Authors: Ed Offley
Dönitz and the BdU staff had not stood idly by as Admiral Adolphus Andrews and the Eastern Sea Frontier (ESF) frantically assembled the “Bucket Brigade” convoy escorts in late March. In addition to conducting early planning for the mine-laying and saboteur operations, BdU had introduced a new element into the mixture of U-boats aimed at significantly expanding the force’s operational range. The first of a new type of U-boat specifically designed to replenish Type VII and IX boats at sea
with fuel and food supplies entered operational service in late March, with nine more on the way. Under the command of Kapitänleutnant Georg von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, the “milch cow” U-459 sailed from Heligoland on March 29 with a cargo of 720 tons of diesel fuel, 34 tons of lubricating oil, and 10 tons of fresh water. Arriving at its designated operational area five hundred nautical miles northeast of Bermuda on April 20, U-459 refueled twelve outbound Type VII and two Type IXB U-boats and three VIIs on return passage during a two-week period.
The impact of these refueling boats on U-boat deployments was dramatic. The ten outbound Type VII boats in the previous patrols had been at sea for an average of thirty-six days before being forced to return to France. Now, with up to fifty tons of additional diesel oil in their tanks from U-459, they would be able to patrol for an average of sixty-six days—more than four additional weeks at sea. Because of that dramatic development, Dönitz was able to dispatch seven of the shorter-range Type VIIs to the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and northern coastal waters of Brazil, rich hunting grounds previously out of range for the 500-ton “medium” U-boats.
But any celebration at BdU Headquarters would have been premature. In the weeks that followed the deployment of the first “milch cow,” U-boat commanders who had obtained the extra fuel and more time on station reported disappointing results as they patrolled from Cape Hatteras south to Florida. BdU kept a close eye on the tonnage-per-day rate, derived by simply dividing a U-boat’s total tonnage of ships sunk by the number of days on patrol. In January, the daily average was 209 tons. This increased to 378 tons in February, then climbed to 409 tons in
March and 412 in April. None of the Type VII boats on extended patrols in American waters in May came even close to matching these earlier numbers. The daily tonnage formula ranged from 73.4 tons per day for U-751 (two ships totaling 4,555 tons sunk during sixty-two days at sea) to a high of 234.4 tons per day for U-333 (three ships sunk totaling 13,596 tons during fifty-eight days at sea). “Reports from the boats [operating along the US East Coast] showed that . . . extremely few ships were sighted,” Hessler later observed. “As the days passed, it became evident that the [merchant ship] traffic situation had fundamentally changed.”
During a face-to-face meeting with Adolf Hitler in his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on Thursday, May 14, Dönitz admitted that American coastal defenses were becoming “considerable” but quickly added that the inshore campaign would continue. The admiral predicted the establishment of an American coastal convoy system in the near future, then briefed the Führer on the planned mine-laying campaign by U-701 and the other two boats.
Dönitz’s prediction about coastal convoys came true much faster than he and his staff anticipated. Within hours of his meeting with Hitler that second Thursday in May, Convoy KS500, with nineteen merchant ships totaling 155,680 gross registered tons, departed Norfolk for Key West accompanied by seven escort warships. The easy times along America’s coast were over.
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A
MID ALL THE FRUSTRATIONS AND SETBACKS
, there was one piece of good news for the 396th Medium Bombardment Squadron in the spring of 1942. The Fourth Air Force decided to replace
the unit’s underperforming B-18 Bolos with the newer Lockheed A-29 Hudson. Forty-four feet long with a wingspan of sixty-five feet, the Hudson was a militarized update of the Model 14 Super Electra, which at the time of its first commercial flight in October 1937 was lauded as a state-of-the-art passenger airliner. It had two main landing wheels and a small tail wheel that left the aircraft resting on the tarmac at a cant. The civilian model, flown by a pilot and copilot, could carry twelve passengers at a speed of 250 knots. It had a maximum range of about 2,000 miles, with a maximum altitude of 24,000 feet. Even for those who had yet to experience commercial flight, the A-29 would have been a clearly recognizable plane; on the outside, it was virtually identical to the Model 10 Electra that famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart had flown in her ill-fated 1937 quest to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
While the A-29 may have superficially resembled a civilian aircraft, Lockheed engineers had significantly modified its airframe for combat. The Hudson’s fuselage and wings were painted in a camouflage pattern of brown and tan swirls. Its armament included a pair of fixed, forward-firing .30-cal. machine guns in the upper nose, a retractable .30-cal. “tunnel gun” in the rear belly of the fuselage facing aft, and a rotating British-supplied Boulton Paul gun turret with twin .303-cal. machine guns protruding from the top of the fuselage just forward of the aircraft’s twin rudders. The main armament, however, was not visible once loaded. The Hudson could carry in its eleven-foot-long internal bomb bay four 250-pound bombs plus another four 100-pound bombs. For antisubmarine patrols, the aircraft carried three 325-pound Mark XVII depth charges, plus a practice dummy depth charge
for training should a patrol prove uneventful. The Hudson’s four fuel tanks carried 643 gallons of avgas, which was enough fuel to fly at cruising speed for nearly eight hours.
