Peace-time Problems
In World War I, mines caused a great many losses and gave the German Navy some unpleasant surprises, from the Russian minefields in the Central Baltic in 1914 to the British mine blockade of the German Bight of the North Sea in 1917-18 and the U. S. mine barrage between the Orkneys and Norway in the last months of the war. Small wonder that after 1920 the Reichsmarine very closely studied all questions concerning minelaying and minesweeping. Practical training was carried out by a flotilla of four old coal-burning minesweepers, so-called M-boats. They were handy, good seaboats in spite of their shallow draft (8 feet), and what they lacked in speed, they made up in smoke. In the thirties, the number of minesweepers in commission was slowly increased; an oil-burning M-boat was designed, and a very useful 100-ton motor minesweeper, the so-called R-boat, was developed for clearing fields of shallow mines, which particularly had to be expected in the tideless Baltic. By 1939, there were two flotillas, mostly of new M-boats, three flotillas of R-boats, and an escort flotilla of a type that was a dream on the drawing board but a nightmare at sea, turning grey the hair of the captains and breaking the hearts of the engineroom staff. Very interesting and successful minesweeping methods were tried out, practiced diligently by day and by night and, for the most part, never used during the war. Yet they helped to develop versatility and good seamanship, so that these efforts were not wasted by any means.
In the years of the Spanish Civil War a considerable part of the small German fleet was kept in Spanish waters, but never any minesweepers. Of course, we resented this slur on our warlike qualities and the seaworthiness of our boats—quite rightly, for later on M-boats and even R-boats went up and down the Channel and the Bay of Biscay in almost any weather. Yet this reluctance of our superiors turned out to be a blessing in disguise, inasmuch as training could be carried out all the time and the Captain (M) had his flotillas all to himself for six weeks every spring. At the end of this period of intensive training some cruisers or destroyers would lay a large field of mines and antisweep obstacles, generally interspersed with new gadgets invented by our experimental people. The obstacles had their full charge of nearly two lbs. of explosive; the mines had a charge of about two oz. that made quite a bang but broke the mooring rope only. When a boat full of sight-seeing admirals struck one of these mines, there was general regret that the charge had not been somewhat stronger. In June, 1939, Admiral Raeder, the C.-in-C. Navy, inspected the minesweeping flotillas near Heligoland and went on board several boats. He expressed himself greatly satisfied by what he saw. From a personal conversation on the way back to Cuxhaven on board of the yacht Grille, I learned that he was firmly convinced that there would be no war in 1939.
Minesweeping in 1939
Well, about ten weeks later, some of the same boats were sweeping live mines in Danzig Bight under the guns of Polish batteries. At first supported by one, then by two very obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships, the minesweepers bore the brunt of that campaign, serving as maids of all work because the real warships had all gone to the North Sea. They cleared Polish minefields, losing one M-boat, took to pieces the first mines they swept to see what they were like, escorted a number of convoys to East Prussia and Danzig without any losses, fought light guns at close quarters, stood from under the heavier calibers, kept channels swept far beyond the Polish front line all the time, and blockaded Gdynia and Hela. Their first attempts at dealing with submarines were not much of a success, however. There had been five Polish submarines; seven at least were definitely sunk (not only by minesweepers) according to official reports—:yet eventually all five reached neutral or Allied harbors!
This set us thinking a bit, and, three months later, minesweepers caught the first British submarines in the North Sea, the Undine and the Starfish, after the bulk of the minesweeping forces had been transferred there about the middle of October, 1939. I was in a bit of a funk when passing westwards through Kiel Canal in order to take over at Cuxhaven our main minesweeping base. There I had 10 flotillas of 8 to 12 boats each—4 composed of trawlers or drifters, 3 of M-boats, 2 of R-boats, 1 of Sperrbrechers (large steamers being converted for magnetic sweeping). Not all of them were fully commissioned or trained, and the whole force did not seem to amount to very much compared with the might of the Royal Navy.
