by Clay Blair
Commencing on November 19, Gysae in U-177 also patrolled the area near Lourenço Marques, but usually at a considerable distance from Lüth. Over a period of twenty-six days he expended all of his torpedoes to sink seven ships (including one tanker) for 44,800 tons. One of these was another unescorted British troopship: the homeward-bound, armed, 6,800-ton Nova Scotia, the sixth British troopship to be lost to unassisted Axis submarines within two months.† In addition to her crew, Nova Scotia carried 899 passengers: 765 Italian civilian internees and 134 South African soldiers. Upon learning that he, like Hartenstein in U-156, had sunk a ship carrying hundreds of Italian allies, Gysae radioed Dönitz for instructions: “Sank auxiliary cruiser Nova Scotia with over 1,000 Italian civil internees ex [from] Massaua [Ethiopia]. Two survivors taken on board. Still about 400 on boats or rafts. Moved away because of air [craft]” In his reply, Dönitz, in effect, evoked the “Laconia Order”: “Continue operating. Waging war comes first. No rescue attempts.”
Dönitz notified the Portuguese, who dispatched vessels from Lourenço Marques. A Portuguese sloop rescued 192 survivors (including forty-three South Africans) in boats or rafts, surrounded by ravenous sharks. Including the crewmen, about 750 persons perished. One hundred and twenty corpses washed up on Durban beaches. Sharks consumed many of the other 630 dead. At Gysae’s request, the crew of U-177 signed a pledge never to discuss the catastrophe.
Gysae returned U-177 to France on January 22, completing a patrol of 128 days. His confirmed score was eight ships for 49,371 tons. Like Lüth, he remained with his boat to prepare for another patrol to the Indian Ocean. Dönitz awarded his engineer, Gerhard Bieleg, a Ritterkreuz, noting that he had served 454 days on patrol on three U-boats and had “saved his boats three times.”
The big Italian U-cruiser Cagni contributed almost nothing to this attack on South Africa. On November 29 she sank one ship off Cape Town, the 2,000-ton Greek Argo. Encountering intensified ASW measures near the Cape, she soon reversed course and headed home. Near the equator on January 10, she refueled from the tanker U-459, then proceeded to Bordeaux.
Four German U-cruisers had operated off Cape Town and Durban. In all they sank twenty-seven confirmed ships for 161,407 tons, an average of 6.75 ships for 40,350 tons per boat per patrol. Considering that one boat, Sobe’s U-179, had been lost after sinking only one ship, this was an exceptionally good average return. The single success of the Italian U-cruiser Cagni raised the total for all Axis U-cruisers to twenty-eight ships for 163,400 tons.
When the successes of the four Type IXs of group Eisbär were added to those of the four Type IXD2 U-cruisers, the number was impressive indeed: sixty-two ships for 379,566 tons, including the six British troopships. This was an average of 7.8 ships for 47,446 tons sunk per boat per patrol, exceeding the best performance of the Type IXs in American waters.
Altogether, in the second half of 1942 about fifty U-boats patrolled to the Azores, the Canaries, Freetown, to African waters farther south, and to Cape Town and Durban. These sank about 150 ships for about 900,000 tons, for the loss of merely three boats* with all hands. This was an “exchange rate” of about fifty ships sunk for each U-boat, an extraordinary German achievement but also a rarely mentioned and embarrassing failure of Commonwealth ASW forces in those waters.
Like the sinkings in American waters, these German successes in South African waters during October and November 1942 also added substantially to the aggregate Allied ship losses to U-boats in those months. Since, as related, Allied losses were not identified by geographical area, the figures also tended to reinforce the wrong impression that U-boats were conducting a “massacre” on the North Atlantic run.
THE MEDITERRANEAN: PRICELESS CAPTURES
At ten o’clock on the evening of October 23, the British Eighth Army, commanded by Bernard Law Montgomery, launched a massive attack on the Axis forces at El Alamein. On the following day, when Hitler was informed, he telephoned Erwin Rommel, who was still in a hospital, and asked if he was well enough to return to North Africa to resume command of his Afrika Korps. Rommel arrived on the second day, October 25, to find Axis forces cracking under the weight of Montgomery’s attack, which profited greatly from the reading of Luftwaffe Enigma and some timely breaks in German Army Enigma. Rommel proposed a strategic withdrawal westward toward Benghazi, but Hitler demurred and foolishly directed Rommel to “stand fast!” whatever the cost.
