Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag)

13 January 1942 was the date set by the commander of the German U-boat arm, Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz, for the start of Operation Paukenschlag – “Drumbeat”, or literally “a stroke on the kettledrum”. Five large U-boats, which had sailed from France in the last days of December, took up positions off the coasts of Canada and the United States, from Newfoundland to Cape Hatteras. They were to strike simultaneously and by surprise at shipping that was still sailing there as if in peacetime. In the early hours of 14 January the first torpedo struck a tanker off Long Island, almost within sight of land.

The day is usually linked with the beginning of the “second happy time”. That is accurate, though two points are worth adding. The name was given to the period by the German crews themselves, in reference to the “happy time” of 1940–1941; it was not the code name of the operation. Moreover, the operation claimed its first ship a day before the appointed date: on the night of 11–12 January U-123 sank the British steamer Cyclops off Nova Scotia.

The war finally reaches America

Since the autumn of 1941 an undeclared German–American war had been fought in the Atlantic. After the Greer incident President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued the shoot-on-sight order against Axis warships in waters deemed vital to the defence of America, and American destroyers escorted British and Canadian convoys as far as Iceland. In October U-boats torpedoed the destroyer Kearny and sank the Reuben James. Adolf Hitler, however, forbade attacks on American ships outside the combat zones and ordered his forces to avoid incidents until he had settled the war with the Soviet Union. Dönitz regarded these restrictions as shackles: his commanders could not even defend themselves against the destroyers hunting them.

The situation changed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On 11 December 1941 Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and all the restrictions fell away. Dönitz saw his chance at once. The American East Coast was one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world: along it ran tankers carrying oil from the Gulf of Mexico and Venezuela to the north-eastern ports, colliers, ore carriers and general cargo ships bound for Halifax and New York, from where the convoys to Britain departed. Dönitz assumed that the Americans, although they had been watching the submarine war for months, had not yet organised the defence of their own waters. He reckoned that a short, powerful blow would yield more sunk tonnage than long weeks of waiting for convoys in mid-ocean.

That was the essence of his strategy of the “tonnage war”. Dönitz believed that Germany would win the Battle of the Atlantic if the U-boats sank ships faster than Allied shipyards could build new ones. It therefore mattered little to him where a ship was sunk; what counted was to sink as many as possible at the lowest possible risk. American waters, without convoys and without an experienced defence, seemed ideal for the purpose.

Five boats instead of twelve

From the outset the plan was limited by the number of boats. Only the large ocean-going Type IX boats could reach the American coast, more than 3,000 nautical miles from the bases in Brittany, with enough fuel for a patrol of several weeks. According to most accounts Dönitz wanted to send twelve of them. The naval high command, however, held back some boats for other tasks, especially in the approaches to Gibraltar and in the Mediterranean, where many U-boats had been sent on Hitler’s orders in the autumn of 1941. Six boats were assigned to the expedition, and one of them had to turn back with a defect (sources differ as to which).

In the end five boats sailed from Lorient in Brittany between 18 and 27 December 1941:

• U-123 under Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen, a Type IXB boat,
• U-66 under Richard Zapp,
• U-109 under Heinrich Bleichrodt,
• U-125 under Ulrich Folkers,
• U-130 under Ernst Kals.

The boats took on as much fuel, food and as many torpedoes as they could carry. The commanders had sealed orders, which they were to open only after crossing the 20th meridian west. Until then they were not allowed to attack unless an especially valuable target presented itself, such as a large warship. Even basic navigational aids were lacking. Hardegen, who was to enter the approaches to New York, recalled years later that he had been given only large-scale sea charts and had made up the rest with a pocket atlas and tourist guidebooks.

The British knew that something was afoot. The Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room in London, headed by Commander Rodger Winn, worked out from radio direction-finding and other indications that a large group of U-boats was heading for the coast of North America, and warned the Canadians and the Americans. According to British and American historians, the warnings were passed on to the commanders on the coast, but almost nothing came of them. On 12 January the commander responsible for the defence of the north-eastern coast, Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, was warned that three or four submarines were about to begin attacking coastal shipping. He concluded that he had nothing with which to organise convoys.

