Dönitz’s face broke into a wide grin and he surprised Godt, who was standing to one side of the office, with a single loud guffaw.
“Hardegen,” he said, “I knew you were aggressive, I just didn’t know you were devious. I think the word for you is ehrgeizig (ambitious).23 Yes, that’s you. Well, you succeeded in getting yourself a large boat. But look at you! You’re as pale as a boat’s wake. If I didn’t need you so badly right now I’d send you to a shore assignment straightaway. And that’s precisely what I’m going to do just as soon as you get back from the next patrol. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Herr Admiral.”
Dönitz nodded toward Godt. “You may bring in the others.”
The other two commanders filed in, stood in a row alongside Hardegen, and saluted in the customary manner. As before, Dönitz walked around his desk to shake hands with each of them, speaking with the familiar du and remarking on special items relating to each. He then resumed his position behind the desk and, remaining on his feet, spoke to the three together.
“Gentlemen, as you might have anticipated, I am sending you together on the same mission. I could have let your Flotilla commander, Korvettenkapitän Victor Schütze, brief you on the patrol, as is customary. But this mission is so sensitive and so important to the future victory of the Reich that I choose to brief you myself.
“I have given the same orders to Ulrich Folkers whose U-/25 sortied yesterday. Later I shall speak to the fifth member of your group, Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt. He should be ready to sortie in a few days. [Knight’s Cross holder Heinrich “Ajax” Bleichrodt, commander of U-/09, was the most successful to date of the five commanders, having sunk fifteen ships in 1940.]
“You will provision your boats for a long cruise. Take everything that you even imagine you’ll need. Torpedoes. Food. Drinking water. Medicines. Tools and spare parts. Oilskins. Leathers for your binoculars. Check your potash cartridges. Everything.
“Test-dive your boats as soon as possible after departure. Make certain you can get below the surface in thirty-five seconds. On your transit of the Bay of Biscay to the Atlantic have your best lookouts on watch and your hand on the diving alarm. The British Sunderlands will come at you out of the sun. Too slow a dive and your part in this mission will be over. Your survival in the Bay of Biscay will depend on your ability to clear the bridge, dog the hatch, and submerge the boat in thirty-five seconds—no more.
“Once into the Atlantic the possibility of air attack will diminish. But not totally. Never become complacent. We do not know all that the enemy can do. Some commanders became lax once they passed the longitudes of highest danger. Some of them are no longer with us.
“Maintain the strictest discipline on board. I don’t need to tell you in detail how to do that. You would not be commanders if you have not already learned how to lead men. On this mission I want optimum performance from every man. See to it that you get it.
“On 26 December you will receive a signal from me changing depth designations, so that sixty meters in transmissions will read A plus forty meters, thirty meters’ depth will read A plus ten, and so on. Be alert to this signal and to others.24
“Sortie individually just as quickly as your boats are ready. Korvettenkapitän Schütze will hand each of you a sealed Operation Order on departure. As the instructions indicate you will open that Order and make it known to your officers when you cross twenty degrees longitude. As you approach your target area Korvettenkapitän Meckel will transmit attack data. Study the maps in your Order carefully. You will each be assigned a separate operational area. This is not a rake operation. There will be no patrol line. You will operate independently. However, there is one important sense in which you will act in concert. I emphasize this. You will all begin offensive operations against targets on the same day. That day will be transmitted to you by radio while you are en route.
“When you sortie into the bay take radio bearings on Saint John’s and Cape Race, Newfoundland, and follow the Great Circle route. That will keep you on course until you open your orders and learn your exact destination. During your passage to the operational area, except for the initial short signal position reports, maintain absolute wireless silence. I will call you when I want you to transmit. For purposes of control I am naming U-/23, 125, and 66 as Gruppe Hardegen and 109 and 130 as Gruppe Bleichrodt.25 Economize on fuel. The more fuel you save, the more time you will have on station. And when in place I expect you to move aggressively against all targets of opportunity. Because of the necessity of surprise you are not to attack any ships en route to your assigned areas unless you are convinced that the target exceeds ten thousand tons. We never let a ten-thousand-tonner go by.
