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    Grey Wolves: The U-Boat War 1939?1945
    Grey Wolves: The U-Boat War 1939?1945
    Grey Wolves: The U-Boat War 1939?1945
    Ebook360 pages5 hours

    Grey Wolves: The U-Boat War 1939?1945

    By Philip Kaplan

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    In the early years of the Second World War, the elite force of German submariners known as the Ubootwaffe came perilously close to perfecting the underwater battle tactics and successfully cutting Britain's transatlantic lifeline. To the Allies, these enemy sailors were embarking on a mission of unequivocal evil.

    Each member of the Ubootwaffe understood that he must take pride in being part of a unique brotherhood. He had to do so because he was setting outin claustrophobic, unsanitary, stench-filled, and ultimately hellish conditionson a journey that would test his mental and physical endurance to the very limits, and which he had little chance of surviving. Those that did return soon ceased to take comfort in friends or family, dwelling only on the knowledge that another patrol awaited them. By the end of the war, of the 39,000 men who went to sea in the U-boats, 27,491 died in action and a further 5,000 were made prisoners of war. Of the 863 U-boats that sailed on operational patrols, 754 were lost.

    Grey Wolves captures life on board a U-boat, in text, letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, prose, and poetry, relaying tales of the mundane and the routine, dramatic and heroic; the fear and resilience of every crew member, from Kapitainleutnant to Mechaniker. It is a vivid, brutally realistic portrait of the men who fought and died beneath the surface of the Atlantic in what was, perhaps, the most critical battle of the war.

    Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateJun 3, 2014
    ISBN9781629140766
    Grey Wolves: The U-Boat War 1939?1945
    Author

    Philip Kaplan

    Author/historian/designer/photographer Philip Kaplan has written and co-authored forty-seven books on aviation, military and naval subjects. His previous books include: One Last Look, The Few, Little Friends, Round the Clock, Wolfpack, Convoy, Fighter Pilot, Bombers, Fly Navy, Run Silent, Chariots of Fire, Legend and, for Pen and Sword, Big Wings, Two-Man Air Force, Night and Day Bomber Offensive, Mustang The Inspiration, Rolling Thunder, Behind the Wire, Grey Wolves, Naval Air, and Sailor. He is married to the novelist Margaret Mayhew.

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      Book preview

      Grey Wolves - Philip Kaplan

      Cover Page of Grey WolvesHalf Title of Grey Wolves

      FOR MARGARET

      Title Page of Grey Wolves

      Copyright © 2013 by Philip Kaplan

      First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2014.

      All rights to any and all materials in copyright owned by the publisher are strictly reserved by the publisher.

      First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Pen & Sword Maritime, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd

      All reasonable efforts have been made to trace the copyright owners of all material used in this book. The author apologizes to any copyright owners we were unable to contact during this clearance process.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

      Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

      Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

      Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

      Jacket design by Jon Wilkinson

      ISBN: 978-1-62873-727-1

      Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-076-6

      Printed in the United States of America

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      GLOSSARY

      THE LION

      THE CREW

      THE IDEA

      FISH, EELS AND MIXERS

      THE GOODS

      THE BOAT

      LUSITANIA

      ATHENIA

      SHELTERS

      THE CAPTAIN

      THE HUNTER BECOMES THE HUNTED

      RUSSIAN RUN

      ROUTINE

      DEATH FROM ABOVE

      SIT THERE AND TAKE IT

      THE END

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      WHY DO THEY DO IT?

      INDEX

      Photo Insert

      INTRODUCTION

      Submariners are a race apart, even from their comrades who serve in surface vessels. Early in the Second World War, an elite force of German submariners known as the Ubootwaffe nearly perfected the underwater tactics of the First World War U-boats to successfully sever Britain’s transatlantic supply lifeline. To the Allies, these enemy sailors were on a mission that was unequivocally evil.

      A popular fiction persists that the U-boat men were all volunteers; they were not. But once committed to the Ubootwaffe, each man soon understood and accepted that he would be a proud part of a unique brotherhood. Doing so was essential; he was about to set out, in claustrophobic, unsanitary, hellish conditions, on a voyage—an adventure—that would challenge and stretch his mental and physical endurance to the very limits, one that he was unlikely to survive. And, if he did return, he drew little comfort from family or friends, trapped in the knowledge that another, possibly fatal patrol awaited him. The men of the Ubootwaffe were linked together as comrades, by the ever-present dangers of the enemy and the weather, and by their unity of purpose more powerful than that of any other sailors.

