Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  Dönitz received command, successively, of two boats, UC-25 and UB-68. With the first he sank a 5,000-GRT Italian collier and with the second a 3,883-GRT British steamer. While pursuing a convoy east of Malta on 4 October 1918, he experienced a diving accident that left four of his crew dead and the rest, including Dönitz, prisoners on board HMS Snapdragon. Taken to England, he was placed in a POW camp for officers at Redmires, near Sheffield, where to gain his release he feigned insanity—with such success that he was removed for a time (though this was not his plan) to the Manchester Lunatic Asylum. Eventually, in July 1919, he was repatriated to Germany, where he joined the new postwar Navy. In the Reichsmarine, as it was then called, he rose in rank by 1921 to Kapitänleutnant and by 1928 to Korvettenkapitän. In the latter year he commanded the Fourth Torpedo Boat Half Flotilla. Two years later he visited Ceylon and other countries in the Far East, after which he put in four years as a high Naval Staff officer at Wilhelmshaven. In June 1934, as a newly minted Fregattenkapitän eager for return to sea duty, he took command of the light cruiser Emden and, accompanied by his adjutant, Kptlt. Eberhard Godt, he steamed with great enthusiasm around the Cape of East Africa and on to Ceylon, thence through the Red Sea and Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, where orders awaited him to return home. Germany was secretly rebuilding its U-boat fleet, starting with Tvpe-IIA and IIB “canoes.” and the capital-ship admirals who wanted to refight the Battle of Jutland (31 May-1 June 1916) had agreed, reluctantly, that there should be an auxiliary Ubootwaffe. Would Dönitz like to be considered for Führer der Uboote (FdU)? It meant giving up a new cruise on Emden to Borneo, Japan, China, and Australia, but Dönitz said yes. On 28 September 1935, he took over a training fleet of thirteen boats, all that then existed—Flotilla Wed-digen, named after a World War I ace. A year later, as FdU, with the first Type VIIs and Type IXs on stream, Dönitz began the creation of the U-boat force that in only three years would begin slashing at Britain’s economic and military sea communications.

  The year 1939 was much too early for Dönitz to go to war for a second time. He lacked both the boats and the crews. Repeatedly he insisted that three hundred was the minimum number of boats required to wage successful operations against trade in the Atlantic, and thus to sever Britain’s essential lifelines. But he was forced by events and had to do the best he could with what he had. In fact, those crews he did possess had been exquisitely trained to watch-movement precision by Dönitz himself. Every commander had to have completed sixty-six surface and sixty-six submerged simulated attacks before being allowed to launch a live torpedo, while Dönitz personally watched and coached either from within the boat or from his command vessel Saar. The U-boatmen were his men in every sense of the word. After one of them, Günther Prien (U-47), sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys on 14 October 1939, the then Rear Admiral Dönitz was promoted from Führer to Befehlshaber (commander in chief) Unterseeboote (BdU).

  A visibly commanding figure, Dönitz stood only slightly above average height, though his extraordinarily slender frame and upright bearing lent the appearance of added stature. His countenance at fifty years was serious, even stern, but it could wrinkle quickly into a smile or even give way to a loud guffaw when something struck him as incongruous. Perhaps the best clues to his personality and attributes are those found in commendations and annual fitness reports written by superior officers from 1913 on: “Charming, dashing, plucky … especially good professional ability … strength of judgment… very good military appearance, socially very deft … popular comrade, tactful messmate … magnificent dash and great circumspection … tough and brisk officer … absolutely reliable … always in good spirits … taut, stern … quick power of perception and blameless character… iron willpower, goal-oriented certainty and unwearying toughness.”13 This, then, was the man who had determined to vault the Atlantic moat and test his will against the U.S. Navy’s.

  Since Pearl Harbor and the lifting of all restrictions on U.S. targets on 9 December Dönitz and Godt had drawn up a meticulously detailed plan for twelve Type IXB and IXC boats to strike simultaneously against offshore North America from Halifax in the north to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in the south. The targets were to be independently routed freighters and tankers with war cargoes vital to both U.S. and British industries and defenses. Off the United States there would as yet be no convoys in place, the naval device used since medieval times to defeat a guerre de course, a war on commerce. Nor, Dönitz reasoned, would there be for some months to come anything resembling an effective antisubmarine defense. Twelve boats were hardly enough to do the damage, and to create the shock, intended. One hundred boats would more exactly match the operational ideal. But the Ubootwaffe was continually short of its strategic needs. Despite the fact that he had made the German U-boats the dread of the oceans, they were still available only in absurdly small numbers.

