The Burning Shore (17 page)

Some 5,440 miles to the northeast, Horst Degen and the crew of U-701 were also unaware of the fiasco in Los Angeles. They had other, more pressing things on their minds. While Commander Nishino was shelling the fuel farm, BdU technicians were loading fourteen torpedoes into U-701’s forward and aft torpedo rooms and its topside canisters. At the moment that Harry Kane and his aircrew were scaring the bejesus out of Southern California, Degen’s crewmen were finishing the backbreaking work of loading fuel, ammunition, water, and food supplies for the boat’s next patrol. And at about the time Secretaries Stimson and Knox were going public with their radically different versions of what had occurred over Los Angeles, U-701 was on its way to the waters off Iceland for its second war patrol.
⁷

V
ICE
A
DMIRAL
K
ARL
D
ÖNITZ
should have been a happy man as the month of February 1942 drew to a close. For the previous six weeks, his U-boat commanders in the first wave of attacks along the US East Coast and Newfoundland had reported successes far beyond what he and his staff at BdU Operations had anticipated. After hearing Reinhard Hardegen’s postpatrol report for U-123 after its return on February 9, Dönitz summarized the situation along the American littoral in practically gleeful terms: “The expectation of encountering many independently routed ships, clumsy handling of ships, slight, inexperienced sea and air patrols and defenses was so truly fulfilled that conditions had to be described as almost completely of peacetime standards.” It was almost as if the Americans refused to believe that a war was on.

Dönitz and his staff were aware, however, of a number of negative incidents stemming from the Drumbeat and Ziethen patrols. At least six of the U-boat commanders, including Degen, reported torpedo failures that had prevented them from sinking Allied merchant ships even at very close range. Both Degen and Horst Uphoff in U-84 cited failures in the contact pistols of their torpedoes that resulted in their hearing the dull boom of torpedoes slamming into the hulls of merchant ships but no warhead detonation. Other U-boat skippers complained that the depth-setting gear inside their torpedoes had failed, causing the weapons to underrun their targets without going off. Winter storms off Newfoundland had also played havoc with a number of the U-boats. But these were relatively minor issues. Threatening to undermine the U-boat campaign in American waters was something else: paranoia at the highest level of the Nazi regime. The source of the problem was none other than Adolf Hitler himself.
⁸

For several months, the Führer had been worrying about the security of northern Norway, a vital corridor for iron ore and nickel supplies keeping the German war machine in operation. After British commandos staged hit-and-run raids near Narvik and Ålesund the night of December 26–27, Hitler summoned Admiral Erich Raeder to his Wolf’s Lair headquarters. “If the British go about things properly, they will attack northern Norway at several points,” Hitler said. “This might be of decisive importance for the outcome of the war.” He then demanded the immediate transfer of the Kriegsmarine’s major surface warships to Norwegian waters.

To Raeder’s and Dönitz’s acute dismay, three weeks later Hitler had announced that Norway was now the “zone of destiny” for the war. In a meeting on January 22 with Vice Admiral Kurt Fricke, Raeder’s chief of staff, the Führer—according to official minutes of the meeting—demanded “unconditional obedience to all his commands and wishes concerning the defense of this area.” One of them was that twenty U-boats would permanently patrol the Iceland-Faroes gap and Norwegian coastal waters, an exorbitant reallocation that threatened to seriously undermine the Drumbeat-Newfoundland campaign just eleven days after it had begun. Well aware of Hitler’s impulsive firing of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch three weeks earlier, Raeder and Dönitz had no desire to challenge the dictator—although Dönitz, at least, knew full well that the U-boats were in a decisive phase of the battle against Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic. “I believed at the time, and I still believe, that our overall war effort would have been best served had we seized the opportunity offered by the exceptionally favorable conditions in the Atlantic and concentrated every available U-boat on the
war in shipping,” Dönitz later recalled. However, BdU issued the orders to send eight of his U-boats designated for the western Atlantic to the Iceland-Faroes gap. One of them was U-701.

