World War II was just a week old when the telephone jangled on the desk of the Flag Officer, Commanding German U- Boats in Berlin:
Doenitz hier. Ah, Schniewind, I want to talk to you about the U-Boat construction program. . . . And we also want to go ahead with the Type X-B minelayer boats for use outside European waters, namely around the Cape of Good Hope, Simonstown, Colombo, and Singapore.
Commodore Doenitz, here talking with Admiral Schniewind, gave firm notice of his plans to send out the U-Boats to the Far East for offensive operations. Later that same fall, Hitler himself approved the German Navy’s intentions to lease U-Boat bases in the Pacific from the Japanese. But it was three years, late 1942, before the first German submarine rounded the Cape of Good Hope in order to carry the U-Boat war into the Indian Ocean.
Three fundamental issues account for this long delay. First, the Germans did not have the long-range U-boat types needed for such distant operations until 1942, because they had to concentrate on overcoming the critical shortage of medium-range, oceangoing types for the Atlantic war until then. Second, as long as his U-Boat war in the Atlantic met with such success, Doenitz was unwilling to encroach upon those efforts in any way. Finally, German surface raider operations in the Far East in those early war years achieved considerable success without requiring additional help from the U-Boat arm. Moreover, the navy’s blockade runners kept up the flow of critical supplies from the Far East (rubber, tungsten, molybdenum, quinine, opium, and zinc) despite British efforts to stop them. Thus, Doenitz was under no insistent demand from the German High Command to press U-Boats into offensive or supply operations in that area between 1939 and 1942.
Though Doenitz confined his U-Boat efforts to the Atlantic and Mediterranean up to 1942, he did in a sense contribute to the attempt—never a concerted one, really—to knock out the heavy incoming run of British troop and supply traffic from sections of her empire in South Africa and the Far East. His Mediterranean boats picked up the British ships after their transit of the Suez Canal. Moreover, a series of probes along the West African coast between July 1940 and the fall of 1941 brought the U-Boats within striking distance of the Cape of Good Hope. The last effort coincided with the beginning of the German offensive in North Africa and sought to reduce British supply traffic via the Cape to that critical area. But Admiral Doenitz discovered it was a difficult operation because of the fuel problem for the U-Boats. He pressed the Atlantic raider Atlantis (Rogge) and the supply ship Python into U- Boat tanker service, only to lose both of them. The U- boats themselves were so busy picking up survivors that they got no more than ten ships between them during the patrol.1 That operation marked the end of U- Boat activities south of Freetown for almost a year.
December 1941, of course, brought the Japanese into the war, and in the next six months, the Axis powers moved toward the pinnacle of their success in World War II. The Japanese won the greatest prize of all, the vital resources area of Southeast Asia, with minimal losses to themselves. Their operations taxed the Allied Far Eastern efforts almost to the point of total collapse. The German armies stood deep in Russia, while at the same time Rommel pushed his Afrika Korps ever closer to Egypt and the Suez. The U-Boat arm, too, achieved unprecedented results in a swift, violent campaign against U. S. coastal shipping, so successful a campaign that Doenitz all but forgot the possibilities of an Indian Ocean campaign during the first seven months of 1942.
There was another specific reason for the lack of interest in a possible Far Eastern U- Boat campaign. The Japanese had indicated to the Germans that they themselves might run submarine patrols in the Indian Ocean where German surface raiders still appeared periodically. Therefore, the three Axis powers defined their future operating areas by running a line of demarcation down the 70th meridian of east longitude (west of Bombay, the Laccadive Islands, the Maldives, and southward through Kerguelen). But since the Germans were not operating U-Boats there and the Italians confined their efforts to the Red Sea generally, the Japanese never regarded the line as the western limit for their operations.
Surprisingly, the Japanese, neither particularly interested nor adroit in conducting submarine warfare against merchant shipping during the entire war, pointed the way for such operations in the Indian Ocean with a highly successful assault on shipping with their long-range, German-type submarine cruisers between April and July 1942. Five big I- boats, carrying midget submarines as they had during the Pearl Harbor operation, came out of Penang, Malaya, in April with two auxiliary cruisers as supply ships and raiders.2 After their midgets delivered a successful attack on the new British base at Diego Suarez in Madagascar, in which they seriously damaged the battleship Ramillies and sank a fleet tanker, the I-boats turned north. In what was the most successful Japanese submarine operation of the war, they sank 22 Allied ships (103,495 gross tons) along the Suez-India- Australia routes.
The Germans received a first-hand report of this Japanese operation when the 1-30 continued on to Germany after the patrol. That report was pregnant with paramount strategical undertones: the northern Indian Ocean was alive with Allied merchant shipping, out of convoy and all but devoid of naval escorts. With the Mediterranean now closed, the British were undertaking one of the greatest logistics efforts of the war to help the beleaguered 8th Army in North Africa. The men, tanks, arms, and supplies that went to Montgomery to break the back of Rommel’s Africa Korps drive were pouring into Egypt via the back door, through the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea to the Suez. But the very successes that the Germans were experiencing in the spring and summer of 1942—Rommel was rolling headlong into Egypt, the U-Boats were enjoying the days of the great “U-Boat Paradise” off the U. S. East Coast, in the Caribbean, and off Freetown—made them commit one of their greatest blunders of the war. They made no attempt to support Rommel’s effort during the days of his greatest successes by interdicting the Allied Suez logistics effort in the Indian Ocean. Nor did the Japanese follow up their spring success in that area.