At that time, the Mediterranean U-boat force, commanded by Leo Karl Kreisch, numbered nineteen Type VIICs. This number included four new arrivals from the Atlantic (U-458, U-593, U-605, U-660), which had slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar on the nights of October 10 and 11. One of these, U-605, commanded by Herbert-Viktor Schütze, age twenty-five, had had a harrowing transit. An unidentified submerged Allied submarine had shot torpedoes at U-605 but missed. Schütze had dived and the two submarines had played cat and mouse for three hours. Schütze had shot a full bow salvo—four torpedoes—at the enemy submarine, but he, too, had missed. These four boats had arrived at the Italian naval base at La Spezia, Italy, on October 14 and 15, where Kreisch indoctrinated the men in fighting in the hazardous waters of the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean U-boat force was in its worst slump yet. Apart from several small sailing vessels, in all of September and October the U-boats had sunk only one ship, a 600-ton Palestinian freighter.
When Montgomery attacked on October 23-24, there were seven U-boats at sea. Four patrolled in western sectors off Algeria and Tunisia and three in the eastern sectors off Egypt and Palestine. The plan was to maintain that deployment scheme in case the Allies staged an amphibious assault in North Africa behind (or west) of Rommel or in the more extreme west at Algeria or Oran or on the island of Sardinia. Three U-boats (U-458, U-565, U-660) were due to sail from La Spezia to the eastern sector to relieve the three boats in that area (U-77, U-205, U-559).
On October 25, Hitler personally intervened and changed the deployment of the Mediterranean U-boats. Based on German intelligence reports indicating that the British carrier Furious and other warships were gathering at Gibraltar, perhaps to invade Sardinia or fly off fighters to Malta, the Fuhrer directed that “all available” U-boats be sent to the western Mediterranean immediately. Leo Kreisch, therefore, redirected the three newly sailed U-boats intended for the eastern Mediterranean to go to the western Mediterranean. Furthermore, Kreisch ordered two of the three U-boats in the east (U-77, U-205) to make for Messina, Sicily, to replenish and prepare to join the other U-boats in the west.
What the British had afoot was yet another fighter-aircraft reinforcement of Malta. At Gibraltar on October 27, the carrier Furious took on the aircraft. The next day the task force, which included the cruisers Charybdis and Penelope and six destroyers, set sail. By then the Axis naval commands had deployed fourteen submarines in the narrow neck of the western Mediterranean: seven German U-boats* and a separate force of seven Italian submarines blocking the channel between Cape Antonio, Spain, and the island of Ibiza9 in case the British elected to go north of the Balearic Islands, then eastward.
In the late evening of October 28, two U-boats sighted and reported the task force: Ritterkreuz holder Friedrich (Fritz) Guggenberger in U-81, who had sunk the British carrier Ark Royal the year before, and the new arrival Schütze in U-605. Nearby, at about the same time, another Mediterranean veteran, Wilhelm Franken in U-565, shot four torpedoes at Furious but, he reported, all were duds. Inasmuch as Guggenberger had reported the task force speed as twenty-one knots, Leo Kreisch logged: “It is hopeless for the U-boats to pursue.”
The new German plan was to sink Furious on her return voyage to Gibraltar. Kreisch redeployed the seven U-boats to likely waiting spots, while Axis aircraft reconnoitered and found the task force. Several U-boats spotted the formation. One, U-431, commanded by another Mediterranean veteran, Wilhelm Dommes, shot four torpedoes at Furious but all missed. Still making about twenty knots, the task force returned to Gibraltar without incurring any lo
sses.
Leo Kreisch logged:
The operation is thus concluded. It has been quite unsuccessful. … Of the seven boats available, five different boats have had altogether six encounters with the enemy. Two boats each fired a fan of four, no hits were obtained. To attack a heavily defended aircraft carrier, proceeding at high speed, is not simply a question of opportunity but also luck. …
As a result of Hitler’s personal intervention, only one U-boat was left in the eastern Mediterranean. She was U-559, commanded by twenty-eight-year-old Hans-Otto Heidtmann. He had commanded three school ducks* in the last half of 1940, after which he commissioned U-559 on February 27, 1941. Reporting to the Atlantic force in June 1941, Heidtmann had sunk one 1,600-ton British freighter during the attack on convoy Outbound Gibraltar 71 in August.† A month later, U-559 was one of the six U-boats that pioneered the way into the Mediterranean. In a full year of combat operations in those dangerous waters, Heidtmann had sunk four confirmed ships: the 1,100-ton Australian sloop Parramatta, two freighters, and the 4,700-ton Norwegian tanker Athene.
