In the early evening of 15 January 1942, Vice Admiral Karl Donitz, Commander U-boats, hosted five submarine captains, the Second U-boat Flotilla commander, and two Hamburg-America Line captains at his command post in the Villa Kerillon at Kern?
vel, near Brittany's Atlantic coast. The U-boat skippers were all regular navy men, had all graduated from the German Naval Academy, and had all served with the surface fleet before joining the "Volunteer Corps Donitz." The more senior among them were in their late 30s to early 40s, well above the average age for their rank-first lieutenant (Kapitanleutnant). None knew why he had been summoned.
Donitz quickly enlightened them. The five skippers and their boats were to be the first wave in a special operation, code-named Neuland (New Land-a cross-Atlantic assault on the Allied oil tankers and bauxite carriers that plied the Caribbean Sea. While oil was the military's lifeblood, bauxite was the chief source of aluminum, from which aircraft components were made. As always, Donitz's orders were precise: "Surprise, concentric attack on the traffic in the waters adjacent to the West Indies Islands. The core of the attack thus consists in the surprising and synchronized appearance at the main stations of Aruba a[nd] Curacao."1 The group was to start operations during the new moon period beginning on 16 February. Gunther Muller-Stockheim's U-67 was to take up station off Curacao; Werner Hartenstein's U-156 and Jurgen von Rosenstiel's U-502 off Aruba; Albrecht Achilles' U-161 off Port of Spain, Trinidad; and Asmus "Nicolai" Clausen's U-129 off the coast of British and Dutch Guiana.
Formalized on 17 January, "Operations Order No. 51 'West Indien'" identified the primary targets as oil tankers and bauxite freighters as well as the various oil refineries on the islands-most notably the Standard Oil of New Jersey Esso Lago plant at San Nicolas, Aruba, the largest in the world; the Trinidad Leaseholds' refinery at Pointe-a-Pierre, the largest in the British Empire; and the Royal Dutch Shell Shottegat plant at Curacao.
The Hamburg-America Line captains, who were familiar with the region, had briefed the admiral on the precise nature of the oil traffic: "The oil is brought to Aruba as well as Curacao from the Gulf of Maracaibo in shallow-draft tankers of about 1,200 to 1,500 tons with a draft of 2 to 3 m[eters], is refined there and loaded onto large ocean-going tankers." Trinidad offered an especially target-rich environment; apart from housing the oil refinery and tank farms, it was the trans-shipment site for bauxite as well as the departure point for seaborne traffic bound for Cape Town, South Africa.
Each of the U-boats was to undertake the great Atlantic roundtrip-8,000 nautical miles to Aruba and back, 7,200 nautical miles to and from Trinidad-using only one diesel engine to save fuel. That would eat up 67 percent of the Type IXC boats' range and leave the skippers two to three weeks on station in the Caribbean (the so-called Milchkuhe [milk cow] resupply subs were not yet operational). All attacks were to be launched precisely "five hours before daybreak" to assure surprise.
The operational tactics for Neuland would, in many ways, be a departure from Donitz's customary methods. This time the "gray sharks" were assigned specific vessels to attack, and their captains were free to interpret their zones of attack liberally and independently. Furthermore, their instructions stated, "Do not break off [operations] too soon!" The U-boats were not to "kill" and run, but were to remain in theater and drive home their attacks. They were to fire torpedoes first and then use their 10.5-cm deck guns, if land targets were in the offing. In eager anticipation of Neuland, the five captains spoke of a dawning "Golden West" during which they were sure to have good hunting.
