Hunt and Kill

by Theodore P. Savas

  Today U-505 has been preserved and can be seen and toured in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry. I have been there many years ago now, and it was very impressive. It brings back to me many memories, although I did not serve on a Type IXC boat but rather a Type II and VIIC, and at the end of the war a Type XXI.

  U-505 is best remembered, from my point of view, as a monument to all seamen from every country who never returned from patrol. This collection of accounts, written by authors who know what they are writing about, will help preserve the history of this boat and the memory of these lost men, and in that regard the fate suffered by U-505 on June 4, 1944, can be turned into something positive for mankind.

  U-505’s feats were more than balanced by interminable months of drudgery and flat-out failure—odysseys, if you want, without the cleverness, skill, endurance, and character of an Odysseus. The only vision the men of U-505 are certain to have shared with Troy’s legendary conqueror must have been a determination to come home for good to their Penelopes and to leave the sea to Poseidon’s devious whims.

  Eric C. Rust

  Introduction

  I still remember the day—I was then a ten-year-old Gymnasiast in the town of Kappeln on the Baltic Sea just south of Denmark—when Dr. Schnoor acquainted me with my first Latin phrase: pars pro toto. “Doc” Schnoor was not a particularly exciting teacher in any of the subjects he taught (German, religion and history), in large measure because, as a veteran of Operation Barbarossa, he suffered from terrible pains in the stump of his right leg which the Russians had shot away two decades before. Indeed, it would have made more sense if our school principal and director of Latin studies, Pasche Klüver, who had lost an eye in Germany’s costly airborne attack on Crete in 1941, had introduced me to that majestic ancient language.

  Over the years I have used both the expression and the concept of pars pro toto on more than a few occasions on my students for it suggests a method of inquiry and a path toward deeper insight as simple and as straightforward as it is effective. Translated literally it means “a part for the whole” and corresponds to the basic notion that, by studying a small segment of a much larger phenomenon in great detail and intensity, one stands to gain a solid and valid understanding of that broader entity through a process of measured and informed generalization. Applied to our case, the story of U-505 as told in Hunt and Kill becomes the pars that holds the key to our grasp of the totum, that long, bloody, relentless, but also grand and epic struggle from 1939 to 1945 that transformed the Atlantic Ocean and its peripheral waters for those who were there into the most terrifying theatre of the most terrible war in modern memory.

  In all likelihood U-505 would have remained a more or less typical German submarine among hundreds of U-boats with similar war histories had it not become involved in a sequence of events that led to its capture on the high seas by American naval forces and its eventual display as the most prized exhibit of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. To be sure, its eleven wartime patrols before that fateful day off the West African coast in June 1944 knew moments of high suspense and fleeting glory, but those feats were more than balanced by interminable months of drudgery and flat-out failure—odysseys, if you want, without the cleverness, skill, endurance, and character of an Odysseus. The only vision the men of U-505 are certain to have shared with Troy’s legendary conqueror must have been a determination to come home for good to their Penelopes and to leave the sea to Poseidon’s devious whims.

  But back to the pars and the totum. This volume describes and analyzes the history of a single U-boat—its men, its activities, its adversaries, and its unusual fate—in as much detail as any reader is likely to discover in a book on naval history. Recounted by some of the foremost experts in the field today, the saga of U-505, by informed extension, is the story of all German submarines and submariners in World War II, and of all Allied sailors, soldiers, and airmen whose skills, wits, and courage marked the Battle of the Atlantic. When we read of the conception and deployment of Type IX boats like U-505 in the Kriegsmarine, we feel transported to U-boat headquarters where Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and his staff plotted their cleverly conceived but fatally doomed “tonnage war” against Allied shipping on all seven seas. The careful breakdown and scholarly scrutiny of the boat’s officers and men speaks volumes about the German Navy’s staffing habits and how they stacked up against the war’s inexorable demands. The summary of U-505’s prior patrols illuminates both the possibilities and limitations of Germany’s raiders of the deep as their chances for meaningful success first flickered and then expired like a candle’s flame out of wax and oxygen. And not least there is the masterful examination of the ever-diminishing options Oblt.z.S.d.R. Harald Lange and his men faced when their boat shot up from the depths to encounter certain destruction by a foe who held every trump card in the deck. No doubt, dozens of U-boat commanders must have felt exactly as Lange did when they opened their boat’s conning tower hatch after surfacing and realized in an instant that the game was up.

