The new U-boat war that Admiral Doenitz had promised Churchill and that severely worried the British admirals never came about, but not through any failure by Doenitz or his brilliant staff. They had it all worked out in detail; the Type XXI boats were as perfect as they could be, given the speed with which they were assembled. By May, 140 Type XXI boats had been launched and were ready for service, 20 in Norwegian harbors, 120 in Germany. Sixty-one Type XXIII boats had also been completed and a number of the “canoes” were on service in the inshore waters of Britain. So were several dozen two-man midget submarines, which had first come into use after the Allies invaded France, and thereafter worked the eastern British coastal waters and the channel. They did considerable damage to coastal shipping and the Allied war effort since they were so hard to detect. But in the last months of the war 50 “canoes” were sunk by coastal craft and another 15 by aircraft. As with all the new developments it was a question of finding the antidote, which took time, but which the British did not fail to do.
Although the Germans had their Type XXI boats ready for action, the necessary support was not forthcoming. Fuel transportation and manning could not be arranged as quickly as submarine technology. Also, because the RAF and American strategic bombers were not doing what the navy wanted, General Eisenhower was persuaded to make a special effort to capture the U-boat yards and factories. In the summer of 1944 a large contingent of American troops had rushed down to the coast of the Bay of Biscay although the German armies were retreating eastward, and Montgomery’s forces along the Belgian and Dutch coasts gave special emphasis to capturing shipyards. Their prime mission was to force the U-boat operations back to Norway and Germany.
In the beginning of May the first Type XXI boat went out to raid British shipping. She was the U-2511, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Adelbert Schnee, who had gained his fame in the U-60 and the U-201. He was instructed to take the boat into the Caribbean, which was about as far as he could go, and attack shipping, testing the boat to its maximum. Schnee had reached the Faroe Islands on May 4 when Grand Admiral Doenitz ordered all his U-boats to cease hostilities and return to their bases. He issued an order of the day explaining that the war had come to a point where there was no future for the U-boat and paid homage to the men of his command for waging “a heroic fight which knows no equal”.
Lieutenant Commander Schnee was just then taking sight on a British cruiser on the edge of the North Atlantic. Having satisfied himself that he could have sunk the ship with a homing torpedo, Schnee snapped down his periscope shears and pointed the boat back east. That was the last patrol of the U-boat campaign. It ended in the North Atlantic, where it had started, where the most important battles had been fought and where Britain had won the war against the U-boats.