Some of the crew of the type IX D2 German submarine U-198 (commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Burkhard Heusinger von Waldegg) before her second war patrol at La Pallice, France, 20 April 1944. From left to right: unknown; Obermaschinist Otto Pick (17 March 1913 – 12 August 1944), DKiG 22 December 1943; unknown; Obermaschinist Hans Gottermeyer (29 December 1916), DKiG 22 December 1943; and another unknown. The two friends Otto Pick and Hans Gottermeyer both served together on U-103, and again on U-198, Hans was Diesel-Obermaschinist and Otto Engine-Obermaschinist, after U-198’s first war patrol both received the Deutsches Kreuz in Gold (German Cross in Gold). U-198 was sunk on 12 August 1944 near the Seychelles, in position 03.35S, 52.49E, by depth charges from the British frigate HMS Findhorn and the Indian sloop HMIS Godavari. 66 dead (all hands lost).
Work started on a new generation of U-boats. Doenitz took his inspiration from Hellmuth Walter, an inventor-engineer who was commissioned in 1933 by the Kriegsmarine to produce an experimental streamlined submarine, fuelled by hydrogen peroxide. The prototype was capable of speeds as high as 28 knots and could stay submerged for as long as the crew could endure the stale air.
In November 1942, Doenitz called a conference at his headquarters in Paris to map the progress of the Walter U-boat and to plan for its launch. To his surprise, he was told that the end product was nowhere near ready for service. Other priorities, expounded by powerful lobbies, had brought development of the Walter U-boat to a virtual standstill. It could be years before the designers and engineers caught up with demand. Doenitz looked to ways of accelerating the process. One suggestion was for adopting the basics of Walter’s thinking to enhance the performance of existing U-boats, for example by doubling the number of batteries carried to increase underwater speeds.
Another idea was to adopt what became known as the snorkel, the brainchild of the Dutch submarine commander Jan Jacobs Wichers. The snorkel was simplicity itself. Two concentric pipes, one inside the other, about the same length as a periscope, were fitted to the deck. The inner pipe expelled exhaust from the diesel engines while the outer pipe sucked in air. This meant that the U-boat was no longer compelled to surface to recharge its batteries which, in turn, enabled it to attack while submerged at periscope depth. The snorkel was not in itself sufficient to restore U-boat superiority but it was enough of a threat to ensure that there could be no letting up on the costly provision of Allied convoy escorts for the rest of the war.
Meanwhile, the ocean-going Type XXI, the forebear of all modern submarines, and the smaller, coastal Type XXIII went into production. The aim was to have the first off the assembly line by the end of 1944. On Hitler’s orders U-boat construction was given top priority but Doenitz had to endure the frustrations of an overstretched war economy. Shortages and mismanagement were endemic. Engineering companies with no experience of shipbuilding delivered components that bore little relation to the overall design.
A sense of order was imposed after Doenitz came to a deal with Albert Speer, Reichsminister of armaments and production, to take control of production. The result was a dramatic improvement in the supply of standardised prefabricated units sent to the shipyards for assembly. The Allies’ carpet-bombing of Hamburg, Bremen and Danzig where most of the work was done caused disruption, though the new U-boats were given better than ordinary protection by their ‘pens’ of reinforced concrete. The XXI held out great promise. Fitted with an anti-radar-coated snorkel head with radar search aerials, it had ultrasensitive hydrophones with a 50-mile range for locating ships, a supersonic echo device to give the course, range and speed of targets and an impressive range of weaponry including torpedoes which could be fired at targets at any angle.
Of the XXI and XXIII, 98 were commissioned in the second half of 1944 and 83 in the first quarter of 1945. Of all new U-boats coming into service the monthly average for 1944 was 19.5, an extraordinary achievement bearing in mind that the only higher figure (19.9) was scored in 1942 when the bombing of German industrial plant was relatively light.
The production of minesweepers and E-boats was also impressive. In 1944, 87 minesweepers and 62 E-boats were delivered, against 52 and 41 in 1943 and even fewer in earlier years. Doenitz gave full credit to Speer. ‘He alone was in a position to make available alternative industrial resources when the original factories had been bombed out.’
Doenitz was on leave in June 1944 when the Normandy landings gave notice that the biggest ever invasion force had burst into occupied Europe. Returning to his HQ, his fear was of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of Allied vessels at sea. He had 73 U-boats within range of the mass of cross-Channel troopships but, of these, only 25 were fitted with snorkels. After ordering seventeen U-boats to attack the invasion force, the rest were directed to the Bay of Biscay to guard against possible landings on the French Atlantic coast.
His message to crews was pitiless. ‘Each soldier and each weapon destroyed before reaching the beachhead diminishes the enemy’s chance of victory. A U-boat which inflicts losses on the invasion forces fulfils her highest mission and justifies her existence, even though she herself may be destroyed.’
Nine days after D-Day three snorkel boats sank an American landing ship and two British warships. On 25 June, Lieutenant Heinz Sieder in U-984 damaged a frigate, evaded detection for four days and then scored four crippling hits on separate American supply ships a few miles from Portsmouth, using his snorkel to escape.
