TOP SECRET SUB SIGNALS CRACKED Thanks to our boffins at Bletchley Park, we’re able to read some of the Germans’ most important radio traffic. Despite being encoded into a billion different combinations by an innocuous-looking portable type-writer, known as an Enigma machine, many of these signals can be read by our top team of scientists. Some of these cracked signals – codenamed Ultra – show just how desperate the U-boat force is becoming.
Britain’s lifelines on the Seven Seas
lves and Iron Coffins For sailors on their first trip, stuck in a lolling U-boat, seasick, disorientated, Goebbels’ propaganda image of modern-day Vikings going to sea “with their red shield fixed to their mast” was a world away. Harald Busch remembered that recruits lay withdrawn and wretched on their bunks, longing only to die... The poor lads were gripped by an agony of the soul. If they could get out – simply climb overboard and jump into the sea – instead of being shut in, battened down, in this deafening, reeking tube of steel. If only they had never volunteered. Their thoughts groped out toward home, far away, to their friends.
Fighting spirit And yet for many men, there was something unique about life in the U-boats; a bond of comradeship, built up unheard of elsewhere in Germany’s armed forces. Erich Topp, given command of the new Type VIIC boat U552 at the beginning of 1941, summed up this “special way of life” – a spirit not a million miles away from today’s submariners: Everyone has to know everything on board. Everybody must be able to replace the other. More than that, you have to know not only the activities of your neighbour, but his way of thinking, and his strong and weak points. When you are leaving harbour, closing the hatch, diving, you and your crew are bidding farewell to a colourful world, to the sun and the stars, the wind and the waves, the smell of the sea. All are living under constant tension, produced by living in a steel tube – a very small, cramped and confined space, with congested compartments, monotony and an unhealthy lifestyle, caused by bad air, the lack of normal rhythms of day and night and the lack of physical exercise. These conditions can wear down any man quite rapidly, and can only be balanced by discipline for oneself and one’s crew, a well organised daily routine, and officers who deal correctly with the individual man and his welfare. However grim being battered by the North Atlantic was, it was still better than submerging for long
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periods, as Wolfgang Hirschfeld, a radio operator in U109, recalled. The air in the boat was foul and the fug was being circulated from bow to stern by the fans; we all knew the effect that this would be having on us... All off-watch men were confined to bed. There was probably enough oxygen in the boat for 48 hours, but it was doubtful if the batteries could last that long. Once the charge was exhausted, the propellers would no longer revolve and the boat would sink. Sustained periods dived were invariably the result of sustained enemy activity. In the presence of warships and aircraft, the first thought was to dive – and dive quickly the Type VII could, reaching 150m (500ft). But dived, and especially with a frigate or corvette circling above, a U-boat was almost defenceless.
Under attack “There was an abrupt rattle as though someone had tossed a handful of gravel at the hull,” wrote LotharGünther Buchheim whose U96 dived after sinking the Dutch steamer Bennekom from convoy OS10. The rattle was the sound of the ASDIC of sloop HMS Lulworth. Depth charges could – and frequently did – kill a U-boat. But the rattle or ping of sonar, reverberating through a boat, could drive men mad. I wanted to shout “Switch off!” The chirping grated on my nerves. We froze, hardly daring to breathe, although Asdic would find us even if we turned to stone...Nervous tension gripped me. My hands were trembling. My skull felt as fragile as glass, subjected to the same extreme pressure that weighed on our steel skin. The least touch might be too much. Amplified heartbeats filled my ears. I shook my head, but the pounding did not diminish. Terror of hysterical intensity seemed to be destroying my capacity for thought. At the same time, it honed my powers of perception to a fine edge. I could see and feel all that went on round me with preternatural distinctness. As for depth charging – Wabos in the parlance of the U-bootmann, short for Wasserbomben (literally
water bombs) – the experience was “as if a giant fist had pounded the boat from above”, Karl-Friedrich Merten remembered. Merten was learning the ropes of commanding a U-boat from the experienced Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Liebe in U38 when the boat was surprised on the surface and dived to avoid an approaching warship. We shook as if both ends had broken off. The lights went out, of course. The emergency lighting flickered into life in a fraction of a minute. It shed light on chaos in every compartment, particularly the control room which we reached by diving through the bulkhead in the darkness. After the smoke had thinned out and there was no water evident in the control room, Liebe reacted to this totally unexpected event with a violent change of course and increase of speed. No more depth charges were dropped after we quickly doubled our depth and slunk off at a reduced speed. Repeated ‘all clear’ reports came from every compartment. The lights went on again but there was a faint smell of chlorine for’ard. In the battery check which was immediately carried out; six wrecked battery cells were quickly identified – they had to be bypassed immediately. Then clearing out the forward battery bilge began and the boat was quickly spared the danger of chlorine gas. The depth charge had evidently exploded very much close to our port side, roughly level with the control room – and probably set for a depth of about 50 metres. U68 survived. Just. “In my opinion we’d been a whisker from destruction,” Merten observed. His boat’s luck ran out – with a different captain at the helm, Oberleutnant Albert Lauzemis – in April 1944. She was caught on the surface some 70 miles off the coast of Madeira by aircraft from the USS Guadalcanal. The boat’s crew threw up a wall of flak, but the American bombers persisted with their attack, throwing first rockets then, as U68 dived, depth charges at her. “There followed a terrific underwater explosion, with large air bubbles, debris, oil, battery acid, torpedo air flasks and several survivors coming to the surface and again a large glowing light
underwater,” an official report of the attack states. The “several survivors” sighted by the American airmen turned out to be two crewmen left above deck when U68 dived – the conning hatch had been closed before they could scramble below. They spent three hours floating in the debris of their submarine – oil, cork, cloth, food, a canvas bag, a sofa pillow, a leather jacket, and the mangled remains of their shipmates – before they were picked out of the Atlantic. In that time, one man had died, leaving 19-year-old Matrosengefreiter (able seaman) Hans Kastrup as the sole survivor from a crew of 57. Kastrup’s fate was atypical – two thirds of all U-boats destroyed sank with all hands. U68’s fate, however, was not atypical. It was one of 249 U-boats sunk in 1944 – six more than in 1943 when the Battle of the Atlantic was declared as won. In a little over four months of 1945, a further 120 submarines were sunk – a rate of killing unsurpassed. Over the course of the war, the prospects facing a U-bootmann were bleak. More than 30,000 were killed – roughly two-thirds of all those who went to sea between 1939 and 1945. Some 757 U-boats were destroyed, 648 on operational missions. One in three was sunk on its first patrol, while in the final two years of the war the rate of killing was so high that one in every two U-boats failed to return to base. No wonder, then, that Herbert Werner, who settled in the USA after the war, titled his memoirs Die eisernen Särge – Iron Coffins. In those final 12 months of its existence – when Werner commanded two boats – the U-boat arm “accomplished little but selfdestruction,” he lamented 25 years later. Werner knew the statistics and knew the fate of his comrades – one by one they sailed “on ludicrous missions that ended in death”. Yet when the order came from the German Navy’s commander, Karl Dönitz, to cease hostilities in May 1945 he had to fight back the tears “for I had never been taught to lose”. The reality of peace soon sunk in, however. “An unknown tranquility took possession of me as I realised fully that I had survived. My death in an iron coffin – a verdict of long standing – was finally suspended. The truth was so beautiful that it seemed to be a dream.”
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