First shot from Tube IV at a 6,000 GRT freighter, bows right bearing 100°. After a running time of 68 seconds the torpedo hit below the aft mast causing a very wide detonation column containing ship fragments. The steamer burned. We assume it sank.
Second shot from Tube I at a 6,000 GRT freighter, bows right bearing 90°. After a running time of 65 seconds, this ship, too, put out a wide detonation column. It burned immediately. We assume it sank.
Third shot from Tube III at a 7,000 GRT freighter, bows right bearing 90°. After a running time of 35 seconds, the torpedo hit toward the stern causing a large detonation and flames that shot very high. Apparently, artillery ammunition went up. We observed the burning stern sink.
By 0549 the sky was alive with starshells and white rockets that illuminated two nearby “destroyers.” There were three RN destroyers that had come on the scene belatedly from Freetown: H.M.S. Rapid, Malcolm, and Wolverine. Henke crash-dived in the shallow (80 meters, 250 feet) coastal water, seeking temperature gradients and varying density layers that abounded there as a protection against the inevitable British sonar detection pulses (called asdic). Taking a southwesterly course toward deeper water, U-515 again succeeded in eluding her pursuers. The sounds of depth charges and of ship hulls fracturing receded astern.
Henke’s rampage was over.32 And this time his observations were all correct. During one remarkable night he had equaled the record seven sinkings [plus one damaged] in a single twenty-four-hour day achieved by U-boat “ace” Kptlt. Joachim Schepke (U-100) against Convoy SC.II on 23 November 1940. And he had exceeded the earlier best night of six sinkings (one damaged) posted by Kptlt. Otto Kretschmer (U-99), the “tonnage king,” on the night of 18/19 October 1940, one of three nights (17–19 October) during which nine U-boats savaged Convoys SC.7 and HX.79 off Rockall Bank near Ireland—nights that came collectively to be called in Germany die Nacht der langen Messer, “The Night of the Long Knives.”33 (This phrase, earlier used to describe Hitler’s bloody purge of Ernst Rohm and his SA ["storm troopers"] leadership in 1934, originated in a medieval legend, known in both Germany and Britain, that told how Saxons who invited the British king Vortigern and his leaders to a banquet slaughtered three hundred of the leaders with their long knives.)
There was no glory for the merchant seamen, of course. Though their cost in lives was less in Henke’s second fusillade, the newly afflicted seamen of Convoy TS.37 experienced anyone’s full share of “peril on the sea,” which, it must be added, they managed with commendable composure. First hit this time was the Belgian freighter Mokambo, 4,996 GRT, out of Matadi and Takoradi for Freetown and the United Kingdom with a cargo of 1,139 tons of palm oil, 1,520 tons of kernels, 440 tons of copal, 2,000 tons of cotton, 2,000 tons of copper, and 38 tons of wolframite.34 Other than that the weather at the time was cloudy and showery, that the sky was still very dark, and that there was a slight sea with a west wind, Force 3 on the Beaufort scale, there are no surviving details of her sinking.
Henke’s second victim was the British steamer City of Singapore, 6,555 GRT, which was sailing from Calcutta and Takoradi for Freetown and Liverpool. Her cargo was 9,000 tons, which included 2,750 tons of pig iron, 2,750 tons of general cargo and mail, and, the remainder, jute, linseed, and groundnuts. The ship was hit by a torpedo that exploded just abaft the mainmast on the starboard side, throwing up a tall column of water but showing no flash. The hatches and beams from No. 5 hold were crushed; No. 4 hold flooded; the deck gun was blasted off its platform onto the deck; one of the six lifeboats was rendered useless; and the remaining boats, like the ship as a whole, were completely covered with oil from the tanks.
