Triton, King of the Seas, belched loudly as another man was dragged to the foot of his throne. Like the prisoners before him, he was dressed like a beggar and covered from head to foot in diesel oil. The king yawned and began to pick his nose ostentatiously. “Name?”
“Schmidt, Your Majesty.”
“Well, what do you want?” Triton leaned forward to see better. “You are a wretched little thing, aren’t you?” The crowd around the rickety throne laughed hysterically, and Triton, a huge smile on his face, nodded and held up one filthy hand for silence. “Guards! Give this man a whack for impertinence.”
Two men stepped forward. Schmidt bent over and was smacked soundly on his bottom with a pine plank. Triton sighed, his eyes closed, his wig askew, his finger still in his nose. “What was that you wanted again?”
“Holy Baptism, Your Majesty.”
Triton frowned and waved his hand limply. “Take him away. Work on him for a while and then we’ll see.” The crowd went wild. Poor Schmidt was dragged off for another round of public humiliation, physical abuse, and chemical poisoning. He was smiling as he went. For King Triton was only a shipmate named Grobelny in a false beard. His court was the weather deck of a gigantic U-boat. And Walter Schmidt was having fun.
Wolfgang Lüth, the commander of U-181, laughed and clapped along with the rest of the crew, but as Schmidt was led away and the next man brought before the king, he separated from the crowd, walked over to the railing, lit a cigar, and gazed out at a horizon as empty and as blue as his Fuhrer’s eyes. It was 16 October 1942. U-181 was on the equator, 500 nautical miles southwest of Freetown and headed south at seven knots toward the Cape of Good Hope. The sun was out. The weather deck was too hot for bare feet. The temperature in the engine room was approximately 140° Fahrenheit. The ceremony going on behind him made it all the more difficult to believe that nine months earlier the ice on his last boat was so thick that hammers had to be used to knock it off.
Lüth had been a U-boat commander for almost three years by October 1942. His performance during those years, if not the stuff of legend, had been better than adequate, and he had matured in the job. His first boat was U-9, a type II Einbaum commissioned in 1935 and the namesake of Otto Weddigen’s old SM U-9. In four patrols he sank three ships, the first two in a farcical manner. His second patrol, a mining operation, was saved by the luck usually associated with fools. During Operation Weserübung, he had been assigned to a position outside Bergen, where he was thoroughly bored, and shortly after the invasion he had fired four defective magnetic torpedoes at the Polish destroyer Grom, all of which missed or misfired. . . .
After U-9 came command of U-138. It was at this time, June 1940, that Lüth became irritated at having to leave the front for her commissioning, but ultimately he won the Knight’s Cross as her commander. Curiously, after almost three months spent commissioning and shaking down his new boat, Lüth was allowed to make only two war patrols, both of them in the Western Approaches during the wild month of October 1940, before he had to leave for command of a third boat, the larger type IXB boat U-43. Within three months one of his watch officers allowed her to sink in Lorient harbor. Another man might have been cashiered, but Lüth was eventually forgiven, and over the next 12 months he chased the Bismarck in 17-43, cheered Operation Barbarossa, saw the untouchable Americans in his crosshairs, and sank 22 ships in five patrols.
Five days before Victor Oehrn left Wilhelmshaven for the North Atlantic in May 1940, Lüth had departed the same harbor in U-9 for the English Channel. They would be the only two German U-boat commanders at sea for most of the month, and they made a striking contrast. They were as different as day and night. Oehrn was a handsome man, not dashing but handsome in the saturnine way of a sleek and well-fed burgher. His appearance on the bridge of U-37 in May 1940, every hair in place, calls to mind the image of a successful businessman looking only slightly out of place lashed to the wing of a small airplane. Wolfgang Lüth was a plain-looking man (although he looked less so after a shave and wearing a pressed uniform), bald, with a pointed head, a large nose, and a gap between his two front teeth wide enough to push a pencil through. Oehrn was urbane, a diplomat, a thinker. Lüth had neither diplomacy nor tact, he was remarkably rude, and he was pushy, prying, and utterly prudish regarding other people’s personal lives. He was not a sentimental man.