  This exercise of projecting the experience of U-505 onto the whole of the war at sea is by no means restricted to the German side. No reader can possibly be deceived into believing the Allies were destined to win the war on account of sheer superiority in numbers, industrial capacity, and motivation. The bloodletting associated with the U-boats’ assault on the United States’ and Canada’s Eastern Seaboard as well as the Caribbean in 1942 should cure anyone of such delusions. But numbers, economic potential, and the consistent application of human ingenuity to the necessities of combat did favor the Allied effort from the start and only grew more pronounced as the war grew old. Foremost among such endeavors must rank the extraordinary accomplishment of codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Britain who, with help from their American associates in Dayton, Ohio, broke the German Enigma cipher—known as the Ultra Secret to the Allies—which most German naval leaders in their unfathomable hubris deemed perfectly secure until the very end of the conflict. Still, reading the enemy’s mail is one thing; making him pay for it in tangible ways is quite another. And here again readers will discern that history is ultimately predicated on the performance and character of individuals, in this case Commander Knowles and Captain Gallery of the U.S. Navy whose mutual trust, friendship, and singleness of purpose made a decisive difference. Sometimes historians point to independent chains of causation to account for historical events whose outcomes they have trouble understanding or explaining, typically dismissing them as products of contingency or chance beyond plausible solution. No such excuse can apply to the Allied detection and capture of U-505. While the boat may have made its way home to Lorient with the greatest of luck in a counter-factual scenario, the indisputable reality remains that successful codebreaking, HF/DF vigilance, relentless aerial surveillance, and the dogged determination of a hunter-killer task force commander and his men, doomed the boat days before its final encounter with destiny.

  An argument can be made, as my good friend Admiral Topp reminds us in his Foreword to this work, that the capture of U-505, its crew and all its contents came too late to make a real difference in the Battle of the Atlantic. Fair enough. But war is also about symbols, heroes, and yes, trophies. And here the ultimate significance of U-505’s journey comes together for us alive today, from its encounter with Task Group 22.3 off the littoral of Africa, to its lay-over in Bermuda, its long and almost lethal sojourn at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to its final and present-day display off the shores of Lake Michigan in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois. There was nothing in the stars that destined this boat, built proudly and efficiently by the Deutsche Werft in Hamburg in 1941, to end its life as a tourist attraction and curiosity for school children and history enthusiasts in the heartland of its former enemy. By the same token, every indication suggests the Allies earned their triumph fair and square, and they continue to enjoy every right to savor a victory celebrating that eternal and inimitable recipe for victory: brains and grit.r />
  Critical readers, especially those with a pacifist set of mind, may take issue with the title we chose for our book: Hunt and Kill. Upon superficial inspection it appears to convey a taste and predeliction for blood and violence, for celebrating the gory side of things. We certainly do not feel that way; nor did the men engaged on either side of the U-boat campaign. They deeply respected their enemy—as we do with the benefit of hindsight—and took extraordinary care to ensure their stricken foe, once cornered beyond hope, enjoyed every chance to survive. The capture of U-505 is a remarkable but not at all unusual case in point. At the same time both sides knew that as long as the fight was on and neither side had gained a decisive advantage, everything came down to that simple yet terrible demand: Hunt and Kill.

  One final annotation. Not long ago I published a book review about a work on the strategic cooperation (or lack of it) between the navies of Japan and Germany in World War II. While my evaluation of the book was on balance quite positive, I felt impelled to include the following observation: “Collaborative historiography involving multiple authors often leads to an uneven product marked by gaps, duplication, imbalance in coverage, irritating changes in style and emphasis, and a less than satisfactory sense of closure, even if aimed at a knowledgeable audience.” No such problems pertain to the present volume. Readers will immediately and instinctively notice that this study, thanks to the guidance of its editor and the expertise of its contributors, is carefully coordinated to focus exclusively on U-505 and its singular but telling fate—pars pro toto.

  One of the myths regarding German U-boats is that all submarines were created equal and looked alike. In fact, German naval architects and engineers produced a range of different submarine types, each intended for specific tactical or strategic purposes, each with its particular strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and limitations.

  Eric C. Rust

  No Target Too Far

  The Genesis, Concept, and Operations of

  Type IX U-Boats in World War II

  Artícles 188 and 191 of the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany’s representatives signed under protest on June 28, 1919, could not have been clearer: “All German submarines…must [be] handed over to the Governments of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers…Those in course of construction shall be broken up entirely by the German Government under the supervision of the said Governments…The construction or acquisition of any submarine, even for commercial purposes, shall be forbidden in Germany.”1

  These stark and unforgiving clauses closed Germany’s first great experiment in underwater naval warfare, an experiment which had sent twelve million tons of Allied and neutral shipping to the bottom of the oceans, had struck terror into the hearts of merchant sailors and naval crews alike, indeed had lent to the First World War a dimension nobody could in the least have foreseen when the “Guns of August” ended a spectacular century of peace, progress and prosperity in that by then distant summer of 1914. It had also cost the lives of 5,000 German U-boat officers and men, the wrecks of their sunken craft, some 200 of them, along with those of their thousands of victims, littering the waters around the British Isles, the Atlantic, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean Sea.