Soon ideas like these were forgotten under the stress of the day’s work. A net of “roads,” as we called them, had to be swept at short intervals all over our part of the North Sea. In addition, all the reserve flotillas and their crews (some had never seen any military service) had to go on with their training. At first nothing much seemed to happen, and by slow degrees only did things get a bit livelier. First there were planes, rather inefficient at the time; then submarines, far-more dangerous; then mines, first anchored, and then, from the spring 1940 on, magnetic, but both in small numbers and not difficult to sweep. The first loss was a minesweeping drifter at anchor in Heligoland roads. A bomb went through her forecastle without detonating, but disturbing the afternoon nap of a sick- berth attendant whose pillow it touched, then holing the boat which settled slowly down in the deepest part of the roadstead. Things were not always as harmless as that, but on the Whole it was a kind of phoney war, not at all what we had expected.
Tasks in the West
After the occupation of Denmark and Norway, the German Bight became an absolutely quiet place until one morning the radio gave the news of the German offensive just started in the West. Nobody seemed to want us there; so we swept a channel along the Dutch coast to Terschelling and sent some officers by car to the Dutch and Belgian ports to find out about the situation there. The Army sometimes took them for field post officials, which was a help. Soon they reported that many of the ports had been mined, and the flotillas began to move westwards.
There were only a few available because some had gone to the Kattegat to hunt submarines and others to Norway for escort purposes and for sweeping mines. For more than 1000 miles of new coast they would not have been sufficient in any case. That meant finding more vessels and men and weapons, and shipyards for converting the craft into minesweepers. One thing was quite clear from the beginning: To a great extent we would have to rely on our own efforts. No use drawing up eloquent letters about what we ought to have, sending them through channels to the Powers that be, and waiting for an answer in the form of ships and men. On the contrary, the best way seemed to be to report results only, tell them as little as possible about methods, and ask for support only in cases of real emergency, if at all.
Finding New Flotillas
There were vessels enough in all the western harbors—trawlers, drifters, pilot boats, cutters, motorboats, yachts, lobsterboats, and what not, some half and some entirely under water, none in good repair, very few really meant and equipped for war, fewer meant for minesweeping. There were shipyards, too, efficient and glad to get work, and there had not yet been time for a bureaucracy to become firmly established. So we lacked only arms and the men. As to the latter, we had built up quite a sizable reserve of trained personnel at Cuxhaven, but it was far from sufficient for more than 200 vessels. So I drew on my flotillas, in which by that time I knew by name every officer and many ratings. The Senior Officers of the new flotillas were picked very carefully and were given a “god-father” flotilla each. This was a doubtful honor, for it meant that it had to give one half of its officers and men to the new flotilla and to assist it as far as possible. Which half they would lose they did not know until a few days before the men had to go to their new units. In the meantime, lists had been prepared of the two halves, and lots were drawn or a coin was spun to find out who was to get which half. In this way the division was made as impartially as humanly possible.
For filling up the crews we received raw recruits—a number of infantrymen released from the Army after the campaign in France when the war seemed to be over, and finally 500 naval cadets who stayed for about six months on board the minesweepers. After their return our Naval Academy complained that their manners and habits had grown somewhat rough. We politely answered that this seemed just the job for the Naval Academy, and did anybody find fault with their practical seamanship and war experience? Nobody did.
The Senior Officers generally went ahead to their future bases with a few officers and specialists to get things going. One of them, an architect in civilian life, ran a large shipyard for several months with great success. When eventually he handed it over to a staff of naval officials, they requested an account from him strictly in accordance with the usual Government Dockyard Procedure. They desisted, however, when he showed them that under his benevolent and inspiring regime work had been carried out at half the government prices.
To procure arms was the greatest difficulty, all the more so as the crews were no longer content with one 20 mm. per boat and what we called “the people’s gun,” a very primitive 75 mm. Air Force competition was strong, and our official quota was not at all adequate to meet our urgent needs. There were informal ways, however, to improve the situation. In the first weeks after the French campaign there was quite a collection of weapons lying around. This helped somewhat. Then some bright boys went on “finding” things very near our own air bases. But this source dried up after some unpleasantness had been avoided with difficulty. The wrecks in and off the ports furnished more guns, particularly Bofors 40 mm. One flotilla spotted a large consignment of French 20 mm’s in a marine warehouse at Bordeaux. They had been assigned to the Air Force and were spirited away in the nick of time, actually under the eyes of a party that was to fetch them. That definitely finished activities in this direction. So I got me an ordnance lieutenant on the establishment of my staff (unheard-of for minesweepers) who knew his way around artillery depots, etc. Among other things, he unearthed a considerable number of 15 mm machine guns already sold to a neutral country “because nobody wanted them.” We did, and we got them. In this way we acquired a somewhat mixed but quite powerful armament for our boats.
