Kaplan - Grey wolves : the U-boat war, 1939-1945

FOR MARGARET

Copyright 2013 by Philip Kaplan

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2014.

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First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Pen & Sword Maritime, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Jacket design by Jon Wilkinson

ISBN: 978-1-62873-727-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-076-6

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Submariners are a race apart, even from their comrades who serve in surface vessels. Early in the Second World War, an elite force of German submariners known as the Ubootwaffe nearly perfected the underwater tactics of the First World War U-boats to successfully sever Britains transatlantic supply lifeline. To the Allies, these enemy sailors were on a mission that was unequivocally evil.

A popular fiction persists that the U-boat men were all volunteers; they were not. But once committed to the Ubootwaffe, each man soon understood and accepted that he would be a proud part of a unique brotherhood. Doing so was essential; he was about to set out, in claustrophobic, unsanitary, hellish conditions, on a voyagean adventurethat would challenge and stretch his mental and physical endurance to the very limits, one that he was unlikely to survive. And, if he did return, he drew little comfort from family or friends, trapped in the knowledge that another, possibly fatal patrol awaited him. The men of the Ubootwaffe were linked together as comrades, by the ever-present dangers of the enemy and the weather, and by their unity of purpose more powerful than that of any other sailors.

All submariners are brave, no matter what cause they are fighting for. The men of the Ubootwaffe were eventually beaten by the overwhelming industrial and technological might of the Allies. Of the 39,000 men who went to sea in the U-boats of the Second World War, 27,491 died in action and a further 5,000 became prisoners of war. Of the 863 German U-boats that sailed on operational patrols in that war, 754 were lost.

Those who passed the training had to be the sort of men who did not mind being unaware of where or why they were going when they sailed out of harbour, who had never known claustrophobia, who could live in close proximity to forty other men for up to three months at a time and who could spend four hours on watch, lashed by icy winds, their eyes stung by salt spray, strapped or chained to a deck rail or wire to avoid being swept away, and learning the truth of the old sailors adage that water is pointed.

The men best suited for life aboard a U-boat were those who could sleep well in a bed that was still warm and redolent of the man who last lay in it, and who could stay in dreamland through the hissing of the inlet valves, the odd gurgle of the bilge-pumps and the pounding of the pistons, and who would only be awakened by the sound of depthcharges or the warning klaxon. They were those who could tumble out of bed and scramble aft or forward like pieces of human ballast when the commander ordered Take her up! or Dive!, who would be ever keen for action, who could stay motionless and silent for hour after hour while the depth-charges boomed around them and hurled the boat about, and who never worried when their muscles began to atrophy from insufficient exercise.

As the days went by, they got to know one another and their officers, and began to realise that, although they were all individuals, each was now a part of something morea unit that was going to war. This was the touchstone that helped them to become the sort of men they had to be. Not so much for love of country, nor yet for love of family, but out of loyalty to the men they had trained, messed and sailed with, and with whom they now shared their lives and fate.

A U-BOAT GLOSSARY

AA Anti-Aircraft, weapon or firing.

AAF (U.S.) Army Air Force.

Abaft towards the stern of a boat or ship.

Abt Abteilung / department or division.

Adressbuch U-boat code book used in disguising ocean chart grid positions in radio transmissions.

AGRU Front Ausbildungsgruppe Front / a technical testing branch to evaluate submarines and crews before releasing them to operational duty.

Alarm! emergency dive order on a U-boat.

Angle-on-the-bow variance between line of sight on a U-boat, and the compass heading of its target.

Aphrodite German device used to confuse radar by reflecting impulses.

Armed Guard U.S. Navy gun crew serving aboard a merchant ship.

ASDIC acronym for the British Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee; the name given to a device housed in a dome under the hull of an anti-submaring vessel and used in detecting the presence of submerged submarines.

ASV airborne microwave radar (10 and 3 cm).

ASW anti-submarine warfare.

Athos radio detection antenna.

Bachstelze (water-stilt) autogiro-like device towed on a cable behind a U-boat to improve the field of vision of the flying lookout.

Bali a radar detection aerial.

Bauwerft a ship-building yard.

B-Dienst Funkbeobachtungsdienst / German radio-monitoring and cryptographic intelligence service.

BdU Befehlshaber der Unterseeboot / Commander in Chief, U-boats (referred specifically to Admiral Karl Dnitz, but also in reference to his staff or headquarters.

Betasom the Italian submarine command based in Bordeaux.

Biscay, Bay Atlantic bay extending from northwestern France to northern Spain; the area in which the main German U-boat pen shelters were located.

Biscay Cross nickname of the early radar detection aerial used on U-boats.

Bletchley Park the British Government Code and Cipher School located in a large country house in Buckinghamshire, north of London.

Bold a device used by U-boats to confuse ASDIC.

Bombe a linked series of Enigma machines, devised at Bletchley Park.

Boot a German boat or warship; the commander is not a staff officer, and the secondin-command is called First Watch Officer, i.e. on a submarine.

Bootskanone gun on the foredeck of a U-boat.

Bow forward end of a vessel.

Bow caps small doors at the outside ends of a submarines torpedo tubes.

Bows forward exterior hull of a vessel.

Bunkers exterior fuel tanks on a U-boat.

Calibre the measurement of gun and shell size, taken from the internal diameter, or bore, of the gun barrel, i.e. a five-inch shell is not five inches long, but five inches in diameter.