Battleship Bismarck (55 page)

Since 1942, Ralph Izzard, a lieutenant commander in the Royal
Naval Volunteer Reserve and member of the Naval Intelligence Department in London, had been in Washington as a visiting instructor training American officers in the examination of German prisoners of war. As the reply had come from Dönitz personally, for this and no other reason Ottawa reproduced it as an object of presumably general interest for its postal distribution list and also sent a copy to Izzard in Washington. The latter, who had just thoroughly explained this very letter code to his students, immediately began to decode the letter, purely out of routine as a teaching aid, in view of the apparently harmless contents without special expectations, in the self-evident certainty that Ottawa, technically competent, had long before gone over the ground for him.

But what a surprise! Peeled away, there it stood in black and white, that the
U-536
would appear in Chaleur Bay to pick up German U-boat officers after a breakout from camp. The exact date would follow. Izzard’s congratulations to Ottawa: “That was well done”—but in Ottawa nothing at all had been “well done”; the content of the letter had been overlooked. Izzard’s congratulations informed the authorities of the alarming situation for the first time!

Now it was up to the Allied planners to build a trap in which to catch the expected escapees and to ensnare, to destroy, better yet to capture the
U-536.
The Naval Intelligence Department and the Canadian army and navy went to work. They chose to let the German plan unfold without hindrance while they secretly readied their counter-measures, and then strike at the last possible moment with the maximum chance of success. For the Germans, who continued to believe themselves unwatched, everything seemed to click—even if in the end only a single officer, Wolfgang Heyda, succeeded in breaking out on 24 September. But when he reached the rendezvous point on the coast—awaited with anxious satisfaction by the British and Canadian authorities—where he was to give the prearranged light signals to the
U-536
to send a rubber boat to the beach, the heavy hand of a Canadian coast guardsman came down on his shoulder.

“You’re under arrest!”

A completely independent organization, the coast guard had known nothing of the operation in progress, nothing of the trap that the Canadian army and navy, together with the British, had readied for the Germans—the trap which, in ignorance of the planned course of events, it had just ruined. Ottawa had neglected to inform it. Under the circumstances, what else could the lone-wolf Heyda be for the coast guardsman than a suspicious stranger in a prohibited area?

And so it came about that the
U-536
, punctually entering Chaleur Bay, never received the prearranged light signals. Instead it received the radio request
“Komm! Komm
!”
*
from the British naval officer who, with the help of a whole group of destroyers, was directing the entire operation against the
U-536
and the escapees from the shore. The stir caused by Heyda’s arrest had drawn his attention, and he had already greeted the would-be escaper with the question: “Well, now, are you the gentleman who was to be picked up here by a German U-boat?” Astonished, Heyda realized that it was “over” for him.

“Komm, Komm
” Rolf Schauenburg, the captain of the
U-536
asked himself. That was by no means the agreed-upon radio message and furthermore, it was on the wrong wavelength! The secret radio transmitter at Bowmanville was supposed to have reported the successful breakout on an entirely different wavelength. But nothing had been received from it, and now there was no light signal from the beach, either.

Growing suspicious, Schauenberg halted, turned about, and for fear of surprises submerged to the bottom and lay there, waiting. No sound must come from the boat now! And then the submarine chasers burst into action, their propellers churning nauseatingly near, depth charges crashing. But in the end, with much patience and skill Schauenberg escaped back to the open sea, with a practically undamaged boat, ready for new operations in another area. But why, he kept asking himself, had the object of his operation so mysteriously avoided him? Why?

Yet for the British, too, the operation had finally failed, at the last moment, through the Canadians neglecting to notify their coast guard. Red faces in Ottawa! For London and Ottawa the situation would appear somewhat less disreputable when shortly thereafter the
U-536
was sunk by British and Canadian destroyers while attacking an Allied convoy northeast of the Azores on 20 November 1943.

Room 39 had wanted to let the breach of the German letter code, which it made at the beginning of the U-boat war, ripen into a fruit that would count. Except for the breakdown in Ottawa, presumably it would have so ripened. Had Heyda been able to exchange the prearranged light signals with the
U-536
in Chaleur Bay, the Allied action against the boat and the escapee would have succeeded. The basic British plan had certainly proven sound; it had brought a great success almost over the threshold: the capture of a U-boat. It was sheer
bad luck that at the decisive moment an ally’s omission had spoiled it. At least the subsequent sinking of the
U-536
near the Azores was a retroactive consolation.

The reverses. Soon after the beginning of the war Cockfosters had learned through interrogations that German U-boats could dive deeper than 185 meters. The British submarine staff and British submarine constructors dismissed this information as unrealistic, however, and British depth charges continued to be set for depths of up to 185 meters. German U-boats profited from that and could evade depth charges set too shallow.

Then in August 1941, an unhoped-for stroke of luck came to the assistance of the British. They unexpectedly captured the
U-570
, which saw service from 1941–1944 as HMS
Graph
in the Royal Navy.
*
Its hull was composed of steel of a strength whose utilization in submarine construction had previously been thought impossible. Now, hoping to make up for lost time, the Admiralty acted upon the information received earlier from Cockfosters and had depth charges set to depths of more than 200 meters.

How right this was later emerged from a report by the Anti U-Boat Division, Naval Staff, of 5 July 1943, in which the destruction of 17
202
was described. It says in part: “It should be noted that
U-202
was probably of similar construction to HMS
Graph
, being built at approximately the same time and under the same conditions of mass production and prefabrication.
Graph
could dive to 800 feet [266 meters] in an emergency but examination of her hull has shown that this depth is dangerously near the collapsing point for strength. Furthermore, her pumps were only designed to work to a pressure head of 400 feet of water.”
†

Another instance of the Admiralty’s disbelief of information from Cockfosters concerned the guns of our Narvik-class destroyers. German
prisoners had spoken of their carrying guns of 15 centimeters rather than 12.7 centimeters, which had been customary for destroyers until then. However, the Admiralty held that this would be completely impossible for a ship of only 2,400 tons and did not even notify the Home Fleet. In 1944 a destroyer of the Narvik-class fell into British hands. Inspection revealed that the British experts had been wrong to doubt.