The Master, Captain A. G. Freeman, followed the book: He stopped engines; sent out wireless messages, which were acknowledged; fired two white rockets and showed the red light; and, when the ship had almost lost headway so that boats could be lowered without fear of their capsizing, he threw the Confidential Books overboard and ordered Abandon Ship. Freeman left last in No. 2 boat after making certain that no one remained on board. By that time, the ship was quickly sinking aft and the poop was awash. Fourteen minutes after the torpedo hit, Freeman heard a loud report, which he assumed was the No. 4 deep tank bulkhead collapsing, following which the vessel folded in two and disappeared. An hour and a half later, the survivors were picked up by Birdlip and by the convoy’s second trawler, H.M.T. Arran, and taken by them to Freetown. Not one of the eighty-seven-man crew and two gunners had been lost. Freeman reported: “I consider this Convoy was inadequately escorted.”35
The last ship to be hit by Henke, who had expended only nine eels to cause seven sinkings—an unusually successful economy of firepower—was the British freighter Clan Macpherson, 6,940 GRT, out of Calcutta, Durban, and Takoradi for Freetown and the United Kingdom with 8,421 tons of general cargo that included 2,750 tons of pig iron, plus zinc, mica, jute, linseed, tea, and groundnuts.36 His crew, including gunners, numbered a large 140. No one saw the track of the torpedo, which exploded, “not violently,” in No. 2 hold on the starboard side. Knowing that the hold was 100 feet in length and 134,000 cubic feet of space, and fearing that it would fill quickly, the ship’s Master, Captain E. Gough, immediately ordered Abandon Ship. He switched on the red light, fired two white rockets, sent out a W/T message, and threw overboard the Confidential Books.
“All my men lined up like soldiers,” Gough reported, “no one attempted to do anything without orders, and within ten minutes the five lifeboats and the one small boat were clear of the ship,” which, they saw, did not go down as expected. The men on the small No. 2 bridgeboat were taken on board a freighter, Silver Ash, and the occupants of the other five boats, keeping in contact with each other by means of flashlights, had the opportunity of being rescued by Arran; but, instead, Gough asked the trawler to stand by them until daybreak, when he and the crew from the five boats reboarded their still floating vessel. The pumps were put on and all the engineers went below to raise steam. By 0920 the ship was under way doing twenty revolutions, and Gough had her under helm on a course of 047° toward Freetown, some 67 nautical miles distant. But, after a short while, it became apparent that No. 1 hold was filling, and some measure had to be taken to balance the ship.
Accordingly, Gough ordered the Chief Engineer in the engine room to fill tanks Nos. 4 and 5 in an attempt to bring the boat down by the stern. When that action was completed, though, the ship was listing to starboard, and the sea was lapping at the fore deck. Gough rang the engine room: “Finish With Engines.” He thought he might take a tow, stern first, from Arran. But it was no use. Clan Macpherson was not going to make it. He again ordered Abandon Ship and personally phoned the engineers and engine room crew to order them out. Unfortunately, two minutes after the boats were away, the ship suddenly upended, hung there in that state, quivering, then sank in a frothy gulp, and there was no sign in the boats of Chief Engineer Neil Robertson, or of the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Engineers, “who were just a little slow in leaving the engine room.”
In his report Gough complimented a half-dozen Lascars (East Indians) in his crew who had gone into No. 1 hold and, working up to their waists in water, tried to build up a bulkhead with bags; had the bulkhead collapsed, “all would have most certainly been drowned.” The boarding party reached Freetown Harbour at 2015 GMT on 1 May, where the Europeans, including Masters and Officers, were assigned to the ghastly Grand Hotel and the native crew were placed in even grimmer boardinghouses. By 10 June, so far as Gough knew, the natives were still housed in squalid conditions, with awful food, if any, and no water for bathing, most of them afflicted with boils and diarrhea. The extent of the suffering caused by U-boat warfare was simply unknown to its perpetrators.37
In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the heavy sinkings “deplorable.”38 His Anti-U-Boat Warfare Committee invited an explanation for the lack of air cover provided Convoy TS.37 from Sir Archibald Sinclair, Bt., M.P., Secretary of State for Air. Sinclair responded that, “Bad weath
er was responsible for the absence of air escort during the night on which the 7 ships had been sunk.”39
Inside U-515, as the opening day of May drew to a close, Werner Henke received a Funkspruch (wireless signal) from BdU in Berlin acknowledging his report of the sinkings. It consisted of one word: BRAVO. Henke recorded his and the crew’s reaction to it: Große Freude im Boot—“Great elation in the boat.”40
At midnight GST on 30 April/1 May, twenty-seven-year-old Kptlt. Harald Gelhaus, Commander of the Type IXB U-107, was on the surface pursuing a fast (“15 to 16 knots”), zigzagging, independent steamer on a northeasterly course in 47°49'N, 22°02'W, about 560 miles southwest from Cape Clear, Ireland. He was on his thirteenth Feindfahrt (war cruise), his tenth as a Commander. This steamer was his first target sighted since departing base at Lorient, France, on 24 April, and he still had his full complement of torpedoes fore and aft. If he had had to attempt this pursuit from astern, he might not have overhauled the target while it was still dark, since his own maximum speed under diesel power was only marginally better than the steamer’s. Fortunately, though, he stood at bow ahead position, and his only real problem would be in figuring out the steamer’s zigzag pattern. He writes in his KTB:
So I run in front of him with two engines at full speed, and I can just keep him in sight. Because of the high swell the bridge and funnel are often well out of the water. I hope he won’t see me.
