It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The fire, the deaths, even the survivors icing up in half-submerged lifeboats: these were all part of the regretful yet expected cost of doing war. But the instigating circumstance, that of a lone U-boat touring the barren expanse of the mid-Atlantic to happen upon a ship? This was never Karl Doenitz, Führer der U-boote’s plan, a plan that was decades in the making.
Doenitz grew up in the Berlin suburb of Grünau where wolves still hunted in the nearby forests. Doenitz’s mother died when he was three years old. His father, an optical engineer who worked for Karl Zeiss, the company that would later provide lenses for the binoculars used on U-boats, brought his two sons up as a single parent.1 Doenitz, who read and reread books describing the exploits of explorers such as Fritjof Nansen, Hermann von Wissmann and Sven Hedin, left school with romantic, novelistic visions of life at sea that led him to join the navy at eighteen. Among the other 200-odd recruits, Doenitz found fraternity, belonging and, in the reassuring strictures of the military, an orderly path toward promotion and success. He had become estranged from his elder brother, and began to view, in ways both practical and psychological, the navy as his surrogate family.
In September 1916, after a brief tour on a warship, Doenitz was ordered to the U-boatwaffe.2 It was a welcome transfer. Not only did U-boats offer a relatively fast track to positions of command and distinction, but Doenitz’s wife was expecting a baby; the extra financial allowances offered to U-boat crew members–a compensation for the suffocating perils and traumas of the work–would help provide for the young family. After completing his training, Doenitz gladly joined the crew of U-39, serving under the U-boat ace Kapitänleutnant Walter Forstmann, who a month earlier had received the Pour le Mérite, among the highest orders of merit in the Kingdom of Prussia.3
Under Forstmann, Doenitz’s generalised love of the navy narrowed and focused on the individual men of the U-boat division. Proximity to one another and proximity to danger knitted crews together far more closely than for those sailing on the ships overhead, where it was possible to go an entire voyage without knowing the name of a sailor assigned to another station. In the isolated desert of the deep ocean, a U-boat crew inevitably became another family. Survival required a total daily investment of one’s trust in those around you. You knew their names. You knew their girlfriends’ names. The need for constant alertness and self-discipline was a binding agent that turned camaraderie into something approaching love. Years later, as commander of the U-boats, Doenitz would tell new recruits that, if the navy represents the cream of the armed forces, then the U-boat arm represents the cream of the navy; for Doenitz there was no higher calling than that of the life of the submariner.
This was the context in which Doenitz watched Forstmann sink ship after ship. Forstmann had one of the highest hit rates of any U-boat captain in the Great War, a notable achievement considering that the machine calculators used in the Second World War were still years away: every torpedo had to be angled and timed by eye. To narrow the odds, Forstmann would draw closer to his targets than most U-boat captains, who’d prefer to maintain an equitable distance from the enemy’s circling escort ships. The technique made its mark on the young Doenitz, who, in September 1917, was given command of a U-boat.
It was a short-lived career leg. Ten months later, Doenitz and his crew were submerged in the Mediterranean, 150 miles south of Malta. Depending on whether you believe Doenitz’s official report, his memoir or the testimony of survivors interrogated by the British, UB-68 either developed a mechanical fault or, during a crash dive, was poorly handled by its engineer, Leumanl Jeschen. Either way, the U-boat ended up almost vertical under the water, an arrow pointed at the seabed. Next, to Doenitz’s and his inexperienced crew’s dismay, UB-68 began to involuntarily surface. The vessel broke the surface inside the middle of a fleet of British warships, like a salmon breaching the centre of a ring of patient grizzlies.
Doenitz ordered Jeschen to scuttle the boat, a well-rehearsed action whereby the U-boat was filled with water and sunk in order to prevent the vessel and its constituent technologies from falling into enemy hands. UB-68 took just eight seconds to disappear, while the crew trod water in a sea bubbling with its final exhalation. Jeschen never surfaced. All but three of the crew were rescued and Doenitz, who had shed his heavy leathers in the sea, was pulled from the water wearing just a shirt, underpants and a single sock.
