From this seaside villa, on the edge of the French port of Lorient,
Karl Donitz directed the Battle of the Atlantic.
By the summer of 1942, Donitz commanded three hundred and thirty U-boats.
Five times more than at the beginning of the war.
With these, he hoped to strike a decisive blow against the convoys on
which the allied war effort depended.
Fast on the surface, able to hide beneath it, the U-boat seemed an invincible enemy.
This is the story of how the allies fought back
and within a year drove the U-boat from the Atlantic.
After three years of success, the hunter became the hunted.
Hitler's U-boats sank more than a hundred and thirty ships in June 1942.
The crews called this their 'happy time.'
We were convinced we were fighting in the right service.
We expected to have success in battle.
We were young, optimistic,
and we'd sworn our Oath of Allegiance to the Fatherland, and to our
- well, as he was then - beloved Fuhrer.
The U-boat was winning the battle of the Atlantic.
More than five hundred allied ships were sunk in the first half of 1942,
for the loss ofjust twenty-one German U-boats.
The leader of the U-boat arm judged a decisive victory
in the Atlantic to be within his grasp.
But Karl Donitz's confidence was shaken that summer,
by a new and entirely unexpected threat.
On the night of July the 13th, 1942,
U-159 was making good speed home to its base on the French coast.
lts crew felt safe. The dark hull of the boat was almost invisible at night.
We were sailing at full speed at night
when we were suddenly caught in the glare of a searchlight.
A plane was running in to attack us.
The U-boat had been detected by a Wellington from RAF Coastal Command.
lt dropped five depth charges next to the boat, pretty close.
We didn't know how it had found us. We only knew for the -
- first time a plane had attacked us at night
and caught us in the full beam of its searchlight.
The U-159 limped back into Lorient to discover
that two other boats had been attacked that night.
The mystery was, how had the allies found them in the dark?
lt was a surprise for us. The U-boats were now -
- always being detected and we didn't know how it was happening.
British air crews were using a new detection device.
One that threatened to force the U-boat from the surface.
ln the first months of the war,
the Admiralty had contacted a small civilian research team
that was working for the RAF.
Admiral Somerville rang up one day from the Admiralty and said -
- 'Do you think with an aeroplane you could detect a - a conning tower of a submarine?
l'll give you a submarine in the Solent, L27, you go and try it.
So l fitted a Lockheed Hudson with an early form of radar
and we went out to meet our submarine.
We saw it at three and a half miles, peering into a cathode ray tube anxiously
and it was the first detection of a submarine l think by radar.
The radar was a crucial breakthrough.
The U-boat spent more than ninety percent of its time on the surface.
Beneath it, it was slow and blind.
lf it could be detected above the waves,
a vital step would be taken towards victory in the Atlantic.
The lessons of radar were not lost on the Naval staff.
By the summer of 1942
the Admiralty and the Air Ministry had opened their doors to a new type of scientist.
The operational researcher.
For the first time,
civilians were given the freedom to assess
notjust the equipment needed to defeat the U-boat, but the tactics too.
After three years of war the number of U-boat kills from the air
were still disappointingly low. lt was soon clear why.
Aircraft could be spotted by day many miles away.
Time enough for a U-boat to dive. The solution was astonishingly simple.
To paint allied planes the colour of the Atlantic sky.
The scientists were also able to prove that a large number of small depth charges,
timed to go off close to the surface, would improve the chances of a kill.
Their work promised to turn the radar guided aircraft into a formidable hunter.
On December the 8th, 1942,
a Liberator from the RAF's 120 Squadron set out from lceland.
lt used to take us five hours to get out to pick up a convoy
and sometimes they were hundreds of miles out of position.
We'd pick them up on radar,
a big convoy of about fifty ships would show up enormously on the radar screen -
- so we used to home in on that.
Bulloch and his crew picked up the ships of Convoy HX-21 7.
Within minutes, he'd made another contact.
We knew there were - there were about fifteen U-boats in the area.
You'd pick up the - its wake first of all, a big stream behind it.
There was one there about ten miles astern and we spotted him on the surface.
Bomb gone.
We felt er, a lot of satisfaction that we'd made a good attack.