  At fault, first, was Hitler himself, the land animal, who never wanted or expected a U-boat war, failed to understand the necessity of rupturing Allied sea communications in the Atlantic, and instead poured the majority of Germany’s industrial resources into tanks for warfare across his obsession: the Eurasian landmass. Just days before, Hitler had sacked his army commander, taken command of the Army himself, and rejected a Kriegsmarine plan to concentrate all available naval forces on an effort to isolate Britain and take her out of the war before America could use her as “aircraft carrier England” from which to bomb and eventually invade the continent. Hitler’s eyes looked only to the east. Next to blame was OKM, Supreme Naval Command, and Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, commander in chief Navy, in particular, who failed to see before 1939 that the capital ship of the n°xt Atlantic war would not be the dreadnought, or battleship, but, as World War I had already demonstrated (excepting the stalemate Battle of Jutland in late spring of 1916), the U-boat allied with the minelayer. Dönitz had pleaded for a fleet of three hundred U-boats that would be barely adequate for a war against British trade. With one-third of the boats in repair, another third en route to or returning from patrol stations, at any one time he would have one hundred boats on combat operations. Instead, Raeder and Hitler, influenced by a Naval Staff dominated by surface gunnery officers in the Jutland tradition, opted for a mainly surface fleet: a home fleet of four superbattleships, like Bismarck and Tirpitz, two heavy cruisers, and flotillas of destroyers; a raiding force for attacking commerce composed of three pocket battleships, five armored cruisers, five light cruisers, and 190 U-boats; and two attack forces, each of which would consist of an aircraft carrier, three fast battleships, two cruisers, and destroyers. The projected construction/completion date of this Z Plan, as it was called, was 1948!14

  When war with England broke out in September 1939, Dönitz had to go to sea with fifty-seven U-boats, only forty-six of which were operational. So small was the total fleet that Dönitz could not place more than an average of thirteen attackers on station during 1939-40, the rest being in transit to or from station, or in the repair yard. At the same time he could count on only two deliveries of new boats per month since Hitler, biased toward quick victory on the Continent, had brought U-boat construction almost to a halt. By the time full-scale construction resumed, Germany’s chances of dominating the Atlantic were seriously at question. Still, with one-sixth the force he had estimated as required for a war on British trade, Dönitz scored a series of staggering successes off Britain’s coast in what became known as the “happy time”—a million tons sunk from July to the end of October 1940. He easily imagined the crippling blow he could have delivered with a three-hundred-boat fleet in that first year before British defenses stiffened. The war with England could have been over.

  Deliveries of new boats increased to fifteen a month by June 1941 and to twenty early the next year. Meanwhile the surface, or blue-water, fleet construction envisioned in Z Plan slowed to a near halt.15 Ironically, the surface vessels on operational status by December 1941 had been reduced to in-port “flypaper status,” t
heir function now being to tie down the British Home Fleet that might otherwise be directed at German cities, ports, and commerce, or at targets in the Mediterranean, while the lone German capital ship, the U-boat, ranged far across the compass rose seeking prey to devour. Dönitz was proud of his boats and his crews, and of what they had been able to accomplish against enemy odds. Yet other forces continued to conspire against his plans for decisive victory at sea, including the drain on his resources to support operations in the Mediterranean and off Gibraltar and the diversion of boats to weather reporting. Also frustrating was the practice, defended by Raeder, of drawing off maintenance workers from U-boats to repair work on surface vessels at Kiel, Hamburg, and Bremen; at one point eight hundred dockyard workers were reassigned from U-boat maintenance to repair fuel tanks on the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. Revealingly, oneof Dönitz’s memoranda to Naval Staff on this subject came back with the inadvertent marginal comment, “We don’t want to become a navy of U-boats.”16 Dönitz received no satisfaction on this matter, as he lamented in his December war diary alongside bitter tallies of boats lost transiting the Strait of Gibraltar.17 By December his force consisted of ninety-one operational boats, of which twenty-three were in the Mediterranean, three more under orders from Naval Staff to proceed there, six deployed west of Gibraltar, and four stationed on a line from Reykjavik to North Cape along the Arctic Circle. Of the remaining fifty-five, thirty-three were in shipyards undergoing repair, eleven en route to or from operational areas, six more in various states of refit, and five on North Atlantic patrol, including one boat, U-653, that Dönitz had placed west of the Faeroe Islands as a radio decoy to simulate the presence of many more boats than actually existed.18

  The crudest blow of all came that same December when, on the tenth, the day after restrictions were lifted on American shipping, Dönitz asked for twelve long-distance Type IX boats to be released for attacks against the U.S. coastal sea-lanes, and Naval Staff allowed him only six.19 Two were IXBs(U-709, 123), four were IXCs(U-66, 125, 128, 130). It was incredible to him that large boats plainly unsuitable for Gibraltar duty were being maintained there instead of being assigned where they could do the most good. Only six, then, could sail on the most dramatic cruise of the war, which—the same 10 December—Dönitz christened Operation Paukenschlag—“Operation Drumbeat.”20 The code name was of a type favored by Dönitz. His nomenclature for the most recent U-boat operational groups in the North Atlantic had included Mordbrenner (Incendiary), Schlagetot (Hacker), Reisswolf (Shredder), and Raubgraf (Robber Baron). Paukenschlag was designed to inflict a sudden severe injury on the American enemy. The blow would come like a thunderbolt—or like the percussion of a timpani stick on the tightly stretched head of a brass-barreled drum. Intended were quick, violent sinkings and resounding psychological shock. By having all the boats strike their first targets on the same day he would scatter and confuse the defending forces, such as they were. Furthermore, the simultaneity of initial attacks would prevent one boat’s successes from either spoiling the chances of the others or triggering a trap for them. The plan pleased Dönitz. The number of available boats did not, particularly when he learned that owing to mechanical problems the sixth boat assigned to the mission, the newly commissioned V-128 (Kptlt. Ulrich Heyse), would not be able to sortie in time. Now there were five.21