The only U-Boat operation that resembled an effort to help Rommel’s cause was one concocted by Doenitz during the summer of 1942. This was a special operation, a surprise attack on the roadstead at the Cape of Good Hope, where, according to a secret German agent, a large concentration of Allied shipping generally lay at anchor. In August, four U- Boats and a U-Tanker (a U-Boat whose mission was to supply others with fuel), known as Group Eisbaer, left French bases for the surprise attack.3 On the way, however, Harten- stein in U-156 sank the British liner, Laconia, which was carrying 1,800 Italian POW’s. In the rescue operation that followed, Harten- stein took part, but Doenitz was able to let the rest of the Eisbaer group proceed on the Capetown operation by detailing three boats operating off Freetown to pick up Laconia survivors.
When the three remaining Eisbaer boats reached the Capetown area, Merten and Emmermann took their boats into the roadstead to reconnoiter. Much to their dismay, they found it empty. On orders from Doenitz they then conducted a regular offensive patrol together with U-179 (Sobe), the first of the new long-range Type IXD2 boats, which had caught up with them. Though U-179 was lost after sinking one ship, the others achieved phenomenal success, sinking 24 ships of some 163,100 gross tons during October 1942. That month also marked the great Allied victory at El Alamein, and the beginning of the German retreat across Libya.
Curiously enough, Admiral Doenitz was ready to experiment further in the same area with a few more of the Type IXD2 boats that were just coming into service during the summer of 1942. In September, even before the Eisbaer group had reached the Cape, he dispatched another group of five boats to take up where Eisbaer would leave off.4
But this new relief group rounded the Cape of Good Hope and moved north into the Mozambique Channel. German U-Boats had finally entered the Indian Ocean.
There they played well Doenitz’ masterful game of hitting where Allied ASW defenses were the weakest and his U-Boats were least expected. During the last three months of 1942, they sank 36 Allied merchantmen, all sailing independently and with not a single escort in sight. Once again Doenitz was forcing the Allies to re-learn at frightful cost the great tactical maxim of the Atlantic war: merchantmen must travel in convoy.
The Germans also learned a lesson from this last operation. Though the U-Boats were still based in European ports, they now began to run the equivalent of double patrols by refueling from two German surface tankers, Charlotte Schliemann and Brake, which had earlier served as refuelers for German surface raiders and blockade runners in the Indian Ocean. This was the pattern followed by the next two groups, totaling 11 U-Boats, that appeared in the western Indian Ocean during the winter and spring of 1943.
U-182, with her ace commander, Nicolai Clausen, led the first group when she slipped out of Horton, Norway, in early December 1942. She was followed by U-160 (Lassen) in January and then by U-516 (Wiebe), and two returnees to the area, U-68 (Merten) and U-504 (Poske). Joined there by five Italian submarines operating out of Somalia, they sank another 24 ships, some 165,000 gross tons, with Lassen, Clausen (whose boat was sunk by USS Mackenzie (DD-614) in May), and the Italian Grazzana getting the lion’s share of the kill. All the boats cleared the area by June.
During that spring, two other boats, U-180 (Musen- berg) and U-511 (Schnee- wind), undertook special missions in Far Eastern waters. Early in February 1943, a balding, middle-aged Indian gentleman crossed over the gangway of U-180 as she lay in Kiel. He was aboard when Musenberg put to sea on 9 February. U-180 was taking the Nazi-indoctrinated, fascist Indian nationalist, Chandra Bose, back to his homeland. On 27 April, deep in the reaches of the Indian Ocean, U-180 transferred her passenger and his orderly to the Japanese submarine, 1-29. The latter in turn deposited Bose on the shores of India, where he hoped to raise a fascist revolt against the British.
The second boat, U-511, left Germany in early April on her special assignment. Designated “Marco Polo,” U-511 was transferring to the Japanese Imperial standard as Hitler’s personal gift to the Emperor. U-511 was the first of several German boats transferred to Japan. In fact, before the end of the war in Europe, the Germans sent on the plans for almost all their major operational U- Boats for the Japanese to copy. En route to the Far East, Schneewind sank two ships and then delivered U-511 in early July 1943. He and his crew then moved south to Singapore.
By the time U-511 left for Japan in April, the spring group of six Far East boats had sortied from their European bases to relieve the winter group, then returning home.5 These boats came through the Atlantic without a loss, a most fortunate passage because U-Boat losses were running extremely high at that time. Operating in the western Indian Ocean between June and September 1943, this pack sank 34 Allied merchantmen for over 165,000 gross tons.6 All but two of the U-boat group then returned safely to their European home ports. U-178, however, made for the Japanese submarine base at Penang, Malaya, to become the first German U-boat to base in Far Eastern waters. U-197 was sunk in August in a British air attack south of Madagascar.
The loss of U-197 to land-based air patrols that fanned out over the critical “funnel” areas at the Cape, the Straits of Madagascar, and the Gulf of Aden was a warning of things to come. To be sure, these days in mid-1943 were reminiscent of the old “happy times” that the Atlantic U-Boats had seen. But there were signs of change even in the Indian Ocean. This last group of U-Boats had run into convoys for the first time. As in the Atlantic, successes against the convoys were meager, though the U-Boats continued to find easy targets among the large number of ships still sailing independently. Churchill, however, goaded the Admiralty into rushing 40 ships to the Indian Ocean for ASW and convoy work by sending a sharply-worded memo to Whitehall: “I am shocked by the renewed disaster off the Cape.” It was now simply a matter of time.