You don't worry about the forty-eight people onboard the thing.
Bulloch had sunk the U-61 1 .
That day he attacked and damaged another six U-boats.
ln the first three years of the war,
aircraft had sunk just fifteen U-boats,
but in the six months from September 1942, they sank twenty-nine.
Naval intelligence began to detect encouraging signs.
A new reticence among U-boat crews to press home the attack
when they came within range of allied aircraft.
The allied staff effort was bearing fruit.
The contrast with U-boat Command in France, couldn't have been more marked.
ln 1942, Donitz's headquarters was based in a villa on the outskirts of Lorient
-The Chateau Kernevel.
The U-boat war in the Atlantic was run from two rooms on the ground floor
and the small bunker beneath the house.
Headquarters was so small, staff dubbed it the 'Sardine tin.'
Donitz relied on a core of just six young staff officers.
Orders for the U-boats had to be written with stencils and water soluble ink,
so that if the U-boat was sunk it would be impossible to find them.
l would first of all hang up these stencils to dry in my little room
on a washing line over my bunk.
They had to dry first of all, you know. That was a joke in itself.
How primitive this whole warfare business was.
Donitz's headquarters looked across to huge new U-boat pens.
Millions of Marks were spent on protecting the U-boat in port,
but next to nothing on improving its fighting capability at sea.
Donitz and his staff relied entirely on navy experts in Berlin for technical advice.
Their record was poor.
The boats hardly differed from the ones that were already in service
at the end of the First World War.
That meant no significant improvements had been made in twenty years.
The same old U-boats were still being launched.
No serious effort had been made to develop a submarine with high underwater speeds.
One that would be safe from allied air attack.
But there was one stretch of ocean in which the old U-boats
could still operate on the surface.
Donitz began to direct his packs into the waters south of Greenland. The air gap.
Here they were beyond the range of all but a handful of aircraft.
By September, 1942,
it was clear to Donitz that whilst the allies might be one step
ahead in the technical race, the battle was still there to be won.
Sinkings were as high as ever and the number of frontline
U-boats was still steadily rising.
But the more distant future caused me some anxiety.
Donitz took his fears to Hitler.
Hitler had a simple solution.
Shoot anyone who survived a U-boat attack,
then allied seamen would no longer want to serve.
Donitz refused to consider such a brutal step.
But two weeks after his meeting with Hitler an event took place
with hardened Donitz's attitude towards survivors.
The liner Laconia was homebound from Cape Town
with two thousand seven hundred people onboard.
Eighteen hundred of them ltalian prisoners of war.
She was sailing alone - unprotected.
We thought we were fast enough to survive anything,
so it was speed and zigzagging, you know, which is the usual thing.
On the evening of September the 12th,
the Laconia was nine hundred miles from Freetown on the west coast of Africa.
Among the passengers were Janet Walker and her five year old daughter, Noreen.
l was putting my little girl to bed there was me getting her to say her prayers
and she was sitting up in bed and l heard this bang.
People around me said, 'What was that?'
Well l'd already knew what that bump, l'd heard that before.
l didn't want to panic them all so l said, 'l don't know,
we might have - might have hit something in the dark, another ship,' you know.
We were sort of looking at one another, sort of what's happened like,
and then the second torpedo hit.
There was a lot of screaming going on.
l think it was the children and that that was screaming in the passage.
l was just stunned. l stood there because l didn't know where to go.
No one picked up the Laconia's distress signal.
This Navy boy came up and he says,
'Come on, l'll show you where the lifeboat is.'
And he took my little girl and he said, 'Follow me.' So l followed him.
He said, 'You go down first and l'll hand her down to you.'
When l got in the lifeboat l looked up -
- and he wasn't there. And l started screaming.
And this Air Force man was in the lifeboat and he said -
-'l'll go up and get her.'
He came back down he said, 'He's taken her to another lifeboat.'
He said, 'Don't worry, you'll see her in the morning.'
The port side was coming up and you could see the rust and barnacles on the bottom.
So l jumped and that was that really.
Hundreds of men, most of them ltalian prisoners, were struggling in the sea.
They were desperate for a place in a lifeboat.
There were sharks about.
