On 23rd May 1945, the day when Roberts’ cabin was broken into, the captain arrived in the town of Flensburg as the first delegation of British interrogators sent to U-boat headquarters following Germany’s surrender. He and his group, which included ONS.5’s Commander Peter Gretton, came in peace. Yet, Heinz Walkerling, the former U-boatman assigned to serve Roberts during his stay, had good reason to despise the British. Two years earlier in early March 1943, while taking part in a wolfpack attack on an eastbound convoy in the North Atlantic Walkerling had witnessed the sinking of his compatriots on U-444. Thanks to WATU’s work, hundreds of U-boatmen, some of whom would have been personally known to the German, had been killed in action.
If Roberts had any reservations about being assigned a U-boat officer for an assistant, he did not raise it. He saw nothing of concern in Walkerling’s demeanour and described him in his official report as ‘a pleasant but rather ineffective weakling’.1 If anything, the German seemed keen to please, helping Roberts track down potential interviewees from whom to extract information to take back to England.
Roberts was eager to interview German naval officers who had served either at BdU or as U-boat commanders in order to verify his deductions and suppositions. But there were few candidates left in Flensberg.
‘Many had been killed, some were prisoners of war in Russian hands and others were already dispersed or disbanded,’ Roberts wrote in his report.2 ‘BdU was unable to state their whereabouts.’3
Compounding this confusion was the fact that on 8th May, German naval personnel had been forbidden from sending messages to one another. Nobody seemed to quite know where anybody else was. There was, however, one high-value prisoner aboard the Patria, the ship which Roberts had boarded soon after landing in Germany. Walkerling led Roberts to the cabin of Rear Admiral Godt, Doenitz’s chief of staff and the man responsible for the organisation and operation of all U-boats. Roberts and Walkerling found the German officer ‘violently incensed’ and in a ‘shocking temper’.4 In pristine English, Godt explained that British soldiers had forced their way into his HQ and torn the plot from the wall. Then, Godt claimed, the men had broken into his private cabin to steal various items, including a silver frame in which he kept a photograph of his daughter.
His dismay at the British troops’ unmannerly behaviour had been further compounded when Godt was kept on a parade ground among a crowd of officers and ratings for no less than five hours, awaiting a search by British intelligence. Also, Godt added mournfully, he hadn’t had any lunch.
Roberts could see he was unlikely to extract any useful information unless he was able to calm Doenitz’s chief of staff. Besides, he could see for himself the mess that the soldiers had made of Godt’s room and was now ‘just as angry’ as the German officer. Roberts requested to see the nearest brigade commander. A major general arrived, and Roberts demanded the silver photo frame be found and returned. Without it, Roberts said, I ‘would have no cooperation with the Germans and my mission would be useless.’
Not realising that he was being rather forcefully addressed by a retired naval captain, the more senior officer agreed to locate and return the trinket, which duly arrived at Roberts’ room. With Godt appeased, the two men sat down in Roberts’ cabin for the interview. Roberts placed a tape recorder on the bench beside him, so that his interviewee would think they knew when they were on- and off-record. But a member of Roberts’ delegation, Commander Harry Taylor Gherardi, set up a second tape recorder, disguised as a suitcase, under Roberts’ bunk. Gherardi was a former FBI agent from Rhode Island, the grandson of the first Italian-American admiral in the United States Navy, Bancroft Gherardi. At the start of the war, he joined the United States Navy Reserves and, due to his experience as an intelligence agent, was sent to Britain to interview U-boat captains.5 His secret suitcase recording device recorded any and all conversation, so that nothing would be lost. Nothing would be, in other words, ‘off-record’.6
Roberts found Godt to be ‘a good subject for interrogation’, not least because within a few minutes he had confirmed what Roberts and Laidlaw had deduced via the game: that following Kretschmer’s pioneering manoeuvres, U-boat crews were specifically trained to penetrate the columns of a convoy, fire at the merchant ships from point-blank range, and then perform a dive to evade detection.
With the thrill of having his theory confirmed by the highest-ranking officer in the German U-boat wing beneath Doenitz, a cascade of questions fell from Roberts. Did the Germans, he asked next, use a game like the one at WATU to develop or refine tactics? Godt replied that they did not, but that a year earlier he had seen the edition of Illustrated magazine in which Roberts and the Wrens of WATU had been profiled.