If U-Boat operations were destined to become more difficult in the Indian Ocean, they still would in no way compare to the frightful situation which the German submarines faced in the Atlantic in mid-1943. There the sands of good fortune had run out. U-Boat losses mounted rapidly in early 1943 with the evolution of an improved convoy system and the sharpening of Allied ASW techniques. Over half of the U-Boat arm—130 boats—went down in the first seven months of 1943 in this greatest of all concentrated Allied efforts to win the war in the Atlantic. The convoy system had defeated the North Atlantic wolf packs, and Doenitz called off that type of operation once and for all. Additionally, land- based air took a heavy toll of the U-Boats as they tried to break out of their European bases or ventured into areas covered by such patrols. And in the crucial mid-Atlantic, transited by the U-Boats on their way to distant patrol areas, the U-Boats ran headlong into the new hunter-killer groups. Small wonder that Admiral Doenitz himself labeled the January-July 1943 phase of his Atlantic operations, “the collapse of the U-Boat war.”
It was in mid-1943 that Admiral Doenitz, now head of the navy, and his new U-Boat arm chief, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg, faced the horrendous decision of whether or not to call off the U-Boat war entirely. That decision came forth almost immediately: the U-Boats would continue general offensive operations in order, according to Doenitz, to tie down Allied efforts and machines of war that would otherwise go into immediate use against German forces elsewhere. Further, the Germans continued the U-Boat war on the basic assumption of their thread-bare “tonnage warfare” theory: by sinking as many Allied ships as possible, they would help to defeat the Allied logistics effort to supply their combat forces. The question was where to use the U-Boats to the best advantage. At best that would involve an equivocal compromise, because the U-Boat operational staff was looking for areas of highly concentrated Allied shipping and those where enemy ASW forces were light. Such areas were scarce.
In that regard, the Indian Ocean at once attracted attention. There four scratch U-Boat operations between September 1942 and the summer of 1943 had produced significant results. Against but slight Allied ASW pressure and with the loss of only three U-Boats out of the 28 that had operated in the area, the Germans could claim 116 ships for almost 600,000 gross tons. This one-year total compares very favorably with those for German U-Boat operations in the Mediterranean for the entire war, though they approximate only a single month’s total for Atlantic sinkings at the height of the U-Boat campaign in 1942. Nonetheless, the Indian Ocean area looked promising.
There were, however, pressures from other directions which favored an Indian Ocean U-Boat campaign. First, as a result of relentless British search efforts there in the spring of 1943, German raider and blockade running operations had ground to a halt. For example, of the 34 ships allocated to keep up a constant flow of crucial war materials between Japan and Germany during the spring of 1943, seven had turned back in the face of British offensive efforts that sank 11 others. Now the German High Command stepped in to demand that the U-Boats take over the supply chores to and from the Far East.
Second, in reply to a renewed Japanese offer of Far Eastern bases in 1942, the Germans had established facilities for raiders and supply ships at Penang, Malaya, and at Djakarta (Batavia) in Java. In addition, the Japanese offered repair facilities at Singapore. By the spring of 1943, German officers staffed the bases. Korvettenkapitan Wolfgang Erhardt, formerly executive officer of the raider Michel, took command of the Shonan- Singapore and Penang bases in March 1943 and exercised general command of any German forces in the East Indian Ocean area. These facilities were now at the disposal of the U-Boat arm.
Third, the big Type IX-D boats, originally intended for just such operations in the Far East, were rapidly coming into service in 1943. Moreover, a number of 1,700-ton Type X-B and Type XIV cargo carrier U-Boats were available for supply operations. Finally, with the Japanese navy heavily engaged by the American dual advance in the Pacific, and the Italians all but out of the war, the Indian Ocean would be practically free from any Axis threat unless the Germans stepped in.
In the face of so powerful an argument, Grand Admiral Doenitz worked out the planning for extensive operations in the Indian Ocean that would commence in June 1943. First, on the command side, Admiral Paul Wenneker, the German naval attaché in Tokyo, would serve as area commander for all general German naval activities in the Far East, including the supply exchange program with the Japanese. German submarine operations, however, would be run from Germany by the U-Boat operational staff that Rear Admiral Eberhard Godt headed.
This staff worked out the following scheme of operations. The big IX-G and IX-D patrollers and the VII-F, X-B, and XIV supply type boats would leave European bases in groups, but proceed independently to the Indian Ocean area for offensive or supply operations. They would refuel from U- Tankers in the Atlantic, from surface tankers in the Indian Ocean and then carry out a standard war patrol in assigned areas before heading for the Far East bases for repairs, overhaul, recreation, and reprovisioning. Then, as the situation warranted, they would either conduct another war patrol or take on a cargo of some 150 tons of high priority raw materials for Germany. Either operation, however, would end in Germany, the boats refueling at sea once again en route. Newly dispatched boats would relieve the homeward- bound ones, so that the entire operation would be continuous. In the meanwhile, they would build up the Far East bases by sending both key personnel and supplies in the outgoing boats.
