Operation Drumbeat Read online

  OPERATION

  DRUMBEAT

  The Dramatic True Story of

  Germany’s first U-Boat

  Attacks Along

  the American Coast

  in World War II

  MICHAEL GANNON

  To Gigi

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Prologue

  1 U-Boats Westward

  2 Down to the Seas

  3 “We Are at War”

  4 A Fighting Machine

  5 Destination New York

  6 Waiting for Hardegen

  7 Beat on the Kettledrum

  8 New York, New York

  9 Where Is the Navy?

  10 Course Home!

  11 Last Patrol

  12 The Wavy Stirs

  13 final Reckoning

  Afterword

  APPENDIX A Maintaining Trim

  APPENDIX B Operation of the Head

  APPENDIX C Operation of the Schlüssel M (Enigma) Machine

  APPENDIX D The Engine Room

  NOTES

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  GLOSSARY

  INDEX

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  It was night when the message from B-Dienst, the radio intelligence service of the German Navy, reached Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) field headquarters near Rastenburg, deep in the Görlitz forest of East Prussia. When he read it the Führer was stunned: JAPAN BEGAN HOSTILITIES AGAINST THE UNITED STATES ON 7 DECEMBER. AT 1930 HOURS CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME STRONG AIR FORMATIONS ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR (HONOLULU).1 A declaration of war might have been expected, but a carrier strike across 3,200 miles of open sea against the American main battle fleet? If at that moment Hitler recalled the maxim of Frederick the Great, whom he claimed to emulate—“It is pardonable to be defeated but never to be surprised”—he knew that the muse of history was not likely to absolve him. The master of Europe was caught completely by surprise.2

  The same message but with additional details of U.S. warship and aircraft losses flashed on the Siemens Geheimschreiber T-52 teleprinter in a handsome chateau requisitioned from a French sardine merchant at Kernével, a point of land bordering the mouth of the inner harbor of the German-occupied Atlantic port of Lorient. There it was read with equal amazement by Admiral Karl Dönitz, Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (BdU) (commander in chief, U-boats). Dönitz went directly to his Situation Room and moved his dividers across the three-foot-diameter world globe that he used for rapid-distance calculations. From the principal U-boat base at Lorient he tracked the Great Circle distance to New York City on the east coast of the United States—distance: 3,000 nautical miles. Only the large Unterseeboot (submarine) Types IXB and IXC would be able to make that distance, he calculated, and still have fuel to maneuver. Quickly he made additional measurements and computations. After reaching an operations area off New York in twenty-two days the 1,050-ton Type IXB would have 60 cubic meters of diesel fuel oil for attack maneuvers against merchant ships with war cargoes; the 1,120-ton IXC with its larger fuel bunkers would need about the same number of days to cross and have 110 cubic meters available for maneuvers. That would give the IXB six or seven days in the area and the IXC about fifteen days, plenty of time for both to do great damage. Looking at other ports for comparison, Dönitz found that an IXB reaching and returning from Galveston, Texas, would have zero cubic meters for operations while an IXC would have barely 40. For Aruba, the rich oil depot in the Dutch West Indies, the figures were 25 and 65, respectively. The “SC” slow eastbound convoys, averaging six and one-half knots, with war maté-riel bound for England routinely assembled at Sydney, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, and the figures there were a promising 90 and 140.3