Degen’s new deployment lasted thirty-five days and took him and his crew over 4,619 nautical miles of ocean between the U-boat’s departure from Saint-Nazaire on February 26 and its return to France on April 1. Crewman Gerhard Schwendel recalled that after the patrol, a German news bulletin announced that U-701 had destroyed “an entire convoy bringing war materials from America to England.” In actuality, during twenty-two days spent lurking off the southeast coast of Iceland, it managed to sink two small coastal steamers and two British antisubmarine warfare trawlers for a minute total of 1,610 gross registered tons—less than one-half the tonnage of the 3,657-ton freighter
Baron Erskine
, its solitary kill on its first war patrol. While the winter weather frequently disrupted their patrol patterns, the real reason for the lack of success among U-701 and the other boats was that the Führer’s intuition had packed them off to an empty stretch of the North Atlantic.

On Friday, March 27, U-701 was still northwest of Scotland on its homeward course, when BdU transmitted a message directing it to return to Brest rather than Saint-Nazaire. Several hours later, Oberfunkmaat Herbert Grotheer decrypted an Enigma message alerting all U-boats at sea to “proceed at high speed” to a rendezvous point in the Bay of Biscay. Three hours later, a follow-up message reported that a British special operations force had attacked Saint-Nazaire but had been repulsed. In Operation Chariot, the British targeted the large Louis Joubert dry dock at Saint-Nazaire, the only facility on the French Atlantic
coast large enough to repair major German surface warships such as the battleship
Tirpitz
. Loss of the dry dock would force the Kriegsmarine to return any major warships needing repairs to German home waters, significantly reducing that particular threat in the Atlantic. The Royal Navy converted the World War I–era destroyer
HMS Campbeltown
(formerly the
USS Buchanan
) into a floating time bomb, with a cache of 4.1 tons of high explosives concealed below decks in several steel containers. Escorted by 18 smaller torpedo and patrol boats bearing a force of 346 Royal Navy crewman and 265 British army commandos, the destroyer steamed up the Loire River at midnight on March 28 and, despite heavy German gunfire, rammed the dry dock at 0138 hours—just four minutes behind schedule. German defenders put up a fierce fight that killed 169 of the raiders and resulted in the capture of 215 others, while another 228 men safely evacuated. The Germans failed to detect the explosives onboard the destroyer, and at noon the next day, the
Campbeltown
blew up with such force that it destroyed the dry dock gate and killed around 360 German soldiers and French civilians. The mission was a total success: the dry dock remained unusable for the rest of the war and would not be repaired until 1947.

The Saint-Nazaire raid had little effect, however, on the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic. U-701 continued its homeward journey, arriving in Brest on Wednesday, April 1. While U-701 underwent repairs at its new home in a Brest U-boat bunker, Degen and his men once more savored life ashore after a frigid month inside their steel tube. Six weeks later, U-701 was ready for sea again.
⁹

8

UNPREPARED DEFENDERS

A
S
U-
BOATS RAMPAGED ALONG THE
US E
AST
C
OAST IN THE
spring of 1942, one of the Allies’ newest lines of defense struggled to respond to the crisis. During World War I, the British had sent then-primitive aircraft and dirigibles offshore to hunt for the kaiser’s first-generation U-boats, but they lacked effective sensors and weapons to locate and destroy the enemy. As a result, aircraft sank none of the 204 U-boats lost between 1914 and 1918, although the British continued to expand aerial patrols since they succeeded in driving the submersibles under water, thereby allowing Allied ships to escape attack.

It had been well known that aviation could be an effective tool against submarines; difficult for U-boat commanders to detect, airplanes were unusually effective at spotting and forcing the submersibles under water. Yet, although the Allies possessed several strong and growing air service branches, infighting hobbled most of them as the Battle of the Atlantic accelerated.

In the United Kingdom, the Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command was struggling against its two more powerful rivals—Bomber
Command and Fighter Command—for aircraft, resources, and trained personnel. In the United States, the USAAF and the navy were gridlocked over which service should take on the fight against the U-boats with the scarce numbers of long-range bombers then available. The USAAF, under long-standing federal law, owned and controlled all land-based bombers, while the navy merely operated seaplanes and smaller land-based aircraft to patrol the nation’s sea frontiers.