“As you could see from the maps in our situation room, the number of combat boats in the main North Atlantic shipping lanes is smaller today than it was at the start of the war. Only five, and four of them are on passage to the Mediterranean.26 We are going back into the Battle of the Atlantic, gentlemen. Your boats are the vanguard. We will beat the waters like a drum. This is Atlantic Order Number forty-six. I have named the mission Operation Paukenschlag. [“Drumbeat”]. Your five boats alone will constitute the force.271 intend this operation to succeed. And it will succeed if you live up to the charge contained in our U-boat motto: Angreifen! Ran! Versenken!—Attack! Advance! Sink!
“Do you understand my orders?”
“Yes, Herr Admiral!” the three commanders responded in unison. Dönitz walked around his desk, shook hands sternly with each man, and nodded to Godt, who opened the office door.
“This way, gentlemen,” Godt said, leading the officers to the foyer, where they donned their coats and caps and then walked down the eight steps to the waiting cars.
The usually irrepressible Hardegen was subdued. “Well, I don’t understand the orders at all,” he said to his back-seat companions as their vehicle passed through the sentry gate.
“That’s because he said nothing about America,” said one. “We’re not going to America. When he mentioned the St. John’s and Cape Race beacons, that should have been your clue. I bet you’re headed back to your fogs in the Strait of Belle Isle!”
Hardegen groaned. But then, he reasoned, he was lucky to be going anywhere at all.
In the days immediately following Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler’s mind was pulled in two contrary directions. On the one hand he denigrated U.S. military power and considered the average American fighting man incompetent if not cowardly. On the other hand—though OKM endeavored to erase such memories—the Führer was aware that the United States’ entry into World War I, in 1917, had been decisive in the resolution of that conflict, and that Germany’s unrestricted U-boat campaign in that year had been the most important single factor leading to American intervention. Thus, ever since the previous June, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) expecting to conquer the Russian defenders with a series of Blitzfeldzüge (lightning campaigns), Hitler had assiduously avoided any incident that might provoke U.S. entry into the war at that particular time; though from other evidence it is clear that he intended to make war on the United States after other, more immediate targets had been seized or neutralized. That caution was expressed on the very eve of the eastward plunge by Dönitz’s superior, Grossadmiral Raeder: “Until the effects of Barbarossa can be seen, that is, for several weeks, the Führer wants every possible incident with the U.S.A. to be strictly avoided.”28 As events transpired that caution had had to be observed for months instead of weeks. On 9 July, anticipating victory in the east no sooner than September, Hitler told Raeder: “It is vitally important to put off America’s entry into the war.… There must be no incidents with the U.S.A. before mid-October.”29 This policy, it must be acknowledged, required considerable restraint. The official animus of the United States toward what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “the Nazi tyranny” was by this date overt to the point of undeclared war, and certain actions had been taken by the United States so that—un
der prevailing international law violated so frequently and so blatantly by Hitler—a case could be made by a dispassionate jurist that the United States had abandoned its long-declared neutrality and was now an avowed belligerent.
