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EXCHANGES OF SECRETS

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

After the war Churchill admitted that the U-boat successes had been the only thing that frightened him, and it has been widely assumed that Hitler went to war understanding the submarine’s potential value. The truth is that the German navy was completely unprepared for war. At its outbreak, Germany had built 56 U-boats,¹ of which some were short-range Type IIs seldom used beyond the North Sea. The building programme was providing two or three submarines a month (in some months only one), and it was taking about a year to build and test each boat. After the war Admiral Dönitz said: ‘A realistic policy would have given Germany a thousand U-boats at the beginning.’ We can but agree and shudder.

One of the war’s most eminent naval historians, S. E. Morison, said Hitler was landsinnig (land-minded) and believed, like Napoleon, that possession of the European ‘heartland’ would bring England to heel. Winston Churchill, like President Roosevelt, knew that Britain’s survival depended upon sea lanes, for without supply by sea there could be no continuation of the war.

Dönitz and Raeder: the German commanders

Hitler had only one sailor among his high commanders, the 63-year-old Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, who was commander in chief (Oberbefehlshaber) of the navy. He was old-fashioned and aloof, as photos of him in his frock-coat, sword and high stiff collar confirm. Although Raeder looked like a prim and proper officer of the Kaiserliche Marine, his speech in 1939 declared his full support for ‘the clear and relentless fight against Bolshevism and International Jewry whose nation-destroying deeds we have fully experienced.’ At the Nuremberg trial he was found guilty of having issued orders to kill prisoners. His memoirs, published a decade after the war ended, reiterated his belief in Hitler.

The man conducting the submarine battles, Karl Dönitz, was a quite different personality. The son of an engineer working for Zeiss in Berlin, he had never had staff college training. As a U-boat commander in the First World War, he had survived a sinking to become a prisoner of war. Despite other jobs in signals, and command of a cruiser, his primary interest was with undersea warfare. The rebuilding of Germany’s submarine fleet gave him status. He was a dedicated Nazi and his speeches usually included lavish praise for Hitler: ‘Heaven has sent us the leadership of the Führer.’ Anything but aloof, he delighted in mixing socially with his officers, who referred to him as ‘the lion’. Luncheons and dinners with him were remembered for their ‘tone of light-hearted banter and camaraderie’. Dönitz was 47 years old at the start of the war. Morison (the author of the official US navy histories) was moved to describe him as ‘one of the most able, daring and versatile flag officers on either side of the entire war’. Eventually, in January 1943, Dönitz was to become C-in-C of the navy, succeeding Raeder, and in the final days of the war it was Dönitz whom Hitler chose to take his place as Führer of the collapsing Third Reich.

Widespread misunderstandings persist as to Dönitz’s role in the war at sea. The submarine arm was not controlled by him; it was run from Berlin by the Seekriegsleitung, which was both a staff and an organ of command. In May 1940 Dönitz was not even among the thirty most senior naval officers. He was not consulted on such matters as crew training, submarine design, or construction schedules, nor on technical matters about weaponry such as mines and torpedoes. His chief, Admiral Raeder, emphasized this to him in a memo dated November 1940: ‘The Commander-in-Chief for U-boats is to devote his time to conducting battles at sea and he is not to occupy himself with technical matters.’ It is also a revealing sidelight on the cumbersome way in which dictatorships distort the chain of command that, when there came a shortage of torpedoes, Dönitz went to Raeder and asked him to persuade Hitler to order increased production.

In the opening weeks of the war the opposing navies were discovering each other’s weaknesses as well as their own. Dismayed at first by the severe limitations of asdic, the Royal Navy found that skilled and experienced operators could overcome some of its faults. The German navy, like other navies, was discovering that under active service conditions the torpedo was a temperamental piece of machinery.

All torpedoes normally have two pistols which can be selected quickly and easily immediately before use. A hit with the cruder contact pistol will usually result in a hole in the ship’s hull, which can often be sealed off and the ship saved. A magnetic pistol is activated by the magnetism in a ship’s metal hull and explodes the charge under the ship, which is likely to break its back. The German magnetic pistols gave so much trouble that crews switched to contact pistols and found that they were faulty too. The trigger prongs were too short: a torpedo sometimes hit a ship and was deflected without the prongs being touched. The torpedoes of the submarine fleets were also affected by a design problem in the detonators. Constant pressure variations inside the U-boats affected the torpedoes’ depth-keeping mechanisms.