Minesweeping in 1940-41
It goes without saying that minesweeping had been carried out all the time from June, 1940, on. First the ports and their approaches had to be cleared of German magnetic mines, rather a ticklish business and not made easier by the fact that the pilots who had dropped these mines often were rather hazy about their position. Yet our gear was efficient, and by applying the right methods losses were kept unexpectedly low compared with 1914-18. The defensive fields of anchored mines were easy to sweep. On the Atlantic coast a French flotilla assisted under the terms of the armistice. They worked well, in spite of their rather unwieldy gear. When they had finished their task, they were permitted to slip away to North Africa, after a farewell dinner.
1940 to 1941 were halcyon times under the cover of our own Air Force. Many of its members did not know much of the sea, yet those who had to fly over it soon realized the value of the small vessels which might pick them up in case of involuntary immersions. This resulted in very good local relations. Whether there was cooperation at top level or not, minesweepers had only to ring up the nearest squadron leader to get their combat air patrol. This lasted well into 1942, as long as there was something like a German Air Force in France.
After the beginning of the Russian War, the attacks of the Royal Air Force increased steadily and losses mounted. From that time on, movements in the narrow part of the Channel were carried out by night as a rule. In a few cases of emergency we used Sunday morning to go through by day because we knew from experience that this was a quiet time.
In October, 1941, a flotilla of R-boats left Dieppe when it was still light; caught by a strong force of fighters it lost 40 per cent of its men in two or three minutes. Among those killed were the Captain (M) of the “Channel Division,” the Senior Officer of the flotilla, and three of the twelve captains.
This and other events showed that armor was needed if the boats were to fight aircraft with any prospect of success. Shelter for the personnel on the bridge could be procured without difficulty, but the shields for the guns had to be light and had to train easily and rapidly with the guns. No pattern existed to meet these demands; in order to get results quickly an armor-designing competition was arranged among the Channel flotillas. They used normal steel for the first models, and good protection was developed quickly. Armor was a bottleneck, but some was found in dockyards and depots, and there was a small factory in Belgium that manufactured the shields. These gave the guns’ crews a greater sense of security, and many a fierce fight was fought between aircraft and small craft. In 1941-42, on an average, one attacker was shot down for every two of our own men killed.
Organization of the Western Defences
In the course of time, our minesweeping organization underwent some changes. In the North Sea, there had been a Captain (Escorts and Patrols) and a Captain (Minesweepers), bot}i under the Flag Officer Commanding Western Defences. In August, 1940, this set-up was transferred to France, with Headquarters at Trouville, for the coasts of Holland, Belgium, and France to the Spanish Frontier. Owing to the large distances, and, at that time, bad communications, the most experienced Senior Officers of flotillas were unofficially made a kind of Captains (M), Second Class, and put in charge of sections of the coast. In 1941, minesweepers, escort and patrol vessels, and subchasers were all lumped together and subdivided into four “Security Divisions” (Sicherungsdivisionen): one for Holland (which was soon transferred to the North Sea Command), one in Belgium and Northern France, one in Brittany, and one in the Bay of Biscay south of the Loire River. The Flag Officer Commanding Western Defences was ordered to take up quarters at Paris, in order to be in closest contact with Navy Group West. He did not think much of Paris as Headquarters for a front staff and said so in his war diary, yet his protests were of no avail.
The total number of vessels in his command was between 400 and 500, each Division having 8 to 10 flotillas of various types. About half of the strength was mobile (M- boats, R-boats, trawlers) and could rapidly be transferred from one Division to the other or to another theater of war; the others were stationary in a limited area, having groups of 8 to 10 vessels in every port of their area, one flotilla, for example being stationed at Ostende, Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne.
Officers and Men
All the staffs were kept small; almost all their officers had already seen active service during the war, quite a few also in World War I. There was a sprinkling only of active officers; in addition to merchant marine officers we had lawyers and businessmen, managers and engineers, teachers and a professor or two.