After a long trip to England, a journey that he spent in a sulk, turning the accident over in his mind, Doenitz spent the next ten months in a British prisoner-of-war camp at Redmires, near Sheffield. There, he began to show signs of insanity. At breakfast he would play childish games with biscuit tins and china dogs. At one point, reportedly, he pretended to be a U-boat.4 While, in an unpublished diary written at the time, he wrote of how he became obsessed by Jeschen’s death–who would appear in his dreams with ‘the salt flood’ dripping ‘from hair and leathers’–Doenitz later claimed all of this was a ploy.5 Whether his madness was genuine or faked, or something between the two, Doenitz was dispatched to Manchester Lunatic Asylum. In the privacy of his mind however, he remained at work.
Doenitz believed that he had the secret to a tactic that could transform U-boat warfare. The scheme was borrowed from the wolves of his childhood fairy tales. Wolves, Doenitz knew, hunt cooperatively. By working as a pack, they bewilder and run down prey that would be too large to tackle alone. Togetherness also affords the animals the ability to care for wounded pack members, without sacrificing momentum. What better way, Doenitz reasoned, for U-boats to hunt, not as loners picking off stragglers, but as an organised pack, touring the sea with shared focus and intention, able to take down far stronger foes?
‘Against the massed ships of a convoy,’ he later wrote, ‘the only right course is to engage them with every available U-boat simultaneously.’6
As a U-boat commander, Doenitz had hoped to test an early version of the concept in battle. The night before he was captured, Doenitz planned to rendezvous with another boat, U-48 (the namesake precursor to Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt’s vessel) and to attempt a joint attack on a convoy under the light of a new moon. It would be more of a pairing than a pack, of course, but in this embryonic sortie, Doenitz wanted to see, first-hand, how much more devastation might be wrought by U-boats working in tandem. U-48, however, was held up for repairs, and missed the appointment. Nevertheless, he wrote in his memoirs ‘that last night [at sea in a U-boat]… had taught me a lesson: a U-boat attacking a convoy on the surface and under cover of darkness stood very good prospects of success’.7
Doenitz was among the first German prisoners of war to be sent home to Germany, in July 1919. In the years that followed, Die Rudeltaktik, or the wolfpack tactic, grew into an obsession for Doenitz. In November 1937, two years before the war, he published a paper in which he formally described, for the first time, how it might work.8 Now, he just had to convince his superiors in the German navy to build him a sufficient number of U-boats to turn the plan into action. For this too, Doenitz had a plan. More specifically, he had a game.
Tangled up in her life jacket, the City of Benares’ nurse began to slip into the well of the boat. Throughout the night, she had cared for the lascar sailors aboard Lifeboat Two. Wearing little more than sandals and cotton shirts, these men had succumbed to the cold of the Atlantic quicker than the others. Dribbling and incoherent, one had tipped himself out of the boat.9 Perhaps seeing their crew mate’s despair, over the next thirty minutes, three other lascars also slipped into unconsciousness and beyond. Their deaths robbed the nurse of an immediate purpose. After Colin helped the lifeboat’s skipper, MacDonald, push their bodies overboard, she cried out: ‘I’m going! I’m going!’
The boy held out his arms to embrace the young woman. After a moment’s struggle, she relaxed and let him cradle her head, lifting it clear of the water each time a wave broke over the sides of the boat.
‘There’ll be a ship coming soon, ma’am,’ Colin reassured her. ‘It won’t be long now.’10
Colin’s calmness belied his true feelings, familiar to anyone who, as a child, has witnessed an intimate crisis of the adult world: the anxiety that there was something more you should be doing, combined with the bewildered sense that it is neither your place nor responsibility to do so.
‘I think I see a light, ma’am,’ the boy kindly lied. ‘It could be a ship.’
As dawn bled onto the horizon, the rain turned to sleet, and the sleet turned to hail. Where, in the early hours at sea, those on the lifeboat had sung songs to maintain their spirits, the relentless weather had enforced a glum silence. Colin–still contemplating the fates of the oil-slicked people in the water who had tried and failed to haul themselves aboard, before sinking away–shielded the nurse’s head from the pocking hail.
