Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II

The U-boat

Since the First World War, submarine design had improved only marginally, and then chiefly in greater hull strength. This enabled them to dive far deeper, and provided escape for many U-boats under attack. (Due largely to inter-departmental squabbles, it took some time before British depth charges were designed for deep water use.) Although more efficient electric batteries enabled submarines to stay submerged longer, they still spent almost all their time on the surface, submerging only to escape attacks from the air or avoid very rough seas.

A submarine of this period consisted of a cylindrical pressure hull like a gigantic steel sewer pipe. To this pipe, a stern and bow were welded and the whole vessel was clad in external casing to give it some ‘sea-keeping capability’, although submarines could never be manoeuvred like ships with regular hulls. A casing deck and a conning tower – what the Germans called an ‘attack centre’ – was added to the structure. Directly below the conning tower was the ‘control room’ where the captain manned the periscope. The tower was given outer cladding to provide some weather protection to men standing there, as well as some measure of streamlining when the boat went underwater. An electric motor room and an engine room with supercharged diesels of about 3,000 bhp were positioned well aft for the sake of sea-keeping and to cut diving time. The great bulk of a submarine was below the water-line, and visitors going below are always surprised to discover how big they are, compared with the portion visible above water. For instance, the long-range Type IXC U-boat that displaced 1,178 tons submerged would still displace 1,051 tons when on the surface.

There were two basic types of German U-boat used operationally in the Atlantic campaign, the big long-range Type IX and the smaller Type VII, which was the standard German U-boat of the Second World War.

The VII typically had a displacement of 626 tons, a crew of four officers and forty-four ratings (enlisted men), and carried about fourteen 21-inch torpedoes. Four tubes faced forward and one aft. All the tubes were kept loaded and when they had been fired, the awkward business of reloading had to be done. On the surface the diesel engines gave a range of 7,900 nautical miles at 10 knots. If they pushed the speed up to 12 knots it would reduce their range to 6,500 nautical miles. In an emergency the diesels could give 17 knots for short periods. With a fully trained crew a Type VII dived in thirty seconds and when submerged used electric motors. The rechargeable batteries could go for about 80 nautical miles at 4 knots. Maximum speed underwater was reckoned to be 7.5 knots, depending upon gun platforms which obstructed the water flow. Most reference books give manufacturer’s specification speeds which are faster than this.

The whole purpose of the submarines was to fire torpedoes. These big G7 – seven metres long – devices were no less complicated than the submarine itself, and in some respects exactly like them. They were treated with extraordinary care. Each torpedo arrived complete with a certificate to show that its delicate mechanisms had been tested by firing over a range. It had been transported in a specially designed railway wagon to avoid risk of it being jolted or shaken. One by one, with infinite concern, the ‘eels’ were loaded into the U-boat, which was usually moored inside a massive concrete pen. From then onwards, all through the voyage, each and every eel would be hung up in slings every few days, so that the specialists could check its battery charge, pistols, propellers, bearings, hydroplanes, rudders, lubrication points and guidance system.

To make an attack it was necessary to estimate the bearing and track of the target. Usually the submarine was surfaced, and the captain used the UZO (U-Boot-Zieloptik) which was attached to its steel mounting on the conning tower. This large binocular device had excellent light-transmission capability, even in semi-darkness, and from it the bearing, range and angle of the target vessel was sent down to the Vorhaltrechner. This calculator sent the target details to the torpedo launch device, Schuss-Empfänger, and right into the torpedoes, continuing to adjust the settings automatically as the U-boat moved its relative position. By means of these instruments the U-boat did not have to be heading for its target at the moment of launching its torpedo. The torpedo’s gyro mechanism would correct its heading after exiting the tube. Thus a ‘fan’ of shots, each on a slightly different bearing, could be fired without turning the boat. This device was coveted by British submarine skippers who aimed their torpedoes by heading their submarines towards the target.

