Dönitz: The Last Führer (33 page)

He was disappointed on this occasion; although one other U-boat did find the convoy, the mass attack intended never developed. On the next day he sent a questionnaire to the Intelligence Service in order to obtain information on English trade routes.

Individual boats were scoring successes against ships sailing independently as they had in the First War, but he knew it could be only a matter of time before the convoy system was in operation on all routes; meanwhile his minelaying U-boats operated close inshore, sowing mines at focal points of traffic.

On the 18th he received the best news to date; this was the sinking of the aircraft carrier,
Courageous
, by U 29. ‘A glorious success,’ he noted in the war diary, ‘and further confirmation of the fact that English counter-measures are not as effective as they maintain.’
¹⁴

Raeder visited his unpretentious headquarters in Wilhelmshaven that day to suggest the transfer of some U-boats to the Mediterranean; Dönitz strongly opposed the idea since he had so few boats anyway; he thought it wrong to remove those from the key area around the British Isles to make a long cruise south. Raeder, who was chafing quite as much as he at the opportunities missed by adhering to the Prize Rules, then told him of his plans for stepping up the war on trade by stages: before
declaring an unrestricted ‘danger zone’ around the British Isles, he intended to declare a zone in which enemy ships only—not neutrals—would be liable to be sunk without warning. Dönitz opposed this idea too since submerged U-boats would have difficulty in identifying their targets in time to make their attack; in any case the British would presumably get around it by sailing their ships under neutral colours.

He was not averse to an unrestricted campaign in principle. The dangers for his boats of operating according to Prize Law were already becoming apparent. Nearly all boats had either come home or were on the return passage by now and several Commanders had reported merchantmen using their wireless when ordered to stop, as a result of which aircraft had appeared on the scene, sometimes while the prize crew was still aboard the merchantman. He considered that ships acting in this way were a part of the enemy anti-U-boat organization and should therefore be classed as warships and sunk; he sent a memorandum to Berlin to this effect on the 23rd. Raeder brought it to Hitler’s attention on the same day and obtained his agreement. However, he could not move him on his other ideas for stepping up the war on trade. Hitler still hoped to drive a wedge between Britain and France and was concerned about American and neutral opinion generally; for instance it was decided that the notorious term ‘unrestricted U-boat warfare’ should be dropped from the vocabulary; when the time came to implement it ‘the siege of England’ would have better connotations while allowing equal ‘freedom from having to observe any regulations whatever on account of military law’.
¹⁵

The next day Dönitz sent a signal to all boats: ‘Armed force should be used against all merchant ships using their wireless when ordered to stop. They are subject to seizure or sinking without exception.’
¹⁶
It was the first turn of the screw. Another was under consideration; it is described in a staff memorandum of two days earlier:

Permission was granted on October 2nd. The memorandum is more important for the light it throws on the character of the German Navy than for the gradual introduction of ‘unrestricted’ U-boat warfare—which soon came in by other means. It is another example of the cynicism permeating every level of the service. It is also a pointer to the caution which has to be exercised when examining even documentary evidence for later, far more serious crimes against law and morality.

Poland had been beaten by this time, her ill-equipped armies outclassed by the German armour and the screaming Stukas of the
Luftwaffe
; a few centres of resistance still held out, but the end was very near. Behind the
Panzers
Himmler’s special SS groups were rounding up and massacring Jews and resisters with extemporized bestiality, and the second stage of the total plan for Poland, the annihilation of the nobility, officers, priests, teachers, the educated and leaders of any kind and the degradation of the rest of the nation to the status of an illiterate mobile labour force for the German overlords was ready for when the Army had completed its task. Hitler’s thoughts had turned west. Two days later he was back in Berlin, and on the 27th, as Warsaw surrendered, he startled his generals by telling them that the offensive against France must begin before the end of the year. He knew that time was not on Germany’s side.

The next day he travelled to Wilhelmshaven to visit U-boat headquarters and see the boats which had returned from their first war cruises. He had been surrounded by Army and Air Force men during the Polish campaign and Raeder wished to remind him of the Navy’s existence. He could not have chosen a better venue: Dönitz seized the opportunity with verve, the hyperbole from his passionate beliefs masked by the dogmatic tone and
gravitas
of the expert as he explained his boats’ performance to date and enormous potential for the future: the material and psychological effect of U-boats was as great as it had been in the First World War; it was not true that the enemy Asdic had mastered the threat; operational experience to date confirmed that the British escorts were not as effective as claimed. On the other hand the present U-boats had great advantages over their First World War predecessors, splashless discharge of torpedoes which left no bubbles in their wake, above all long-distance wireless communication—and he launched into his
favourite theme—allowing all boats in a given area to converge on convoys in that area, so meeting concentrations of enemy merchantmen with a concentration of attacking force; he had proved this practically in exercises in the Bay of Biscay.

And he went on, ‘After consideration of all questions relating to U-boat warfare I am convinced that it is a means of inflicting decisive damage on England at her weakest point.’
¹⁸

Again he returned to the number which had become fixed in his mind—300—‘if this number of boats is available I believe that the U-boat arm can achieve decisive success.’