Although the official explanation for some of the failures was that magnetic triggers could be affected by changes in the earth’s magnetic field, due to latitude or to iron ore or volcanic rock in the sea bed, to me it seems extremely likely that the degaussing of British ships – to protect them against magnetic mines – protected them against magnetic pistols too. Whatever the causes, these troubles continued all through the war, and the faults were not finally diagnosed until after hostilities were over.²

Understandably Dönitz complained bitterly to the Torpedo Directorate. He said pointedly that he remembered the same trouble in 1914 but in the first war the Torpedo Inspectorate knew how primitive mechanisms worked! The torpedo experts – their experimental firing ranges frozen in the first winter of war – responded to most criticism by blaming the U-boat crews. Postwar research suggested a failure rate of almost 30 per cent overall. On one war cruise the U-32 fired 50 per cent duds. An inquiry showed that the contact pistols had only been tested twice before the war, and had failed both times. It became clear that torpedo failures had been experienced and reported since December 1936 but nothing had been done about them. When the war made it impossible to ignore the faults any longer, Raeder demanded action. A rear-admiral was court-martialled and found guilty, a vice-admiral dismissed. The scandal shook the navy and affected the morale of the U-boat service, as well as providing a glimpse of the sort of bureaucratic bungling that was a well established feature of Hitler’s Third Reich, when Nazi loyalty tended to outrank competence.

Unrestricted submarine warfare

Article 22 of the 1930 London naval treaty, which Germany signed, held that merchant vessels might not be sunk until the passengers, crew and ship’s papers were in a place of safety, adding that the ship’s boats were not regarded as a place of safety unless land or another vessel was nearby in safe sea and weather conditions. Anyone who hoped that the Germans might observe their treaty obligations had only twelve hours to wait after the declaration of war. The U-30, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, sighted the unescorted passenger ship Athenia while it was 200 miles off the coast of Donegal. It had left Liverpool at 4 o’clock on the afternoon before war began. Its passenger accommodation was fully booked and included 316 Americans heading home before war engulfed them.

Lemp saw the 16-year-old liner at 7.30 pm. It was getting dark and he made little or no attempt to distinguish whether she was a passenger ship or an auxiliary cruiser which would have been a legitimate target. He fired a salvo of torpedoes, one of which wrecked the bulkhead between the boiler rooms. In the words of one ship’s passenger:

I was standing on the upper deck when suddenly there was a terrific explosion. I reckon I must be a very lucky woman because when I recovered from the shock I saw several men lying dead on the deck.³

The passengers in the tourist and third-class dining rooms were trapped when the explosion wrecked the stairways. Athenia listed and settled down. About half an hour later Lemp’s submarine surfaced and fired at his victim with the deck gun. Now it must have been clear that she was a passenger liner, the torpedoing of which was explicitly forbidden by the prize laws of the Hague Convention. Without making contact, or offering directions or assistance of any kind, Lemp submerged and went away.

The Athenia sank: 112 people died, including many women and children. The German Admiralty instantly denied the sinking and ordered Lemp to remove the page from his boat’s war diary and substitute false entries.⁴ Those officers and men of the German navy who knew the truth were sworn to secrecy and the Reich propaganda ministry issued a statement that a bomb had been placed aboard the Athenia on the instructions of Winston Churchill.

The Athenia sinking came just as President Roosevelt asked Congress to pass Neutrality Act amendments, allowing Britain and France to buy war material. Seeing that the unlawful sinking of Athenia would persuade Congress to say yes, the German propaganda machine employed its formidable resources. An American survivor was persuaded to say that the ship was carrying coastal defence guns, destined for Canada. The allegation that Churchill put a bomb aboard the liner, in order to drag America into his war, was repeated time and time again in radio broadcasts, newspaper items and in letters mailed to prominent Americans. The German navy in Berlin issued a series of warnings about Churchill’s bombs on other American ships. This bombardment of lies scored many hits. A Gallup poll revealed that 40 per cent of Americans believed the Germans. The Senate voting reflected a similar feeling when Roosevelt’s amendments passed by 63 votes to 31. The House of Representatives also voted in favour of the French and British, by a majority of 61.

By Christmas 1939 Berlin’s orders decreed that all ships except fully lit ones identified as Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish or Portuguese (United States shipping was excluded from the ‘war zone’ by American neutrality laws) must be sunk without warning. U-boat captains were told to falsify their logs and describe unlit target ships as warships or auxiliary cruisers.

Just in case there was any misunderstanding, Dönitz’s Standing Order No. 154 told his commanders: ‘Rescue no one and take no one aboard. Do not concern yourselves with the ship’s boats. Weather conditions and the proximity of land are of no account.’