The first tentative U.S. step toward armed intervention could be discerned in the Third Neutrality Act of 1937, reconfirmed in 1939, which allowed that such commodities as copper, steel, aluminum, and lead, which could be used in the manufacture of weaponry and munitions, might be sold to other nations (read Britain and France) on a “cash and carry” basis. A proviso required foreign purchasers to haul the cargoes in their own ships. It was not expected that German merchantmen could pass through a British-French blockade, so the bias of the act was clear. In October 1939, the United States persuaded the other republics in the Western Hemisphere to sign the Declaration of Panama, establishing a Pan-American “security” or “safety” zone around the Americas, inside which, other nations were warned, no belligerent action should take place. The protected waters ranged from three hundred to one thousand miles offshore. (In December 1939, Roosevelt had to slap Britain on the wrist for her three-cruiser action that crippled the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee a short distance off the Uruguayan coast.) The administration further directed that “planes or Navy or Coast Guard ships may report the sighting of any submarine or suspicious surface ships in plain English to Force Commander or Department”—action that plainly favored British antisubmarine patrols.30
In September 1940, with solid Gallup Poll backing (62 percent), the president agreed to transfer fifty 1,060- to 1,090-ton World War I vintage four-stack destroyers to Britain in exchange for six military bases under ninety-nine-year leases in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and British Guiana. At the same time, in a separate package, Britain ceded bases in Argentia (Newfoundland) and Bermuda as outright gifts. The destroyers were rusting “old iron” antiques, ten of which barely made it across the Atlantic. But even in decrepit condition they would contribute substantially to Britain’s antisubmarine program, which, owing to the loss of destroyers at Dunkirk and to the fact that some 70 percent of the remaining destroyer force was laid up for repairs, was in desperate shape. In April 1941, the U.S. Navy delivered to the Royal Navy an additional ten 250-foot Lake-class Coast Guard cutters that were well armed and suited for escort of convoy. (Washington may have worried that the U.S. Navy might need these destroyers and cutters in its own coastal waters a short time later, but Britain’s was the current emergency.) There was no question in any one’s mind, least of all in Germany, that the warship transfers constituted explicit breach of the neutrality provisions generally honored in international law since the Hague Conference of 1907. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would write nine years later that the destroyer deal “was a decidedly unneutral act by the United States” that would have “justified” Hitler in declaring war.31 In Berlin at the time there was great indignation over the deal, which was seen as plainly threatening Germany’s U-boat war against Britain. Hitler himself, however, remained silent. He would save this incident, along with others, for use in a scathing list of particulars delivered to the Reichstag fourteen months later.
Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy,” as he called the U.S. industrial base, moved even closer to armed participation in the war with the adoption by Congress of the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941. Under this act the U.S. abandoned “cash and carry” transactions in raw materials for a direct transfer to England of finished weapons and munitions on a deferred return, or lease, arrangement—a specious future possibility that Roosevelt rationalized to the American people by citing the homespun example of lending a length of garden hose to a neighbor whose home was on fire. Despite bitter isolationist objection, Gallup Polls showed that this new experiment in “short of war” inter-ventionism had support from 71 percent of the population. During February and March, Washington seized German and Italian ships and those from German-occupied countries in U.S. harbors “to prevent their sabotage”; froze German and Italian assets in the United States; pledged to train eight thousand Royal Air Force pilots at U.S. airfields, mostly in Florida; and out of three destroyer squadrons and four flying-boat squadrons, used since 1939 as an Atlantic “neutrality patrol,” created a Support Force of twenty-seven destroyers to escort merchant ship convoys from North America as far as Iceland. This force, together with two aircraft carriers, three battleships, five heavy cruisers, and four light cruisers, was designated Atlantic Fleet effective 1 February and its commander, Rear Admiral Ernest J. King, was promoted to admiral, commander in chief Atlantic Fleet (CINCLANT). The shortening of “short of war” gained momentum during April and May when Roosevelt authorized the transfer of additional battleships, light cruisers, and destroyers as well as the carrier Yorktown from Pearl Harbor to the Atlantic. On 9 April the United States signed an agreement permitting the establishment of U.S. military bases and meteorological stations in Greenland. Nine days later, in the manner of Pope Alexander VI drawing his famous line of demarcation to distinguish between the New World property rights of Spain and Portugal, Roosevelt drew a line that extended the Western Hemisphere, thereafter the Pan-American Security Zone, to about west longitude twenty-six—the meridian that passes some fifty miles west of Reykjavik, Iceland. The new zone extended 2,300 nautical miles east of New York, covered approximately four-fifths of the Atlantic, and included in addition to Greenland all the islands of the European Azores. On 7 July, as a concrete expression of these claims, a U.S. occupation force of 4,095 Marines steamed into Reykjavik harbor; and on the fifteenth Roosevelt revised his reading of the Western Hemisphere eastward to twenty-two degrees west longitude, to include Iceland. The United States was edging into the Battle of the Atlantic, as both Churchill and the New York Times were now calling the ocean struggle. When in September the U.S. Navy assumed full responsibility for escorting Britain-bound convoys as far as a mid-ocean meeting point (MOMP), or “chop” (Change of Operational Control) line, south of Iceland, where British escorts from Western Approaches Command took the guard, the odds greatly increased out on the deep that despite Hitler’s still-tight leash on the Ubootwaffe one of Dönitz’s boats would tangle with one of Admiral King’s destroyers.