Agnes Wallace’s last words were straightforward.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘I am dying.’
Then, after a pause, she added: ‘Are the children all right?’
After a while the man sitting on Colin’s other side, a fifty-nine-year-old academic from a Canadian university, who had swum to the lifeboat after falling from a rope ladder into the sea, suggested, as gently as any person might in a storm, that the boy let her body go. She was dead, he said. Colin refused. He feared that, if he released her arm, he might lose his anchoring.
When Angus MacDonald told Colin to push the woman overboard, the boy found his arms stiff and cramped. He was unable to shift the weight. MacDonald made his way to Colin’s end of the lifeboat, and together they lifted the body over the side, where it washed away in a swell.11
The desperation of the situation on the water was obvious to the Wrens in the plotting room at Western Approaches HQ in Plymouth. There, in the centre of the map, like a drop of blood in oil, a tiny red ship showed the location of the sunken liner. Admiral Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, commander-in-chief at the Office of Western Approaches, scanned the map for possible candidates to stage a rescue attempt. There were few contenders. The closest ship was HMS Winchelsea, the destroyer that had initially chaperoned the convoy of which City of Benares was a part. It was now 200 miles away, protecting another flock of merchant ships.
The next best option was HMS Hurricane, a Brazilian destroyer that had been bought and rechristened by the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war, which was currently escorting another convoy of vessels from Britain to Canada. This ship was a little over 300 miles from the site of the City of Benares’ sinking but, thanks to the size of the escort it sailed with, could be more readily spared than the Winchelsea.
Dunbar-Nasmith had a difficult decision to make: return the Winchelsea to the Gap, and imperil the ships and crew of its new convoy, or dispatch Hurricane, a ship that would take longer to reach the survivors, the life expectancy of whom, he knew, was likely measured in hours, but which would place its current charges in less danger.
Pragmatism won the argument. In the early hours of the morning, Peter Collinson, Hurricane’s twenty-eight-year-old surgeon and code officer, received the message. Once decoded it read, with the brevity forced by the ponderous technology of the era: ‘Proceed with utmost dispatch to position 56°43N/21°15W. Survivors reported in boats.’ Collinson passed the message to the ship’s captain, thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant Commander Hugh Crofton Simms.
‘Utmost dispatch?’ said Simms, feeling the pitch and roll of the waves below. ‘We’ll do our best.’12
Doenitz hunched over a crumpled map, spread out across a broad table. It was early 1939, eighteen months before Colin boarded the City of Benares, and while well-to-do Berliners and their families were skiing the Harz Mountains, Doenitz was set to play a game, not with his immediate family, but with his naval colleagues. Around him, an assortment of German officers bent and peered with an equal intensity of focus. The map showed the flat expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, bordered on the east by the tip of Portugal and, on the west, the toothy coast of North America. The map was accurate to scale, but its function that day was that of a board, like chess’s chequered battlefield, the squared-off streets of Monopoly or the rungs and slides of Snakes and Ladders.
The Germans were split into two teams. The Reds played as the Royal Navy. Their side held a pile of tokens to represent the forces at their disposal: twelve battleships, five aircraft carriers, twenty-seven light cruisers and a hundred destroyers.13 The Blues played as the Germans. With tokens representing fifteen torpedo U-boats, two large fleet U-boats, two artillery U-boats, a minelayer, an armoured raider and a single supply ship, they were impossibly outgunned.
The rules of the game, which was set four years into the future, at a time when Germany was imagined to again be at war with Britain, were simple. The Red team must use their considerable forces to protect and chaperone five British convoys of merchant ships heading towards Britain from various countries via the Atlantic. Using their sorry fleet of U-boats, the Blue team must stop them.
Why, while the clouds of war thickened above them, would a group of serious-minded, middle-aged men waste their time on a board game? Doenitz, at forty-seven, had become a grandfather for the first time a few weeks earlier. But wargames like this had been an integral part of the German military for more than a century, when Prussian officers began to restage recent or forthcoming real-world battles using miniature figures on sand-covered tables. In this way, wargames assumed an essential role in military training, enabling high-ranking officers to experience something of the magnitude of high-level military strategy, in a consequence-free environment.
