Hunt and Kill: U-505 and the Battle of the Atlantic

By Theodore P. Savas

One of WWII's pivotal events was the capture of U-505 on June 4, 1944. The top secret seizure of this massive Type IX submarine provided the Allies with priceless information on German technology and innovation. After the war U-505 was transported to Chicago, where today 1,000,000 visitors a year pass through her at the Museum of Science and Industry. Hunt and Kill offers the first definitive study of U-505. The chapters cover her construction, crew and commanders, combat history, general Type IX operations, naval intelligence, the eight fatal German mistakes that doomed the boat, and her capture, transportation, and restoration for posterity. The contributors to this fascinating volume--a Who's Who of U-boat historians--include: Erich Topp (U-Boat Ace, commander of U-552); Eric Rust (Naval Officers Under Hitler); Timothy Mulligan (Neither Sharks Nor Wolves); Jak Mallman Showell (Hitler's U-boat Bases); Jordan Vause (Wolf); Lawrence Patterson (First U-boat Flotilla); Mark Wise (Enigma and the Battle of the Atlantic); Keith Gill (Curator, Museum of Science and Industry), and Theodore Savas (Silent Hunters; Nazi Millionaries).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 19, 2004
• ISBN: 9781611210019

Book preview

Also by Theodore P. Savas

Silent Hunters: German U-boat Commanders of World War II, editor

Nazi Millionaires: The Allied Search for Hidden SS Gold, with Kenneth D. Alford

A Guide to the Battles of the American Revolution, with J. David Dameron

The Red River Campaign: Union and Confederate Leadership and the War in Louisiana, editor, with David W. Woodbury and Gary D. Joiner

The Campaign for Atlanta & Sherman’s March to the Sea, 2 vols., editor, with David A. Woodbury

© 2004 by Theodore P. Savas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

First Savas Beatie edition 2004

2006 printing

ISBN: 1-932714-01-4

Digital Edition ISBN: 978-1-61121-001-9

Published by

Savas Beatie LLC

521 Fifth Avenue, Suite 3400

New York, NY 10175

Phone: [phone]

Savas Beatie titles are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more details, please contact Special Sales, P.O. Box 4527, El Dorado Hills, CA 95762, or you may e-mail us as at [e-mail], or visit our website at www.savasbeatie.com for additional information.

For CR.

1-4-3

Contents

Editor’s Preface

Theodore P. Savas

Foreword

Erich Topp

Introduction

Eric C. Rust

No Target Too Far: The Genesis, Concept, and Operations of Type IX U-Boats in World War II

Eric C. Rust

A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505

Timothy Mulligan

From the Lion’s Roar to Blunted Axe: The Combat Patrols of U-505

Lawrence Paterson

Deciphering the U-boat War: The Role of Intelligence in the Capture of U-505

Mark E. Wise and Jak P. Mallmann Showell

Collision Course: Task Group 22.3 and the Hunt for U-505

Lawrence Paterson

Desperate Decisions: The German Loss of U-505

Jordan Vause

Project 356: U-505 and the Journey to Chicago

Keith Gill

Appendix A: Type IXC U-boats: Technical Data

Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology

Appendix C: Statement of Harald Lange Regarding the Capture of U-505

Notes

Contributors

Maps and Photographs

Map 1: Collision Course: U-505

and TG 22.3 frontis

Map 2: U-505’s Second Patrol to the

Central Atlantic

Map 3: U-505’s Third Patrol

to the Caribbean

Photograph galleries

U-505’s remarkable history, including its astonishing transformation from frontline U-boat to Chicago landmark, is only cursorily understood by most readers—even those with a deep interest in World War II naval history. This incomplete appreciation is understandable because most published accounts highlight only narrow slices of the boat’s complex three-year wartime history…

Theodore P. Savas

Editor’s Preface

In the mid-1990s I organized and had the pleasure of serving as editor of a collection of essays written by leading U-boat scholars and published under the title Silent Hunters: German U-boat Commanders of World War II (Campbell, CA: Savas, 1997; Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003). The criteria set forth for the selection of the biographical portraits were simple: choose a U-boat commander who has not received the scholarly treatment he deserves, one who either accomplished his record incrementally over several patrols or someone whose experiences were somehow unique and worthy of study. The result was a well-received compilation. Hopefully, others think it added something significant to the genre’s literature. At that time I believed other aspects of the U-boat war needed similar treatment, but my transformation from active lawyer to the publishing world, coupled with two cross-country moves in two years, delayed the book you now hold in your hands.