Squeezing the Oil Supply
The element of surprise was with the German raiders. In the early hours of 16 February, simultaneous explosions from torpedoes slamming into tankers off Aruba, Curacao, and Trinidad shattered a tranquil paradise. Radio transmitters from Galveston to Caracas blared out the new danger to shipping. On Aruba, there ensued a widespread exodus from coastal cities into the cacti-studded cunucu (countryside). Chinese tanker crews on Curacao went on strike; 15 were shot by the local Dutch militia, and 37 others "disappeared."2
Other U-boats as well as Italian submarines joined the operation, and over Neuland's first six months, the raiders dispatched 965,000 tons of Allied shipping in the Caribbean, of which a staggering 57 percent were tankers. For a short period the offensive put the Allied oil supply in jeopardy. The roughly 95 percent of the oil for the U.S. East Coast that came from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico-59 million gallons per day-quickly dropped by 25 percent by the end of 1942 as a result of the U-boat war. The decline became critical for Operation Torch, the November 1942 Allied landings in North Africa, and Neuland was the catalyst behind the construction of both the Big Inch and the Little Big Inch pipelines from the east Texas oil fields to near Philadelphia and New York City.3
Oil shipments from the Caribbean to Britain declined from 67 percent of total imports in 1941 to just 23 percent by 1943.4 At the end of that year, oil reserves had shrank to six months' consumption. Royal Navy stocks fell to the danger level, and some RAF bomber squadrons faced being grounded for lack of fuel.5
Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill was well aware to the criticality of oil. On 22 June 1941, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he had informed the British nation in a radio broadcast that "The terrible war machine must be fed not only with flesh but with oil."6
The Allies also dearly felt the effects of bauxite carrier losses. In 1939 Britain had imported all of its raw supply of the ore-some 302,000 tons. By 1942, as the U-boats ravaged the waters off British and Dutch Guiana, that figure fell to the dangerous level of just 48,000 tons.7 Aircraft production was only maintained by drastically increasing finished aluminum imports, almost exclusively from the United States, from 58,000 to 132,000 tons between 1939 and 1942.
Similarly, the U-boats in the Caribbean made a severe dent in the 1 million tons of bauxite that had been shipped annually to ALCOA in the United States and ALCAN in Canada. In May 1942, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall sent his assessment of the situation to Admiral Ernest R. King, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet: The Neuland boats had destroyed 22 percent of the Allied bauxite fleet, one out of every four Army ships sent to reinforce the Caribbean theater, and 3.5 percent of Allied tanker tonnage per month.8 Marshall warned that "Our entire war effort [was now] threatened," and King would at times suspend sailings into the area. The U.S. Navy calculated that the sinking of an average-sized ship was equivalent to the damage inflicted by 1,000 successful Luftwaffe bombing sorties.
With regard to the modern-day Pirates of the Caribbean, the U-boat captains who had undertaken the initial Neuland attacks enjoyed immense success and were well rewarded by Admiral Donitz. Four earned the coveted Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross): Clausen in March 1942, Hartenstein in September 1942, Muller-Stockheim in November 1942, and Achilles in January 1943. The fifth captain, Rosenstiel, sank or damaged 104,000 tons of shipping but died when his U-boat went to the bottom in July 1942 after having been depth-charged in the Bay of Biscay. Had he lived he certainly would have earned his Knight's Cross.9
The Allies Strike Back
The defeat of the U-boats, in the Caribbean as well as in the Atlantic, came through no single device or effort but rather through a combination of Allied antisubmarine (ASW) technologies. They ranged from Ultra (intelligence from Allied decryptions of German radio messages) to Huff-Duff (high-frequency direction-finder receivers used to triangulate the position of U-boats) and from the Leigh Light (a powerful searchlight mounted on bombers) to centimetric radar (which could detect objects as small as a submerged U-boat's raised periscope).
Put bluntly, Germany never developed the R&D to counter Allied ASW technology. Neither a host of primitive radar detectors (FuMB, Wanze) nor decoys (Aphrodite, Bold) proved effective. To the Third Reich, radar largely remained a mystery. By May 1943, all Donitz could do was demand that his skippers overcome Allied "cunning and technical innovations" with their "ingenuity, ability and iron will."10 Using language reminiscent of that used by General Erich von Falkenhayn to justify the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the "Great Lion" ordered his skippers fight on to the bitter end and "force the enemy to undergo a permanent bloodletting, one by which even the strongest body must slowly and inevitably bleed to death."11
In the Caribbean, the force multiplier and killer was air power. With the first wave of Neuland attacks, the United States pressed its rights under the 1940 "destroyers-for-bases" deal with Britain to militarize the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Antigua, British Guiana, and Trinidad. Eventually, two-thirds of all U.S. ASW aircraft in the Caribbean Defense Zone were based on these British holdings. Jungles were bulldozed and airfields constructed almost overnight; harbors and inlets were dredged and flying-boat bases established. Of the roughly 90 U-boats that sortied in the Caribbean, U.S. Navy patrol craft destroyed 30, U.S. Army Air of bombers 4, and the Royal Air Force 3.12 Allied ASW measures combined in July 1942 to decimate Donitz's milk-cow fleet (U-487, U-459, U-461, U-462, and U-489) off the Azores and Spain, leaving but two resupply subs to service the Neuland boats.13 Even a cursory reading of the Caribbean boats' war diaries reveals a litany of repeated and prolonged crash dives owing to being spotted from the air.
