Dönitz: The Last Führer (39 page)
Read Dönitz: The Last Führer Online
Authors: Peter Padfield
Presiding over the submarine tracking room was a former barrister with a keen brain, Commander Roger Wynn, RNVR. He had a staff of six—actually inadequate to deal with the flood of information coming in from all sources, but of course equal to the entire staff of Dönitz’s headquarters, who had their normal executive duties to attend to. Wynn himself wrote a weekly appreciation of the U-boat war, and attempted to peer into Dönitz’s mind and forecast his future moves; as he acquired experience of his opponent he was able to do this with remarkable accuracy.
As important as this co-ordinated intelligence web feeding operational command in the Atlantic battle was the intimate co-operation now established between Western Approaches Headquarters and the several Coastal Command groups of the Air Force who covered the sea area; it was this combination of air and sea forces which was pushing the U-boats ever more westerly; by June Dönitz was grouping his boats as far west as Newfoundland.
By contrast Raeder had been unable to break through Göring’s jealous control of everything that flew, and at the beginning of the year Hitler himself had taken advantage of the Reichsmarschall’s absence on holiday to place a small Air Force group under BdU’s operational control; there had been few aircraft and those of the wrong type, but Dönitz had had ‘great hopes that this co-operation will eventually lead to success.’
80
Already those hopes were dashed: the planes lacked the
endurance to keep contact for long, their navigators were not sufficiently accurate and their numbers had not been increased.
To add to his difficulties in reconnaissance the Italian flotilla had proved useless. It had been apparent before the end of 1940 that he could expect little from them; by May 1941 ‘in spite of attempts to increase their abilities by … taking Italian Commanders along with operational boats and training in the Baltic’ he had come to regard them as incorrigibly unsuitable for Atlantic warfare.
They see nothing, report nothing or too late, their tactical ability is effectively nil… The Italians will be assigned an area between 47 30 and 53 N, and 15–25 W. Here they cannot adversely affect our own operations, on the other hand if they are only sighted without achieving any successes they may contribute by diverting traffic into the area of our own boats.
81
He thought the real reason for the failure of the Italians had more to do with national character than with the refusal of the Supamarina (Admiralty) in Rome to permit training in German methods under German officers:
… they [Italian personnel] are not sufficiently hard and tough for this type of warfare. Their way of thinking is too sluggish and according to rule to allow them to adapt themselves clearly and simply to the changing conditions of war. Their personal conduct is not sufficiently disciplined and in the face of the enemy not calm enough. In view of this I am forced to dispose and operate the German boats without regard to the Italian boats.
82
To add to his frustrations with the Italian ally, Hitler, who had had to send a German Army Corps to North Africa to stiffen Italian forces there, decided in August to offer Mussolini 20 U-boats to help him in the struggle to keep open the sea lines of communication to these forces! Despite Dönitz’s urgent pleas that the Atlantic ‘tonnage war’ was the decisive task for his boats, he was ordered to send further waves down to the Mediterranean that autumn for there was danger of Italy crumbling altogether. As delays in the U-boat building programme caused by bottlenecks in materials and labour, together with losses of boats on
operations, had left him with a fleet scarcely larger than in 1939, Dönitz was forced virtually to give up the battle in the Atlantic for a while. As compensation, his boats had striking successes against the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, sinking both the aircraft carrier,
Ark Royal
, and the battleship
Barham
.
Hitler meanwhile had launched his assault on Russia. It has been represented as a great strategic mistake—impaling himself on the two-front war that had been the Kaiser’s undoing; his choices were limited though, dictated as in 1939 by the necessities of his overheated war economy. Raeder’s and Dönitz’s view was, of course, that every resource had to be poured into the defeat of Great Britain; yet short of a successful jump across the Channel which neither the generals nor the naval staff thought feasible without absolute air superiority and the exclusion somehow of the Royal Navy from the invasion route, this was bound to be a long-drawn-out process. In the meantime the Soviet Union, which was growing stronger by the month, held the tap on vital war materials, particularly oil and rubber which Germany could not get through the British naval blockade. Given the nature of Bolshevism and its unchanging goal of world revolution, it is not necessary to explain Hitler’s desire for getting in his blow first simply by his long-standing ideological crusade against Communism; the feeling was sound on strategic and economic grounds. For if the Navy and
Luftwaffe
proved unable to force Great Britain’s surrender in comparatively short time there would be real danger from the east.
The campaign was designed as another
Blitzkrieg
by the
Luftwaffe
and
Panzer
columns, which Hitler expected to bring about the utter downfall of the Soviet system in short time; on the eve of the assault, which was cloaked with the most brilliant campaign of deception, he was boasting that they would see ‘at the latest in three months such a collapse as has not yet been seen in world history’.
83
It was not to be a simple territorial victory as had been achieved in the west, but a repeat of the Polish operation, a repeat of what the Soviets themselves had been doing in the eastern states they had walked into since the Nazi-Soviet pact—the extermination of the enemy leadership class and culture. There was no place in this for out-dated soldierly notions of chivalry, Hitler had briefed his service chiefs—including Raeder—it was a struggle in which Bolshevism was to be eradicated for all time.
84
Commissars and other Soviet officials were criminals; they were to be summarily executed, and any civilian resistance broken with the utmost severity. ‘One of the
sacrifices which Commanders have to make is to overcome any scruples they may have.’
85
Following this long briefing, at which none of the officers present raised a word in protest, or even question, a staff memorandum had spelled out the illegalities necessary: political leaders (Commissars) not executed summarily were to be segregated from other prisoners and exterminated at prisoner collection points or at the latest on passage through the transit camps. One of the operations staff officers minuted the draft, ‘it remains to be seen whether a
written
instruction of this kind is
necessary
’
86
—calling to mind the naval staff memorandum that permission to sink without warning ships in areas where only English units were to be expected should ‘not be given in writing, but need merely be based on the unspoken approval of the naval operations staff’.