It was an impressive performance, quite untrammelled by scientific analysis and running contrary to every lesson of naval history, including those of the campaign in which he himself had taken part, but it left Hitler with the impression of a capable and forthright Commander. From the timber headquarters hut the Führer and his entourage, his chief of staff, Keitel, his naval adjutant, von Puttkamer, Raeder and now Dönitz, sped to the U-boat dock to see the weather-stained boats which had returned from British waters, and inspect their bearded crews—thence to the officers’ mess, where he talked with the Commanders and lieutenants, including Schuhart of U 29 who had torpedoed the carrier,
Courageous
, and survived counter-attack by her destroyer escorts. The Führer’s already favourable impression of the arm was enhanced; they were a tight brotherhood mirroring their chief’s pride in their dangerous service—an élite with the confidence and ebullience of youth and recent successes and, now that the bogey of Asdic had been almost exploded, untroubled by too much doubt. As von Puttkamer wrote, Hitler ‘carried back to Berlin an excellent impression of the leadership of the U-boat arm as well as of the liveliness and spirit of the crews’.
¹⁹

In the days after the visit, with the last boats returning home, Dönitz pondered his next campaign; his conclusions remained typical of his conduct throughout the Battle of the Atlantic:

He believed that success would depend upon a surprise appearance in strength, and since the boats would become ready and sail at different times, he decided to order them to waiting positions in the south-west approaches to the English Channel where they might find targets; when all were concentrated, he would order them to Gibraltar as a group with a flotilla leader in U 37 to take over tactical control when necessary. If the leader found conditions unpromising he would be authorized to order new dispositions.

Here are all the principles of surprise and concentration and probing for the enemy’s weak points and trying to disperse the defence forces which were to become hallmarks of his Atlantic campaign, as familiar to his opponents in anti-submarine operations in London as to his own staff. Practically the only change was the abandonment later of the idea of divided control; it was found that the local flotilla chief could not remain on the surface—which was necessary if he was to exercise control—close enough to the actual operations; he had no advantage, therefore, over U-boat headquarters, and the concept of local tactical control was dropped.

A great success of the kind he had achieved theoretically in the May exercises with a convoy beset on all sides by U-boats, the escorts outnumbered or sunk and incapable of defending their charges eluded him on this occasion, but an equally dramatic blow he had been planning succeeded brilliantly. This was an old-fashioned operation by a lone U-boat against the British main fleet base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. It had been attempted twice before in the First World War; on both occasions the U-boats had been lost without scoring any success. Despite these precedents, on September 6th, three days after the start of the second round against Britain, Dönitz had called for the naval intelligence file on the fleet base;
²¹
it proved disappointingly incomplete. However, U 16 was in the Orkney area and her Commander spent some time reconnoitring the several entrances to the Flow; returning to Wilhelmshaven in late September, he reported his findings on enemy patrols, currents and the booms and blockships to be seen across the
entrances. At about the same time Dönitz received a report from Admiral Canaris’
Abwehr
; a merchant skipper, who had called at the port of Kirkwall just north of Scapa Flow, a few days before the outbreak of war, had heard that the underwater defences at the eastern entrances to the Flow had been neglected.
²²

Heartened by both reports, Dönitz called for a
Luftwaffe
reconnaissance flight to obtain ‘the most precise aerial photographs of all the individual obstacles blocking the entrances’.
²³
He received an excellent set of prints on September 26th, and after studying them came to the conclusion that there was a seventeen-metre-wide passage between sunken blockships in the eastern entrance by Lamb Holm Island, which would be negotiable by a U-boat on the surface at slack water. Obviously this meant a night operation; the chief difficulties would be navigational, nevertheless it seemed that it might be done; furthermore it was found that on the night of October 13/14 both periods of slack water fell in the dark hours and the moon would be new, so lessening the chances of discovery.

The idea was worked up into a detailed plan and a Commander chosen,
Kapitänleutnant
Günther Prien, a tough extrovert with a zeal and competence matching Dönitz’s own. On Sunday October 1st Prien and the Commander of U 16 were called in together to discuss the project over the charts and photographs. Finally Dönitz said to Prien, ‘I don’t want an answer now. Think it over and report back on Tuesday.’
²⁴

Prien was back the next day, his answer, as Dönitz must have known it would be, ‘Yes’.

Strict secrecy was maintained, and when Prien took his boat, U 47, out on the 8th the crew had no idea of the mission on which they were embarked. They reached a position off the eastern entrance of the Flow on the 13th and spent the day submerged, waiting for slack water. When they rose that evening Prien was alarmed to see the sky bright with the radiance of the northern lights. Suppressing his doubts about going in with such brilliant visibility, he steered for the narrow passage between the blockships, scraping through, and entered the great basin of the Flow undetected soon after midnight. Casting about, he detected the silhouettes of two great ships, which he took to be the
Royal Oak
and
Repulse
, and steered for them, firing a salvo of three torpedoes at 4,000 metres. Only one of these hit, and that with so little apparent effect that he re-loaded and came in for a second attempt eighteen minutes later; this time two of the salvos struck the
Royal Oak
, igniting a magazine;
the battleship was torn apart in a thunderous explosion, then rolled over and sank, taking 833 officers and men with her.

Prien ran back for the Holm passage at full speed and succeeded in making his escape despite the now falling tide and the sweeps of the alerted guard ships. All in all it was a brilliant venture carried out with iron nerve, the hazard justified by success.