Black May (13 page)

Aircraft shortages would be made up gradually as Prime Minister Churchill’s cabinet became more attuned to the gravity of the Atlantic struggle, Churchill saying that what was most needed were new air tactics and
time
to train.
⁴⁷
The latter would be provided by a totally unexpected
coup de main
that led to a diminution of U-boat operations in the convoy lanes. The former would be provided not, as might be expected, by an increase in hardware, by astute command judgment and leadership, or even by air crew proficiency and gallantry, though each of these factors was an essential precondition. The improvement would come from a band of civilian physicists, mathematicians, and other academics, “Boffins” as they came to be called—“gentlemen in grey flannel bags”—who took on a myriad of complex search and attack problems and, to the astonishment of the uniformed service, solved them. But first, the events of 7 December 1941 and following.

T
HE JAPANESE ATTACK ON
Pearl Harbor caught Hitler and Donitz just as much by surprise as it did the Americans. Dönitz reacted swiftly when on 9 December Hitler lifted all previous restrictions on
attacks against both USN warships and merchant vessels under U.S. flag. His Commanders had long bridled under those restrictions, since U.S. destroyers had been escorting Britain-bound convoys as far as Iceland, and it seemed to Dönitz that the Americans had long been belligerents in everything but name. Not surprisingly, there had been several incidents involving U-boats and USN vessels, including the sinking of the destroyer U.S.S.
Reuben James
by U-552 (Kptlt. Erich Topp) on 31 October 1941. Unknown to Dönitz, another Admiral, Ernest J. King, then Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet (CINC-LANT), was also itching to shake off the fetters of formal nonbelligerency.

When war between the two nations came formally on 11 December, King pulled all his destroyers home to the U.S. Atlantic seaboard expressly to defend it against the U-boats, stating that, “The imminent probability of submarine attack in that area, and the weakness of our coastal defense force, make it essential that the maximum practicable number of our destroyers be based at home bases.”
¹
The move seemed all the more sensible since U-boat activity had slackened in the east-west convoy lanes, Dönitz having been compelled by the Naval Staff in Berlin to withdraw boats from those waters for stations off Gibraltar to attack Mediterranean-bound supply transports during the British winter offensive against General Erwin Rommel’s
Afrika-Korps.

Dönitz was pleased to meet King’s expectations. He immediately requested that twelve boats be made available for an operation along the North American coast, but Naval Staff allowed him only six, of which one, the newly commissioned U
-128,
had to be withdrawn because of mechanical problems. The other five were
U—123,
Type IXB (Kptlt. Reinhard Hardegen), U-125, IXB (Kptlt. Ulrich Folkers), and U
-66,
IXC (Korv. Kapt. Richard Zapp), which were to form
Gruppe Hardegen
for attacks in U.S. waters; and U-109, IXB (Kptlt. Heinrich Bleichrodt) and U-130, IXC (Korv. Kapt. Ernst Kals), which were to form
Gruppe Bleichrodt
for attacks southeast of Halifax and in Cabot Strait off Cape Breton Island. To their joint operation Dönitz gave the code-name
Paukenschlag
—“beat on a kettledrum”—or “Drumbeat.” What was meant here was not “drumroll,” as some would have it, but a
single percussion of a timpani stick on the stretched head of a brass-barreled kettledrum; a sudden blow—
einen kräftigen Paukenschlag—
since, as Hardegen, Commander of
U—123,
insisted to the writer, the aim was to deliver a simultaneous surprise attack on a given day, later signaled to be 13 January. Though many waves of additional U-boats were to follow the first five to North America, their latter operations were not called
Paukenschlag.
None of the original five boats would make their assigned positions by the 13th, but, two days before the deadline,
U-123
sank the 9,076-GRT British freighter
Cyclops
300 miles east of Cape Cod, effectively beginning the campaign.

News of the Drumbeat fleet’s coming was flashed by Rodger Winn to the U.S. Navy Department (Main Navy) in Washington, D.C. From there the Tracking Room’s U-boat position estimates were sent, day by day, to the appropriate USN eastern seaboard defense commands.
²
The sinking of
Cyclops
on the nth was all the confirmation anyone required. But Hardegen gave further notice of his coming, sinking the 9,577-GRT former Norwegian motor tanker
Norness
60 miles southeast of Montauk Point, Long Island, on the night of the 14th.