  It was the East Coast of the United States, however, that interested Dönitz most. A strike there would have much the same effect as the Japanese had had at Hawaii, revealing American vulnerability to a determined military foe. It would intimidate U.S. defenses and humiliate the civilian population. Most important, if followed by additional and unremitting strikes during the period when U.S. naval and air forces could still be expected to be weak and inexperienced, the operation could result in damage to the U.S. and Allied war effort far exceeding the damage wreaked at Pearl Harbor. Lost in the anchorage at Hawaii, it appeared from the news flash, were aged, slow warships, obsolescent by the standards of the new capital ships of the German Fleet; lost on the United States’ Atlantic doorstep, which contained the busiest sea-lanes in the world, would be a significant part of the merchant lifeblood that was keeping England in the war, not to mention fueling the United States’ own nascent war industries. The prospects of going after single, unescorted vessels in American waters were all the more exciting to the admiral since, in his view, it was in the Atlantic battle against commerce that the war with England would be won or lost, and at the present moment, on orders from the Führer, all his U-boats had been withdrawn from the Atlantic in order to support operations in the Mediterranean and off Gibraltar.4 War with the United States would get the U-boats back in the Atlantic where they belonged. The commander in chief knew that all his commanders would be of one mind with him: The Americans must be made to pay for their false neutrality; for their arrogance in declaring four-fifths of the Atlantic to be part of the Western Hemisphere; for their sighting reports on U-boats to British destroyers; and for their hitherto-untouchable convoys of war materiel and food to enemy England.

  Since October, Dönitz had sent boats to intercept Britain-bound convoys as far west as the banks of Newfoundland, but now, with mounting expectancy, he jumped his gaze southward, past the St. Lawrence River and the Nova Scotia coast, to the seaports of New England; then along the south shore of Long Island to New York Harbor, where in 1941 one could count fifty arrivals and departures every twenty-four hours; from there down the shipping lanes that fed into Delaware and Chesapeake bays; past the dangerous currents off Cape Hatteras; and, finally, through the heavily trafficked Straits of Florida that funneled shipping to and from the Gulf of Mexico and the Windward Passage. Now it was the U.S. coastal waters themselves that must be attacked—from New York to Cape Hatteras to Florida. If Dönitz could persuade Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine (OKM), Naval High Command at Berlin, to release Type IX boats from west of Gibraltar, U-Boat Command (BdU) might be able to put together enough boats for a “combined surprise attack.”5 When the Führer declared war on the United States, as he soon must, Dönitz would be poised to strike a blow against the United States as sudden and as jarring as a beat on a kettledrum. And that, he decided, was what he would call it: Operation Paukenschlag (“Operation Drumbeat”).

  This book began as a single footnote to a history of larger scope in which I have been engaged for a number of years. It has long been known in a general way that German U-boats operated against merchant shipping along the United States East Coast during the first period of formal U.S.-German warfare in January-July 1942. But was it possible, I wondered, to identify the individual U-boat that sank the oil tanker Gulfamerica in a blazing display off Jacksonville Beach, Florida, on the night of 10 April 1942—and identify as well the U-boat’s commander? The more the footnote fascinated, the more detective work it provoked, with the result that the footnote grew into a paragraph, a chapter, a book. It became a book because the research disclosed that there was a much larger story attached to that particular U-boat, which bore the designation V-123, and to its commander, twenty-eight-year-old Kapitänleutnant (lieutenant commander) Rein-hard Hardegen, than the single sinking of Gulfamerica. It w
as a story that took me far from Florida waters to the approaches to New York Harbor, where on 14 January 1942, the same Reinhard Hardegen inaugurated a series of U-boat attacks on the United States so severe and extensive, and so appallingly undefended, that, taken together, they constituted an “Atlantic Pearl Harbor.” In Hardegen’s case the targets were not warships but freighters and tankers and their cargoes—the “sinews” of war.

  It can, and will be, argued in this book that the U-boat assault on merchant shipping in United States home waters and the Caribbean during 1942 constituted a greater strategic setback for the Allied war effort than did the defeat at Pearl Harbor—particularly in that the loss of naval vessels destroyed or damaged at Hawaii had little or no bearing on the decisive carrier battles that developed soon after with the Japanese at Coral Sea and Midway; whereas the loss of nearly 400 hulls and cargoes strewn across the sands of the U.S. Navy’s Eastern, Gulf, and Caribbean Sea frontiers threatened both to sever Great Britain’s lifeline and to cripple American war industries. As Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall agonized on 19 June 1942: “The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort.”6 If the leaching of lives and materiel had continued unchecked, one can speculate what would have been the effects on any future Allied invasion of German-occupied Europe and on Germany’s ability to concentrate all her forces in the war against Russia.