Screams they were, some of them, yeah. Oh aye.
ln fact one fellow in the boat says,
'lf any of them are on - hanging onto the side,'
he said, 'Call out and l'll give you the hatchet, chop their fingers off.'
Well l wasn't thinking like that.
l could see ahead of us like a - it was a low vess
- it was a submarine really and she had a lamp on corners,
like circling light like that and she was picking people up.
He drew up alongside us and he said,
'The women and children must go on the sh - in the - submarine'
and one of them said, 'They are not going in the submarine.'
He said, 'Don't worry, they'll be all right.'
So we went on the submarine.
The crew of the U-156 had heard the ltalians crying out from the water.
lts Commander sent a message to U-boat Headquarters,
asking for immediate assistance.
Donitz directed three of his nearest boats to join the rescue operation.
They were quite concerned about me losing my wee girl.
Every time they saw a lifeboat they would call me up to the conning tower -
- and tell me to have a look to see if she was in any of the boats.
They were very good.
l said them, 'Cigarette'
And he - this German took a cigarette out and l gave them back to him,
'Kamarad, give them to your mates.'
l thought this is a funny Germany, the way l'd been brought up to believe about them.
The U-boats had hundreds of survivors standing on their decks.
They'd made Red Cross flags and they kept sending radio messages
so that everyone would know where they were.
Then American planes arrived and flew over the boats.
They asked their commander what the should do, and the order came back, 'Attack.'
The American aircraft knew nothing of the rescue operation,
but thought it had caught the enemy on the surface.
No boats were lost, but Donitz was furious.
On September the 1 7th he sent a new order to his commanders.
No attempt was to be made at rescuing enemy crews.
No help offered. Be harsh.
The war called for the destruction of men, as well as ships.
Above all, no commander was to risk his U-boat to help survivors.
One thousand, six hundred people were lost with the Laconia.
l never gave up hope, never.
l used to spend as much money on fortune tellers.
Maybe they would give me some clue.
l heard later on this boy was drowned trying to save a little girl.
But they didn't - they didn't know who the little girl was,
but l presumed it was mine. And yet l still didn't believe it.
By the winter of 1942, the war was becoming more brutal elsewhere.
News began to reach the U-boat bases of a terrible defeat.
Not at sea, but more than three thousand miles away on the Eastern Front.
The unthinkable had happened at Stalingrad.
The Germany Army had surrendered.
Ninety thousand men marched off into Soviet captivity.
Only at sea were there still victories to report.
On the day before the final surrender at Stalingrad Adolf Hitler appointed
Donitz Grossadmiral, to head all operations at sea.
lt was a sign of the confidence he placed in him.
But Donitz's job changed little.
Germany's small surface fleet had claimed less than four percent of the ships sunk.
The struggle in the Atlantic had rested from the first with the U-boat.
Donitz continued personally to direct them.
By now there were four hundred and five.
There was also a new man in charge of the Royal Navy's escort ships.
A poacher turned game keeper, a former submarine commander, Admiral Max Horton.
Horton was to bring a new vigour to the war against the U-boat.
His captains were sent back to school
to learn new group tactics for the defence of the convoys.
Five thousand officers were to play what was known as 'the game.'
Wrens -
- would come behind the curtain and say, 'Ship number so and so's been torpedoed,'
you see, and what action were -
- you going to take?
What type of searches should you use in this weather?
lf it's really, really, really foul weather, is it worth it at all?
Um, should any escorts go back to pick up stragglers?
All these things you need to have a co-ordinated plan for.
Terrible criticism. l mean you got murder if you made a mistake.
We got all the right ideas of defence and then
we got the right ideas of how to attack the U-boat.
By the spring of 1943,
the allies were beginning to make the training and the technical edge count.
A second volley of high explosives...
On April the 1 7th, the U-1 75 was detected by a US Navy cutter.
And there's the Nazi submarine, forced to the surface.
Donitz's packs were still sinking ships, but at a price.
Fifty-seven U-boats were sunk in the first four months of 1943.
But now the allies had access again to a vital source of intelligence.
The cryptographers at Bletchley Park were able at last to read some of the messages
sent by the U-boats in the key Enigma cipher 'Shark.'
