The Burning Shore (9 page)

For someone with dreams of soaring through the skies, this daily routine quickly became a tedious, frustrating task.
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F
OR THE MEN IN
U-701
AND OTHER OPERATIONAL
U-
BOATS
, the frustrations of training were a thing of the past—and the terrors of active duty were all too real. Degen and the crew of U-701 got their first taste in the waning hours of 1941.

Holding to a course of 320 degrees, due northwest, U-701 had been plowing through moderate seas in the predawn darkness with short, high swells occasionally breaking over the tower. Suddenly, a loud banging startled the four lookouts on the narrow bridge. Lieutenant Bernfried Weinitschke, the senior man on lookout watch, leaned over the rail and saw that a wave had knocked open the starboard ammunition hatch. A tall, muscular young man who had excelled in sports as a teenager, Weinitschke unbuckled his steel safety belt and scrambled over the rail to close the swinging hatch cover. His back turned to the sea, he failed to spot the rogue wave that suddenly fell on U-701. In an instant, he was gone.

Degen raced up the ladder, his heart pounding, ordering the helmsman to reverse course and bring the boat back to the spot on the heaving ocean where his 1WO had gone in. He ordered a portable searchlight illuminated to try to find Weinitschke amid the waves. After ten minutes, the lookouts could hear faint cries, and for an instant, the searchlight provided a glimpse of the young officer. Then, he disappeared once more amid the waves.

After a futile half hour of additional searching, Degen had to give up. He ordered his engine room to light off the second diesel motor and put U-701 back on a new course of 250 degrees to begin its west-southwest track into the open North Atlantic. One crewman later said the U-boat was too close to the British coast for them to safely linger. “We had brought ourselves into danger,” Schwendel recalled.

Any sense of grief among U-701’s crew over the loss of their 1WO did not last long. Pushing the boat’s course track to a new, southwesterly slant, Degen and his men spent the rest of New Year’s Eve coping with a brewing North Atlantic storm whose thirty-mile-per-hour winds pushed the waves up to nearly fifteen feet. Foam and spray tore into the soaked bridge watch as 1941 ended. Down in the radio room at three minutes before midnight, an encrypted message came in from Admiral Dönitz: “Men of the U-boat Service: In the year anew we want to be like steel, harder, fiercer. Long live the Führer. BdU.”
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Enlisting in the German navy at the age of eighteen, Gerhard Schwendel was a fireman 1st class aboard U-701 throughout its wartime service. COURTESY OF GERHARD SCHWENDEL.

On New Year’s Day 1942, the German U-boat Force—on paper—appeared stronger than ever. Admiral Dönitz could count a fleet of 248 commissioned U-boats, including 162 of
the workhorse Type VIIs and 50 of the larger Type IX boats. However, the number actually available for North Atlantic operations was quite small. BdU was able to send only thirty-three boats into the North Atlantic during December 1941 prior to the deployment of the six Type IX boats to Operation Drumbeat and the eight (later twelve) Type VIIs ordered to the Newfoundland area in a separate wolf pack, identified as Gruppe Ziethen. The rest were undergoing repairs, preparing for departure on patrol later in January or February, or assigned to other operational areas such as Norway and the Mediterranean.

Writing in his command war diary two days earlier, a glum Dönitz had noted, “The war in the Atlantic has been suspended for weeks now—the first objective must be to resume it with new forces as soon and thoroughly as possible.” Disappointed that the Naval High Command had released only six of the larger, long-range Type IXB and IXC boats for Operation Drumbeat, Dönitz and the BdU operations staff at Lorient devised a deployment order that aimed to maximize their impact along the US East Coast. “Their object must be to intercept
single
vessels and to make use of the enemy’s inexperience and the fact that [the Americans] are not used to operations by U-boats,” Dönitz explained. “For this purpose, operations must not and cannot be too massed; rather the boats should spread to such an extent that good prospects of success are ensured.”

