Black May

by Michael Gannon

  While that remarkable series of attacks was taking place, Sunderland “R” of 201 Sqdn. was patrolling Derange in position 45°38'N, 13°04'W when, at 1711, a surfaced U-boat was sighted visually, bearing 240°T, distant 8 miles, on an outbound course of 250° at 5–6 knots. Pilot Flight Lieutenant Douglas M. Gall immediately headed straight downhill from 5,000 feet at 150 knots. It was his crew’s first-ever U-boat sighting after many fruitless and boring 15-hour patrols, and he was not going to let this chance go by if he could help it. The only thought that deterred him was that this submarine might be “one of ours.” When he saw light pulses from the boat he feared that they might be Aldis lamp flashes of the recognition Letter of the Day, but a Scottish gunner put his mind at ease: “He’s no’ flashin,’ skipper, he’s firin'.”

  Gall made his run in up the U-boat’s track at 50 feet off the deck. In the last seconds of the approach, when it appeared that his four-D/C drop might miss the U-boat to starboard, the U-boat suddenly made a turn to starboard directly into the stick(!). When the explosion plumes subsided, the U-boat was observed to proceed on course for approximately half a minute, then to sink by the stern at a steep angle into the dark malls below.

  After making a circuit to port, Gall and his crew saw the surface shimmer from two heavy underwater explosions. One or two minutes later, they watched the sea “effervesce” over an area 200 to 300 feet in diameter and become pale blue and brown in color. A large oil patch appeared and eventually extended a half-mile in diameter. At 1753, Gall’s aircraft resumed patrol with the crew cheering loudly at their triumph. But, as Gall said later, his own feelings were the same as those of Oulton after U-563—“the poor devils!”60 For the action he received the DFC. The boat was later identified as U-440 (Oblt.z.S. Werner Schwaff), which had sortied from St.-Nazaire on the 26th, bound for what she hoped would be her fifth war cruise.61

  No. 19 Group, and units of No. 15 Group attached to it, did not accomplish May’s six sinkings and seven damaged U-boats in the Bay transit area without losses of their own, nineteen aircraft in daytime and two at night. Twenty-eight percent (6) of the losses were to enemy aircraft, mainly JU88C6 heavy fighters based on the Biscay coast at Kerlin Bastard near Lorient and Bordeaux Mérignac. Also active, and possibly responsible for daylight losses to “unknown causes,” were four-engine Focke Wulf 200s at Bordeaux and shorter-ranged FW190S at Brest. Another 28 percent of aircraft (6) were lost on takeoff or landing crashes. Twenty-four percent (5) were shot down by U-boat flak. And twenty-one percent (4), including two L/L Wellingtons at night, were lost to unknown causes. (Aircraft occasionally lost engines; the twin-engine Wellington VIII could not maintain altitude on one engine. Some aircraft, as earlier noted, flew into destructive weather systems; some, through navigational error, went down from fuel exhaustion; still others, when close to the sea, hooked a wing on a wave and cartwheeled in.)

  The human casualties in the Bay during May were ninety-four crewmen killed, seven missing, and six taken prisoner (from the shot-down Whitley “N” of 10 Sqdn. O.T.U. on 30 May). An additional fifty-two men, two with injuries, were rescued by their countrymen. The number of airmen both killed and missing (101) compares with the number of U-boat crew members killed on six boats, which was 264, figured on the typical Type VIIC crew list of forty-four. The number of U-boat crewmen lost or wounded on damaged boats is not known. The total hours of RAF and RAAF flight time from liftoff to landing required to destroy six boats and damage seven was 6,181 in daytime and 1,314 at night: that is, 1249 flight hours per U-boat sunk, or 576 hours per boat sunk or damaged.

