The Burning Shore (4 page)

The famed German engineering firm Organisation Todt, which had developed Germany’s autobahn system and other massive public works projects in the prewar years, began building what would become a massive U-boat bunker along the Saint-Nazaire waterfront. Design plans called for a reinforced concrete-and-steel structure running 980 feet along the waterfront and containing fourteen separate U-boat pens—eight that could hold a solitary U-boat and another six wide enough to fit two boats. The roof itself would consist of twenty-eight feet of concrete and steel reinforcements to ward off enemy air attacks. Construction was barely underway on the first three pens—which would comprise the center of the finished bunker—when U-552 tied up to the quay on March 16, 1941.
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The armored bunkers at Saint-Nazaire and the other French ports were an integral part of newly promoted four-star admiral Dönitz’s ongoing plan for a major expansion of the U-boat Force. The forty-nine-year-old admiral was adamant that Germany could
only defeat Great Britain by severing the maritime trade routes that brought food, fuel, and other critical supplies to the island nation from overseas. Thus far, however, recurring delays in new construction, bureaucratic struggles with the army and Luftwaffe for steel and aluminum, and occasional personnel shortages in the German shipbuilding industry had hamstrung Dönitz’s efforts to knock Britain out of the fight. Dönitz had won Adolf Hitler’s tentative approval in January 1941 for a significant acceleration of U-boat construction. Barring further snags, he anticipated that within the next eighteen months, another 205 U-boats would join the 77 then in service. As Horst Degen prepared for his first combat cruise aboard the U-552 at the beginning of April, the Battle of the Atlantic was poised to enter a new and even more vicious phase.
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H
ARRY
K
ANE WAS A VERY BUSY BUT SATISFIED MAN
in the summer of 1941. Having earned his private pilot’s license prior to enlisting in the US Army Air Corps, he breezed through primary flight training at Drane Field. During the ten-week course, he flew with an instructor pilot in an open-cockpit Boeing Stearman PT-13 trainer, learning and rehearsing basic flight maneuvers. The PT-13 was designed for ruggedness, and both its cruising speed (a giddy 106 mph) and service ceiling (11,200 feet) were quite modest. Nevertheless, this biplane served the aim of the instructor cadre well, permitting novice pilots to glean the basics of flight in a reliable and sturdy aircraft.

Once Kane satisfied his instructors as to his abilities in basic tasks like takeoff, level flight, landing, and response to various in-flight emergencies such as stall and spin recovery, he began learning more complex flying patterns. These included the “lazy 8,” where the pilot learns confidence in making constantly changing adjustments to the flight controls as he puts the aircraft through a series of climbing, turning, and diving maneuvers. Another task was the “Immelmann,” a climbing exercise where the pilot pulls his aircraft up into a climbing half loop, then rolls out in level flight on an opposite course. The daily schedule was quite rigorous, with several flights per day to meet the US Army Air Forces’ (the command’s new title had been announced in June) requirement that every primary student make 175 successful landings during the ten weeks of training. In addition to basic military instruction and daily physical fitness training, Kane and the other cadets also had ninety-six hours of ground school instruction on aircraft equipment, navigation, principles of flight, aircraft recognition, and radio codes.
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The Boeing-built PT-13 Stearman was the ubiquitous primary training aircraft for both USAAF and navy aviation cadets during World War II. USAAF PHOTOGRAPH.

After Lakeland, Kane and other successful cadets proceeded to Montgomery, Alabama, where they would hone their flying skills at basic flight school. The facility was located at Gunter Army Airfield, an auxiliary facility attached to nearby Maxwell Field. In the early 1930s, Maxwell was home to the Air Corps Tactical School, whose 200 officers and 1,000 enlisted personnel made it the largest air corps installation in the southeast. Then, in 1940, the training command at Maxwell had landed another major mission, serving as the Southeast Air Corps Training Center, instructing pilots both at the base itself and at dozens of airfields across the eastern United States.

