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By Root 1383 0

wrote: ‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril… I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.’15 The UK had to import two-thirds of all her food during the war, 30 per cent of her iron ore, 80 per cent of her soft timber and wool, 90 per cent of her copper and bauxite, 95 per cent of her petroleum products and 100 per cent of her rubber and chrome.16 It is a moot point whether, in the event of the U-boats closing down her imports completely, Britain’s armaments industry would have ground to a halt before or after mass starvation struck every urbanized area. Yet that was unlikely to happen, for Hitler saw only too late the potential war-winning capacity of the U-boat, despite its almost bringing Britain to her knees in 1917. If the Nazis had started the war with as many submarines operational in September 1939 as they had in March 1945 – that is, 463 instead of only 43 – they might have won it. As it was, they did not come close to strangling British imports at any point, and once they had invaded Russia instead of the Middle East, and declared war against the United States, Britain was effectively safe from a naval and supply point of view. ‘The decisive point in warfare against England lies in attacking her merchant shipping in the Atlantic,’ Dönitz had long argued, but he believed he needed a minimum of 300 U-boats to be sure of victory, and he had less than one-sixth of that total in 1939.17 Once Hitler finally recognized their potential, a huge increase in U-boat production took place, but it was too late to win the all-important battle of the Atlantic. With only one-third of submarines operational at any one time, the others needing crew training and boat refitting, a massive building effort should have been instituted by Hitler by 1937 at the very latest, but he missed the opportunity.

Churchill agreed with Dönitz’s thesis, writing after the war: ‘The U-boat attack was our worst evil. It would have been wise for the Germans to stake all on it.’18 However, Dönitz was not the important figure when war broke out that he later became (indeed he ended the war as Führer of Germany). Although he was Führer der Untersee-boote at the outbreak of war, he only held the same rank as a cruiser captain.19 Born in September 1891 at Grünau near Berlin, he served as first watch officer under the U-boat ace Walter Forstmann in the Great War, before being given his own command in the Mediterranean, only for his boat to surface out of control while attacking a convoy. As a POW aboard a British cruiser in Gibraltar, he witnessed the armistice celebrations on the Rock in November 1918, and gestured to the ship’s captain at all the flags of the Allied powers flying from the ships, before asking what pleasure could be gained ‘from a victory attained with the whole world as allies’. The Briton replied pathetically, ‘Yes, it’s very curious,’ thus missing out on teaching Dönitz a valuable lesson about what would happen when Germany declared war against a global alliance.20

Karl Dönitz became a proponent of submarine warfare long before the moment when the Reich threw off its restraints under the Versailles Treaty, which banned it from having any submarines. Under the 1935 London Treaty, all signatories, including Germany, agreed to build a submarine fleet of no more than 52,700 tons, with no individual boat of more than 2,000 tons, but Germany used Spanish and Finnish yards to circumvent these restrictions. Yet Germany needed a tonnage vastly larger than she was building even illegally in order to destroy British maritime trade in wartime; and even if Dönitz had held greater sway in the German Naval Ministry than he actually did, it would probably have made little difference, as Admiral Erich Raeder was also making these arguments, with only intermittent interest from Hitler. ‘On land I am a hero,’ the Führer once said, ‘but at sea I am a coward.’21

Hitler was fascinated by the great surface ships such as the battleships Bismarck