However there was another more heroic aspect of the U-boat war. On 14 October 1939 there came a dashing action that was planned and briefed by Dönitz himself. Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, commander of the U-47, is said by one historian to have been to Scapa Flow and studied the Royal Navy anchorage as a tourist before war began. Whether this is true or not, Prien showed amazing skill as he threaded his boat through the defences and into the British main fleet anchorage there. Two of his torpedoes hit HMS Royal Oak. There were explosions and the battleship turned over. Kirk Sound, through which Prien navigated, was 170 metres wide and only seven metres deep. It was such a notable achievement that even after an Admiralty inquiry had identified fragments of the German torpedoes, many people in Britain insisted that the sinking was due to sabotage. Another, completely unfounded, story told of a German spy who shone lights to guide the U-boat through Kirk Sound. In fact the sinking of the Royal Oak was one more indication of the Royal Navy’s failure to prepare for war.

Britain’s loss was an ancient battleship, but at this time unrestricted U-boat warfare was being criticized, and the German propaganda ministry saw its opportunity. The U-47 crew were heroes and gained headlines across the world. In Berlin they were congratulated by Adolf Hitler. Prien was awarded the Knight’s Cross⁵ and Dönitz was promoted to admiral and appointed BdU, Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (C-in-C of U-boats). The whole German U-boat arm rightly rejoiced in this proof that the Royal Navy were unable to protect their battleships even in their fleet anchorage.

Benefiting from their First World War experience, the British started convoys as soon as war began. It paid off: between September 1939 and the following May, 229 ships were sunk by U-boats but only twelve of these were sailing in convoy. The organization of the convoys was managed, despite the difficulties of making the civilian ships’ captains do things the Royal Navy way, and there were fast and slow convoys to accommodate ships of varying performance. The layman usually supposes that it was the protection given by escort vessels that made it safer to go in convoy, but this was not so. Churchill provided the true reason:

The size of the sea is so vast that the difference between the size of a convoy and the size of a single ship shrinks in comparison almost to insignificance. There was in fact very nearly as good a chance of a convoy of forty ships in close order slipping unperceived between the patrolling U-boats as there was for a single ship; and each time this happened, forty ships escaped instead of one.⁶

The basic Dönitz tactic was to have surfaced submarines patrol across known shipping routes until one of the lookouts spotted a convoy. The radio monitoring service in Germany, with its ability to read the secret British merchant ship code, helped Dönitz to position his ‘rake’ of boats. The first submarine to sight a convoy sent high-frequency radio signals to a master control room ashore, and made medium-frequency signals to nearby submarines to bring them to the convoy.

At night on the surface the U-boats engaged the merchant ships independently, and often at point-blank range. Before daylight came, they ran ahead to concentrate for another attack on the following night, the submarine’s surface speed being faster than its speed underwater.

The Admiral Graf Spee action

Submarines were not the only threat to Britain’s sea lanes. Admiral Graf Spee and Deutschland had put to sea a few days before war began. Construction of these cruisers had been started before Hitler came to power, when the peace treaty restricted Germany to ships of less than 10,000 tons. Perhaps in reaction to the way in which the Royal Navy had lost three cruisers at Jutland by single well placed shots, these Panzerschiffe (‘armour ships’) were given thick armour and big guns. Newspaper writers called them ‘pocket battleships’ but they were designed to prey upon merchant shipping. Their innovations included electrically welded hulls. Welding requires metal to be heated to an even temperature; for that reason the welding of thick steels is vastly more difficult than welding light aircraft alloys. The new ships had very shallow draught, and their honeycombed hulls reduced the danger from torpedoes. Heavy top-side armour protected them from air attack and their 11-inch guns had a range of 20 miles. They were powered by diesel engines – which until that time had only been used as auxiliary engines in such vessels – and could steam at 26 knots, an unimpressive speed for a cruiser but suitable for a raider. Each warship had a tanker at its disposal.

The Deutschland was assigned to raid the routes of the North Atlantic. She sank two merchant ships and captured a third (the City of Flint sailing under a US flag) and then returned to Germany, skilfully using the long November nights to elude the Royal Navy blockade. Her two-month voyage had destroyed 7,000 tons of small shipping; it was a disappointing debut for the ‘pocket battleship’. Soon she was renamed Lützow because Hitler feared the propaganda effect of a mishap to a ship named Deutschland.

Admiral Graf Spee was sent to the sea lanes of the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. By 7 December 1939, in a voyage that included the South African coast and South America, she had sunk nine merchant ships. The captain, Hans Langsdorff, a handsome fifty-year-old, had strict ideas about the rules of war. His targets were sunk without loss of life, his prisoners were all treated well and German morale was high. His only setback was a cracked engine block in the battleship’s spotter plane and no spare to replace it.

