Hitler's U-Boat War by Clay Blair

Author:Clay Blair [Blair, Clay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-87437-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

UNHAPPY TIMES

While Dönitz took leave in the month of January 1941, his chief of staff, Eberhard Godt, directed the U-boat war.

At the beginning of the year, four December boats were still on patrol, two on weather-reporting station. These four were joined by five others: two new IXBs, U-105 and U-106, which sailed from Germany, and three boats from Lorient. All were handicapped by winter darkness and by a seemingly endless parade of brutal storms. The only Ritterkreuz holder on patrol, Heinrich Liebe in the aging Type IX U-38, who had sunk two ships in December (sharing one with Tazzoli), incurred “heavy” depth-charge damage and was forced to abort to Lorient. At mid-month there were seven U-boats in the North Atlantic and a number of Italian boats, including Torelli, commanded by Primo Longobardo, who had trained in combat under Otto Kretschmer in U-99.

The hunting continued to be very poor. The glancing attack by Hipper on the military convoy on Christmas Day and the hideous weather had led the British to delay again the sailing of Halifax convoys. For example, when convoy Halifax 103 was ready to put to sea, the bad weather forced thirty-one ships to abort the voyage. In the whole month of January, only 243 ships crossed from Canada to the British Isles in convoys, 170 of them in Halifax convoys, seventy-three in Slow Convoys.

In the first half of January, Axis submarines in the North Atlantic sank only six ships, all sailing alone or stragglers from storm-tossed convoys. Primo Longobardo in Torelli accounted for three of the sinkings for 12,291 tons, the most successful patrol by an Italian submarine to then. The new Type IXB U-105, commanded by Georg Schewe, age thirty-one, from the duck U-60, sank the 4,800-ton British freighter Bassano. The new IXB U-106, commanded by Jürgen Oesten, age twenty-eight, from the duck U-61, sank the 10,600-ton British freighter Zealandic. The promising new skipper, Georg-Wilhelm Schulz in U-124, sank the 6,000-ton British freighter Empire Thunder, an exasperating and near-fatal victory requiring the expenditure of five torpedoes. The first two missed, the third hit, and the fourth missed and circled back, missing U-124 by “a few meters.”* The fifth hit and finally sank the ship. After thirty-eight miserable days at sea, Schulz returned to Lorient in ill humor.

At this time, a third Italian boat was lost in the North Atlantic. She was the Nani, commanded by Gioacchino Polizzi. She was sunk on January 7 by depth charges from the British corvette Anemone. There were no survivors from this boat either.

One of the new VIICs, U-96, commanded by Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock who had sunk five ships on his first patrol, sailed from Lorient on January 9, after merely twelve days in port. He arrived off Rockall Bank on January 16, and that day and the next U-96 found and attacked two big British freighters, which were sailing unescorted: one for 14,118 tons and one for 15,000 tons.

Lehmann-Willenbrock expended all twelve torpedoes to sink these ships and returned to Lorient on January 22, having been out only fourteen days.

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