Dire Wolves of the Sea

U-boat resupply. U-564 is resupplied with torpedoes from another U Boat whilst in the Caribbean in early August 1942.

U-Boat (Ship Type) German submarine. The word is a shortened form of Unterseeboot, which means “undersea boat” in German. Germany’s foremost naval weapon in both world wars was the submarine. Especially in World War I, it nearly cut the crucial ocean supply lines to Great Britain. From the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II, U-boats accounted for the sinking of almost 8,000 merchant ships and warships with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. But they were vulnerable: 962 U-boats were lost by the end of World War II, taking some 33,000 seamen (half of all crewmen) to the bottom.

In World War I, Germany was the first nation to mount a combination of torpedo tubes and a deck gun on its boats and fit them with superior periscopes and wireless sets. The use of batteries combined with diesel propulsion paved the way for long-range strikes against enemy targets. Such craft were taken by Allied powers for study after the war, becoming the basis for most World War II submarine fleets. Even during the 1940s Germany led the way in submarine technology with the development of the homing torpedo and the schnorkel, although, perhaps ironically, it was the U.S. Navy in the Pacific theater in World War II that was the most effective practitioner of submarine warfare.

The scene of extensive German U-boat operations from the beginning of World War II to May 1943. Germany surrendered all its U-boats at the end of World War I but during the interwar years violated the Treaty of Versailles and had submarines built in neutral countries, drafted mobilization plans, and established schools for submarine deck officers and engineers. Unfortunately for Germany, Adolf Hitler and his naval commander, Admiral Erich Raeder, planned to build a balanced fleet by 1948, with the result that instead of the 300 U-boats demanded by Submarine Service commander Admiral Karl Dönitz, Germany had but 57 submarines, of which 27 were oceangoing types, on 1 September 1939.

Nonetheless, during the war German U-boats came close to cutting Allied North Atlantic communications lines. The German navy listened to Allied radio traffic, and Dönitz used the information thus obtained to direct his boats to where he believed enemy ships would be. His success was reduced in part because Luftwaffe commander Herman Göring would not provide planes to reconnoiter at sea and because Hitler often directed U-boats to engage in missions that they were not designed to undertake. Yet single U-boats, and then wolf packs resupplied at sea by supply boats (“milk cows”), had nearly severed maritime communications between the United States and the beleaguered British Isles by the early spring of 1943.

The success of Dönitz’s tactics was proved by the sinkings accomplished in the first year of the war by such aces as Otto Kretschmer, Wolfgang Luth, Gunther Prien, Joachim Schepke, Herbert Schultze, and Erich Topp. U-boat losses, however, led Dönitz to stress the use of wolf packs. He placed great reliance on the very maneuverable Type VII U-boat: 625/745 tons (surfaced/submerged), diesel-electric drive, speed of 16 knots surfaced/submerged, range of 4,300 kilometers surfaced, and armament of 5 torpedo tubes and 6 reloads as well as 2 deck guns. These and other types were not fitted with effective radar until almost the end of the war, and their magnetic torpedo detonators often failed, but at least during the first year of the war they could operate farther west in the Atlantic than the Royal Navy could escort convoys.

Forty-two U-boats supported the German naval forces that invaded Norway in the spring of 1940. In addition to having bases in Norway, after 22 June 1940 Dönitz had U-boat bases built along the Atlantic coast of defeated France, thus sparing the boats the dangerous long journey from Germany through the North Sea and around Scotland to reach the Atlantic and increasing the time they could remain on station. At the cost of 31 submarines lost, Dönitz’s U-boats sank much of the 1.11 million tons of British merchant shipping that was destroyed in the northwestern Atlantic in the latter half of 1940. U-boats would trail convoys until dark and then attack. The 27 boats Italy sent to the South Atlantic beginning in July 1940 had slim pickings.

The Allies meanwhile increased warship, merchant ship, aircraft, and blimp production programs, and they relied on radio direction-finding stations ashore and afloat, radar on ships and aircraft, sonar, improved depth charges, and brilliant floodlights (the Leigh Light) on aircraft. The British stopped using fleet carriers for convoy escort after losing two of them, but in the fall of 1940 the United States gave Britain 50 old destroyers. After that, the British had support groups leave convoys to attack nearby U-boats, and the United States fitted aircraft with rockets and antisubmarine ships with forward-thrown shipborne antisubmarine “hedgehogs,” or “mousetraps” (small depth charges Britons called Squids). It helped the Allies that in the spring of 1941 Dönitz instituted “tonnage warfare,” a strategy of sinking ships wherever they were found. This meant that a U-boat might go after an unloaded freighter instead of a more important tanker.