      All submariners are brave, no matter what cause they are fighting for. The men of the Ubootwaffe were eventually beaten by the overwhelming industrial and technological might of the Allies. Of the 39,000 men who went to sea in the U-boats of the Second World War, 27,491 died in action and a further 5,000 became prisoners of war. Of the 863 German U-boats that sailed on operational patrols in that war, 754 were lost.

      Those who passed the training had to be the sort of men who did not mind being unaware of where or why they were going when they sailed out of harbour, who had never known claustrophobia, who could live in close proximity to forty other men for up to three months at a time and who could spend four hours on watch, lashed by icy winds, their eyes stung by salt spray, strapped or chained to a deck rail or wire to avoid being swept away, and learning the truth of the old sailor’s adage that water is pointed.

      The men best suited for life aboard a U-boat were those who could sleep well in a bed that was still warm and redolent of the man who last lay in it, and who could stay in dreamland through the hissing of the inlet valves, the odd gurgle of the bilge-pumps and the pounding of the pistons, and who would only be awakened by the sound of depthcharges or the warning klaxon. They were those who could tumble out of bed and scramble aft or forward like pieces of human ballast when the commander ordered Take her up! or Dive!, who would be ever keen for action, who could stay motionless and silent for hour after hour while the depth-charges boomed around them and hurled the boat about, and who never worried when their muscles began to atrophy from insufficient exercise.

      As the days went by, they got to know one another and their officers, and began to realise that, although they were all individuals, each was now a part of something more—a unit that was going to war. This was the touchstone that helped them to become the sort of men they had to be. Not so much for love of country, nor yet for love of family, but out of loyalty to the men they had trained, messed and sailed with, and with whom they now shared their lives and fate.

      A U-BOAT GLOSSARY

      AA Anti-Aircraft, weapon or firing.

      AAF (U.S.) Army Air Force.

      Abaft towards the stern of a boat or ship.

      Abt Abteilung / department or division.

      Adressbuch U-boat code book used in disguising ocean chart grid positions in radio transmissions.

      AGRU Front Ausbildungsgruppe Front / a technical testing branch to evaluate submarines and crews before releasing them to operational duty.

      Alarm! emergency dive order on a U-boat.

      Angle-on-the-bow variance between line of sight on a U-boat, and the compass heading of its target.

      Aphrodite German device used to confuse radar by reflecting impulses.

      Armed Guard U.S. Navy gun crew serving aboard a merchant ship.

      ASDIC acronym for the British Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee; the name given to a device housed in a dome under the hull of an anti-submaring vessel and used in detecting the presence of submerged submarines.

      ASV airborne microwave radar (10 and 3 cm).

      ASW anti-submarine warfare.

      Athos radio detection antenna.

      Bachstelze (water-stilt) autogiro-like device towed on a cable behind a U-boat to improve the field of vision of the ‘flying’ lookout.

      Bali a radar detection aerial.

      Bauwerft a ship-building yard.

      B-Dienst Funkbeobachtungsdienst / German radio-monitoring and cryptographic intelligence service.

      BdU Befehlshaber der Unterseeboot / Commander in Chief, U-boats (referred specifically to Admiral Karl Dönitz, but also in reference to his staff or headquarters.

      Betasom the Italian submarine command based in Bordeaux.

      Biscay, Bay Atlantic bay extending from northwestern France to northern Spain; the area in which the main German U-boat pen shelters were located.

      Biscay Cross nickname of the early radar detection aerial used on U-boats.

      Bletchley Park the British Government Code and Cipher School located in a large country house in Buckinghamshire, north of London.

      Bold a device used by U-boats to confuse ASDIC.

      Bombe a linked series of Enigma machines, devised at Bletchley Park.

      Boot a German boat or warship; the commander is not a staff officer, and the secondin-command is called First Watch Officer, i.e. on a submarine.

      Bootskanone gun on the foredeck of a U-boat.

      Bow forward end of a vessel.

      Bow caps small doors at the outside ends of a submarine’s torpedo tubes.

      Bows forward exterior hull of a vessel.

      Bunkers exterior fuel tanks on a U-boat.

      Calibre the measurement of gun and shell size, taken from the internal diameter, or bore, of the gun barrel, i.e. a five-inch shell is not five inches long, but five inches in diameter.