When Graf Spee sank the Trevanion in the South Atlantic on 2 October 1939, the men in the Admiralty had looked at their charts and guessed that the raider would head for the shipping lanes of South America. They stationed HMS Ajax off the River Plate, the New Zealand warship Achilles off Rio de Janeiro, and HMS Exeter off Port Stanley in the Falklands. But the next signal was an RRR – ‘raider sighted’ – from the tanker Africa Shell off the East African coast. Had Graf Spee’s captain immediately sent a signal to inform Berlin of his success things might have ended quite differently for him; there would have been no way of guessing whether he was bound for the Indian Ocean or back into the South Atlantic. But Langsdorff waited ten hours, and when his signal was transmitted, three British Direction Finding Stations took a bearing on the signal. These bearings were sent to London on priority channels but even the Hydrographic Section at the Admiralty had no charts large enough to plot them.

FIGURE 3

HMS Ajax

Fortunately Merlin Minshall, a young officer of the Volunteer Reserve, had bought a globe four feet in diameter. It was, he calculated, ‘equivalent to a flat chart nearly twelve feet from top to bottom … Within seconds I had placed three thin loops of rubber round my newly acquired globe. Their intersection clearly showed that the Graf Spee was heading not north up into the Indian Ocean but south back into the Atlantic.’⁷ It was 4 o’clock in the morning. Rear Admiral ‘Tom Thumb’ Phillips, the vice-chief of naval staff, arrived dressed in a scruffy kimono to see the globe which was too big to be moved. ‘Good idea using the globe,’ he said. (Admiral Dönitz had come to the same idea as Lieutenant Minshall and was using a similar globe in his situation room.)

FIGURE 4

HMS Exeter

More sinkings confirmed this route. Graf See was in the southern hemisphere and 13 December 1939 was an idyllic calm summer’s day. Visibility was perfect and at 0614 hours Graf Spee’s spotters saw the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter (8-inch guns) and turned towards her. The Graf Spee had six 11-inch guns and Langsdorff assumed that the two vessels with Exeter were destroyers escorting a merchant shipping convoy of the sort that Graf Spee was seeking as prey, but without the use of his spotting aircraft he was unable to confirm this.

In fact Langsdorff was heading towards one of the many ‘hunting groups’ that were looking for him. Exeter had seen Graf Spee’s smoke and had turned towards it. And the destroyers Langsdorff had spotted were actually light cruisers: HMS Ajax and the New Zealand navy’s Achilles (each with eight 6-inch guns). He was probably misled by the fact that both ships were of unusual profile, having single funnels serving boilers sited together so as to economize on weight.

These three ships provide three different answers to the question that had plagued the world’s navies for half a century: what should a cruiser be? Should it be a light vessel, fast at 32 knots with small 6-inch guns like the Ajax and Achilles; should it be of medium weight like the Exeter, with 8-inch guns; or should it be a heavy ship with massive 11-inch guns that make it so formidable that it is called a pocket-battleship but unable to exceed 26 knots? No wonder the camouflage experts had painted a huge white wave curling from the Graf Spee’s bow. It would never make such a wave in real life – and now it could not speed away.

Ajax – the group’s flagship – catapulted a Seafox aircraft into the air. The difficulties of launching and recovery made this the only time such a warship used aircraft in a surface action.⁸ On most Royal Navy ships, space designed for aircraft, catapults and hangars was soon to be occupied by radar and AA guns. With the reconnaissance plane in the air searching for her, Graf Spee turned away and made smoke. The encounter presented tactical problems for both sides. The Graf Spee’s guns far outranged her adversaries, but with enemy ships to both port and starboard the German captain hesitated before choosing his target.

Eventually Graf Spee opened fire at maximum range. At first one turret was firing to port and the other to starboard but then all six big guns were concentrated on the Exeter, whose 8-inch guns were the most dangerous threat. While the British force had no radar, the German Sextant radar provided hits on Exeter’s turret and then on her main steering. Had it not been for the fact that some of the German shells failed to explode, she would have been sunk. After an unsuccessful riposte with torpedoes, the badly damaged Exeter withdrew, listing to starboard and taking in water forward. There were serious fires below decks and a near miss had put enough water through the shell holes in her side to short-circuit the electricity to her last remaining turret. Telephones and radio links were also lost. There was a real chance that Exeter would sink.⁹

Langsdorff might have closed and finished off the stricken vessel had the two 6-inch-gun ships not dashed in close and forced the Graf Spee to switch her attention to them, moving fast enough to avoid mortal hits by the big German guns, which could not change elevation and bearing fast enough.

