The Burning Shore (3 page)

Lieutenant Harry J. Kane joined the US Army Air Forces in March 1941, receiving his commission five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. COURTESY OF MARGUERITE KANE JAMESON.

Kane grew up immersed in the Irish Catholic community of Brooklyn, attending private Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school. The family’s wealth provided for a comfortable life insulated from the Great Depression, but Kane’s childhood did not pass without trauma. His mother gave birth
to two more sons, Frank and Richard, and the family grieved when Richard died at the age of four from a sudden illness. Then, when Harry and Frank Kane were still young, their father abandoned the family, forcing the boys’ mother to raise them alone. Somewhere along the way, Kane realized that if he were to accomplish his goals in life, he alone would identify them and make them come true.

After graduating from Brooklyn Prep in 1937, Kane spent three years working at various jobs, but he began paying close attention to the darkening world headlines. Choosing to join the military service before he was conscripted, Kane enrolled in a private flight school sometime in 1940, earning his private pilot’s license as he mulled over whether to join the Army Air Corps or the navy’s aviation branch. In early 1941, Kane opted for army aviation. His educational record and private pilot’s license won him quick acceptance. At Drane Army Airfield, he would take a three-month primary flight training course. Barring academic failure, an unexpected physiological problem, or aerial mishap, Kane anticipated finishing the other two phases of flight training—a ten-week basic flight school at Gunter Field in Montgomery, Alabama, followed by a ten-week advanced flight school at Barksdale Field in Louisiana—sometime in December 1941.
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S
EVERAL WEEKS AFTER
K
ANE ARRIVED IN
F
LORIDA
, in early April 1941, newly promoted
Kapitänleutnant
(Lieutenant Commander) Horst Degen took a train from northern Germany through occupied France to the Atlantic port of Saint-Nazaire. While the
twenty-seven-year-old was no newcomer to military service or the ongoing European war, this particular journey marked a major milestone in his seven-year naval career. A surface navy officer since receiving his commission in 1936, Degen had transferred into the elite U-boat branch the previous July. Now, having recently finished five months of U-boat training and a three-month U-boat commander’s course, Degen was about to experience an actual wartime U-boat patrol. It was a heady time for a man who had dreamed of a life at sea ever since he was a young boy.

Degen was born on July 19, 1913, in the town of Hemer in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. His parents, Carl and Josephine Degen, were a respected couple in the town, where Carl Degen was a longtime civil servant and mayor. Horst Degen later recalled that he enjoyed “a happy, carefree time” as a boy, despite the harsh living conditions in Germany after the end of World War I. But tragedy found Degen all the same: both of his parents died before he reached the age of sixteen, leaving him and his ten-year-old sister, Ilse, to be raised by their twenty-three-year-old sister, Hanna, and her husband.

Upon finishing his last year in grammar school (the German equivalent of high school), Degen, then eighteen, traveled to the Reichsmarine Naval Barracks outside Kiel as an applicant to the German Naval Academy. There, he and other candidates were organized into groups of eight and given a battery of academic, physical fitness, and psychological tests to gauge their mental, athletic, and psychological prowess. In one test, instructors placed Degen alone in a room with one-way mirrors through which they monitored him. They told him to lift a heavy metal
bar, which, as he did so, was charged with increasing levels of electricity. The candidates who resisted the shock and pain from the electrical current the longest received the highest marks. Degen himself never mentioned his score on that particular test, but his subsequent naval record indicates that he passed. Another challenge entailed following a complicated set of instructions for delivering a message to a navy officer. A classmate of Degen’s, Reinhard Hardegen, later recounted his experience: an instructor dictated, “Carry this piece of paper over that obstacle, cross the ditch, turn left, run until you arrive at a tall tree,” adding, “turn right, walk until you come to a man in a green coat, and say to him, ‘I have been ordered to deliver this paper to you.’” The candidate’s grade would depend on his ability to carry out the instructions accurately.

Horst Degen joined the navy at a time of profound change for Germany and its people. On April 1, 1933, the Reichsmarine formally admitted him as an
Offiziersanwärter
(officer candidate). Just one week earlier, Adolf Hitler—who had been serving as German chancellor in a coalition government since January 30—had persuaded the German Reichstag to pass a law formally consolidating his hold on power by granting the Nazis full legislative authority for a four-year period. Like many young members of the navy, Degen kept whatever opinions he had of the Nazi Party to himself, even as the regime tightened its grip on German society. He would later tell a navy colleague that while he himself had enjoyed a blithe upbringing as a boy, “This was no longer possible in the present days of the Hitler Youth,” which had supplanted all other children’s organizations and in which participation was mandatory for all.
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After passing the entry tests, Degen and his classmates reported to the Naval Academy at Flensburg-Mürwik. Overlooking the Flensburg Fjord, which links the ancient German city with the Baltic Sea, the academy was founded in 1910 by Kaiser Wilhelm II. At the time that Degen and the other members of the Class of 1933 entered, the academy curriculum included three months of basic infantry training on the island of Dänholm in the Baltic, followed by sailing instruction. Upon completion of that phase in the late summer, the ninety-four members of the Class of 1933 embarked on the four-year-old light cruiser
Karlsruhe
for a nine-month, around-the-world cruise.
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Leaving Kiel on October 4, 1933, the 8,130-ton warship carried a crew of 1,550 officers and enlisted crewmen, plus the Class of 1933 naval cadets.
Karlsruhe
skipper
Kapitän zur See
(Captain) Baron Harsdorf von Enderndorf ordered the cruiser south to Gibraltar and the Mediterranean for port visits in Sicily and Egypt, then transited the Suez Canal for the Indian Ocean and stops in Yemen, Ceylon, and India before a Christmas stopover in Indonesia. Degen would later recall enjoying a sumptuous Christmas Eve dinner with the owners of the Oranje Hotel in Padang before the
Karlsruhe
once again got underway for Australia and the long Pacific crossing to American Samoa and Hawaii.

