With mounting evidence of Teutonic maritime resurgence and uncertain prospects of an independent Reich’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western Powers must attach major significance to an unmistakable revival of German interest in naval affairs. Time alone will fully reveal the maritime aspirations of the “Fourth Reich” during this atomic age. In any event, the recent publication of Vice-Admiral Friedrich Ruge’s Der Seekrieg, 1939-1945 (K. F. Koehler, Stuttgart, 1954, $4.50) clearly illustrates for Anglo-American readers a maturing German appreciation of strategic realities in the late conflict, a development of far-reaching consequence. Conceived in world-wide perspective, this classic study by one of the Kriegsmarine’s most versatile leaders[1] possesses a remarkable degree of objectivity, stemming in part from extensive reliance on Allied as well as Axis sources. Admiral Ruge has written one of the most concise yet informative analyses of naval operations in World War II that has appeared in any language; it justly occupies a commanding position amid a growing German naval literature, of which it is an admirable synthesis.
Viewed in this context, Der Seekrieg is the ultimate fruit of an obvious effort by Kriegsmarine veterans to reconstruct enlightening accounts of their grim trial in defense of the Third Reich. Whatever their motives, these witnesses have found substantial encouragement. Despite widespread neutralism and a veritable obscurantism toward military preparedness in the postwar Reich, German publishers have ventured to offer their readers over a score of naval memoirs, ships’ histories, and strategic surveys in the last half decade. Happily for students of sea power, there have emerged, amid the inevitable glut of memorial volumes, several studies of considerable historical merit, notably works by Kurt Assmann, Cajus Bekker, Walther Hubatsch, Wolfgang Frank, and Friedrich Ruge, dealing with the Reich’s second maritime disaster on a progressively broader and more dispassionate plane. Despite continued delay in the return of captured German naval archives (notably the Tambach collection), these studies contain substantial documentation, particularly at the higher command level. The dearth of individual unit records may well prove to have been a blessing in disguise for the Germans, frustrating that passion for massive thoroughness which has often obscured their view of basic naval realities.
A. Inadequate Preparations
First to undertake a survey of the Reich’s catastrophe was Vice Admiral Kurt Assmann, Germany’s senior naval historian, who late in 1950 provided his disillusioned countrymen a diplomatic as well as naval and military appraisal, Deutsche Schicksalsjahre (E. Brockhaus, Wiesbaden, $7.50), that reflected his wartime vantage point as chief of the Supreme Naval Command’s historical section. Although fully aware of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder’s frequent difficulties with Hitlerian intuition, Assmann has not attempted to explain German defeat simply in terms of the Fuehrer’s alleged ignorance of naval strategy. Granted the theoretical prudence of such an historical approach, it needs be noted that Assmann, who penned a eulogy of Adolf Hilter as late as October, 1942, for having avoided a two-front war (see his essay, “Wandlungen der Seekriegsführung,” in Nauticus, 1943), has based his interpretation of the Reich’s disaster on the conviction that British rather than German statesmen erred tragically during the Polish crisis of August, 1939, particularly in their decision that an aggressive Nazi regime, rather than Soviet Russia, was the chief menace to peace on the Continent. In broadly narrating Germany’s naval and military fortunes, Assmann does gradually work up an impersonal indictment of the Fuehrerprinzip, with its alternate vacillation and reckless inspiration, as the basic source of the Reich’s strategic blunders. Yet there remains throughout Deutsche Schicksalsjahre, notably in lengthy passages dealing with international law aspects of blockade and U-boat warfare, the aggrieved tone of bewildered innocence that characterized initial German reaction to defeat. Notwithstanding these strictures, which stem partly from the difficulty of blending complex military, political, and diplomatic ingredients, Admiral Assmann’s work must be recognized as an important initial contribution to the re-education of a tragically deluded generation.[2]
Far more informative on the Kriegsmarine’s desperate position at the outset of World War II is Admiral Ruge’s Der Seekrieg, wherein is sharply delineated Hitler’s fateful decision in mid-1938 to gamble on a balanced, ten-year program of naval construction (the “Z-Plan”), rather than an emergency schedule, proposed by U-boat chieftain Karl Dönitz, for imminent commerce warfare with submarines and cruisers. In spelling out the resultant weakness of the German Navy during the Danzig crisis barely a year later, Ruge flatly concludes that Hitler’s impetuous maneuvers into war made a farce of the “Z-Plan,” a verdict that echoes the postwar testimony of both Raeder and Dönitz. Equally forceful criticism of the Fuehrer’s timing (though, again, not his objectives) has been advanced in Cajus D. Bekker’s Kampf und Untergang der Kriegsmarine (A. Sponholtz, Hannover 1953, $3.70), published in translation by William Kimber of London a year later as Swastika at Sea ($4.00), and in 1955 as Defeat at Sea (Holt, $3.95). Written with the cooperation of Admiral Theodor Krancke, daring commander of the high seas raider Admiral Scheer, and Rear Admiral Gerhard Wagner, of the Naval Staff, this illuminating series of essays on the Kriegsmarine’s decline might well be subtitled “the admirals bite back,” containing as it does a running indictment of Hitler’s nigh-pathological attitude toward capital ships that reached a climax with the unforgiven ouster of Raeder.