We were well in on the Shark traffic for some time.
The common signal was, 'Gustav Gelp'
- and that means (in German) convoy sighted.
Unfortunately the one we most often saw.
lt was clear from the decrypts that Donitz was able to maintain
as many as a hundred U-boats at sea every day.
Most of them in the air gap.
That spring, a convoy would sail into this huge concentration of boats.
lt would prove to be one of the most decisive moments -
- of the Battle of the Atlantic.
ONS 5 set out on April the 22nd with just six escorts in support.
We had fog, icebergs, drifting south with the cold Labrador current.
lt got worse and worse and then er,
eventually we were making only about two or three knots.
And you see we were being routed further north
all the time as they knew that U-boats were packing onto us.
Admiral Horton was notified by Naval intelligence
that ONS 5 was sailing into trouble and for a time he was able to offer some air support.
But by May the 4th,
the convoy was on its own and on that day it sailed into packs Amsel and Fink.
We received a signal and l remember it quite well,
that 'you are encircled by approximately thirty-four U-boats.
You may expect attack from down moon at approximately 02.30.'
Donitz sent a message to the waiting boats, stating simply,
'Fight with everything you've got. Strike the enemy dead.'
l was able to take up a position on the port side of the convoy.
And when a gap opened between the destroyers,
l turned towards the convoy and fired two double shots.
A steamship was hit and began to sink as once on an even keel.
That night, the packs sank seven ships.
When you had a mass attack, as you had in ONS 5 -
- the only thing you could do was to get them under the water
and they would lose contact with the - the convoy
and that would be another night they would out of action.
On the morning of May the 5th, forty U-boats were still in pursuit.
But the escorts had one hidden advantage.
Some of the ships were equipped with the latest radio direction finding sets.
There was a great deal of chatter went on among the U-boats and er,
strangely enough the U-boats hadn't realised that we were able to
- to work on this chatter.
When the escorts picked up a radio signal, they went in pursuit.
A log of contact was kept by the Commanding Officer of HMS Oribi.
There's constant enemy wireless activity.
A first class bearing at one-five-five.
We see the smoke haze from the submarine's diesel engines.
The submarine dives and we have contact. We drop a ten charge pattern.
The escort group sank a U-boat that day, but four ships were lost.
At nightfall on the 5th,
at least fifteen U-boats were still in close contact with the convoy.
We heard the radio messages from all the other U-boats -
- and we thought, 'Oh God, if they all rush the convoy at once,
this will end up as a 'night of the long knives.'
Suddenly, a thick pea-souper appeared.
l'd never seen anything like it out at sea. lt was dreadful.
We heard on the radio that two or three U-boats were already in danger.
At Western Approaches headquarters,
the battle around the convoy was plotted through the night.
Only if the escorts could find the pack and drive it from the surface,
would the defence succeed.
Radio detection, and above all radar, would be the key to victory.
Radar contact picked up on the port bow.
Close to investigate at fourteen knots.
We picked the submarine up on ASDlC.
Radar contact, picked up ahead at 3400 yards, a torpedo fired from Red 20.
Turned towards it and passed it down on port side.
...our pattern was dropped set at 150 feet.
lt was a most promising attack.
Whilst we wee doddering about in this pea-souper,
trying to achieving something, we were almost rammed by a destroyer.
lt suddenly appeared behind us,
lightening up the stern of our U-boat with a big searchlight on its foremast.
lt thundered past our stern with about three metres to spare.
Five U-boats were sunk on the night of May the 5th.
The operations chart at U-boat Command told its own story.
A total of nine boats lost in the week long battle.
A small escort group equipped with radio detection
and radar had beaten off the largest concentration of U-boats ever assembled.
Donitz called off the rest of the pack.
That was depressing.
We realised that the ONS 5 operation had pretty much failed.
And that it represented a colossal setback for the U-boats.
The crews that managed to make it home in the spring of 1943
began to grumble about their U-boats.
lt wasn'tjust allied aircraft,
the escort ships were now able to detect them as soon as they approached the convoys.
We had one song which went something like this.
'Give me a new little U-boat,
a U-boat that can no longer be located, Karl Donitz.'
