Black May

by Michael Gannon

  I thank my colleagues at the University of Florida: Associate Vice President Catherine A. Longstreth, Associate Dean Elizabeth Lang-land, and Professor of History and Department Chair Robert McMahon, who made possible a research and writing sabbatical in fall 1996. Numerous individuals have helped me in various ways during the writing of this book, and I express my gratitude to them: Jerry N. Uelsmann, Maggie Taylor, Leonidas Roberts, Florence Goldstein, Roger Thomas, Ken Ekelund Jr., Robert A. Bryan, Raymond Gay-Crosier, Helen Armstrong, Jim Craig, Larry Severy, Sherrel Brockington, Lewis A. Sussman, and veterans of U.S.S. Bogue who are acknowledged by name in the endnotes.

  Also acknowledged with gratitude are Brian McCue for his assistance in interpreting statistics used in chapter 8 and cartographer Paul Pugliese for his well-crafted maps, three of which are based on graphics supplied by Jürgen Rohwer and Thomas Weis.

  Particular thanks go to the distinguished gentleman and my good friend M. S. “Buz” Wyeth Jr., former vice president and executive editor, Adult Trade Division, of HarperCollins. Buz believed in this book and, before his recent retirement, gave it a robust launch. I also thank warmly Paul D. McCarthy, senior consulting editor, who came on board to navigate Black May through the remaining rocks and shoals. Barbara Smerage, of Gainesville, Florida, expertly keyboarded the final text.

  As a sign of loving gratitude to my spouse, Genevieve Haugen, for her keyboarding of the early draft chapters and the endnotes; for her patient, lonely vigil on the dock while waiting for this ship to come in; and for her unstinting support of the project itself, I do now solemnly swear that I will clean up my study.

  A WORD TO THE READER

  This book does not attempt to describe every Allied convoy sailing in May 1943. Neither does it recount every operational patrol by the U-boats, every torpedo launched by them at Allied shipping, every Allied surface ship engagement with the U-boats, or every depth charge dropped on U-boats by aircraft. Rather, it focuses on those major actions at sea that defined “Black May” and led to that month’s unprecedented number of U-boat losses.

  U-boats are referred to here as “it” until identified by number and name of the Commander, after which the pronoun used is she or her. In keeping with Royal Navy practice, escort vessel Captains are sometimes referred to not by their personal names but by the names of their ships. In place of the abbreviations A/S (Anti-Submarine) or A. U. (Anti-U-Boat Warfare) customarily used in British documents, the present text uses ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare), which is more familiar to an American readership (though ASW also appears in British documents).

  The approach taken in this narrative to the surviving record of what happened in May 1943 is both chronological and thematic, the latter usually to give background or to describe one battle separately from others; for example, the Bay Offensive as distinct from the convoy battles.

  Any errors of fact or interpretation, though one strives mightily to prevent them, are, of course, the author’s own.

  On 22 May 1943, the German U-boat U-569 is attacked in the mid-Atlantic with four depth charges released by a U.S. Navy TBF-1 Avenger carrier aircraft. Two charges have entered the water. Two more are seen falling at the right. Severely damaged by the resulting explosions, the U-boat surrendered, her crew waving a white sheet. National Archives and Records Administration

  ALSO BY MICHAEL GANNON

  NONFICTION

  Rebel Bishop

  The Cross in the Sand

  Explorations and Settlements in the Spanish Borderlands

  (Editor and Contributor)

  Operation Drumbeat

  Florida: A Short History

  The New History of Florida

  (Editor and Contributor)

  FICTION

  Secret Missions

  DRAMA

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on Trial

  PRAISE FOR MICHAEL GANNON’S OPERATION DRUMBEAT: THE DRAMATIC TRUE STORY OF GERMANY’S FIRST U-BOAT ATTACKS ALONG THE AMERICAN COAST IN WORLD WAR II

  “Like that best-selling novel [The Hunt for Red October], Operation Drumbeat is a ripping good yarn of submarine warfare, espionage and geopolitics. The difference is that Operation Drumbeat is not a novel.”

