Sixty Years Ago Today...
Battle
of the Atlantic
U-Boat
Menace
by Jennifer
King and Timothy Rollins
Reflections on World War II
A
Special Note to Our Readers: Just as America was caught napping (or rather
comatose) when the towers of the World Trade Center toppled six months ago this
coming Monday, so it was the case during World War II when the war first came
to America.
Unlike terrorists from the Middle East however, it was Nazis in U-boats off both the coast of Britain as well as the East Coast of the United States that were sinking vessels left and right. The cause of the war was not being aided any due to the intransigence of city officials major cities who would not turn off the lights "for fear of hurting tourism." Such short-sighted action would only lead to the unnecessary loss of life of merchant seamen who all too often faced a much more grisly and painful loss of life than those veterans who had to endure the death marches at Bataan and other locations made famous during the war. - Jennifer and Tim
While the United States slumbered prior to Pearl Harbor, the British had been waging a desperate maritime war with the Nazis. As an island nation, England was dependent upon shipping for much of her nonferrous metal, one half of her food and all of her oil. German U-Boats (Unterseeboot) prowled the waters around England, disrupting not only commerce but the shipping of armament, troops and supplies from North Africa to beleaguered Russia.
This
“Battle of the Atlantic” - a term coined by Winston Churchill
(right) - had heretofore undergone three distinct phases. Initially hampered
by geography and the limited range of their boats, the U-Boat activity was constrained
to the Baltic, the North Sea and the area immediately adjacent to the British
Isles. After the fall of France, the U-Boat fleet gained access to several French
ports, and began to operate in the eastern Atlantic, with particular emphasis
being paid to the “Cape Route” which went to West and South Africa. From April
to December of 1941, the U-Boats expanded their operations into the central
and western Atlantic, and in June of that year started patrolling Arctic waters
in order to have a go at the Russian bound shipping.
Admiral Doenitz, a submarine captain in the First World War, realized the defensive advantage that the British would have by running their ships together, in convoys. Doenitz sought to overcome this by placing a group of subs in a “pack”, soon designated “the wolf-pack”. The subs, who were faster on the surface than the merchant ships, could overwhelm the defenses of the escort ships and thus ensure mass sinkings.
The submarine war was also a war in which espionage played a big part. In the 1930’s, the Germans had acquired a commercially made machine, the Enigma, built by A. Scherbius. Before the war even started, Polish cryptographers had been working on breaking the Enigma code. The Poles had invented the Cyclometer, which was two Enigma machines wired together, designed to diminish the amount of possible combination sequences used in the coded messages. As the Germans changed the code more frequently and added more rotors to the Enigma machines, Polish citizen M. Rejewski invented another deciphering machine, comprised of six Enigma machines wired together. This device was code named “Bomba”.
The ability to read German messages had helped Britain immeasurably during the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz. However, the Germans developed another code, named Triton, which would not be successfully deciphered until December of 1942. This “intelligence blackout” had a dramatic and immediate impact upon the United States and her shipping activities.
When America joined the war in December 1941, Admiral Doenitz immediately realized the dire implications to the German war effort. The United States, as a noncombatant, had already been helping - first England, then later, Russia - with shipments of food, arms and supplies. Now, America’s war machine was about to crank up to full gear.
Admiral Doenitz positioned his fleet accordingly and named his operation “Paukenschlag“, or “Drumbeat“. From January 1942, Doenitz ordered up to 12 U-Boats on continual patrol - from the Gulf of Mexico to the heart of America’s Eastern Seaboard. Between January and March of 1942, the U-Boats sunk 1.25 million tons of shipping, aided by the bright lights of New York, Miami and Atlantic City - all of which initially refused to impose a wartime blackout for fear of impacting tourism.
Lt. Commander Reinhard Hardegan, U-123, started the duck shoot by sinking the British freighter Cyclops near Nantucket, on 12 January 1942. Hardegan, who would sink seven ships that first week, noted the lights atop the Ferris Wheel on Coney Island as he sailed past.
The U-Boats operated freely amid this astounding laxity, in one instance sinking two ships within view of astonished sunbathers at Virginia Beach, VA. The beleaguered U.S. Navy, one half-sunk at Pearl Harbor and the other half battling for its existence in the war-torn Pacific, was hard-pressed to defend one of America’s own coasts.
Admiral
Ernest King - (COMINCH and later promoted to Fleet Admiral in 1944, left) finally
accepted the validity of the British arguments and those of General George C.
Marshall. In May, King established a convoy system for American shipping and
also improved American antisubmarine aviation. The Allies also had the advantage
of an early RADAR system, and the ability to utilize the “Huff-Duff” system
of High Frequency Radio Directional Finder.
However, in a six month period, German U-Boats had sunk nearly 400 ships in USN protected waters. Approximately 5,000 lives were lost in “Operation Drumbeat”, the highest number of them being merchant sailors. As reported by Henry Steele Commanger, “in the spring of 1942, merchant seamen had a higher likelihood of being killed than American troops trapped in the jungles of Bataan. And, they died hideously - blown to pieces, frozen solid in icy Atlantic waters, or boiled at sea by oil fires that burned with raging force for miles around sunken tankers.”
American ingenuity, and the insatiable energy of her citizens would soon inject the war with tons of new material and a newfound optimism for victory. Yet, none of that was visible in the early, dark days of 1942. ***
© 2002 Jennifer King and Timothy Rollins
COPYRIGHT © 2002 BY THE AMERICAN PARTISAN. All writers retain rights to their work.
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