  No profound insight is required to discern why it was primarily British (and to some extent American) pressure that reduced Germany’s postwar surface fleet to miniscule proportions compared to its status as the world’s second most powerful navy in 1914, or why the Anglo-Saxon powers specifically insisted on the total and permanent elimination of Germany’s submarine component. On numerous occasions during the war, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson expressed his outrage over what he considered Germany’s barbaric use of submarines, with the Lusitania case of May 1915 ranking merely as the most notorious of such incidents. Indeed, Germany’s calculated resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 led directly to the United States’s declaration of war against the Center Powers two months later and ultimately to the Second Reich’s military defeat and political collapse. In a similar fashion the British Admiralty considered the submarine a decidedly ungentle-manly weapon—sneaky, stealthy, and bluntly brutal, its hit-and-run tactics and newfangled torpedo technology at odds with, and unworthy of, the western naval tradition which the Royal Navy felt called upon to preserve and to prolong. To play the game fairly, the Germans should have come out and fought in the open in time-honored Nelsonian style on the surface for all to see, as their High Seas Fleet had done briefly at Jutland in 1916 with sufficiently bloody but strategically inconclusive results. To Anglo-Saxon observers, Germany’s U-boat campaign simply proved the Teutonic way of making war had indeed deteriorated ingloriously from the days of Frederick the Great and, more recently those of Otto von Bismarck, to a level akin to the terror of late antiquity’s Attila and his Huns.

  Upon honest inspection, even the winners of the war had to admit by 1919 that the hostilities just concluded held out a number of revolutionary lessons for future naval warfare, just as they did for their counterparts in the army who had survived the slaughter along the Western Front and elsewhere, or for those who had opened a new dimension altogether by taking the war to the air. The experience of Germany’s formidable submarine campaign—by 1918 the Kaiser’s shipyards had completed no fewer that 344 boats of various designs to add to the 28 U-boats in commission when the war began—would undermine the very foundations upon which western naval doctrine had rested for centuries.2

  Among many others, the experience of the First World War raised the question of whether major naval powers such as Great Britain, the United States and Japan could or even should continue to try to exercise effective and ubiquitous control over the seas. Enemy submarines, if available in sufficient numbers and operating from convenient forward bases, stood to threaten such hegemony by endangering not only the vital lifelines of merchant shipping but the safety of the surface fleet units designed and deployed to protect them. The era in which a numerically and qualitatively dominant fleet of capital ships with its vast and superior fire power, together with a supporting cast of cruisers, destroyers, and torpedo boats, could literally chase the enemy from the seas appeared to have come to a close.

  The future strategy of naval superpowers called for a considerably more sophisticated approach. Whereas domination of the seas remained a desirable and perhaps even feasible objective, it could only be attained by complex fleets consisting of as many as five different elements:

  (a) mighty battleships and battle cruisers, along with the new and as yet untried aircraft carriers, would continue to symbolize and attempt to exercise maritime hegemony by destroying or neutralizing the enemy’s surface fleet;

  (b) a second and very differently composed set of naval units would guard one’s own merchantmen against the new submarine menace with large numbers of escort craft for the defense of these commercial vessels, whether sailing in convoys or singly, and with specialized submarine chasers to hunt, locate, destroy or otherwise deter the enemy’s hunters of the deep;

  (c) an effective blockade of hostile ports and coasts would be required to deny use of maritime communications to the enemy;

  (d) a submarine force of one’s own to reinforce the blockade, threaten the enemy’s remaining supply lines, and to perform reconnaissance duties for the surface fleet; and

  (e) the development of a naval air arm for such diverse tasks as reconnaissance, artillery spotting, submarine hunting, ship and shore bombardment, and aerial combat, was fast becoming indispensable.

  Such an approach, if realistically pursued, demanded massive outlays in terms of finance, resources, and personnel, and would be a hard sell to civilian authorities or the other branches of the military—particularly after 1918, when in most minds another war of modern dimensions was all but unimaginable.

  From the perspective of middling and minor naval powers—which included Germany as the principal loser of the war—the tactical characteristics and strategic possibilities of the submarine represented a huge
and quickly understood windfall. Whatever else the war that had just ended may have meant, it introduced in the submarine a weapon ideally suited for the needs of naval underdogs. With submarines, even if built and deployed in modest numbers, such lesser powers could compel their mightier neighbors to lay out vast amounts of financial, material, and human resources for their naval establishments in pursuit of a sense of national and maritime security that might prove fleeting or altogether illusory. While by their very nature submarines could never hope to gain more than partial or temporary control of the seas, they surely could deny any such hegemony to their adversaries. The higher their numbers—and the better supported they were by forward bases, surface raiders, aircraft, supply vessels and reliable reconnaissance of all kinds—the more lethal their threat to the enemy’s oceanic lifelines would become.

  In this sense Articles 188 and 191 of the Versailles Treaty not only exemplified another manifestation of Allied revenge and mean-spiritedness vis-à-vis defeated Germany in a treaty saturated with such sentiments, but mirrored the concern, uncertainty, and even fear of Allied military experts who sensed the victory of 1918 had been bought at the cost of a revolution in military technology that threatened to negate and even overturn in the long run the Allied triumph just won. Their response of denying modern weapons such as submarines, aircraft, and tanks to the vanquished powers, and engaging in arms-control and disarmament measures such as those negotiated at the Washington Conference of 1922, could be but feeble, half-hearted, and pessimistic efforts to arrest the march of modernization and innovation.3