      Casing a submarine’s outer skin of light plating, which encloses the ballast tanks and pressure hull.

      Cipher a secret letter-substitution communication code system.

      Conn steering responsibility for a boat or ship.

      Conning tower the observation tower or platform of a submarine; on a U-boat it contained steering controls; on type ix U-boats it contained the attack periscope eyepiece and torpedo deflection calculator.

      Contact pistol torpedo detonator that explodes on striking a solid object.

      Control room Zentrale the U-boat diving control facility, located below the conning tower and bridge.

      Convoy a precise assembly of merchant ships organised in columns and escorted by warships.

      Corvette A highly manoeuvrable armed escort ship, smaller than a destroyer.

      Cypern a type of radar detector.

      DD U.S. Navy reference to a destroyer-class warship.

      DE a destroyer escort-class warship.

      Decrypt a deciphered or decoded message.

      Destroyer Germans used this term for all small vessels employed in combat protection and often included frigates and corvettes in this category.

      Dienst duty.

      Dienstgrad rank.

      Dienstelle headquarters.

      D-maschine diesel engine.

      Displacement the weight of a boat or ship, as measured by the amount of water displaced when placing the boat or ship in water.

      Dräger Tauchretter underwater escape apparatus for U-boat crewmen (made by the firm Dräger).

      Eel (Aal) U-boat nickname for a torpedo.

      EK Eisernes Kreuz Iron Cross award.

      E-maschinen electric motors.

      Encryption enciphered or encoded message.

      Englisch a common German reference term to everything Allied or British during World War Two.

      Enigma the Schlussel M cipher machine (also used in reference to the machine’s encrypted product).

      Fächerschuss simultaneous spread or fan-launch of two or more torpedoes.

      Fähnrich zur See Midshipman.

      Fangschuss coup de grace or finishing shot.

      FAT (Federapparat Torpedo) an anti-convoy weapon that travelled in a straight line for a predetermined distance and then zigzagged.

      FdU (Führer der Unterseeboote) Flag Officer for Submarines.

      Feindfahrt operational patrol.

      Flak (Fliegerabwehrkanone) anti-aircraft gun.

      Fliege Fly. A radar detector.

      Flotilla small fleet of small vessels.

      Flugboot German for flying-boat aircraft.

      Fregattenkapitän Captain (junior).

      Freya a radar detection apparatus.

      Frontboot U-boat at sea that has entered an operational area.

      Funk-Telegraphie (FT) German reference for Wireless Telegraphy radio transmission / reception.

      Funker German Navy radioman.

      Funkmess radio / radar detection.

      Funkpeilgerät radio direction finder.

      Great Circle shortest route, following arc of the earth’s surface.

      Grossadmiral grand admiral, corresponding to Fleet Admiral (U.S.)

      GRT gross register tonnage, the total displacement of a ship.

      Gruppe group.

      HE (hydrophone effect) underwater sound such as propeller cavitation of a surface ship.

      Hedgehog a type of anti-U-boat bomb thrown ahead of the vessel carrying it.

      HF / DF (Huff-Duff) high-frequency / direction finder.

      Hundekurve (dog curve) track taken by a U-boat in attacking a ship, to present the smallest possible profile to the enemy at all times.

      Hydra cipher used by U-boats in establishing the daily setting of the Enigma / Schlussel M cipher machine.

      Hydrophone underwater sound detection device.

      Hydroplanes extended rudder surfaces on submarine hull that make the boat go up and down when it is underwater.

      Jumping wire heavy cable with a cutting edge, stretched from bow to stern over the submarine’s conning tower, to cut or deflect underwater obstacles such as nets.

      Kaleu, Kaleunt diminutive forms of the naval rank Kapitänleutnant.

      Kapitänleutnant Lieutenant Commander.

      Kalipatrone Potash-cartridge respirator that absorbed carbon dioxide.

      Keroman protective U-boat bunkers at Pointe de Keroman near the Lorient harbour entrance.

      Kleine boot small training submarine, i.e. type IID.

      KM (Kriegsmarine) the German Navy, 1935-1945.

      Km kilometre.

      Knot a ship’s speed measured as one nautical mile per hour.

      Konteradmiral Rear Admiral.

      Korvettenkapitän Commander.

      Krieg war.

      Kriegstagebuch (KTB) German war diary kept by boats and ships at sea and by shore-based headquarters staffs.

      Kurzsignale a U-boat’s short signal radio position report.