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES

  “Operation Drumbeat is a truly wonderful book—the best by far that I have read on Ll-boats and believe me, I have read them all. It combines a great knowledge of U-boars and meticulous scholarship with dramatic narrative. The upshot is an important and riveting story that gives the reader the most reliable and penetrating account of U-boar warfare ever written. Furthermore, the ‘Atlantic Pearl Harbor’ thesis is well developed and unassailable. On every page the author demonstrates complete mastery of immense primary source material with shocking new revelations—such as the failure to bring the 25 American destroyers into play despite clear warning from Bletchley Park that Drumbeat was afoot.”

  —CLAY BLAIR, AUTHOR OF SILENT VICTORY: THE U.S. SUBMARINE WAR AGAINST JAPAN

  “I started reading Operation Drumbeat and literally could not stop. I think it’s an absolutely stunning book—revelatory. It should startle everyone who thinks there is nothing more to be said about World War II. His expose of the V.S. Navy’s incompetence in the opening months of the war is the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes. His grasp of the German side of the story is equally remarkable. On top of all that it often reads like a novel.”

  —THOMAS FLEMING, AUTHOR OF TIME & TIDE

  “It is difficult to fault Gannon’s assertion that in the face of the U-boar threat [Admiral] King’s failure to act decisively was ‘like a sentry asleep at his post.’”

  —HOUSTON CHRONICLE

  “Engrossing reading, most especially the part in which the dereliction of our naval leaders along the eastern seaboard is so well described.”

  —CAPTAIN EDWARD L. BEACH, AUTHOR OF RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP

  “Operation Drumbeat is a splendid book, moving in description, instructive in well supported analysis. Gannon knows how everything worked in a U-Boar, and he gives brilliant descriptions of all the technological conditions that shaped its warfare. He also makes a memorable contribution to our understanding of the nature of the [U-Boar] war and warriors. He is fully informed and he is full, fair and justifiably critical of some [U.S.] policies, personalities, and performances.”

  —ELTING E. MORISON, AUTHOR OF MEN, MACHINES AND MODERN TIMES AND ADMIRAL SIMS AND THE MODERN AMERICAN NAVY

  “Gannon’s book is a crisply written, vivid and thoroughly researched account of the adventure of U-123 in American waters.”

  —MICHAEL L. HADLEY, AUTHOR OF U-BOATS AGAINST CANADA

  COPYRIGHT

  Grateful acknowledgment is given the University of Toronto Press for permission to quote from the poem “Behind the Log” by E. J. Pratt. Copyright © 1989, all rights reserved.

  Crown copyright material in the Public Record Office, London, is reproduced by permission of the Controller of Her Brittanic Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  BLACK MAY. Copyright © 1998 by Michael Gannon.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  Epub Edition © JANUARY 2011 ISBN: 9780062039460

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 0-06-017819-1

  98 99 00 01 02 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1. Martin Middlebrook, Convoy (New York: William Morrow, 1976), p. 307 and Appendix 3. The Royal Navy ocean escort groups included two United States Navy destroyers, two United States Coast Guard cutters, and two Royal Canadian Navy corvettes. A German study of this convoy battle is Jürgen Rohwer, The Critical Convoy Battles of March 1943: The Battle for HX.229/SC.122 (London: Ian Allan Ltd., 1977).

  2. Ibid., pp. 302–304. The number of ships and tonnage sunk claimed by the U-boat commanders was 32 and 186,000 GRT. The actual losses were 22 and 146,596 GRT. U—384 (Oberleutnant z. See Hans-Achim von Rosenberg-Gruczszynski) was sunk by Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress “B” of 206 Squadron Royal Air Force on 20 March 1943.

  3. The monthly tonnage figures used here for the period May 1942 through March 1943 are given in Jürgen Rohwer, U-Boote. Eine Chronik in Bildern (Oldenburg/Hamburg: Stalling o.J., 1962), p. 94. Sinkings of Allied ships by Italian and Japanese submarines are not included in these totals; Prof. Dr. Rohwer to the author, 1 May 1997. Cf. Jürgen Rohwer, Axis Submarine Successes, introductory material trans. John A. Broadwin (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1983), pp. 153–160.