B. Early Success and Fatal Indecision
Although containing vivid chapters on the Graf Spee, the Bismarck and the Channel Dash, Bekker’s Defeat at Sea offers no discussion of Hitler’s most amazing nautical gamble, the invasion of Denmark and Norway, wherein the German Navy first demonstrated its fighting mettle. By contrast, Admiral Ruge’s succinct account of that remarkable amphibious operation, including its belated but ingenious organization, renders full credit to all services involved, making clear in discussing the celebrated U-boat torpedo failures just how vulnerable such an extended “Trojan horse” undertaking actually was in face of superior British naval power. What made this substitution of surprise for sea mastery the more remarkable was the fact that key Norse harbors were seized directly, practically without landing craft, rather than by encirclement following preliminary beachhead operations.
In summarizing the various stages of Operation weserÜbung, Ruge has drawn on a remarkably detailed monograph by Walther Hubatsch, Die Deutsche Besetzung von Dädnemark und Norwegen, 1940 (Muster-schmidt, Göttingen, 1952, $7.10), the most scholarly naval study on World War II yet produced in Germany. Basing his well-illustrated narrative on a wide range of Allied and German documents, including daily Wehrmacht situation reports which are reproduced in an appendix, Professor Hubatsch has persisted in representing the occupation of Norway as essentially a German countermove to forestall an impending Anglo-French establishment in Scandinavia. Such an interpretation, while startlingly similar to Nazi propaganda in the spring of 1940, cannot be lightly dismissed. Much of its substance, relating to Allied plans for a northern diversion in behalf of the French, has been recently corroborated by the official Britsh historian, Professor T. Kingston Derry, in his candidly revisionist study, The Campaign in Norway (London, 1954). Such refreshing frankness may be detected in Dr. Hubatsch’s account of Vidkun Quisling’s treasonable preliminaries with Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, but only bare mention is made of flagrant efforts to terrorize the Norwegian government prior to invasion.
Many more heavily-documented studies on various phases of the Second World War may be expected from German scholars, notably those sponsored by the Institute of International Law at the University of Göttingen. It can only be hoped that their command of official documents is matched by a comparable sensitivity to the ruthlessness with which Hitler’s agents frequently treated the Reich’s unfortunate neighbors. Records of Nazi atrocities across the Continent are available for those German historians seeking an honest picture of the Third Reich at war.
Brief as proved the respite won by the Allies in Norway, that campaign so weakened the stunted Kriegsmarine that, as demonstrated by Admiral Ruge, it played an even less significant role in the invasion of France and the Low Countries than it had against Poland. Save for noting a growing disharmony between the Navy and Marshal Goering’s Luftwaffe, neither Ruge nor Assmann devote much space to events prior to Dunkirk, and in dealing with that historic evacuation these German historians take characteristically divergent courses. Assmann’s many-sided work interprets German failure to annihilate the British Expeditionary Force in terms of Hitler’s desire to conclude peace and win British support against a restive Russia; those critical days of inaction, in Ruge’s view, mark the beginning of a fateful change in the character of German leadership, described henceforth as hesitant, indecisive, and imprisoned in its Continental outlook. Thus Hitler, by his failure to apprehend the regenerative nature of Britain’s sea power, is credited with virtually losing the war at this juncture, first turning from his debilitated Navy to the Luftwaffe for a solution of the baffling British problem and ultimately scrapping plans for Operation sealion in favor of the assault on Russia.