In June 1943, the Germans were ready to attempt an extensive campaign in the Far East, and that month 11 boats of the so-called “1st Monsoon” group began putting to sea from Norwegian, German, and French bases, supported by two U-Tankers.7 But it was an ill-fated start. Aircraft from VP-84 blew apart Schonder’s U-200 just south of Iceland on 24 June. British air patrols caught Vowe’s U-Tanker, U-462, and U-514 during the highly successful “Biscay U-Boat Trap” campaign in July. Planes from three U. S. escort carriers and an Army Air Force plane took their toll. Metz’s U-Tanker, U-487, had an ill-fated meeting with planes of USS Core's VC-13 in mid- Atlantic. U-509, looking for the emergency tanker U-160 (Pommer-Eschel), instead rendezvoused with planes from USS Santee's VC-29, which had sunk the U-Tanker the day before. They supplied U-509 with the same fate. U-506 crossed with a U. S. Army Air Force patroller just outside the Bay of Biscay on 12 July and went down. Finally, VC-1, from USS Card, sank U-847 with all hands in August.
So five of the 11 boats destined for the Far East and three supporting U-Tankers were simply ground up in the great Allied Atlantic ASW offensive of mid-1943. These losses came near wrecking the Indian Ocean midsummer campaign, because, with the U-Tankers knocked out, fuel became a critical issue. For example, Tillassen’s U-516 had to pump over most of the contents of her bunkers to U-532 and U-533 in the fuel emergency and then return without reaching the Indian Ocean.
The remaining five boats (U-168, U-183, U-188, U-532, and U-533) got through to the Indian Ocean where they refueled immediately from the surface tankers. Then, joined by U-178 (Dommes), which came out of Penang, the boats began operations in the Madagascar Straits, the Gulf of Aden, and off the west coast of India during the autumn and fall of 1943. Though U-533 was lost in an air attack in October, the others achieved considerable success, sinking 21 ships for 121,625 gross tons, albeit with the help of some Japanese I-boats. Interestingly enough, the Germans discovered that the British were still permitting a large number of ships to travel independently, because they had been forced to withdraw additional ASW units for use in the Mediterranean. But the British learned something, too. From the convoys the U-Boats had attacked, they lost only two ships.
After this operation, the five boats put' into Penang for overhaul in early November. The newcomers found three ex-Italian submarines there, now manned by German crews. Designated UIT-23 (Striegler), U1T-24 (Pals) and UIT-25 (Meier), these boats were intended for cargo-carrying duties, since by German standards they were unfit for offensive operations. While UIT-23, UIT-24, U-178 and U- 188 moved to Djakarta to load cargo for Germany, the others prepared for a new operation to open 1944.
In the meanwhile, Admiral Doenitz had dispatched the “2nd Monsoon” group in the late fall of 1943 to reinforce the first group. Three of the four boats in this group never arrived in the Indian Ocean. Instead, they met disaster in the Atlantic. Rollman’s U-848 was sunk in an air attack by VB-107 and Compron 1 near Ascension in November, and VB-107 also accounted for Rollman’s fellow Knight’s Cross holder, Heinz-Otto Schultze, in U-849 a fortnight later. VC-19 from USS Bogue (CVE-9) finished off Ewerth’s U-850. The Germans discovered that not even the skills of these three senior U-Boat commanders could cope with the formidable Allied ASW forces which awaited the boats in the Atlantic. Only U-510 (Eick) out of this group got through to the Indian Ocean. There she met with success, sinking five ships before reaching Penang in April 1944.
By that time, the boats of the “1st Monsoon” group had sortied from Penang and Djakarta. UIT-23, UIT-24 and U-178 started on the long, dangerous trek to Europe in January 1944. But UIT-23 was torpedoed by the British submarine, HMS Tallyho, in Malacca Strait in February. UIT-24 got as far as the South Atlantic. Then battery trouble forced her back to Penang and thence to Japan. U-178 alone ran the Atlantic blockade and arrived in Bordeaux in late spring. The surface tanker, Charlotte Schliemann, which had refueled her just short of the Cape, was not so fortunate. Sighted by HMS Relentless in early February, her crew opened the seacocks and scuttled.
German refueling problems really approached disastrous proportions when their other big tanker, Brake, in the very process of refueling patrollers U-188, U-168, and U-532, for their dash into the Atlantic, was spotted by HMS Battler's Indian Ocean hunter-killer group south of Mauritius. While the U-Boats dove, Brake’s crew set demolition charges and abandoned ship. The Germans were now without surface refuelers for sustained operations, and they had no U-Tankers for the Indian Ocean.
The impact of the loss was felt immediately. Of the three boats refueling from Brake, only U-188 had taken on enough to reach the next mobile “gas station” in the Atlantic. She continued on her way and reached Bordeaux in mid-June, turning in her patrol report: seven ships, totaling 42,549 gross tons. U-168, loaded with Brake’s survivors, and U-532, with battery troubles, headed for Penang. There they found U-183 still in port. Her captain had succumbed to a heart attack, and Schnee- wind, who had delivered the “Marco Polo” U-511 to Japan, took over her command. So fared the two “Monsoon” groups up to the spring of 1944. During that dismal winter they had managed to sink but 12 ships.