  On the strength of the numbers given above it is difficult to assess whether BdU’s policy of maximum submergence at night saved more U-boats than would have been saved had most submerged hours been observed by day, as was the practice prior to May. Certainly in favor of the May policy were the five known aircraft shot down in daylight, actions that not only saved the U-boats involved but also inflicted material and human losses on the enemy, which would not have been likely if attempted at night. Without real numbers for comparison the question remains speculative, but the historical judgment continues to be that the Dönitz/Godt policy was mistaken.62

  Although No. 19 Group was never able to put in the air the full requirement of 260 aircraft specified in both the Stark and Admiralty plans, proportionately, for the number of assets that could be made available, and taking into account the spanner thrown into the plans by BdU’s surprise nighttime submergence policy, it was thought by both the Air Ministry and AOC-in-C Coastal Command Air Marshal Slessor that Operation Derange had matched the predictions put forth in Raushenbush’s paper. The 103 sightings and 68 attacks in the Bay in May conformed to the numbers crunched in Raushenbush’s “slide rule strategy.”63

  Twice Slessor went on record to that effect, first on 12 May in the 18th Meeting of the A.U. Committee, when he stated: “An analysis over the past four weeks of operations in the Bay of Biscay showed that the number of sightings and attacks accorded with the previous estimates that had been submitted to the Committee.”64 And on 23 May, in a “Comparison of Actual and Estimated Results,” Slessor reported to the A.U. Committee that his general conclusion, based on a sufficiently long period of operations to permit such a conclusion, was, in the case of Derange, “that the difference between theory and fact is very small—in fact the two can never be expected to approximate more closely in war.” (Nor could there ever be a more candid concession to strategy by slide rule.) “The analysis of those operations, therefore, can be taken as bearing out the calculations used in A.U. (43) 84 and 86.”65

  The latter document cited (86) was the Rauschenbush paper (Stark Plan). The former (84), cannily, was Slessor’s own “Value of the Bay of Biscay Patrols” Paper, in which he had consigned the Bay offensive to the status of “a residuary legatee.” If anyone knew, he did, that while there had been 103 sightings and 68 attacks in the Bay during May, there had been 110 sightings and 67 attacks elsewhere in the Atlantic during the same period; and that, while six U-boats had been sunk and seven others damaged in the Bay, during May there had been nine sunk and four damaged by Coastal aircraft giving cover to threatened convoys. Slessor had loyally come on board the Raushenbush strategy. But he had been vindicated, too.

  Of such judgments it is not thought that Stephen Raushenbush had any direct knowledge. After Enclose I, learning that his permanent position at the Department of the Interior was in jeopardy, he resigned from the Navy and returned to Washington to reclaim it—and to enter an obscurity from which only now he has been delivered. Virtually unknown for the brief but impressive role he played in the making of Black May, he died in 1991 at the age of ninety-five in Sarasota, Florida.66 Evan James Williams, it was earlier noted, died in 1945. Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, Baron Blackett, of Chelsea, died in 1974.

  9

  INSIDE THE U-BOAT MIND

  The Latimer House Discs

  HERMANN KOHLER (U-175): There are only four things you are allowed to tell as a POW, otherwise you will be guilty of betraying your country. Our Commander read it out to us: your name, rank, number, and home address—you mustn’t tell them anything else.

  29 APRIL 1943

  HELMUT KLOTZSCH (U-175): It gets worse and worse, all the U-boat men are grousing.

  ADOLF MARCH (U-175): Now it practically amounts to this: as soon as one U-boat is put into commission, another is lost at the same moment.

  26 MAY 1943

  KLOTZSCH: Things look very bad for us. The boats are being sunk one after the other.

  13 MAY 1943

  WLLHELM RAHN (U-307): To tell the truth, I haven’t much hope. They’ll crush us in time.

  3 MAY 1943

  DURING THE WAR, approximately 5,000 German prisoners were captured from 181 U-boats. Most of them, ranks and ratings alike, were passed through the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, U.K., which, in 1943, was situated at Latimer House, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, northwest of London. There, each ma
n was purposely billeted with a POW from a different boat, or a surface ship, or a Luftwaffe bomber or fighter squadron. The expectation was that a U-boat POW who did not previously know his roommate(s) would want to explain in detail his experiences at sea, how his boat was sunk, his boat’s operating systems and weapons, the layout of his home base, and his general thoughts about the war. Such raw, contemporaneous accounts, British Intelligence apparently believed, equaled or exceeded in value the often guarded information that the POWs gave to Interrogation Officers in formal debriefings. For that reason, each living space was secretly bugged with hidden microphones that picked up most of what the POWs said to one another, and a team of “listeners”—native German speakers able to identify voices—clandestinely recorded their conversations on shellac-covered metal discs.