Space forbids extended discussion of Germany’s fatal year of indecision, but it must be said that the panorama in Der Seekrieg is particularly striking, pointing up in Rommel’s badly-supported North African campaigns the last great opportunity which the Fuehrer neglected in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Unlike Admiral Assmann, who necessarily devotes space to the sordid diplomatic background to the invasion of Russia, Ruge has been free to concentrate his critique of barbarossa on the Wehrmacht’s preoccupation with Ukrainia and the Caucasus, both tremendous economic prizes yet somehow not the key to Russia’s destruction. More aggressive exploitation of Soviet naval inactivity in the Baltic, he feels, would have resulted in the capture of Leningrad and thus, by creating a major northern convoy route, have relieved the Army’s transportation difficulties and ensured the conquest of Muscovy. Admiral Ruge’s conclusions on the passive character of Russian naval leadership are not unique among German officers, but they are solidly substantiated by his crisp narrative of Baltic and Black Sea operations. It is to be hoped that German naval veterans will eventually reconstruct detailed accounts of the naval action in those two maritime theaters on Russia’s flanks.
C. The Atlantic Battle
In turning to the Battle of the Atlantic, students of German naval literature find themselves repeatedly confronted by Gross-admiral Raeder’s desperate problem of what effective if not possibly decisive use might be made of his bare handful of heavy surface units. By all odds, nothing approaching Jutland was feasible; owing to Hitler’s precipitation, which virtually scuttled the “Z-Plan,” the German naval chieftain had no fighting chance of even achieving a tortuous piecemeal attrition of the Royal Navy, as he had originally intended, by means of far-ranging commerce warfare that might conceivably produce a temporary division of the Home Fleet. Ironically, Raeder was additionally handicapped by his Fuehrer’s myopic views on naval strategy, as is clearly portrayed by Karl von Puttkamer in Die Umheimliche See: Hitler und die Kriegsmarine (K. Kuhne, Munich, 1955, $1.00), a work based primarily on the author’s experiences at Hitler’s oft-painful naval conferences. The Nazi leader’s fear, following the loss of the armored ship Graf Spee at Montevideo in 1939, of additional maritime humiliations, clashed increasingly with his admirals’ resolve that German battleships should not again rust in port. Strong testimony of that sentiment is provided in Bekker’s Defeat at Sea, but one must turn to Ruge for adequate coverage of subsequent surface raiding and for the considerations which dictated its abandonment midway in 1941, following the Bismarck episode. An eye-witness report of that super-battleship’s last foray is found in Fritz-Otto Busch’s Das Geheimnis der Bismarck (A. Sponholtz, Hannover, 1951, $2.50), whose author poses the question of why the Bismarck received such ineffective Luftwaffe support. German fascination with the shifting fortunes of that epic chase was not satisfied by this view from the Prinz Eugen’s decks, for in 1953, Russell Grenfell’s The Bismarck Episode was published as Die Jagd auf die Bismarck (Schlichtenmayer, Tübingen, $2.80). Startling as proved the subsequent success of Vice-Admiral Otto Ciliax’s Channel dash with Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen,[3] the ensuing concentration of German heavy units in Arctic waters, by general consensus, simplified the British Admiralty’s problem of keeping these marauders in hand.