There had been incidents at sea before September. In the first, on 10 April off the coast of Iceland, the destroyer USS Niblack rescued three boatloads of survivors from a torpedoed Netherlands freighter, and in the process made sound contact with what was thought to be a submarine, range closing. Niblack dropped depth charges—the first American shots fired in World War II—but the lack of visible result combined with the absence of any account of the incident in German archives leads to the presumption that Niblack’s was a false contact. More certain and serious was a second incident, on 21 May, the sinking of a 5,000-ton American freighter, SS Robin Moor, on the edge of the Pan-American Security Zone in the South Atlantic. The ship carried a general cargo and flew the American flag. After sailing hundreds of miles in open boats the thirty-eight member crew and eight passengers were rescued. Two years later, an unrepentant Kptlt. Jost Metzler, commander of the attacking boat, U-69, justified his actions in a propaganda book as motivated by suspicion that the Robin Moor was a Q-ship (armed decoy vessel).32 He was never disciplined by BdU. Roosevelt called the sinking “ruthless” and on 27 May declared an “unlimited national emergency.” The State Department demanded compensation from Germany for the Robin Moor. Berlin defiantly rejected the demand. Hitler remained silent.
On 20 June, though the incident was not known until after the war, U-203, commanded by Kptlt. Rolf Mützelburg, attempted to attack U.S. battleship Texas in the Western Approaches to Britain. After a sixteen-hour pursuit U-203 was not able to overtake Texas and obtain a favorable attack position.33 There is no record to show that Mützelburg, either, was held to account for violating the Führer’s strict directive against “incidents,” and Dönitz seems to have accepted his commander’s explanation that he thought the battleship
, like the fifty destroyers, had been transferred to the British—a suspicion lent some credence from the fact that Texas was east of the Pan-American Security Zone and inside the announced German operational area surrounding the British Isles.-34 Dönitz issued new orders to all boats: “U.S.A. warships should not be attacked even in the blockade area, since the present [BdU] permission to do this does not seem to agree with the political views of the Führer.35 Fearing that boat commanders might mistake a U.S. destroyer for one of the fifty former U.S. destroyers’exchanged to Britain, on 21 June Hitler required BdU to signal all boats that, “Attacks on warships within and outside the blockade area” must until further notice be limited to “cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers and only if these are definitely recognized as enemy [excluding U.S.] vessels.”36
These last orders were particularly galling to boat commanders since it was the destroyers, corvettes, and frigates that provided the most effective curtain of protection to the U-boats’ targets and it was the escorts, when aroused, that were the U-boats’ most mortal threat. As a corrective to flagging U-boat morale, OKM issued a subsidiary order permitting a U-boat to defend itself against escorts when under attack, “but only while an attack on it was in actual progress.”37 Even with this proviso the new orders markedly favored the British antisubmarine forces, as Dönitz lamented: “Whenever a destroyer succeeded in locating a U-boat, it attacked it with depth charges or gunfire and destroyed it before it had time to reply.”38 Furthermore, the U-boats were hampered in their attacks on convoys because the surrounding screen of escort vessels was now untouchable. Throughout the remainder of the year resentment among commanders at the Hitler-imposed handicaps was widely shared and commented on. Germany, the commanders argued, was-being forced to fight with one hand tied behind her back, and understandably they scorned American naval personnel for waging a war in which they could not be hurt. Despite the restrictions the North Atlantic remained a killing sea, although the records disclose that U-boat successes declined in number during the summer of 1941, and there were no further “incidents” until the first week of September, when the political and ostensible attempts by both U.S. and German governments to avoid exchange of fire, on the U.S. side by neutrality legislation, on the German side by restriction of U-boat operations, were overtaken by events.
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