That was the kind of thing.
Once, when coming into port after a short trip,
we were welcomed by people singing these songs.
After ONS 5 the convoy battle seemed to follow a new pattern.
U-boats sunk for little or no loss.
By the end of May, 1943, the air gap had all but closed.
The huge allied technical and training effort had thrown the U-boat on the defensive.
Forty U-boats were lost in May.
Two thousand men. Among the dead was Donitz's own son, Peter.
On May 24th, Donitz ordered all his boats with withdraw
from the main North Atlantic convoy routes.
lt was a bitter blow.
He was really in despair. He saw how things were going.
This was a very great burden for him.
As if to underscore the importance of these successes,
just six weeks later the allies celebrated the news
that American yards had replaced all the ships lost in almost four years of war.
They were building ships really er, very fast indeed.
ln fact they - it was a joke in America that they were building ships so fast
that they were running out of names for the new ships, you see.
They couldn't come up with enough names.
Recently, in one twenty-four hour working day,
27 brand new ships slid down the ways.
Nowhere else in all the world is such production possible.
The goal for 1943, 23 million tons of shipping.
Donitz called a meeting with six of his most senior officers.
He asked them, should the campaign in the Atlantic continue?
The allies enjoyed overwhelming material and technical superiority
and it would be two years before a new submarine
with high underwater speeds could be developed.
Everybody gave his view and this was
- even if we can no longer expect to make a decisive impact with the U-boat war,
as long as there is fighting, we still have to keep up the pressure.
And, well, when everyone had his say, myself last of all, Donitz said,
'Okay, you have simply confirmed what l also think.'
The U-boat would fight on.
But Donitz knew well enough that the cost of continuing would be very great.
That summer the allies mounted their Biscay campaign.
U-boats were attacked as soon as they left their bases.
Sixty more U-boats were sunk in just three months.
Most of the crews were lost with their boats.
The few survivors that were fished out of the Atlantic by the British
began to tell their interrogators of the growing sense of unease in the U-boat messes.
They knew it was their duty not to give away information and so forth,
but they were perfectly happy to talk to other naval officers.
They then went back to their cabins and um -
- if they had somebody else there with them he might well say,
'Well, what are they asking you about' and so forth, and he'd say,
'Well, what they really wanted to know was so and so,
but l wasn't going to tell them,' and all this was being recorded.
The picture that began to emerge from these interrogations was of a crisis in morale.
Naval intelligence reported that 'Defeatist conversation was common.'
The prisoners spoke of frequent fights between Nazis and anti-Nazis.
Agents in the U-boat bases reported 'proof'
that some crews were damaging pieces of machinery
to delay their departure on war patrol.
We talked exactly the same way about this shitty war,
if l may use that expression.
We said to each other, 'For God's sake, you just can't go on like this.
We suffer losses and don't sink a single ship. ls it worth carrying on?'
Hitler believed so.
ln October, 1943, the U-boat ace Erich Topp was invited to Fuhrer headquarters.
lt was soon clear to him that Hitler remained stubbornly optimistic
about the future of the U-boat war.
Hopes now rested on the plans for a revolutionary new submarine.
We were a group of four or five submarine commanders
who had been invited to lunch by Hitler.
He said they were in the process of developing new batteries
which would enable a U-boat to remain under water for days.
With these new batteries the U-boat could at last become a true submarine.
ln the meantime, Donitz was forced to turn to an old device to protect his crews.
The schnorkel. Through this, air was drawn down to the diesel engines.
lt meant the U-boat could remain hidden just beneath the surface.
On the 5th of February, 1944,
the first U-boat to be equipped with the Schnorkel left on war patrol.
Hardwig Look's U-264.
We'd ceased to think we'd be successful in battle.
We realised that the U-boats arriving from home,
the new U-boats with young crews, nearly all of them stayed out and never came back.
Just days before, the six ships of the Second Support Group
had left Northern lreland to the strains of 'a hunting we will go.'
The allies now had enough ships to form new escort groups,
dedicated to hunting and killing U-boats.