Notwithstanding the crippling impact of ensuing air, surface and U-boat assaults on Allied convoys bound for North Russia, Raeder’s aggressive capital ship policy was increasingly shackled by the Fuehrer’s insistence that no unnecessary risks be taken, orders which, as Bekker has shown, led ironically to the German failure off North Cape on New Year’s Eve, 1942, and to the consequent rupture between Hitler and his able naval chieftain. Close-range accounts of the decline of the Reich’s surface superiority in northern waters have been provided in three ship histories: Karl Peter, Schlachtkreuzer Scharnhorst (E. Mittler, Berlin, 1951, $1.15), which re-creates that raider’s last gallant but confused sortie from Altenfjord on Christmas Eve, 1943;[4] Fritz-Otto Busch, Tragödie am Nordkap (A. Sponholtz, Hannover, 1952, $2.00), a more thorough and well-illustrated narrative of Scharnhorst’s career that has been translated as Drama of the Scharnhorst (Robert Hale, London, 1955, $5.00); and Jochen Brennecke, Schlachtschiff Tirpitz (Deutscher See- Verlag, Hamm, 1953, $1.60), a gloomy account of that “lonesome Queen of the North” which had the misfortune, as pointed out by Admiral Krancke in a concluding essay, to enter service after the Reich had lost air superiority in the West. Brennecke’s discussion of Tirpitz’s unusual morale problem, as well as her antiaircraft and antisubmarine defenses, merit consideration by all battleship watch officers. For his part, Krancke has not neglected the opportunity to excoriate anew Hitler’s “no unnecessary risk” order, a policy which, to the dismay of Raeder’s naval generation, condemned Tirpitz to a fate more dismal than that of the Imperial High Seas Fleet. A comprehensive indictment may be expected in Krancke’s most recent collaborative work with Brennecke, RRR, Das Glückhafte See, the long-awaited account of Admiral Scheer’s extended patrol into the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Not to be ignored among accounts of German commerce warfare are several works dealing with auxiliary cruisers (Hilfskreuzern), whose world-wide depredations, concisely summarized by Admiral Ruge, had accounted for some 850,000 tons of Allied shipping by early 1943. The Luckneresque careers of these dozen cunningly-disguised marauders have recently been woven together by the British author, David Woodward, in The Secret Raiders (Kimber, London, 1955, $3.00). Greater detail on three of the more successful, Atlantis (HK-16), Pinguin (HK-33), and Orion (HK-36), may be found in the following German accounts: Bernhard Rogge and Wolfgang Frank, Schiff 16: die Kaperfahrt des Hilfskreuzers Atlantis (G. Stalling, Oldenburg, 1955, $4.25); Jochen Brennecke, Gespensterkreuzer HK-33 (Deutscher See-Verlag, Hamm, 1953, $1.60); Kurt Weyher and Hans Jurgen Ehrlich, Vagabunden auf See (Katzmann, Tübingen, 1953, $2.60). First and most deadly of these disguised raiders, Atlantis, had slipped through the blockade during Hitler’s invasion of Norway, subsequently mining Capetown’s approaches and ravaging Allied shipping with impunity for six months throughout the Indian Ocean. Intent of menacing British sealanes “for the longest possible time,” Captain Rogge refitted in the uninhabited Kerguelen Islands late in 1940 and then returned to bag additional merchantmen in distant conjunction with the Admiral Scheer. As author Frank effectively demonstrates, the return of the Atlantis was tinged with the unbelievable: diversionary sorties into the South Atlantic that brought Rogge within one ship of his record 145,698 gross tons; an eastward circumnavigation broken only by a brief idyllic sojourn at Vana Vana in the South Pacific; and a final cruise northeast from Cape Horn that terminated in the raider’s destruction by HMS Devonshire off Ascension. With timely assistance from nearby U-boats, Rogge nevertheless saved virtually his entire crew, thus gallantly concluding this twenty-one month odyssey.[5]
Although the hardy skipper of wide-ranging Pinguin, Captain Felix Krüder, went down with his ghost raider in May, 1941, enough crewmen survived that sinking off East Africa to provide Jochen Brennecke with another rousing tale of Indian Ocean cruising, highlighted by the destruction of a large Norwegian whaling fleet and the mining of Australian harbors. Minelaying also had its hour in the saga of Orion’s seventeen-month circumnavigation, during which Commander Weyher joined the raider Komet (HK45) in disrupting Allied phosphate shipments from the Gilbert Islands, narrowly escaped an encounter with Pinguin’s nemesis, HMS Cornwall, and subsequently hunted merchantmen off Madagascar before heading home via the Cape of Good Hope. Weyher’s ship had better luck negotiating the Atlantic narrows than did many a rust-streaked blockade runner, whose furtive experiences, briefly summarized by Ruge, have been related in considerable detail by Gunter Steinweg’s Die Deutschen Handelsflotte im Zweiten Weltkrieg (O. Schwartz, Göttingen, 1955, $2.35), a useful source of information on the Reich’s merchant shipbuilding program as well as on the inexorable destruction of the Handelsflotte.