Infantry need only congregate in a field, split into two teams, load their guns and tanks with blanks and start shooting at one another to experience the disorientating fury of battle without risk. It is harder for the strategists and tacticians to practise war. Wargames had come to be used to anticipate battles, as well as review them, allowing military commanders to test tactical theories in hypothetical scenarios, and gain a degree of experience that is otherwise unavailable outside of war itself.
That day, in Doenitz’s game, no restrictions were placed on players. Each side was given the run of the Atlantic, free to select the courses followed by their vessels. The method may have been playful but Doenitz, a keen bridge player, had a purpose of utmost solemnity. Via the game, he hoped to see how the Royal Navy might act at sea during a war, how he might best cut his adversaries’ supply lines and, crucially, how many U-boats he would need to do so with any meaningful degree of success.
As the officers nudged the little tokens representing their warships and U-boats around the map, it became increasingly obvious that the Blue team’s U-boat fleet was too small to halt the flow of convoys to Britain. They had carefully split their fifteen torpedo U-boats into five groups consisting of three vessels apiece. They positioned the majority of their fleet in the mid-Atlantic along the Canada-Ireland shipping route, where the Red team’s ships would be most numerous. A separate group of tokens was sent toward the Canary Islands. So sparse was the coverage that, during the next few turns, three British convoys made it through the U-boats without a single ship being spotted. One U-boat spied a fourth convoy, but the Blue team chose to keep radio silence so as not to give away the vessel’s position. The British escort ships found and made short work of the solitary U-boat the moment it attacked.
After the map was folded up and the pieces packed away, Doenitz wrote a report describing what had happened. The Blue team’s failure, he surmised, lay not in any particular tactical mistakes but in the ‘emptiness of the sea’, as he put it. The German fleet was simply spread too thinly. None of this was surprising to Doenitz, who, since becoming the head of the U-boat division in 1935, had been urging his superiors to build more–and better–U-boats. But the game provided evidence to support his arguments. In his written summary, Doenitz drew the conclusion the Germans would require ‘at least some three hundred’ operational U-boats if they were to form the wolfpacks needed to sink the numbers of Allied convoy ships required to starve the British.14
With a sufficient number of U-boats at sea, Doenitz explained that he would be able to form his U-boats into a huge line, perhaps with as much as twenty miles between each vessel. This line would sweep at a right angle to the suspected course of an incoming convoy, intercepting its route. Once the convoy was spotted, the U-boats would converge as a pack, ahead of its route. Finally, when the signal came to attack, the U-boats could attack all at once, confusing and distracting the naval escorts. Without sufficient numbers, however, Doenitz’s U-boats would be forced to roam the ocean as lone wolves, hoping to catch sight of something at which to aim and fire a torpedo.
A few months later, in May 1939, Doenitz restaged the Red vs Blue training exercise, this time transposing the scenario from the board to the ocean.15 In the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of Portugal, he summoned fifteen U-boats to comprise the Blue team’s fleet. The Red team, playing as the British, consisted of two helpless merchant supply vessels and two well-armed escort ships, the Saar and the Erwin Wasser.
This game was intended to be played out on the entire expanse of the sea. Nevertheless, after just four hours one of the U-boats spotted the pretend ‘convoy’. Doenitz watched while, as the hours passed, the U-boats congregated and tracked the convoy, first in a group of seven then, by the end of the game, in a pack consisting of no fewer than thirteen boats.
Doenitz’s conclusion was foregone. In his report, he wrote that success against the enemy could only be achieved when ‘a great number of U-boats can be successfully set on the convoy’. Both the game played on the water and the game played on the board had proven the effectiveness of his tactic.