Inexperience was a major handicap for US coastal defenders up and down the eastern seaboard, but BdU would have to wait for more U-boat deployments before taking full advantage of the Americans’ weakness. For now, it would make most sense to focus on those parts of the coastline where ships would be
gathering in the largest concentrations before heading across the Atlantic in guarded convoys. Accordingly, Dönitz decided, for the initial strike, to send three of the long-range U-boats to the area of New York and the second trio up around Halifax, Nova Scotia, to operate in proximity with the Type VII U-boats in Gruppe Ziethen. Other fruitful hunting grounds, such as the Florida coastline, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico would have to wait until more long-range U-boats became available.
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Like the Americans, the crew of U-701 were still inexperienced in combat, although Horst Degen and Obersteuermann Günter Kunert had previously experienced war at sea—Degen on the destroyer
Hans Lody
and his patrol with Erich Topp in U-552 and Kunert in another U-boat. Like the other four U-boat crews en route to their first combat patrol out of Kiel, the crewmen on U-701 kept up with their shipboard tasks while trying to remember all of the lessons they had taken in during their training in the Baltic. Making life even more difficult, U-701 was steaming into the teeth of a fierce winter storm. “In this confined space it was not pleasant,” Gerhard Schwendel recalled. “We were all tense. We knew nothing about the hardships of the Battle of the Atlantic.”

Two days after Weinitschke was lost at sea, the waiting came to an abrupt end. On Friday morning, January 2, at 0700 hours Greenwich Mean Time, U-701 was about 150 miles southwest of the Faroes. The storm was easing from a fresh gale down to a moderate breeze. Despite the light overcast, the full moon—which would not set for another two and a half hours—illuminated the heavy swells over which the boat was moving. The lookouts taking position on the bridge were as alert as the outgoing watch when, suddenly, a hail came from the bridge.

U-701 was close ahead of an eastbound Allied convoy. Degen ordered a ninety-degree turn to port to avoid running into its escorts and leaped up the ladder. “When I arrive on the bridge, I see close astern, in moonlight bright as day, about 30 medium-sized steamers,” Degen wrote in his war diary. “Because the horizon behind U-701 is dark, the enemy lookouts cannot detect the U-boat as it rises and falls in the heavy swells,” he added. “What an opportunity!” Degen called his crew to battle stations.

Unbeknownst to Degen, he was shadowing eastbound Convoy HX166, consisting of twenty-eight merchant ships with a total cargo capacity of 195,744 gross registered tons. The formation was twelve days out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a diverse cargo of military supplies, grain, meat, cotton, and wheat. Of particular value were the eleven oil tankers whose holds were awash in 93,341 tons of avgas, benzene, paraffin, and other petroleum products. Five US Navy warships had escorted HX166 to the mid-ocean meeting point south of Iceland, where on New Year’s Eve they had handed it off to an American escort group of four destroyers and one
Treasury
-class coast guard cutter. On New Year’s Day, a local escort formation of four British destroyers and two corvettes had relieved the US Navy escort group northwest of Scotland’s Isle of Lewis for the final leg of the convoy’s journey.

After a crash dive to avoid one of the escorts, Degen surfaced at 0810 to find the convoy on a course of 155 degrees and just six nautical miles away. Two hours later, he ordered Radioman 2nd Class Herbert Grotheer to flash a “convoy sighted” message to BdU Operations. When the convoy made a turn to starboard five minutes later, Degen described the situation as ideal: “The
last 10 steamers, including a big tanker, appear to us as a wide, broad group before the bright horizon.” With the eastern horizon steadily brightening, Degen realized he could no longer wait to close the range.

At 0910, Oberleutnant zur See Batzies, filling in for the lost Weinitschke, turned the firing lever, and four G7e electric torpedoes raced out of the forward tubes toward the merchant ships 3,800 yards away. Three minutes later, Degen reversed course and launched a G7e from his solitary stern tube. The seconds ticked by with no sign of impact and detonation. All missed. With the Scottish coast only seventy-four nautical miles to the southeast, Degen decided not to press his luck in a follow-up attack and ordered U-701 to resume its west-southwest heading.

