Torpedo Junction U-Boat War Off America's East Coast 1942

Paukenschlag If lines were to be drawn on a map from Cape Race, Newfoundland, down the east coast of the North American continent and into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, they would coincide with perhaps the most congested sea lanes in the world. When the United States entered World War II, the industrial cities of the eastern seaboard were particularly vulnerable to the disruption of these lanes. Fuel was required to keep those cities from freezing during the winter, and most of that fuel was provided by ships hauling it from Curacao and Aruba in the Netherlands West Indies, from Venezuelan oil fields, and from the Gulf of Mexico ports of Corpus Christi, Houston, and Port Arthur, Texas. The United States military was also vulnerable. The oil reserves of the United States were simply not large enough to meet the sustained, high demands of world conflict. To cut her supply lines along the Atlantic coast and to the south would be, in effect, to defeat the United States, to freeze much of her population, and force her out of the war. In January 1942, five German Type IX U-boats set forth to accomplish all that. Although Admiral Karl Doenitz, commander of the German U-boat fleet, was surprised by Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war, he quickly improvised a plan for an attack across the Atlantic. Sensing a great opportunity, he proposed sending twelve U-boats to American waters, six of which were to be the new Type IXs, which had greater fuel and armaments than the standard Type VIIs. Doenitz called this operation Paukenschlag, the word meaning "drumroll." The admiral's bold plan, however, was turned down. The Mediterranean and Norwegian fronts, he was told, were of first priority for his U-boats, and not some risky adventure across the Atlantic. Doenitz was disappointed but not surprised by the denial. It was simply a continuation of the bureaucratic battle he had fought for what he considered to be the proper operation of his U-boats since the beginning of the war. Admiral Doenitz was an intense, studious man who had spent much of the years after World War I planning a huge force of submarines that would lay waste to convoys in the Atlantic. But on the day Britain declared hostilities against Germany, the Kriegsmarine had in its inventory only twenty-two U-boats large enough to operate in the open ocean. Ordered to blockade the British Isles and pin down the Royal Navy, Doenitz knew that all he could actually do while waiting for a promised increase in the numbers of his U-boats was to inflict a few wounds here and there using "hit and run" tactics. Still, his fiercely loyal commanders were able to spring several surprises on the Royal Navy, the most spectacular being the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak inside the British fleet anchorage at Scapa Flow. This success, perhaps more than any other, was the one that established the U-boat myth of reckless daring and made a hero of the U-47's commander, Gunther Prien. Doenitz did not mind the adulation given to one of his commanders. If it helped in his struggle to wage U-boat warfare and get more U-boats built, he minded nothing. The first of what U-boat sailors would come to refer to as their "Happy Time" would be in the summer of 1940. The British had gone to the convoy system to defend their merchant ships as they brought vital supplies from the United States and Canada. This system had worked well during World War I and, it was assumed, would be just as effective in World War II, especially with the new ASDIC "pinging" equipment that would allow defending destroyers to locate intruding submarines. Doenitz, however, had studied the convoy system and thought that he had found a way to defeat it. His tactic was to send his U-boats out singly but with orders to immediately radio command headquarters the moment aHickam, Homer H., Jr. is the author of 'Torpedo Junction U-Boat War Off America's East Coast 1942', published 1991 under ISBN 9780440210276 and ISBN 0440210275.