U-505’s remarkable history, including its astonishing transformation from frontline U-boat to Chicago landmark, is only cursorily understood by most readers—even those with a deep interest in World War II naval history. This incomplete appreciation is understandable because most published accounts highlight only narrow slices of the boat’s complex three-year wartime history: Axel-Olaf Loewe’s appendicitis while on patrol, Peter Zschech’s gunshot-to-the-head suicide in the control room, and Harald Lange’s fateful June 4, 1944, encounter with the audacious Daniel V. Gallery and his Task Group 22.3. The boat’s postwar fate is similarly planed smooth, usually with little more than a sentence or two explaining that U-505 was transported to Illinois and can be toured at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

The historical record of U-505 and its crew is much more interesting than these paltry few points and, until now, has never been fully told. After a long and thought-provoking tour of the boat in the late 1990s, I decided it was time to reassemble the team members and challenge them to tell it. The individual chapters they have prepared provide what we all hope is a broad and deep portrait of the history of U-505, its crew, the naval intelligence behind its discovery and seizure in 1944, and its final journey to Chicago and significance to future generations as a historical artifact and war memorial. Captain Gallery’s capture of the boat off the African coast has been told and retold from his perspective, and so a conscious decision was made to weave the various threads of that event within several different chapters, which also made it easier to avoid having to present readers with what would otherwise have been an irksome overlap of coverage.

I remember clearly the first time I met Erich Topp. He was visiting family in Texas and was on his way to southern California before returning to Germany. Baylor University’s Eric Rust provided me with his phone number. At Topp’s invitation I flew down to the desert on January 27, 1996. He walked outside to greet me and flashed a broad smile. He was 82 years old but looked 55—tall, erect and handsome, with piercing ice-blue eyes, a firm handshake, and a hearty laugh. We struck it off immediately and I ended up staying many hours longer than originally planned. The honesty and forthrightness of his responses impressed me. Admiral Topp contributed to Silent Hunters with a moving essay about his deep friendship with fellow ace Engelbert Endrass, written while on patrol in the North Atlantic. Topp believed a book on U-505 was long overdue and kindly agreed to pen the Foreword for it. I have enjoyed our friendship over the years, and wish him continued good health.

Type IX U-boats played a unique role in the war. Their bulky size and slow diving capabilities rendered them less suited for convoy work than the more agile Type VII, though this was only fully realized after many good crews met their end raking North Atlantic lanes in search of clustered prey. The same girth and weight that made Type IXs clumsy convoy participants, however, furnished them with their potency as solo warriors. Their extra tanks held substantially more fuel, allowing them to operate as lone hunters for long periods of time in distant waters. First engineered in the mid-1930s, the Type IX series evolved over the years to become one of the most effective submarines in history. All of this and much more is carefully presented in our opening contribution, No Target Too Far: The Genesis, Concept, and Operations of Type IX U-Boats in World War II, by Eric C. Rust of Baylor University. Dr. Rust meticulously explains the evolution of the German navy and naval doctrine from the First World War through the tumultuous years preceding World War II, the development and technical aspects of this U-boat series, how the Type IX was employed during the war, and its place in German naval history. He also willingly compiled the technical data related to Type IXC boats that appears as Appendix A. As he did so ably with Silent Hunters, Eric graciously agreed to review and help edit each of the essays that appear in this book as well as pen its insightful Introduction. Eric’s keen observations, always graciously delivered, made this study stronger and more cohesive than it otherwise would have been. Over the years our friendship has grown, and for that I am both thankful and fortunate.