By using ‘wakeless’ electric G7e torpedoes – and suppressing the water swell – a submarine could fire without betraying its position. Smaller targets were sunk by means of the deck gun, which was usually an 8.8-cm artillery piece. To fire it in anything but calm water without going overboard demanded the agility of an acrobat. Hitting anything other than a large target was very difficult. When war began there was also a single 2-cm Flak gun (short for Flugabwehrkanone, anti-aircraft gun) but this proved of little use against aircraft and bigger and better ones were fitted as the war continued.

Life aboard a submarine was rigorous. The hull’s interior was the size and shape of a passenger train but the ‘train’ was crammed with machinery into which the men were artfully fitted. There was no privacy whatever for anyone. Even the captain had no more than a curtained desk, past which everyone pushed to get to their stations. This is how an official German navy war correspondent saw it:

My bunk is in the petty officers’ quarters, the U-room, the most uncomfortable on board: it has the most through traffic. Anyone who wants to get to the galley, or to the diesels or the E-motors has to come through here. At every change of watch the men from the engine room squeeze through from astern, and the new watch comes through from the control room. That means six men each time. And the stewards have to work their way past with their full dishes and pots. In fact, the whole place is nothing more than a narrow corridor with four bunks on the right and four on the left. In the middle of the passage, screwed to the floor, there’s a table with folding leaves. The space on both sides is so narrow that at mealtimes the men have to sit on the lower bunks with their heads bent. There is far too little space for stools. And there is mess and confusion whenever someone has to get from the engines to the control room or vice versa during a meal.

There were no bathing facilities, and only one lavatory which could not be used when the submarine dived. When under attack the lavatory might well be out of action for 24 hours. No one shaved and most didn’t change even one article of clothing for the entire voyage. The stink of human bodies was mixed with those of oil and fuel. There was also the pervading smell of mould, for in the damp air everything, from bread to log books, went mouldy. The men – mostly young, for only young men could endure the hardships and the stress – were apt to douse themselves in eau de cologne to exchange one smell for another.

The Commander is astride the periscope saddle in the narrow space between the periscope shaft and the tower wall, his face pressed against the rubber shell, his thighs spread wide to grip the huge shaft. His feet are on the pedals that enable him to spin the great column and his saddle through 360 degrees without making a sound; his right hand rests on the lever that raises and lowers it. The periscope motor hums. He’s lowering it a little, keeping its head as close to the surface of the water as he possibly can.

The Chief is standing immobile behind the two men of the bridge watch who are now operating the hydroplanes. His eyes are glued to the Papenberg and its slowly rising and falling column of water. Each change in it means that the boat is doing the same.

Not a word from anyone. The humming of the periscope motor sounds as if it’s coming through a fine filter; the motor starts, stops, starts again, and the humming resumes. The Commander ups periscope for fractions of a second and immediately lets it sink below the surface again. The destroyer must be very close.

Most of the time was spent on the surface. In the Atlantic this meant endless rolling and pitching. Boats on the surface needed lookouts who got very cold and wet. In the northern waters lookouts grew accustomed to icy water breaking over them with such force that they required leather harness to secure them to the bridge brackets. Reminders about wearing such restraints sometimes included the names of U-boat men who had recently been washed overboard. The men on watch wore protective clothing of leather, or sometimes of rubber, under their oilskins, with towels around their necks. Even so they usually became soaked to the skin in anything but calm weather. Almost every submariner complained of rheumatic pains. Below decks the crew were permitted to wear any clothing they wished. ‘Lucky’ sweaters, knitted by loved ones, were popular, so were British army khaki battledress jackets, thousands of which had come from captured dumps in France. Some captains would distribute a measure of schnapps at times of great joy or great suffering; other boats were completely dry.

The men of the preceding watch come down the ladder stiffly. They are soaking wet. The navigator has turned up his collar and drawn his sou’wester down over his face. The faces of the others are whipped red by spray. All of them hang their binoculars over hooks and undress as silently as the new watch dressed, peeling themselves awkwardly and heavily out of their rubber jackets. Then they help one another off with their rubber pants. The youngest member of the watch loads himself with the whole mass of wet oil-skin trousers, jackets, and sou’westers, and carries it aft. The spaces between the two electric motors and on both sides of the stern torpedo tube are the best for drying. The men who have come off duty gulp down a mouthful of hot coffee, polish their binoculars, and stow them away.