An unprepared coast

The defence of American coastal waters in January 1942 was largely a fiction. According to American accounts, Andrews’s command, which covered the coast from Maine to North Carolina (and from February bore the name of the Eastern Sea Frontier), had a few Coast Guard cutters, a handful of armed yachts, old gunboats and First World War submarine chasers, and about a hundred aircraft, mostly short-range trainers. The large aircraft belonged to the Army Air Forces, which had not been trained in anti-submarine warfare, and co-operation between the two services was poor. The modern destroyers of the Atlantic Fleet were needed for the North Atlantic convoys, in the Pacific and in harbour as a reserve; some of them lay idle in New York and Norfolk.

Overall responsibility lay with Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet since the end of December 1941. He was an outstanding organiser, but his attention was absorbed by the Pacific, where the Japanese were going from victory to victory. He did not introduce coastal convoys, and the prevailing view in the US Navy was that a convoy without adequate escort was worse than no convoy at all, because it gathered targets in one place. The British, who had learned in 1939–1941 that even a weakly protected convoy was safer than ships sailing independently, thought otherwise and passed their experience on to the Americans. The American historian Michael Gannon later called these months a “second Pearl Harbor” and laid much of the blame on King himself; other scholars point rather to the genuine shortage of escorts and aircraft, and to the choices that had to be made on two oceans at once in the first weeks of the war.

Most striking of all, the coast was lit up as if in peacetime. Ships sailed with their navigation lights on along well-worn routes, lighthouses and lighted buoys worked normally, and the seaside resorts and towns, from Atlantic City to Miami, kept their neon signs and promenades ablaze. In December 1941 the authorities had merely appealed to coastal communities to consider reducing their lighting; there were fears of losses to tourism and trade. For the U-boat commanders, ships silhouetted against the glow of the towns were perfect targets: by day the boats lay on the bottom or submerged far from shore, and at night they surfaced and attacked on the surface.

“A stroke on the kettledrum”

U-123 opened fire earlier than the plan envisaged. On the evening of 11 January local time, some 125 nautical miles south-east of Cape Sable in Nova Scotia, Hardegen hit the British Blue Funnel Line steamer Cyclops with two torpedoes; she was sailing from Panama to Halifax to join a convoy for Britain. Eighty-seven crew members, passengers and gunners were killed; the survivors were picked up by the Canadian minesweeper Red Deer. Over the following days U-130 sank further ships off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.

The real blow against American waters came after 13 January. U-123 took up position off the eastern tip of Long Island, U-125 off New Jersey, U-66 east of Cape Hatteras, while U-109 and U-130 operated farther north. In the early hours of 14 January, near Montauk on Long Island, Hardegen sank the Panamanian-flagged tanker Norness, owned by a Norwegian company. The following night he went right into the approaches to New York. The crew could see the glow of the city and the lights of Manhattan; traffic, however, turned out to be lighter than expected, and U-123 sank nothing in the approach channels. Heading back to the open sea, on 15 January it sent the British tanker Coimbra to the bottom off the south shore of Long Island. Although the attacks were reported immediately, no forces capable of threatening the boat were sent against it.

Hardegen then moved south, along New Jersey and Virginia towards Cape Hatteras, where the shipping lanes came close to the shore and the shoals of the Outer Banks forced ships into a narrow strip of water. Sailors soon called the area “Torpedo Alley” (or “Torpedo Junction”). On the night of 18–19 January U-123 sank several ships there, among them the steamer City of Atlanta, of whose crew only three survived, and with a torpedo and gunfire damaged the tanker Malay, which nevertheless managed to reach port. In the same days U-66 sank near Hatteras the American tanker Allan Jackson, most of whose crew died, and the Canadian passenger ship Lady Hawkins, bound from Halifax to the Caribbean. About 250 people died on the Lady Hawkins, many of them in lifeboats and on rafts during several days adrift.

The surprise was total. At night the submarines surfaced a few miles from the shore, and the inhabitants of seaside towns watched tankers burning. Oil covered the beaches, and the waves washed up wreckage and bodies. After the boats returned, Dönitz noted that every commander had had so many opportunities to attack that he could not exploit them all: at times up to ten ships were in sight, sailing with their lights on along their usual peacetime courses.