After our experiences in the mutiny and revolution of 1918, we gave much thought to keeping up discipline. We were convinced that, in the long run, neither severity nor aloofness could guarantee a good spirit among our men, and that justice and firmness combined with good personal relations would form the best basis for discipline. The Senior Officers and most members of the staffs went regularly to the bases and on board the boats, taking part in operations of all kinds. For the midshipmen and younger petty officers special courses were arranged to teach them the fundamentals of the art of commanding and leading men. The same courses were used for giving them close combat training because British raids might be expected at any time. This knowledge came in handy at St. Nazaire.
A legal officer went from flotilla to flotilla to give lectures on military law and justice and to talk these things over with the officers. Disciplinary cases were published and expounded in a special legal bulletin. An experienced supply officer with some CPO’s (teachers of the Naval Cooking School among them), went from boat to boat, checking cooking, cleanliness, and economy in the galleys, going through the accounts, giving hints on utilization of leftovers, etc.—not as an inspection but as assistance in a friendly way. Food was rationed, of course; its quality was good; rations were ample all through the war. They were the same for everybody from admiral to recruit, and strict supervision saw to it that everybody was allotted his share, no more and no less. It was a very good system, only a bit hard on the staffs because there was too much fat and pulse for their more sedentary mode of living.
We set up our own signal, minesweeping, and A. A. schools, because training establishments at home were overcrowded. There were even courses in arts and crafts and in singing—at first separate, later combined— for we found that many a carver had a good voice, and not a few singers were handy with the glue pot. In 1941 we set up our own recreation home in the Taunus woods near Wiesbaden, principally for the married officers and ratings and their families. There they were all treated equally, went about in civilian clothes, and had their meals at small tables with white cloths, where all were served the same food. The children were cared for by trained nurses in a separate building; their parents could take them for walks, and some were rather surprised when their hopeful offspring preferred to play with the new friends.
All this worked well, and there were hardly any disciplinary difficulties up to the end of the war. Even now many officers and men are still in close touch and hold reunions from time to time.
Give and Take in 1942-44
The two main duties of the Western Security Forces were getting our submarines, war vessels, and blockade runners into and out of their bases on the coast of the Bay of Biscay (Brest, Lorient, St. Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux), and getting a constant stream (later a mere trickle) of vessels in both directions through the Channel. Secondary tasks were running the traffic to the Channel Islands (up to 200,000 tons of supplies and construction material monthly) and protecting the ore traffic from northern Spain (up to 50,000 tons per month). Up to June, 1944 (the Normandy Invasion), several thousand submarine escorts were carried out with the loss of only a single submarine destroyed by a mine while the U-Boats were actually following minesweeping units. A few more were lost because they ventured into dangerous waters against orders, or may have been lost on anchored mines in the outer Bay of Biscay. There our minesweepers could not work regularly owing to the presence of too many enemy planes; the faster type of M-boats and sometimes old destroyers made exploratory sweeps now and then. If mines were found, they could not be swept; the only remedy was finding another route clear of the minefield. Fortunately the number of contact mines laid by the British on the edge of the continental shelf about a hundred miles from the shore does not seem to have been more than a few thousand, so bypassing them was not too difficult.
The main British effort was ground mines dropped from the air; in the course of time these gave us a lot of trouble, although not so much as the British imagined according to their postwar publications. They incorporated a number of brilliant ideas in their mines, but our minesweepers went on improving gear and methods and kept slightly ahead as far as can be judged from results. Traffic was rarely interrupted, and never for more than 12 to 24 hours, even in the North Sea and the Western Baltic in the winter of 1944-45. Losses were tolerable all the time, mostly slight. At first, the best means of fighting magnetic mines were the Sperrbrecher (barrage breaker), steamers with thousands of yards of electric cable wound around their forecastles forming an immense vertical coil that acted as a powerful magnet as soon as an electric current was sent through. The magnetic field was so strong over the coil that a knife or a bunch of keys would stand on deck at an angle of 60 to 70 degrees in accordance with the direction of the field.