      Leutnant zur See Lieutenant junior grade.

      LI (Leitender Ingenieur) Chief Engineering Officer.

      Löwe Lion. Nickname for Karl Dönitz.

      Luftwaffe German Air Force.

      M.A.N. Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg AG, the manufacturer of diesel engines for the Type VII and IX U-boats.

      Manoeuvring room electric motor room on U-boat.

      Metox a type of German radar detector.

      Milch cow nickname for a U-boat used for re-supply and re-fueling of other U-boats.

      Mixers torpedo mates on a U-boat.

      Naxos a radar detection device.

      ObdM (Oberbefehlshaber der Marine) Supreme C-in-C of the German Navy.

      Oberfähnrich zur See Ensign.

      Oberleutnant zur See Lieutenant senior grade.

      Papenberg column a shallow depth pressure gauge.

      Paukenschlag to beat on the kettle drums—a code name for the initial U-boat attack on the United States.

      Periscope extendable tube-like optical device containing prisms, mirrors, and lenses that enable a U-boat crewman to view the sea surface while the boat is submerged.

      Radar radio direction and ranging.

      Rake a patrol line of several U-boats across the path of a convoy.

      Reichsmarine the German Navy, 1919-1935.

      Ritterkreuz the Knight’s Cross decoration.

      Rohr torpedo tube.

      Rudeltaktik technique of massing U-boats in a ‘wolfpack’ patrol line across a convoy’s course and engaging ships of the convoy in a radio-coordinated attack.

      Schlüssel M the Kriegsmarine version of the Enigma cipher machine.

      Schnorchel / Schnorkel a valved air pipe that protruded above the surface and a allowed submerged U-boat to proceed on diesel power.

      Schussmeldung a U-boat’s ‘shooting report’, required after each action.

      Sea cow nickname for large U-boats.

      Sea force recorded in a U-boat’s KTB on an ascending scale from zero to ten.

      Soda-lime a chemical used to absorb moisture and carbon dioxide breathed into the air by the crew of a submarine during a prolonged dive.

      Sonar acronym for Sound Navigation and Ranging (U.S.)

      Spargel literally, asparagus; U-boat nickname for the periscope.

      Special Intelligence decrypted wireless German radio traffic, from Bletchley Park in England.

      Squid an Allied anti-submarine mortar weapon.

      Standzielsehrohr the attack periscope sight in a U-boat conning tower.

      Tetis a U-boat cipher used in wireless transmissions by new U-boats in training.

      Tiefenmesser a U-boat’s depth-pressure gauge.

      Torpex a high-explosive mix of Cyclonite, TNT and aluminium flakes.

      Trim the balancing of a submarine’s weight and equillibrium underwater.

      U-boat underwater boat, German submarine.

      Ubootwaffe the German submarine fleet.

      Verloren lost; sunk.

      Vernichtet destroyed.

      Versenkt sunk.

      Vorhaltrechner a Siemens-made electro-mechanical deflection calculator in the U-boat conning tower that fed attack coordinates into the gyrocompass steering mechanism of the torpedoes in their tubes.

      Wabos German nickname for Wasserbombe.

      Wasserbombe German term for depth-charge.

      Wanze a radar detection device.

      Wehrmacht the German Army.

      Weyer a U-boat’s identification manual for the warships of all nations.

      Werft shipyard or dockyard.

      Wind force wind velocities were recorded in a U-boat’s KTB on an ascending scale from zero to ten.

      Wintergarten German nickname for the open, railed platform on the after part of a U-boat bridge. The British referred to it as a ‘bandstand’.

      Wolfpack Rudel in German; an attack technique developed by Admiral Karl Dönitz.

      Working up the time allotted for officers and crewmen to familiarise themselves with their new boat prior to sailing on their first patrol in her.

      Zaunkönig the German acoustic torpedo, also known as T5.

      Zentrale the U-boat control room, directly below the conning tower and bridge, containing all diving controls.

      THE LION

      Karl Dönitz was the son of a Prussian family living in the Berlin suburb of Grünau. He was born in December 1891 and took after his father—instilled with the qualities required and expected in an officer of the Imperial German Navy, which he joined as a cadet when he was eighteen. Dutiful, patriotic, loyal and efficient in his work, the young Dönitz was soon rewarded for his enthusiastic, diligent and dedicated performance, with a commission as a naval officer.

