Shadow over the Atlantic

by Robert Forsyth

  The convoy battle raged during the night of the 19th/20th as Dönitz ordered more attacks. During the early hours of the 20th, one U-boat, U-536, was blown to the surface by depth charges from the frigate Nene and the corvettes of Canadian Support Group 5, Calgary and Snowberry. As the submarine surfaced, the Allied ships used all their guns to finish it off. The vessel's commander, Kapitänleutnant Rolf Schauenburg, and 16 of his crew, were later rescued by a British frigate.53 Simultaneously, Allied air cover was strengthened as morning broke; 12 B-17s and B-24s operated throughout the day.54

  Taking over from Bretnütz to monitor the convoy’s progress was another aircraft from FAGr 5. But 20 November was to prove a black day for the Gruppe. The plan was for the third group of Schill boats to make an attack during the evening in a line 46 ° 15´ North – 18° 00´–21° 30´ West and to be in position by 1800 hrs. Fliegerführer Atlantik would provide reconnaissance during the morning with Fw 200s from III./KG 40 and by deploying a single Ju 290 from FAGr 5 during the afternoon. However it was to be a luckless deployment, for Allied intercepts indicate that no German aircraft made contact with SL.139/MKS.30 during the day.55

  At 1145 hrs that morning, Ju 290A-2 Wk-Nr 0159 (originally SB+QI), coded 9V+CK, commanded and piloted by the recently arrived Leutnant Hans-Roger Friedrich of 2./FAGr 5, formerly of LTS 290, took off from Mont de Marsan to track the convoy in the area 24° West 8656–34° West 2656 to 24° West 9453. At some point the Ju 290 was joined by its escort of eight Ju 88C-6s from 3./ZG 1, which had also been detailed to watch over a lone Fw 200 of 7./KG 40.56 During the afternoon, at a point off Cape (Cabo) Ortegal at the north-western tip of Spain, the German formation was spotted by a patrol of four RAF Mosquito IIs of No. 157 Squadron, led by Wing Commander James A. Mackie, which had recently moved to Predannack in Cornwall. The four fighters were crewed by Mackie and Flying Officer Leslie Scholefield; Flight Lieutenant George Dyke and Warrant Officer Charles Aindow; Flying Officer John Clifton and Pilot Officer G. Davidson; and Flying Officer Verdun Hannawin with Pilot Officer Bill Tofts.57 The Mosquitos were not alone: four Beaufighter Xs from No. 248 Squadron from the same base were also operating over the Biscay. The British aircraft were flying an ‘Instep’ patrol, intended to shield Coastal Command units from enemy fighter attack while on operations in the Bay of Biscay, and they were searching for enemy aircraft eight miles north-west of Estaca de Bares. According to No. 157 Squadron’s subsequent intelligence report, ‘Course was set at “0” feet for 48° North 07°30´ West. Cape Ortegal was sighted at 1351 hrs.’ The weather was murky: ten-tenths cloud at 1,500–2,000 ft, with visibility for two miles.

  All these units then clashed in a large aerial engagement 13 km off the Spanish coast. At 1410 hrs, having attacked and fought the Ju 88s, Wing Commander Mackie ordered the Mosquitos to re-form. No. 157 Squadron’s Intelligence Officer later recorded the following in the mission debrief:

  At this moment a large aircraft was seen 15 miles north of Cape Ortegal, flying north-west at 400 feet and about two miles away. When F/Lt. [George] Dyke was about 1,500 yards from the aircraft, he recognised it as a Ju 290. The enemy aircraft opened fire from a turret behind the cockpit with explosive or self-destroying shells. [Dyke] kept to the port side, out of range and waited for the other aircraft to come in on the starboard side. He estimated that the enemy aircraft was flying at 260 mph [420 km/h] and it had dropped height to about 150 feet [46 m].

  W/Cdr Mackie attacked from the starboard from 600 yards [550 m], closing to 200 yards [180 m] dead astern, firing two long bursts. Strikes were seen on the outer starboard engine, along the fuselage and on both port engines. The three engines that were hit were alight and omitting black smoke, the port outer burning furiously.

  As the Mosquito broke away, the Ju 290 was seen in a shallow dive. It hit the sea with a huge explosion on impact, flames going up to 100 feet [30 m]. Wreckage on the sea continued to burn for some time. The combat ended 40 miles [65 km] north-west of Cape Ortegal at 1415 hours.