As the steamer zigzagged to the west, the swell made it hard to keep him in the binoculars. Gelhaus made up his mind to attack with a three-eel fan shot (Fächer) when he next zigzagged east. But when that altered course came, it was so sharply to the east that Gelhaus’s bow was out of position, and he had to use his stern tubes, V and VI. Those two torpedoes were released at 0300 GST on a bearing of 70°, but with a variance of 6.4° between them; speed of target 16 knots; range 1,500 meters; running time 80 seconds:
A hit amidships, apparently in the engine room. There’s fumbling with flashlights on deck. It seems that the lifeboats are being readied for lowering. The steamer turns to port, slows, and loses steam. But to make sure he doesn’t get away, we point the bow at him at short range and launch a coup de grace from Tube II. After 29 seconds there’s a hit under the bridge. The steamer sinks a bit deeper and stops. Boats are lowered into the water. But because the ship still shows no sign of drowning, we give him another coup de grace, from Tube III, set at 7 meters depth. After 51 seconds there’s a hit in the forward hold behind the mast. The ship sinks only a bit more and lists 15° to starboard. While waiting for it to sink, we maneuver up to a lifeboat to find out the ship’s name. It turns out to be the 12,000 GRT heavy refrigerator ship Port Pictory [actually Victor], out of Glasgow, built just last year in Newcastle, heading from Buenos Aires to England, the specific port of destination not yet known. Its cargo consists of 10,000 tons of frozen meat and skins. Additionally, there were 60 passengers on board, including women and children.
Gelhaus learned that the ship carried one 4.7-inch gun and two 12-pounders, though none was fired, and that the Captain was, apparently, still on board. “We took no prisoners,” he wrote, “because we had no room on board.” Because the vessel was still floating after an hour— its position having been sent out repeatedly by the ship’s radio operator together with the distress call SSS … SSS … SSS (Struck By Torpedo)—Gelhaus put yet another eel into her hull, hitting the waterline below the front edge of the bridge after a 42-second run. This time the vessel broke apart and the midship descended below the surface, leaving only the bow and stern visible. “I consider the steamer as having been sunk,” he wrote, “because its chances of making port are extremely unlikely, but complete sinking will still take a while due to the amount of insulation.” He reported as much to BdU, adding that he still had nine Etos and six Atos together with 161 cubic meters of fuel remaining.41
More precise information about M.V. Port Victor and her ordeal comes from her Master, Captain W. G. Higgs, who, with the Chief Officer, was the last to leave her. The 12,411 GRT motor vessel had actually sailed from Montevideo on 17 April with a refrigerated cargo of 7,600 tons and a general cargo of 2,000 tons. The crew numbered 99, including nine Naval and three Military Gunners, who, like so many other D.E.M.S. gunners, never got off a shot either for lack of time or because they never saw their assailant. The passengers, sixty-five in number, included twenty-three women and children. The first of Gelhaus’s torpedoes struck in the engine room on the port side while the ship was steaming at 16¾ knots, on a mean course of 055°, Zigzag Pattern No. 11. The explosion was accompanied by a brilliant flash that illuminated the whole ship for a split second and a large column of water that cascaded over the upper deck. The No. 4 lifeboat collapsed in the chocks and the No. 6 boat, which was “swung out,” disappeared from view. Electrical power failed, and with the engine room flooding, the port engine stopped. With no one in the engine room answering the telephone, the Chief Engineer stopped the starboard engine using remote controls on the upper deck.