Reasons for Failure
Throughout Neuland a bitter behind-the-scenes dispute raged over targeting. While Donitz was, as ever, fixated on "tonnage warfare," Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief, Navy, had demanded that shore installations such as refineries and tank farms be given priority. He had a point. The giant Aruba refineries alone produced 500,000 barrels of gasoline and diesel fuel per day, including some 5,000 barrels of critical 100-octane aviation fuel. But Donitz continued to insist that the U-boat war was a purely operational art form. "Not the strategic pressure," he lectured Raeder, but rather "the number of sinkings . . . regardless where and whether [the ships were loaded] or in ballast" was decisive. "The strategic pressure alone cannot . . . justify a war patrol."14 He simply hoped that Germany could sink ships faster than Britain and the United States could build them. In the end, this simple and naive "strategy" failed.
Raeder, for his part, admonished Donitz as early as 11 February 1942 that the U-boats "deploy their artillery with incendiary shells against oil tank farms." Five days later, as the Neuland boats were about to launch their attacks, he repeated his demand that Donitz "inaugurate actions of boats [near] Aruba-Curacao by shelling tank farms."15
With few exceptions during the campaign, the orders were to no avail. Each time the boats sortied, Donitz promised compliance with Raeder's directives but then ignored them. After one of Donitz's many rebuttals, in which he again juxtaposed "strategic pressure" and tactical "sinkings," Raeder's staff queried him whether "Commander U-Boats has been misled in these matters or simply does not want to understand them!"16 An angry Donitz committed to his war diary what amounted to a lecture: "The tonnage war is the primary task of the U-boats, perhaps the decisive contribution by the U-boats to the outcome to the war. It must be conducted where the greatest successes can be gained at the least cost."17
Confusion also existed between the German admirals as to how to proceed operationally. Donitz's position was that the available U-boats were to be sent out in rotating waves to maintain the element of surprise and to exert the maximum pressure on Allied tankers, transports, and their escorts. Raeder, on the other hand, on 26 March 1942 demanded that no more waves be dispatched. Instead, he wanted what he termed "continuous occupation" of the Caribbean basin by the gray sharks.18 Within 48 hours, Donitz was angrily lecturing his commander that U-boats simply could not occupy any area of the sea. Only five boats were available for the Caribbean theater at any time. It would take them up to three weeks to reach their operational area. And to hold back fully provisioned boats until a small armada could sail would not only cause "unwanted congestion" in the small Brittany bases but would have "a very negative psychological effect on crews ready for war patrol."19
When Raeder on 2 April fired off an acid one-sentence telegram to Kernevel, "Commander-in-Chief wishes that his dispatched order [of 26 March] will be carried out through deployment of all suitable units," Donitz resorted to his customary practice of not replying.20 Instead, he again repeated the U-boats' primary mission in his war diary: "The decisive question in the long run is the race between sinking and new construction."21
The absence of a clear tactical objective also crippled Neuland. What should be targeted: the small tankers exiting the Bay of Maracaibo; the ocean-going tankers departing Aruba, Curacao, and Trinidad; or the refineries on shore? And should single boats in specific areas carry out the mission, or concentrated "wolf packs" undertake it in one area at a time? In the end, the operation remained a pure "tonnage war."
As if the Raeder-Donitz antagonism was not enough, the Commander-in-Chief, German Armed Forces, continually meddled in Neuland. Time and again, Adolf Hitler, on the basis of his famous "intuition," ordered U-boats diverted from operations and reassigned to "threatened" areas. Norway, he constantly lectured Donitz, remained the "zone of destiny" in the Battle of the Atlantic.22 In February 1942, at the very launch of Neuland, the F??hrer ordered 20 U-boats to patrol Norwegian waters against an expected Allied invasion. Similarly in June 1942, as yet another wave of boats headed for the Caribbean, Hitler instructed D??nitz to redeploy them around the Azores as well as the Cape Verde and Madeira islands to rebuff what he was sure was an imminent Allied assault on North Africa.23 And when that operation finally came in November 1942, Hitler predictably ordered all available U-boats (eight) to execute a "completely victorious operation" against the Allied invasion flotillas.24
The conclusion of a Naval War College study provided another reason for Operation Neuland's failure: Donitz did not apply "overwhelming force" to a "decisive point."25 He shifted his forces to react to enemy moves rather than concentrate them against a single target or commodity. The initial U-boat concentration off Aruba, Curacao, and Trinidad yielded to a concentration off Brazil that, in turn, yielded to a concentration off Africa, and finally the boats returned to wolf-pack tactics against almost invulnerable Atlantic convoys. Donitz remained firm in his conviction that success was measured by the average sinkings per U-boat per day (the statistics, in neat tables, were displayed on the walls of his headquarters) while ignoring the constantly rising overall number of enemy ships as well as the limited labor and materiel available to replace lost U-boats. The fact that Hitler's war in the East consumed ever greater amounts of labor and materiel, including fuel, was certainly beyond the U-boat commander's power to remedy.