More to the point, there was a critical difference in the way the two men went about their work. Oehrn was tentative; torn between the desire to succeed and the need to temper his destruction with charity. He sank ships because he had to. Lüth was as cold-blooded about his work as any predatory animal. On 9 May 1940, for example, he sank the French submarine Doris off the Dutch coast. When the Doris blew up and bits and pieces of her crew rained down on U-9’s bridge, he was unmoved. ‘“Poor fellows!’ said [my watch officer], ‘they were only U-boat sailors like us.’ But war drives feelings like this into the background. It is either you or me. If we hadn’t sunk them they would have sunk us or one of our comrades.” This attitude was not uncommon, but Lüth held it more firmly than most of his fellow commanders. “He had no idea of the suffering he caused,” said his friend Theodor Petersen sadly, “when he sank ships.”
As his career progressed and his numbers mounted, Lüth’s behavior became worse. He developed a reputation as a political man. He was one of the few officers in the U-Bootwaffe who openly admired National Socialism, and he took every opportunity that arose to say something favorable about the government or the party. His mean streak became more pronounced. As Theodor Petersen said, he had no idea of the misery he caused every time he let loose a torpedo. In April 1941 he shot the French sailing ship Notre Dame du Châtelet to matchsticks and killed several men, not because she was a threat to anyone but because he wanted some target practice and he was smarting from the tongue-lashing Karl Dönitz had given him for scuttling his own boat in Lorient. “Not something I would have done,” murmured Karl-Friedrich Merten, who had once let a similar ship sail. Lüth’s prudish sense of morality was very annoying. He nagged his men to get married and have children; if they were married, he nagged them to be faithful and have even more children for the good of the Reich. He restricted them to the boat so they could not visit bordellos, he followed his officers around to make sure they did not cheat on their wives, he banned pinups and “unhealthy” reading material from his boats, and he never drank. It is not easy to imagine Lüth relaxing in the Scheherazade. Petersen dragged him into the Lido once, and he was “shocked” to learn that there were nude women inside. Clearly, his behavior was odd, and many people thought it approached eccentricity. “Wolfgang Lüth,” said Lothar-Günther Buchheim, “was the craziest man I ever knew.”
Few commanders with such character flaws could have survived. There is no doubt that some were fervent Nazis, some were morally straitlaced, some were bullies, some were even psychopaths. But none of the top commanders, the aces, carried all the baggage Lüth carried, and yet he survived and prospered in the U-Bootwaffe. By the time he left the front, he was second only to Otto Kretschmer in tonnage sunk, and his career, which lasted from the first day of the war to the last, was arguably more impressive and more rewarding than that of any commander in the service. Such hardly seems fair, or even fitting, until one realizes that Wolfgang Lüth’s faults were like so much chaff compared to his one great virtue. This virtue, which made him a superb military officer and a tolerable human being as well, was his sublime ability to lead men. . . .
The responsibility of a commander to his crew formed the leadership style of Wolfgang Lüth. It drove him as a leader. We know this because Lüth took the most time and trouble to explain his idea of U-boat leadership, and he authored the single most important first-person document on the subject, a lecture he delivered to a convention of Kriegsmarine officers meeting in Weimar in December 1943. This lecture, which Lüth entitled “Problems of Leadership in a Submarine,” was an immediate and sustained success, first as a teaching tool for the Kriegsmarine, then as a legitimate source of information for historians. It is the best-written description of the mind games that so often went on inside a U-boat. It is one of the most candid and unexpurgated statements of personal opinion from a commander in wartime. . . .
“Problems of Leadership,” which is about 10,000 words long and would have taken over an hour to read, is divided into five uneven sections. In each section Lüth discusses one of the factors he thought necessary for good leadership in a U-boat: discipline, success, shipboard routine, the example of the officers, and “real spiritual leadership for the men, together with a genuine concern for their personal welfare.” It is as good an outline as any for such a lecture, even if Lüth adheres to it only casually. . . .
