John White - Endgame: The U-Boat Inshore Campaign,1944-45

ENDGAME: THE U-BOAT EAST INSHORE CAMPAIGN

First published in the UK in 2008 by

The History Press,

The Mill, Brimscombe Port,

Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

John White 2008

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 7953 5

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The photographs in this book are reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum.

The front cover painting Schnorchel attack on convoy, 1945 was created for the author by David Jenner, Cardiff. John F. White.

I first discovered the German Navy at the age of ten, when I had to prepare a project for school work concerning the Second World War. I drew on the experience of a British sailor known to me who gave me an eyewitness account of the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. Two years later, now at secondary school, I happened to stumble across my old project notes and became interested in how the German Navy had responded to the Normandy invasion. Thus started a lifelong fascination that had resulted, by my late teens, in the compilation of a huge, hand-written database that contained everything about the Kriegsmarine that I had been able to discover.

After the publication of U-boat Tankers 194145 (Airlife/Naval Institute Press) in 1998, I found my interest rekindled in a new area that had been little researched: the New U-boat War of 194445, particularly as directed against the British east coast.

By the time of the Normandy invasion, the U-boats were a beaten force, hunted and harried wherever they appeared by Allied warships and aircraft that were technologically superior. The U-boats proved to be little more than pin pricks against the landings, and advancing Anglo-American armies had driven them out of their French west Atlantic bases all the way back to Norway by September 1944. Yet the U-boat force mounted a sustained and effective campaign from their Norwegian bases, the New U-boat War, against Allied merchant shipping from September until the end of the war in May 1945.

The explanation for the reversal of fortunes was the introduction of the schnorchel, a device that allowed the submerged U-boat to ventilate its interior and draw air for the diesels to recharge its batteries. As the U-boat no longer needed to come to the surface, it was much more difficult to detect, and successful aircraft attacks since 1942 the principal cause of losses to the U-boat arm dwindled almost to nothing. However, most of the schnorchel-fitted U-boats now lacked the range and endurance to patrol further than the British Isles. Thus the last months of the war saw a final onslaught by schnorchel-fitted U-boats into the shallow waters of Britains coastlines, better known today as the Inshore Campaign.

Although the basic story of the Inshore Campaign has been covered many times in general books about U-boat warfare, I have been unable to discover a single book dedicated to this extremely important topic. Therefore I have provided a substantial background to the Inshore Campaign generally, before focussing on the main subject: the Inshore Campaign off Britains east coast. The East Coast Campaign had several unique features, including the presence of extensive minefields, the shallowness of the waters, the importance of army supplies ferried directly from Britain to the Dutch river Scheldt, and the first and only deployment of the new German Type XXIII electric U-boats.

Most of the existing accounts of the Inshore Campaign rely on standard British sources and the war diary of U-boat Command. The great majority of the original war diaries of U-boats patrolling from Norway were deliberately destroyed towards the end of the war, or when the commanders surrendered at sea; all on direct orders from U-boat Command. In fact there remain virtually no war diaries from any U-boat on patrol after mid January 1945. Since archived war diaries have survived, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the guiding principle was that war diaries should not be archived until they had been vetted for anything that might incriminate senior naval staff after the war, which was now clearly lost.

However, I have managed to reconstruct events with additional information from a painstaking trawl though decrypted wireless messages stored at the British Public Records Office, and by discovery of a very few surviving U-boat war diaries, with the very helpful aid of Kate Tildesley, curator at the Naval Historical Branch, Portsmouth. It is a pleasure also to thank Prof. Juergen Rohwer, Dr. Axel Niestl and Frans Becker for their valuable and speedy assistance in clearing up some unresolved issues.

John White, Wokingham.

Miles always refers to sea-miles.

Kristiansand in the text always refers to the Norwegian harbour of Kristiansand South, and should not be confused with Kristiansund.

zS in the text is always an abbreviation for zur See.

The Germans used ranks equivalent to those in the Royal Navy, as follows:

The Kriegsmarine had divided up all the oceans of the world into a series of grids before the war, as a security measure. Thus references by the Germans to a particular sea area were always made by reference to this grid (e.g. AN7134) and not by the more conventional latitude and longitude measurements. The smallest element of the grid the 4 in the above example referred to an area about six miles square, the smallest measurement that could be made accurately by ships or U-boats at sea. The British Admiralty had little difficulty in reconstructing the whole grid system once they had seen a torn part of a captured German map.

The Germans measured fluids, such as fuel, in cubic metres, referred to as cbm. A cubic metre of water weighs one metric ton, approximately equivalent to a British or American ton. However, fuel and diesel oils are lighter than water, so that one cbm of oil weighs rather less than one ton.

At the time of the Allied invasions at Normandy on 6 June, the much vaunted U-boat arm was a weakened and defeated force. Long gone were the days of glory when the grey wolves, running at high speed on the surface at night, had emerged from their bomb-proof bases along the west coast of France to terrorise merchant shipping in the Atlantic ocean. The introduction of radar into Allied warships had stopped the night surface attack, and the introduction of radar into Allied aircraft had forced the U-boats underwater, where they crawled around at one or two knots, surfacing only to recharge their batteries. Even this brief period of exposure on the ocean surface at night exposed the U-boats to a severe danger of air attack. Moreover, the happy days when submersible tankers, the so-called milk cows, could refuel the U-boats so that they could turn their attentions to any sea area across the entire Atlantic had also disappeared. The old U-boat aces, made famous by German propaganda and high awards (such as the Knights Cross), had by now all died in action, been transferred, or promoted to office jobs. Their successors lacked the same experience and tended to be sunk before they could acquire it. By mid 1944, it was very common for U-boats to be sunk during their first patrol.