Black May (17 page)

Donitz, who had expected a possible Allied action at Dakar, and had stationed boats in the Freetown and Cape Verde Island zones as a precaution, found himself on 8 November completely out of position. His rushed disposition of boats to the Moroccan Atlantic coast and to the western approaches of Gibraltar to attack new supply shipping and thus strangle the invasion buildup led to the sinking of ten merchant ships, four transports, and five warships—including Werner Henke’s fleet repair ship H.M.S.
Hecla
on n/12 November—but at terrible cost: eight U-boats sunk, 19 damaged, and one Italian submarine sunk. With such thin results attended by disproportionately high losses, Donitz pulled his boats in early December for assignment to more productive areas of the Atlantic.

Three notable command changes took place in the fall and winter of 1942–1943. On 17 November, Admiral Sir Max Horton, since December 1939 Vice-Admiral (later Admiral) Submarines, succeeded Percy Noble as CinCWA. Noble was named Chief of the British Admiralty delegation (BAD) in Washington. Horton had earlier turned down C-in-C Home Fleet because he thought that post to be too much under the thumb of Whitehall. At Submarine Command in Northways, Hampstead, he had forged close working ties with Coastal Command at nearby Northwood, and during three years of war became convinced “that fleets cannot operate without the close cooperation of air power”—a conviction that he would translate into deeds at Western Approaches.
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Upon his arrival at the large gray block of buildings that was Derby House, he inspected its facilities, including the armored and gasproof Operations Room in its basement, and called for the principal officers to explain their duties. To Gilbert Roberts of the Tactical School he said, “What do you think you do?” Roberts replied, “Why don’t you come up and see properly?” Horton did, and at 9:00 the next morning
he returned unattended to begin the six-day course.
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Not everyone so impressed Horton, however, and more than a few officers fell victim to deadwood cutting.

Horton’s mandate as CinCWA was: “the protection of trade, the routing and control of all convoys and measures to combat any attack on convoy by U-boats or hostile aircraft within his Command.” (Military convoys and fast troopships remained under the control of the Admiralty.) He also saw as his responsibility the improvement and intensification of training. Early in February 1943 he received a yacht, H.M.S.
Philante,
and a submarine, sometimes two, with which, in effect, to take Roberts’s Tactical School to sea. At Larne in Northern Ireland each Escort Group prior to joining its convoy was put through exercises designed by Captain A. J. Baker-Creswell, R.N., to represent actual combat conditions to be encountered. What was more, the exercises were conducted in close cooperation with Coastal Command aircraft, in order to perfect navigation and rendezvous, TBS and signal code communications, and joint attack procedures. Furthermore, surface-air collaboration was to be practiced even while with the convoys en route. And the surface Escort Groups, a Percy Noble innovation, were to be kept together as teams.

Another Noble innovation that, except for one prototype, had not been possible to implement in his predecessor’s time for lack of assets was Support Groups—small, highly trained, and offensively minded flotillas of destroyers, sloops, frigates, and cutters that would ride to the rescue of convoys and Escort Groups directly menaced or under attack. In Noble’s vision such groups would include, when they became available, auxiliary aircraft carriers. Horton embraced the concept and wrote almost daily to the Admiralty begging for ships to make the forces possible, eventually succeeding in obtaining the loan of a number of Home Fleet destroyers. To these he took the risk of adding sixteen warships obtained by reducing the strength of each Escort Group by one vessel. The result was, at the end of March, five Support Groups fully trained and ready to fulfill their sole mission: hunt down and kill U-boats.

Meanwhile, in his glass-fronted office facing the Operations Room, Horton had constant access in an adjoining office to Air Vice Marshal
Sir Leonard H. Slatter, commanding No. 15 Group, whose squadrons covered the North Atlantic convoy lanes from bases on the West Coast of Scotland, in the Hebrides, and in Northern Ireland, with a detachment at Reykjavik. Both men lived on the premises, though Slatter did not follow Horton’s somewhat eccentric daily schedule, which had him on the golf course all afternoon, at the bridge table after dinner, and in his office by 2330, usually in “worn and split” pajamas, drinking barley water while directing convoy battles on the huge wall plot opposite, and with, as one observer said, an “uncanny prevision” of what the U-boats would do next. Different in manner from the urbane and kindly Noble, for whom everyone at Derby House had affection as well as respect, especially the Wrens, Horton’s behavior prompted such descriptions as “ruthless,” “determined,” “selfish,” “intolerant,” “perfectionist,” and “maddening.”
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Apparently the flinty old submariner was just the type Churchill thought should lead the surface and air escorts into the dangerous new year—“a thief to catch a thief,” as it were.