Timothy P. Mulligan, another veteran from the Silent Hunters project, switches gears from a solo biography of Karl-Friedrich Merten to something closer to a collective biography entitled "A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505." The title originates with Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the head and soul of the German submarine service in World War II who used the phrase to describe a U-boat crew. As an archivist working with captured German naval records and the author of a recent in-depth book about U-boat sailors, Tim is uniquely situated to write about the men who served aboard U-505. Although the officers are more fully developed as individuals, the common crewmen receive the lion’s share of his attention. Utilizing a vast array of source material, he explores the rich diversity of these men, and in many cases is able to trace how particular individuals ended up aboard U-505. It is indeed a pioneering contribution. The helpful combat chronology for U-505 that appears as Appendix B is also his work. Success or failure for the submarine, and life or death for all on board, ultimately depended on each man performing his job, from the lowest rating to the captain, explains Mulligan. A U-boat was indeed a community bound by fate.

Surprisingly little has been published about U-505’s history before its last voyage from Brest to its fateful rendezvous off Africa’s sultry west coast. Lawrence Paterson’s From Lion’s Roar to Blunted Axe: The Combat Patrols of U-505, explores this little-known and often misunderstood chapter of U-boat history. As those who read the essay will discover, its title is particularly apt. Some will be surprised to learn that U-505 made several successful and difficult patrols in the southern Atlantic and Caribbean. As the pressures of service mounted, acts of sabotage while refitting in port repeatedly forced the boat to return to Lorient, casting a pall over those who served aboard it. It is impossible to fully appreciate and evaluate U-505’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic without an understanding of what transpired on its first eleven war patrols. The boat’s twelfth and final patrol, also related by Paterson in Collision Course: Task Group 22.3 and the Hunt for U-505, caps his contribution to this compendium. Paterson is a native New Zealander, accomplished musician, experienced scuba diver, and the author of two outstanding U-boat Flotilla studies. Over the past two years he has provided both good advice and friendly cheer.

Most readers of U-boat history have a general grasp of the role played by Enigma in the Battle of the Atlantic, but are unaware of how Enigma and other advances in technology led to the capture of U-505. A thorough and thoughtful examination of this story, based almost wholly upon archival sources, is presented in "Deciphering the U-boat War: The Role of Intelligence in the Capture U-505." This chapter is the product of a marvelous collaboration between Mark E. Wise and Jak P. Mallmann Showell. Together, they describe more fully and forcefully than any other published account how Allied intelligence efforts melded with Daniel Gallery’s perseverance and German mistakes to bring about an event unparalleled in the history of modern naval warfare. Both know well of what they write. Wise is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and an intelligence specialist in the U.S. Naval Reserve. His Master’s thesis is on the same subject as his chapter. This contribution is Mark’s first foray into the ranks of the published in the U-boat field. Co-author Jak Showell is well-known to students of the U-boat war. Teacher, scientist, and computing expert, Jak is the author of some two dozen titles and like Wise, enjoys a deep interest in Enigma and intelligence-related issues. Jak also helped provide me with coordinates to map U-505’s patrol routes.

Most accounts of the capture of U-505 are written from the Allied perspective as related through the words and eyes of Daniel V. Gallery. Jordan Vause’s "Desperate Decisions: The German Loss of U-505" examines the issue from the German perspective. He reconstructs (as far as such a thing is possible) what took place inside the boat from the moment the depth charges began to explode through its ascent to the surface and the terrifying minutes that followed. It is a thoughtful essay based upon eyewitness accounts, a keen appreciation of the chain of command, and the observations of other U-boat commanders and personnel. It is also the closest we shall probably ever come to understanding the German decision-making process that fateful day. Jordan, who has authored two well-received U-boat books, was present when the seeds that eventually sprouted the earlier Silent Hunters study were planted in the summer of 1995. Nine years have passed since that evening in his living room. Since that time he and his charming family have moved to the wrong coast. We manage to keep in relatively close contact, though I miss our face-to-face banter.

