Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ his last patrol,’ said the obituary notice personally dictated by Admiral Dönitz when, after 76 days had passed, they finally told the German public of their hero’s death. Even then stories about him having survived circulated for months afterwards.

      A few days later on 15 March 1941, south of Iceland, Fritz-Julius Lemp, now promoted to Korvettenkapitän, signalled the approach of a convoy. It was an attractive target but the escort was formidable. The escort commander was Captain Macintyre RN, who was to become the war’s most successful U-boat hunter. He was in an old First World War destroyer, HMS Walker. There were four other old destroyers with him, and two corvettes. The homeward convoy HX 112 consisted of almost 50 ships, in ten columns half a mile apart. They were heavily laden tankers and freighters, and even in this unusually calm sea they could make no more than 10 knots (11.5 mph).

      Lemp’s sighting signal was intercepted by direction-finding stations in Britain. Such plots could only be approximate, but Captain Macintyre was warned that U-boats were probably converging on HX 112. Without waiting for other U-boats, Lemp’s U-110 surfaced and used darkness to infiltrate the convoy. Two torpedoes from his bow tubes missed, but one from his stern hit Erodona, a tanker carrying petrol, and the sea around it became a lake of flames.

      The next day other U-boats arrived. The uncertainties of U-boat operations are illustrated by the way in which U-74 never found the rendezvous and U-37, having surfaced in fog, was run down by a tanker and had to return to base for repairs. But Schepke (U-100) and Kretschmer (U-99) provided enough trouble for the resourceful Captain Macintyre. Having spotted Schepke’s boat, the escorts started a systematic search which kept it submerged and allowed the convoy to steam away. At this stage of the war the escorts had not discovered that U-boats impudently infiltrated the convoys to fire at point-blank range. The search for the attackers always took place outside the convoy area. So the chase after Schepke was Kretschmer’s opportunity to penetrate the columns of the virtually unprotected convoy, and at 2200 hours there was a loud boom which marked the beginning of an hour during which Kretschmer hit six ships. Five of them sank. The hunt for Schepke’s U-100 was abandoned as the escorts closed upon their charges.

      Schepke’s U-100, damaged by the continuous attacks, soon caught up with the convoy. Although a surfaced submarine was immune to asdic, it was vulnerable to detection by radar, and despite the darkness he’d been detected a mile away by a primitive Type 271 radar set aboard the escort HMS Vanoc. A surfaced submarine, if spotted, did not have much time in which to dive to safety. This was Schepke’s predicament as Vanoc was suddenly seen accelerating to full speed. As she sped past HMS Walker, the escort commander ordered a signal made to caution her about speeding. He received the reply ‘have rammed and sunk U-boat’. By that time the shriek of the destroyer’s bow tearing through the steel U-boat came echoing through the night air. Schepke and the duty watch standing on the tower were all crushed and lost. Someone below gave the order to crash-dive but depth charges ripped the hull open and U-100 sank with all but seven of its crew.

      While Vanoc was repairing its damage, and picking up German survivors, HMS Walker’s asdic showed another U-boat nearby, and then the set broke down. This brief encounter was with Kretschmer’s U-99. It was surfaced and heading home under cover of darkness. Kretschmer was below. On the conning tower there was the usual complement of four men: an officer, a petty officer and two ratings. Each man was assigned a quarter of the horizon to watch through his Zeiss 7×50 binoculars. Lighter, smaller and more waterproof than RN binoculars, such glasses were coveted by every Allied sailor who saw them. The officer occasionally swept the entire horizon: it was the routine. Suddenly they came upon the warships that had sunk Schepke’s boat. One of them was searching for survivors. One of the German lookouts on U-99 saw the moonlight reflecting off a gun turret: it was a destroyer about 100 yards away. Had they done nothing they would probably have escaped – standing orders said submarines sighting the enemy at night must stay surfaced – but the submariners were tired. Thinking he’d been seen, and contrary to orders, the officer on watch dived the U-99, and it was then that Walker’s asdic operator saw it briefly before his screen went blank.

      The Walker’s depth charge attack had to rely upon skill, instinct and practice. Those first explosions brought Kretschmer’s damaged boat to the surface. Both destroyers opened fire. ‘With an understandable enthusiasm,’ rescued merchant seamen taken on board the Walker piled up so much ammunition around the guns as to cause confusion.

      Kretschmer was forced back to the surface. All torpedoes expended and his boat crippled, he realized that his career was at an end, but his tonnage claims were foremost in his mind. He ordered his radio operator to send a message claiming 50,000 tons of shipping and telling Dönitz that he was a prisoner of war. When Kretschmer saw Walker lowering a boat he took it to be an attempt to capture his submarine. He sent his engineer officer to flood the aft ballast tanks so that the U-boat would sink stern-first. It reared up suddenly and steeply, and slid back into the ocean, leaving the crew swimming. When he climbed aboard the ship that rescued him Kretschmer still had his binoculars round his neck and wore the white-topped hat that had become a captain’s prerogative in the U-boat service. All but three of the U-boat’s crew were saved, but the engineer officer was one of those lost. Captain Macintyre, the escort commander, used Kretschmer’s Zeiss binoculars for the rest of the war.

      Kretschmer, a prisoner aboard HMS Walker, remarked to George Osborne, her chief engineer, upon the coincidence that both ship and submarine had a horseshoe badge but one was the wrong way up. It was explained to him that in Britain a horseshoe pointing down is considered bad luck. An eyewitness said ‘it brought a rueful laugh from our prisoner.’

      A destroyer was a cramped place, even without shipwrecked seamen and enemy prisoners aboard, and there was evidence of bad feeling. But the master and chief officer of J. B. White, a sunken merchant ship, and Otto Kretschmer an unrepentant Nazi, were persuaded by the chief engineer to join him in a game of contract bridge. Osborne said it was the only decent game he managed to get in the entire war.

      Germany had lost her three U-boat aces and the Propaganda Ministry discovered that stardom for fighting men is a two-edged weapon. The loss of three ‘experts’ made Dönitz suspect that the British must have some new secret weapon. But then he changed his mind and decided it was just bad luck.

      Dönitz had been right with his first guess. HMS Vanoc had used a primitive radar set, and in this same month, March 1941, a far more sophisticated 10-centimetre set was being tested at sea. It was the cavity magnetron which made such advanced radar possible and put the British work far ahead of the Germans. But in the summer of 1941 the range at which radar gave the first indication of an enemy’s presence was not always better than an alert observer could provide on a clear day. In May 1941 the pursuit of the Bismarck provided a better example of the contribution radar played in the naval encounters of that period.

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       WAR ON THE CATHODE TUBE

       When snatched from all effectual aid,

       We perished, each alone:

       But I beneath a rougher sea,

       And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

      William Cowper, ‘The Castaway’

      The battleship Bismarck had been launched by the granddaughter СКАЧАТЬ