  F/Lt. Dyke came into attack from slightly above and from the port quarter just after W/Cdr. Mackie started his attack. He gave a 2–3 second burst from 600 yards [550 m] closing to 300 yards [275 m]. He saw that a port engine was on fire and received return fire, but could not see strikes as his windscreen had been splintered on the starboard side during the previous combat [with the Ju 88s of ZG 1]. His navigator (W/O Charles Aindow) however saw strikes on the port engine. As he broke away to starboard, the enemy aircraft fired a three-star red cartridge just before it went into the sea. F/O [John] Clifton took photographs of the enemy aircraft burning on the water.58

  Wing Commander Mackie, and his navigator, Flying Officer Scholefield, claimed the destruction of a Ju 290. They also claimed a damaged Ju 88. Two of the other Mosquito crews claimed, collectively, a Ju 88 probably destroyed and two more damaged.59 The Beaufighters claimed one Ju 88 destroyed and two damaged. In fact, I./ZG 1 lost only the Ju 88C-6 of the Staffelkapitän of 3.Staffel, Oberleutnant Hans Schuster.60 But for 2./FAGr 5 the first loss of a Ju 290 represented even greater human sacrifice; Friedrich, and his crew of Leutnant Gottfried Sachse (co-pilot), Leutnant Heinz Arnold (observer), Unteroffizier Wilhelm Schief (radio-operator), Feldwebel Friedrich Gerschwitz (flight engineer), Feldwebel Adolf Martens (gunner), Obergefreiter Horst Bentke (gunner) and Gefreiter Heinz Engelleitner (gunner) failed to return. Schief’s body was eventually recovered by a fishing vessel, the Mardomingo A, near La Coruña on 15 December. In order to identify the body, the Spanish naval command in La Coruña advised the local German consulate of the number on Schief’s identity tag. Felipe Rodriguez, at the German consulate, contacted the German air attaché in Madrid who then checked with the RLM in Berlin. It was not until June 1944 that Rodriguez was able to confirm to the Spanish naval authorities that the body was that of the Köln-born NCO, Schief.61 He was later buried at the Deutscher Soldat Militärfriedhof at Cuacos de Yuste, west of Madrid.62

  As soon as news reached Mont de Marsan of the loss of Friedrich and his crew, at 1331 hrs, the Gruppe sent out Oberleutnant Karl-Heinz Schmidt, whose Ju 290 was loaded with extra dinghies, to conduct a search of the sea area in question, but it was a fruitless effort. Another mission conducted later that day by Hauptmann Bergen failed to locate the convoy which had altered course, but in any case, Bergen was forced to abort early because of an engine failure.63

  Dönitz too threw in the towel on the 20th and called off his U-boats. Thirty-one U-boats had been deployed, but the sum total of the attack was the damage inflicted to Chanticleer and the shooting down of two aircraft.64 Six of the Schill U-boats had been sunk in the action against the convoy, while another three limped away to France with severe damage and/or heavy casualties.65 The BdU war diary noted: ‘Our own air reconnaissance obtained no results on the decisive last day because of the few aircraft available.’66

  An official historian of the U-boat war in the Atlantic, Günter Hessler, wrote:

  This last operation again demonstrated the impossibility of conducting proper reconnaissance and U-boat direction with only a handful of aircraft. The convoy’s position had to be established not once or twice in 24 hours, but every four hours at least, otherwise it was impossible to manoeuvre the submerged U-boats ahead of the convoy in time, or to counter a diversionary change of course. While it was gratifying to confirm that our aircraft were able, with their radar, to maintain contact with a convoy at night, it was unfortunate that beacon signals alone did not indicate the convoy position with sufficient accuracy for the U-boats, which at night had to rely exclusively on visual sighting.67

  The next day, 21 November, with U-boats of the Schill wolfpack failing to make any impact against the convoy, the Luftwaffe launched a strike, this time using He 177s of II./KG 40 fitted with new Hs 293 glide bombs. SL.139/MKS.30 was once again located, this time, firstly, by five Fw 200s of III./KG 40 which commenced their sorties from 0330 hrs and were airborne for 12–13 hours. The Condors were followed by two Ju 290s from 2./FAGr 5, the
A-3 Wk-Nr 0163 9V+IK and the A-4 Wk-Nr 0158 9V+BK, which were airborne at 0400 hrs and 0915 hrs respectively. 9V+IK first reported sighting the ships at 1020 hrs in 24° West 9700. At 1100 hrs, ‘I’’s information was passed to one of the Fw 200s which was in the vicinity and the approaching 9V+BK. Fifty-seven minutes later, the second Ju 290 was warned to watch for beacon signals. At 1215 hrs, the aircraft advised its expected arrival over the convoy as 1515 hrs. Five minutes after that, 9V+IK, still the only German aircraft with visual contact, signalled a detailed report on the composition of the convoy at 24° West 9748, advising ‘50 motor vessels and six escorts, speed seven [knots], one reconnaissance aircraft’. Then, 30 minutes later, the Ju 290 was forced to discontinue shadowing SL.139/MKS.30 as a result of engine problems. 9V+BK was advised of this development, but it seems that the aircraft did not make contact with the enemy ships. At 1815 hrs, this aircraft advised it was abandoning its mission, with no shadowing reports having been signalled. It returned to Mont de Marsan at around 0025 hrs on the 22nd.68