      From the beginning of the First World War, Dönitz served in a naval aviation squadron as an air observer, but by 1916 he had developed an intense interest in submarines, leading to his transferring to the Navy’s U-boat arm and, by March 1918, advancing to command of UB-68. In October of that year, while submerged in the Mediterranean near the Sicilian coast, his submarine developed a malfunction which caused it to involuntarily surface. The boat emerged among a British convoy of merchant vessels being shepherded by several warship escorts which immediately sank it. Dönitz and most of his crew were rescued, captured and interned. He would spend the next ten months in a remote Scottish prisoner of war camp. Finally, he was declared mentally unsound and was invalided back to Germany, having undoubtedly pretended the condition.

      A clever tactician, Dönitz’s enthusiasm for the submarine weapon remained strong and he had spent much of his confinement working on plans for the development and deployment of the rudel or wolfpack battle technique—a concept he had learned about during the war—in which a group of U-boats operated together in a coordinated attack. The theory had long fascinated him, and inspired him to follow it to fruition. The rudeltaktik had been devised during World War One as a new and unique method of attack, grouping several submarines into a wolfpack to overwhelm the protective warship escorts of an enemy convoy. The method had proven difficult to implement in that war due to limitations in the capabilities of the available radios. Since then, however, the Germans had developed a range of ultra-high frequency transmitters which they believed would place their radio communications beyond the ability of the enemy to jam them. This, together with the highly capable Enigma cipher machine, made the Germans feel secure about their U-boat capabilities. Dönitz also supported the concept of attacking convoys at night from the surface or near the surface, minimising the ability of the British sonar to detect the U-boats.

      From the postwar years of the 1920s, through the 1930s, Karl Dönitz promoted the values and capabilities of the U-boats, to all who would listen within the German Navy and elsewhere. In September 1933, he was made a Fregattenkapitän (full commander) and the following year was given command of the cruiser Emden, which was then operating a training ship.

      In 1935, as a result of a new Anglo-German Naval Treaty revising some of the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Conference Treaty, Germany was permitted to resume limited production of submarines, and the then German Navy Commander-in-Chief, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, placed Dönitz in charge of rebuilding the Kriegsmarine U-boat arm. Dönitz quickly went to work, dedicating himself to planning the new force around his dream rudeltaktik, based on his firm belief that Germany’s primary target in a future conflict would be the vital overseas supply lines, the lifelines providing food, fuel, and other resources to Britain from around the world. He reasoned that his U-boats were the only means for Germany to conduct a war on such trade in which the British enemy would transport its supplies by ships in convoy that were escorted and protected by warships. They were accustomed to the threat of lone U-boats, but he believed intensely in the capability of his new wolfpacks to elude the convoy protection and destroy the convoy supply ships. His theory called for a fleet of at least 300 submarines . . . fast, medium size, highly manoeuvrable boats of which, 100 would be on-station in the high seas, a further hundred would be either on the way to the convoys or on the way home after their patrols, and the final hundred would be back at base undergoing servicing and being reequipped.

      By November 1937, Dönitz was lobbying agressively for the conversion of the German fleet to a force composed almost entirely of U-boats. His philosophy of attack was to strike only at merchant vessels, relatively soft targets. He pointed out that, for example, destroying the British oil tanker fleet would deny the Royal Navy the supplies it needed to power its ships, thus depleting its capability and eliminating it as a threat at sea.

      The boat Dönitz preferred for the task was the Type VII, a vessel of about 750 tons displacement and equipped with five torpedo tubes. It was suitable for mid-Atlantic operations, unlike larger U-boats, or the smaller, 250-ton boats whose usefulness was limited to activity in the Baltic or the North Sea. The German head of state, Adolf Hitler, had a different view about preparedness for battle at sea, however. Politically, he believed that the British and the French would not go to war with Germany unless their global wealth was threatened. He projected 1945 as the date by which his navy and Ubootwaffe would have to be ready for the sort of submarine campaign that Dönitz had in mind.