87
When one considers Carls’ memorandum about ‘the war against half to two thirds of the whole world’ and the British interrogator’s report on the prisoners from Hans Jenisch’s U-boat, who were ‘prepared to condone all aggressive violence, cruelty, breaches of treaties and other crimes as being necessary to the rise of the German race to the control of Europe’ one is brought against the terrifying reality of a nation thinking with its blood, in the grip of a wish to destruction—with honourable but as in all such cases relatively few active exceptions—in which individuals, Himmler, Heydrich—whose special squads were to follow the army into Russia to round up and dispose of the Jewish enemy at the heart of both Bolshevism and Capitalism—were simply the visible tips of a general will to revolt against the entire system of European civilization; it is a startling insight into the genie Hitler had uncorked, and which drove him mercilessly—the desperate
Weltanschauung
of a locked-in, continental people indoctrinated for generations with the idea of an amoral world, red in tooth and claw, in which only the fittest survived and all means were permissible for the desired end, a people who had cast off reason, marching through the dark forests of their tribal imagination.
For Carls’ prediction was about to come true; since Roosevelt’s declaration of ‘all aid short of war’ to Great Britain, the United States’ productive capacity had been thrown into the scales against the
Reich
and the US Navy had formed escort groups to patrol a so-called US Security Zone without precedent in international law which was extended by stages over 2,000 miles into the Atlantic from the American seaboard! In September, after a meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, the US Navy began to take part in convoying ships of all
nationalities from US ports as far as Iceland with both surface and air escorts. Hitler stressed the importance of avoiding incidents which might provoke full and open hostilities from this undeclared war, but U-boat Commanders were faced with impossible tasks of recognition when attacking convoys in the north-west, and there must have been many incidents between US escorts and U-boats, had Dönitz not had to send the majority of his force to the Mediterranean; as it was, there were several skirmishes and in one at the end of October the US destroyer,
Reuben James
, was torpedoed and sunk.
By this time German armies in the east had been halted before Moscow by the Russian winter and their own lack of preparation for meeting it—another example of the amateurishness in every separated department of Hitler’s machine. The lightning war had failed against the distances and sheer manpower of Russia; the stage of easy conquest was over; now it was to be a struggle for survival against the productive capacity and manpower potential of the three leading world powers.
Dönitz was to need all the strength of character and ability which, in his 1939 book, he described as the mark of the U-boat Commander, who ‘alone must decide and act and fight out the inner battle to preserve in his heart despite all difficulties the will to victory to the last’.
88
In this battle he was to be remarkably successful.
On December 7th 1941 Japanese fleet aircraft struck the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. The news came as a surprise to Hitler although he knew of their intention to strike somewhere at some time and had made up his mind to support them if they attacked the United States. Now frivolously disregarding the huge financial and productive power of America and, according to his naval adjutant, von Puttkamer, blind to the realization that this power could be projected across the Atlantic, he gained renewed confidence in a victorious outcome to the war. His generals suffered from the same land-locked hallucination; his entire headquarters staff gave themselves up to ‘an ecstacy of rejoicing’; the few who saw further ‘became even lonelier’.
89
Naval officers saw no more clearly than the generals: Carls, thinking in terms of combined operations with the new Japanese ally on an oceanic scale, exulted in a coming ‘new division of the possessions of the world’.
90
The chief of Navy Group South broke into verse: ‘Begone coward thoughts, defeatist wavering and womanly timidity …’
91
The
naval staff war diary carried a note of pain that the ‘decisive blow’ had been struck by the Japanese, not the German Navy.
92
Some of the euphoria, at least on Hitler’s part, was no doubt a release of the tension that had been building up in the undeclared Atlantic war; now he could clarify the position with Roosevelt. Nevertheless, Hitler was not without rare flashes of insight, and perhaps there was another reason for this burst of manic confidence; it is possible that even as he gave orders for lifting all restrictions on attacking US ships in the ‘so-called Pan-American Safety Zone’,
93
and cast about for reasons for presenting a formal declaration of war against the United States which would encourage his own people, he foresaw the end.
Dönitz had no such presentiments. He welcomed the removal of the restrictions against attacking American ships which gave him opportunity to strike in the formerly closed area along the eastern seaboard:
… an area in which the assembly of ships at the few points of departure of Atlantic convoys is in single-ship traffic. Here, therefore, is an opportunity of getting at enemy merchant ships in conditions which elsewhere have ceased almost completely for a long time. Further, in the American coastal area, there can hardly be any question of an efficient patrol, at least a patrol used to U-boats. Attempts must be made as quickly as possible to utilize these advantages, which will disappear shortly, and to ‘beat the drum’ along the American coast.
94
This extract from his war diary for December 9th, two days before Hitler’s official declaration of war on the United States, reveals the extent to which British defence against U-boat pack attack on convoys had tightened. In the early years he had looked for a ‘great success, for instance the destruction of a whole convoy’, now he was probing for a resounding success against
single
ships in a soft spot where the defenders would be inexperienced.
True to the principles of concentration and surprise which had marked all his probes in different areas, he asked High Command to release twelve of the large Type IX boats with the range for such distant operations, intending to send them straight to the American coast with instructions not to give away their positions by attacks until all were assembled and he gave the order. In the event he was only allowed to send half the force he had asked for, but when these boats reached their
areas on January 13, and he sent the code-word
Paukenschlag
, the conditions were more favourable than he could possibly have expected, and the Commanders gathered an immediate, rich harvest.