  When the He 177s of II./KG 40 attacked using their Hs 293s, they most probably did so using the location information provided by 9V+IK at 1220 hrs. The 25 Heinkels, led by Major Rudolf Mons, took off from Bordeaux-Mérignac at 1215 hrs and arrived over the convoy some 675 km north-east of Cape Finisterre about 4¼ hours later. By this stage, the weather had deteriorated with the cloud base down to 300–400 m, and the bombers concentrated on attacking two ships that were straggling, the 6,065-ton Marsa and the 4,405-ton Delius.69 They sank the former, leaving it burning, and damaged the latter. Two frigates, HMS Calder and HMS Drury, were also attacked with Hs 293s, but they evaded the bombs by rapid manoeuvring, defensive fire and by letting off flares. A single He 177 attempted to attack the destroyers Watchman and Winchelsea, but failed to damage them.

  During their attack, the He 177s had launched 40 bombs, 25 of which failed. The unit returned to Bordeaux still in bad weather between 2100 and 2400 hrs, to discover that they had lost three of their number, with a fourth crashing on landing, suffering bad damage, and three others sustaining lighter damage.70

  In overall terms, it had not been a particularly auspicious start to operations for FAGr 5 either, but despite fuel and range limitations and attacks by enemy aircraft, the unit’s contribution, such as it was, had been key to the efforts of the U-boats. In flights averaging 17–18 hours’ duration, the Ju 290s were able to radio back their observations on the convoy’s composition, as well as that of its escort, plus details of its course, defence and speed. Oskar Schmidt notes how the lurking presence of the big four-engined shadowers close to the convoy had a ‘surprising effect on the enemy’ forcing him to introduce new defensive tactics, course and composition.71

  Nevertheless, as Captain S.W. Roskill eloquently describes in the official history of Britain’s war at sea, ‘the long-awaited cooperation of the Luftwaffe with the U-boats had not achieved the results hoped for by Dönitz. The truth now seems to be that it came too late to restore the balance, let alone tip the scales in the German favour.’72

  Tactically, Hauptmann Fischer had directed that, whenever possible, FAGr 5’s aircraft were to fly as low as possible, in order to operate below enemy radar detection. Occasionally, the Junkers would climb to around 1000 m altitude to fly a search circle. A key element of FAGr 5’s operations was the nose-mounted FuG 200 Hohentwiel air-to-surface vessel (ASV) radar apparatus. When installed, this ASV and navigational search radar was able to cover a radius of about 100 km, weather permitting.73 Oskar Schmidt recalled:

  The ‘Hohentwiel’ rendered good services in addition to visual observation, giving a good bearing on the screen at up to 60 km. In this way, an area of sea could be searched accurately. By adopting search circles at 1000 m altitude, we could detect a target at up to around 100 km away. Upon detection of enemy shipping, the strength and composition was determined and pictures taken after detection. Then a safe distance would be kept, the shipping shadowed and then reported to the Gruppe. Further orders were then issued and our command decided on the future course of the flight.74

  Intended to replace the Rostock Gerät search equipment from the summer of 1943, and developed and manufactured by C. Lorenz of Berlin, the FuG 200 Hohentwiel was a low-UHF band system which had a greater range than its predecessor of some 60–80 km when used to locate individual ships. It also had less impact on aircraft speed because of its small antennae array. But production was slow and although the apparatus was intended for use in the Ju 88, Ju 188, He 111, Do 217 and Ju 290, in the case of III./KG 40, by December 1943, only 16 of 26 Fw 200s had been fitted with the radar.75

  Externally, the transmitter antenna for the FuG 200 comprised eight end-fed, half-wave horizontal dipoles arranged in colinear pairs mounted on brackets in the nose of a Ju 290, facing forward in the line of flight. The receiver had no r-f amplification, but was connected, by means of a motor-driven switch, alternately to two antennas fitted on the right and left sides of the fuselage at angles of 30° to the line of flight. Internally, the apparatus was powered by a motor generator and consisted of a transmitter and modulator, an indicator unit (the Sichtgerät [SG] 200) and a control- or switch box (Schaltkasten [SK] 200). There was a two-tube, high-power transmitter, a superheterodyne receiver, and a cathode ray tube (CRT) indicator. The switch box fitted with four knobs was located in the observer’s position in the aircraft. The top left knob controlled the zero point; the top right, the focus of the trace; the bottom left changed the range from 0 to 150 km for search and navigational aid to the 0–150-km range for approach and attack; the bottom right governed the brightness of the trace. A two-way switch at the top of the box turned the equipment on and off, while the lowermost knob remotely controlled the gain in the receiver. A lever to the right of the unit was self-centring and made a slight adjustment in the frequency. A left-hand switch was used when the Hohentwiel was being used at 2000 m or higher.

