The Burning Shore (31 page)

Authors: Ed Offley

BOOK: The Burning Shore

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In Saint-Nazaire, France, Luc Braeuer was a generous host and tour guide at the wartime U-boat bunker complex, which survived a massive Allied aerial bombing campaign and remains intact to this day. Braeuer is cofounder of Le Grand Blockhaus, a museum located in the nearby coastal town of Batz-sur-Mer and dedicated to the wartime history of Saint-Nazaire.

Günther Degen also turned over invaluable private papers from his father’s collection, including an extensive correspondence between Horst Degen and Harry Kane conducted by the two veterans in 1979 and 1980.

Marguerite Kane Jameson, the daughter of Lieutenant Harry Kane, was another strong supporter of the project and provided key papers and information concerning her father and her family’s history.

My particular thanks to British code-breaking expert and author Ralph Erskine for his patience in teaching me the intricacies of the German naval Enigma system and the British campaign to penetrate the U-boat Force’s encrypted communications—a major element in the ultimate Allied defeat of the U-boats.

Since the discovery of the Civil War–era ironclad
USS Monitor
in 1976, the study of submerged shipwrecks has become a major field of scientific inquiry. Gains in underwater diving and salvage technology have also raised concern among scientists, environmentalists, and government officials over the need to safeguard historical shipwreck sites from damage and plundering. The hulk of U-701, resting not far from the
Monitor
, has become a part of that broad effort. My particular thanks go to David Alberg, superintendent of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, for his support and for providing underwater photos of U-701. Among Alberg’s colleagues, I want to thank National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine archeologists Joseph Hoyt and John Wagner, as well as Syracuse University emeritus dean Dr. Cathryn R. Newton.

I owe a debt to many other people who have provided help and support for this book. In Washington, DC, researcher Candice Clifford diligently retrieved hundreds of documents at the National Archives relating to U-701 and the A-29 Hudson that sank it. Rear Admiral Jay DeLoach, then commander of the Naval History and Heritage Command, provided important papers from the late Frank Knox, wartime secretary of the navy under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center, archivists Brian Nicklas and Mark Kahn were most helpful in providing flight manuals and other technical documents for the Lockheed A-29 Hudson.

At the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, researcher Ginny Kilander once more assisted in retrieving documents from the extensive U-boat archive donated to the center by the late Clay Blair, author of the encyclopedic two-volume history
Hitler’s U-boat War
. In San Diego, naval historian and retired navy Captain Bruce Linder helped locate ancient news reports involving Degen’s port visit on the cruiser
Karlsruhe
and Kane’s 1942 patrol flight that inadvertently triggered what became known as the “Battle of Los Angeles.” Thomas P. Lauria at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, provided detailed information on the 396th Medium Bombardment Squadron and its parent unit, the 41st Bombardment Group, as well as other US Army Air Forces units. Ranita Gaskins at the Learning Resources Center at Lenoir Community College in Kinston, North Carolina, was most helpful in locating family papers of Marguerite LaRoque, who married Harry Kane in 1943.

In London, naval researcher Tony Cooper retrieved fascinating intelligence reports by the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre in January 1942 that confirm the Allies were aware of the planned U-boat campaign against Allied merchant shipping in American coastal waters.

Once more, the website
Uboat.net
, created and managed by Icelander Gudmundur Helgason, was a major source of information about the U-boats and their campaign in American waters in 1942. If you want to become a student of the U-boat campaign, that website and Jerry Mason’s U-boat Archive are the best places to begin. I also want to thank the folks at the Internet-based travel site
Indo.com
for the use of their marvelous latitude-longitude calculator, which transforms the tedious and frustrating effort of computing distances and directions for events at sea into a simple and efficient routine (
www.indo.com/distance
).

And last but not least, a grateful thanks to my friends at Sunnyside Grill for their friendship and logistical support (good company, great food, and unlimited iced tea): Glenn Bowker, Nathan and Kelly Morgan, Julie Layne, Pam Battles, Misty Folds, and Sherri Varner. Go Steelers!

As ever, these people deserve a large share of the credit for this book. Responsibility for its accuracy, however, is mine alone.

Ed Offley

Panama City Beach, Florida

GLOSSARY

10th Fleet—Special US Navy command established in Washington, DC, headquarters in May 1943 to direct the control and routing of convoys, coordinate and direct all antisubmarine operations against U-boats, and supervise all US Navy antisubmarine warfare training and development.

1WO—first watch officer; the second in command of a U-boat.

2WO—second watch officer; a junior officer on a U-boat.

ABC-1 Conference—See
Conferences
.

Arcadia—See
Conferences
.

Atlantic Conference—See
Conferences
.