Anyone with even a cursory interest in the U-boat war learns sooner or later that a real German submarine sits outside Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It is by far the institution’s most popular exhibit, and draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. How it ended up in the American heartland is set forth in meticulous fashion by the boat’s curator, Keith R. Gill, in "Project 356: U-505 and the Journey to Chicago." The boat’s meandering path to the Windy City was paved with politics, money, and egos—which together conspired to nearly derail the effort and doom the submarine to a humiliating end as a target for American artillery practice. Displaying and preserving U-505 has been both costly and difficult, but the museum has finally solved its preservation dilemma by moving the boat indoors, where it will continue to serve as a memorial and historical curiosity to generations yet unborn. The vast majority of the photos in this study would not have been available without Keith’s assistance. On more than one occasion our late-night conversations wandered far a field from the Battle of the Atlantic. I have enjoyed each of them.

Except for its editor, every contributor to Hunt and Kill is a U-boat scholar. Quite honestly, my forte is a long and deep interest in the subject, coupled with reasonably good organizational skills. If this body of work adds substance and understanding to the growing literature on U-boats, it is solely because of their expertise and the strength of their work product. It has been a pleasure working with such an outstanding team. Every editor should be so fortunate.

The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, courtesy of U-505’s always helpful curator and contributor Keith Gill, worked overtime to help locate and prepare many of the photographs that appear in this book. The visual record makes this study much richer and easier to comprehend and appreciate. Fellow contributors Timothy Mulligan and Jak Mallmann Showell supplied map details and boat coordinates.

I would also like to thank Lee Merideth of Historical Indexes for preparing the index, and Ian Hughes of Mousemat Design in the UK for crafting such a fine cover.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I closed without thanking my wife Carol and children, Alexandra Maria and Demetrious Theodore. Somehow I always manage to stretch myself in too many directions simultaneously, and despite Carol’s best efforts to tamp me back into form, she is rarely (if ever) successful. She suffers because of my frenetic existence, bearing as a result more than her fair share of the home front’s daily burdens. I can only ask for my best friend’s continued understanding. Alex and Demetri know what it means when papa slinks toward his library after supper: Momma’s putting us down tonight!

Someday I will try to make it up to you both.

U-505 is best remembered, from my point of view, as a monument to all seamen from every country who never returned from patrol.

Erich Topp

Foreword

Many U-boats and their commanders and crews are celebrated or remembered for their activities and accomplishments made during their war patrols. U-47 for entering Scapa Flow and sinking HMS Royal Oak, for example, or the dramatic successes of the Paukenschlag boats off the eastern coast of America in 1942, the desperate convoy actions and successes of the Happy Times, and even my own accidental sinking of the American destroyer USS Reuben James on October 31, 1941. These events and naturally many more, stand out as accomplishments. The U-505 story, as told in this book, is remembered for other reasons.

U-505 was found by what was called a Hunter-Killer group. If aircraft or escorts from one found you, there was almost no chance of escape. Under the influence of depth charges, U-505 was heavily damaged and forced to surface. The commanding officer, Oberleutnant zur See Harald Lange, tried to defend his boat with available machine guns against overwhelming odds, bravely I might add, but was hurt severely when struck by a bullet in the knee. His brain was still working, but as I understand the case to be, he did not give orders to sink the boat by activating the prepared explosives, as has been the tradition among submariners. It was his duty no matter the circumstances, and in this he failed. The crew, of course, did what they could to survive. They left the boat probably thinking it was set to sink but somehow no one eliminated the coding and enciphering machines and enigma. The result was the Americans captured U-505 and learned valuable information but it did not, I must say, at that late date in the war change fundamentally their war effort. From our perspective it would have been considered a shocking thing, but of course at the time we knew nothing about this activity and Allied success.