Thus far in the Indian Ocean U-Boat operations, Admiral Doenitz had committed 42 boats, including the ex-Italians. He had lost 12 to enemy action; 23 had made the round trip successfully, one was a gift to Japan; and six, U-168, U-183, U-532, U-510 and UIT-24 and UIT-25 were in Far Eastern bases. But while the U-Boats had sunk 116 ships in the ten months prior to the departure of the “1st Monsoon” group in June 1943, during the next ten months, up to April 1944, they sank only 33. But losses in the Atlantic—of 15 boats sent out between June and December 1943, nine were sunk and one aborted her mission—had sharply reduced the number of boats on patrol. The Indian Ocean area still had a high concentration of Allied shipping passing through it. For that reason, the Germans planned to send out new groups during 1944 and strove to build up their base organization and facilities that spring to receive them.
One of the initial tasks for the Germans in 1944 was to straighten out the Far East command organization. Admiral Wenneker in Tokyo continued to exercise his command over all general naval activities, save the U- Boat operations themselves, until the end of the war. But since the character of the German activities had changed to U-Boat operations exclusively, some adjustments followed. First, Korvettenkapitan Dr. Kandeler left his post in Djakarta to head the base at Penang. Then in Marcft Korvettenkapitan Wilhelm Dommes, former commanding officer of U-178, took over duties as an impromptu flotilla chief for the Penang- based U-Boats. Dommes was directly responsible to the U- Boat operational staff in Germany on all matters concerning U-Boat operations, and to Admiral Wenneker in Japan, via Kandeler and Korvettenkapitan Eckhardt, the Malaya area chief and head of the Singapore base, on all other issues. Then in July 1944, because of the overcrowded docking conditions in Singapore, the Germans opened a new base at Soerabaja under Kapitanleutnant Hoppe. This divided command system, which never worked well, lasted until the end of the war, though in December 1944, Dommes became senior officer as Chief of the Southern Area, in charge of all activities and bases, and exercised his command from Penang. Dr. Kandeler returned to Djakarta in January 1945, and at the same time Korvettenkapitan Kentrat, former commanding officer of U-196, opened a new facility in Kobe, Japan, for U-Boat battery renewals.
Thus by 1945, the Germans were operating five bases in the Far East: Penang as the principal U-Boat operating base, Kobe and Singapore exclusively for repairs, and Djakarta for loading raw materials, while Soerabaja did double duty as a repair base and loading port. Needless to say, this arrangement spread the German command system very thin, while at the same time, the Germans made no effort either to co-ordinate or consolidate their duties on their operational efforts.
Of all the facilities which the Japanese made available to their comrades-in-arms, none surpassed the beautiful recreational facilities for the U-Boat crews. The Japanese outdid even the famous Lemp and Prien U- Boat rest camps in France. In Malaya, there were Penang Hill, Fraser Hill, and the Cameron Highlands; in Java, Selepentana and Tschikopo. These resorts were dotted with shaded bungalows, soccer fields, tennis courts, swimming pools, and beaches. The enlisted men’s and officers’ clubs stocked German schnapps, Japanese beer, French whiskey, and had Japanese “Waves” as hostesses. The Germans even took the trouble to import foods from home, and every one of the camps sported a garden from which sprouted the eternal German staples, potatoes and cabbages.
In contrast to these pleasantries, the Germans faced a number of difficult problems which seriously affected their operations in the Far East. Malaria took a heavy toll among the U-Boat crews, running often as high as 25 per cent despite the copious supply of quinine. And there were no replacement crews available. Next was the matter of working with the Japanese. The Japanese Navy has always been meticulous to a fault in matters of protocol. Admirals Nakamura, Hoshino, and Uzumi at Singapore, Soerabaja, and Penang, respectively, far outranked the senior German officers, and though they always treated the Germans cordially, working with their staffs, always from the inferior side, and with an interpreter even when the Japanese officers spoke German, always meant delays and complications for the Germans. Admiral Doenitz never did correct this situation by sending out a full captain or admiral as he always did for local U-Boat operational commands in Europe.
German air reconnaissance was negligible, because they never had more than three aircraft for scouting.8 And the Japanese were neither prompt nor consistent in passing on results of their own reconnaissance efforts. In addition, the Germans had no surface craft available for ASW, and the Japanese, who did, were entirely erratic in their ASW sweeps in the area, much to the dismay of the Germans, who lost no less than five U-Boats to Allied submarines around Malaya. Thus, difficulties with health and lack of complete cooperation from the Japanese harassed Far East U-Boat operations until the end of the war.
Materiel and manpower shortages, however, produced the greatest problems for the Germans in the Far East. Among other materiel deficiencies, lube oil and spare parts ranked high. Propellers, shafts, electrical equipment, torpedoes, pumps, and diesel parts all had to come from Germany via incoming U-Boats, and the Germans tried to stockpile torpedoes often to the exclusion of other parts.
The greatest holdups in U-Boat operations resulted from the lack of skilled personnel to carry on intricate submarine repair work. Since the Japanese shipyards in the area were over-crowded with ships damaged in the Pacific war, they could never lend much assistance to the Germans. A few civilian specialists were brought from Germany, but they were supervisors only. So the Germans formed a nucleus repair unit from the crew of U-511, which they had turned over to the Japanese in August 1943. The 40-odd men in this group had to handle a half dozen or more boats requiring work at any one time. It is small wonder that the U-Boats averaged 70 days in port either awaiting drydocking in the over-taxed Japanese yards, or with their crews, tired from long, arduous patrols, attempting major repair work side-by-side with the members of the repair unit. The delays, monotony, and the tropical heat lowered morale and dulled the operational skills of once-fine crews.