A final Neuland flaw was more basic: The vessels available in 1942 simply were not up to the task demanded of them. The workhorse of the German submarine fleet, the Type VIIC, was a small 800-ton craft with an optimum range of only 8,500 nautical miles at 10 knots. The larger Type IXC boats displaced 1,541 tons submerged and had an optimum range of 14,035 nautical miles at 10 knots. Neither could compare with the U.S. Navy's 2,400-ton, air-conditioned Gato or Balao classes.
Conditions on board the U-boats in tropical waters were abysmal. On his first Neuland patrol, Achilles in U-161 reported temperatures of 40 degrees C (104 degrees F) in the boat and humidity near 100 percent. After nine successive crash dives under those conditions, the men "had reached the limits of their physical and psychological capacities."26
Shortly thereafter, Hartenstein in U-156 reported similar conditions after 13 hours underwater: "Humidity is much more troublesome than heat" and resulted in "severe diminution of the crews' efficiency."27 In July 1942 his chief engineer, Wilhelm Polchau, took pains to inform Donitz that 30 degree C (86 F) water failed to cool the engines, inside temperatures averaged 34 degrees C (93 F), and charging the batteries had been impossible when the temperature was 47 degrees (117 F).28 A month later, Achilles for a second time informed Commander U-boats that heat and humidity in the tropics had taken their toll on the crew, which was suffering from skin sores, boils, digestive disorders, and exhaustion.29
Operation Neuland showed Donitz at his operational best but strategic worst. He skillfully employed "operational maneuver as a force multiplier," thereby forcing the Allies to patrol mammoth areas of water while he struck what he considered the weak points in their defense.30 In the process, he sought to ensure "the greatest successes . . . at the least cost." While Neuland dealt the Allies a stunning initial blow both materially and psychologically, the U-boat commander never managed to sustain that effort. Nor could he convince Hitler or Raeder to commit overwhelming force to this critical area.
Even after succeeding Raeder in 1943 as navy commander-in-chief, Karl Donitz remained wedded to his lifelong belief that tonnage alone mattered. He perhaps had put it best in his war diary on 14 April 1942: "The enemies' shipping forms a single totality. Therefore, in this regard, it is immaterial where a ship is sunk; in the last analysis, it has to be replaced by a new construction." Simply sinking ships, whether loaded or in ballast, he added, was "incomparably more important [than] to reduce sinkings by making them in a prescribed area."31
It was a fool's game. In the critical September 1942 to May 1945 period, the U-boats sank only 272 of 43,526 Allied merchant ships on the Atlantic run; 99.4 percent of Allied ships made it to port safely. Of the 859 gray sharks that sortied on war patrols, 648 (75 percent) were lost-and those, a shocking 215 (33 percent) went down on their first patrol. Allied air power accounted for 234 (36 percent) of all boats lost.32 The human toll, whatever the final tally, remains even more shocking. The names of some 30,000 German submariners killed during World War II are listed on bronze tablets at the U-Boat Memorial at Multenort, Germany.33
Less than a year into Operation Neuland, the entire U-boat war was effectively over except for the killing. According to one eminent U-boat historian, Clay Blair, by 1943 it had become a "suicidal enterprise." Another submarine scholar, Michael Salewski, described it as being "dragged on like a ghostly, senseless, and murderous charade."34 Neuland, at least, was conceived within the realm of operational logic and probability, but largely because of high-command dissension it similarly became a senseless effort.
1. "Operationsbefehl 'West Indien' No 51, Secret. For Commanders Only!" Bundesarchiv-Militurarchiv (hereafter BA-MA), Freiburg, Germany, RM 7/2336 Chefsache, vol. 3, U-Boote. Allgemein. Signed "Donitz."
2. Junnes Sint Jago, De Tragedie van 20 April 1942. Arbeidsconflict Chinese zeelieden en CSM mondt uit in bloedbad (Willemstad: In eigen Beheer 2000).