D. Tonnage Warfare with U-boats
Anglo-American interest in recent German naval literature inevitably centers, however, on the career of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s ill-starred U-bootswaffe, whose West France flotillas actually found themselves in excellent position, late in 1940, to mount a major assault on British convoy lanes to South Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Western Atlantic. Although German writers have yet to demonstrate a comprehensive grasp of the reasons why commerce warfare with U-boats again failed in World War II, their memorials to that hard-fighting service provide arresting testimony to the grimly defiant spirit which distinguished Dönitz’s men to the very last. The exploits of U-boat aces still fascinate British as well as German readers, as evidenced by publication of Wolfgang Frank’s Enemy Submarine (Kimber, London, 1954, $3.25), a readable, well-illustrated biography of Günther Prien, that original “snorting bull of Scapa Flow,” whose colorful conning tower emblem was adopted by the entire U-boat service. Like such fellow aces as Wolfgang Lüth, Werner Hartmann, and Reinhard Hardegen, the nemesis of HMS Royal Oak published his own “recruiting” book for the U-Waffe early in the war, but his biographer has wisely relied most heavily on U-47's war diary and his own impressions as war reporter on one of that 740-tonner’s last patrols. Ex-Propagandamann Frank has candidly recalled several of Prien’s more frustrating experiences, notably torpedo failures off Narvik during the Norwegian invasion, and has summed up his conclusions as to the actual fate of U-47’s skipper, the mystery of which had earlier led Frank and Hans Meckel to publish an enquiry Was War Nun Wirklich mit Prien? (H. Köhler, Hamburg, 1950). Significantly enough, though Frank again disposes of a fantastic tale that Prien died in a punishment battalion on the Russian front, he has not bothered to recount another story that Prien survived U-47’s destruction in the North Allantic and ended the war in a Canadian POW camp. This rumor’s groundless character is confirmed by the Admiralty in permitting inclusion of HMS Wolverine’s action report, which contains almost conclusive proof that Prien’s boat went down with all hands.
Surviving U-boat commanders remained conspicuously silent in their own regard until 1950, when Heinz Schaeffer published his truculent and puzzling U-977 (Limes, Wiesbaden, $2.60), translated two years later as U-boat 977 (Norton, New York, $3.50). In 1954 a veteran marauder of the Central Atlantic, Jost Metzler, followed up with Die Lachende Kuh (Veitsburg, Ravensburg, $2.30), a memoir which, with flambuoyant descriptions of Allied ship sinkings, smacks strongly of wartime U-boat recruiting propaganda. Metzler’s account of U-boat mining operations will interest the expert, but his narrative is significant primarily for its version of the Robin Moor incident of May, 1941, one of several sinkings which undermined German-American relations during the “short-of-war” period. While defending his actions on grounds that this American freighter was reported carrying contraband for Capetown, U-69’s skipper has nevertheless felt obliged to record Dönitz’s abrupt comment: “The sinking of the steamship Robin Moor was not in accord with published orders.”
In contrast to Metzler’s book, which recalls the golden months of U-Waffe supremacy, Schaeffer’s U-boat 977 catches the growing desperation that gripped German submariners following the psychological turning of the tide in “Black May,” 1943. Particularly striking is his description of sagging morale in West France flotillas during the Anglo-American aerial blitz against transient U-boats in the Bay of Biscay. Certain technical and factual eyebrow-raisers needlessly becloud Schaeffer’s attempt to disprove the intriguing postwar rumor that his schnorkel boat had transported Hitler to Patagonia during her remarkable two-month submerged passage to Argentine waters in 1945. Many valuable area studies remain to be written by U-boat commanders possessing extended experience in such maritime theaters as the North Atlantic, American East Coast, Caribbean, Mediterranean, Arctic, and Indian Ocean, an excellent wartime model for which was Horst Gotthard Ost’s U-Boote im Eismeer (Berlin, 1943), which provided not only a vivid description of Arctic warfare conditions but also a stalker’s account of Convoy PQ-17’s tragic ordeal on the Murmansk run.
