Watt, Zuckerman, Bernal, and other leading scientists who had been a part of the wartime operational research effort calling for wider civilian applications of OR.

It was perhaps inevitable that hopes of duplicating in peacetime the unique wartime success of the scientists who had beat the U-boats would be disappointed. Neither on a personal nor on an institutional level did the wartime camaraderie and enthusiasm survive. Most of those involved in the scientific war against the U-boats quickly drifted away, returning to their old jobs, getting on with lives and careers, forgetting about their brief foray into a world where mathematical equations stood for life and death. A deadpan report by the Admiralty’s operational researchers a year after the war’s end offered a bit of cynical commentary on their conviction that their contributions had already been forgotten. The report solemnly calculated to several decimal places the proportion of knighthoods, honors, and awards bestowed upon scientists in various branches of government; it found that while 8.6 per 1,000 scientists in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research had been awarded knighthoods and 22.8 per 1,000 had received lesser honors, the corresponding figures in the Department of Naval Operational Research were 1.0 and 7.0.
¹⁰