  4. Cited in Captain S. W. Roskill, D.S.C., R.N., The Period of Balance, Vol. II of The War at Sea 1939–1943, 3 vols, in 4 parts (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1956), p. 367.

  5. Cited in ibid., p. 367.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939–194$ (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1978), p. 181. Also author’s interview with Beesly, Lymington, England, 9 July 1986.

  8. Günter Hessler, The U-Boat War in the Atlantic, 1939–1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1989), Vol. II p. 100.

  9. Roskill, The Period of Balance, p. 368.

  10. Public Record Office [hereafter PRO], Kew (London), Cabinet [hereafter CAB] 86/4, A.U.(43)103, Memorandum by the First Sea Lord, 30th March 1943. Cf. Michael Howard in N. H. Gibbs, J. R. M. Butler, J. M. A. Gwyer, Michael Howard and John Ehrman, Grand Strategy, 6 volumes (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1956–1972), Vol. 4, August 1942-September 1943, p. 310. The exchange rate for the first quarter of 1943 is given in Professor C. H. Waddington, C.B.E., M.A., Sc.D., F.R.S., O.R. in World War 2: Operational Research Against the U-Boat (London: Elek Science, 1973 [though written in 1946]), p. 37. Also see J. David Brown, “The Battle of the Atlantic, 1941–1943: Peaks and Troughs,” in Timothy J. Runyan and Jan M. Copes, eds., To Die Gallantly: The Battle of the Atlantic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 154. As for the reported post-20 March despondency at the Admiralty, the closest expression of that in time found by this writer is PRO, Admiralty [hereafter ADM] 199/2060, “Monthly Anti-Submarine Report” for December 1943, dated 15 January 1944, p. 3, where the Anti-U-Boat Division of the Naval Staff, reflecting on the heavy losses to HX.229/SC.122, stated “… that it appeared possible that we should not be able to continue convoy as an effective system of defence against the enemy’s pack tactics.” This appears to have been a Staff position that neither reflected the Submarine Tracking Room’s appreciation nor percolated up to the First Sea Lord’s suite. No doubt it was a source for Roskill’s doleful sentences. For a German view of the convoy question, see Rohwer, Critical Convoy Battles, 187–188.

  11. Timothy P. Mulligan, Lone Wolf: The Life and Death of U-Boat Ace Werner Henke (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), p. 222, citing Bodo Herzog and Günter Schomaekers, Ritter der Tiefe: Graue Wölfe (Wels, Austria: Weisermühl München-Wels, 1976), pp. 308–309.

  12. Hessler, U-Boat War, Plan 60 (facing p. 113). These Naval Staff U-boat per day at sea estimates were inaccurate on the high side. The true figures, based on postwar analysis of German and British records, were as follows: November, 220 GRT; December, 96; January, 65; February, 99; March, 147.

  13. Eberhard Rössler, The U-Boat: The Evolution and Technical History of German Submarines, trans. Harold Erenberg (London/Melbourne: Arms and Armour Press, 1981), p. 127, graph: “Deliveries of Types VIIB, VIIC and C/41.” See also the information collected by the Operational Intelligence Centre of the British Admiralty on monthly averages of new U-boat construction, commissioning, and first war cruises (19 per month) in the period 1 April 1942–1 April 1943; PRO, ADM 223/16, “Special Intelligence Summary,” folio [hereafter f.] 115. The German Naval Intelligence Division figure for minimum tonnage requirement per month in 1943 is given in Hessler, U-Boat War, p. 17.

  14. Hessler, U-Boat War, pp. 101,103.

  15. National Archives and Records Administration [hereafter NARA], Archives II, College Park, Maryland, Kriegstagebuch des Befehlshabers der Unterseeboote (War Diary of the Commander-in-Chief of U-Boots), hereafter KTB-BdU, entry for r6 April 1943, record item PG 30348; National Archives Microfilm Publication T1022, Records of the German Navy, 1850–1945, received from the U.S. Naval History Division, roll 4065; National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized 194t—, Record Group [hereafter RG] 242. Henceforth in the present narrative U-Boat Headquarters is cited as BdU. All German naval war diaries, including those for individual U-boats, are cited with the prefix KTB.