This was the situation which awaited U- Boats, destined for the Far East, when they left their European bases during 1944. What awaited them in their patrol sectors was less pleasant. The new British Far East fleet returned to Ceylon in January, and though short of escort vessels, Admiral Sir James Somerville, immediately put the U-Boat quarries in convoy whenever possible. As the year progressed, the U-Boats found more and more of their targets guarded by veterans of Atlantic and Mediterranean ASW groups. And there appeared, too, new hunter-killer groups of the Atlantic variety, built around jeep carriers like HMS Battler. Also land- based aircraft of the RAF, RAAF and RAIF ranged over broad areas of the Indian Ocean.
Nor were there favorable odds for the U- Boats to break through the Atlantic ASW barrier. American hunter-killer groups, centered around the escort carriers USS Card, USS Guadalcanal, USS Solomons, USS Mission Bay, USS Tripoli, USS Bogue, USS Croatan, and USS Wake Island, patrolled the mid- Atlantic “chop line” as distant support groups for the Atlantic convoys. They destroyed the U-boats on the surface or submerged as they attempted to pass through to their patrol areas or rendezvous with the dwindling numbers of U-Tankers.
Still, out came the U-Boats at the turn of the year, headed for the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean. The next group of seven boats ran into the same type of catastrophe that had hit the “2nd Monsoon” group in November and December 1943.9 A VB-107 Ascension-based Liberator first mauled U-177 so badly in early February that the crew scuttled her. USS Card's VC-6 got the supply boat, U-1059 in March, while British planes sank UIT-22 off the Cape of Good Hope that same month. Weingaertner, an old campaigner with ten years’ service in the U-Boat arm, radioed U-851's position south of Iceland in late March. She was never heard from again. Thus, only three boats out of the seven got through to the Indian Ocean. But Heinz Eck’s atrocity boat, U-852, (Eck had ordered the lifeboats of the Greek freighter Peleus fired on after sinking her off Liberia), was forced aground by air attack off Somaliland. Captured with his entire crew, Eck and two others were executed before a British firing squad in the only atrocity case to spoil the record of the U-Boat arm in World War II. U-1062, fully loaded with high priority materials from the Far East, ran into the USS Mission Bay hunter-killer group off the Cape Verdes in September, and one of the escorts, USS Fessenden (DE-142) destroyed her. And U-843, after months of frustrating dock time in Singapore, got within 100 miles of the German naval base at Kiel only to fall victim to an RAF attack in April 1945. So fared the winter group—seven boats, all lost.
Between March and early May 1944, 11 other U-Boats left for the Far East. Contrary to Allied accounts after the war, only U-68 (Lauzemis), sunk by VC-58 of USS Guadalcanal in May, was lost out of the nine regular patrollers in the Atlantic breakthrough. All the others reached the Indian Ocean.10 The tenth boat, the cargo carrier U-490 (Gerlach), was sunk by USS Croatan's VC-95 and her escorts in June, while the eleventh boat, ex- U-1224, newly commissioned by a Japanese crew in Germany, was sunk by one of USS Bogue’s escorts, USS Francis M. Robinson (IDE-220), in May.
The eight other boats of the spring group began patroling their operating areas in June and by October accounted for but 18 ships (only one in convoy). Though Freiwald and Timm in U-181 and U-862 respectively, turned in exceptionally fine patrols, they and the others found the “convoy law of diminishing returns” in evidence and U-Boat losses up. U-860, which managed to survive a particularly savage air attack in the Atlantic on 15 June (Admiral Morison has mistakenly claimed that U-860 was sunk in this attack), suffered a fatal assault from the air on 4 July off Durban by the RAF. U-198 ran into a British-Indian ASW team north of the Seychelles in August and disappeared in a swirl of debris. Then U-859, inbound for Penang in September, was torpedoed by the submerged HMS Trenchant in Malacca Strait. The remaining five boats (U-181, U-196, U-537, U-861 and U-862) joined the survivors of the earlier “Monsoon” groups (U-168, U-183, U-510, U-532, U-843, and U1T-25) in the Far East bases during the early autumn for replenishing and overhaul.
By that time another group of seven patrol boats and cargo carriers had left Europe for the Indian station. All three patrolers were lost in the Atlantic—U-863 (von der Esch) to that arch-nemesis of U-boats, VB-107 out of Ascension; U-867 (von Muehlendahl) to RAF Coastal Command Squadron 224, north of the Shetlands; and U-871 (Ganzer) to RAF Squadron 220, north of the Azores. The cargo boats also fared badly. U-180 (Riesen) struck a mine just two days out of Bordeaux in late August, and U-1060 was lost to planes from HMS Implaccable in October. The two others, U-195 (Steinfeld) and U-219 (Burghagen), made the perilous voyage safely.