Upon publication in 1952 of the first German “submarine history,” Harald Busch’s So War der U-Boot Krieg (Deutscher Heimat Verlag, Bielefeld, $4.00), it became evident that Dönitz, the Reich’s last Fuehrer, still commanded the extraordinary loyalty among U-Waffe survivors that saved his life at Nuremberg. This action-filled memorial, translated as U-boats at War (Ballantine, N. Y., 1955, 35 ¢), is based on the war diaries and reminiscences of such aces as Albrecht Brandi, Günter Hessler, Otto Kretschmer, Reinhard Suhren, and Erich Topp, and reflects throughout its narrative of rising and declining U-boat fortunes that hearty confidence which the Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote enjoyed. Although strengthened internally by reliance on the Admiralty’s preliminary survey, The Battle of the Atlantic, Busch’s work nevertheless lacks the strategic focus needed to bring numerous individual operations into an adequate relation with U-boat Command planning. Much more adequate in that regard is Wolfgang Frank’s well-illustrated Die Wölfe und der Admiral (G. Stalling, Oldenburg, 1953, $4.70), which appeared in 1955 in abridged and occasionally careless translation as The Sea Wolves (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, $4.50, and Rinehart, New York, $5.00). Graced with introductory notes from Rear Admiral Eberhard Godt, Dönitz’s chief of staff, and from “Der löwe” himself, this history of the U-boat Command actually met a mixed reception in Germany, being excoriated by Die Zeit’s reviewer for excessive adulation of the yet-imprisoned Grand Admiral. Such criticism, though betraying ignorance of Dönitz’s genuine popularity among his men, is not without some merit in regard to the U-boat Commander’s operational strategy, a modern version of the classic guerre de course known as “tonnage warfare,” which Frank has faithfully but uncritically defined on several occasions. The difficulty lies less, perhaps, with The Sea Wolves’ author, who knew U-boat headquarters as a venturesome public relations officer, than with his crafty Grand Admiral, who was in no mood to reveal trade secrets for historians in 1945 when required by Allied naval authorities to prepare his essay “On the War at Sea.” Propagandamann Frank, having evidently enjoyed access to the richly revealing U-boat war diary, has recalled remarks by the U-boat chieftain as early as April, 1941, indicating how this tonnage warfare idea, of operating in those areas where the greatest amount of shipping might be sunk at least cost to the U-Waffe, had grown out of his revolutionary wolf-pack tactics. It must be said that Frank has effectively demonstrated the maturing of this strategic conception, spurred by the union of Anglo-American shipping capacity following Pearl Harbor and the success that met Operation paukenschlag against U. S. merchantmen on the East Coast, in the Gulf, and in the Carribean during the spring and summer of 1942. Yet the disastrous results of this same strategy during 1943 and 1944, culminating in the Second Front, have not been frankly examined; the collapse of submarine warfare is interpreted in terms of increasing Allied escort forces and technical superiority, but the failure of Dönitz’s strategy of indirect attrition, so evident in the North Atlantic, has merited stony silence. Even the published Fuehrer Conferences have been ignored.
A similar disinclination to examine this tonnage warfare concept critically is evident is an essay by Rear Admiral Eberhard Godt, entitled “Der U-Boot-Krieg,” published in Bilanz des Zweiten Weltkrieges (G. Stalling, Oldenburg, 1953, $4.75), a collection of articles by over a score of German wartime leaders including Kurt Assmann, Heinz Guderian, Hasso von Manteuffel, Albert Kesselring, and Kurt von Tippelskirch. While alluding to Dönitz’s strategy briefly in discussing American entry into the war, Godt has preferred to enlarge on such U-Waffe difficulties as inadequate Luftwaffe support,[6] mounting Allied air coverage of Atlantic shipping lanes, and the unequal battle in radar development. Admiral Ruge has utilized the term “Tonnagekrieg” in its more obvious sense, the fluctuating relation between Allied merchant tonnage built and sunk by U-boat action, but it appears that he has not grasped the full significance of Dönitz’s definition. On the other hand, Admiral Assmann, doubtless as thoroughly grounded in modern adaptations of the guerre de course as any living naval historian,[7] has avoided comment on tonnage warfare as conducted by the U-boat Command, both in his essay for Bilanz des Zweiten Weltkrieges and in Deutsche Schicksalsjahre. Evidently the universally recognized theory of acceptable losses, which occupied a central position in the strategy of Admiral Dönitz, has not been considered suitable fare for German readers. Actually, it is difficult to criticize the Grand Admiral’s policy severely in this regard, for had he persisted in fighting out the tactically hopeless situation existing in the North Atlantic during the summer of 1943, in complete violation of tonnage warfare theory, his U-Waffe would very probably have been annihilated, with meager returns in Allied merchant tonnage, months before Allied invasion forces crossed the Channel. It will be the hard lot of Dönitz’s biographers to decide whether or not he failed Germany through this policy; their choice is made no easier by knowledge of the annihilation that ultimately overtook the U-Bootwaffe.