The A-29 “was quite a bit faster, more maneuverable than the old B-18s,” Harry Kane later recalled. “Of course, we had to check out in those again and get all accustomed to going in them.” Kane was not the only airman who needed extensive training in order to use the new warplanes. The 396th by now had grown to thirty-six officers and 271 enlisted men, and all of the aircrews, armorers, and maintenance personnel required “transition training” to the new aircraft. “The A-29 . . . had a terrific tendency to ground loop” because of the powerful torque generated by its two 1,100-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp engines, Kane said. Landings were equally challenging because the Hudson easily stalled at low speeds. “On landing they were very, very treacherous,” he said. The Hudson had a strong tendency to bounce back into the air after touching down on the runway, and that could easily result in the aircraft stalling out and cartwheeling into the ground, Kane added.
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Kane’s concern about the safety of the A-29 was not unreasonable. During the first half of 1942, an air crewman in the USAAF was nearly as likely to die in training as in combat. The Army Air Forces expansion was in high gear as the new service branch prepared to fight the Japanese and Germans overseas. At the beginning of the year, Lieutenant General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who had been promoted to three stars on December 15, 1941, had 417,526 uniformed personnel under his command, of which 30,040 were commissioned officers. Total personnel would double over the next six months as the USAAF passed the 840,000
mark in July; it would double again to 1.6 million personnel by year’s end. At the same time, aircraft production was soaring as the American aircraft industry hit full stride in meeting President Franklin Roosevelt’s goal of fielding nearly 240,000 combat, transport, and training aircraft. Inevitably, the legion of new pilots, navigators, radio operators, and crewmen made mistakes, many of them fatal. The number of midair collisions, crash landings, and aircraft vanishing into the mountains or disappearing at sea was as horrific as other statistics were inspiring. And since the number of USAAF units overseas remained miniscule (only 90,542 airmen were serving outside the continental United States by May 1942, and most of them were support personnel preparing for later unit deployments), most of the carnage was taking place at home. During the first six months of the war, the USAAF recorded 3,341 aircraft accidents inside the continental United States in which 763 airmen perished and 825 aircraft were wrecked. The daily average was astonishingly high: 4.5 aircraft destroyed and 4.1 personnel killed every day. For two of those months (March and April 1942), more airmen died in stateside training than in combat overseas.
Although the 396th had to adjust to a new type of aircraft, the squadron’s mission remained the same. But the mood of the men in the squadron had also changed. On April 21, a cadre of twenty-five officers and 153 enlisted men was abruptly transferred from Sacramento to Naval Air Station Alameda on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. From there, they mounted daily patrols out into the North Pacific searching for the Japanese fleet. Fears of another Japanese attack from the sea had suddenly spiked in the wake of the Doolittle Raid against Tokyo three days
earlier. Intent on avenging the country’s losses at Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Colonel James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle of the USAAF had led a group of sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers launched from the carrier
USS Hornet
on a daring air raid over the Japanese capital and five other cities. Senior army officials—including Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson—had convinced themselves that the Japanese navy would retaliate for the American strike by attacking the West Coast. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warned Fourth Army commander Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt to be on his guard.