The leader of the Second Support Group was Captain Johnny Walker.
lt was a hunt to him. He would sort of treat it as a sport.
l mean for instance we sank one submarine -
- and there was oil and debris on the surface and he signalled to er,
the captain of the ship which had sunk the submarine and said,
'Come over here and look what a mess you've made.'
As the Second Support Group was setting out,
a British intercept station picked up heavy signals traffic
some two hundred miles to the west of lreland.
A pack of U-boats seemed to be converging on convoy ON 221 .
The Admiralty sent Walker to intercept them.
The group's hunt was filmed.
Walker had developed a new tactic. The 'creeping attack.'
One ship, usually Walker's own, the Starling, held sonar contact.
lt then directed one or more of the group in a slow,
creeping attack along the U-boats course.
The rest of the group formed a ring around the target.
Once a U-boat was caught in this, it was almost impossible to escape.
ln just twelve days the group found and sank five U-boats. There were no survivors.
None of them came to the surface,
so the Admiralty needed proof that a sinking had taken place.
And er, whatever tangible things that they could get hold of were picked up
and put in the boat.
This was a rather gruesome thing, picking up human remains.
On February the 19th, Walker picked up another contact. The U-264.
That was really pretty terrible.
During this period, twelve hours, we were submerged for twelve hours.
We got around two hundred depth charges.
Just about everything in the U-boat was smashed.
We shot out of the water like a champagne cork
and found ourselves inside the circle made by Captain Walker's submarine chasers.
They were swimming towards us.
Now we had a rule that unless we discovered the number
and name of the captain of the submarine we would not pick them up,
and a young boy was swimming towards us.
Er, he came alongside, near to where the scrambling net was
and l held his arm in my right hand and another officer said,
'Well, look, we're going to ask them for the last time,' and um,
no sort of unified number came up and the call was, 'Let the prisoner go.'
But l can still feel this young boy's arm or hand sliding through my hand
and l would say that this lad was no more than sixteen years of age.
And it's something which has haunted me er, for a very long period of time.
lt was not Navy policy, but on Walker's ship he made the rules.
The crew of the U-264 was prepared to furnish him with all the details he required,
including intelligence on the Schnorkel.
They were the only survivors from six U-boats sunk in twenty days.
They took me to the mess and three our four British officers
began bombarding me with questions.
One of them said, 'That was a very, very clever fight.'
That wasn't how l felt about it.
As we sailed in line ahead, up the Mersey l think we felt, you know, pretty good.
Oh, there must have been hundreds of er,
of Wrens and people sort of cheering us as we came in
Waiting to greet the group was the First Lord of the Admiralty.
lt was a moment of triumph that seemed to symbolise the final victory in the Atlantic.
l want to say to you fellas
that l feel that you've had an enormous part to play in settling the issue -
- against the threat of dictatorship in Europe.
Hip, hip, hip.
Hooray.
Three months later British and American troops landed in France.
The Battle of the Atlantic was virtually over.
There was still rationing and food shortages, but the convoys were arriving unmolested.
On the land and the air and the sea let's swing out to victory.
Over here over there anywhere, we can take them one, two, three,
with a rip a break and flare.
Trumpets blasting through the air with a rat-and-a-tat on the drum. Yeah, man..
The U-boat menace has for the time being been practically effaced.
Their was a recent month in which up till the last day
they did not sink a single ship.
'Britain's ability to fight, Churchill wrote, to keep itself alive,
depended on the Battle of the Atlantic.'
Yet it was difficult to cheer the final victory.
More than half the ships sunk in the Atlantic had flown the Red Ensign
and fifty thousand British seamen died protecting the lifeline.
Donitz's fleet of new submarines never sailed against the convoys.
The old boats fought on to the end.
Six hundred and fifty were lost. With them, thirty thousand U-boat men.
l could tell you, l wept.
All my comrades, who l'd spent all those months with had perished.
We'd been trained to do our duty to the very end.
That's why we still put to sea.
l don't think that many people thought of us, quite frankly,
because we were an unseen war.
You didn't see the sunken ships or the survivors who never made it.
Well, it was - it was ourjob.
We knew we were going out and you mightn't come back.
You never dwelt on it.
This nation owes those people a great deal.
lf the North Atlantic Convoy route had failed, all else would have failed.