Black May (42 page)

Although No. 19 Group was never able to put in the air the full requirement of 260 aircraft specified in both the Stark and Admiralty plans, proportionately, for the number of assets that could be made available, and taking into account the spanner thrown into the plans by BdU’s surprise nighttime submergence policy, it was thought by both the Air Ministry and AOC-in-C Coastal Command Air Marshal Slessor that Operation Derange had matched the predictions put forth in Raushenbush’s paper. The 103 sightings and 68 attacks in the Bay in May conformed to the numbers crunched in Raushenbush’s “slide rule strategy.”
⁶³

Twice Slessor went on record to that effect, first on 12 May in the 18th Meeting of the A.U. Committee, when he stated: “An analysis over the past four weeks of operations in the Bay of Biscay showed that the number of sightings and attacks accorded with the previous estimates that had been submitted to the Committee.”
⁶⁴
And on 23 May, in a “Comparison of Actual and Estimated Results,” Slessor reported to the A.U. Committee that his general conclusion, based on a sufficiently long period of operations to permit such a conclusion, was, in the case
of Derange, “that the difference between theory and fact is very small—in fact the two can never be expected to approximate more closely in war.” (Nor could there ever be a more candid concession to strategy by slide rule.) “The analysis of those operations, therefore, can be taken as bearing out the calculations used in A.U. (43) 84 and 86.”
⁶⁵

The latter document cited (86) was the Rauschenbush paper (Stark Plan). The former (84), cannily, was Slessor’s own “Value of the Bay of Biscay Patrols” Paper, in which he had consigned the Bay offensive to the status of “a residuary legatee.” If anyone knew, he did, that while there had been 103 sightings and 68 attacks in the Bay during May, there had been 110 sightings and 67 attacks elsewhere in the Atlantic during the same period; and that, while
six
U-boats had been sunk and seven others damaged in the Bay, during May there had been
nine
sunk and four damaged by Coastal aircraft giving cover to threatened convoys. Slessor had loyally come on board the Raushenbush strategy. But he had been vindicated, too.

Of such judgments it is not thought that Stephen Raushenbush had any direct knowledge. After Enclose I, learning that his permanent position at the Department of the Interior was in jeopardy, he resigned from the Navy and returned to Washington to reclaim it—and to enter an obscurity from which only now he has been delivered. Virtually unknown for the brief but impressive role he played in the making of Black May, he died in 1991 at the age of ninety-five in Sarasota, Florida.
⁶⁶
Evan James Williams, it was earlier noted, died in 1945. Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, Baron Blackett, of Chelsea, died in 1974.

D
URING THE WAR
, approximately 5,000 German prisoners were captured from 181 U-boats. Most of them, ranks and ratings alike, were passed through the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre,
U.K., which, in 1943, was situated at Latimer House, Chesham, Buckinghamshire, northwest of London. There, each man was purposely billeted with a POW from a different boat, or a surface ship, or a Luftwaffe bomber or fighter squadron. The expectation was that a U-boat POW who did not previously know his roommate(s) would want to explain in detail his experiences at sea, how his boat was sunk, his boat’s operating systems and weapons, the layout of his home base, and his general thoughts about the war. Such raw, contemporaneous accounts, British Intelligence apparently believed, equaled or exceeded in value the often guarded information that the POWs gave to Interrogation Officers in formal debriefings. For that reason, each living space was secretly bugged with hidden microphones that picked up most of what the POWs said to one another, and a team of “listeners”—native German speakers able to identify voices—clandestinely recorded their conversations on shellac-covered metal discs.

The data were then transcribed in both the original German and English translation onto typewritten forms headed with the words: “This report is Most Secret. If further circulation is necessary, it must be paraphrased so that neither the source of the information nor the means by which it has been obtained is apparent.” There is no indication in the record that the listeners had any ethical scruples about what a later period in history would call “invasion of privacy.” A similar bugging operation was conducted immediately after the war, from July to December 1945, when ten German nuclear scientists were detained in Farm Hall, Godmanchester, near Cambridge. Latimer House, however, was apparently the first large-scale deliberate operation of clandestine recording of ordinary conversation.
¹

The Latimer House transcripts are housed in the Public Record Office, Kew, under Crown Copyright.
²
The extracts given below focus mainly on U-boat men captured in April and May and on conversations of men captured earlier but recorded during May. Several conversations from March, June, and August are included because of the interesting character of the information contained. The writer has endeavored to make a representative and balanced selection of conversations that fall generally into four categories: (1) operational experiences
at sea; (2) technical equipment, including torpedoes; (3) the home front and Biscay bases; and (4) questions of morale and the course of the war.