The British designed several new types of mines to counter these methods; they were all outmaneuvred, however, with the exception of very “blunt” mines detonating only in a very strong magnetic field, i.e., directly under the Sperrbrecher. That meant the end of this type of sweeper in shallow waters of 70 feet and less. In deeper water Sperrbrechers were successfully used up to the end of the war. In addition we had several types of towed magnetic gear adapted to various tasks and types of vessels.
The English Channel
Step by step, the Channel from Boulogne to Ostende developed from an interesting fairway to our trouble spot No. 1. In 1940-41, we could do on our side more or less what we wanted. For instance, in August, 1940, we took about twenty of our highest army officers, among them von Brauchitsch, Haider, Jodi, and Model, on board of two R-boats and went from Boulogne to Le Touquet and back to have a look at an Army landing exercise. Our only escorts were two trawlers, and I felt rather relieved when all the high brass was safely ashore again. At the same time the vessels for operation Sea Lion (Landing in England) were taken along the coast to their respective ports of embarkation. We were not very enthusiastic about that operation because we had not yet any modern landing craft and had to rely on towed barges to a great extent. Our crossing would have taken more time than Caesar’s 2,000 years ago; this speed did not seem quite sufficient in view of the technical development of the last few hundred years.
After Operation Sea Lion had been cancelled, a great number of ships went up and down the Channel. There were auxiliary cruisers (raiders) and supply ships for them, outward bound or returning; steamers that had been repaired in Western France and were transferred to other theaters of war; a French submarine which could not dive; tankers, colliers, etc. Squeezing a large ship through the narrow part of the Channel became quite an art in the course of time. The British attacked with increasing numbers of MTB’s, MGB’s and sometimes DD’s. There were many spectacular night fights with starshells and thousands of tracers illuminating water and sky—and sometimes the target—and with duels at point-blank range and attempts at ramming. Mostly the results were not so decisive, however, as the participants on both sides imagined.
In the spring of 1942, we had to take a tanker of 8,000 gross tons from Boulogne to Germany. She had lost a propeller and rudder and had to be towed by eight tugs. The first two attempts failed, owing to the weather; at the third she got around Cape Gris Nez. Several determined attacks of British MTB’s were beaten off; one, however, succeeded in breaking through the outer ring of R-boats and in firing torpedoes through the inner ring of minesweeping trawlers. One torpedo hit a small tug that happened to be between the MTB and the tanker, the other failed, and the tanker safely reached Dunkirk and later Germany.
In 1941-42 we were rather behind the British with our radar for some time. To some extent this was compensated by our having broken their W/T code. When they transmitted the position of one of our convoys to their units, we, too, got that information. We soon found that the British broadcast was very reliable, and we used it to assist our vessels in their difficult navigation. Besides, we could tell them when and where enemy attacks were to be expected.
Owing to radar, darkness lost much of its value for vessels trying to slip through unobserved. When the British began to locate the fall of shot of their heavy batteries very accurately by radar, things became distinctly uncomfortable for all larger vessels. In 1943-44 losses became so heavy that the Channel was practically closed for them. Minesweepers and similar small craft passed through, however, until the German retreat in the summer of 1944.
We encountered many mines of various types; yet on the whole they did not cause any undue losses or difficulties, with one exception. That was when anchored mines appeared with snag lines attached to the top horns. By day, it was possible to make these floating lines out in time and to avoid them, but not so by night. We seemed to be at a dead end when the Senior Officer of the local stationary flotilla solved the problem in an unconventional manner. He went to sea by day in a small fishing cutter, went up to the mines in a rubber boat, tied a long line to the floating line and blew the mine up by giving jerks to its upper horn by means of these lines. He cleared several hundred in this way.
Some Special Events
In the Channel, the highlight was taking the battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau from Brest to the North Sea in February, 1942, a distance of about 700 miles. The preparations entailed much minesweeping and the utmost secrecy. Nevertheless, the British realized that something was in the offing and laid fourteen fields of anchored mines in order to catch the German ships. In addition a great number of groundmines were dropped from the air, mostly in the Holland-North Sea area where the water was shallower. We swept some of the new minefields off Cherbourg and the Flanders coast, losing one destroyer and one trawler. Another field was discovered by one of the flotillas a few hours ahead of the battleships. Four M-boats succeeded in clearing a passage so quickly that the squadron could proceed unharmed and without loss of time. Although the British Admiralty had correctly deduced which route the German ships would take, they were surprised, after all, because they had not expected the German squadron to navigate the narrow part of the Channel by day and to pass Dover shortly after noon at a distance of no more than 16 nautical miles. Neither their coast artillery nor their rather raggedly attacking MTB’s, destroyers, and aircraft succeeded in establishing a single hit on the capital ships. However, Scharnhorst took a ground mine off the Scheldte a few minutes after she had left the Western Defence area, and each ship struck another ground mine off Terschelling, yet without serious damage.