Fear and anticipation flowed down the army chain of command to individual squadrons such as the 396th, and the aviators flew out on patrols with a grim sense of purpose. For Kane and his fellow air crewmen, the patrols “consisted of flying up and down the Pacific coast, covering most of the state of California.” When the squadron detachment returned to Sacramento on May 10, two additional antiaircraft regiments were being rushed to Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, and army officials were issuing 350,000 gas masks and protective clothing to the West Coast troops. Well aware of the Japanese use of chemical weapons in China, the army was preparing for the worst.
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U-701
BEGAN ITS THIRD COMBAT PATROL
on Tuesday, May 19, just five days after the first American coastal convoy set sail from Norfolk. Casting off late in the afternoon as a military band played from the U-boat bunker quayside and a small crowd of well-wishers—including U-202’s Kapitänleutnant Linder—waved farewell, Degen backed U-701 out of the Brest bunker,
turned around, and conned the boat out through the opening in the harbor’s two long jetties, entering the Atlantic while two patrol boats kept station and a pair of Messerschmitt fighters circled overhead. The boat was back up to a full complement of four officers, one midshipman under training, and forty-one enlisted crewmen. Six new faces had reported aboard U-701 during its in-port period, including twenty-two-year-old
Fähnrich Ingenieur
(Engineering Midshipman) Günter Lange and five junior enlisted men.
The first leg of the deployment was short. U-701 made an overnight passage down the Brittany coast to the larger U-boat base at Lorient. Arriving early the next morning, shipyard workers loaded fifteen TMB seabed mines, three apiece, in its five torpedo tubes. First deployed in 1939, the TMB featured an aluminum cylindrical shell whose exterior dimensions allowed for three mines to fit inside each of the Type VIIC U-boat’s five torpedo tubes. Although at 7.5 feet it was only one-third the length of a G7e torpedo, each mine carried a much more powerful explosive charge of 1,276 pounds of hexanite, nearly twice the size of a torpedo warhead. This was possible since no propulsion system was required. The mine utilized a timing clock to delay arming the weapon until the U-boat was safely out of the area and employed a sensor whereby the magnetic field of a ship passing overhead set off the explosive. Earlier in the war, U-boats had dropped TMB mines where the water was one hundred feet deep, but subsequent engineering tests showed that the weapon’s lethality sharply increased in water eighty feet deep or less. Since channels for ships entering and departing American ports were dredged to a depth of around fifty feet or so, the only
question regarding the effectiveness of the mine-laying operation was whether the U-boats could accurately drop their mines in the most highly traveled sectors of the narrow waterways.
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While in Lorient, Degen engaged in a minor deception operation of his own, telling dockyard officials that he had been unable to completely fill his diesel tanks before leaving Brest. “We wanted the expedition to last as long as possible, and that depended on how much diesel oil we could take,” Degen recalled years later. “The authorities at Lorient did not ask silly questions when we told them that fueling was not done completely in Brest.” U-701 got the additional tons of fuel oil without debate. As a result, Degen was able to make a three-day dash at high speed across the Bay of Biscay into the open Atlantic without cutting into the boat’s normal fuel allotment.
The three-week transit of the North Atlantic passed in relative calm. The U-boat crew fell into the normal at-sea rhythm of practice crash dives, four-hour daytime watches and six-hour night watches at their workstations, and meals served in the crowded bow compartment. Herbert Grotheer and the other radiomen entertained their shipmates by playing popular music over the boat’s intercom system as the men worked or relaxed off watch. Yet it was still far from a pleasure cruise: the danger of detection was constant, and crewmen maintained a rigorous work schedule in cramped and uncomfortable conditions.
Only two events broke the crew’s daily routine. One day, Degen’s lookouts spotted a neutral Portuguese fishing trawler as it headed northwest toward the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Several days later, Degen and his lookouts sighted an 18,000-ton passenger liner heading east toward Europe. Visions of bagging
such a large prize prompted Degen to reverse course and pursue the vessel. Alas, after several hours of chasing the prey, U-701 closed in after nightfall only for the lookouts to report that it was the Swedish American Line
Drottningholm
, sailing under a neutral flag. The liner was bearing German and Italian diplomats back to Europe after months of internment in the United States following Pearl Harbor and the American declaration of war against the Axis. Degen ordered his helmsman to resume the boat’s westward course toward the United States.
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