  16. NARA, RG 457, Historic Cryptographic Collection, World War I Through World War II (declassified by the National Security Agency in 1996), Box 94, G.C.&C.S. Naval History, Vol. XVIII, “The Battle of the Atlantic” (typescript), by Lt.-Cmdr. R. J. Goodman, R.N.V.R., Lt.-Cmdr. K. W. McMahan, U.S.N.R., Lt.-Cmdr. E. J. Carpenter, U.S.N.R., and Others (Bletchley Park, n.d., probably 1946), p. 321; it is the wording as given in this manuscript that the present writer has used in the text. The first appearance of the “failed to press home” expression is in Naval Historical Branch, Ministry of Defence, London [hereafter NHB/MOD], Monthly Anti-Submarine Report, Anti-Submarine Warfare Division of the Naval Staff, April 1943, p. 184; the quotation is repeated in F. W. Barley and D. Waters, Naval Staff History, Second World War, The Defeat of the Enemy Attack on Shipping 1939–1945: A Study of Policy and Operations, vol. iA (Text and Appendices) (London: Historical Section, Admiralty, 1957), p. 93. and in many subsequent works, British and American.

  17. Beesly, Very Special Intelligence, p. 188.

  18. Interview with Horst von Schroeter, Bonn, Germany, 26 December 1995. Holding the highest rank in the postwar Bundesmarine, Vice Admiral v. Schroeter, now retired, was NATO Commander Allied Naval Forces Baltic Approaches in 1976–1979.

  19. NARA, KTB-BdU, 7, 25 April 1943.

  20. U-Boat Headquarters to boats, wireless (W/T) transmission cited in NARA, RG 457, Goodman, McMahan, Carpenter, et al., “Battle of the Atlantic,” p. 321.

  21. Roskill, War at Sea, Vol. II, p. 379, Map 41. See British Vessels Lost at Sea 1939–45 (first published in 1947 by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; Cambridge: Patrick Stephens, 1948) for daily and monthly listing of losses by enemy action of merchant vessels under the British flag, which includes those on United Kingdom, Dominion, Indian, or Colonial Registers as well as those on Bareboat Charter or on requisition from other flags. A calculation of these losses from 3 September 1939 through April 1943, excluding losses by capture, seizure, and scuttling, reveals that 58 percent of British losses were caused by U-boats, 17 percent by a
ircraft, 13 percent by mines, 7 percent by surface warships and raiders, 3 percent by S-boats, and 2 percent by unknown causes. The percentage of losses caused by U-boats as against other causes increased from 1941 (46% by U-boats, 54% by other causes) through 1942 (74% by U-boats, 26% by other causes) to the first four months of 1943 (86% by U-boats, 14% by other causes). Mines were a significant cause of losses in 1939 and 1940, when they were responsible for 32 and 23 percent, respectively; however, their significance declined markedly thereafter (aircraft supplanting them in rank in 1941 and 1942), and by the first four months of 1943 they were responsible for a negligible 5 percent of losses. By this reckoning it would appear that the statement by Professor Geoffrey Till—“Mines were another serious threat to British shipping, and in fact sank more ships than did U-boats—” is in error; Geoffrey Till, “The Battle of the Atlantic as History,” in Stephen Howarth and Derek Law, eds., The Battle of the Atlantic 1939–1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), p. 591.

  22. Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs 1939–1945, Foreword by Jak P. Mallmann Showell (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990), pp. 316–319. Cf. Rössler, U-Boat, p. 211, Table 34. On 31 March Dönitz had issued twelve “Commandments” to his staff, the second of which read: “The ‘Tonnage war’ has the first rank. For this every effort must be made.” Cited in Peter Padfield, Dönitz: The Last Führer (London: Panther Books, 1984), p. 311. Padfield is the best source for Dönitz’s early life and naval career.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Mulligan, Lone Wolf, p. 150. Mulligan slightly revises the figure of ten ships sunk, pointing out that one sinking (the American Antinous) was shared with U-512, commanded by Kapitänleutnant [hereafter Kptlt.] Wolfgang Schultze; p. 220.