The Burning Shore (5 page)

U-552 returned to Saint-Nazaire on May 6, 1941, with Lieutenant Topp and his crew having sunk a total of three ships totaling 15,929 tons and damaging the 10,119-ton
Capulet
, which was abandoned by its crew and finished off four days later by U-201. For the U-boat’s crew, the in-port period meant a nineteen-day respite of liberty and relaxation while technicians repaired battle damage to the boat and prepared it for its next patrol. For Degen, however, it signaled the beginning of actual U-boat command. On U-552, he had not taken part in operating the U-boat or attacking enemy shipping, serving instead as an observer and carefully watching how Topp and his crew carried out their duties.

Now it was time to take command himself. Degen hastened to Hamburg, where at the H. C. Stülcken Sohn shipyard on the Elbe River, shipwrights had been constructing the Type VIIC U-701 over the past twelve months. It was now time to meet his forty-four-man crew and begin
Baubelehrung
(familiarization training), which had become standard practice in the U-boat Force. As the shipyard workers finished installing a myriad of equipment and components of every conceivable design—cables, power units, gyrocompass, torpedo-aiming gear, steering controls, tip-up bunks, echo sounder, signaling lamp, radio set, cook’s electric range, to name a few—teams of Degen’s crew watched closely and learned how to operate and maintain the U-boat’s systems. As one U-boat commander put it, “We all grew up, as it were, with the boat.” In a brief ceremony attended by several hundred shipyard workers on July 16, 1941, Degen ordered the German naval ensign raised on a small jack staff mounted on
the rear of the U-boat’s bridge and saluted as his crew stood in formation on the main deck. U-701 had finally joined the U-boat Force. Five days later, U-boat and crew headed into the Baltic for a backbreaking training program to prepare them for combat at sea.
²⁰

In its six years of operational existence, the U-boat Force had honed its strategy and tactics for attacking enemy merchant convoys, solitary merchant vessels, and even warships. The curriculum was tough, complex, and thorough for everyone on a U-boat, from the commander to the most junior
Matrose
(seaman apprentice). As former U-boat commander Peter Cremer later described it, the training began with forty-five to fifty-one men learning how to survive and function in a very inhospitable place: “One’s whole existence had to be adapted to the U-boat—eating, sleeping, going on watch, all in the narrowest space, in close physical contact, in closest relationship with the steel hull,” he wrote. “There can hardly be a branch of the services in which a man must rely so much on others, tolerate their habits and subordinate himself to the team.” During their tours of duty, the men in U-701 would be living cheek by jowl in extreme conditions for weeks on end; their initial training run aboard the ship was meant to prepare them to work efficiently and in unison despite the stresses of such confinement.

Degen and his crew had only got a brief taste of life aboard their new U-boat before trouble developed. As part of the formal process of joining the U-boat Force, the U-boat Acceptance Commission in Kiel carefully inspected each newly constructed boat. When checked after returning from its initial training run, U-701 flunked. The U-boat was full of mechanical glitches,
electrical wiring errors, and faulty air and oil line installations. The chief issue, Degen later said, was that U-701 was the first U-boat the Hamburg shipyard had ever built, and its workers had relied on faulty blueprints from two other shipyards. After technicians spent several weeks trying to fix the problems in a Danzig shipyard, Degen had to take the boat back to Hamburg for six frustrating weeks of remedial repairs at H. C. Stülcken Sohn. The U-boat did not return to Kiel for a second Acceptance Commission inspection until October 9, after which the crew was cleared to resume combat exercises.
²¹

