Operation Drumbeat : the dramatic true story of Germany’s first U-boat attack against the American coast in World War II

1140 Pages·1991·4.38 MB·English

by  Gannon

OPERATION
DRUMBEAT
The Dramatic True Story of
Germany’s first U-Boat
Attacks Along
the American Coast
in World War II
MICHAEL GANNON
To Gigi

CONTENTS
Map
Prologue
1 U-Boats Westward
2 Down to the Seas
3 “We Are at War”
4 A Fighting Machine
5 Destination New York
6 Waiting for Hardegen
7 Beat on the Kettledrum
8 New York, New York
9 Where Is the Navy?
10 Course Home!
11 Last Patrol
12 The Wavy Stirs
13 final Reckoning
Afterword
APPENDIX A Maintaining Trim
APPENDIX B Operation of the Head
APPENDIX C Operation of the Schlüssel M (Enigma) Machine
APPENDIX D The Engine Room
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
GLOSSARY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
It was night when the message from B-Dienst, the radio intelligence service of
the German Navy, reached Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker at the
Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) field headquarters near Rastenburg, deep in the
Görlitz forest of East Prussia. When he read it the Führer was stunned: JAPAN
BEGAN HOSTILITIES AGAINST THE UNITED STATES ON 7 DECEMBER. AT 1930 HOURS
CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME STRONG AIR FORMATIONS ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR
(HONOLULU).1 A declaration of war might have been expected, but a carrier strike
across 3,200 miles of open sea against the American main battle fleet? If at that
moment Hitler recalled the maxim of Frederick the Great, whom he claimed to
emulate—“It is pardonable to be defeated but never to be surprised”—he knew
that the muse of history was not likely to absolve him. The master of Europe was
caught completely by surprise.2
The same message but with additional details of U.S. warship and aircraft
losses flashed on the Siemens Geheimschreiber T-52 teleprinter in a handsome
chateau requisitioned from a French sardine merchant at Kernével, a point of
land bordering the mouth of the inner harbor of the German-occupied Atlantic
port of Lorient. There it was read with equal amazement by Admiral Karl
Dönitz, Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (BdU) (commander in chief, U-boats).
Dönitz went directly to his Situation Room and moved his dividers across the
three-foot-diameter world globe that he used for rapid-distance calculations.
From the principal U-boat base at Lorient he tracked the Great Circle distance to
New York City on the east coast of the United States—distance: 3,000 nautical
miles. Only the large Unterseeboot (submarine) Types IXB and IXC would be
able to make that distance, he calculated, and still have fuel to maneuver.
Quickly he made additional measurements and computations. After reaching an
operations area off New York in twenty-two days the 1,050-ton Type IXB would
have 60 cubic meters of diesel fuel oil for attack maneuvers against merchant
ships with war cargoes; the 1,120-ton IXC with its larger fuel bunkers would
need about the same number of days to cross and have 110 cubic meters
available for maneuvers. That would give the IXB six or seven days in the area
and the IXC about fifteen days, plenty of time for both to do great damage.
Looking at other ports for comparison, Dönitz found that an IXB reaching and
returning from Galveston, Texas, would have zero cubic meters for operations
while an IXC would have barely 40. For Aruba, the rich oil depot in the Dutch
West Indies, the figures were 25 and 65, respectively. The “SC” slow eastbound
convoys, averaging six and one-half knots, with war maté-riel bound for
England routinely assembled at Sydney, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island,
and the figures there were a promising 90 and 140.3
It was the East Coast of the United States, however, that interested Dönitz
most. A strike there would have much the same effect as the Japanese had had at
Hawaii, revealing American vulnerability to a determined military foe. It would
intimidate U.S. defenses and humiliate the civilian population. Most important,
if followed by additional and unremitting strikes during the period when U.S.
naval and air forces could still be expected to be weak and inexperienced, the
operation could result in damage to the U.S. and Allied war effort far exceeding
the damage wreaked at Pearl Harbor. Lost in the anchorage at Hawaii, it
appeared from the news flash, were aged, slow warships, obsolescent by the
standards of the new capital ships of the German Fleet; lost on the United States’
Atlantic doorstep, which contained the busiest sea-lanes in the world, would be a
significant part of the merchant lifeblood that was keeping England in the war,
not to mention fueling the United States’ own nascent war industries. The
prospects of going after single, unescorted vessels in American waters were all
the more exciting to the admiral since, in his view, it was in the Atlantic battle
against commerce that the war with England would be won or lost, and at the
present moment, on orders from the Führer, all his U-boats had been withdrawn
from the Atlantic in order to support operations in the Mediterranean and off
Gibraltar.4 War with the United States would get the U-boats back in the
Atlantic where they belonged. The commander in chief knew that all his
commanders would be of one mind with him: The Americans must be made to
pay for their false neutrality; for their arrogance in declaring four-fifths of the
Atlantic to be part of the Western Hemisphere; for their sighting reports on U-
boats to British destroyers; and for their hitherto-untouchable convoys of war
materiel and food to enemy England.
Since October, Dönitz had sent boats to intercept Britain-bound convoys as far
west as the banks of Newfoundland, but now, with mounting expectancy, he
jumped his gaze southward, past the St. Lawrence River and the Nova Scotia