Ernest Cordes in U-763 was able to avoid the consequences of a serious navigational error. Having sunk a freighter on 5 July and fired five torpedoes at a military convoy and missed, U-763 escaped a massive hunt to take refuge at what Cordes initially thought was the island of Alderney in the German-occupied Channel Islands. It was in fact Spithead Bay near Portsmouth. His snorkel saved him as he crept out to sea, firing a torpedo at a passing destroyer (it missed) before docking undamaged at Brest on 14 July. His War Diary tells a sorry tale of life on a U-boat.
It is nearly thirty hours since the boat was last aired. The first cases of vomiting occur and I issue each man with a potash cartridge [air-filter]. Breathing becomes distressed. The enemy search group is still active … during the thirty hours of pursuit, 252 depth-charges were counted in the near vicinity, sixty-one at medium range and fifty-one at long range.
By July, Allied bombing was so intense that U-boats on the French coast were restricted to their bomb-proof pens. Doenitz ordered their withdrawal to Norway. Their combined tally since D-Day accounted for five warships, twelve merchantmen and four landing craft. It was little enough to show for the sacrifice of 20 U-boats sunk or otherwise put out of action and close on 800 lives.
More of a threat to the Allied supply chain was the motor torpedo boat or E-boat. In the first half of 1944, operating from the Dutch coast, German E-boats sank 31 ships. The British response came from Coastal Forces with its own motor torpedo boats (MTBs) based mostly at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast. As a young war correspondent, Tom Pocock saw them in action.
Ferocious battles took place at high speed and close range. It was a curiously old-fashioned form of warfare, fought with dash by both sides. In the balance of the weaponry there was a touch of medieval trial by combat. E-boats and MTBs were about the same size; wooden boats of little more than one hundred tons with a crew of thirty-odd, but their armament and capabilities were as different as those of gladiators with trident and net, or sword and armour. Armed with torpedoes, or mines, and few guns, the E-boats could make more than 40 knots, whereas the British, heavily armed with torpedoes, depth charges and perhaps a dozen guns, could not manage 30. If the E-boat came within range of the MTB it could be instantly shot to pieces. Since it could not be caught in pursuit, the British would lie in wait with engines stopped in the hope of interception.
Having regrouped in Norway, more U-boat campaigns were launched against Allied shipping in the Channel. To succeed, crews had to endure long periods submerged. When a corvette and four merchantmen were destroyed not far from Liverpool, it was by a U-boat that sailed 2,500 miles out of 2,729 underwater. It returned to Trondheim unharmed. In the last four months of 1944 U-boats sank sixteen ships in British waters. Warning of the new generation of U-boats to come, the Admiralty conceded that the snorkel made U-boats virtually undetectable.
The failure to repel the Allied invasion forces led to prolonged sniping between the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine. Doenitz was blamed for allowing the trans-Atlantic build-up of the vast quantities of weaponry and support needed to overwhelm the German defences. General Hans Speidel, Chief of Staff for Field Marshal Rommel and for his successor Field Marshal von Kluge, went further by accusing Doenitz of ‘turning against the Army’. The disappointing U-boat performance he could forgive, but not the refusal to throw into battle the 5,000-strong Marine Security Unit based in Paris, or the underestimating by half the range of Allied naval guns which hit targets 25 miles inland. For his part, Doenitz blamed the Wehrmacht for the ‘premature surrender’ of Cherbourg with its harbour installations damaged but not beyond repair. Operating from Norwegian and home bases extended by more than a thousand miles the U-boat voyage to and from operational areas.
There was no let-up in the speed and ferocity of the Allied invasion as forces broke through German defences to sweep across France and Belgium. Caught in a pincer movement between American forces curving round from their advance and Canadian and British troops moving down from Caen, the German Fifth and Seventh Armies were trapped and destroyed. Paris was liberated on 24 August.
Doenitz concluded, and he was not alone, that ‘the war could no longer be won by force of arms’. But since the Allies were in no mood to negotiate, ‘there was nothing for it but to fight on’. This fatalistic appraisal was softened when, by September, it was clear that the invasion had run out of steam. Supply lines had become dangerously extended and battle-weary troops were in need of respite.
Allied hopes of an early breakthrough were not easily abandoned. Operation Market Garden, a combined ground and airborne attack across 60 miles of enemy-held territory, was conceived by Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery as a speedy conclusion to the war. The airborne troops would be dropped at Arnhem in Holland to secure a Rhine crossing. An infantry follow-up could then bypass the Siegfried Line defences to make directly for the great German industrial cities of the Ruhr. The plan foundered. After nine days of close fighting, which virtually wiped out the British First Airborne Division and inflicted heavy casualties on the American parachutists, the operation was called off.
The ability of the Wehrmacht to challenge the odds was proved again 80 miles south of Arnhem, at Aachen, the first German city to fall to the Allies but at terrible cost to American forces. It was the same story in Italy, the only other front where Allied progress might reasonably have been expected. After the capture of Rome in June, Allied forces moving north had bumped up against a stubborn German defence of the Po Valley.
