Bernard Edwards - Death in the Doldrums: U-Cruiser Actions Off West Africa

by the same author

Masters Next to God

They Sank the Red Dragon

The Fighting Tramps

The Grey Widow Maker

Blood and Bushido

SOS Men Against the Sea

Salvo!

Attack and Sink

Dnitz and the Wolf Packs

Return of the Coffin Ships

Beware Raiders!

The Road to Russia

The Quiet Heroes

The Twilight of the U-boats

Beware the Grey Widow Maker

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Bernard Edwards, 2005

ISBN 1 84415 261 8
eISBN 9781781596197

The right of Bernard Edwards to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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For Noel Billy Williams, Radio Officer s/s Katanga

The western wave was all aflame,

The day was well nigh done!

Almost upon the western wave

Rested the broad, bright Sun;

When that strange shape drove suddenly

Betwixt us and the Sun.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Contents

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the following for their help in the research for this book:

Willem Hage, Albert Kelder, Sirri Lawson, Bernard de Neuman, David Silbey, Ken Williams, and National Archives & Records Administration, Washington, the National Archives, Kew, www.uboat.net, www.armed-guard.com, Sea Breezes magazine.

Chapter One

The sun climbed out of the eastern horizon with the dramatic suddenness peculiar to the equatorial latitudes, turning a cloudless sky quickly from pale grey to azure blue. Porpoises sliced lazily through the glassy-calm sea, welcoming a new day that promised to be hot and sultry. Ashore, behind the white-sand beaches of Liberia, the last wisps of early morning mist lifted, to be replaced by the blue smoke of native cooking fires.

Although the Great European War was in its fourth bloody year, the sound of its guns had not yet reached these remote shores. In the spring of 1918 the Gulf of Guinea, where once the slave traders sailed yardarm to yardarm seeking the black gold for the plantations of the Americas, presented a tranquil picture. This was about to change.

Far out to sea, the water suddenly boiled, and with a loud roar as her main ballast tanks were blown, the long, grey shape of the German U-cruiser U-154 broke the surface, sending shoals of silver flying fish skittering in all directions. The submarines conning tower hatch clanged open while the water was still streaming from her casings and men came tumbling out to man her bridge. Hard on their heels others jumped down onto the casings and closed up on the long-barrelled guns, swinging them menacingly towards the shore.

Nearing the end of a month-long sweep of West African waters which had yielded nothing more than a few distant glimpses of enemy merchant ships, usually stern-on and going hull-down at a speed she could not hope to match, U-154 seemed condemned to return home without a sinking to her name. But before she finally quit the Gulf of Guinea her commander, Korvettenkapitn Hermann Gercke, was determined to leave his mark on this distant outpost of American influence.

As the U-boat, her diesels throbbing, steered for the white-painted lighthouse visible on the summit of Cape Mesurado, Gercke examined the shoreline through his powerful binoculars, swinging round to scan the untidy cluster of houses on the south bank of the Mesurado River forming the town of Monrovia, capital of Liberia, and traditional homeland of freed slaves. To the north of the town two tall lattice masts reached for the sky, marking the American-operated wireless station. This was one target that could not run away from Gerckes guns.

At five miles off the shore, with the leadsman in the chains calling 20 fathoms and shelving, Gercke swung U-154 around parallel to the beach and gave the order for the submarines two 150-mm deck guns to open fire on the wireless masts.

The combined recoil of the two powerful guns threw the U-boat over on her beam ends, their thunderous roar deafening those in the conning tower. As she slowly returned to the upright, a cloud of acrid black smoke drifted astern low down on the sea as the gunners, working to a disciplined routine, swabbed out and reloaded.

The 1,500-ton German U-cruisers, of which U-154 was one, were five times as big as the conventional U-boat of the day, and had started life as a commercial venture born out of the necessity of war. Right from the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the Royal Navy had thrown a blockade around German waters that grew tighter with every month that passed. Almost completely cut off from her overseas trade, by January 1915 Germany was already running short of food. Bread was strictly rationed, butter, meat and other staples were increasingly hard to come by. In a country engaged in a world war and surrounded by her enemies on land and sea, this was not surprising. However, the situation had worsened dramatically when the harvest failed, and was followed by severe winter. The morale of the civilian population deteriorated to the point of revolution. And more worrying for the Kaisers government was the desperate shortage of copper, zinc, tin and nickel; the essential metals of war. Even scouring the country for pots and pans, anything that could be melted down, failed to stem the shortage, and unless a solution was found soon German guns on the Western Front might fall silent.

Largely due to the reluctance of the German Navys surface ships to put to sea, the British blockade remained virtually unbroken. On the other hand, the U-boats were enjoying unprecedented success in the North Sea and western Atlantic. The Allies had not yet adopted the convoy system and their slow-moving merchant ships, sailing alone and unarmed, were easy prey for the U-boats whose great advantage was their ability to hide beneath the waves. The situation being what it was, it was not surprising that the German High Command decided to put this advantage to good use in breaking the blockade.

In late 1915, in great secrecy in the Baltic port of Flensburg, the keel was laid of the first of six commercial submarine freighters. These were to be large, double-hulled vessels of nearly 2,000 tons displacement submerged. They would have a speed of 12.4 knots on the surface and 5.3 knots under water, with an endurance of 13,000 miles at 5.5 knots. Unarmed, their envisaged role was purely and simply as blockade runners, carrying cargo 1,000 tons or more at a time across the Atlantic. It was expected they would sail mainly on the surface, using their ability to submerge and travel underwater only when required to avoid British naval ships.