Dönitz: The Last Führer (28 page)

Dönitz’s chief task as he returned, refreshed from his skiing, was to prepare for a large-scale test of his group tactics in spring exercises in the North Sea. Despite the hint in his November report that he may have heard something of the anti-British drift of the ‘Hossbach’ Conference, he was still working within the official framework of British neutrality in any immediate conflict. This is evident from a report he made on U-boat types just before the exercises; he declared the centre of gravity of U-boat operations in war as ‘attacks on the French transports and sea communications in the Mediterranean …’
¹⁵
In the Atlantic he saw the
U-boat’s task as attack on French sea communications and west-coast ports, in the North Sea the security of German traffic lanes. For these tasks he recommended the 626-ton Type VII boat as most suitable.

His paper went to Admiral Carls, who had taken over as Fleet Chief in October 1936. Like Foerster, Carls was mightily impressed with the leader of his U-boat arm: ‘an excellent officer of iron will power, goal-oriented certainty and unwearying toughness… teacher, example and stimulus to his officers’, deserving ‘wholly special attention’ and ‘promising to become an outstanding leader in higher positions as well’.
¹⁶
In the report from which these remarks are extracted he had added to the usual description of Dönitz as ‘tall and slim’ the adjective ‘
straffe
’, which might be translated as ‘taut’, ‘stern’, or ‘extremely upright’. All fitted!

On May 6th Carls forwarded Dönitz’s paper on U-boat types to the High Command; in the meantime the exercises had taken place off the coast of Jutland; it is evident from his covering paper that Carls was thoroughly convinced about group tactics.

Dönitz’s own report after the exercises was quite clear on the point:

He also reported that ‘the question of communications between U-boats, and between the leadership (ashore) and U-boats is basically solved—short wave, long wave, periscope aerial’. The question of tactical command was not entirely resolved, however, since both a group leader in the operational area and a shore-based overall controller seemed necessary—the man on the spot with the knowledge of the actual conditions, the shore leadership with access to a more complete picture—and it was not certain how this dual system would function in war conditions.

It is the lot of the innovator to be thwarted. Dönitz was no exception. The Staff at High Command were against group tactics on the grounds that the wireless traffic necessary would forfeit surprise and aid detection of the boats by the enemy; meanwhile ideas for oceanic warfare with huge cruiser U-boats armed with heavy guns, virtually submersible surface raiders, were in the ascendant. Dönitz held that the U-boat was first and foremost a torpedo carrier and that to give it heavy artillery was to put it at a disadvantage by forcing it to the surface to fight. Some of the frustration of his running battle with the High Command shows through his reports at this period.

Meanwhile the whole orientation of naval policy changed. Since the
Anschluss
with Austria the second stage of Hitler’s programme—Czechoslovakia—had been building up to crisis. The western half of this State was sandwiched between Germany and Austria and in the extreme west the German-speaking Sudetenlanders—now almost the only part of the ‘shut-in race core’ outside the boundaries of the
Reich
—were acting in concert with Hitler and Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry to produce the internal tension and fabricated excuses for action by the German Army that had characterized the move into Austria. Czechoslovakia had a defensive alliance with France, however, and the French government made it clear it would respect its obligations. Then on May 22nd, as it seemed the German Army was about to march, the British Ambassador in Berlin sought a meeting with Ribbentrop and delivered a personal message from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax: if resort were had to force it would be quite impossible to foretell the consequences, ‘and I would beg him not to count upon this country being able to stand aside’.
¹⁹
Hitler must have erupted in the same sense as the Kaiser when similarly checked by the British government in the Balkan crisis of December 1912—‘The final struggle between the Slavs and Teutons will see the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs and Gauls!’

Whether on this occasion the Führer threw one of his uncontrollable rages, as he was said to have done later in the crisis, is not recorded. But on the 24th his naval Adjutant, Dönitz’s former torpedo boat Commander, von Puttkamer, wired Raeder with an invitation to a meeting with the Führer on the 28th; with the message came proposals for a great acceleration of naval construction, particularly U-boats and large battleships, which left Raeder in no doubt that the target was Great Britain. What Hitler had suggested rather ambiguously at the ‘Hossbach’ meeting was now to be starkly confronted: the step-by-step approach to continental
hegemony while wooing England was a chimera; it was necessary to build up such a threat, particularly with U-boats against supply lines, that Great Britain would be deterred from interfering with the continental plans; it was the predictable response of an international terrorist; it was also the tactic the Kaiser’s Chancellor had attempted before the First War; Tirpitz’s policy had come full circle; there was no way out of Germany’s boxed-in position in the centre of the European land mass.

Raeder had reached similar conclusions on the political situation at least as early as the previous month—although of course England had always been in his long-term sights. At the ‘wash-up’ after the annual war game he had revealed to the Baltic station chief, Admiral Albrecht, ‘I am convinced that today we have to reckon with a war
with France and with England
, as a result of which the fundamentals of naval operations will be radically altered.’
²⁰
He had not taken steps to alter them; perhaps he still considered it too dangerous even to discuss the possibility officially. On the days immediately following Puttkamer’s cable, however, he made that possibility official naval policy. And after the meeting with the other service chiefs on the 28th, at which Hitler affirmed his ‘unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action’—a meeting which Raeder had completely forgotten by the time he came to the witness stand at Nuremberg—he ordered his 1st staff officer, operations, to prepare a paper on the possibility of waging a naval war with Great Britain.