Twenty-one of the destroyers Admiral King had brought home to defend U.S. coastal waters were stationed at ports that bracketed Hardegen’s approach, from Casco Bay, Maine, in the north to Norfolk, Virginia, in the south. All were battle-ready. Four other destroyers in the same districts were ready “only in an emergency.” But no emergency was declared. Nor were the ready-category destroyers deployed by Admiral King or anyone else to meet the invasion. By this date, effective 30 December 1941, King was Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet (COMINCH), with headquarters at Main Navy, but he maintained direct personal command over all anti-submarine warfare (ASW), requiring the various Atlantic commands in the U.S. Strategic Area to clear all such operations through him.
³

As it happened, by King’s order or compliance, most of the destroyers that he had assembled on the seaboard to defend against “submarine attack in that area” were sent off or held in port for other missions instead.
⁴
Even when, at 10:00
P.M.
Eastern Time on the 15th, Hardegen stood at the Ambrose Channel Lightship station marking the
entrance to New York Harbor (which he had reached in 22 days of transit, 98 percent of the distance on the surface), with the tip of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to his port and Coney Island to starboard, none of the seven ready-status destroyers in the harbor that night—U.S.S.
Gwin, Mayrant, Monssen, Rowan, Trippe, Roe,
and
Wainwright
—sallied forth to meet him. Hardegen then leisurely withdrew and sank the 6,800-GRT British tanker
Goimbra
on his way out of the harbor approaches. The worst was yet to come.

For three weeks Hardegen and the other two boats in his group savaged Allied independently routed shipping along the East Coast as far south as Cape Hatteras and into the deeper waters of the U.S. Strategic Area. They were joined there eventually by the two Gruppe Bleichrodt boats, which, harried by Canadian destroyers and aircraft and impeded by freezing weather, made revolutions south to friendlier U.S. waters where coastwise shipping was steaming without surface or air escort, advancing along the buoys in straight line ahead, as though in peacetime, and mercilessly outlined by shore lights. Not only were buoy lights and lighthouses undimmed, but coastal communities, amusement parks, and beach resorts were still brilliantly lit, providing a luminous backdrop to merchant ship silhouettes as they passed north and south.

This was particularly true along the Jersey shore, where even the headlights of automobiles could be seen from U-boat bridges. Commanders learned that they could save fuel by bottoming out during the daytime, and then surfacing at night to wait in stationary bow attack position, like Prussian deer hunters in camp chairs waiting for game to be driven in front of their guns. And there was little in the way of defenses to concern them. An occasional destroyer or aircraft would be sighted, and at dusk on the 15th one aircraft chanced across U—
123's
course and dropped four bombs to starboard, but continued without circling or returning. Neither the USN nor the U.S. Army Air Corps made a single planned attack or a “scarecrow” effort to keep the U-boats down.

At Kernevel, Admiral Donitz was enthusiastic about
the early
reports, which showed, he said, “that activities of U-boats can be successful much longer than was expected.”
⁵
Though it was being waged
at a great distance, the tonnage battle remained the same battle. Only the venue had changed. The transportation of the sinews of war was an endless chain, whether in the Western Approaches to Britain, or in midocean, or off the Carolina Capes. The chain could be pulled apart at any point. It was immaterial where. And now, the most vulnerable link of it—Donitz’s new
Schwerpunkt
(focus)—was the American coast.

Altogether, the five Paukenschlag boats sank twenty-five ships for a total tonnage of 156,939 GRT, a number that compares favorably with the 152,000 GRT sunk by nine boats in the famous “Night of the Long Knives” in October 1940. While the simultaneously delivered drumbeatlike strike that Donitz had envisioned did not happen as scheduled, the operation was a triumph nonetheless, and in the weeks and months that followed, an exultant Dönitz sent out wave after wave of additional Type IX boats to pursue the advantage. The first blood drawn by Drumbeat soon became a hemorrhage, staining the waters off Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico, and throughout the USN-protected Caribbean basin, including the Panama Sea Frontier. Not only American flag ships but scores of British bottoms sank beneath the torpedo onslaught.