Today U-505 has been preserved and can be seen and toured in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry. I have been there many years ago now, and it was very impressive. It brings back to me many memories, although I did not serve on a Type IXC boat but rather a Type II and VIIC, and at the end of the war a Type XXI.

U-505 is best remembered, from my point of view, as a monument to all seamen from every country who never returned from patrol. This collection of accounts, written by authors who know what they are writing about, will help preserve the history of this boat and the memory of these lost men, and in that regard the fate suffered by U-505 on June 4, 1944, can be turned into something positive for mankind.

U-505’s feats were more than balanced by interminable months of drudgery and flat-out failure—odysseys, if you want, without the cleverness, skill, endurance, and character of an Odysseus. The only vision the men of U-505 are certain to have shared with Troy’s legendary conqueror must have been a determination to come home for good to their Penelopes and to leave the sea to Poseidon’s devious whims.

Eric C. Rust

Introduction

I still remember the day—I was then a ten-year-old Gymnasiast in the town of Kappeln on the Baltic Sea just south of Denmark—when Dr. Schnoor acquainted me with my first Latin phrase: pars pro toto. Doc Schnoor was not a particularly exciting teacher in any of the subjects he taught (German, religion and history), in large measure because, as a veteran of Operation Barbarossa, he suffered from terrible pains in the stump of his right leg which the Russians had shot away two decades before. Indeed, it would have made more sense if our school principal and director of Latin studies, Pasche Klüver, who had lost an eye in Germany’s costly airborne attack on Crete in 1941, had introduced me to that majestic ancient language.

Over the years I have used both the expression and the concept of pars pro toto on more than a few occasions on my students for it suggests a method of inquiry and a path toward deeper insight as simple and as straightforward as it is effective. Translated literally it means a part for the whole and corresponds to the basic notion that, by studying a small segment of a much larger phenomenon in great detail and intensity, one stands to gain a solid and valid understanding of that broader entity through a process of measured and informed generalization. Applied to our case, the story of U-505 as told in Hunt and Kill becomes the pars that holds the key to our grasp of the totum, that long, bloody, relentless, but also grand and epic struggle from 1939 to 1945 that transformed the Atlantic Ocean and its peripheral waters for those who were there into the most terrifying theatre of the most terrible war in modern memory.

In all likelihood U-505 would have remained a more or less typical German submarine among hundreds of U-boats with similar war histories had it not become involved in a sequence of events that led to its capture on the high seas by American naval forces and its eventual display as the most prized exhibit of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. To be sure, its eleven wartime patrols before that fateful day off the West African coast in June 1944 knew moments of high suspense and fleeting glory, but those feats were more than balanced by interminable months of drudgery and flat-out failure—odysseys, if you want, without the cleverness, skill, endurance, and character of an Odysseus. The only vision the men of U-505 are certain to have shared with Troy’s legendary conqueror must have been a determination to come home for good to their Penelopes and to leave the sea to Poseidon’s devious whims.

But back to the pars and the totum. This volume describes and analyzes the history of a single U-boat—its men, its activities, its adversaries, and its unusual fate—in as much detail as any reader is likely to discover in a book on naval history. Recounted by some of the foremost experts in the field today, the saga of U-505, by informed extension, is the story of all German submarines and submariners in World War II, and of all Allied sailors, soldiers, and airmen whose skills, wits, and courage marked the Battle of the Atlantic. When we read of the conception and deployment of Type IX boats like U-505 in the Kriegsmarine, we feel transported to U-boat headquarters where Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and his staff plotted their cleverly conceived but fatally doomed tonnage war against Allied shipping on all seven seas. The careful breakdown and scholarly scrutiny of the boat’s officers and men speaks volumes about the German Navy’s staffing habits and how they stacked up against the war’s inexorable demands. The summary of U-505’s prior patrols illuminates both the possibilities and limitations of Germany’s raiders of the deep as their chances for meaningful success first flickered and then expired like a candle’s flame out of wax and oxygen. And not least there is the masterful examination of the ever-diminishing options Oblt.z.S.d.R. Harald Lange and his men faced when their boat shot up from the depths to encounter certain destruction by a foe who held every trump card in the deck. No doubt, dozens of U-boat commanders must have felt exactly as Lange did when they opened their boat’s conning tower hatch after surfacing and realized in an instant that the game was up.