B-Dienst—Funkbeobachtungsdienst; German navy cryptologic service.

Ballast tanks—Tanks outside the pressure hull of a submarine that, when flooded with water, enabled the submarine to dive.

Baubelehrung
—“Boat familiarization”; U-boat Force program that assigned officers and enlisted crewmen to a U-boat under construction from the time its keel was laid through commissioning for the purpose of training and getting used to all aspects of the boat.

BdU—
Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote
; commander-in-chief of U-boats (Admiral Karl Dönitz); the abbreviation was also commonly used to identify the admiral’s staff or U-boat Force Headquarters.

BdU Zug
—Special passenger train for U-boat personnel on leave.

Bletchley Park—A mansion and grounds northwest of London in Buckinghamshire, England, officially termed the Government Code and Cypher School, where cryptanalysts “broke” intercepts of encrypted German wireless radio traffic.

Bombe—Nickname for the electromechanical device at Bletchley Park used to solve the German Enigma cipher key settings.

CNO—Chief of naval operations; the senior uniformed officer in the US Navy. Prior to World War II, the CNO was the service’s chief planner but subordinate to the commander-in-chief, US Fleet, at the time the highest-ranking admiral. The positions were merged early in World War II, with Admiral Ernest J. King holding both titles.

COMINCH—Commander-in-chief, US Fleet; senior-most US Navy admiral; position merged in 1942 with chief of naval operations under Admiral Ernest J. King.

Conferences

• ABC-1 Conference—American-British-Canadian Conference held by American, British, and Canadian senior military staff in Washington from January through March 1941 to develop a joint strategy against the Axis.

• Arcadia—Code name for US-British leadership conference in Washington from December 22, 1941, to January 14, 1942.

• Argonaut Conference—Second meeting of Anglo-American leaders in Washington, DC, during June 21 to 27, 1942.

• Atlantic Conference—Meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their military staffs on naval warships in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, from August 9 to 12, 1941. During the meetings the Allied leaders assigned top priority to defeating the U-boat threat in the Atlantic.

Dräger Tauchretter
—Underwater breathing apparatus used by U-boat crewmen.

Enigma—German communications encryption device that used mechanical rotors to scramble a clear-text message and to reverse encryption back to clear-text at the receiving station. The formal name for the German naval cipher machine was the
Schlüssel M
, or
Marine Funkschlüssel-Maschine
. Other terms relating to the Allied-German struggle over penetrating the enemy’s encrypted communications include

• Bombe—Electromechanical machine used to simulate Enigma settings and decrypt messages.

• Short signal—
Kurzsignale
; a code that used brief letter-numeral designations to provide routine reports such as weather conditions, fuel state, etc.

• Triton—Advanced naval Enigma using four changeable rotors in the machine rather than the three operational in February 1942.

ESF—Eastern Sea Frontier; the New York–based US Navy Headquarters responsible for coastal defense and convoys from Maine to the Florida-Georgia border (original name was North Atlantic Naval Coastal Frontier).

Flak—German acronym for
Flieger-Abwehr-Kanone
; term for antiaircraft gun or gunfire.

Führerprinzip
—Leader principle; fundamental basis of political authority in the Third Reich that mandated that the leader’s (Hitler’s) word was supreme and above all written laws. This gave Hitler absolute authority over all political and military decisions, however small.

General quarters—US Navy signal that combat with an enemy is imminent.

GRT—Gross registered tonnage; measurement of a ship’s total internal volume expressed as one “register ton” for each one hundred cubic feet.

Guerre de course
—French for a war on seaborne trade or shipping.

HF/DF—High-frequency direction finding (“huff-duff”); a system of shore stations and/or ship-mounted direction-finding gear to pinpoint U-boat locations via intercepted bearings to the source of high-frequency radio transmissions.

Hydrophone—Underwater sound-detection device employed by both U-boats and surface warships; in German,
Gruppenhorchgerät
, or GHG.

Knight’s Cross—
Ritterkreuz
; variation of the German Iron Cross decoration for valor in combat. There were six grades of the decoration, and to receive a higher class, one had to have previously earned the next-lowest medal. The levels and numbers awarded to U-boat sailors were

• Iron Cross Second Class (unknown number)

• Iron Cross First Class (unknown number)

• Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves (146 awarded)

• Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Crossed Swords (29 awarded)

• Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Crossed Swords, and Diamonds (5 awarded)

• Knight’s Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Crossed Swords, and Diamonds (0 awarded).

Knot—Unit of speed equivalent to one nautical mile (1.1516 statute miles) per hour.

Kommandantenschüler
—“Commander pupil”; the phase of a U-boat commander’s instruction when the officer makes a U-boat war patrol as an observer in training.