Of all the seas in Europe, none was busier during the first five months of the year than the English Channel. Here there were almost daily sorties carried out by flotillas of MTBs and other torpedo boats in which the Germans were well to the fore, mining harbours, attacking convoys and exchanging blows with destroyers and corvettes. They assumed a pest-like aggravation and swatting them effectively proved to be impossible. Short of employing air cover over everything that moved by sea – obviously a non-starter given the amount of traffic and RAF Coastal Command’s lack of airframes – the MTBs and other fast, light craft that packed a punch could be expected to do some damage in the Allied build up towards D-Day and Operation Neptune and they did. Hundreds of mines were sown around the English coast from Cornwall to Lincolnshire with particular emphasis on the Strait of Dover, as well as off Cherbourg and the other Normandy ports. Convoys were always fair game and yielded decent returns given that they were mostly inadequately defended in these coastal waters. While there was to be no Channel version of PQ. 17, a resourceful and experienced MTB flotilla, such as the German 5th, commanded by officers of Bernd Klug and Karl Müller’s abilities, could destroy several ships at one sitting, and did so on more than one occasion. While on the receiving end of much of this waspish activity, the British employed their own MTB resources in much the same way off the Dutch coast without gaining as much success and from mid- April concentrated on attempting to block German access to the Channel by laying 3,000 mines in these waters. Five groups of RAF Bomber Command were also similarly employed. They dropped 4,000 mines, some of which were acoustic ground mines for low frequencies and some acoustic anchor mines too. This minelaying activity was to reap considerable rewards with approximately 100 German ships coming to grief on these mines in the weeks to come.
While Allied activity was frantic, German ignorance of what was afoot on 5 June was almost total. Apart from the foul weather which convinced many in authority that an invasion in those conditions was scarcely credible – an attitude shared by the Luftwaffe, resulting in a failure to conduct reconnaissance sorties. Seizing the initiative over the Channel – the means of detection available to the Kriegsmarine was limited. Its surface warning radar system had been badly bombed in the previous week and those that remained operational were jammed in the Normandy vicinity, while those north of the River Seine only picked up those `decoy’ convoys, (barrage balloons towed by motor launches) that had been sent to confuse them and make them think that landings were intended at scattered sites in the Pas-de- Calais.
A sortie on D-Day
Woefully weak, the German Navy could only disrupt the Allied landings. At 1:50a. m. on June 6, Naval Group West alerted Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Hoffmann’s 5th Torpedo Boat Flotilla based at Le Havre. The first reports of sighting enemy ships in the Channel provoked a sortie by the flotilla. At 3:30a. m. Hoffman set sail with T28, Jaguar and Möwe and sped up the Channel at high speed. An hour later they came across a gigantic smoke screen. At top speed the three torpedo boats soared through the smoke. “It’s impossible,” a shocked Heinrich Frömke stammered as the boats emerged from the smoke and saw myriad ships of the invasion fleet before them. All business, Hoffmann immediately ordered attack. In zigzag fashion, the boats maneuvered through the hail of fire unleashed toward them from defending escorts and loosed off 15 torpedoes before turning tail for the safety of the smoke screen. Out of a total of fifteen torpedoes fired by the three boats, the Norwegian destroyer Svenner was hit amidships by one and broken apart, while the two battleships of the bombardment squadron Ramillies and Warspite and the headquarters ship Largs of Force S had perilous encounters with three others, but their officers and crew survived to tell the tale. Hoffman’s “kill” was one of very few successes achieved by the German Navy on D-Day. But, like the entire German response, it reflected too little, too late.
Over the next eight nights his boats attacked the Allied fleet, on June 13, the Torpedo Boat Falke, the Allied invasion fleet was mine laying. It was by strafed by Allied aircraft and sustained numerous dead and wounded. On the nights of June 14 and15 the 1944 Torpedo Boat Flotilla was almost completely destroyed. A heavy air raid of nearly 300 bombers flew in two waves bombing the docks of Le Havre. Torpedo Boats Möwe, Falke and Jaguar were sunk after multiple bomb hits. T-28 survived the night with minor damage. Hoffmann received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross on July 11 1944.
German Naval Response
According to Eric Grove, 304 assorted landing craft had been destroyed by mines, gunfire, traps or obstacles during the first day of the assault, but once night drew on the Germans brought an offensive component to bear on the convoy traffic that continued to plough its way to the shoreline.
Flotillas of enemy MTBs, torpedo boats and motorised minesweepers were deployed from their bases in the Channel ports of Cherbourg, Le Havre and Boulogne to interdict the well-defended supply trains where and when they could. It was hardly an unexpected response and was bound to achieve some success, but the scale of destruction was largely contained and countered by the durable effectiveness of the Allied escort groups and through a series of aggressive patrols mounted by packs of their destroyers, MTBs and frigates beyond `The Spout’ and the invasion beaches. A series of violent clashes were rapidly joined and broken off as each set of combatants sought to gain a momentary and often elusive advantage over the other. Skirmishing became part of the expected nightly order and an integral feature of the assault phase. Attack was resorted to whenever the opportunity presented itself and the combat toll grew on both sides as did the number of claims and counter-claims of even more damage and destruction. While the flotillas of fast, light surface vessels largely cancelled themselves out, German mines, coastal artillery and air attacks accounted for a light cruiser (Scylla), and eight more fleet destroyers before the month was out. Many smaller supply ships succumbed to the same dangers as they closed the shore or sought to retreat from it.
Notwithstanding the inroads made into the invasion forces, far more might have been expected from the thirty-six U-boats which Dönitz had immediately mobilised from their Biscay ports to form the Landwirt group in the Channel. In truth, this deployment was ill-starred from the outset. None of the non-schnorchel boats could escape detection as they tried to enter the Channel. Ten Allied Support Groups were on the lookout for them as were aircraft from RAF Coastal Command and the three escort carriers Activity, Tracker and Vindex. Five of the U-boats were located and sunk and another five were damaged as they made their way through the Bay of Biscay. Reinforced by several more schnorchel boats from Norwegian waters, the Germans persevered and managed to get thirteen into the western part of the Channel within the next few days. Their attempts to begin chipping away at the destroyer escorts, however, were blighted by malfunctioning torpedoes and when they actually got to the convoy routes on 14 June they found themselves the focus of even closer and more vigorous attention from several of the reassigned Support Groups. By the end of June the U-boats that had reached the English Channel had achieved a modest record of success, but this had only been achieved at the cost of fourteen schnorchel craft and damage to ten others. Their efforts were hardly going to put a stop to the invasion.
Allied counter-measures also extended to the mounting of a pair of massive air raids on Le Havre and Boulogne on the nights of 14 and 15 June respectively in an effort to strike a blow at the flotillas of light surface craft that were based there. In the first of these raids, 234 aircraft from RAF Bomber Command left the naval base at Le Havre in chaos after attacking the harbour and port facilities with a mixture of `Tallboy’ bombs (each weighing 12,000 pounds) and more conventional bombs. Next evening a repeat dose was administered to Boulogne with 297 more bombers taking part in the mayhem. If such a swarm of aircraft appeared over a port, they could quickly overwhelm the defenders and create real disruption amongst whatever shipping was present. Nonetheless, ports such as Cherbourg, Le Havre, Dieppe and Boulogne revived quickly after a raid and remained a distinct thorn in the Allied side either as bases for attack craft or the site of coastal batteries which – in the case of Cherbourg and Le Havre – were within range of some of the invasion beaches.