The first wave’s tally

The five boats of the first wave operated off the coast of North America until early February; the last of them set off for home on 6 February. According to various tallies they sank 23–25 ships totalling some 150,000–157,000 gross register tons without losing a single boat. The most successful was Hardegen, credited with seven to nine ships depending on the method of counting; for this patrol he received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and, according to German accounts, a signal from Dönitz: “To the drummer Hardegen. Bravo! Well drummed.” Kals in U-130 sank six ships, Zapp in U-66 five and Bleichrodt in U-109 four. Folkers in U-125 sank only one and had to endure Dönitz’s criticism.

The success was all the greater for having been achieved with a handful of boats. Meanwhile further groups were putting to sea, and in Canada the Royal Canadian Navy began organising coastal convoys in its own waters, although it was short of escorts. In American waters losses mounted week by week. For German propaganda this was proof that the war with America, contrary to the fears of part of the high command, was bringing the Reich benefits.

What followed: six months of the “happy time”

Strictly speaking, Paukenschlag covered only the first wave of five boats, but the name stuck to the whole campaign off the American coast. The first wave was followed by others, with the best commanders of the German U-boat arm, among them Erich Topp in U-552, who had sunk the Reuben James in October 1941, and Hardegen once again. In mid-February the boats of Operation Neuland attacked refineries and tankers on Aruba and Curaçao and off Trinidad, and in the spring the offensive spread to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Dönitz also sent smaller Type VII boats to the American coast; their crews crammed supplies into every corner and sometimes filled the drinking-water tanks with diesel oil. From April their range was extended by the Type XIV submarine tankers, known as “milch cows”.

Figures for Allied shipping losses in this period vary according to the waters and time span covered. According to frequently cited calculations, in the first six months of the campaign off the American coast and in the Caribbean U-boats sank 397 ships of more than 2 million gross register tons, and some 5,000 people were killed, mostly merchant seamen. In that time the Germans lost seven boats and about 300 men in these waters. Broader tallies, covering January to August 1942 and all the waters of the western Atlantic, speak of more than 600 ships and some 3 million tons for the loss of twenty-odd submarines. The tanker fleet suffered especially badly, which affected fuel supplies for the whole East Coast and Canada.

The defence developed slowly. The first U-boat sunk by an American warship off the US East Coast, U-85, went down only on 14 April 1942, hit by the destroyer Roper near the Outer Banks. In the spring the coast was dimmed, and from April ships moved by day in short hops between protected anchorages. The coast was patrolled by civilian aircraft of the Civil Air Patrol, by volunteers’ armed yachts and by anti-submarine trawlers lent by the British. The decisive factor, however, was convoys: the first American coastal convoy sailed from Hampton Roads to Key West on 14 May 1942, and in the summer the system was extended to the Caribbean. Losses fell rapidly, and on 19 July Dönitz withdrew the last boats from the US coast in order to concentrate once more on the convoys in mid-Atlantic.

Significance

Operation Paukenschlag was the most effective German submarine offensive since the first “happy time” of 1940–1941. It showed that the United States, despite months of undeclared war in the Atlantic, had entered the naval war unprepared to defend its own coasts. It cost thousands of seamen, hundreds of ships and millions of tons of cargo, including oil whose shortage hit the Allies in the most difficult period of the war. 1942 became the worst year of the Battle of the Atlantic for Allied shipping, and the excess of losses over shipyard output forced Washington and London to postpone plans for major operations that required ships.

At the same time, the campaign off the American coast drew U-boats away from the main convoy routes in the North Atlantic, where in the first half of 1942 the British and Canadians gained a breathing space. The experience of these months converted the US Navy to convoys and accelerated the construction of escorts, patrol aircraft and escort carriers. The vast shipbuilding programme announced by Roosevelt in his State of the Union address began to outstrip losses within the following year. When Dönitz threw his wolf packs into the decisive struggle for the convoys in the spring of 1943, he met an opponent that had learned the lessons of 1942.