The reader will find that many of the conversations are flat and passionless; some even banal. It is typical sailors’ talk, with predictable criticism of superiors and occasional bellyaching—or, as the British translation expresses it, “grousing.” One hears exaggerations, misconceptions, and falsehoods, as well as authentic experiences and feelings. There is little that can be called wit or intended humor; and, considering the circumstances, that should not be surprising. How much vital information the Intelligence people drew from the extracts given here is not known. Probably some of the data contributed to the overall interrogation summaries that were printed up periodically.
³

What, then, are the transcripts’ special value to the present narrative? The answer must be that fifty-five years after the events of spring-summer 1943, they provide us the only existing completely fresh, artless, and uninhibited disclosure of the U-boat mind: what these men were thinking and feeling
at the time.
Whereas officers and crewmen interviewed in the 1990s concede that details once green in memory have now gone gray in mind, and that the immediacy of once-intense experiences has dissipated through the wake of years, in these long-ago recorded voices we hear U-boat men as they were, in the months of their testing.

All but one of them cited here are now dead, according to the files of the Verband Deutscher U-Bootfahren e.V. (U-Boat Veterans Association) in Hamburg. On the “listeners” forms they are identified only by number. Walter Köhler, for example, a
Matrosenobergefreiter
(Seaman, first class) captured from U-752 on 23 May, was identified as N 1635; and Helmut Klotzsch, an
Obersteuermann
(Navigator) captured from U-175 on 17 April, was identified as N(Am)15, the “Am” indicating that he was captured as the result of an American action, namely depth charges and gunfire from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter U.S.C.G.C.
Spencer.
At some point in the later history of these transcripts someone (one of the listeners? one of the former POWs?) wrote the prisoners’ family names alongside their numbers. The names correspond to names on the U-boat crew lists preserved in the U-Boot-Archiv
at Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, where founder and director Horst Bredow was able to supply as well many first, or given, names.

Because not every word or phrase spoken by the POWs was captured on the discs, there are numerous ellipses in the transcripts. Additional ellipses were entered on the following extracts by the writer in order to pass over uninteresting detail or confusing phraseology. Occasionally a word or phrase was added in brackets to identify persons or U-boats or to help the flow of speech: here, as in similar transcripts of unguarded conversation, one learns that people do not always speak in complete sentences. Numerals were written out to conform with speech,
Captain
was changed to
Commander
, and British spellings (e.g.,
harbour, defence)
were changed to American forms. Briticisms such as “That’s not cricket” were left untouched.

All the speakers in these extracts are identified in the endnotes, where the reader will find each POWs family name, and given name if it is available in the records; the U-boat on which he served; his rank or rating together with the U.S. Navy equivalent; and his date of capture.
⁴
The first section of the extracts, which focuses on experiences at sea, begins, for example, with conversations between Heinrich Schauffel, a
Leutnant zur See
(Ensign) from U-752, captured on 23 May, Werner Opolka, an
Oberleutnant zur See
(Lieutenant [jg]) from U-528, captured on 11 May; and Karl-Heinz Foertsch, a
Leutnant (Ing.)
(Ensign, engineering duties) from U-659, captured on 4 May. The date of each recording is given below the extract.

S
CHAUFFEL
: A bomb fell on the after deck of [Kptlt. Heinz] Wolfs boat [U
-465].…
Everything was ripped open, but the bomb didn’t explode. We once got a depth charge on deck and were unable to submerge with it, yet they couldn’t remove it. It had gone through the woodwork and was so jammed that we couldn’t get it out. It happened in the Bay of Biscay and we fought off aircraft for two days.

F
OERTSCH:
Kapitünleutnant [Heinrich] Schmid [U-663] got a direct hit on the metal of his outboard tank, but the thing glanced off.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Did you hear that the outboard tank of a boat had come off?

O
POLKA:
Not the whole outboard tank, but the outer covering was torn off; there are double ribs in it and you couldn’t break them down. [Oblt.z.S. Karl] Hauser [U
-211]
once came back with all his compensating tanks smashed. Also, in the Bay of Biscay, he got eight depth charges, four on the surface and four when submerged. The external pressure connection for the quick-diving tank was broken, then the compensating tanks and the oil compensating tanks.…

S
CHAUFFEL
(?): Yes, our boats can take tremendous punishment.

O
POLKA
(?): You can do anything you like with them.

Recorded 10 June 1943
⁵

F
OERTSCH:
Not far from the American coast … unloaded the two hundred kilogram mines. At first the Commander wanted to see what it looked like there; we rushed off at three-fifths speed, which was reduced to one electric motor at “dead slow.” That’s how we went along. It wasn’t pleasant, sitting right in the harbor entrance.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Which harbor was that?

F
OERTSCH:
Over at Jacksonville.

S
CHAUFFEL:
That’s in the south, isn’t it?