Nor was this interservice rivalry alone hampering the development of aircraft antisubmarine capabilities. The USAAF itself was consumed with its own ongoing expansion, as Lieutenant Harry Kane and the rest of the 396th Medium Bombardment Squadron were well aware when March ended and April blew in on a fresh spring breeze. The weather had improved, but frustration levels remained high. Still based at Sacramento Municipal Airport, the 396th aircrews continued a nonstop slog of combat crew training and administrative duties that seemed as if they might outlast the war. “Most of it was training and patrol, flying up and down the Pacific Coast,” Kane later said. “There [were] other squadrons further north that [trained] up around Oregon and Washington.” Four months after Pearl Harbor, the USAAF was nowhere near ready to take on the Germans and the Japanese. Aviation strategists since the 1920s had predicted that air power would someday become a primary military force for any industrial nation, and the USAAF had indeed accomplished much in the past three years. But the newest military branch still had an incredible distance to go before it could feasibly take the war into the skies over the Axis.

The Army Air Corps (as it had been called until mid-1941) was born four years after Orville Wright made the first powered flight in an airplane at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, in 1903. Buried within the army bureaucracy, its predecessor, the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps, initially had a maximum personnel strength of three men. While World War I saw a spike in its growth to 227 aircraft, during the early 1920s the air branch languished. It would take the rise of Adolf Hitler and the spectacle of German airpower wreaking havoc in the Spanish Civil War to prompt President Franklin Roosevelt and army leaders to get Congress to open the money spigot for new aircraft, airfields, training centers, and pilots. After the 1938 Munich crisis, when Hitler bullied the British and French into allowing Germany to swallow the Czech Sudetenland, FDR said he wanted to build a modern air corps of 20,000 combat aircraft and develop an aviation industry production capability of 2,000 aircraft per month.

As the specter of war drew nearer, Roosevelt had to revise his initially ambitious goal as planners’ estimates of what army aviation would require rapidly expanded: in April 1940, FDR told Congress he wanted American industry to produce 50,000 aircraft per year. Nevertheless, a month after the fall of France in June 1940, air corps planners formally proposed to field a force of fifty-four combat groups and receive over 4,000 modern warplanes by April 1942. Each bomb group fielded between seventy-two and ninety-six aircraft. Just seven months later, on February 14, 1941, General George C. Marshall ordered air corps commander-in-chief Major General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold to prepare for a force of eighty-four combat groups totaling 7,800
aircraft. To man this emerging behemoth, Marshall also directed the expansion of army pilot training in 1941 to 30,000 cadets per year. This also unleashed construction crews from coast to coast building hundreds of new air corps bases, as well as pilot and aircrew training centers. The USAAF would ultimately grow to a force of 231,099 aircraft of all types, including 35,000 long-range bombers and 68,712 fighters, and a manpower of 2.1 million personnel.

In the spring of 1942, however, the USAAF was still a mere shadow of the force it would become by the end of the war. Harry Kane and his fellow fliers in the 396th were part of a fighting organization still in its infancy. Few USAAF bomber units were fully certified for combat, and none had the sensors, weapons, tactics, and aviator skills needed for the difficult mission of locating and destroying a U-boat. This was especially true on the US East Coast.
¹

On December 8, 1941, the I Bomber Command under Brigadier General Arnold N. Krogstad had begun patrol flights offshore. Krogstad had a force of fewer than fifty bombers, including nine long-range B-17s, a handful of the underperforming B-18s, and several dozen medium-range B-25 and B-26 bombers. Daily patrols of two aircraft apiece originated at Bangor, Maine; Westover Field, Massachusetts; Mitchel Field, New York; and Langley Field, Virginia. The B-17s patrolled out to six hundred miles offshore, while the medium-range bombers flew shorter circuits of up to several hundred miles. Meanwhile, single-engine utility and trainer aircraft from the I Air Support Command bolstered Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews’s ragtag air fleet of 103 similar planes in mounting short-range missions several dozen
miles off the coast. These latter aircraft were unarmed, and most lacked radios, so their value—if any—was in tricking U-boat commanders into crash-diving upon sighting them, thereby safeguarding any civilian ships in the area until navy warships—if available—could rush to the scene.