  German naval historian Michael Salewski has suggested that in order to understand the complex sixty-nine-month-long Battle of the Atlantic, the battle on which, more than any other, turned the outcome of World War II, one might profitably study a single heavily engaged U-boat, which “mirrored at once both the greater strategy of war and its everyday horror.”7 V-123 was such a boat. Essentially, then, this book is the story of Kptlt. Reinhard Hardegen and of V-123, as recorded in on-board documents and as remembered by Hardegen and hiscrew.lt is the story of an officer who, owing to injuries sustained in a plane crash, was not supposed to be at sea in U-boats in the first place. It is the story of an officer who was one of the most determined, daring, even reckless commanders in the Ubootwaffe, the submarine fleet. It is the story as well of U-boat warfare in general, of daily life and routine aboard the Type IXB boat that Hardegen commanded, of the woefully deficient U.S. defenses against U-boats in the opening months of U.S.-German hostilities, of U-723′s bold, determined destruction of enemy vessels, yet also of a commander’s sometimes humanitarian concern for the enemy crews he set adrift. It is also a story of fear—the panicky fear of merchant seamen scrambling for lifeboats and the claustrophobic fear of a U-boat crew trapped under the dread pounding of depth charges. It is a story told also through the eyes of the U.S. Navy Command, so far as that story can be pieced together from the extant record (most of the principals being deceased). On the German side it is a story of lost opportunities for the Kriegsmarine (German Navy), which might well have defeated England (and thus denied the United States that island base from which to mount a joint American-British invasion of German-occupied Europe) if Adolf Hitler had permitted the timely diversion of resources from tanks for land war to U-boats for the decisive Battle of the Atlantic. On the American side it is a story of naval unpreparedness and inexperience, of negligence and dereliction of duty, of command inflexibility and unseemly arrogance—and yet of final triumph.

  Though it goes without saying, Winston Churchill said it best: “Crimes were committed by the Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected, which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record.”8 This book does not attempt to portray the Kriegsmarine as anything other than an armed force in service to objective evil. At the same time it does not paint a swath of guilt across the name of every German who went to sea, for to do so would be more than indiscriminate: It would be to miss the truth that most officers and ratings went to sea for Navy, not for Nazi, reasons. The Kriegsmarine was the least politicized of the German armed forces.9 U-boatmen fought for one another or for duty’s sake. Some few, more politically sophisticated, fought to avenge the Fatherland’s defeat in World War I and to redress the humiliating Versailles Diktat. Officers fought for the U-boat arm itself: Calling themselves Freikorps Dönitz, they were a “navy within the Navy.” U-boat commanders recorded successes with what appears to have been a politically detached, professional pride.10 Moreover, though they and their crews waged total war against merchant seamen of other nations, the historian of balanced perspective can find their like among U.S. Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command crewmen who waged total war against civilians in German cities. Nor should it be forgotten that unrestricted U-boat warfare in the Atlantic had its exact copy in U.S. submarine warfare against Japanese merchant shipping throughout the Pacific. While Hardegen and the Drumbeat boats were consigning hundreds of Allied merchant seamen to watery graves, U.S. Navy Fleet-type submarines were sending hundreds of Japanese merchant seamen to the same dark fate. It should also be observed that members of the U.S. Merchant Marine had combatant status, and that those who died were casualties instead of victims, although that was not recognized until 1977 when the U.S. Congress granted veteran standing, including discharge certificates and benefits, to all surviving merchant sailors who served on an oceangoing ship between 7 December 1941 and 15 August 1945. The mariners suffered a casualty rate matched only by the Marines among the U.S. military branches of the Second World War. Objections to the survivors’ status as veterans raised by the Department of Defense were overruled by the courts in July 1987 (again in January 1988) and the first discharge papers were mailed to those mariners still living who applied for them by the U.S. Coast Guard in March of 1988.11

