The Chief is standing immobile behind the two men of the bridge watch who are now operating the hydroplanes. His eyes are glued to the Papenberg and its slowly rising and falling column of water. Each change in it means that the boat is doing the same.
Not a word from anyone. The humming of the periscope motor sounds as if it’s coming through a fine filter; the motor starts, stops, starts again, and the humming resumes. The Commander ups periscope for fractions of a second and immediately lets it sink below the surface again. The destroyer must be very close.7
Most of the time was spent on the surface. In the Atlantic this meant endless rolling and pitching. Boats on the surface needed lookouts who got very cold and wet. In the northern waters lookouts grew accustomed to icy water breaking over them with such force that they required leather harness to secure them to the bridge brackets. Reminders about wearing such restraints sometimes included the names of U-boat men who had recently been washed overboard. The men on watch wore protective clothing of leather, or sometimes of rubber, under their oilskins, with towels around their necks. Even so they usually became soaked to the skin in anything but calm weather. Almost every submariner complained of rheumatic pains. Below decks the crew were permitted to wear any clothing they wished. ‘Lucky’ sweaters, knitted by loved ones, were popular, so were British army khaki battledress jackets, thousands of which had come from captured dumps in France. Some captains would distribute a measure of schnapps at times of great joy or great suffering; other boats were completely dry.
The men of the preceding watch come down the ladder stiffly. They are soaking wet. The navigator has turned up his collar and drawn his sou’wester down over his face. The faces of the others are whipped red by spray. All of them hang their binoculars over hooks and undress as silently as the new watch dressed, peeling themselves awkwardly and heavily out of their rubber jackets. Then they help one another off with their rubber pants. The youngest member of the watch loads himself with the whole mass of wet oil-skin trousers, jackets, and sou’westers, and carries it aft. The spaces between the two electric motors and on both sides of the stern torpedo tube are the best for drying. The men who have come off duty gulp down a mouthful of hot coffee, polish their binoculars, and stow them away.8
When in May 1941 a young British officer led a boarding party to search a U-boat captured at sea, he was impressed by its fine construction, the fittings and the way in which the ward room had varnished woodwork and numbered cupboards with keys to fit them. He remarked upon the magnificent galley and the cleanliness of the boat throughout. During his search he found other evidence of the high living standards the Germans enjoyed; cameras and even a movie camera were among the crew’s personal effects. He said the sextants were of far better quality than the Admiralty issue and the binoculars the best he’d ever seen. He kept a pair for himself.9
In the war at sea, as well as on land and in the air, radio brought changes in tactics. Better longer-range radios enabled the submarines to be sent to find victims in distant waters or concentrated against a choice target. Admiral Karl Dönitz was the German navy’s single-minded submarine expert. He thought primarily, if not solely, in terms of war against Britain. He had long since decided that a future submarine war would be an all-weather one, and that (with asdic unable to detect small surface targets) he would coordinate night attacks by surfaced submarines. This line of thinking was published in his prewar book. It was to prove one of the most effective tactics of the war.
The Royal Navy liked to believe that U-boats could be countered by means of ‘hunting groups’ of warships. Such warfare had the name, colour, speed and drama that suited the navy’s image of itself. But this idea had been tried and found useless in the First World War. Experience proved that in the vastness of the seas the submarine could remain undetected without difficulty. It was one of these hunting groups – an aircraft-carrier with a destroyer escort – which was attacked at night by U-29 just two weeks after the declaration of war. The carrier HMS Courageous sank with heavy loss of life.
The way in which Courageous was exposed to danger was proof that the Admiralty truly believed that asdic and depth charges provided adequate protection against the U-boat. But now there were second thoughts about ‘hunting groups’ which had depleted the number of escorts available for the merchant convoys. The way to kill U-boats was to guard the merchantmen. Then the submarines would have to come and find you.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
After the war Churchill admitted that the U-boat successes had been the only thing that frightened him, and it has been widely assumed that Hitler went to war understanding the submarine’s potential value. The truth is that the German navy was completely unprepared for war. At its outbreak, Germany had built 56 U-boats,1 of which some were short-range Type IIs seldom used beyond the North Sea. The building programme was providing two or three submarines a month (in some months only one), and it was taking about a year to build and test each boat. After the war Admiral Dönitz said: ‘A realistic policy would have given Germany a thousand U-boats at the beginning.’ We can but agree and shudder.
One of the war’s most eminent naval historians, S. E. Morison, said Hitler was landsinnig (land-minded) and believed, like Napoleon, that possession of the European ‘heartland’ would bring England to heel. Winston Churchill, like President Roosevelt, knew that Britain’s survival depended upon sea lanes, for without supply by sea there could be no continuation of the war.
Dönitz and Raeder: the German commanders
Hitler had only one sailor among his high commanders, the 63-year-old Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, who was commander in chief (Oberbefehlshaber) of the navy. He was old-fashioned and aloof, as photos of him in his frock-coat, sword and high stiff collar confirm. Although Raeder looked like a prim and proper officer of the Kaiserliche Marine, his speech in 1939 declared his full support for ‘the clear and relentless fight against Bolshevism and International Jewry whose nation-destroying deeds we have fully experienced.’ At the Nuremberg trial he was found guilty of having issued orders to kill prisoners. His memoirs, published a decade after the war ended, reiterated his belief in Hitler.
The man conducting the submarine battles, Karl Dönitz, was a quite different personality. The son of an engineer working for Zeiss in Berlin, he had never had staff college training. As a U-boat commander in the First World War, he had survived a sinking to become a prisoner of war. Despite other jobs in signals, and command of a cruiser, his primary interest was with undersea warfare. The rebuilding of Germany’s submarine fleet gave him status. He was a dedicated Nazi and his speeches usually included lavish praise for Hitler: ‘Heaven has sent us the leadership of the Führer.’ Anything but aloof, he delighted in mixing socially with his officers, who referred to him as ‘the lion’. Luncheons and dinners with him were remembered for their ‘tone of light-hearted banter and camaraderie’. Dönitz was 47 years old at the start of the war. Morison (the author of the official US navy histories) was moved to describe him as ‘one of the most able, daring and versatile flag officers on either side of the entire war’. Eventually, in January 1943, Dönitz was to become C-in-C of the navy, succeeding Raeder, and in the final days of the war it was Dönitz whom Hitler chose to take his place as Führer of the collapsing Third Reich.