Heidtmann was quite familiar with the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. He had conducted a barren thirty-eight-day patrol there from August 15 to September 21, returning to Messina. After merely eight days in that port for replenishing and crew R&R, he had resailed for the eastern Mediterranean on September 29.
The senior German naval commander in the Mediterranean Basin, Eberhard Weichold, wrote:
Leaving U-559 behind in the Eastern Mediterranean after the other boats operating there had been recalled, was done deliberately. The boat had been operating against the enemy since August with only one break of a few days [in Messina] and as it is in need of repairs it was out of the question to put it into operation in the Western Mediterranean. But the boat can be of use in the Eastern Mediterranean a few days longer until it has exhausted all its resources.
Heidtmann’s orders were to attack shipping “anywhere” in the eastern Mediterranean (the Levant). Like other boats before him, he focused his efforts on the short Allied convoy route running between Port Said, the Mediterranean terminus of the Suez Canal, and the British naval base at Haifa, Palestine. In the early hours of October 30, when U-559 was about seventy miles north by northeast of Port Said, a radar-equipped Sunderland on ASW patrol found U-559 and reported a contact, “possibly a submarine.” The British destroyer Hero, which was about twenty miles from the reported position, proceeded there and commenced a sonar search, but she found nothing. Other British aircraft arrived to assist Hero in the hunt, but they could not find anything either.
Upon receiving the initial report from the Sunderland, the commander of Destroyer Squadron 12, Eric B. K. Stevens in Pakenham, sailed from Port Said with three other destroyers: Petard, Dulverton, and Hurworth. Seven hours later, at about thirty minutes after noon, the four destroyers arrived near the reported site. Just as they did so, a British Wellesley aircraft seven miles distant sighted a periscope and the “clearly visible” outline of a submerged submarine. The pilot attacked from low altitude, dropping three depth charges and firing Very flares to alert the destroyers. Absorbing Hero into his formation, Stevens raced the five destroyers to the circling aircraft at thirty-one knots. Upon slowing to sonar-search speed, Dulverton almost immediately reported a submarine contact.
The U-boat hunt that ensued resembled the tenacious thirteen-hour hunt (and kill) of U-372 by four destroyers and aircraft in early August in nearly the same spot.* The five destroyers and aircraft hunting U-559 doggedly clung to the contact for almost ten hours. Alternating passes, Dulverton attacked six times, with fifty-six depth charges; Pakenham and Petard each attacked four times, dropping thirty-two and thirty charges, respectively; Hew attacked three times, with seventeen charges; and Hurworth attacked twice, dropping fifteen charges. Totals: nineteen separate attacks in which 150 depth charges were dropped at depths ranging between 150 and 600 feet.†
Earlier on his second Atlantic patrol, Heidtmann had been detected and hunted for hours by a tenacious team of British destroyers. He escaped by taking U-559 to 590 feet and lying doggo. He repeated this tactic, but he could not shake these five destroyers. After nearly ten hours of pursuit, the air in the boat was foul. Moreover, the last five of the 150 depth charges—dropped by Petard—had caused severe damage and flooding. Therefore, at about 10:40 P.M., Heidtmann surfaced, hoping to slip away in darkness.
The instant U-559 reached the surface, Hurworth picked her up on radar and caught her in a big searchlight. Too close to depress the main 4” guns, Hurworth and Petard opened fire with 20 and 40mm cannons. Petard’s fire, officially described as “a murderous barrage,” raked the U-559’s bridge, probably killing several Germans, possibly including Heidtmann (the record is not clear), and wounding others. With no possibility of escape, the Germans scuttled U-559 and began jumping into the sea. In the rush to abandon ship, they failed to jettison all Enigma material in accordance with regulations.
Petard’s captain, Mark Thornton, sensed an opportunity to ransack and possibly even capture U-559. He brought his ship to starboard of U-559, pointed in the opposite direction, his bow to her stern. As Petard eased close alongside the U-boat, some of her crew, including Lieutenant Spens-Black, Able Seamen K. Lacroix and G. W. MacFarlane, and Canteen Assistant Thomas Brown, jumped down onto the deck of U-559 to shackle on a towline. The first line parted, as did the second, but finally they attached a big manila line to the U-559’’s stern that held.