When in May 1941 a young British officer led a boarding party to search a U-boat captured at sea, he was impressed by its fine construction, the fittings and the way in which the ward room had varnished woodwork and numbered cupboards with keys to fit them. He remarked upon the magnificent galley and the cleanliness of the boat throughout. During his search he found other evidence of the high living standards the Germans enjoyed; cameras and even a movie camera were among the crew’s personal effects. He said the sextants were of far better quality than the Admiralty issue and the binoculars the best he’d ever seen. He kept a pair for himself.

In the war at sea, as well as on land and in the air, radio brought changes in tactics. Better longer-range radios enabled the submarines to be sent to find victims in distant waters or concentrated against a choice target. Admiral Karl Dönitz was the German navy’s single-minded submarine expert. He thought primarily, if not solely, in terms of war against Britain. He had long since decided that a future submarine war would be an all-weather one, and that (with asdic unable to detect small surface targets) he would coordinate night attacks by surfaced submarines. This line of thinking was published in his prewar book. It was to prove one of the most effective tactics of the war.

The Royal Navy liked to believe that U-boats could be countered by means of ‘hunting groups’ of warships. Such warfare had the name, colour, speed and drama that suited the navy’s image of itself. But this idea had been tried and found useless in the First World War. Experience proved that in the vastness of the seas the submarine could remain undetected without difficulty. It was one of these hunting groups – an aircraft-carrier with a destroyer escort – which was attacked at night by U-29 just two weeks after the declaration of war. The carrier HMS Courageous sank with heavy loss of life.

The way in which Courageous was exposed to danger was proof that the Admiralty truly believed that asdic and depth charges provided adequate protection against the U-boat. But now there were second thoughts about ‘hunting groups’ which had depleted the number of escorts available for the merchant convoys. The way to kill U-boats was to guard the merchantmen. Then the submarines would have to come and find you.

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EXCHANGES OF SECRETS (#ulink_e160a7b9-cb7f-5ab4-976d-7c351f151f06)

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

After the war Churchill admitted that the U-boat successes had been the only thing that frightened him, and it has been widely assumed that Hitler went to war understanding the submarine’s potential value. The truth is that the German navy was completely unprepared for war. At its outbreak, Germany had built 56 U-boats,

of which some were short-range Type IIs seldom used beyond the North Sea. The building programme was providing two or three submarines a month (in some months only one), and it was taking about a year to build and test each boat. After the war Admiral Dönitz said: ‘A realistic policy would have given Germany a thousand U-boats at the beginning.’ We can but agree and shudder.

One of the war’s most eminent naval historians, S. E. Morison, said Hitler was landsinnig (land-minded) and believed, like Napoleon, that possession of the European ‘heartland’ would bring England to heel. Winston Churchill, like President Roosevelt, knew that Britain’s survival depended upon sea lanes, for without supply by sea there could be no continuation of the war.

Dönitz and Raeder: the German commanders

Hitler had only one sailor among his high commanders, the 63-year-old Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, who was commander in chief (Oberbefehlshaber) of the navy. He was old-fashioned and aloof, as photos of him in his frock-coat, sword and high stiff collar confirm. Although Raeder looked like a prim and proper officer of the Kaiserliche Marine, his speech in 1939 declared his full support for ‘the clear and relentless fight against Bolshevism and International Jewry whose nation-destroying deeds we have fully experienced.’ At the Nuremberg trial he was found guilty of having issued orders to kill prisoners. His memoirs, published a decade after the war ended, reiterated his belief in Hitler.