The Allies gained greatly after the United States entered World War II. U.S. industrial might provided many warships and merchant ships. For convoy work, the United States provided hunter-killer groups—an escort carrier escorted by about 5 destroyers or new destroyer escorts. But 81 ships were sunk along the U.S. Atlantic coast by the 19 U-boats Dönitz dispatched beginning in February 1942. Finally the organization of convoys led in May to the U-boats being redirected southward.

Dönitz also sent some large boats to operate in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, but supply problems and attacks by surface ships caused their recall. Meanwhile, British and American convoys to Murmansk, Russia, reduced the number of warships operating against U-boats in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

The nadir for the Allied convoys occurred between the summer of 1942 and spring of 1943. In March 1943 British, Canadian, and U.S. representatives met in Washington and, among other things, agreed that Britain and Canada would assume responsibility for convoys north of 40 degrees and the United States for those to the south and for troop convoys entering the Mediterranean. The United States in addition would provide Canada very long-range (VLR) planes to reconnoiter a large area in the Central Atlantic in which U-boats hid and would provide at least one hunter-killer group for convoy work. Moreover, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and Commander in Chief U. S. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King had his operations officer, Rear Admiral Francis S. “Frog” Low, head a “phantom” Tenth Fleet—a brain center for antisubmarine warfare (ASW). It had no ships but could give orders to any vessel, and its research and publications were of great use to all the Allies.

The tide now began to turn against Dönitz. Particularly effective against his boats were aircraft fitted with shortwave 10 cm radar the Germans could not detect. Increased Allied radio direction-finding stations often ordered convoys to change course to evade suspected U-boats while aircraft utilized floodlights to illuminate and attack the boats. The Allies lost 36 ships in the Atlantic in May, but Dönitz lost as many as 41 boats, a third of those at sea. Moreover, Allied ships and aircraft were sinking his boats all over the Atlantic and in the Bay of Biscay—and Germany was losing the war on land.

Dönitz counted on success from a radar receiver; acoustic torpedo; new propelling plant; new small, speedy coastal submarines; and improved deck guns with which to fight Allied aircraft. No radar receiver appeared until the end of the war; the acoustic torpedo was countered with noisemakers that attracted it away from ships’ screws; aircraft guns, rockets, and depth charges overcame U-boat guns; the new submarines appeared too late; Allied radar could pick up the schnorkel tubes fitted to some boats; and the Allied produced so many ASW ships that they overwhelmed the numbers of U-boats.

May 1943 was Dönitz’s “Black May,” a month from which his submarine campaign never recovered. He was responsible for that result, primarily because the Allies homed in on his radio signals not only to his boats in the North Atlantic but to those recalled from the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean and sent forces to attack those boats.

By February 1944 few U-boats could survive in the North Atlantic. The Russians largely forced German submarines out of the Baltic, and American and British forces made U-boat operations in the Bay of Biscay extremely dangerous. The Western Allies invaded France with little U-boat opposition.

References

Bekker, Cajus D. Hitler’s Naval War. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.

Busch, Harald. U-Boats at War. London: Putnam, 1955.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. United States Naval Operations in World War II. Vol. 1. The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939–May 1943. Vol. X. The Atlantic Battle Won, May 1943–May 1945. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947–1956.

The Tripolitanian War

Mustafa Kemal and Libyan bedevis

The Young Turks' transition to Turkish nationalism had only begun, however, when it was given a final thrust forward by a new wave of foreign attacks on the empire starting with that of the Italians in Tripoli and Bengazi late in 1911. The kingdom of Italy dreamed of an empire that would revive the glory of the old Roman Empire. Most of the African territories contiguous to the Mediterranean had been already taken by Britain and France, and only Tripoli seemed reasonably available. Ottoman rule there was nominal. The garrisons were weak, the government limited and inadequate, and the economic situation poor. The interior, inhabited by bedouins, had recently come under the control of a Muslim pietistic movement led by the Senusis, further undermining the sultan's suzerainty. On the other hand, Tripoli was close to Italy. Italian merchants had been active there for some time, and their complaints about mistreatment as well as the difficult conditions in the country provided a pretext for armed intervention. Nor were the Italian ambitions particularly secret. In 1900 France had agreed to allow it to take Tripoli in compensation for the expected acquisition of Morocco. Two years later Austria had followed suit in return for Italian support of its ambitions in Bosnia- Herzegovina. Britain joined the agreement as part of its effort to gain Italian participation in the emerging Triple Entente. In 1909 Russian approval was secured in return for Italian support of its ambition to force the Porte to open the Straits to its warships. Though Germany and Austria feared Italian aggression into the Ottoman Empire might cause a major new crisis, they did not wish to alienate Italy and push it even closer to Britain and France. Thus once the French position in Morocco was secured and the Italian press and public agitated for compensatory action in Tripoli, the Italian government decided to go ahead.