Four days later, U-701’s luck turned. The boat had traveled 718 nautical miles out into the North Atlantic and was now proceeding down the broad oceanic corridor where east- and westbound convoys moved in their journeys between North America and Great Britain. It was evening twilight when his lookouts spotted smoke and masts bearing to port. Accelerating to sixteen knots, Degen maneuvered the boat to pass ahead of the solitary merchantman and then crash-dived. Within thirty minutes, the freighter had closed to within 5,400 yards. He waited until the ship was only nine hundred yards off and then ordered a spread of two torpedoes. This time, the men of U-701 felt twin shock waves slam into their vessel’s hull, and when he raised the periscope, Degen saw two towering columns of water where the two 620-pound warheads had exploded against the merchantman’s hull.

After the boat surfaced, Degen, Batzies, and two lookouts scrambled onto the bridge. The ship was sinking fast by the bow,
its forecastle already submerged. A distant flurry of motion told them the crew was abandoning ship. Degen slowly approached the scene and edged U-701 within earshot of the lifeboats and several life rafts. Ship’s master George Sharp Cumming and thirty-three crewmen from the 3,657-ton British freighter
Baron Erskine
had been en route from Tampa, Florida, to Loch Ewe, Scotland, with a cargo of phosphates when the twin blasts rocked their ship. They were now helpless hostages to the North Atlantic in winter. Degen asked the crewmen in one boat for the name of their ship, and someone replied falsely that it was the
Baron Haig
. Degen then ordered
Matrosengefreiter
(Seaman 2nd Class) Alfred Wallaschek, the U-boat’s twenty-one-year-old cook, to bring up a supply of food, liquor, and tobacco for the stranded merchant sailors. He also gave the British crewmen the best course to land: Reykjavik, Iceland, was 475 nautical miles to the north-northeast. Degen’s act of generosity toward the British crew came to naught; they were never seen again, perishing in the next winter storm that blew over the North Atlantic.

Breaking off from the stricken merchantman, U-701 resumed its transit toward Newfoundland on a course of 230 degrees at seven knots, its crew pleased that they had succeeded in sinking an Allied merchant ship. But to their disappointment and frustration, the fates once more conspired against the U-boat.

Just forty-five minutes after the
Baron Erskine
slipped beneath the waves, Degen’s lookouts sighted another steamer about forty-five degrees off the starboard bow steering a northeast course toward the British Isles. Despite the overcast sky and steadily deepening twilight gloom, Degen called his crew to battle stations and turned to a course of 340 degrees to intercept. When
the U-boat and its target closed to 1,000 yards, Degen fired two G7e electrics with a running speed of thirty knots. The seconds ticked by, and then something strange occurred. Peering through his Zeiss binoculars, Degen could see no sign of a warhead detonation; yet a loud cheering suddenly erupted down in the U-boat’s interior. Not only Herbert Grotheer manning the passive hydrophone listening gear but all of the crew throughout the boat had heard two loud thuds. Both torpedoes had struck the 7,000-ton enemy merchantman, but their warheads failed to detonate. Even more surprisingly, the ship neither changed course nor radioed an emergency message signaling that it was under attack. “Has he not noticed anything?” Degen later wrote in his war diary. “Run ahead and initiate a new attack. It is completely dark. I want to shoot before the moon sets.” Turning to a new heading of 300 degrees, with the target bearing 327 degrees true, Degen ordered U-701 to close to five hundred yards and then fired two more G7es from the other pair of bow tubes, aiming at the freighter’s port side. Both missed. Thoroughly frustrated, Degen ran off at a new course of forty degrees from the ship and fired his last torpedo from the stern tube, again from a nearly point-blank range. Another miss.

With four weeks remaining on his first combat patrol, Degen now commanded a nearly unarmed U-boat. Since sighting the convoy five days earlier on January 2, he had expended all twelve torpedoes stored inside U-701’s pressure hull, leaving only two G7a compressed-air torpedoes in above-deck storage canisters. “I now have no more torpedoes in the boat,” Degen noted. “Hopefully good weather will come, in order to reload [from] the upper deck tubes.” Even that wish, however, would go unfulfilled.