‘He admitted the value of such an establishment,’ Roberts wrote in his report, ‘but he did not consider adapting it to his needs as it was “too late in the war”.’
Unprompted, Godt went on to ‘marvel’ at the use of Wrens in such duty. He explained that women were used a great deal in the German navy. This much was probably already known to Roberts as four weeks earlier, on 22nd April 1945, no fewer than 500 German ‘Wrens’ had surrendered (‘sullenly, but without resistance’, as one newspaper report put it7) to the 7th Armoured Division, or ‘Desert Rats’ as they were better known, at a North Sea naval station in Buxtehude. Godt explained, however, that women would never be employed in the German navy for such important work as that carried out by WATU. In fact, Godt added, women ‘did not even assist in the working of the Atlantic plot’.
Finally, Roberts asked whether Godt knew of any of the tactical operations that WATU had developed, and which had proven so effective in changing the fortunes of the Allied ships. Godt replied that of course he realised that there were concerted tactical movements, and also probably several choices for selection, if a U-boat was found before or after a torpedoing. The name of just one of these manoeuvres was known to the Germans, he said.
‘Which one?’ asked Roberts.
‘Operation Raspberry.’8
The satisfaction of knowing that news of WATU’s creation had reached the highest ranks of the German navy surely contributed to the deep sleep into which Roberts fell, a few hours before his cabin door opened.
The chaos at Flensburg was reflected in the French port of Lorient with its vast and concrete-shielded U-boat bunkers. In recent weeks Lorient had become a siege city populated by monstrous rats and tenacious U-boatmen. On the eve of Germany’s final surrender, it was now the last stalwart of Doenitz’s grand and now failed U-boat scheme.
Most German garrisons in France had surrendered following the liberation of Paris in August 1944. Lorient, which, other than the unscathed fortresses of its U-boat bunkers Kéroman I–IV, had been reduced to a city of rubble, was a rare pocket of German resistance: 26,000 German soldiers had taken up residence in a city whose streets had not heard the laughter of children playing for more than two years.
In early 1943, just prior to the Battle of Birds and Wolves, Churchill had conceded that after a sustained bombing campaign, the U-boat bunkers were apparently indestructible.* Instead he had ordered the annihilation of the city, hoping that, by ruining Lorient’s infrastructure, the men stationed in the U-boat bases might, in turn, starve. On the night of 15th January 1943, 200 bombers dropped incendiary bombs on the French port. During the next week, 353 civilians were killed and more than 800 structures damaged or destroyed: approximately ninety per cent of the buildings within the city walls. Telephone and gas lines were broken. One half of the post office was cleaved away, the building left showing an indignity of beams through its gaping roof.
Citizens were officially evacuated on 3rd February, and between 50,000 and 60,000 inhabitants were evacuated to surrounding towns and villages, so that ‘only workers employed by the Germans’, those who were ‘indispensable for providing fresh supplies, food and public health’, remained. If Kiel, with its churning U-boat factories, was the mechanical heart of Doenitz’s U-boat scheme, Lorient was the front line of operations, and the city paid a heavy price for its unlikely promotion to a position of utmost importance in the Atlantic war. According to the city’s official figures, between 25th September 1940 and 8th May 1945, it sustained 370 aerial bombings.
Led by the fifty-seven-year-old General Wilhelm Fahrmbacher, the Germans resisted Allied attempts to liberate the port, which continued to serve as a place for U-boat crews to recuperate and replenish supplies. Fahrmbacher sustained his soldiers’ morale with a daily supply of bread made from flour mixed with sawdust, a fact hidden from most of the troops. In order to eke out supplies, Fahrmbacher had the local railway track pulled up and the sleepers removed to be sawed up to help make dough.
In just two years Lorient had gone from a place of champagne and plenty for the Germans to a city of poverty. Coffee was brewed not from coffee beans, but from ground acorns or, sometimes, from thinly sliced and baked carrots. For the French citizens, leather shoes had not been sold in the city since 7th November 1940, when France had been directed to send all its leather to Germany. Now those same impositions had come to the occupiers. Unlike the French, they may not have had to make clothes from the scavenged parachutes of downed American pilots, but many soldiers had only their fraying uniforms to wear.
In the first week of May 1945, Fahrmbacher summoned his quartermaster.
‘How many railroad sleepers have we left?’ he asked.