The man conducting the submarine battles, Karl Dönitz, was a quite different personality. The son of an engineer working for Zeiss in Berlin, he had never had staff college training. As a U-boat commander in the First World War, he had survived a sinking to become a prisoner of war. Despite other jobs in signals, and command of a cruiser, his primary interest was with undersea warfare. The rebuilding of Germany’s submarine fleet gave him status. He was a dedicated Nazi and his speeches usually included lavish praise for Hitler: ‘Heaven has sent us the leadership of the Führer.’ Anything but aloof, he delighted in mixing socially with his officers, who referred to him as ‘the lion’. Luncheons and dinners with him were remembered for their ‘tone of light-hearted banter and camaraderie’. Dönitz was 47 years old at the start of the war. Morison (the author of the official US navy histories) was moved to describe him as ‘one of the most able, daring and versatile flag officers on either side of the entire war’. Eventually, in January 1943, Dönitz was to become C-in-C of the navy, succeeding Raeder, and in the final days of the war it was Dönitz whom Hitler chose to take his place as Führer of the collapsing Third Reich.

Widespread misunderstandings persist as to Dönitz’s role in the war at sea. The submarine arm was not controlled by him; it was run from Berlin by the Seekriegsleitung, which was both a staff and an organ of command. In May 1940 Dönitz was not even among the thirty most senior naval officers. He was not consulted on such matters as crew training, submarine design, or construction schedules, nor on technical matters about weaponry such as mines and torpedoes. His chief, Admiral Raeder, emphasized this to him in a memo dated November 1940: ‘The Commander-in-Chief for U-boats is to devote his time to conducting battles at sea and he is not to occupy himself with technical matters.’ It is also a revealing sidelight on the cumbersome way in which dictatorships distort the chain of command that, when there came a shortage of torpedoes, Dönitz went to Raeder and asked him to persuade Hitler to order increased production.

In the opening weeks of the war the opposing navies were discovering each other’s weaknesses as well as their own. Dismayed at first by the severe limitations of asdic, the Royal Navy found that skilled and experienced operators could overcome some of its faults. The German navy, like other navies, was discovering that under active service conditions the torpedo was a temperamental piece of machinery.

All torpedoes normally have two pistols which can be selected quickly and easily immediately before use. A hit with the cruder contact pistol will usually result in a hole in the ship’s hull, which can often be sealed off and the ship saved. A magnetic pistol is activated by the magnetism in a ship’s metal hull and explodes the charge under the ship, which is likely to break its back. The German magnetic pistols gave so much trouble that crews switched to contact pistols and found that they were faulty too. The trigger prongs were too short: a torpedo sometimes hit a ship and was deflected without the prongs being touched. The torpedoes of the submarine fleets were also affected by a design problem in the detonators. Constant pressure variations inside the U-boats affected the torpedoes’ depth-keeping mechanisms.

Although the official explanation for some of the failures was that magnetic triggers could be affected by changes in the earth’s magnetic field, due to latitude or to iron ore or volcanic rock in the sea bed, to me it seems extremely likely that the degaussing of British ships – to protect them against magnetic mines – protected them against magnetic pistols too. Whatever the causes, these troubles continued all through the war, and the faults were not finally diagnosed until after hostilities were over.

Understandably Dönitz complained bitterly to the Torpedo Directorate. He said pointedly that he remembered the same trouble in 1914 but in the first war the Torpedo Inspectorate knew how primitive mechanisms worked! The torpedo experts – their experimental firing ranges frozen in the first winter of war – responded to most criticism by blaming the U-boat crews. Postwar research suggested a failure rate of almost 30 per cent overall. On one war cruise the U-32 fired 50 per cent duds. An inquiry showed that the contact pistols had only been tested twice before the war, and had failed both times. It became clear that torpedo failures had been experienced and reported since December 1936 but nothing had been done about them. When the war made it impossible to ignore the faults any longer, Raeder demanded action. A rear-admiral was court-martialled and found guilty, a vice-admiral dismissed. The scandal shook the navy and affected the morale of the U-boat service, as well as providing a glimpse of the sort of bureaucratic bungling that was a well established feature of Hitler’s Third Reich, when Nazi loyalty tended to outrank competence.

Unrestricted submarine warfare

Article 22 of the 1930 London naval treaty, which Germany signed, held that merchant vessels might not be sunk until the passengers, crew and ship’s papers were in a place of safety, adding that the ship’s boats were not regarded as a place of safety unless land or another vessel was nearby in safe sea and weather conditions. Anyone who hoped that the Germans might observe their treaty obligations had only twelve hours to wait after the declaration of war. The U-30, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, sighted the unescorted passenger ship Athenia while it was 200 miles off the coast of Donegal. It had left Liverpool at 4 o’clock on the afternoon before war began. Its passenger accommodation was fully booked and included 316 Americans heading home before war engulfed them.