One of Lüth’s favorite leadership tools was competition. He made a contest out of anything, no matter how dull or how odd it was. After the boat’s doctor, Lothar Engel, had presented his de riguere lecture on hygiene and venereal disease, Lüth arranged a poetry contest on the same subjects. The winning entries were predictably vulgar. He had a tall tales contest, in which contestants tried to outdo each other in telling lies. He held a shipboard Olympic Games, a drawing contest, chess and card tournaments, and a singing contest that was broadcast (with commentary) over the address system. He encouraged a sense of competition with the few other boats in the Indian Ocean by printing each boat’s tonnage totals in the newspaper.
He had a talent for taking advantage of the unexpected. One could only manufacture so many things to do within the hull of a U-boat, even a boat that was 88 meters long with three deck guns and her own refrigerator. Thus it became very important to adapt external events to fit the need. Sinkings were always best for interrupting the tedium, and Lüth liked to turn them into special events. During a chase he would summon crewmen onto the bridge to look at the ship through binoculars and identify it. During an attack he would keep the crew informed of torpedo firing, target angle, expected run time, hit or miss. After sinking the Panamanian steamer Amaryllis in December 1942, he allowed his crew to haul an entire sheep aboard; fresh meat was rare on a long cruise and the sheep was chopped up and roasted with enthusiasm. . . .
He was a strong believer in celebrating holidays and birthdays. Any holiday, no matter how obscure, was the occasion for a party. The most important of these, of course, was Christmas. On Christmas Eve the officers’ mess was dissolved; the entire crew ate together, presents were distributed, and songs were sung around a Christmas tree made out of green toilet paper. But Easter was also cause for celebration, and so were Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Lüth made a lot of these last two because he had such strong views on the value of family and the responsibilities of parenthood (by the time he returned from his last patrol he had three children). Birthdays were celebrated in U-181 with songs, parties, cakes, and cognac. The day the boat crossed the equator [was when] Lüth held a wild crossing ceremony preceded by weeks of publicity and commemorated with hand-lettered certificates. Finally, U-181 was one of the few boats in the U-Bootwaffe that observed the Führer’s birthday. . . .
In the closing paragraph of “Problems of Leadership,” Lüth stated, clearly and simply, a very simple truth: a commander’s first obligation, his first thought, his first love, must be his crew. He blows the opportunity completely, wasting it on one last gratuitous wheeze of Nazi ideology. The result is a curious welding together of his greatest virtue, the virtue that led him to present the lecture in the first place and made him famous despite himself, and his greatest vice. . . .
Ironically, one of the more positive reactions to “Problems of Leadership” came from a prominent American submarine commander, Edward L. Beach. “My general impression of the lecture is that it was right on target,” he stated. “Making allowances for the differences in submarines and our own submariner experiences during the war, [his practices] would have applied perfectly well to us.” He agreed that some of Lüth’s methods were pedantic, “but so were mine, in a similar situation.” Others he considered genuinely innovative and only wished that he had thought of them himself. As a prize in one of his competitions, for example, Lüth would stand a man’s watch for him. “This had a double effect that no submariner would miss, but which others might: the skipper could stand any watch in the ship. ... I don’t know if I would have had the self- confidence to do that.” Would Lüth’s style have worked in one of Beach’s boats? Probably not, “because both the boat and the crew would have been different. But he was smart enough that he would have thought up appropriate things for the same objective and they would have worked about as well.”. . .
“Problems of Leadership” should be recognized for what it is: an imperfect but illuminating glimpse into the practice of good leadership at the U-boat command level. It is the best glimpse we have, even though it is badly written, politically skewed, and easily mocked. To get a better idea of the qualities that made Lüth special, one is well advised to skip it and listen instead to his men; their bond with him has lasted over 50 years and transcends death. “Kapitän Lüth was a man to depend on,” wrote Franz Per- sch, one of the crewmen on that last long patrol, “and I can say with great pride that his entire crew stood beside him and, as one would say in German, would go through fire for him.” “There are no men like him anymore,” sobbed Walter Schmidt.