The End of a Dream
Had U-223 been fitted with a schnorkel, both Peter Gerlach and his boat might have lived to fight another day. The schnorkel, originally a Dutch invention, the plans of which were captured by the Germans when they overran Holland in 1940, was essentially a 9-inch diameter tube with a non-return valve at the top, which could be raised above the surface when a submarine was at periscope depth. This provided sufficient air for the diesel engines to be run underwater without creating a vacuum in the pressure hull. Batteries could then be recharged without surfacing, and there would always be a circulation of fresh air. In theory, a U-boat so equipped would become a true submarine, rather than a submersible, able to remain underwater indefinitely. There were, however, some serious drawbacks to the schnorkel. It was liable to break off at speeds in excess of 7 knots, and the diesel exhaust smoke from a submerged U-boat was easily spotted from the air. It was also found that the noise of the diesels running underwater rendered the hydrophones useless. These may have been the reasons why the German Navy ignored the schnorkel for much of the war. It was not until May 1944 that it was widely fitted in operational Type VIIC boats, and only then as a last-ditch measure to help turn the tide of the war at sea. By then it was plainly evident that the fortunes of the U-boat were on the wane. In that month, they sank only five Allied merchant ships totalling 27,297 tons, and this for the loss of twenty-two of their own number. This was a far cry from the heady days of early 1942, when up to 150 Allied ships were going down every month, while only two or three U-boats were lost.
On land, Nemesis was knocking at Germany’s door. At dawn on 6 June 1944, a huge Allied fleet of 5000 ships appeared off the beaches of Normandy, and the long-planned Operation Overlord began. The German generals, perhaps rendered complacent by so many easy victories in the West in past years, were taken completely unawares. While this may have been predictable, with so many Allied ships at sea in the confined waters of the English Channel – in all some 7,000 ships and landing craft were involved – that Dönitz’s U-boats were unable to inflict massive losses is almost beyond belief. At that time, it is on record that 168 U-boats were operational, and of these at least forty were at sea in the Western Approaches or the Bay of Biscay, and ready to oppose the invasion. For reasons best known to Grand Admiral Dönitz, these boats did not receive orders to intervene until twelve hours after the first Allied troops came ashore in Europe. Even then, only fourteen boats went into action against the enemy, and six of these were sunk in the Bay and Western Channel long before they came near the invasion area. Of the others, most were damaged and forced to return to port. Not one Allied ship was sunk by a U-boat.
Karl-Jurgen Wächter went back to sea in November 1944, in command of a brand new Type XXI, U-2503. The Type XXI was the ultimate underwater weapon on which Dönitz was by then pinning his hopes to win the war at sea. At a meeting in Stettin in January of that year, he had said:
The enemy has succeeded in gaining the advantage in submarine defence. The day will come when I shall offer Churchill a first-rate submarine war. The submarine weapon has not been broken by the setbacks of 1943. On the contrary, it has become stronger. In 1944, which will be a successful but a hard year, we shall smash Britain’s supply with a new submarine weapon.
Undoubtedly, the Type XXI was a vast improvement on the Type VIIC, with which the U-boat men had fought most of the war, and had it come a year earlier, it might well have changed the course of history. With a displacement of 1,621 tons, the Type XXI was ten metres longer and two metres wider in the beam than the Type VIIC, and had a rubber outerskin designed to reflect radar and Asdic. Its own radar was a much improved model, and it was equipped with the Balkon hydrophone which could detect ships at a range of fifty miles. Two 4,000 horse power diesels gave it a speed of 15.6 knots on the surface and 16.8 knots submerged, with a range of 15,000 miles at 10 knots cruising speed. It could dive in eighteen seconds, as compared with thirty seconds for the VIIC, and using the schnorkel it could, in theory at least, stay underwater permanently. The acoustic torpedo was standard, and with a hydraulic torpedo loader all six tubes could be reloaded in twelve minutes. This was a great advance on the manhandling of torpedoes in the VIIC, where it usually took anything up to twenty minutes to reload one tube. For defence against attacking aircraft, considered the greatest danger at this stage of the war, two 37mm and two twin 20mm AA guns were fitted on deck. And, not least as far as its crew was concerned, the Type XXI offered much more in the way of comfort. There was more room to move around, a ventilation plant to purify the air, and a refrigerator to keep the food fresh.
Dönitz’s optimistic opinion of the capabilities of the Type XXI was ill-founded, for the time was long past when any new weapon could have saved Germany from the forces of retribution. As 1944 drew to a close, British and American troops were poised to cross the Rhine, and in the east Russian armies had crossed the East Prussian border and were pushing towards Berlin.