  The data were then transcribed in both the original German and English translation onto typewritten forms headed with the words: “This report is Most Secret. If further circulation is necessary, it must be paraphrased so that neither the source of the information nor the means by which it has been obtained is apparent.” There is no indication in the record that the listeners had any ethical scruples about what a later period in history would call “invasion of privacy.” A similar bugging operation was conducted immediately after the war, from July to December 1945, when ten German nuclear scientists were detained in Farm Hall, Godmanchester, near Cambridge. Latimer House, however, was apparently the first large-scale deliberate operation of clandestine recording of ordinary conversation.1

  The Latimer House transcripts are housed in the Public Record Office, Kew, under Crown Copyright.2 The extracts given below focus mainly on U-boat men captured in April and May and on conversations of men captured earlier but recorded during May. Several conversations from March, June, and August are included because of the interesting character of the information contained. The writer has endeavored to make a representative and balanced selection of conversations that fall generally into four categories: (1) operational experiences at sea; (2) technical equipment, including torpedoes; (3) the home front and Biscay bases; and (4) questions of morale and the course of the war.

  The reader will find that many of the conversations are flat and passionless; some even banal. It is typical sailors’ talk, with predictable criticism of superiors and occasional bellyaching—or, as the British translation expresses it, “grousing.” One hears exaggerations, misconceptions, and falsehoods, as well as authentic experiences and feelings. There is little that can be called wit or intended humor; and, considering the circumstances, that should not be surprising. How much vital information the Intelligence people drew from the extracts given here is not known. Probably some of the data contributed to the overall interrogation summaries that were printed up periodically.3

  What, then, are the transcripts’ special value to the present narrative? The answer must be that fifty-five years after the events of spring-summer 1943, they provide us the only existing completely fresh, artless, and uninhibited disclosure of the U-boat mind: what these men were thinking and feeling at the time. Whereas officers and crewmen interviewed in the 1990s concede that details once green in memory have now gone gray in mind, and that the immediacy of once-intense experiences has dissipated through the wake of years, in these long-ago recorded voices we hear U-boat men as they were, in the months of their testing.

  All but one of them cited here are now dead, according to the files of the Verband Deutscher U-Bootfahren e.V. (U-Boat Veterans Association) in Hamburg. On the “listeners” forms they are identified only by number. Walter Köhler, for example, a Matrosenobergefreiter (Seaman, first class) captured from U-752 on 23 May, was identified as N 1635; and Helmut Klotzsch, an Obersteuermann (Navigator) captured from U-175 on 17 April, was identified as N(Am)15, the “Am” indicating that he was captured as the result of an American action, namely depth charges and gunfire from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter U.S.C.G.C. Spencer. At some point in the later history of these transcripts someone (one of the listeners? one of the former POWs?) wrote the prisoners’ family names alongside their numbers. The names correspond to names on the U-boat crew lists preserved in the U-Boot-Archiv at Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, where founder and director Horst Bredow was able to supply as well many first, or given, names.

  Because not every word or phrase spoken by the POWs was captured on the discs, there are numerous ellipses in the transcripts. Additional ellipses were entered on the following extracts by the writer in order to pass over uninteresting detail or confusing phraseology. Occasionally a word or phrase was added in brackets to identify persons or U-boats or to help the flow of speech: here, as in similar transcripts of unguarded conversation, one learns that people do not always speak in complete sentences. Numerals were written out to conform with speech, Captain was changed to Commander, and British spellings (e.g., harbour, defence) were changed to American forms. Briticisms such as “That’s not cricket” were left untouched.

  All the speakers in these extracts are identified in the endnotes, where the reader will find each POWs family name, and given name if it is available in the records; the U-boat on which he served; his rank or rating together with the U.S. Navy equivalent; and his date of capture.4 The first section of the extracts, which focuses on experiences at sea, begins, for example, with conversations between Heinrich Schauffel, a Leutnant zur See (Ensign) from U-752, captured on 23 May, Werner Opolka, an Oberleutnant zur See (Lieutenant [jg]) from U-528, captured on 11 May; and Karl-Heinz Foertsch, a Leutnant (Ing.) (Ensign, engineering duties) from U-659, captured on 4 May. The date of each recording is given below the extract.