Lemp saw the 16-year-old liner at 7.30 pm. It was getting dark and he made little or no attempt to distinguish whether she was a passenger ship or an auxiliary cruiser which would have been a legitimate target. He fired a salvo of torpedoes, one of which wrecked the bulkhead between the boiler rooms. In the words of one ship’s passenger:

I was standing on the upper deck when suddenly there was a terrific explosion. I reckon I must be a very lucky woman because when I recovered from the shock I saw several men lying dead on the deck.

The passengers in the tourist and third-class dining rooms were trapped when the explosion wrecked the stairways. Athenia listed and settled down. About half an hour later Lemp’s submarine surfaced and fired at his victim with the deck gun. Now it must have been clear that she was a passenger liner, the torpedoing of which was explicitly forbidden by the prize laws of the Hague Convention. Without making contact, or offering directions or assistance of any kind, Lemp submerged and went away.

The Athenia sank: 112 people died, including many women and children. The German Admiralty instantly denied the sinking and ordered Lemp to remove the page from his boat’s war diary and substitute false entries.

Those officers and men of the German navy who knew the truth were sworn to secrecy and the Reich propaganda ministry issued a statement that a bomb had been placed aboard the Athenia on the instructions of Winston Churchill.

The Athenia sinking came just as President Roosevelt asked Congress to pass Neutrality Act amendments, allowing Britain and France to buy war material. Seeing that the unlawful sinking of Athenia would persuade Congress to say yes, the German propaganda machine employed its formidable resources. An American survivor was persuaded to say that the ship was carrying coastal defence guns, destined for Canada. The allegation that Churchill put a bomb aboard the liner, in order to drag America into his war, was repeated time and time again in radio broadcasts, newspaper items and in letters mailed to prominent Americans. The German navy in Berlin issued a series of warnings about Churchill’s bombs on other American ships. This bombardment of lies scored many hits. A Gallup poll revealed that 40 per cent of Americans believed the Germans. The Senate voting reflected a similar feeling when Roosevelt’s amendments passed by 63 votes to 31. The House of Representatives also voted in favour of the French and British, by a majority of 61.

By Christmas 1939 Berlin’s orders decreed that all ships except fully lit ones identified as Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish or Portuguese (United States shipping was excluded from the ‘war zone’ by American neutrality laws) must be sunk without warning. U-boat captains were told to falsify their logs and describe unlit target ships as warships or auxiliary cruisers.

Just in case there was any misunderstanding, Dönitz’s Standing Order No. 154 told his commanders: ‘Rescue no one and take no one aboard. Do not concern yourselves with the ship’s boats. Weather conditions and the proximity of land are of no account.’

However there was another more heroic aspect of the U-boat war. On 14 October 1939 there came a dashing action that was planned and briefed by Dönitz himself. Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, commander of the U-47, is said by one historian to have been to Scapa Flow and studied the Royal Navy anchorage as a tourist before war began. Whether this is true or not, Prien showed amazing skill as he threaded his boat through the defences and into the British main fleet anchorage there. Two of his torpedoes hit HMS Royal Oak. There were explosions and the battleship turned over. Kirk Sound, through which Prien navigated, was 170 metres wide and only seven metres deep. It was such a notable achievement that even after an Admiralty inquiry had identified fragments of the German torpedoes, many people in Britain insisted that the sinking was due to sabotage. Another, completely unfounded, story told of a German spy who shone lights to guide the U-boat through Kirk Sound. In fact the sinking of the Royal Oak was one more indication of the Royal Navy’s failure to prepare for war.

Britain’s loss was an ancient battleship, but at this time unrestricted U-boat warfare was being criticized, and the German propaganda ministry saw its opportunity. The U-47 crew were heroes and gained headlines across the world. In Berlin they were congratulated by Adolf Hitler. Prien was awarded the Knight’s Cross