By the time they arrived, however, the old “Monsoon” group had suffered further setbacks. Battery trouble forced U-510, U-532, U-183, and UIT-25 to go all the way to Kobe in the summer of 1944 where they joined UIT-24. Herwartz in U-843 and Freiwald in U-181, ordered home as cargo carriers in the fall, had difficulties. U-843 got as far as the Baltic, where she was sunk, while Freiwald’s boat suffered heavy damage in an air attack and returned to Singapore. U-168, U-537, and U-862 went on patrol off Australia in October. On the way out, the Dutch submarine Swaardvisch sank Pich’s U-168 in the coastal waters of Samarang. In the remainder of the patrol, U-862 sank one American freighter. Then, returning to port in November, Schrewe’s U-537 was sighted running on the surface by Stevens’ USS Flounder (SS-251), which promptly torpedoed her. U-196, captained by Striegler who had survived the sinking of UIT-23, blew up in Sundra Strait in late November, probably the result of mining. As a result of these heavy losses and a major Allied effort to mine the approaches to Penang, the Germans abandoned their northern base and moved en masse to Djakarta.
So closed 1944. The Germans had lost 19 of 24 boats sent out from Germany that year. In addition, two others from earlier groups were sunk. Those sent out in 1944 had sunk just 28 Allied ships (two in the Atlantic) for roughly 150,000 gross tons, less than half the 1943 totals.
As 1945 opened, only two boats, U-861 and U-862, were ready for new operations. Six others were undergoing repairs and two were in loading cargo. But Oesten’s U-861, along with U-510, and U-532, were ordered home that winter and arrived just in time to surrender to the Allies in May. U-862 went out alone on the last successful German war patrol in the Far East; she sank one ship in February before returning to Djakarta. In the late spring, U-183 set out for a patrol off the Philippines in the first German attempt to interfere with American naval operations in the Pacific. En route she ran into a spread of torpedoes from USS Desugo (SS-321) (Wogan) in the Java Sea in late April. So U-183 suffered the dubious honor of being the second German U-Boat sunk by American submarines, and she was the last one lost to the German Far East forces.
As V-E Day broke over the Pacific, two patrollers, U-181 and U-862, and four cargo carriers, U-195, U-219, and UIT-24, and -25, lay in Far Eastern harbors. The Japanese promptly took them over and interned the crews. And that was the end of them. In a sense, however, the German U-Boat command had given up on the Far Eastern venture earlier. Only one boat, the cargo carrier U-234 (Fehler), left for the Far East after October 1944, and she surrendered in the Atlantic in May, shortly after her departure. Most of the other boats went home after the fall operations in 1944.
What had this German effort amounted to in the final analysis? First, offensive war patrol operations predominated. In fact, the supply efforts to get critical raw materials into Germany produced negligible results with less than 1,000 tons reaching Germany in U-Boats between 1943 and 1944. And that tonnage, about one-eighth of that which a single merchantman could have carried, all came to Germany in returning regular patrol boats. None of the ten cargo-carrier U-Boats ever reached Germany. Thus, that phase of the German operation failed.
On the other hand, of the 168 Allied ships sunk in the Indian Ocean between October 1942, when the first U-Boats appeared, and the end of the war, German submarines accounted for 151 of them, totaling some 935,000 gross tons.11 The figure is impressive because even though the Far Eastern campaign did not begin until the war was three years old, 51 U-Boats (excluding the cargo boats), or 6 per cent of the 863 U-Boats that made war patrols in World War II, accounted for 7.1 per cent of the total Allied tonnage lost to U-Boats in the war. This was a success of the first magnitude. But losses were very heavy. Of the 57 boats committed (four came out twice, and U-181 three times), 32 were lost in action and another six interned by Japan. These losses were no more severe, however, than over-all U-Boat losses.
Perhaps the best criterion for evaluating this phase of German U-Boat operations—as well as for other phases—lies with an examination of Grand Admiral Doenitz’ application of his “tonnage warfare” theory. To sink as many merchantmen as possible, thus cutting to a critical point the number of bottoms available for carrying supplies to the fronts and Allied countries was the foundation of his strategy. His tactics were to keep his boats in areas of dense shipping, but to shift them from time to time to positions where they were least expected, or where Allied ASW defenses were weakest. In spite of the small number of boats available in the early war years, his plan came close to working. A severe shortage of ships for carrying Allied supplies resulted, so that England was threatened both with starvation at home and the defeat of her forces engaged with the enemy in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
But all this changed. In late 1942, the Allied shipping issue was never again in doubt, and 1943 witnessed three diverging curves as ship production soared, ship losses dropped off, and U-Boat sinkings mounted. The situation demanded a change in German strategy. The need was at once apparent to Admiral Doenitz, because he admitted the loss of the U-Boat war in July 1943. What he chose to do was move the U-Boats into distant waters, removed from the European area. The convoys which brought men and supplies into Europe through the focal areas around England and Africa should have been the objects of massed U-Boat attacks for the remainder of the war. These men and materials, not ships which might carry them eventually, were what the German armies had to face, and what decided the outcome of the war. All other U-Boat operations thus became peripheral. Only after the Allies had taken North Africa, Sicily, and had invaded Italy, Normandy, and Southern France did the Germans begin a belated inshore U-Boat campaign. But the fall of 1944 was too late.
The Indian Ocean campaign does not stand up very well within this framework. The first operations there in the fall of 1942 with nine boats, successful though they were, came too late to help Rommel in North Africa. Field Marshall Montgomery had received crucial supplies and reinforcements by way of the Indian Ocean earlier. When these U- Boats came into action, Rommel’s forces were already reeling backward across Libya. By the time the “Monsoon” groups came out in late 1943 and 1944, with Africa and Sicily in Allied hands and the Mediterranean finally open again to Allied shipping, the Indian Ocean had dropped to low priority as a significant strategic area for the Germans.
