The capitulation of Germany was signed by the high command (including Admiral Doenitz, who was the last fuehrer of Germany as well as commander of the navy and the U-boat corps). The Admiralty arranged with the Germans to give surrender orders to their U-boats at sea. They were to surface and report in plain language their position and number, then proceed to designated ports and anchorages. The first U-boat to comply was the U-249, which surfaced off the British coast and was escorted into Portland by H.M.S. Magpie and H.M.S. Amethyst. By May 31, forty-nine boats had surrendered at sea, leaving a dozen unaccounted for. The difficulty here was that the Allies had destroyed the high-powered radio transmission stations, which alone could reach the U-boats. As time passed more boats straggled in, some of which must have been lost earlier or were not accounted for. The last boat to reach port was the U-977, whose captain, Lieutenant Heinz Schaeffer, was an ardent nationalist out on his first patrol, with no sinkings to his credit. At first he refused to believe the surrender, then he persuaded his crew to sail with him for Argentina. They arrived on August 17, were interned, and Schaeffer and his U-boat were turned over to the Americans, who at first tended to believe the U-977 had been the instrument for Hitler’s escape to the Argentine. Later it was suggested that since Hitler was dead at the time of the surrender, it had been Martin Bormann who had escaped in the submarine. But the fact was that the escape was simply the misdirection of a loyal German who could not stand the thought of defeat.
And there was no question about the defeat, on land or at sea. The Admiralty’s fears were the result of too much information about technicalities, and not enough about the state of the German economy in the last months of the war. On the surface the U-boats seemed bound to grow more formidable each week. By the end of the war the Germans had launched 1,900 submarines, of which 1,150 were commissioned. Thirteen major shipyards had built U-boats at Hamburg, Bremen, Vegesack, Danzig, Kiel, Lubeck, and Flensburg. But the Allied planes hit them day after day in the spring of 1945. On March 30, for example, United States Army Air Force bombers destroyed 13 U-boats in the yards at Bremen and Hamburg. To be sure, the Germans had the most advanced submarine technology in the world, with plans for no fewer than 45 types of submarines. They had actually gone into production on 12 types, ranging from the ocean-going Type XXI down to the Type XXVII, the two-man midget boats. They were working on a one-man midget boat, the Dolphin, and had two prototypes in testing. If Admiral Doenitz had been able to complete his U-boat building program and man his U-boats at sea, Britain would have had to start all over again in the U-boat war, as she did in the winter of 1943. But that did not happen, and given the way the war was going it could not have happened.
Admiral Doenitz never gave up his belief that if he had been given in 1939 the materials of war he needed, he could have defeated Britain with his U-boats by 1943. Certainly Churchill worried enough to make the point ceaselessly in his communications with President Roosevelt. At least a little of his anxiety had to be propagandistic. Had the U-boat menace grown worse sooner than it did, the British would have had to make a further shift of British resources to the U-boat war in the Atlantic, which would have cost the Allies the Mediterranean in all probability, and thus cost the Americans more dearly in the long run. And, had the situation been more grave than it was in 1940 and 1941, America’s entry into the European war would undoubtedly have been accelerated; as noted, the United States was in fact at war with Germany on the high seas early in 1941.
From Doenitz’s point of view his argument seems logical. But always in the war against the U-boat the British were in position to respond to attack. Every challenge that Doenitz put to the Allies was met and overcome—807 of the 1,150 commissioned boats had been destroyed. Doenitz had achieved an operational force of about 350 boats by 1943, where it remained. Sometimes the Allies sank more than the Germans produced; sometimes they sank less, but despite the massive German building program during the last two years of the war, the Allies sank enough boats to keep the U-boat threat under control while the Allied armies moved steadily towards Berlin.
Certainly the German U-boat force was the most dedicated and most tragic of all military forces of either side in World War II. Of a total of 39,000 men in the U-boat crews, 28,000 were killed in action and 5,000 were captured: a casualty rate of 85 percent. One can not call the U-boat war a gallant effort, for it was much too cruel for that after the early days of 1939 when the U-boat captains were observing the London Submarine Agreement of 1936. But it was a struggle of heroes against heroes, deadly enemies all the way. In the end, British perseverance and American productivity overcame German aggression and technological skill. That is the real story of the war against the U-boats.