Armed with his evidence, Doenitz soon found a powerful ally in one of his superiors, Admiral Rolf Carls, who forwarded the paper describing the wolfpack tactics to high command along with a covering note in which Carls wrote that the idea of a U-boat working alone should be ‘dropped’ and a ‘disposition of groups of U-boats striven for’.16
The staff at high command, however, were against wolfpack tactics. While it made sense that coordinated assaults would be more effective than lone-wolf attacks, there was an equally logical concern that the radio signals necessary to organise the U-boats into a pack could, if intercepted by British technology, forfeit any element of surprise and aid detection of the vessels by the enemy. Moreover, Grand Admiral Raeder, commander-in-chief of the German navy, wanted to invest in a surface fleet of warships to rival that of the Royal Navy, and diverted funds away from the U-boat construction plan toward surface vessels. Finally, Hermann Goering, Hitler’s closest ally and confidant, a former First World War fighter-pilot ace, favoured the Luftwaffe, not only because of personal bias but also because planes could be built more quickly than U-boats and, therefore, could be seen to be having a more immediate effect.
On multiple fronts Doenitz’s plan to build a sizeable U-boat fleet was frustrated. By the outbreak of war, instead of the 300 U-boats he estimated that he would need, Doenitz had just forty-six craft available for action, a proportion of which would always be in transit or docked for repairs or resupply.
At the moment at which the City of Benares was sunk there were just twenty-eight U-boats active in the German fleet, not enough to organise into wolfpacks. Or so he thought.
In the grey light of dawn, Colin and the other survivors of the City of Benares could see lumps of wreckage in the water: deckchairs, shoes, oil clinging to bobbing corpses and other lingering traces of violence, yet to be swallowed up by the sea. The ocean was mottled grey and white as if, like those who had survived its lashings, it too had aged during the night.
Daybreak brought, if not fresh hope, then fresh relief; Colin could see farther and therefore anticipate when the next wave would hit and brace for impact. The atmosphere on the lifeboat was subdued with sorrow, fatigue and concentration. The number of survivors had dwindled, from thirty-eight to fewer than a dozen. Spirits were briefly lifted when MacDonald managed to open a food locker, and fished out a dripping tin of canned beef, biscuits and rum. Using a jackknife, another man punctured a hole in the lid, and Colin ate.
It was the first benison of the disaster and one that, for Colin, raised hopes that there might be another. Many times during the next few hours the boy caught sight of some mirage on the horizon, and felt a tentative, momentary flush of relief that they were to be rescued. Then, soon enough, he realised that he was mistaken.
In fact, Colin’s faith was well placed. HMS Hurricane had made good time. Driving through the night storms at fifteen knots, it had been a rough ride for her crew, an ordeal made bearable when word reached the ship that many of the survivors to whom they were racing were children. In the early hours, when the weather had eased, the ship’s captain, Hugh Crofton Simms, had sped to twenty-seven knots, a pace that had brought the ship into the vicinity of the disaster.
In the early afternoon, Simms began a box search around the Benares’ last known position, sailing twenty miles due west before turning to port, steering south for one mile, and finally turning again to track another twenty miles due east. Every available crew member stood on the ship’s deck, binoculars and telescopes pressed tightly to their eye sockets, searching the horizon in all directions while the ship made its urgent sweeps. HMS Hurricane was eighteen miles into the twenty-mile grid before a lookout shouted: ‘Boat ahead.’
Even at its slowest speed, the destroyer produced a swell that could easily upturn a beleaguered lifeboat. Rather than risk tipping survivors back into the sea, Simms dispatched a whaler, a narrow open boat, pointed at both ends, to approach the lifeboat and report back. Albert Gorman, the ship’s whaler, sped toward the first boat, tying a painter rope to latch the craft together. Gorman stepped aboard and, immediately, any sense of hopeful anticipation dissipated. He counted twenty people, all of whom appeared dead. One young woman, wearing nothing but stockings and a torn frock, appeared to be nodding at him. When he checked, Gorman saw that she was gone, her head dipping in time with the waves.
‘Should we find ID?’ he shouted, through cupped hands, to the Hurricane’s deck.
‘No,’ came the reply. If there were survivors alive on other lifeboats, there was no time to follow procedure. They needed to press on.