Kane and the other basic flight students assigned to Gunter Field learned to fly the Vultee BT-13 Valiant trainer, a much higher-performing aircraft than the PT-13 biplane. A low-wing monoplane with a closed canopy for the instructor pilot and student sitting in fore and aft cockpit seats, the Valiant was much more powerful than the Stearman. Its Pratt & Whitney R-985 engine enabled the Valiant to sprint through the air at 180 mph and climb up to 21,650 feet. In the basic flying course, the cadets had to master the intricacies of this more powerful airplane—and under increasingly challenging circumstances.

At Gunter Field, the unspoken motto was “Bigger, faster, trickier.” During their ten weeks there, Kane and the others were introduced to more than mere accuracy maneuvers and acrobatics. After practice in ground-based trainers, they flew the Valiant relying solely on their cockpit instruments to take off, navigate through the air, and land. They relied on the rate-of-turn indicator, the bank indicator, and the airspeed indicator to fly the aircraft. Then came their initial exposure to long-range
navigation, formation flying, and night flying. Ground school courses were also tougher, with the cadets studying principles of instrument flight, radio communications, and advanced aircraft and ship recognition.
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By late September 1941, Harry Kane was in his final phase of flight instruction at the Advanced Pilot Training School at Barksdale Field, near Shreveport, Louisiana. Built on a former cotton plantation near Bossier City, the base originally was home to a pursuit group (as early-model fighters were called) that was training in all facets of fighter operations. However, it too became an air corps flying school in late 1940. Its instructors not only processed individual cadets through the final phase of their training but also prepared entire bombardment groups in unit tactics.

Kane spent the ten weeks at Barksdale mastering the new skills required to operate a twin-engine aircraft. When he began this final phase of instruction, USAAF officials informed him that, upon graduation, he would be assigned to fly this type of plane. They did not reveal which particular model he would fly, however, which left him still uncertain as to what his specific assignment might be. In late 1941, the Army Air Forces had ten separate twin-engine aircraft in its inventory and another five new models under preliminary design. These included five light or medium bombers: the old B-18 Bolo, the new B-25 Mitchell, the new B-26 Marauder, the A-20 Havoc, and the A-29 Hudson. The service was also developing an advanced, high-performance fighter, the P-38 Lightning, as well as five types of twin-engine transports, of which the C-46 Commando and C-47 Skytrain would appear in the largest numbers. During 1940–1941, the
army procured 20,914 new aircraft, of which 3,702—about 18 percent—were twin-engine models.

Regardless of which of these models Kane ended up in, he would need the same basic skills. Single- and twin-engine aircraft had different mission profiles: single-engine craft, being smaller and more maneuverable but with small fuel tanks, were used for air defense, escorting bombers, and short-range patrol missions; larger twin-engine warplanes included light bombers, medium transport planes, and—in the case of the P-38 Lightning—advanced fighter operations. To prepare him for flying aircraft of this type, Kane’s final course load de-emphasized acrobatics and concentrated more on the study of aircraft systems, long-range flight planning, and meteorology.
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Nine months after stepping off the train at Lakeland, Florida, Harry Kane, along with his fellow flight school graduates, raised his right hand and took the oath commissioning him as a second lieutenant in the US Army Air Forces; then, for the first time, he proudly pinned his pilot’s wings on his uniform. The ceremony, however, was somewhat subdued. It took place on December 12—five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the day after Germany’s declaration of war on the United States and America’s declaration of war on Germany and Italy. The global conflagration that Kane and others in his class had seen brewing for so long was finally at hand.
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I
N THE EARLY EVENING TWILIGHT OF
D
ECEMBER
27, 1941, a German U-boat followed an escort icebreaker through the frigid waters of the Kiel Canal. The Type VIIC U-701 edged up to the
quay at the small German seaport of Brunsbüttel, where a large U-boat tender was moored just inside the lock gates leading to the lower Elbe River. As the duty watch shut down the diesel engines, Kapitänleutnant Horst Degen and his forty-five-man crew were feeling both tired and full of nervous anticipation. After his combat patrol aboard U-552 earlier in the year, Degen had been assigned to his very own U-boat—and now he was leading it out on its first patrol of the war.