And exercise the crew did. Admiral Dönitz and his flotilla instructors were adamant that no U-boat crew would leave Kiel without being totally prepared. “The U-boats had to be trained as far as possible for war conditions,” the admiral later wrote. “I wanted to confront my U-boat crews . . . with every situation with which they might be confronted in war, and to do it so thoroughly that when these situations arose in war my crews would be well able to cope with them.” Training goals included complete acclimatization of the men to life aboard ship, familiarity with the sea under all conditions, and absolute precision in navigation, particularly astronomical navigation. In torpedo firing alone, each U-boat had to successfully fire sixty-six surface shots and carry out another sixty-six submerged torpedo firings before instructors would certify it ready for combat. Name an aspect of submarine warfare, and the U-boat crew practiced it repeatedly: remaining unseen and undetected in enemy waters, deciding whether to crash-dive or remain on the surface after detecting an unknown aircraft, conducting night surface attacks and daylight periscope-depth attacks, mastering astronomical navigation,
maintaining control of the U-boat while submerged under combat conditions, carrying out defensive gunfire while operating surfaced. The instructors had detailed, muscle-straining, and mind-numbing exercises for those and scores of other combat scenarios. For eleven weeks, Degen and his crew worked nonstop with the Third U-boat Flotilla based in Kiel. Each day, U-701 and eight other newly commissioned U-boats would leave port in the predawn darkness for the exercise area, returning at sunset to give the exhausted sailors a few hours of rest in barracks ashore. They gradually mastered the complex set of skills that would make them effective in combat and embraced the philosophy of their commander-in-chief: “I wanted to imbue my crews,” Dönitz explained, “with enthusiasm and a complete faith in their [U-boat Force] and to instill in them a spirit of selfless readiness to serve in it.”

Now, as this eventful year drew to a close, Degen and his crew were finally ready. At 0800 on Sunday, December 28, 1941, one of the lock gates at Brunsbüttel slowly opened, and Degen eased U-701 through and into the Elbe River for the short trip to the North Sea. U-701 was on its way to fight.
²²

2

THE GATHERING STORM

O
N
N
EW
Y
EAR
’
S
E
VE
1941,
IF ONE
A
MERICAN NAVY OFFICER
fully comprehended the potential threat that the German U-boat Force posed to Allied merchant shipping along the US East Coast, it was Admiral Ernest J. King. King had yielded command of the US Atlantic Fleet to his successor just two days earlier as he assumed duties as commander-in-chief of the United States Fleet (COMINCH). From his shabby office on the third deck of the massive Main Navy Headquarters building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC, King now held supreme command of a two-ocean fleet that constituted the American military vanguard against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. King’s time commanding the Atlantic Fleet had convinced him of the vital importance of that theater, and he knew just how strained the East Coast warships and their crews were. The men had suffered through two years of prolonged “Neutrality Patrols” that, for the past six months, had resembled war missions more than peacetime cruises. Yet, although their job was intensifying,
they increasingly found themselves competing for resources with the navy’s other commands.

The threat to merchant shipping in the Atlantic littoral was but one of a multitude of crises confronting the US Navy, most of them in the Pacific. Simultaneous attacks by Japan against the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Indochina, Wake Island, and Guam threatened to cut Australia and New Zealand off from the United States; if successful, Japan’s efforts would likely doom any Allied counterattack. A major portion of the Pacific Fleet, meanwhile, lay burned and blackened in the mud at Pearl Harbor. The tiny US Asiatic Fleet, consisting of two cruisers, twenty-eight elderly destroyers, and twenty-eight submarines, could not hope to survive an imminent clash with the Japanese navy.

The dire situation in the Pacific meant that the Atlantic theater and the defense of the US eastern seaboard were relatively low on the navy’s list of priorities. The Atlantic Fleet had grown significantly in 1941, but in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, emergency plans were in place to transfer a number of aircraft carriers, battleships, and destroyers to the Pacific to offset the losses of December 7. By the end of January 1942, the Atlantic Fleet would count only five battleships, two aircraft carriers, and fourteen cruisers to operate against the Germans, who, in addition to the U-boat Force, still had a powerful surface fleet of battleships and cruisers that could threaten the Atlantic sea lanes. The fleet’s workhorse destroyer force also faced severe shortages with dozens of warships idled for overdue repairs.