The scarlet life jacket was all that was holding Colin’s body upright in position when, at 18:00, he caught sight of his rescuers. MacDonald, waving an oar to which he had tied a piece of cloth, stood in the stern singing ‘Rule Britannia’. Of the few survivors on the boat, MacDonald, perhaps through his near-constant physical exertion, was still able to move freely, his only injury a gash to the hand, sustained while groping for the submerged supply locker.
As the ship drew close, one of the crew, Reg Charlton, spied the shivering child and shouted: ‘Get the boy.’
Colin was unable to move or speak in reaction. His hands, puffy, white and useless through being submerged in salt water all night and most of the day, rested by his sides. He could feel nothing below the waist. There was no way the boy could stand, let alone climb. Only MacDonald was able to make it up the scrambling nets; Colin and a small clutch of other survivors on his lifeboat were hauled onto the ship’s deck by lengths of rope looped under their armpits.
Once aboard, the survivors were taken to the galley of the engine room, where the warmth from the engines would dry out their clothes and bones. Colin was given a pair of golfing trousers, the shortest pair on board, in order to allow his pyjama bottoms to dry out. His abiding memory of the rescue was his bewilderment at the youthfulness of the destroyer’s crew, many of whom seemed just a few years older than him, and whose thirty-four-year-old captain was considered the grizzled veteran of the operation.
At 11:52 on 19th September 1940, while HMS Hurricane was still making its way back to Britain, Rolf Hilse, radio operator on U-48, received an unexpected coded message from a nearby U-boat. It came from Günther Prien, captain of U-47 and one of Doenitz’s trio of young U-boat stars. Prien was one of the most esteemed U-boat commanders, having sunk the first Allied merchant ship, the Bosnia, two days into the war. After spotting a plume of smoke on the horizon, ‘like a dragonfly flitting over a stream’,17 Prien dived, let the freighter pass over his position, resurfaced and, using the U-boat’s deck-mounted cannon, attacked the ship. When one of the Bosnia’s lifeboats capsized, Prien’s crew pulled aboard a thrashing teenager, who gave his captors the first account of the war describing what it was like to be confronted by a U-boat.
‘You can’t imagine what it’s like,’ Prien recalled the youngster saying in a thick cockney accent. ‘You looks over the water and sees nothing, on’y sky and water and then suddenly a bloomin’ big thing pops up beside yer, blowing like a walrus. I thought I was seein’ the Loch Ness monster.’
Now, on his current trip, U-47 had expelled all but one of its torpedoes in an earlier battle and, for the past few days, had been acting as a weather boat, a tedious and much-despised beat for a spent U-boat that consisted of signalling intermittent weather reports, often via helium-filled condoms, which German meteorologists could use to estimate the conditions over Britain, useful for planning Luftwaffe attacks.
Hilse decoded the message. Prien, it transpired, wanted U-48, a newer vessel with superior radio equipment to that of his own U-boat, to relay an important message to Doenitz: he had spied a convoy of more than forty ships travelling east, toward Britain. Prien wanted to know what to do.
When he received Prien’s message, via Kapitänleutnant Bleichrodt, Doenitz was at his newly established U-boat headquarters (known in German by the mountain range of letters Operationsabteilung der Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote, or BdU as it was referred to by anyone who had anything else to do that day) in Kerneval, near Lorient.
Doenitz had moved from Paris with his young Alsatian dog, Wolf,18 into the requisitioned Villa Kerillon, a handsome, if small, white, late-nineteenth-century building that overlooked the growing Lorient U-boat base of operations, just three weeks earlier, on 29th August. Sensing an opportunity, Doenitz ordered U-48 to proceed to Prien’s beacon signal. Then he sent a similar message to four other U-boats, including U-99 and U-100, captained by the rival aces Otto Kretschmer and Joachim Schepke respectively, to head to the same position too.