  Dönitz broke off his walking reverie, called back the scampering Wolf, and joined Meckel in the command car for the ride back to Kernével. It was time to meet three of his commanders and give them their orders.

  Hardegen and his colleagues heard the crunch of the admiral’s car on the gravel driveway outside and looked at one another in anticipation. A few minutes later fragments of conversation drifted in from the area of Dönitz’s private office. Hardegen had been in Dönitz’s office twice, both times to go over his KTB following operational patrols that he commanded on U-/23. He expected that all three commanders would now be ordered in. A door opened. Kapitän Godt entered the situation room and looked about expressionlessly. The commanders stiffened.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am pleased that you have had this opportunity to study the kinds of things we do here. At the same time I am sorry that I could not spend time with you. Please continue at your ease. The admiral will see you in a few moments. Hardegen, come with me, please.”

  Hardegen’s pulse quickened. What had he done now? He turned in behind Godt and followed him to Dönitz’s office. A brief knock on the door and the two entered. Dönitz was seated at his desk. Hardegen drew to attention and saluted in naval style with right hand to eyebrow: “Heil, Herr Admiral!”

  Dönitz stood and walked around his desk to take Hardegen’s hand, his usual cold formality and stern visage turning to a warm smile and kindly diction. He used the familiar du:

  “Are you feeling all right, Hardegen?”

  “Yes, Herr Admiral.”

  Hardegen had cause to recall how fellow officers who knew Dönitz much better spoke of the Lion as a father. No father could be more demanding of his sons or more intolerant of less-than-peak performance than Dönitz, yet no father was more solicitous of his sons’ welfare or more careful to attend to their leavings and their returnings. A fixture on the arrival dock at Lorient, Dönitz elicited a depth of personal loyalty from his U-boatmen, of all ranks, that was not only unprecedented in the Kriegsmarine but was of a kind accorded few military leaders in modern history. Hardegen’s split-second memory journey went back to the summer of 1940, when he had first met Dönitz at the airport in Kiel. The recollection was reassuring as he faced the admiral now under more official, if not graver, circumstances.

  Dönitz moved back behind his desk, sat down, and leafed through papers in a folder before him.

  “I’ve been looking through your dossier today, Hardegen.” He turned several pages. “There is one matter that bothers me here, something that I had not noticed before. From 1935 through 1939 you were a pilot in the Naval Air Force, before being assigned to U-boats. In 1936 you were seriously injured in an air crash. Because of lasting physical effects of the crash—internal stomach bleeding, a shortened right leg, it says here—your medical papers state, among other things, that you are ‘not fit for service in U-boats.’ It says so right here in your record. What, then, are you doing in the Ubootwaffe?”

  Dönitz looked up, puzzled.

  “My medical papers never quite caught up with me, Herr Admiral,” Hardegen answered. “As I went from school to school they always came late enough for me to go on to my next assignment. Then, when I returned from my first patrol on U-147, the Flotilla Commander at Kiel told me that he had my papers and that they stated I was unfit for U-boats. He sent me to a doctor who confirmed the opinion. So I was sent away for a four-weeks’ cure to another doctor at the naval recreational center in Spindelmühle. That doctor happened to be a good friend of mine. He wrote in my medical folder that I was fit for all surface ships but not for U-boats.”

  Dönitz now looked at Hardegen more in the manner of a schoolmaster than a father. He reached into the folder for a letter from his second in command, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, at Kiel. Von Friedeburg, head of the large Organization Department of the U-boat arm, superintended the “endless belt” system that supplied new boats, commanders, and crews to the operational bases.

  Dönitz held out von Friedeburg’s letter for Hardegen to read. “The admiral writes, as you can see, that on your return from Spindelmühle he asked you if you were then fit for return to the Ubootwaffe, and that you answered yes, you were. Why did you lie?”

  A look of disappointment was now plainly on Dönitz’s face. Hardegen hastened to reply.

  “Sir,” he said, “the admiral asked me—and these were his exact words—‘Are you fit to return to sea?’ And I answered him honestly, yes, I was. He never said anything about U-boats. What he said next was, ‘Then you are to fly tomorrow to Lorient and take command of U-123.’ I jumped at the chance.”22