The 30 U-Boats dispatched to the Indian Ocean after mid-1943 belonged in the Atlantic, regardless of the dispersion of Allied ASW units which they drew, the sinkings which they achieved, or the need for raw materials. But even accepting the presence of this force in the Far East in the face of counter-argument, one might ask why the Germans did not throw them against the Allied supply lines to New Guinea, the Solomons, and later the Philippines.
Tactically, this Far Eastern operation also points up some flaws. First, the Germans had always assigned a U-Boat operational staff with a senior officer in all other war areas in which U-Boat operations brought contact with an ally or other units of the German Wehrmacht. But neither this, nor the obvious fact that the U-Boats were operating in an area greatly removed from the operational staff in Germany which attempted to direct them, ever brought such a staff to Penang. Second, the U-Boat operational and intelligence sections in the Naval War Staff never made any significant effort to assimilate the Far Eastern patrol reports and experiences of the commanders who came home from the area, so that the boats on station and the new ones sent out might have adequate information about Allied ASW tactics, air patrols, convoy routings, or other significant information for their highly technical operations. This was always done for boats operating in other areas. Nor were the Japanese pressed for information. This failure at home only served to blunt the skills and experiences of the fine commanders and crews sent to the Far East. Third, the operation suffered from a lack of good communication facilities to combat transmission and reception difficulties. Fourth, the Far East effort withered on the vine because the Naval High Command was forced to concentrate its final naval efforts on the European war. The last year of the Indian Ocean war thus brought little success while tying up some 15 boats.
In the operating area itself, there were glaring deficiencies in operating methods, in materiel, and in personnel. Lack of good intelligence analyses produced roughshod operations. Lack of air reconnaissance and escorts in waters in which the enemy either operated or which he controlled caused severe losses among the U-Boats to Allied submarines and to Allied air and hunter- killer assaults. The absence of minesweepers, or at least of Japanese co-operation and support, forced the U-Boats to abandon their best base, Penang.
So went the course of German U-Boat operations in the Indian Ocean—misconceived, misdirected, and tragically wasteful in spite of the devotion to duty, the valiant efforts, sacrifices, and successes of the Far Eastern U-Boat cadre.
“ To control the sea, the Navy must be capable of destroying the source of weapons which threaten ships and operations at sea—submarine bases, air bases, missile bases, and any other bases from which control of the sea can be challenged."
Admiral Arleigh Burke
An assistant Professor in the Department of English, History, and Government at the U. S. Naval Academy, Mr. Saville is a graduate of the University of Washington and received his M.A. degree from Columbia.
A Navy veteran, he served in submarines and destroyers from 1944 to 1947 and in USS Mahopac (ATA-196) during the Korean War. He was a Graduate Assistant at the University of Washington before coming to the Naval Academy.
NOTE: The author is indebted to Captains Kurt Freiwald and Robert Gysae of the Federal German Navy and to Commander F. Barley, R.N.V.R. (Ret.) of the Historical Section in the British Admiralty for materials and suggestions.
1. U-130 (Kals), U-124 (Mohr), U-120 (N. Clausen) U-126 (Bauer) and U-A (Eckcrmann).
2. 1-10 (Kashihara), 1-16 (K. Yamada), 1-18 (Otani), 1-20 (T. Yamada), and 1-30 (Endo).
3. U-156 (Hartenstein), U-68 (Merten), U-172 (Emmermann), U-504 (Poske), and the U-Tanker, U-459 (von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff).
4. U-159 (Helmut Witte), U-177 (Gysae), U-178 (Ibbeken), U-181 (Lueth), U-195 (Buchholz). All boats made the round trip unscathed.
5. U-177 (Gysae), U-178 (Dommes), U-181 (Lueth), U-196 (Kentrat), U-198 (W. Hartmann), U-197 (R. Bartels).
6. Fregattenkapitan Wolfgang Lueth in U-181 became the most decorated German naval officer after this patrol for adding another ten ships to his record. His boat also completed the longest continuous war patrol in submarine history—211 days.
7. U-168 (Pich), U-183 (Schaefer), U-188 (Luedden), U-200 (Schonder), U-506 (Wuerdemann), U-514 (Auf- fermann), U-516 (Tillassen), U-532 (Junker), U-533 (Hennig), U-509 (Werner Witte), U-847 (Kuppisch), and the U-Tankers U-462 (Vowe) and U-487 (H. Metz)
8. This marked the only appearance of the Luftwaffe in the Far East.
9. U-177 (Buchholz), U-843 (Herwartz), U-851 (Weingaertner), U-852 (Eck), U-1059 (Leupold), U-1062 (Albrecht), UIT-22 (Wunderlich).
10. U-181 (Freiwald, U-196 (Kentrat), U-198 (von Waldegg), U-537 (Schrewe), U-859 (Jebsen), U-860 (Beuchel), U-861 (Oesten), U-862 (Timm)
11. The German figures differ from the Allied statistics cited, because the former include a number of ships under 1,000 tons not usually cited in Allied figures. The Germans claimed 176 ships sunk in the Indian Ocean.