The second major command change affected that other thief, Karl Dönitz at BdU. When in December Adolf Hitler harangued Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief Navy (
Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine
), over the failure of a surface force led by two heavy cruisers to advance successfully against an RN Arctic convoy escort screen, and went on to threaten the scrapping of all big ships in the fleet, the proud Hamburger veteran of the Imperial Navy and Battle of Jutland tendered his resignation, which the Führer, though surprised, accepted. On 30 January 1943 Dönitz was named Grossadmiral and C-in-C in his stead, while retaining his command as Flag Officer U-Boats. Now Dönitz had direct access to Hitler, whom he could importune for steel and shipyard workers; he had authority over the Naval Staff,
Seekriegsleitung
(Skl), whose approvals he need no longer seek; and he had freedom to prosecute the Tonnageschlacht without diversion of his forces to unprofitable waters. Just the preceding month he had written in his war diary: “The tonnage battle is the main task of the U-boats…. It must be carried on where the greatest successes can be achieved with the smallest losses.”
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But the new appointment also had its disadvantages, principally, as
Raeder, who nominated him for the post predicted, that as C-in-C Dönitz “would not be able to dedicate himself to the immediate conduct of the U-boat war to the same extent as formerly.”
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The “Lion,” as U-boat men admiringly called him, had already suffered physical distancing from his underseas fleet and their crews, when in March 1942 a British raiding party attacked St.-Nazaire; alerted to how easily such a raid might be made on BdU itself, Dönitz reluctantly abandoned Kernével and established his headquarters in an apartment complex on the Avenue du Maréchal Maunoury in Paris. Now, to consolidate BdU with his new post as C-in-C, he moved U-boat headquarters even farther east, to the Hotel am Steinplatz in the Charlottenburg suburb of Berlin (losing two railroad cars filled with equipment and papers in the process), where BdU became operational on 31 March 1943. It had been Dönitz’s presence on the dock at Lorient and the other bases, where he attended to his crews’ leavings and returnings, that cemented his standing as a father figure to his men and elicited a depth of loyalty from ranks and ratings that was unprecedented in the Kriegsmarine. Now his inspiring figure and voice were far from the bases, with what negative impact it is impossible to calculate.

With his longtime Chief of Operations Branch (BdU-Ops), Konteradmiral Eberhard Godt, Dönitz incorporated BdU into the Naval Staff as its Second Section, with Godt, Chief of Staff, overseeing day-to-day conduct of U-boat operations—although in the war diary, where major convoy battles are described and where strategies or policies are declared, one continues to hear the voice of Dönitz, with the result that in the chapters that follow in this narrative the citations of passages from the diary assume their authorship by a Dönitz/Godt duumvirate. The entire BdU operations staff numbered barely more than a dozen officers, most of them in their early thirties (Dönitz was 51, Godt 42). Though it could draw upon the much larger Naval Staff for such things as Intelligence (3/Skl), Communications Service (4/Skl), Radar Countermeasures (5/Skl), and Meteorology (6/Skl), it remained a thin blue line for trying conclusions with the combined staffs of the Admiralty and Coastal Command, not to mention GC&CS. (Western Approaches alone had a staff of over a thousand officers and ratings.)
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The third major change in command came in RAF Coastal, where Joubert was succeeded as AOC-in-C by Air Marshal Sir John Slessor on 5 February 1943. A Royal Flying Corps pilot in the Kaiser’s war, Slessor had fought off Zeppelins over London and flown artillery observation missions over the trenches of France. His most recent posts in the Führer’s war were Commander of 5 Group of Bomber Command and Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Policy). With Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles F. A. Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, he attended the Casablanca Conference, actually held in a residential suburb of the city called Anfa, where, from 14 to 23 January, Churchill, Roosevelt, and their Combined Chiefs of Staff conferred on the priorities to be established for future operations. He was present when the conferees approved their final Memorandum, “Conduct of the War in 1943,” with, at its head, the now well-known “First Charge” declaration: “The Defeat of the U-boat must remain a first charge on the resources of the United Nations.”
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Slessor wrote after the war that the person responsible for having that strategic imperative given first ranking was Admiral Ernest J. King, though King’s biographer does not mention it, except to say that, “Everyone agreed that the Battle of the Atlantic took first priority.”
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Slessor did not think that the “First Charge” declaration had much practical influence on the anti-U-boat war, except to prod the Air Ministry to divert some of the newly available centimetric radar sets from Bomber to Coastal Command. It was not until March, however, that the first Coastal squadron equipped with 10-centimeter ASV Mark III became operational.
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That squadron, which flew L/L Wellingtons, was then in a position to defeat the Metox receiver, and so surprise the surfaced U-boats at night as L/L aircraft had done up to six months before. The pure hunt was on again. Or was it?

The Admiralty pressed Slessor to make immediate and maximum use of the centimetric aircraft in the Bay of Biscay, and to take full advantage of the interval of time before the Germans developed a new search receiver to detect 10-centimeter pulses. But Slessor balked at going back to the Bay Offensive, as he stated in a Note to the Prime Minister’s Anti-U-Boat Warfare Committee, of which he was a member. The A.U. Committee, as it came to be called, had been formed
subordinate to the War Cabinet on 13 November and thereafter met weekly at No. 10 Downing Street under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister. Its membership was composed of (with varying attendance and occasional visitors) twenty-two Ministers, Admirals, and Air Marshals, together with the scientists Blackett, Watson Watt, and Lindemann (now Lord Cherwell), and Mr. Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s personal envoy to the United Kingdom.
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To this top-level body, on 22 March, Slessor sent his five-page Note accompanied by a twenty-five-page statistical analysis of the Bay Offensive from June 1942 to February 1943 and of the air cover given threatened convoys from September 1942 to February 1943. The analysis had been done by Coastal’s O.R.S., then headed by Professor Waddington, which Slessor valued and supported no less than Joubert. The analysis showed, wrote Slessor, that whereas on the Bay patrols there had been one sighting of a U-boat for every 164 hours flown in the period June to September, and one sighting per 312 hours from October to February, there had been one sighting per only 29 hours flown over threatened convoys. While the Bay patrols of No. 19 Group (Air Vice Marshall Geoffrey Bromet) had resulted in a certain number of kills, the lethal rate was a low 7 percent of attacks made, hardly justifying the disproportionate and uneconomical effort employed. Slessor therefore proposed reducing the scale of the Bay Offensive. “Our policy,” he concluded, “should be to concentrate the greatest practicable proportion of our available resources on close cover of threatened convoys, the Bay patrols assuming the position of a residuary legatee.”
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