Edwin P. Hoyt - The U-Boat Wars

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World War II began in September 1939. Within four months, the Nazis sank one- third of the entire British battleship force, beginning with the daring entry of sub marine U-47 inside the British defenses at Scapa Flow to torpedo the Royal Oak.

In the first six months after America's entry into the war, six U-boats sank fully half the total registered tonnage of the United States. The East Coast beaches ran black with oil.

Despite the experience of the First World War that had made clear the lethal potential of German undersea warfare, and the massive buildup of Nazi military might in the 1930s, neither of the two great Allied powers developed adequate antisubmarine defenses, and the weapons they did have were virtually useless. It was from this appalling start that the great U -boat wars of World War II were fought; and had the battle of the U-boats been lost, the Battle of Berlin and the Allied victorywould never have occurred.

Edwin P. Hoyt has drawn on German, British, and American naval archives to tell the extraordinary story of the U-boat wars and the counter-war of the Allies that finally overcame the Nazi threat. The sights and sounds of battle ring through these pages. It is a story full of formidable personalities, struggles between merchant captains, destroyer captains, and U-boat commanders warring against one another. It is a cruel and tragic story; the German U-boat crews lost 28,000 of their 39,000 men. And it is the story of heroes fighting heroes, deadly enemies all the way. In the end British perseverance and American productivity overcame German aggression and technological skill, but it was an outcome by no means foreordained.

I am especially indebted to a number of archivists and librarians at the Office of Public Records in London, and to Dr. Dean Allard and members of his staff in the Operational Archives of the U.S. Navy Historical Division in Washington. Librarians at the Navy library were also very kind. Michael Willis of the Imperial War Museum in London was especially helpful in securing photographs and answering complicated questions about the Royal Navy. And I am most grateful to the management and staff of Durrant's Hotel in London. They said they would take care of us and they did.

EDWIN P. HOYT

Maryland, 1984

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill,

But Oh for the touch of a vanished hand

And the sound of a voice that is still.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In the winter of 1938-39, the shadows of Hitler's aggressive ambitions loomed so blackly around Britain that the most optimistic peace lovers had to begin thinking of the practicalities of war.

The Admiralty dusted off the records of the 1914-18 war at sea and began to study its history. It was urgent that someone become familiar with the problems of commercial shipping in 1939, a task that fell largely to the trade division of the Admiralty. At Liverpool, Commander C. J. L. Bittleston began discussions with prominent shippers about the handling of merchant ships in a new war. From A. G. Bates, of Thomas and Brocklebank, Ltd. of Liverpool, Bittleston had a thoughtful letter about the new problems. The Brocklebank firm ran triangular services from Ceylon, India and the United States to the United Kingdom. Obviously in time of war its whole fleet would be at risk.

Bates suggested that in the next war wireless silence would be imperative, but that instant reporting of enemy action had to be arranged. The convoys ought to organize wireless watches to help protect themselves. The implication was that all the ships in a convoy would have some sort of wireless, which was true of only one ship in five during the 1914-18 war. The next step, the immediacy of which was obvious, had to be the training of chief wireless officers for convoys. Brocklebank offered Radio Superintendent W. H. Bailey for such a program.

The convoy system had really been invented by Churchill in 1914 when he was first lord of the Admiralty and the German cruiser Emden was scouring the Indian Ocean. Churchill insisted that Australian troops and supplies bound for the western front be convoyed by warships to protect them from the Emden. And for a time at the height of the threat, he stopped shipping altogether when armed convoys could not be put together.

Churchill fell from power in 1915, in the wake of the naval and military disaster in the Dardanelles. The convoy system was then developed by the Royal Navy, but at the end of the war it was put in mothballs.

The British governments of the peacetime years represented to Churchill, on the sidelines, "the acme of gullibility" in their dreamy treatment of Germany. Much was made of the Germans' announced willingness to cooperate with Britain in abolishing the submarine. The Germans, even while talking, were building submarines, although not as quickly as they were able. But that was a failure within the German naval hierarchy.

By 1939 Admiral Doenitz had his fifty-six modern U-boats in commission, which represented only half of what he thought he should have. Far more important, in the Type VII, which displaced about 700 tons but was called the 500-ton boat under the formula in use at the London Conference, the Germans had developed the most effective underwater fighting machine of all. Admiral Doenitz, the submarine commander, had laid out plans for the employment of this weapon. It could be modified so that it could travel 13,000 miles. Doenitz also had an entirely new strategy for use in war: the use of the wolf pack. He was held back only by major differences within the German naval high command about the kind of U-boat that was to be built. These differences prevented him from building up the fleet he wanted, with some of the boats fitted out as command boats. For Doenitz expected from the beginning that his operations would be directed largely against armed convoys. His superiors disagreed; some thought he was half-cracked. The U-boat building program was slowed to a walk between 1935 and

1939. Doenitz had to fight to get a communications ship and did not get the Erwin Wassner, his flagship, until 1938.

At the conference tables the Germans spoke loftily of restricting the use of submarines in order to prevent them from jeopardizing commerce in the inhumane way of World War I to return naval warfare to the chivalrous age when ships were stopped and passengers rescued before they were sunk. Certainly the German battleship admirals, such as Erich Raeder, believed in this theory. But not Doenitz.