In the meantime, Thornton called away his boarding party and put over two whaleboats. Due to a misunderstanding of his orders, one whaler diverted to pick up German survivors, collecting fourteen. The leader of the boarding party, Petard’s second-in-command, Francis Anthony Blair Fasson, turned the other whaler over to another officer, G. Gordon Connell, then stripped naked, dived overboard, and swam to U-559. Able Seaman Colin Grazier also shed his clothes and dived in to assist Fasson.
Fasson, Grazier, and Canteen Assistant Brown went down inside U-559 to the control room. It was dark, Brown remembered, but Fasson had a flashlight and a machine gun. Fasson went directly forward to Heidtmann’s quarters and the radio room and smashed open cabinets with the butt of the machine gun. He found a set of keys hanging on the back of the door, Brown said, and these opened a locked drawer. Fasson took some “confidential books” from the drawer and gave them to Brown, who took them topside and rigged a line to lift others. He returned to help Fasson, who gave him another load of documents, which Brown stacked at the bottom of the conning-tower ladder. He then returned to Heidtmann’s quarters and the radio room, where Fasson had found yet more confidential books. Brown took these to the conning-tower hatch as well and then climbed topside and gave the documents to Spens-Black, Lacroix, and MacFarlane. They, in turn, passed the documents to the men in the whaler.
When Brown returned to the control room, he found Fasson attempting to break an unidentified “apparatus” from a bulkhead. Fasson pried it off, but he could not cut the wires leading into the apparatus, “so we gave up,” Brown remembered. Fasson then handed Brown yet another load of confidential books. On this third trip topside, Brown gave these directly to the men in the whaler. Meanwhile, Spens-Black, Lacroix, and MacFarlane were hauling up a “box” which Fasson had secured to the lifting line that Brown had rigged. Fasson twice shouted up to them to be very careful as the “instrument” was “very delicate” and “important.” It could have been an Enigma machine.
The U-559 suddenly began to sink rapidly by the stern. Thornton ordered Petard’s engines ahead, to put a strain on the towline and hold up the U-boat’s stern, but when he saw he might hit and capsize the whaler and lose the documents, he canceled the order and chopped the towline. Spens-Black, Brown, and others on the U-boat deck and in the whaler all shouted “Abandon ship! Abandon ship!” Brown remembered seeing Fasson and Grazier at the foot of the conning-tower ladder and twice shouted: “You’d better come up.” They “had just started up ,” Brown said, wh
en “the submarine started to sink very quickly.” Vainly fighting against the flood of water pouring down the conning-tower hatch, neither man made it. The “instrument” was lost as well. “I had to leave it,” MacFarlane remembered, “as the water was rising above the conning tower” As U-559 upended and sank stern first, he and Brown and others of the topside group swam to the whaler.*
The British destroyers rescued forty-one of the forty-eight Germans on U-559. Heidtmann was not among the survivors. One other survivor died of wounds, leaving forty. Petard took some of these Germans, as well as all the documents recovered from U-559, directly to the eastern Mediterranean naval intelligence center, which had withdrawn from Alexandria and relocated in Haifa.
Among the intelligence documents recovered from U-559 were two that were priceless to British codebreakers:
• A current edition of the short-signal codebook for weather reports.
• A current edition of the short-signal codebook for reporting enemy ships, battle results, and other tactical information.
For the skippers of Petard and U-559 there were ironic aftermaths. Six weeks later, on December 15, Petard, in company with the Greek destroyer Queen Olga, discovered and attacked the Italian submarine Uarsciek. In keeping with Admiralty policy, during this action Petard drove the submarine to the surface and inflicted merciless casualties on the Italians in an attempt to keep them belowdecks and prevent scuttling. Moreover, for the second time, Petard got a boarding party on an enemy warship and again captured an impressive haul of “confidential books” of all kinds and almost succeeded in towing the captured vessel into port.
Notwithstanding this second outstanding achievement, according to a published history of Petard, the doctor on board the ship, William Finbar Prendergast, concluded that Petard’s captain, Mark Thornton, had gone over the edge and that he should have a “medical checkup and rest.” In effect sacked, Thornton abruptly left his command without the usual farewell ceremonies.† In contrast, for reasons never made clear, U-559’s skipper Heidtmann, who had committed gross negligence in failing to insure destruction of his Enigma papers, was awarded a Ritterkreuz on April 14, 1943‡
