persist as to Dönitz’s role in the war at sea. The submarine arm was not controlled by him; it was run from Berlin by the Seekriegsleitung, which was both a staff and an organ of command. In May 1940 Dönitz was not even among the thirty most senior naval officers. He was not consulted on such matters as crew training, submarine design, or construction schedules, nor on technical matters about weaponry such as mines and torpedoes. His chief, Admiral Raeder, emphasized this to him in a memo dated November 1940: ‘The Commander-in-Chief for U-boats is to devote his time to conducting battles at sea and he is not to occupy himself with technical matters.’ It is also a revealing sidelight on the cumbersome way in which dictatorships distort the chain of command that, when there came a shortage of torpedoes, Dönitz went to Raeder and asked him to persuade Hitler to order increased production.
In the opening weeks of the war the opposing navies were discovering each other’s weaknesses as well as their own. Dismayed at first by the severe limitations of asdic, the Royal Navy found that skilled and experienced operators could overcome some of its faults. The German navy, like other navies, was discovering that under active service conditions the torpedo was a temperamental piece of machinery.
All torpedoes normally have two pistols which can be selected quickly and easily immediately before use. A hit with the cruder contact pistol will usually result in a hole in the ship’s hull, which can often be sealed off and the ship saved. A magnetic pistol is activated by the magnetism in a ship’s metal hull and explodes the charge under the ship, which is likely to break its back. The German magnetic pistols gave so much trouble that crews switched to contact pistols and found that they were faulty too. The trigger prongs were too short: a torpedo sometimes hit a ship and was deflected without the prongs being touched. The torpedoes of the submarine fleets were also affected by a design problem in the detonators. Constant pressure variations inside the U-boats affected the torpedoes’ depth-keeping mechanisms.
Although the official explanation for some of the failures was that magnetic triggers could be affected by changes in the earth’s magnetic field, due to latitude or to iron ore or volcanic rock in the sea bed, to me it seems extremely likely that the degaussing of British ships – to protect them against magnetic mines – protected them against magnetic pistols too. Whatever the causes, these troubles continued all through the war, and the faults were not finally diagnosed until after hostilities were over.2
Understandably Dönitz complained bitterly to the Torpedo Directorate. He said pointedly that he remembered the same trouble in 1914 but in the first war the Torpedo Inspectorate knew how primitive mechanisms worked! The torpedo experts – their experimental firing ranges frozen in the first winter of war – responded to most criticism by blaming the U-boat crews. Postwar research suggested a failure rate of almost 30 per cent overall. On one war cruise the U-32 fired 50 per cent duds. An inquiry showed that the contact pistols had only been tested twice before the war, and had failed both times. It became clear that torpedo failures had been experienced and reported since December 1936 but nothing had been done about them. When the war made it impossible to ignore the faults any longer, Raeder demanded action. A rear-admiral was court-martialled and found guilty, a vice-admiral dismissed. The scandal shook the navy and affected the morale of the U-boat service, as well as providing a glimpse of the sort of bureaucratic bungling that was a well established feature of Hitler’s Third Reich, when Nazi loyalty tended to outrank competence.
Unrestricted submarine warfare
Article 22 of the 1930 London naval treaty, which Germany signed, held that merchant vessels might not be sunk until the passengers, crew and ship’s papers were in a place of safety, adding that the ship’s boats were not regarded as a place of safety unless land or another vessel was nearby in safe sea and weather conditions. Anyone who hoped that the Germans might observe their treaty obligations had only twelve hours to wait after the declaration of war. The U-30, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, sighted the unescorted passenger ship Athenia while it was 200 miles off the coast of Donegal. It had left Liverpool at 4 o’clock on the afternoon before war began. Its passenger accommodation was fully booked and included 316 Americans heading home before war engulfed them.
Lemp saw the 16-year-old liner at 7.30 pm. It was getting dark and he made little or no attempt to distinguish whether she was a passenger ship or an auxiliary cruiser which would have been a legitimate target. He fired a salvo of torpedoes, one of which wrecked the bulkhead between the boiler rooms. In the words of one ship’s passenger:
I was standing on the upper deck when suddenly there was a terrific explosion. I reckon I must be a very lucky woman because when I recovered from the shock I saw several men lying dead on the deck.3
The passengers in the tourist and third-class dining rooms were trapped when the explosion wrecked the stairways. Athenia listed and settled down. About half an hour later Lemp’s submarine surfaced and fired at his victim with the deck gun. Now it must have been clear that she was a passenger liner, the torpedoing of which was explicitly forbidden by the prize laws of the Hague Convention. Without making contact, or offering directions or assistance of any kind, Lemp submerged and went away.
The Athenia sank: 112 people died, including many women and children. The German Admiralty instantly denied the sinking and ordered Lemp to remove the page from his boat’s war diary and substitute false entries.4 Those officers and men of the German navy who knew the truth were sworn to secrecy and the Reich propaganda ministry issued a statement that a bomb had been placed aboard the Athenia on the instructions of Winston Churchill.
The Athenia sinking came just as President Roosevelt asked Congress to pass Neutrality Act amendments, allowing Britain and France to buy war material. Seeing that the unlawful sinking of Athenia would persuade Congress to say yes, the German propaganda machine employed its formidable resources. An American survivor was persuaded to say that the ship was carrying coastal defence guns, destined for Canada. The allegation that Churchill put a bomb aboard the liner, in order to drag America into his war, was repeated time and time again in radio broadcasts, newspaper items and in letters mailed to prominent Americans. The German navy in Berlin issued a series of warnings about Churchill’s bombs on other American ships. This bombardment of lies scored many hits. A Gallup poll revealed that 40 per cent of Americans believed the Germans. The Senate voting reflected a similar feeling when Roosevelt’s amendments passed by 63 votes to 31. The House of Representatives also voted in favour of the French and British, by a majority of 61.
By Christmas 1939 Berlin’s orders decreed that all ships except fully lit ones identified as Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish or Portuguese (United States shipping was excluded from the ‘war zone’ by American neutrality laws) must be sunk without warning. U-boat captains were told to falsify their logs and describe unlit target ships as warships or auxiliary cruisers.
Just in case there was any misunderstanding, Dönitz’s Standing Order No. 154 told his commanders: ‘Rescue no one and take no one aboard. Do not concern yourselves with the ship’s boats. Weather conditions and the proximity of land are of no account.’
However there was another more heroic aspect of the U-boat war. On 14 October 1939 there came a dashing action that was planned and briefed by Dönitz himself. Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, commander of the U-47, is said by one historian to have been to Scapa Flow and studied the Royal Navy anchorage as a tourist before war began. Whether this is true or not, Prien showed amazing skill as he threaded his boat through the defences and into the British main fleet anchorage there. Two of his torpedoes hit HMS Royal Oak. There were explosions and the battleship turned over. Kirk Sound, through which Prien navigated, was 170 metres wide and only seven metres deep. It was such a notable achievement that even after an Admiralty inquiry had identified fragments of the German torpedoes, many people in Britain insisted that the sinking was due to sabotage. Another, completely unfounded, story told of a German spy who shone lights to guide the U-boat through Kirk Sound. In fact the sinking of the Royal Oak was one more indication of the Royal Navy’s failure to prepare for war.
Britain’s loss was an ancient battleship, but at this time unrestricted