When the quartermaster hesitated, the general knew that the situation was grave. Finally, the quartermaster replied: ‘One.’
That afternoon, knowing that his thousands of men could no longer hold out on bread made from a single railway sleeper, Fahrmbacher sent a message to Doenitz.
‘Wish to sign off with my steadfast and unbeaten men,’ it read. ‘We remember our sorely tried homeland. Long live Germany.’
The last of the French U-boat ports, from which the Battle of the Atlantic had been so hard-fought, had fallen. If Fahrmbacher’s men felt relief at the news, it was surely nothing to that experienced by the U-boatmen at sea who, four days earlier, had received a final message from the founder and leader of their beleaguered division:
My U-boatmen,
Six years of U-boat war lie behind us. You have fought like lions… A continuation of our fight is no longer possible… Undefeated and spotless you lay down your arms after a heroic battle without equal. We remember in deep respect our fallen comrades, who had sealed with death their loyalty to Führer and Fatherland.
After their commander’s recent edicts to go on fighting, the order to surrender their boats came as a tremendous surprise to Doenitz’s U-boat captains. Many wondered whether the enemy had taken control of the cypher system and sent a faked message.9 For those who believed the order, relief, seemingly, was followed by confusion about precisely what to do next. Adalbert Schnee, the U-boat officer who served under Otto Kretschmer before sinking the Wren’s ship, SS Aguila, made a dummy attack on a convoy–the last of the war. He approached within the columns of ships, as per his former captain’s tactic, then escaped undetected, before heading to Norway.
Some U-boats made for neutral harbours. Two crossed the Atlantic, for a final time, and made for Argentina, while five left for Japanese waters. Many waited for the code word Regenbogen (‘Rainbow’)–the signal to scuttle their vessels. It never came.
Heinz Walkerling stood in the dark of Roberts’ cabin, the Luger heavy in his hand. In this moment, the German had both the means and the motive to kill the British captain. But Walkerling had not come to assassinate his new master. He padded across to the polished table in the sitting room adjoining Roberts’ bedroom, placed the weapon down and retreated to his own cabin, clicking the door behind him.
Walkerling later explained that he wanted to ensure Roberts had the means to protect himself during his stay aboard the German liner. After all, not everyone could be guaranteed to be as respectful of rank as a U-boat officer. If his actions happened to demonstrate to Roberts the danger in which he had placed himself by stubbornly refusing a weapon, then so be it.
‘I don’t know where he got it, or how it eluded the search parties,’ Roberts later wrote, of the moment he saw the gun lying on the table. Yet still the stubborn captain would not be moved to arm himself. The next morning, after quizzing Walkerling about what he’d done, Roberts passed the weapon to another member of his party, a corvette captain who was ‘a bit of an Autolycus’, as Roberts put it in his diary, comparing the commander to the burglar of Greek myth.
The gun disposed of, Roberts spent the next day on the U-boat plot with Vice Admiral Godt, with whom he was now on ‘excellent terms’.10 On the plot, Roberts met some of the men who, like the Wrens at Derby House and Belfast Castle, had maintained the live position of ships and U-boats on the maps. When introduced, the men appeared to blanch. Their fear was soon explained. As Roberts began his tour of the facility, he visited the U-boat Operations Room. There, enlarged and tacked to a wall, he saw his own photograph, cut out from the Illustrated magazine article. There was a handwritten caption beneath the image: ‘This is your enemy, Captain Roberts, director of Anti-U-boat Tactics.’*
After a moment, one of the men took the photo and handed it to Roberts.
‘I autographed it,’ Roberts recorded. ‘I already had a copy.’
Godt agreed to pass to Roberts three valuable documents: his staff’s U-boat daily position summary, patrol orders and the weekly intelligence summaries charting Allied convoys. While Roberts read over these documents, he dispatched the former FBI agent Gherardi to make a list of last known positions of every operational U-boat. This would allow the Allies to cross-reference their estimated list of U-boat sinkings against the facts.
‘I found it astonishing,’ Roberts wrote, of the exercise, ‘how very accurate the assessment had been by our own Anti-Submarine Committee at Admiralty.’
Godt took the opportunity to vent at Roberts his frustrations with the belatedness of the expansion of the U-boat arm, and the regretful crewing of submarines by barely trained Luftwaffe officers, rather than sailors, after the Blitz.*
Roberts, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from Godt himself, finally asked whether the tactic pioneered by Kretschmer–of a U-boat slinking into the middle of a convoy, attacking merchant ships, then, in the ensuing chaos, diving to wait, engines silenced, till danger had passed–was an official instruction.