  The range scale etched on the glass of the CRT screen coincided with the vertical timebase and was calibrated from zero to 150 km at 10-km intervals, the distance between the 10-km marks being progressively smaller as extreme range was reached. The vertical timebase took the form of a screen of perspex sheet metal with 15 parallel horizontal lines reading 0 to 150 km (from bottom to top). Because of ground returns, satisfactory readings could not be obtained at less than 3 km. To offset that, some FuG 200 sets were fitted with a switch which magnified scale so that close ranges could read off to the nearest 50 m. The device operated on a frequency range of 570 megacycles per second and had a pulse recurrence frequency of 600 cycles per second.76

  Schmidt also remembered:

  We were always on alert for Allied long-range Lightning and other types of fighters which operated from bases in Ireland or Gibraltar, to intercept our machines when they flew out and to pick them up over Cape Ortegal using British radio stations. Our machines were often intercepted on their return flights. At that stage the crew was tired after a long flight time (18 hours) and was, of course, vulnerable at the moment of landing. Therefore attention was demanded from the crews until the very last moment of landing at the operational airfield.77

  Away from the arena of operations over the Atlantic, FAGr 5 continued to strengthen its back-up services; in late November, Oberleutnant Schmidt of the Stabskompanie made several flights to Achmer from where he travelled to the army vehicle repair workshops in the Osnabrück area to obtain surplus light vehicles that FAGr 5 could take on. These were then loaded into Ju 290 transports which had completed their repair and maintenance at the Achmer facility and flown to Mont de Marsan. In such a way, the Gruppe gradually built up its motor transport pool.78

  More tragedy wracked FAGr 5 on 24 November when Ju 290A-4 Wk-Nr 0168 (PI+PV) 9V+FK of 2.Staffel, piloted by Oberfeldwebel Josef Mohr, crashed shortly after taking off on an operational mission. The aircraft climbed vertically, rolled over and burst into flames. The entire crew was lost. It was thought that the accident may have been attributable to a ma
lfunctioning three-way control switch at a time when the aircraft was not taking off in the usual way against the wind towards the west, but rather the reverse. In this direction, the aircraft had to fly over a small knoll, which interrupted the normal initial climb.79 On the runway behind Mohr was the aircraft of Hauptmann Fischer, 9V+BK, and he and his crew watched in horror as the landing lights of 9V+FK faded upwards into the cloud only to reappear and fall away to earth. The commander and observer of the Junkers was Leutnant Wolfgang Adler of the Gruppenstab, and Mohr was accompanied at the controls by Feldwebel Herbert Greihe. They, and the rest of the crew, comprising Oberfeldwebel Hans Werner (radio-operator), Unteroffizier Karl Scheurer (radio-operator), Feldwebel Paul Borchert (flight engineer), Unteroffizier Paul Fridetzki (flight enginer and gunner), Obergefreiter Theodor Wienken (gunner) and Gefreiter Josef Zelenka (gunner), were buried in the military cemetery at Mont de Marsan airport with full honours.80

  Two days later, the aircraft of the Kommandeur, Hauptmann Fischer, who was on board as commander, Ju 290A-1 Wk-Nr 0166 (PI+PT) 9V+BK, made a belly-landing when the landing gear collapsed at Mont de Marsan while being piloted by Leutnant Herbert Wagner. The aircraft suffered only 20 per cent damage, but it would be out of commission for some time, thus reducing an already low unit-serviceability level; when it came back on roster, it would be assigned to 1./FAGr 5.81

  The loss of Adler and Mohr and their crew was a grim harbinger of winter at Mont de Marsan. As autumn faded away, the days retained a clarity and a gentle warmth, but at night the temperatures dropped significantly and the men of FAGr 5 shivered in their billets. The Stabskompanie arranged with the local army administration for the supply of some stoves to warm up the accommodation, which provided some relief but, as Oskar Schmidt recalled: ‘The temperature fluctuations in south-west France, between sun and shade and day and night bedevilled the men. There were many colds.’82