This exercise of projecting the experience of U-505 onto the whole of the war at sea is by no means restricted to the German side. No reader can possibly be deceived into believing the Allies were destined to win the war on account of sheer superiority in numbers, industrial capacity, and motivation. The bloodletting associated with the U-boats’ assault on the United States’ and Canada’s Eastern Seaboard as well as the Caribbean in 1942 should cure anyone of such delusions. But numbers, economic potential, and the consistent application of human ingenuity to the necessities of combat did favor the Allied effort from the start and only grew more pronounced as the war grew old. Foremost among such endeavors must rank the extraordinary accomplishment of codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Britain who, with help from their American associates in Dayton, Ohio, broke the German Enigma cipher—known as the Ultra Secret to the Allies—which most German naval leaders in their unfathomable hubris deemed perfectly secure until the very end of the conflict. Still, reading the enemy’s mail is one thing; making him pay for it in tangible ways is quite another. And here again readers will discern that history is ultimately predicated on the performance and character of individuals, in this case Commander Knowles and Captain Gallery of the U.S. Navy whose mutual trust, friendship, and singleness of purpose made a decisive difference. Sometimes historians point to independent chains of causation to account for historical events whose outcomes they have trouble understanding or explaining, typically dismissing them as products of contingency or chance beyond plausible solution. No such excuse can apply to the Allied detection and capture of U-505. While the boat may have made its way home to Lorient with the greatest of luck in a counter-factual scenario, the indisputable reality remains that successful codebreaking, HF/DF vigilance, relentless aerial surveillance, and the dogged determination of a hunter-killer task force commander and his men, doomed the boat days before its final encounter with destiny.

An argument can be made, as my good friend Admiral Topp reminds us in his Foreword to this work, that the capture of U-505, its crew and all its contents came too late to make a real difference in the Battle of the Atlantic. Fair enough. But war is also about symbols, heroes, and yes, trophies. And here the ultimate significance of U-505’s journey comes together for us alive today, from its encounter with Task Group 22.3 off the littoral of Africa, to its lay-over in Bermuda, its long and almost lethal sojourn at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to its final and present-day display off the shores of Lake Michigan in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois. There was nothing in the stars that destined this boat, built proudly and efficiently by the Deutsche Werft in Hamburg in 1941, to end its life as a tourist attraction and curiosity for school children and history enthusiasts in the heartland of its former enemy. By the same token, every indication suggests the Allies earned their triumph fair and square, and they continue to enjoy every right to savor a victory celebrating that eternal and inimitable recipe for victory: brains and grit.

Critical readers, especially those with a pacifist set of mind, may take issue with the title we chose for our book: Hunt and Kill. Upon superficial inspection it appears to convey a taste and predeliction for blood and violence, for celebrating the gory side of things. We certainly do not feel that way; nor did the men engaged on either side of the U-boat campaign. They deeply respected their enemy—as we do with the benefit of hindsight—and took extraordinary care to ensure their stricken foe, once cornered beyond hope, enjoyed every chance to survive. The capture of U-505 is a remarkable but not at all unusual case in point. At the same time both sides knew that as long as the fight was on and neither side had gained a decisive advantage, everything came down to that simple yet terrible demand: Hunt and Kill.

One final annotation. Not long ago I published a book review about a work on the strategic cooperation (or lack of it) between the navies of Japan and Germany in World War II. While my evaluation of the book was on balance quite positive, I felt impelled to include the following observation: Collaborative historiography involving multiple authors often leads to an uneven product marked by gaps, duplication, imbalance in coverage, irritating changes in style and emphasis, and a less than satisfactory sense of closure, even if aimed at a knowledgeable audience. No such problems pertain to the present volume. Readers will immediately and instinctively notice that this study, thanks to the guidance of its editor and the expertise of its contributors, is carefully coordinated to focus exclusively on U-505 and its singular but telling fate—pars pro toto.