By their increasingly hazy generalizations, German accounts of the Atlantic struggle during its last two years reflect the U-boat Command’s fatal loss of technical and strategic initiative. Useful information about the development of German radar detection gear and the equally laggard Type XXI submarine may be found in Bekker’s Defeat at Sea, but the more comprehensive studies fail to grasp many radical changes in operational conditions, none containing citations to the works of such key Anglo-American authorities as James Phinney Baxter III, Vannevar Bush, Daniel V. Gallery, and David E. G. Wemyss. Virtually nothing can be discovered, even in the detailed accounts by Frank and Busch, of the decisive psychological reverse suffered by Dönitz’s North Atlantic packs in action against Convoy ONS-5 early in May 1943. Just how subsequent Allied hunter-killer group operations developed remains rather mysterious; practically no use is made of published accounts of Captain F. J. Walker’s celebrated Second Support Group, while the capture of U-505 by USS Guadalcanal and company has been completely ignored, significant as it proved. Somewhat more adequate are the narratives, especially by Frank and Ruge, of U-boat operations in the Indian Ocean, the one theater in which Japan and the Reich achieved active wartime co-operation. Judging by available German accounts, the crews of these Far Eastern boats, although based at Penang with the atrocity-stained 8th Japanese Submarine Squadron, little suspected that they were running with barracuda.
As reflected throughout German naval literature, the grim history of the U-Waffe ended not with surrender proceedings in May, 1945, but with the trial and partial vindication of its exhausted chieftain at Nuremberg. That Dönitz had knowingly compromised his professional status in accepting the temporary role of Fuehrer has been attested by a close associate, Walter Lüdde-Neurath, in Regierung Dönitz: die Letzten Tage des Dritten Reiches (Muster-schmidt, Göttingen, 1951, $1.40), which depicts this caretaker regime as dominated by the desire for a speedy, honorable peace. Although subsequently convicted of planning and initiating aggression and of violating the customs of war, the hawk-faced Grossadmiral was able, with strong support from former U-boat commanders, to parry Allied charges of breaching the international law of submarine warfare, even turning his allegedly vicious “Laconia order” (which forbade U-boat captains to risk their boats in order to rescue survivors of torpedoed Allied merchantmen) against his accusers with highly embarrassing explanations. The gauntlet has also been taken up by German historians, who have developed a general defense of U-Waffe honor in the course of relating how U-156 (Hartenstein) and other boats, while engaged in rescuing survivors of the British transport Laconia, had been repeatedly bombed by American aircraft, despite prominent display of a Red Cross flag and the transmission of plain language distress signals to all nearby vessels. To this reviewer’s knowledge, no responsible United States authority has yet offered public explanation, which is clearly in order. By like token, it must be noted that, with the exception of a brief consideration by Admiral Ruge, German chroniclers have noticeably avoided discussion of the infamous Peleus affair of March, 1944, a savage atrocity perpetrated by U-852 (Eck) in the South Atlantic against helpless survivors of a sunken Greek freighter.[8] As veterans of both Atlantic and Pacific are painfully aware, brutal if not barbarous treatment of survivors occurred on both sides during the Second World War. One must agree with the German historian that: “For true seamen, there can be no doubt that such excesses are to be fought with all means. But they can be avoided only if the intention exists on both sides to conduct the war honorably.”
In concluding this survey of recent German naval literature, one inevitably returns to Admiral Ruge’s well-balanced Der Seekrieg, a work unique among those previously reviewed by virtue of its clear projection of the Reich’s catastrophe against a background of global conflict. As an astute student of naval command, Ruge prepared himself for this outstanding historical analysis by making an objective survey of American operations in the Pacific, published in 1951 as Entscheidung im Pazifik (H. Dulk, Hamburg, 2nd edition, 1955, $3.50), which first revealed to German readers the intricacies of island hopping, fast carrier strikes, and even service force operations. It is not surprising that he has relied heavily on Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s monumental History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, following closely the American’s assessment of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Leyte Gulf as major stages in the decline of Japanese sea power. Allied landing techniques and such follow-up phenomena as “See-Bienen” have particularly interested this German admiral, an old hand at coastal defense who served as naval adviser on Marshal Erwin Rommel’s staff prior to overlord. Though not inclined to underestimate the impact of Anglo-American air power on Wehrmacht mobility, Ruge remains convinced, like Hans Speidel, that failure to adopt the “Desert Fox’s” plan for all-out commitment of panzer reserves to the beachhead struggle proved fatal for the Reich. In evident accord with Rommel’s prediction that World War II would be decided within seventy-two hours after initial landings in France, the Admiral has spliced together his narratives of Normandy, the Marianas, and the Philippines in a chapter bluntly entitled, “Amphibious Operations Decide the War in East and West.”