As they gathered, the vessels arranged themselves at five-mile intervals ahead of the convoy, HX.72, which consisted of forty-three ships crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the City of Benares, carrying thousands of tons of supplies and materials from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Liverpool. Everything was playing out in precisely the same way Doenitz had practised in the wargame. At dusk Prien signalled the position, course and speed of the British ships. The U-boats lay in ambush, obeying BdU’s command to not feed the gulls or throw empty tin cans overboard, tells that might give away their hiding places before the convoy was in the ideal position to be attacked.19
Three days after the sinking of the City of Benares, and after years of preparation, Doenitz had successfully managed to orchestrate a six-member-strong wolfpack, the first of the war to date. Finally, the line of U-boats broke into a cluster and rounded on the convoy.
At just twenty-eight years old, Otto Kretschmer was addicted to cigars and already the most famous U-boat captain of the young war. In early August he had sailed into Lorient flying seven victory pennants, one for each of the ships that he believed he had successfully torpedoed. The following day, in Paris, Doenitz informed Kretschmer that he was to be awarded the Knight’s Cross for the greatest number of ships sunk by a commander in a single voyage. Normally, Kretschmer would have to travel to Berlin to receive his award in person from Hitler. Kretschmer could not be spared, however, and the following day Grand Admiral Raeder, the most senior officer in the German navy, flew to Lorient to make the award himself. After the ceremony Kretschmer and his crew, as gaunt as scarecrows, chugged beer on U-99’s deck.
When word of Kretschmer’s achievement reached the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, staff set to work seeding stories in the press about this new, rising ace. A month later, Kretschmer was as famous and feted as a film star. The accolades were appropriate. Kretschmer was a genius submariner who had, in early 1936, been one of the first and most distinguished students at the U-boat school in Kiel, where he was taught by Doenitz himself. For all their competence, Doenitz’s other top students had obvious flaws. Prien was stubborn and quick-tempered, while Schepke, whose considerable charm came, as it often does, with a compulsive need to be liked, was a hard-drinking womaniser.
Kretschmer’s flaws included an obsession with naval warfare at the cost of all other interests, an intolerance of those who did not share his focus and a taciturn nature, all characteristics that, in the U-boat realm, became virtues.
Once, while resting between sorties in Lorient, Kretschmer spied four of his petty officers (their names–Bergman and Clasen, Schnabel and Kassel–have the rhythmic quality of characters in a cautionary fairy tale) attempting to drunkenly sneak, on all fours, past the lounge window of his hotel, the Beau Séjour. The following day Kretschmer lined his crew up on the quayside for a blistering lecture, and the threat of disciplinary action should they ever repeat the night’s behaviour.20 It was a harsh reprimand. This kind of exuberant partying was typical of U-boat crews and captains who, after weeks at sea, in 360-degree proximity to death, unwound explosively on shore. But it showed Kretschmer’s intolerance for weakness. In peacetime, this would have made him a cruel boss, but, on a U-boat, it merely inspired his crew to work harder and more efficiently through a common eagerness to please.
The recipe, whatever its precise formula, worked. In April 1940 when Kretschmer’s newly commissioned U-boat, U-99, left port for its maiden voyage, the dockyard superintendent shouted to its captain: ‘Treat her well and she’ll sink the whole Royal Navy for you.’
It was an exaggeration, but not by much. No U-boat captain would destroy more Allied ships than Kretschmer. That first day, before setting off, one of his crew noticed a pair of horseshoes hanging from the U-boat’s anchor. Kretschmer ordered his staff to paint a pair of horseshoes onto the conning tower. Every time the crew scored a new kill, they’d mark their achievement by daubing another horseshoe on the fin. Luck, however, had little to do with it, as Kretschmer would show that night, during the inaugural wolfpack attack of the war.
Bleichrodt was the first to fire as he loosed a fusillade of his remaining torpedoes. He sank one freighter and damaged another. He then replaced Prien as the convoy ‘shadow’, radioing signals to the other U-boats, and reports back to Doenitz. In this new role, U-48 sent a flurry of radio signals to Lorient. Kretschmer, one of whose nicknames was ‘Silent Otto’, a reference to his aversion to using his U-boat’s radio, was furious, fearing that this incautious chatter would give away the wolfpack’s position.