In the third case, Cockfosters overheard a sensationally strange-sounding piece of information while bugging some of the
Bismarck’s
enlisted crewmen as they were talking among themselves—that the Seekriegsleitung originally intended to bring the
Bismarck
back to Germany through the English Channel after her repairs in a port in western France. Cockfosters speculated: the knowledge possessed by these enlisted men must be based on things that had been spoken of on board. Certainly, there was no more
Bismarck
—but could not such a train of thought, presumably the fruit of long and serious consideration, be put into practice someday with other German ships? However, Room 39 found the idea to be absurd and did not forward it. Except for such oversight, the British operations section might have made dispositions that would have stood in the way of the subsequent Channel Dash by our ships
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau
and
Prinz Eugen
.
*

“Good morning. How are you today?” The greeting, spoken in German, came from a tall, slim figure of easy elegance and cosmopolitan bearing, who entered my cell one day in early June. It was Ralph Izzard—whom we have already met at his subsequent work in Washington—lieutenant commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Prewar correspondent of the
Daily Mail
in Germany and an expert on Berlin and its society, he had developed friendly personal relations even with our former crown prince; the latter once invited him to Cortina for the winter sport. Izzard knew how to chat fascinatingly; one quickly felt at ease in his company. I soon grew accustomed to him and was always glad when he came.

Every now and then he appeared during the German night air raids on London to see how his prisoners reacted when they had their own Luftwaffe up against them. On his first visit of this sort he said:
“Your Italian allies are already cowering in the corners of their cells and doing their beads.” Then for a while we listened together to the noise of the action outside. But in that summer of 1941 I never had the impression that any air raid was really threatening Cockfosters.

Another time Izzard talked about my prior service as an assistant to our naval attaché in London. “Well, do you still remember your motor trip to northern England and Scotland in spring 1939?” he said meaningfully. “We knew exactly where you were staying and what you were doing at all times.”

“I certainly would not have expected anything else,” I growled, without going into it any deeper, also without having to feel a prick of conscience about my outwardly altogether correct information-gathering trip in April 1939. It had taken me, for the purpose of getting to know the country, to Manchester, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, among other places. Naturally, I had also visited our consulate in Glasgow. I will never forget a remark made by our acting consul there. “You could do a good deed,” he opined, “by persuading as many as possible young Luftwaffe officers to spend their leaves in and around Glasgow. That way they could themselves pick out their bombing targets in this important industrial region. I would be glad to help them with it.”

“Bombs on England!”—At the time these words were spoken, Hitler had yet to renounce the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, and the Second World War staged by him still lay nearly five months in the future. Yet several years of a regime of violence in the Reich and its practice of foreign-policy ultimatums had long since demolished the intellectual barriers against war, even all-out war, among some of its diplomatic representatives.

So far, Izzard had obtained his only experience at sea in the role of an able seaman gunlayer 2nd class in an Atlantic tanker. The personal intervention of Troubridge, the former British naval attaché in Berlin, had released him from this position. His knowledge of German had then immediately landed him an officer’s assignment in the Naval Intelligence Department. From there he was assigned to Room 39 and ordered to Cockfosters. Here he belonged to the staff responsible for naval interrogations, but he seldom took part in them himself. As a former journalist, it was incumbent upon him to compose the evaluation reports destined for the Naval Intelligence Department.

I did not learn to know him by his family name then—he went about as Lieutenant Daly, a cover name which he bore, like the other interrogating officers in Cockfosters. The thought was that this
would protect them personally in the event of a successful German invasion. The German prisoners of war could not then facilitate the identification of their interrogating officers through knowing their real names. For the British government strongly reckoned on such an invasion from the end of the French campaign until Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. And in view of the constant concentration of our captured U-boat and air aces in Cockfosters, this camp was regarded as a primary German operational objective—when these aces would immediately be set free. Therefore the British army, which administered all prisoner-of-war camps, stationed an especially strong force at Cockfosters.

For me, only now and again did the army step out of the camp administration that it accomplished in the background to make a direct and, I am glad to say, agreeable appearance. As a rule on Sunday evenings, a welfare officer brought cigarettes, chocolate, and, the most important to me, newspapers! I recall the first
Times
that reached me in this manner—it contained an obituary of the German ex-Kaiser, who had died the day before in Doom. A major sometimes took me for walks through the great park around the house. He was an expert on British literature, which we chiefly discussed. His great favorite was the Scottish poet Robert Burns, whose social criticism on behalf of the poor and whose nature lyrics he praised. He always said that Burns was read much too little.

It was 22 June 1941, around 1000 hours in my cell. My glance fell on Izzard and I heard him say, “Well, do you know that you’re at war with Russia now?”

His words made me feel numb. But that really can’t be true, I thought, I won’t believe it. Not, of course, that Hitler would shrink from brushing aside and violating a nonaggression pact that he himself had concluded; no, pacts and treaties meant nothing to this man. That had been made clear, at latest, by the occupation of Prague in March 1939 in violation of the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938. And mentally I excluded the possibility that Hitler had struck preemptively, for until now the Russians had remained faithful to the pact. The experience of Napoleon and the course of the First World War had not held him back from beginning a two-front war on the Continent! For in the final analysis, the war in the west was still not over. His hunger for land, his craving to conquer “living space” in the east, had overpoweringly, relentlessly, swept him along.