  SCHAUFFEL: A bomb fell on the after deck of [Kptlt. Heinz] Wolfs boat [U-465].… Everything was ripped open, but the bomb didn’t explode. We once got a depth charge on deck and were unable to submerge with it, yet they couldn’t remove it. It had gone through the woodwork and was so jammed that we couldn’t get it out. It happened in the Bay of Biscay and we fought off aircraft for two days.

  FOERTSCH: Kapitünleutnant [Heinrich] Schmid [U-663] got a direct hit on the metal of his outboard tank, but the thing glanced off.

  SCHAUFFEL: Did you hear that the outboard tank of a boat had come off?

  OPOLKA: Not the whole outboard tank, but the outer covering was torn off; there are double ribs in it and you couldn’t break them down. [Oblt.z.S. Karl] Hauser [U-211] once came back with all his compensating tanks smashed. Also, in the Bay of Biscay, he got eight depth charges, four on the surface and four when submerged. The external pressure connection for the quick-diving tank was broken, then the compensating tanks and the oil compensating tanks.…

  SCHAUFFEL (?): Yes, our boats can take tremendous punishment.

  OPOLKA (?): You can do anything you like with them.

  Recorded 10 June 1943 5

  FOERTSCH: Not far from the American coast … unloaded the two hundred kilogram mines. At first the Commander wanted to see what it looked like there; we rushed off at three-fifths speed, which was reduced to one electric motor at “dead slow.” That’s how we went along. It wasn’t pleasant, sitting right in the harbor entrance.

  SCHAUFFEL: Which harbor was that?

  FOERTSCH: Over at Jacksonville.

  SCHAUFFEL: That’s in the south, isn’t it?

  FOERTSCH: Florida.

  SCHAUFFEL: The main thing is that some [merchant ships] ran on to them.

  FOERTSCH: Yes. Three of them.

  SCHAUFFEL: Does that count?

  FOERTSCH: Certainly, they count a tremendous number of points.…

  Recorded 7 June 1943 6

  OPOLKA: It said on the wireless: “[Korv. Kapt. Hans-Rudolf] Rosing has gone.” I bet he laughed!

  SCHAUFFEL: He’s a smart fellow.

  OPOLKA: First-class fellow; he looks very fit, but he’s got gray hair.

  SCHAUFFEL: He hasn’t made many long-distance patrols.

  OPOLKA: Three, I think.

  SCHAUFFEL: He got the Knight’s Cross—what for?


  FOERTSCH: He sank one hundred thousand tons.

  SCHAUFFEL: Kretschmer was the BdU’s favorite, wasn’t he?

  OPOLKA: The BdU has his favorites, that’s quite right. Topp, Kretschmer, Engelbert Endrass, Suhren.

  SCHAUFFEL: Endrass was always rather quiet.

  OPOLKA: Very quiet, yes; it’s a pity that he has gone. It isn’t known at all how that happened. We lost five boats there.

  SCHAUFFEL: On one convoy?

  OPOLKA: Yes, Gibraltar convoy. Endrass, [Eberhard] Hoffmann—

  FOERTSCH: Nico [Nicolai] Clausen was nearly lost, too.

  OPOLKA: If he hadn’t previously rammed the steamer—he still got home.

  SCHAUFFEL: His hair has gone gray, too.

  OPOLKA: From the last patrol.

  SCHAUFFEL: Yes, because of abandoning ship, and water, et cetera.

  OPOLKA (?): They did target practice on the U-boat, with flak and ten-point-five [gunfire]. The whole conning tower was shot to bits. Half of the hatch came down on his head. His whole head was full of splinters; his lower jaw was broken, and he was badly cut about below the eye; he couldn’t … his mouth, he couldn’t see. He was picked up by a cutter.

  SCHAUFFEL (?): Where did that happen?