Kretschmer set a collision course with the convoy and wrathfully motored along the surface of the ocean, maintaining radio silence. En route he spotted Prien’s U-boat on the water. Not wanting to miss a chance to show up his rival, Kretschmer slowed and quietly approached, to within ramming distance, startling Prien’s crew, who for a moment believed they were being attacked.
Doenitz encouraged fraternity between his U-boat crews, forbidding the men from shaving while at sea so that, in time, they shared an appearance, as well as purpose. Through a combination of Doenitz’s design, and the intimacy that is forged through shared experience of peril and trauma, U-boatmen became a brotherhood. But rivalry and one-upmanship were built into the system too: captains competed on the dehumanising leaderboard of tonnage sunk. As Kretschmer took off, he called witheringly to Prien, now standing at the conning tower: ‘You need some lookouts.’
In the light of the moon, Kretschmer closed to attack a freighter. While both the torpedo instruction booklet and the official German Memorandum for Submarine Commanders recommended a minimum distance of 1,000 metres* between the U-boat and its target, Kretschmer wanted to see what would happen if he fired from half this distance. U-99 slipped past the escort destroyer, to sit within the vulnerable columns of the convoy. When the torpedo hit the Invershannon’s bows, the explosion revealed, for a few moments, the immensity of the night sky.
Next, Kretschmer headed to the dark side of the convoy, happening across a deep-laden freighter, the 3,700-ton Baron Blytheswood. It sank in just forty seconds. Through the gap left by the vanished ship, Kretschmer spied another bulky freighter. The next torpedo struck amidships. With three successful hits, Kretschmer cut U-99’s engines to allow the convoy to pull away. His radio operator picked up the distress signal reporting the ship’s name, Elmbank.
This kind of bold attack from within the columns of a convoy, while new to the Battle of the Atlantic, had precedent. Doenitz, who had seen first-hand its effectiveness working under Forstmann, had managed–or at least, not wanting to be shown up by his young captains, claimed to have managed–on more than one occasion to pass undetected through the prowling escorts, into the columns of the merchant vessels to mount attacks.
Most U-boat commanders knew that, logically, the most effective way to target a merchant ship would be to slip, somehow, past the destroyers, and fire at the flock from close range. Moreover, the Type VII-C U-boats were dressed in a thin outer skin, designed to camouflage the U-boat as a low-lying surface vessel when it came up for air. (This skin was perforated to allow the water to penetrate between it and the pressure-withstanding cylindrical core of the ship, to ensure the disguise was not crushed.) Few U-boat captains, however, had had the gumption to attempt such a move. Uncertainty about the effectiveness of British sonar-detection, known at the time as ASDIC, led many U-boats to fire their torpedoes only from well outside the detection range of the escorts, at a range of 3,000 metres or farther.21
In fact, the Royal Navy’s anti-submarine tactics were, in the early stages of the war, miserably ineffectual. The British ships had no radar, and only a few were equipped with ASDIC. This formative submarine-detection device was housed in a dome beneath the hull of escort ships, like a great polyp. It sent out pulses of sound waves, which emitted a ‘ping’ that would produce an antiphonic ‘tong’ response if and when it struck a solid object within a 3,000-metre radius. This call and response would provide an accurate range and bearing. It was, however, notoriously unreliable in its formative iterations, upset by differing density layers in the water, and would fail altogether if the ship exceeded eighteen knots. Moreover, hardly anyone knew how to work the system properly. One operator described operating ASDIC as like playing the harp, a skill that required dexterity and endurance, and of which those assigned to it had no experience.
Kretschmer had executed, that night, the ideal attack on a convoy: one issued from within the patrolling escort ships, as part of a wolfpack. In his diary entry of 22nd September 1940, Doenitz wrote with a straightforwardness that masked his feelings of told-you-so indignation toward the superiors who had frustrated his plans: ‘The engagement of the past few days shows that the principles enunciated in peacetime were correct.’ The efficacy of the wolfpack had been proven in a board game, then a training exercise. Now it had shown its worth in combat.