F
OERTSCH:
Florida.

S
CHAUFFEL:
The main thing is that some [merchant ships] ran on to them.

F
OERTSCH:
Yes. Three of them.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Does that count?

F
OERTSCH:
Certainly, they count a tremendous number of points.…

Recorded 7 June 1943
⁶

O
POLKA:
It said on the wireless: “[Korv. Kapt. Hans-Rudolf] Rosing has gone.” I bet he laughed!

S
CHAUFFEL:
He’s a smart fellow.

O
POLKA:
First-class fellow; he looks very fit, but he’s got gray hair.

S
CHAUFFEL:
He hasn’t made many long-distance patrols.

O
POLKA:
Three, I think.

S
CHAUFFEL:
He got the Knight’s Cross—what for?

F
OERTSCH:
He sank one hundred thousand tons.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Kretschmer was the BdU’s favorite, wasn’t he?

O
POLKA:
The BdU has his favorites, that’s quite right. Topp, Kretschmer, Engelbert Endrass, Suhren.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Endrass was always rather quiet.

O
POLKA:
Very quiet, yes; it’s a pity that he has gone. It isn’t known at all how that happened. We lost five boats there.

S
CHAUFFEL:
On one convoy?

O
POLKA:
Yes, Gibraltar convoy. Endrass, [Eberhard] Hoffmann—

F
OERTSCH:
Nico [Nicolai] Clausen was nearly lost, too.

O
POLKA:
If he hadn’t previously rammed the steamer—he still got home.

S
CHAUFFEL:
His hair has gone gray, too.

O
POLKA:
From the last patrol.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Yes, because of abandoning ship, and water, et cetera.

O
POLKA
(?): They did target practice on the U-boat, with flak and ten-point-five [gunfire]. The whole conning tower was shot to bits. Half of the hatch came down on his head. His whole head was full of splinters; his lower jaw was broken, and he was badly cut about below the eye; he couldn’t … his mouth, he couldn’t see. He was picked up by a cutter.

S
CHAUFFEL
(?): Where did that happen?

O
POLKA
(?): In the Atlantic.…

Recorded 11 June 1943
⁷

S
CHAUFFEL:
[Werner] Hartmann [U-198] is at sea again, isn’t he?

O
POLKA:
Yes. He’s had some successes, too, and [unclear name] should be
Kapitän zur See
now.

S
CHAUFFEL:
Hartmann too.

F
OERTSCH
: Is he Kapitän zur See now?

O
POLKA:
Yes.

S
CHAUFFEL:
[Unclear name] has gone, hasn’t he?

O
POLKA:
Yes. [Otto von] Bülow was very successful!

F
OERTSCH:
Aircraft carrier.…

S
CHAUFFEL:
He’s a smart fellow.

F
OERTSCH:
He was the captain of my training boat—a grand fellow. I
know him very well: he couldn’t [get on] with [Paul] Büchel, who treated him very badly, very shabbily. I couldn’t bear Büchel.

S
CHAUFFEL:
[Otto] Schuhart was the best of the lot.

Recorded 9 June 1943
⁸

A
PEL:
I remember once, the first convoy on my first patrol. The Commander approached—the whole day long we were forced down by aircraft and destroyers; they kept on forcing us to submerge. We were just in contact and wanted to get ahead of it when a destroyer was reported and we submerged. The next time we were ready again—“Aircraft!”—and down we went. The convoy got away every time until one night we had crept up and got well ahead of it. We had gotten right through and had already gone to action stations, ready to attack; the bow caps were open, and we were about to fire. The Commander had picked out a nice eighteen thousand-ton ship that he wanted to sink, when suddenly—
“Pschew, pschew, pschew!”
Starshells!
Bang!
Hell broke loose. The Commander shouted: “Destroyer! Destroyer! Destroyer!” All three were coming for us. “All torpedoes in the tube.” All of a sudden we heard the sounds of propellers and
“tsch, tsch, tsch, bang”
The fun began. It was only a few seconds before we had fired where the ship was lying, and they had located us by radar, which was quite new at that time. They didn’t actually see us, the weather was very bad—it was up here between Iceland and England. They fired starshells and the moment the starshells exploded they naturally fired their guns of all calibers from two to fifteen centimeters. They kept on booming away, there were crashes all round; we submerged immediately; there were a few depth charges, but not many. They only dropped eight of them very close to us and a few more farther away and then they couldn’t find us again. Suddenly we surfaced, but the convoy had gone. Then we went after it again. That day we got another … full from the aircraft. The next day: “Destroyer!” “Crash dive to periscope depth!” “Action stations!” The Commander said: “I’m going to sink the destroyer. Is everything ready?” Two destroyers; suddenly he zigzagged! The whole … made off. That was another fiasco for us.