Final preparations for sea had consumed the past three days. With their craft tied up to the mammoth “Tirpitz Mole” pier at the Kriegsmarine base in Kiel, Degen’s crew had worked around the clock filling their U-boat with 113 tons of diesel fuel, fourteen torpedoes, 220 rounds of ammunition for the 88-mm deck gun, and enough food and fresh water for six weeks at sea. The crew did not have the luxury of celebrating Christmas in town, so Degen found accommodations for them in a naval barracks. The men spent December 25 at an impromptu party where Degen, an accomplished amateur musician, played Christmas carols on a piano as his men sang along.
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The brief passage through the canal on December 27 brought them from the Baltic Sea to the small town of Brunsbüttel along the lower channel of the Elbe River. The next morning, they would cast off for the short trip through the canal lock and down the mouth of the river to the North Sea and the beginning of their first combat patrol against Great Britain and the United States. The German submersibles were a common sight on the sixty-mile man-made waterway across northern Germany. Of eighteen shipyards building U-boats at the time, half were located in cities whose river or harbor access led directly to the
North Sea, and the other nine building yards were located on the Baltic. Yet all U-boats preparing for combat spent at least six months in Kiel, and those leaving for the North Atlantic had to cross back to Brunsbüttel to avoid the dangerous passage around Denmark. U-701 had made the Kiel Canal transit three previous times before arriving at the pier on the southern side of the harbor near the lock gates that last Saturday in December.
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For Horst Degen, the final departure from Kiel was a particularly satisfying moment in his naval career. It was the culmination of eight months of seemingly endless hard work, as well as excitement, danger, and frustration. Since his
Kommandantenschüler
patrol on U-552, he had progressed from commander’s pupil to commander of a newly constructed U-boat with a crew of his own; he had also endured an agonizing six-week overstay in the shipyard while workers repaired construction errors in the boat. He and his crew had then sweated through three months of relentless combat training in the Baltic Sea under the stern eye of a training flotilla.
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Degen’s four-week patrol on U-552 had provided an invaluable lesson on how an aggressive U-boat commander could succeed against the enemy. Initially directed by BdU to patrol some 450 nautical miles southwest of Reykjavik, Iceland, U-552 spent the first four days after leaving Saint-Nazaire conducting rigorous crash-dive exercises and other combat drills to ready the crew for any combat scenario that might occur. During the first three weeks, the lookouts saw nothing but the empty storm-tossed North Atlantic, but Topp knew that their luck could change at any moment—and it did. On April 27, while aligned in a patrol screen with three other U-boats,
U-552 sighted a solitary patrol vessel. After missing with a G7a torpedo, Topp ordered his gun crews to the deck and fired nearly two hundred rounds from his 88-mm deck gun and 20-mm flak gun into the hapless British fishing trawler
Commander Horton
, which sank with the loss of its fourteen-man crew. Like many U-boat commanders, Topp did not hesitate to go after even smaller vessels like this, particularly since the Royal Navy had commandeered scores of them to operate as antisubmarine trawlers. This boat proved to be the first in a target-rich environment for U-552.
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Nine hours after sinking the British trawler, Topp carried out a textbook daylight submerged attack against the independently steaming 10,119-ton British freighter
Beacon Grange
, holing it with a spread of three G7e electric torpedoes and finishing it off with a fourth. Then more riches appeared: seven hours after the
Beacon Grange
sank, Topp’s radio operator intercepted a contact report of a convoy from another U-boat, which had sighted eastbound Convoy HX121. The formation of forty-nine merchant ships totaling 324,311 gross registered tons included seventeen oil tankers, which carried the highest priority for attack by U-boats. Despite the presence of fourteen escort warships, Topp fearlessly ran U-552 directly under the convoy, surfaced between two columns of ships, and struck the 8,190-ton British tanker
Capulet
with a single torpedo. The convoy’s escorts subjected U-552 to an agonizing five-hour depth charge attack, but Topp told Degen that such risks were worth it: only aggressive actions by a U-boat commander guaranteed success against the enemy. “Either you are lucky or you aren’t,” Topp explained, “and it is no good being overcautious if you want to be successful.” Degen
took that lesson to heart when he got his own U-boat. And he said of Topp, “He taught me all I know.”
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