King now commanded a United States Navy that appeared to be coming apart at the seams. On paper, King had assumed command with executive powers unmatched in the 166-year history
of his service. An executive order hastily drafted and signed by President Roosevelt two weeks earlier established that King, as COMINCH, would have “supreme command of the operating forces comprising the several fleets of the United States Navy and the operating forces of the naval coastal frontier commands, and [would] be directly responsible, under the general direction of the Secretary of the Navy, to the President of the United States.” In reality, however, the sixty-three-year-old Ohio native was still struggling to assemble a headquarters staff, and most officers assigned to Main Navy remained shell-shocked by the stunning Japanese strike on Oahu. “Nothing was ready,” King later said of his first days in supreme command. “I had to start with nothing.”
¹

The previous year had been a wild roller-coaster ride for Ernie King. At the end of 1940, King was serving in a dead-end job on the navy’s General Board in his permanent rank of rear admiral, with few prospects for promotion or major command in his future. It was quite a comedown after a stellar career spanning four decades of active service.

Since graduating from the Naval Academy in 1901, King had supervised the conversion of American warships from coal to oil propulsion. Appointed to a three-man board to study the navy’s training and promotion of officers in 1919, King personally wrote a report recommending an overhaul of the officer personnel system that the navy formally implemented; it is essentially still in use more than ninety years later. Under the glare of worldwide media attention, King successfully directed the salvage of the submarine S-51 after it sank in a collision with a civilian steamer in September 1925. Three years later, he repeated the feat by
raising the sunken submarine S-4. His military service reached new heights in 1937, when as a vice admiral King assumed command of the fleet’s aircraft carriers.

Then, suddenly, King’s career hit a brick wall. In the spring of 1939, his hopes for promotion to four stars and assignment to one of the navy’s top two posts—commander-in-chief, US Fleet, which would have made him responsible for the navy’s day-to-day operations, or chief of naval operations (CNO), which would have put him in charge of the service’s broader strategic planning and budget—were dashed when Roosevelt filled the one current vacancy by appointing Admiral Harold R. “Betty” Stark as CNO. Assignment to the navy’s General Board brought a reduction in rank to rear admiral and a cubbyhole at Main Navy. King began calling himself “a has-been” to friends and colleagues.

Soon, however, King discovered that he had one more chance for high command. In the spring of 1940, Acting Navy Secretary Charles Edison assigned King to increase the antiaircraft firepower on all navy warships. With Edison’s support, King slashed through the bureaucratic tentacles that paralyzed most major reforms and got the complicated rearming program underway in just three months. The bureaucrats howled, but the program proceeded on a fast track. Secretary Edison took careful note. When he resigned to run as the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey in the summer of 1940, Edison wrote, in a final memorandum to FDR, “I take the liberty of bringing to your attention the need for shaking the service out of a peacetime psychology.” He urged the president to consider King for appointment as commander-in-chief of the US Fleet. Instead,
Stark assigned King to command the US Atlantic Squadron (renamed the Patrol Force several months later). In many respects, this was a major comedown: a two-star billet commanding the navy’s oldest and most ramshackle warships. Nevertheless, the job took King back to sea and resurrected his career. Three weeks after King assumed command on his flagship
USS Texas
on December 17, 1940, FDR announced that he was renaming the command the US Atlantic Fleet. With that shift, King found himself jumped two ranks to four-star admiral.

During his first months in command in the Atlantic, King struggled to secure funds to bring the fleet up to standard and to carry out badly needed repairs after long months of Neutrality Patrol operations. But while the Atlantic Fleet was still preparing for war, the Royal Navy and the U-boat Force were already engaged in a fierce struggle on the high seas. The North Atlantic was not big enough to keep the peacetime US Navy out of the fight, and a series of incidents would soon lead the Americans to overtly join the battle alongside their British allies.
²

American public opinion in the spring of 1941 was deeply opposed to US entry into the war, so Roosevelt and his admirals were forced to operate in secret when military planning or direct action at sea was required. Behind closed and guarded doors in Washington, DC, beginning in late January 1941, senior American and British military commanders huddled for nearly eight weeks hammering out what became known as the ABC-1 Agreement (for American, British, and Canadian military planning), which enumerated basic strategic priorities in the event the United States entered the war on the side of the British. Nevertheless, FDR often kept Stark and King in the dark about what specific actions he might want them to take. Even though
ABC-1 spelled out the roles and responsibilities of the Atlantic Fleet, King was denied a copy of the report. In desperation, he set up his own fleet operation plan, which would soon be carried out by a new Atlantic Fleet unit that would directly aid Allied convoys and, by default, find itself in combat with the U-boats.
³