The paper, known after its author as the Heye
Denkschrift
, set out clear premises at the beginning: England’s strengths were her commanding geographical position across Germany’s exits to the oceans, and her strong battlefleet which Germany could not hope to match—her weakness was her dependence on overseas communications. From this it followed: ‘The sea war is the battle over economic and military sea communication.’
²¹

This was at the opposite pole to Tirpitz’s doctrine of the decisive fleet battle; however, it too suffered from Germany’s hopeless strategic position, for the commerce raiders and their tankers and supply vessels would have to break out and back through the blockade which the British could so easily set up across the Dover Straits and the northern North Sea. The situation could be eased, Heye pointed out, by the occupation of Holland, Denmark and Norway, yet this would be of tactical, not strategic, significance for they would still be
inside
the British blockade. The best solution was the acquisition of the whole northern coast of
France out to Brest, thus outflanking the Channel blockade and gaining free access to the Atlantic. This would also provide the
Luftwaffe
with bases from which to attack English Channel shipping and harbours, a vital adjunct to the Navy’s war on commerce, hence ‘in the case of war with England and France’ it would be of ‘outstanding value’ if this were provided for in the land operations.

When it came to discussing the types of vessels necessary for the ‘cruiser war’ the paper showed just how far the naval staff in Berlin were from Dönitz’s conceptions:

The paper recommended huge ‘cruiser U-boats’ armed with four 12·7-cm guns and a surface speed of 25 knots for commerce war on the high seas, but pointed out that once forced to dive U-boats had such a low speed they were at the mercy of the new detection device; the medium-sized torpedo U-boats which Dönitz favoured were listed under ‘Other U-boats’ whose chief operational area would be before enemy harbours and where traffic lanes converged. ‘However, it is in precisely these areas that especially strong counter-measures are to be expected.’ The conclusion was that in a U-boat war heavy ‘losses should be reckoned with at some time after the outbreak as soon as the enemy counter-measures are organized and developed’.

Thus the U-boat arm had a fairly low priority in the paper; the highest priority was given to surface units, fast, long-range armoured cruisers supplemented by light cruisers, and to provide support for their breakthrough into the Atlantic a squadron of most powerful battleships. A naval air arm was seen as an ‘unconditionally necessary’ adjunct.

The paper was sent to the naval stations for comment. Dönitz’s chief, Carls, took a positive view, apparently savouring the implications:

Or as he put it in the same paper, ‘The will to make Germany a world power leads of necessity to suitable preparations for war.’

Raeder approved the sentiments and when Carls ended his term as Fleet Chief, he was given a special liaison post with a staff committee set up to translate the philosophy of Heye’s paper into a detailed fleet construction programme for the ‘cruiser war’ against England.

Looking back now, it is as difficult to understand Raeder at this crisis for his Navy as it had been for the British up to that time—outside the small Churchill-Vansittart circle—to comprehend the dark compulsions underlying German policy and the professions of peace and friendship with which Hitler and Goebbels clothed them. There are two parties to every misunderstanding: the British public, misled by their political and intellectual leadership about the true causes of the First World War, the stern necessity if one owns half the world to fight to protect it, seduced by liberal, socialist and pacifist propaganda to believe in their easy scapegoats—the armaments barons, the capitalist system itself—wishing only to prevent a repeat of the horrors of the trench war while retaining the even greater share of the world they had won, had been shut up in the reverse image of the fantasy inhabited by the German nation and so starkly revealed in Admiral Carls’ paper—‘the war… therefore against half to two-thirds of the whole world … has inner justification…’

There were numerous other parties to this cosmic misunderstanding, but any judgement on why the horrific sacrifice of the war was about to be rendered fruitless must take into account the hypocrisy and wishful thinking of the British and the other Western democracies as much as the
Realpolitik
of the Germans. Both sides had been brought up in their opposed convictions, both systems encouraged them and excluded the real world outside. Misunderstanding was inevitable and complete.

The other questions about Raeder concern his intelligence and moral courage; how much of either did he display at this abrupt turning point for his Navy? Already his building programme was lagging years behind schedule, affected not only by material shortages but by a host of technical
problems inevitable in such a rushed start after the inactivity of the ‘Treaty’ years. Yet he now intended increasing the programme, and actually did so in January 1939 after the Führer had approved his staff committee’s grandiose ‘Z Plan’ for huge battleships, armoured cruisers, aircraft carriers and 249 U-boats to be completed at various dates up to 1947. Not only was it impossible to complete the major units within the time limits without encroaching on the other service programmes and aggravating the already severe crisis caused by the war economy and the Four-year Plan, but the fuel required to drive such a fleet was more than Germany’s total oil consumption for 1938—two-thirds of which came from abroad!
²⁴
The ‘Z-Plan’ was as much of a fantasy as the world-view which made it necessary.

This was apparent to the more intelligent officers, including Helmuth Heye, the author of the original staff paper. They did not question ‘the great goal’ before which Germany stood, only the rushed and risky method of attaining it. Time was needed if they were not to be held back by the superior forces encircling them.