One of the myths regarding German U-boats is that all submarines were created equal and looked alike. In fact, German naval architects and engineers produced a range of different submarine types, each intended for specific tactical or strategic purposes, each with its particular strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and limitations.

Eric C. Rust

No Target Too Far

The Genesis, Concept, and Operations of

Type IX U-Boats in World War II

Artícles 188 and 191 of the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany’s representatives signed under protest on June 28, 1919, could not have been clearer: All German submarines…must [be] handed over to the Governments of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers…Those in course of construction shall be broken up entirely by the German Government under the supervision of the said Governments…The construction or acquisition of any submarine, even for commercial purposes, shall be forbidden in Germany.¹

These stark and unforgiving clauses closed Germany’s first great experiment in underwater naval warfare, an experiment which had sent twelve million tons of Allied and neutral shipping to the bottom of the oceans, had struck terror into the hearts of merchant sailors and naval crews alike, indeed had lent to the First World War a dimension nobody could in the least have foreseen when the Guns of August ended a spectacular century of peace, progress and prosperity in that by then distant summer of 1914. It had also cost the lives of 5,000 German U-boat officers and men, the wrecks of their sunken craft, some 200 of them, along with those of their thousands of victims, littering the waters around the British Isles, the Atlantic, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean Sea.

No profound insight is required to discern why it was primarily British (and to some extent American) pressure that reduced Germany’s postwar surface fleet to miniscule proportions compared to its status as the world’s second most powerful navy in 1914, or why the Anglo-Saxon powers specifically insisted on the total and permanent elimination of Germany’s submarine component. On numerous occasions during the war, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson expressed his outrage over what he considered Germany’s barbaric use of submarines, with the Lusitania case of May 1915 ranking merely as the most notorious of such incidents. Indeed, Germany’s calculated resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 led directly to the United States’s declaration of war against the Center Powers two months later and ultimately to the Second Reich’s military defeat and political collapse. In a similar fashion the British Admiralty considered the submarine a decidedly ungentle-manly weapon—sneaky, stealthy, and bluntly brutal, its hit-and-run tactics and newfangled torpedo technology at odds with, and unworthy of, the western naval tradition which the Royal Navy felt called upon to preserve and to prolong. To play the game fairly, the Germans should have come out and fought in the open in time-honored Nelsonian style on the surface for all to see, as their High Seas Fleet had done briefly at Jutland in 1916 with sufficiently bloody but strategically inconclusive results. To Anglo-Saxon observers, Germany’s U-boat campaign simply proved the Teutonic way of making war had indeed deteriorated ingloriously from the days of Frederick the Great and, more recently those of Otto von Bismarck, to a level akin to the terror of late antiquity’s Attila and his Huns.

Upon honest inspection, even the winners of the war had to admit by 1919 that the hostilities just concluded held out a number of revolutionary lessons for future naval warfare, just as they did for their counterparts in the army who had survived the slaughter along the Western Front and elsewhere, or for those who had opened a new dimension altogether by taking the war to the air. The experience of Germany’s formidable submarine campaign—by 1918 the Kaiser’s shipyards had completed no fewer that 344 boats of various designs to add to the 28 U-boats in commission when the war began—would undermine the very foundations upon which western naval doctrine had rested for centuries.²

Among many others, the experience of the First World War raised the question of whether major naval powers such as Great Britain, the United States and Japan could or even should continue to try to exercise effective and ubiquitous control over the seas. Enemy submarines, if available in sufficient numbers and operating from convenient forward bases, stood to threaten such hegemony by endangering not only the vital lifelines of merchant shipping but the safety of the surface fleet units designed and deployed to protect them. The era in which a numerically and qualitatively dominant fleet of capital ships with its vast and superior fire power, together with a supporting cast of cruisers, destroyers, and torpedo boats, could literally