Karl-Jurgen Wächter took command of U-2503 on 12 November 1944 in Hamburg, where she was attached to the 31st Training Flotilla. In the spring of 1945, with British troops advancing north towards Hamburg, Wächter was ordered to take his boat through the North Sea Canal to Kiel to join the 11th Flotilla. Here, the punishing work of bringing U-2503 and her crew to a pitch of operational efficiency began at once.
Although the U-boats had by now lost their convenient bases in the Bay of Biscay, and faced an increasingly dominant enemy at sea, and to any clear thinking German the war on land was lost, Dönitz still believed he might tip the scales with his new weapon. And there were some grounds for his belief. By the end of April 1945, more than 100 Type XXI boats, including U-2503 were in training and almost ready to go to war. Dönitz intended to move them to new bases in Norway, and from there mount a renewed attack on Allied shipping in the Atlantic. The boats would have a longer voyage to reach the operational area, but the potential threat they would then pose to the sea lanes was enormous. This had not escaped the attention of the Allies, and the RAF was given the task of nipping Dönitz’s plan in the bud. Mosquitoes and Beaufighters of Coastal Command based in Holland began to patrol in force over the Skaggerak and Kattegat, their primary objective to stop the Type XXIs reaching their Norwegian bases.
U-2503 sailed from Kiel on 3 May, bound for Bergen. It was Karl-Jurgen Wächter’s intention to remain on the surface whilst among the islands of the Kattegat, relying on his anti-aircraft armament to protect him from sudden attack from the air. This proved to be taking a risk too far. Late that afternoon, while U-2503 was north of the Danish island of Fyn, she was sighted by patrolling Beaufighters of the North Coates Strike Wing, 236 Squadron, RAF. Five of the thirteen fighter-bombers, led by Wing Commander E.P. Hutton, attacked immediately with rockets and cannon fire. Wächter’s AA gunners fought back, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the concentrated firepower of the British aircraft. One rocket went straight down the U-boat’s conning tower hatch, and exploded in the control room. Karl-Jurgen Wächter was killed instantly.
On fire, and with fourteen men, including her commander dead, U-2503 still fought on, and managed to escape her attackers, but she was so badly damaged that her surviving crew had little alternative but to run her ashore on the Danish coast and abandon her.
U-2503 ended her brief career without having had the opportunity to demonstrate how deadly Grand Admiral Dönitz’s new weapon was. The same applied to many others of her class, caught by marauding British aircraft which completely dominated the skies over the North Sea and Baltic. Only one Type XXI, Korvettenkapitän Adalbert Schnee’s U-2511, ever went to sea on an offensive patrol, and she sank nothing. The long awaited super U-boat had arrived too late.
On 5 May 1945, Karl Dönitz, who with Hitler dead in his Berlin bunker was the new German Fuehrer, agreed to surrender his armed forces to the victorious British and Americans, and that included all his beloved U-boats. His last message to the men of the U-boat arm read:
My U-boat men, six years of war lie behind you. You have fought like lions. An overwhelming material superiority had driven us into a tight corner from which it is no longer possible to continue the war. Unbeaten and unblemished, you lay down your arms after a heroic fight without parallel. We proudly remember our fallen comrades who gave their lives for Fuehrer and Fatherland. Comrades, preserve that spirit in which you have fought so long and so gallantly for the sake of the future of the Fatherland. Long live Germany.
Your Grand Admiral
When the ceasefire was declared, the Admiralty broadcast instructions for all U-boats to surface, report their positions, and then make for specified British ports to surrender. This was the ultimate humiliation for the proud U-boat men, and many commanders refused to surrender. A few fought on, Heinrich Schroeteler in U-1023 sinking the Norwegian fleet minesweeper NYMS 382 in the English Channel on 7 May, and Emil Klusmeier’s U-2336 sinking the British steamer Avondale Park and the Norwegian-flag Sneland in the North Sea on the same day. But these were the last desperate actions of a beaten force, and finally drew the line under the U-boat war once and for all. Dönitz had refused to give the order to scuttle the boats, but now the code word Regenbogen, scuttle all boats, was passed by word of mouth and radio amongst those U-boats still in German ports. Soon, the crash of demolition charges was reverberating around the North Sea and Baltic. A total of 221 boats were scuttled by their crews; another 156 surrendered to the Allies. It was an ignominious end to Karl Dönitz’s dream, but even so, he went to his grave thirty-five years later still convinced that, given sufficient U-boats, he could have won the war for Germany. He might well have been right.