‘Yes,’ Godt replied. ‘You take her to the bottom. There you sit, undisturbed, to eat and rest.’
It had been a long day and Godt was tired. He had, it seemed, enjoyed the opportunity to discuss the U-boat war with his erstwhile enemy. Before he retired Godt turned to Roberts and asked if he might shake his hand. Roberts nodded, and the pair reconciled.
During the next few days Roberts continued his rounds of interviews, speaking at length to numerous U-boat captains, including Doenitz’s son-in-law, Commander Hessler. (‘A humourless head-nodder and heel-clicker,’ as Roberts described him, with typical flair. ‘Not my type.’) Hessler confirmed what Godt had told him, that ‘every U-boat captain desired to get inside the columns of the merchant ships because they were safe there from being attacked’.11
One evening, Roberts returned to his suite and found it filled, this time not with loaded pistols but with bottles of champagne. It was a gift from Godt, Walkerling explained, who had taken them from Doenitz’s private store, as ‘he wouldn’t need them again’. Roberts and his team each took two bottles of Bisquit Dubouché to take home, leaving ‘several bottles for immediate use’.
Their work at U-boat headquarters was finished. But prior to returning to England, Roberts and Gherardi travelled to Kiel, where many of the U-boats were built and launched. A few weeks earlier, on 20th April 1945, the port had been razed in a concerted bombing raid, and the party arrived to find the harbour filled with the corpses of ships. The Admiral Sheer lay with her keel rudely stuck in the air. The Hipper and Emden lay wearily on their sides, the first having been struck by three consecutive bombs while in dry dock.12 Roberts recalled seeing the dockyard filled with U-boat bodies, ‘smashed and scuttled’, fragments of Doenitz’s ruined dream poking from the water.13
Vera Laughton Mathews, the founder of the Wrens, visited the port around the same time, and described the streets as ‘nothing but piles of bricks and debris, among which thousands of bodies must still be buried’.14 She wrote of seeing ‘pale ghosts emerging from the ground’ to flit among the ruins. The air was ‘heavy with corruption’, she wrote. ‘I sympathised with the young officer who remarked, “I should hate to be bitten by a mosquito here.”’
Laughton Mathews recalled being fed and entertained ‘royally’, sitting among objets d’art looted from France and drinking bottles of ‘obviously stolen’ wine.
‘It was difficult to retain a sense of proportion and to know what was right,’ she wrote, of her feelings of moral nausea at being looked after in proximity to ‘starving’ Germans.
‘It is not at all a pleasant feeling to be a conqueror,’ she concluded, the first of war’s lessons, seemingly, to be forgotten in peacetime.
For Roberts there was a certain professional fascination to his visit to Kiel. He and the American were taken aboard U-3008, a brand-new Type XXI U-boat that had been commissioned just a few months earlier. While one of the U-boat’s hydroplanes was broken, meaning that it could not dive, Roberts and Gherardi took her briefly to sea. It was his first trip on a U-boat, and Roberts was able to feel the conditions of life on one of the vessels which, for the past three and a half years, he had hunted via The Game. In his official report, Roberts noted his surprise at the apparent comfort of the crew’s quarters on this new class of U-boat, as well as the presence of a gramophone player and a stack of records.
Before Roberts returned to England he spoke with a U-boat captain who, it transpired, had witnessed the destruction of HMS Hood.15 Of all the interviews he undertook, this was the most fraught with emotion; Roberts’ friend Bernard Stubbs, the former BBC reporter with whom he had shared that Christmas night on the London Underground platform, in the unexpected presence of the king, had died in the sinking of the Hood. Roberts asked his questions quickly, then left.
While the interrogators continued their work, Roberts bade goodbye to Gherardi and took a car to the aerodrome. There he ‘thumbed a Dakota’ which was headed to England carrying a senior member of the Nazi Party who was due to be interrogated.
Roberts and the German official spoke intermittently during the flight. After landing at Hendon, the captain hitched a lift to Speke, Liverpool in a Canadian aircraft headed to Iceland. The result of the mission?
‘Nothing,’ Roberts wrote, victoriously. ‘I learned absolutely nothing.’16