Six weeks later, the British undertook their raid against St. Nazaire. They cleverly surprised the defence, and the ex-American destroyer Campbeltown reached her objective, the outer gate of the largest lock, where she put Commandos ashore and later blew up herself and the lock gate. The accompanying MTB’s suffered heavily from the fire of a small Sperrbrecher, some minesweepers, and land flak, and were thus prevented from reaching the lock used by all smaller craft, especially the submarines. When the Commandos tried to force their way to this lock and to the submarine pen they were beaten back in a hand-to-hand fight, mostly by men of a minesweeping flotilla whose Senior Officer had run one of the close combat training centers as a sideline. As a submarine base, St. Nazaire was not out of action for a single day.
In August, when the British attempted to raid Dieppe with 5,000 Canadian troops, a small and slow convoy of five motor barges escorted by a submarine chaser and two minesweeping trawlers ran into the eastern wing of the landing forces. A fierce melée ensued, the German boats attacking and ramming whatever came across their bows. The submarine chaser and one of the barges were sunk; the senior C.O. of the minesweepers, a lieutenant (j.g.) of the reserve, succeeded in extricating the six other vessels and in bringing them back safely to the small port of Le Tréport. His men shot down some planes; when there were too many, they bluffed them by waving their white hats.
In July, 1943, a flotilla of five M-boats sweeping the route Cherbourg-Brest was attacked by the same number of Allied destroyers. In spite of their great inferiority in arms and speed, the M-boats defended themselves so well in a night action lasting more than ninety minutes that the enemy broke the engagement off. One of the German boats sank twelve hours later; the others reached Brest in a more or less damaged condition.
The End in the West
At the time of the invasion of Normandy, the Western Defence Forces totaled 480 vessels, among them 56 M-boats, 65 R- boats, 200 trawlers and drifters, 55 cutters, 23 Sperrbrechers. In a number of fierce engagements, in the air bombardments of Le Havre and Boulogne, in the dockyards, and for blocking purposes, at least 250 of them were destroyed. A few remained in the Channel Islands and in the bases on the Atlantic coast; the rest were transferred to the North Sea and the Baltic where they did good service up to the end of the war.
The last action in the West was the raid on Granville in the night of 8-9 March, 1945. M-boats of the 24th Minesweeping Flotilla and other vessels of the Channel Islands Forces, bypassed and for all practical purposes “withering on the vine,” took the American garrison by surprise, entered the port, scuttled several steamers, wrecked the port installations, blew up one of their own boats that stuck in the mud, and took a collier and some prisoners back to the Channel Islands. Although a pinprick, the operation was well planned and successfully executed under difficult circumstances.
The Other Theaters of War
From 1939 to 1943 the German Minesweeping Forces expanded steadily to meet the demands of all the areas added to the original German position. There were the passages between the Danish Islands and the long reaches along the Norwegian coast. The war against Russia saw minesweepers in the Gulfs of Riga and of Finland, in the Polar Sea, and even in the Black Sea where they had been transferred via rivers and autobahn. Small R-boats were sent to the Mediterranean through French rivers and canals and they followed Rommel’s advances and retreats. The larger R-boat type had to be carried over 100 miles of French roads from the upper Seine to the Sa6ne. They came too late to be of any help for Tunisia, but they participated successfully in the reconquest of the Greek-Italian islands of Cos and Leros in 1943. The North Sea, the Channel, and the Bay of Biscay were the areas where best experience was gained, because here we were up against the best Allied brains and strongest efforts. Everything was done to pass on the experience gained here to the other theaters, in writing, by exchanging officers, and at semi-annual conferences. The result was that even in the last dark phase of the war, traffic was never interrupted for any long time, and losses were kept at a tolerable level.