  As for the oft-alleged machine-gunning of survivors in the water by U-boat crews, there exists only one documented case of that behavior in the war (though, of course, there may have been others), when U-852, commanded by Kptlt. Heinz Eck, machine-gunned both survivors and debris in an attempt to leave no trace of its sinking of the Greek SS Peleus in the Indian Ocean on 13 March 1944. A British court-martial ordered Eck and his officers shot on 30 November 1945. Certainly there were instances when a U-boat shooting with deck guns against a merchant ship’s waterline or radio house or antennae hit crewmen in the process of lowering lifeboats. This could happen inadvertently even in those cases when the U-boat commander—and Reinhard Hardegen was a consistent example—conscientiously refrained from opening gunfire until he thought the crews were safely in boats. And it could happen perforce when, short or out of torpedoes, a U-boat attempted to sink a ship by gunfire alone. Generally speaking, U-boatmen looked on survivors as seamen like themselves: After the destruction of an enemy vessel the larger bond that existed between men of the sea, irrespective of nationality, tended to preclude acts of violence upon the helpless. The ramming of lifeboats filled with survivors by U-boats apparently never happened, except in the imagination of Hollywood screenwriters (for example, in Action in the North Atlantic, Warner Brothers, 1943), who for wartime propaganda purposes depicted U-boat crews as evil, cunning, and ruthless outlaws of the ocean. Quite apart from the Geneva Convention and humanitarian considerations, the Kriegsmarine had very pragmatic reasons for eschewing such behavior. As the German Naval Staff expressed its position on 16 December 1942: “The killing of survivors in lifeboats is inadmissible, not just on humanitarian grounds but also because the morale of our own men would suffer should they consider the same fate as likely for themselves.”12 The historian of the U.S. submarine war against Japan provides an instructive example of this kind of “inadmissible” behavior exhibited by U.S. submariners in the Pacific.13

  In the case of Reinhard Hardegen one concedes nothing to the odiousness of the cause for which he fought by stating that as a professional naval officer he fulfilled his assigned duties, achieved exceptional successes, and brought distinction to his service. In five war patrols as a commander he sank twenty-five ships (including two t
hat were later refloated), for a total of 136,661 tons, a figure that compares favorably with the best record (twenty-four ships, 93,824 tons) posted by a U.S. Navy submarine skipper in the war—Richard H. O’Kane, in five patrols on USS Tang. He should also be credited with four ships totaling 33,247 tons damaged by his torpedoes and artillery. We can recognize Hardegen’s achievements, and those of his men, even as we condemn Hitler and the Nazis who sent them to war. Their story is told in these pages with neither favor nor censure. Finally, it deserves remembering that, of 863 U-boats that sailed on operational patrols, 754 did not return to their bases; of 39,000 men who put to sea in U-boats during World War II, 27,491 rest in iron coffins, and 5,000 others were taken prisoner. That hecatomb is almost without parallel. Though relatively few in numbers, the Ubootwaffe suffered one of the greatest mortal losses of any single arm of any of the belligerent nations. Toward the end of the war, when Allied technology had overwhelmed that of the Germans and it was near suicidal for a U-boat even to stand out to sea, crew after crew did so nonetheless, without hesitation or complaint. On that other side of the Battle of the Atlantic men were no less human, no less brave.

  This book represents an attempt to investigate, understand, and depict how German and American naval personnel conducted combat operations in one of the most critical, yet least-known, military chapters of World War II. I have kept strictly to what the documentary research and interviews disclose. The intention has been to tell all and to palliate nothing. On-board commands and other technical expressions for which Hardegen, his officers, and crew are quoted are based primarily on the U-123 war diaries and shooting reports, on Harde-gen’s wartime writings, and on U-boat language that was common to officers and ratings. Other direct quotations are based on interviews with Hardegen and crew members; and with Patrick Beesly. No characters or events have been invented, and previous fictions devised by those who knew some little bit of the Hardegen story have been flatly discarded.14 With sufficient drama in the facts there is no need to invent the impossible. Every incident at sea has been carefully documented. Whenever I have reconstructed an event or dialogue in order to bring U-723 to life, that fact is acknowledged in the notes at the end of the volume. A straight academic narrative would have been one choice; recreating the U-boat environment was another.