The Burning Shore (15 page)

W
HILE THE CREWMEN OF
U-701 were delighting in what Gerhard Schwendel later called the “pure luxury” of real beds with clean sheets, fresh food, hot showers, and evenings touring the local bars and restaurants of La Baule, the prevailing emotions at Eastern Sea Frontier Headquarters and Main Navy in Washington were the complete opposite—a mixture of frustration, anxiety,
and fear. Assigned to write Vice Admiral Andrews’s daily war diary at ESF Headquarters, Lieutenant j.g. Lawrance R. Thompson in late January penned a blunt assessment of the command’s poor performance to date against the U-boats. Tersely summarizing the U-boats’ tactics of operating alone and attacking merchant ships under cover of darkness, Thompson identified one problem that would bedevil ESF Headquarters for months: “Three of the ships sunk had been silhouetted against the lights from the shore.” But that was not the only problem, Thompson added. The Eastern Sea Frontier simply did not have the warships and aircraft required to thwart the U-boats.

With most of the Atlantic Fleet’s destroyer force preoccupied with mid-Atlantic escort groups or special missions like Convoy AT10, Admiral Royal Ingersoll in Norfolk had no warships to loan to the Eastern Sea Frontier. Rather than redeploying the stretched destroyer force to confront the U-boats offshore, King and other senior navy officials went public with a fusillade of lies.

A formal policy of censorship imposed by the federal government on January 15 facilitated the navy’s campaign of misinformation. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed an executive order creating a federal Office of Censorship and charged its director, former Associated Press executive news editor Byron Price, with drafting formal guidelines for press self-censorship in covering military operations and other sensitive topics. The seven-page “Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press” (and a similar manual for radio stations) called upon journalists to forswear publishing any information on troop movements, operations of navy and merchant ships, military aircraft, the location of military
facilities, war contracts, and even weather forecasts—unless government officials had released such information. The program aimed at protecting vital operational military secrets as the armed forces geared up for a tough war. As it turned out, it also gave the US Navy an effective cloak to hide its lack of preparedness against the U-boats when the number of attacks soared in late January.
⁷

Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Admiral King, and other senior admirals must have thought their attempts to suppress or delay releasing information on the U-boat attacks were becoming insufficient to allay potential civilian doubts about the sea service’s performance. On January 23, just eleven days after the British warned of the U-boats approaching the East Coast, an unnamed navy spokesman issued a remarkable statement to reporters in Washington, DC:

There are many rumors and unofficial reports about the capture or destruction of enemy submarines. Some of the recent visitors to our territorial waters will never enjoy the return portion of their voyage. Furthermore, the percentage of one-way traffic is increasing, while that of two-way traffic is satisfactorily on the decline. But there will be no information given out about the fate of the enemy submarine excursionists who don’t get home, until that information is no longer of aid and comfort to the enemy.

This is a phase of the game of war secrecy into which every American should enter enthusiastically. . . . The press and the radio have made a great, patriotic contribution by voluntarily disciplining themselves in the matter of reporting such incidents as may have come to their attention unofficially. All the people can make the same contribution. Even if you have seen a submarine captured or destroyed [!], keep it to yourself. Let the enemy guess what happened. . . . By this conduct every American can make his contribution to the Navy’s worldwide effort to eliminate the enemy submarine menace.

The Associated Press article containing the navy’s keep-it-to-yourself policy quoted Secretary Knox reaffirming the secrecy guidelines. The article added that Knox had “relaxed his rule of silence only once,” and that had been to say on November 21, 1941, that the US Navy had either sunk or damaged fourteen U-boats to date during the unofficial clash at sea in the North Atlantic. This was a total fabrication.

The navy also took a more proactive stance when it felt compelled to obscure the horrific statistics. On Wednesday, January 28, Aviation Machinists Mate 1st Class Donald F. Mason was piloting a PBY-5A Catalina seaplane on patrol off Newfoundland when he spotted a U-boat down on the surface. Throwing the ungainly aircraft into a dive, Mason dropped a spread of depth charges as the U-boat hastily submerged. Mason duly noted his attack on the enemy, but by the time his report reached Navy Headquarters, someone had penned the eloquent, inspiring—and fictional—message that within hours became a national sensation: “Sighted Sub; Sank Same.” The
New York Times
, among dozens of other newspapers, trumpeted the alleged sinking and characterized the report as having a “brevity worthy of Oliver Hazard Perry, whose message after the Battle of Lake Erie was the laconic ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’”

In fact, the US Navy had yet to sink a single U-boat.
⁸

7

PARANOIA

T
HE SPRING OF
1942
WAS AN UNRELENTING DISASTER FOR THE
Anglo-American alliance at sea. During the two-month period spanning February and March, the Allies suffered four major setbacks that caused merchant shipping losses to soar. First, on February 1, Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz changed his command’s Enigma system by deploying a new encryption machine on U-boats and ashore. The new M4
Marine Funkschlüssel-Maschine
utilized four rotors instead of three to scramble the text. As a result, the decryption bombes at Bletchley Park suddenly went silent, and British code breakers lost their detailed situational awareness of U-boat deployments in the North Atlantic and elsewhere. Second, by mid-February the German code breakers at B-Dienst had significantly broken into Naval Cypher No. 3, gleaning invaluable intelligence on Allied convoy movements. Third, on February 18, U-boat Force Headquarters opened up a second front in the Caribbean that later expanded to the Gulf of Mexico. This new U-boat campaign against North American shipping provided the U-boat commanders with a target-rich environment to rival that of the still-undefended Canadian and
American coastal waters. The fourth Allied setback was the continued failure of the US Navy to reinforce the hamstrung Eastern Sea Frontier (ESF)—and now the Caribbean Sea Frontier as well—with sufficient destroyers and long-range patrol bombers to mount an effective defense against the marauding U-boats.
¹