      Dönitz, felt that he could work with the Nazi regime if they could avenge the humiliation of Germany in the Versailles Treaty at the end of the First World War, and ultimately bring victory to the German Fatherland. I am a firm adherent of the idea of ideological education. For what is it in the main? Doing his duty is a matter of course for the soldier. But the whole importance, the whole weight of duty done, are only present when the heart and spiritual conviction have a voice in the matter. The result of duty done is then quite different to what it would be if I only carried out my task literally, obediently, and faithfully. It is therefore necessary for the soldier to support the execution of his duty with all his mental, all his spiritual energy, and for this his conviction, his ideology are indispensable. It is therefore necessary for us to train the soldier uniformly, comprehensively, that he may be adjusted ideologically to our Germany. Every dualism, every dissension in this connection, or every divergence, or unpreparedness, imply a weakness in all circumstances. He in whom this grows and thrives in unison is superior to the other. Then indeed the whole importance, the whole weight of his conviction comes into play. It is also nonsense to say that the soldier or the officer must have no politics. The soldier embodies the state in which he lives; he is the representative, the articulate exponent of this state. He must therefore stand with his whole weight behind this state. We must travel this road from our deepest conviction. The Russian travels along it. We can only maintain ourselves in this war if we take part in it with holy zeal, with all our fanaticism.

      He continued preparations for the possible employment of his wolfpacks by sending a selection of his best young U-boat commanders on an exercise patrol around the Shetland Islands and down to the French Atlantic coast.

      With the outbreak of war in 1939, Grossadmiral Raeder assigned Dönitz the task of blockading all of Britain’s UK ports. Dönitz undertook the job but was soon in the position of having to persuade Raeder of the extreme vulnerability of the U-boats to attacks by land-based aircraft in such actions, and that his boats would be far better deployed out in the Atlantic, cutting Britain’s supply lifelines, and beyond reach of the aircraft. At that time, Dönitz could only muster twenty-two ocean-going submarines, with seldom more than six on station at any given point in the six months after he was given the task. The wolfpack concept would have to wait.

      His crews wanted to please the Lion, as they referred to Dönitz, and despite their limited numbers, managed to locate and sink more than 300,000 tons of British merchant shipping between January and April 1940, for the loss of thirteen U-boats. The German shipyards were unable at this stage to keep pace with replacement of the submarine losses. But Dönitz, who was now BdU or Befehlshaber der U-boote, Commander-in-Chief, Submarines, was heartened by the French surrender which gave him access to key harbours on the Bay of Biscay coast and the Channel coast where slave labourers employed by the Todt organisation built several bomb-proof U-boat pen shelters. Their locations virtually halved the transit time for his boats to their Atlantic action stations.

      With the development of the Biscay pens, results improved dramatically for Dönitz’s Atlantic raiders. Between June and October—a period known among the Ubootwaffe as die glückliche Zeit, the happy time, the U-boats sank 274 British merchant ships for a total tonnage of nearly 1,400,000, with just six U-boats lost. The losses for Britain were significant.

      In the next two years of war, the German Minister of Munitions Albert Speer managed to produce prefabricated parts in dispersed factories, enabling much faster production of U-boats. At the beginning of 1942, ninety-one U-boats had become operational, with 212 being operational by the end of the year. By April of 1943, 240 were operational. A total tonnage of more than two million was sunk (432 merchant vessels) in 1941. A combined tonnage total of more than 4,300,000 resulted for the year when the overall total of 1,299 merchant ships sunk was considered. It included sinkings caused by aircraft, surface ships, and mine fields.

      Dönitz was forbidden by Hitler to act against the United States, which was providing all possible aid to Britain at that time, in spite of the U.S. position of neutrality in the war. Then, on 1 September 1941, the U.S. Navy Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Ernest King, ordered American warships to join with the British and Canadians in convoy escort duty. In the next few days the USS Greer, a destroyer bound for Iceland, received a warning from an R.A.F. aircraft that a U-boat was near the American warship. What followed was a three-hour chase by the destroyer, with depth-charges and torpedoes exchanged and nothing conclusive resulting. Dönitz believed that the Greer had taken the offensive, while President Roosevelt told the U.S. public that the U-boat commander had been guilty of piracy.

      With America’s entry into the war on 7 December, Dönitz’s pent-up anger at the U.S. was released and he ordered five long-range Type IX U-boats and sixteen widely separated Type VIIs on the attack against American vessels. He called the operation Paukenschlag, beat on the kettle drums, and, of the submarine attacks that ensued along the east coast of the United States, he noted: Bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witnesses of the drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by red aureoles of blazing tankers. In the months up to June 1942, more than 300 Allied ships, including many tankers, had gone down, victims of the German torpedoes unleashed by U-boats ranging south from New York harbour to southern Florida and the Caribbean. These results prompted the U.S. Army General George Marshall to comment: "I am fearful that another month or two of this will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to

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