Complained RN Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches Admiral Sir Percy L. H. Noble: “The Western Approaches Command finds itself in the position today [8 March] of escorting convoys safely over to American eastern seaboard, and then … finding that many of the ships thus escorted are easy prey to the U-boats … off the American coast or in the Caribbean.”
⁶
Even some Type VIIC boats, by filling their torpedo compensating tanks and freshwater tank with fuel oil, managed to make the voyage over (and back) to participate in the “Second Happy Time.” A new set of U-boat “aces” emerged, including Hardegen (U
-123),
Kptlt. Johann Mohr (U
-124),
Kptlt. Erich Topp (U-552), Kptlt. Rolf Mützelburg (U-203), and Oblt.z.S. Georg Lassen (U-160).

Beginning in April, boats operating in the Gulf and Caribbean were able to extend their time on station thanks to the deployment of a new large (1,688 tons surface displacement) U-boat type, the XIV, which carried no torpedoes but, instead, 700 tons of oil as well as spare parts, ammunition, food, other supplies, a physician, and replacement specialist
ratings. Popularly called
Milchkuh
(milch cow), the U-tanker’s capacity to refuel and revictual extended the patrol time of a Type IX boat by eight weeks, that of a Type VII by four, thus becoming for Donitz a long-distance force-multiplier. The U
-459
(Kptlt. Graf Georg von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf) was first on station, refueling the IXB U-108 (Kptlt. Klaus Scholtz) on 20 April, and then fourteen more boats in April and May. By the beginning of summer three more milch cows were tending pump at assigned naval square positions in the Western Atlantic.
⁷
(By the end of summer the British would have to contend with their ministrations in the transatlantic lanes, particularly in the Greenland Air Gap.)

As the number of ships sunk mounted into the hundreds, King’s Navy came under heavy pressure from various quarters to do something about shore lighting and to institute coastwise convoys. In March, a month when oil tankers went down at an average of more than one a day, the Petroleum Industry War Council persuaded the Navy and War departments, which to that date had shared responsibility for coastal lights, to suppress them. The two departments formally agreed that thenceforth control of coastal lights would be “a Navy function.”
⁸
Admiral King quickly exercised his sole authority, ordering that, despite the understandable protests of amusement parks, resorts, and other business interests, all shore lights must be “dimmed”—blackouts, he said, “were not considered necessary.”
⁹
Although both the German and British coasts practiced total light elimination, dim-out was as far as King would ever go during the war. Tragically for the freighter and tanker crews, U-boat Commanders were able to silhouette shipping traffic about as well under dim-out regulation as under full illumination, especially in conditions of haze and low-lying cloud banks.
¹⁰

As for convoy, King would have none of it, arguing that he did not have sufficient escort vessels to make convoying possible and safe. When King thought of escorts he thought of destroyers, and with most of that class ship needed either in transatlantic work or in the Pacific (always King’s overriding concern), he considered ships of lesser draft and tonnage as useless for escort. “Stout hearts in little boats,” he said, “cannot handle an opponent as tough as the submarine”
¹¹
—this in spite
of the fact that the British had been doing quite well with 205–208-foot “Flower” class corvettes; and in spite of the fact that later, in May and June, 165-foot Coast Guard cutters, U.S.C.G.
Icarus
and
Thetis
, sank two of the first three U-boats destroyed in U.S. waters.
¹²
King’s doctrine became: “Inadequately escorted convoys are worse than none.”
¹³
This was the exact opposite of all that British experience had taught since 1939, and, indeed, since 1917, when the Royal Navy of World War I learned the value of convoy under USN tutelage.
¹⁴

Gradually, however, King was forced to change his mind, not least because of the remonstrations of Rodger Winn, who, though a lowly Commander and a reservist at that, was dispatched to Washington by an exasperated Admiralty to reason with the obdurate USN chief.’
¹⁵
By mid-March it was clear that King was undergoing a mind-change. The “little boats” he had disparaged before he now began assembling for convoy escort duty: 173-foot-class patrol craft, 165-foot-class cutters, 147-to-162-foot RN trawlers on loan from the Admiralty, no-foot-class subchasers, down to 83-foot-class cutters, which, though originally considered “of very limited usefulness,” proved, once convoy was instituted, to be an effective guard on the short-leg run between New York and Delaware Bay.