The loss of naval Enigma was a serious blow to the British and American antisubmarine warfare effort. It took the three-rotor bombes twenty-six times longer to find the daily settings of a four-rotor Enigma machine than it had for the older, three-rotor models, rendering obtaining timely intelligence from U-boat message traffic impossible. In fact, apart from isolated—and minor—breakthroughs, the new Triton network used by Atlantic U-boats would remain impenetrable for most of 1942. While British code breakers continued to penetrate lower-security German naval channels and reaped tactical intelligence from high-frequency direction-finding (HF/DF) radio intercepts, photographic reconnaissance, and other means, hunting U-boats at sea had become a far more difficult task.

The British Operational Intelligence Centre’s (OIC) U-boat Situation Report for the week ending February 9 confirmed that the loss of German naval Enigma had rendered tracking U-boat movements nearly impossible. However, Bletchley Park was able to infer from isolated HF/DF intercepts and the pattern of ship losses that at least ten U-boats were moving westbound across the North Atlantic to form a third wave of attack off the Newfoundland and US coastlines. This time, officials at the Eastern Sea Frontier acknowledged the OIC warning, but the Americans could still do very little to protect shipping along the eastern seaboard. Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews and
his staff were still grappling with an impossible situation since neither the Atlantic Fleet nor COMINCH intended to reinforce the command’s motley defenses. Admiral King sent no reinforcements. Admiral Dönitz sent several more waves of U-boats.

In February 1942, sixteen U-boats patrolling in North American waters west of 060 degrees west—a north-south line running from the eastern tip of Nova Scotia to eastern Venezuela—sank thirty-five Allied merchant vessels and one warship totaling 225,390 gross registered tons; just five long-range Type IX boats that began operations in the Caribbean on February 16 sank another fifteen ships totaling 86,507 tons and damaged five more during the last thirteen days of the month alone. Their favorite targets in the oil-producing regions of the Caribbean were, unsurprisingly, Allied oil tankers. Among the ships destroyed in the first phase of the Caribbean operation were ten tankers with a total of 57,560 gross registered tons. Their comrades operating in the chill waters of the western Atlantic did even better, sinking thirteen tankers totaling 103,059 gross registered tons.

The month of March brought two developments that seemed to promise relief to the Eastern Sea Frontier—yet both would prove illusory. First, U-boat attacks suddenly ceased at the end of February. Lieutenant Lawrance Thompson wrote in the ESF War Diary that the first week of March “was unexpectedly and pleasantly free from enemy activity.” This was technically accurate: U-boats sank only five merchant ships in the western Atlantic during that time, four of them off Newfoundland and the fifth four hundred miles south of Bermuda. But attacks suddenly spiked again during the week of March 7 to 14 as no fewer than nine U-boats arrived off the eastern Canadian and US coasts.
Another eight U-boats would appear off Nova Scotia and the American Atlantic coast during the last two weeks of the month. Together, they went on to sink forty-seven merchant ships and two warships totaling 289,123 gross registered tons, damaging another four for 25,841 tons.
²

Admiral Royal Ingersoll at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters was well aware of the deepening crisis and made what appeared to be a significant offer to Vice Admiral Andrews. In a message to all destroyers under his command on March 8, Ingersoll stated, “When such employment is practicable and does not interfere with escort fleet vessels, tasks, and fleet operations, destroyers and other suitable escort ships making passage through Sea Frontier Zones incident to scheduled movements should be utilized to fullest extent in the protection of merchant shipping.” On the surface, it appeared that a sizable part of the Atlantic Fleet destroyer force—some eighty to ninety warships—would soon be available to hunt U-boats in the western Atlantic. In fact, the results were pathetic. During the last three weeks of March, only fourteen destroyers and
Treasury
-class cutters briefly paused in their higher-priority missions to help in the fight against the U-boats. The total number of days on actual patrol ranged from one to sixteen for the different warships, for a total of sixty-three ship-days; this meant that, on average, only two destroyers were operating per day along the 1,100-nautical-mile Eastern Sea Frontier. By the end of March, Admiral Andrews and his subordinates in the six naval districts were in a full-fledged panic.
³

The U-boat rampage along the US East Coast did not just cause sharp strains within the US Navy. As the losses mounted, the British also became exasperated. They regarded the U-boats’ success as a sign of American ineptitude and were frustrated by the US Navy’s refusal to heed the harsh lessons the Royal Navy itself had learned between 1939 and 1941, when U-boats first began attacking British shipping in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Winston Churchill cabled FDR aide Harry Hopkins on March 12 to decry “the immense sinking” of oil tankers along the American coast and in the Caribbean. At one point, the British Admiralty dispatched Commander Rodger Winn from the OIC Submarine Tracking Room to Washington, DC, to plead with the US Navy’s leaders to begin an effective response to the U-boats. His agenda included urging them to create a submarine tracking room of their own as a fusion center for all tactical intelligence regarding the enemy and to personally press Admiral Ernest King to instigate a coastal convoy system. As the British well knew, convoying ships was the best—indeed, the only—proven way of defending shipping and even mounting successful attacks against U-boats. Hunting for submersibles in the open ocean was like looking for needles in a haystack; by massing the U-boats’ targets together and surrounding them with a ring of escort warships, however, American military planners could draw in and overwhelm the hunters.