Reaching the US West Coast in early March 1934, the cruiser docked at Tacoma, Washington, for a week before heading south to the massive US Navy base at San Diego. There, Hamilton and Elsa Marston, owners of a prominent San Diego department store, invited Degen and a fellow naval cadet to dinner, beginning a lifelong friendship between Degen and the American family. During both stops, the naval cadets also
enjoyed extended land excursions to Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

In early April, the
Karlsruhe
left San Diego for Central America and a transit of the Panama Canal, followed by port visits in British Honduras and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. The ship then made a lengthy trek up the US East Coast and arrived in Boston, its final stopover, on May 12.

Whereas the German communities in Asia had welcomed the warship and its men with open arms, their arrival in America sparked anti-Nazi protests that tarnished the formal welcoming ceremonies. In Seattle and Los Angeles, the hosts of the
Karlsruhe
were forced to shepherd the cadets past boisterous protest rallies, and in Boston a small riot—quickly quelled by police—broke out near the ship at the Boston Naval Shipyard. For Degen and the other cadets, these incidents were a minor distraction. They faced another, more troublesome challenge.

By the time the
Karlsruhe
reached the United States, it resembled Noah’s Ark. The training warship was carrying a variety of large mammals, thanks to several German societies that had hosted the ship at stops along its voyage. In Ceylon, the local German community presented the ship’s crew with “Trinco,” a baby leopard. In Calcutta, the crew took aboard “Calco,” a tiny Himalayan bear cub. During a port call in Brisbane, Australia, a local German society gave the ship a baby kangaroo.

It fell to the Class of 1933 cadets to care for and feed this growing menagerie. By the time the
Karlsruhe
reached Boston, Calco the bear had grown quite large and become aggressive toward his captors. Several days after arriving, Captain von Enderndorf hosted the German consul general, Kurt Wilhelm
Viktor von Tippelskirch, his wife, and their young daughter on board the ship. While the two older men conferred, Degen escorted mother and daughter around the main deck. They came upon several large cages containing the donated animals, and the girl bent over to play with the kangaroo. “This made the bear jealous,” Degen later noted. “He reached out of his cage and with one swipe of his claw, ripped her dress from top to bottom.” Both the terrified daughter and the mortified naval cadet’s career survived the encounter. Alas, Calco did not survive the voyage. He was seriously injured during a storm while the cruiser crossed the North Atlantic on its return and had to be shot.
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Now, nearly seven years later, Horst Degen was anticipating a much stiffer challenge than tending to the needs of a captive bear cub. The war that Hitler had instigated nineteen months earlier was spreading across the Atlantic Ocean, and U-boat commanders and crews were in high demand—so much so that Degen had felt compelled to volunteer for eight more months of training in order to join the U-boat Force. He was still a newcomer to U-boats when, on April 7, 1941, he boarded the Type VIIC U-552 for a thirty-day combat patrol in the North Atlantic. Since Degen had not previously served as a watch officer on a U-boat before entering U-boat commander’s training, his curriculum included this “at-sea training” as a
Kommandantenschüler
(commander pupil) on an actual wartime patrol. Commanding the four-month old U-552 was twenty-six-year-old
Oberleutnant zur See
(Lieutenant) Erich Topp. Topp had graduated from the Naval Academy a year after Degen but joined the U-boat Force in October 1937, well ahead of Degen. After serving on two other U-boats, Topp commissioned the Type VIIC U-552 on December 4, 1940. In its first patrol, U-552 had sunk two ships, totaling 12,749 gross registered tons, before reaching its new port at Saint-Nazaire.
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As U-552 returns to Saint-Nazaire on May 6, 1941, Horst Degen (right) said U-boat ace Erich Topp (left), “taught me all I know” about U-boat tactics during a war patrol in the spring of 1941. COURTESY OF GÜNTHER DEGEN.

By the early spring of 1941, the German U-boat Force was firmly established in France. When the German army roared through the Low Countries and northwestern France in May 1940, Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz and his staff at U-boat Force Headquarters (
Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote
, or BdU) seized the opportunity to stage U-boat operations from the Brittany ports, which offered the U-boats direct access to the North Atlantic. This both increased the length of patrols and dramatically
improved what Dönitz described as Germany’s “strategically unfavorable geographical position vis-à-vis Great Britain.” Prior to the fall of France, the U-boats had no choice but to sail from ports on the North Sea or in the Baltic and pass through heavily defended waters north of the British Isles to reach the open Atlantic. In the months that followed the French surrender on June 22, 1940, nearly three dozen U-boats transferred from Germany to operate out of the active bases at Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice, Brest, and Bordeaux. Anticipating British aerial attacks on the new U-boat bases, Dönitz secured the help of a major German construction company to create impregnable bunkers for the boats.