3. See John W. Frey and H. Chandler Ide, eds., A History of the Petroleum Administration for War 1941-1945 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946).
4. War Cabinet and Cabinet Office: Historical Section: War Histories, "Statistics of petroleum supplies, disposal and stocks in the UK 1938 and 1940-50," the National Archives, Kew, Great Britain, Civil CAB 102/588.
5. Melanie Wiggins, Torpedoes in the Gulf: Galveston and the U-Boats, 1942-1943 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), pp. 148-49.
6. British Library of Information, www.ibiblio.org.
7. The Times, British War Production, 1939-1945: A Record (London: The Times Publishing Company, 1945), pp. 135-36; and Fitzroy Baptiste, "The Exploitation of Caribbean Bauxite and Petroleum, 1914-1945," Social and Economic Studies 37 (1988): pp. 110-13.
8. Statistics from Michael C. Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 68-72.
9. Compiled from the web site www.uboat.net.
10. Diary entry, May 1943. BA-MA, RM 87/27, Kriegstagebuch (KTB) des BdU. The undated message was attached to the diary entry for 15 May 1943.
11. Diary entry for 24 May 1943. Ibid.
12. Compiled from Gaylord T. M. Kelshall, The U-Boat War in the Caribbean (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), pp. 461-71.
13. See, John F. White, U-Boat Tankers 1941-1945: Submarine Suppliers to Atlantic Wolf Packs (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998).
14. Diary entries for 11 August and 9 September 1942. BA-MA, KTB des BdU, RM 87/22.
15. Raeder to Donitz, 11 and 16 February 1942. BA-MA, RM 7/2336 Chefsache Bd. 3: U-Boote. Allgemein.
16. Note of 10 August 1942. BA-MA, RM 87/7 KTB des BdU.
17. Diary entry for 19 December 1942. BA-MA, KTB des BdU, RM 87/22.
18. Raeder to Donitz, 26 March 1942. BA-MA, RM 7/846 I SKL, Teil C IV, KTB U-Bootskriegsfuhrung 1942.
19. Donitz to Raeder, 28 March 1942. Ibid.
20. Staff telegram of 2 April 1942. Ibid.
21. Diary entry of 14 April 1941. BA-MA, RM 87/5, KTB des BdU.
22. See Holger H. Herwig, Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889-1941 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 243 ff.
23. Entry for 17 June 1942. Gerhard Wagner, ed., Lagevortrage des Oberbefehlshabers der Kriegsmarine vor Hitler 1939-1945 (Munich: Lehmanns, 1972), p. 396. Also, Robert E. Kuenne, The Attack Submarine: A Study in Strategy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 136.
24. Cited in Lawrence Paterson, Second U-Boat Flotilla (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2003), p. 180.
25. Karl M. Hasslinger, "The U-Boat War in the Caribbean: Opportunities Lost," Department of Operations, Naval War College, Newport, March 1996, pp. 9-10.
26. War Diary (KTB), U-161, 2. Unternehmung, BA-MA, PG 30,148/2.
27. War Diary (KTB), U-156, 2. Unternehmung, BA-MA, PG 30, 143/2.
28. Wilhelm Polchau, Engineer Report, 3rd War Patrol, 22.4-7.7.1942. BA-MA, RM 98/525 "U156" KTB Ing.
29. War Diary (KTB), U-161, 3. Unternehmung, BA-MA, PG 30, 148/3.
30. Hasslinger, "The U-Boat War," p. 14.
31. BA-MA, RM 87/5, KTB des BdU, entry for 14 April 1942. Also, Peter Padfield, "Grand Admiral Karl Donitz," in Stephen Howarth, ed., Men of War: Great Naval Leaders of World War II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), p. 193.
32. Clay Blair, Hitler's U-Boat War, vol. II, The Hunted, 1942-1945 (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 705, 707; Alex Niestle, German U-boat Losses During World War II (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998), passim.
33. For a recent tally, see Timothy Mulligan, Neither Sharks nor Wolves: The Men of Nazi Germany's U-boat Arm (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999).
34. Blair, Hitler's U-Boat War, vol. II, p. 705; Michael Salewski, "The Submarine War: A Historical Essay," in Lothar-Gunther Buchheim, U-Boat War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), n.p. See also Holger H. Herwig, "Germany and the Battle of the Atlantic," in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945 eds. Roger Chickering, Stig Forster, Bernd Greiner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 71-88.