The Italian government for some time had complained about "mistreatment" of its subjects in Tripoli and Bengazi, and the Ottomans had tried to satisfy them with guarantees and other promises in order to avoid a war. The Italians, however, who had already decided to attack, rejected the Ottoman offers. On September 29, 1911, war was declared. A day later Tripoli was put under naval blockade. Britain declared its neutrality. On October 4 Tripoli was bombarded and an Italian expeditionary force landed at Tobruk. The Ottoman garrison in both provinces numbered only 15,000 men at best. Because of the situation in the Balkans the government in Istanbul decided to send only limited reinforcements, but these were put under the command of two of its brightest young officers, both CUP members, Enver Bey, recently married into the imperial family, who was made commander at Bengazi, and Mustafa Kemal Bey, placed in command at Tripoli and Derne. Even before they arrived, however, the Italians overran the entire coastal area; Kemal and Enver landed their forces and took them into the interior, where they took command of the remaining Ottoman garrison and joined the Senusi tribesmen in preparing to resist the infidel in a Holy War. On November 4 Italy officially proclaimed its annexation of both Tripoli and Bengazi, but its control remained limited to the coast while the Ottomans and Senusis began an effective guerrilla resistance from the interior. In response the Italians began to send arms and ammunition to Montenegro and Albania and encouraged new adventures against the Porte.

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D-Day: What Might Have Been

As the anniversary of D-Day approaches, Frank J. Dinan, PhD, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, shares his insight as to what would have happened if Hitler had chosen to use the deadly nerve gas Tabun, that he alone possessed, to oppose the D-Day landings?

General Omar Bradley, commander of all of the American forces landing on D-Day, writing in his memoir, A Soldier’s Story, commented on how relieved he was that the Germans did not use gas as a weapon on D-Day.

“When D-Day finally ended without a whiff of gas, I was vastly relieved. For even a light sprinkling of a persistent gas could have forced a decision in one of history’s climactic battles.”

If General Bradley’s fears were correct, the Allies could have been forced back into the sea with enormous casualties. The political repercussions of a D-Day defeat for Roosevelt, Churchill and Eisenhower, the three men most responsible for the landings would have been devastating. Would another invasion attempt be made? Surely not soon. The war would have been prolonged and could have resulted in the Allies using their still developing atomic bombs against Germany rather than Japan.

Seeing Tabun’s effectiveness as a weapon and the lack of an Allied response, Hitler certainly would have used it against the Russians. Would Stalin then, frustrated by Tabun’s use and by the loss of a long promised Allied second front, have sued for a separate peace? Now confident that no nerve gas retaliatory attacks were forthcoming, it is likely that Hitler would have launched his rapidly improving V2 rockets now filled with Tabun against Allied targets with devastating effect.

The Tabun story began on December 23, 1936, when a single drop of that newly-made chemical fell to the floor of a laboratory in Germany. The two men working there immediately suffered diminished vision, labored breathing and a loss of muscle control. Ironically, Tabun was made to be an insecticide that was toxic to insects but harmless to humans.

The Nazis government required that all discoveries of potential military value be passed along to them. The men’s employer, the giant I.G. Farben Corporation, complied, and its representatives were soon called to Berlin to discuss Tabun with the military.

Demonstrations of Tabun’s lethal effects at extraordinarily low concentrations made its potential as a devastating weapon obvious. Everything about Tabun was immediately classified as top secret and few were aware of its existence.

A weapon oriented Tabun research program began and construction of a plant designed for its production soon started. By mid-1943 thousands of tons of Tabun had been produced, loaded into artillery shells and bombs that were moved to storage sites throughout Germany. The secrecy that surrounded Tabun was so effective that the Allies had no hint of its existence and had no comparable weapons to retaliate with if the Nazis used it.

Nerve agents such as Tabun, are among the deadliest chemicals ever devised and are now classified as weapons of mass destruction by the United Nations. They exert their deadly effects by inhalation and absorption through the skin.

In the body they prevent the action of a key enzyme that regulates all nerve transmission processes. A nerve impulse is transmitted along a nerve pathway by a chemical called a neurotransmitter. Once it has done its job, the neurotransmitter must be immediately removed or the nerve transmission process repeats itself uncontrollably. Tabun prevents this removal and a victim’s ability to see, breathe and control bodily functions is rapidly lost. Death soon follows.