Captain Higgs had a distress message sent by wireless, which was acknowledged, while he personally threw the Confidential Books and Wireless Books overboard in weighted boxes. He then went to the embarkation deck, where the passengers were assembling at boat stations. When the remaining boats were lowered to that deck, Higgs ordered them loaded and lowered. The first to go down was No. 2 boat on the port side with about fourteen women and an Able Seaman in charge. Just as it was being lowered down the falls, however, the second torpedo struck just under it. The blast and the column of water discharged flung most of the boat’s occupants into the sea, where they had to swim vigorously against being sucked into the large hole made in the hull by the explosion. Most of the younger women managed to overcome the suction and reach a nearby raft. Two middle-aged women did not.
When the passengers had been lowered, Higgs gave orders for the crew to abandon ship. The third torpedo to hit the ship exploded under No. 8 boat and completely wrecked it, the Second Officer being the only survivor (“injured and badly shattered”) of the eight or nine crew who were in it at the time. The rest of the crew were able to abandon on the other boats and four rafts, after which Higgs and the Chief Officer went down the starboard ladder and jumped into the sea, where they were hauled on board No. 5 boat. From that heaving perch Higgs watched the U-boat approach No. 1 boat, which was in the charge of the Bosun. (The U-boat, Higgs said, was “freshly painted dark gray with no distinguishing marks on the conning tower”—although Gelhaus said in an interview in 1997 that the conning tower bore the device of four aces.)
While he hid his cap and prepared to remove his uniform coat, Higgs listened to the conversation between the Commander and the Bosun. Asked where was the ship’s Captain, the Bosun answered that he was probably still on board. In answer to further questions, the Bosun gave the name, tonnage, age, route, and cargo of the ship. Hearing women’s voices, the Commander expressed surprise. On being told that there were women and children passengers, the Commander said that they “had no business to come to sea.” Then, after apologizing for not being able to take anyone on board and wishing the survivors a “good voyage,” he steamed off. Higgs later described the Commander as physically a “big man,” and said that while he interrogated the Bosun, a U-boat crewman kept a handheld machine gun trained on the lifeboat.
When the Bosun’s boat encountered No. 2 boat, he found that it held several gravely injured men and that the morale of the occupants generally was very low. The Bosun transferred into it Able Seaman Daniels, a tall strong Irishman with a keen sense of humor. Though Daniels had been a bit of a problem to Higgs on several occasions during the voyage, he quickly redeemed himself in No. 2 boat, where he threw overboard two dead bodies and made the wounded as comfortable as possible, including the Second Steward, who had an arm broken in three places, and a 74-year-old Church of England Canon, who had a deep cut on his head. To everyone in the boat, his cheerfulness and good nature were an inspirational lift. “In a time l
ike this,” Higgs said, “I could not have wished for a better man.” When daylight came and No. 2 boat brushed by No. 5, containing the Chief Officer, Daniels asked him if the Official Log had been lost. When told yes, it had, Daniels said, “Good, the Old Man won’t be able to fine me when we get back now.”
At 0700 GMT, with five lifeboats and three rafts collected, and, on Higgs’s order, a tot of rum being passed around to each person, someone cried, “Aircraft!” Higgs called to the crew of each boat to throw over a red smoke flare. Within minutes the aircraft, a B-24 Liberator of RAF Coastal Command, turned in their direction and circled the lifeboats and their clouds of red smoke. After signaling that help was coming, the aircraft departed, but returned every two hours to give reassurance. In the early afternoon the Liberator dropped a package containing food, water, and a note saying that a destroyer should reach their position about 1750. The note ended: “Best of luck and drop us a line when you get back,” signed by the eight men of the air crew. Shortly after 1700, H.M.S. Wren hove into view, made a wide circle around the lifeboats listening with her asdic for any U-boat that might be lurking below, then began taking the survivors on board, a process completed by 1730. When the destroyer made port at Liverpool on 4 May, Higgs reported his fatal casualties: seventeen in number, including the old Canon, who couldn’t make it. “All my Engineers, Officers and men behaved extremely well,” he stated, “and I cannot speak too highly of the magnificent conduct of all my passengers.”42
Black May Page 5