After one and a half hours, during which the British warships got close enough to use even secondary armament, all four ships had suffered damage. Having taken hits from two 11-inch shells, the Ajax lost two of her four turrets, while the hoist failed in a third turret. The main top mast was chopped off by one of Graf Spee’s last salvoes. Three of her guns were still operating but she had used up 80 per cent of her ammunition. Achilles had suffered the least damage but she had no radio gunnery control in operation. Graf Spee had been hit many times but all her armament was still in operation.

The action was broken off by the British commander, who put up a smokescreen. There is no doubt that Langsdorff would have done better to have pressed home his attack on the battered trio but he did not, and afterwards it was said he had suffered flesh wounds and been knocked unconscious during the encounter. This might have been enough to affect his decision to head for a neutral port.

According to one account the Exeter had suffered more than one hundred serious hits. Five of her six big guns were out of action and there was so much smoke and flame that the Germans expected her to blow up and sink at any moment. With 61 dead, and many wounded, she made for the Falkland Islands while the two light cruisers trailed Graf Spee to the neutral South American port of Montevideo in Uruguay.

Had the Germans gained access to the sort of port facilities that the British had provided for themselves at strategic spots throughout the world, Graf Spee could have been replenished with ammunition and her minor battle damage – which might have proved dangerous in heavy seas – quickly repaired. But Germany was unable to provide for such needs in distant seas. With a more audacious captain the Graf Spee might have turned north and braved the northern seas in winter despite the battle damage and her 36 dead and 59 wounded. It was not to be.

When the Graf Spee docked in Montevideo, many local people, many of them expatriates, warmly welcomed the Germans but diplomats began arguing fiercely about the rights of belligerent warships in neutral ports. The Uruguayan government gave Langsdorff permission to remain in port for no more than 72 hours, the minimum permitted by international law. It was not enough time for repairs to be effected. Langsdorff tried, and failed, to charter a plane from which to see any Royal Navy ships that might be waiting for him.

To deter Langsdorff from fighting his way past them, the British were keen to give the impression that a large naval force was waiting for Graf Spee. A deception plan included the BBC radio bulletins and the British naval attaché who, knowing that the phones were tapped, called the ambassador in Buenos Aires and told him the Admiralty wanted 2,000 tons of fuel oil to be made available for two capital ships that evening at the Argentine naval base of Mar del Plata. It was enough to get the story circulated. There can be little doubt that Langsdorff believed that a sizeable naval force was ready to pounce on him.

On the evening of 17 December the Graf Spee moved out of harbour watched by the world’s Press and newsreel cameras. At sunset the great ship came to a standstill and, to the astonishment of most of the spectators, blew up. Torpedo heads had been suspended above open ammunition hatches which led to the main magazines. Petrol was ignited to burn through the ropes. The explosion in the forward part of the ship went as planned but seawater came in and doused the aft fires. Graf Spee lurched forward and settled fo’c’sle down. Langsdorff shot himself. The German crew were interned but many of them escaped and got back to Germany to fight again.

Those ship designers who said the German pocket battleships were misconceived had been proved right. A commerce raider did not need 11-inch guns to sink merchant ships. With smaller guns the specifications would have been lighter and considerably faster. Raiders which fight and run away live to fight another day.

Still today little is said of the contribution that German gun-laying radar made to this or any other sea battle. Frequently throughout the war, German naval gunners seemed to enjoy ‘lucky shots’ for which we might read accurate gun-laying. In London the Admiralty was sufficiently impressed by Graf Spee’s performance to offer the government of Uruguay £14,000 for the Graf Spee’s smoking hulk, whose decks remained above water. British radar experts rowed out and boarded her to examine, sketch and dismantle the Seetakt radar. HMS Exeter and Ajax were eventually fitted with British Type 79, an air defence radar that could be used for gun-laying and gave a performance not unlike the German Seetakt.

While Raeder, the German naval chief, said the Graf Spee should have run rather than fight, Hitler found the loss of his battleship intolerable, but neither man was deterred by the sinking. During the winter of 1940–41 the Scheer, the Gneisenau and the Hipper left their ports to raid Atlantic shipping. The men in the Admiralty had cause to worry, for the German naval Enigma code¹⁰ remained unbroken and the spectre of the German surface raider was given new substance by the trouble that Graf Spee had given them. Precious warships – including battleships, cruisers and carriers – were to spend the next few years chasing phantom German commerce raiders ‘seen’ by nervous merchant seamen on distant horizons.