On D-Day, June 4, 1944, the largest invasion armada ever assembled assaulted the Normandy beaches of France. Allied troops stormed ashore and gradually overcame determined German resistance to establish narrow, tenuous beachheads. The invaders were tightly packed together and pinned on the beach with the sea at their backs and the German defenders before them. There was no going back; it was a clear case of advance or die. By nightfall, nearly 100,000 Allied troops had landed and about 10,000 of their comrades were either dead or wounded. Allied forces slowly fought their way inland. Within two weeks they had progressed far enough to allow a makeshift port to be built and soon 20,000 tons per day of supplies were being landed. At this point, although much fierce fighting and many casualties were still to come, the fate of Hitler’s Third Reich was effectively sealed. But did this have to be the case?

Allied confidence that Germany had not developed new war gasses of any significance was so great that General Bernard Montgomery, Commander of the British and Canadian D-Day forces, ordered that all gas protection equipment be left behind when his troops departed England on D-Day. American soldiers carried only a gas mask but no rubber protective gear to stop gasses from being absorbed through clothing and skin. They would have quickly become casualties to Tabun.

Earlier, in the summer of 1940, the British had formulated plans to use gas to repel what then seemed a likely cross Channel invasion of their island by Nazi forces. They recognized that gas would be a much more effective weapon than explosives to use against an invading army tightly packed together on a narrow invasion beach. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so convinced that the use of mustard gas, much less effective than Tabun, would stop a German invasion and drive the invaders back into the sea that he urged the military to use its entire supply of mustard gas on the first day of an attack.

Why then didn’t Hitler, certainly no humanitarian, use the far deadlier Tabun, that he alone possessed, to defeat the Allies on D-Day? The answer to this question centers on one fateful meeting and an event that occurred in the closing days of World War I when then corporal Adolph Hitler was temporally blinded by gas and was hospitalized at the war’s end. This experience gave Hitler a life-long aversion to poison gas warfare.

By 1943, the tide of war had turned against Germany and Hitler came under increasing pressure from fanatical Nazi leaders to use Tabun. He resisted, maintaining that it would only be used in response to a nerve gas attack on Germany. But their pressure was unrelenting, and in the Fall of 1943, Hitler agreed to discuss Tabun’s use with Otto Ambros, Germany’s leading expert on chemical warfare and Albert Speer, the Reich’s Minister for Armaments.

In his book, Inside the Third Reich, Speer relates that at that meeting Ambros told Hitler that he doubted that Germany had a monopoly on Tabun. He stated that Tabun had appeared in the chemical literature as early as 1902, that I.G. Farben had patented Tabun in 1937, and that since 1939, no mention of phosphorus insecticide chemistry had appeared in the scientific literature of the Allied nations. Ambros argued that these facts indicated that the Allies had nerve weapons and had imposed strict censorship on them to prevent Germany from realizing their deadly nature. After hearing Ambros’ arguments, Hitler never again seriously considered Tabun’s use.

We know now that Ambros was wrong. The Allies knew nothing about nerve weapons until the war ended. But what we can never know with certainty is whether Ambros deliberately mislead Hitler as a result of his own misgivings about Tabun’s use, or if he believed the information that he gave to Hitler was correct. However several facts indicate that, whatever the reason, Ambros may have deliberately misled Hitler.

Ambros was a Director of I.G. Farben Industries and knew that although Tabun had been patented, the patent was held in complete secrecy. It did not issue publicly until well after the war ended and was not available to the Allies. An extensive search of the scientific literature over the period 1896 to 1911 recently conducted by experts failed to reveal any report of Tabun’s existence or mention of any such highly toxic chemicals. Ambros’ claim that nothing about phosphorus chemicals appeared in Allies’ scientific literature was correct, but this was a result of their efforts to prevent Germany from considering the use of these materials as insecticides.

Disease has always been a major enemy of armies during wars and Allied policy dictated that all information on insecticides was classified as secret. This caused the lack of publication that Ambros reported to Hitler.

We can never be sure what might have happened if Tabun had been used but we know this: what the little known chemist, Otto Ambros told Adolph Hitler at their fateful 1943 meeting saved countless lives, shortened history’s most horrific war and may have prevented a tragic D-Day defeat.

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Postscript

Just before the outbreak of the war, a Belgian chemist at the university of Liege was researching similar organophosphorus compounds and in 1939 his and his team’s publications on the topic suddenly ceased. This led the Germans to assume that the Allies had also discovered the nerve agents. In reality, the Belgian researchers had concluded that their line of investigation was unlikely to lead to the desired results and had halted their work. The German concerns were (at least partially) rooted in observation, but, as we know from many cold war developments, misinterpretation of the facts through mirroring one’s own activities.