Despite the bitter futility of the Kriegsmarine’s six-year struggle, notably as reflected in the virtual annihilation of the U-Waffe,[9] Admiral Ruge and his compatriot historians have found in their Navy’s dying months an episode worthy of a great seafaring people: the astonishingly successful evacuation of German troops and civilians from the crumbling Baltic front. Beset by increasing swarms of Soviet aircraft, motor torpedo boats, and submarines, Grand Admiral Dönitz’s harried convoy commanders somehow managed to embark over a million and a half refugees, losing less than one per cent, according to Günter Steinweg, in transit to North German ports, despite three major disasters. Thus it was that the Kriegsmarine, fighting to the very last to achieve a greater Dunkirk, won the undying gratitude of its fallen nation. Directly touched as never before by the phenomenon of sea power, veritable millions within the Fourth Reich are yet willing to consider the question of whether, as posed in Admiral Ruge’s recent Seemacht und Sicherheit (F. Schlichtenmayer, Tübingen, 1955, $1.00), their nation will fully embrace its community of interest with the Western sea powers or again cast its lot with continentalism. One feels inclined to predict, however, that German naval leaders will remain loathe to promote revival of the Kriegsmarine until reasonably satisfied that it would become the instrument of intelligent national policy.
Dr. Lundeberg served as an officer in the U. S. Naval Reserve during World War II, and after the war completed his Ph.D. in history at Harvard and was research assistant to Rear Admiral S. E. Morison in the preparation of The Atlantic Battle Won, May 1943-May 1945 which is Volume X in the series U. S. Naval Operations in World War II. This volume is due for publication in April, 1956.
In 1955 Dr. Lundeberg joined the faculty of the U. S. Naval Academy’s Department of English, History, and Government after having taught history for two years at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.
Editor’s Note: The Board of Control takes pride in announcing that final details have been arranged for the Naval Institute to publish the American edition of Admiral Friedrich Ruge’s Der Seekrieg (The Sea War), 1939-1945. The translation is due to reach the Institute’s editorial offices this month, and the book should be published in 1956.
[1] Admiral Ruge served as Commander Minesweepers during the Polish, Norwegian, and French campaigns, subsequently commanded all escort forces in the West, headed the German Naval Command in Italy in 1943, was naval advisor to Rommel in 1944, and at the end of the war was Chief of the Naval Construction Bureau.
Admiral Ruge has written the following three articles for the Proceedings: “German Minesweepers in World War II,” September, 1952; “With Rommel Before Normandy,” June, 1954; and “German Naval Strategy Across Two Wars,” February, 1955.
[2] Elements of the naval conflict are scattered chronologically throughout Kurt von Tippelskirch’s Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Athenäum, Bonn, 1951, $9.00), but there are two statistics-laden chapters on the subject in Walter Görlitz’s two-volume Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 1939-1945 (Steingrüben, Stuttgart, 1951-52, $11.00).
[3] See “The German Side of the Channel Dash,” page 637, June, 1955 Proceedings.
[4] See page 48 of this issue of the Proceedings for Herr Peter’s story of the sinking of the Scharnhorst.
[5] Dr. Ulrich Mohr, who published an interesting wartime pictorial account, Der Kriegsfahrt des Hilfskreuzers Atlantis (J. Jahr, Berlin, 1944), has just compiled another, Atlantis: the Story of a German Surface Raider (W. Laurie, London, 1955).
[6] Interestingly enough, former Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, in his essay on the Luftwaffe, makes no mention of the naval war.
[7] Excellent background is available in Herbert Rosinski’s “Strategy and Propaganda in German Naval Thought,” in Brassey’s Naval Annual, 1945.
[8] See Robert M. Langdon, “Live Men Do Tell Tales,” in United States Naval Institute Proceedings (January, 1952), 17-21; and Leonard W. Seagren, “The Last Fuehrer,” in ibid. (May, 1954), 523-37.
[9] A new, revised edition of Erich Gröner’s study of German naval losses in World War II has been recently published as Die Schiffe der Deutschen Kriegsmarine und Luftwaffe, 1939-45, und ihr Verblieb (J. F. Lehmanns, Munich 1954, $2.25). Late in 1956 Gröner will publish his Die Deutschen Kriegsschiffe, 1815-1945.