The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [202]
The deeply religious, handsome Dr Erich Raeder was born in Hamburg, the son of a languages teacher. He had been the navigation officer aboard the Kaiser’s yacht Hohenzollern, then served as a Staff officer under Admiral von Hipper during the Great War. He took an honours doctorate from Kiel University afterwards, writing a dissertation on cruiser warfare that he later published as a book. Naval chief of staff from 1928 and commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine from 1935, Raeder’s naval building programme, Plan Z, presupposed a war that began in 1944, which implies very poor co-ordination with the Führer. When it actually began five years too early, the German Navy did not yet have the balance – specifically in the areas of aircraft carriers and U-boats – to deliver victory against the Royal Navy. On the outbreak of war, Germany had only two modern battle cruisers – Scharnhorst and Gneisenau – three pocket battleships, two heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, twenty-two destroyers and only forty-three submarines, so on 24 September 1939 Raeder spent several hours trying to persuade the Führer of the attractions of a major, immediate U-boat building programme.22 Hitler said that he sympathized, but the necessary manpower and steel were not subsequently allotted to the Kriegsmarine in anything like the quantities required.
After a series of sharp engagements against the Royal Navy, by the end of 1940 Germany only had twenty-two U-boats left, and only twenty were built between the outbreak of war and the summer of 1940. Yet the twenty-five U-boats that were operating in the Atlantic by then had sunk no less than 680,000 tons between them.23 On 17 October 1940 a group of seven U-boats attacked Convoy SC-7 near Rockall, which numbered thirty-four merchantmen but had only four escorts. No fewer than seventeen ships were sunk, and no U-boat was damaged. U-boat captain Otto Kretschmer chalked up sinkings in the Atlantic that were to amount to more than a quarter of a million tons. As a result, Hitler slowly recognized the submarines’ potential and on 6 February 1941 he issued Führer Directive No. 23, which emphasized that ‘The wider employment of submarines… can bring about the collapse of English resistance within the foreseeable future… It must therefore be the aim of our further operations… to concentrate all weapons of air and sea warfare against enemy imports… The sinking of merchantmen is more important than attack on enemy warships.’24 Yet by then he was already deep into the planning stage for Operation Barbarossa, which was severely to undermine the U-boat offensive. Had he concentrated on knocking Britain out of the war first, he could then have turned eastwards at his leisure, with all the forces of the Reich and no prospect of having to draw off forces into Africa or the Mediterranean, and no aid coming to Russia from Britain either.
The Kondor was the Focke-Wulf 200 maritime reconnaissance bomber and had a range of up to 2,200 miles; it carried a 4,626-pound bomb load, flew at 152mph but lacked significant armour. It could be an invaluable spotter for U-boats, but when Dönitz asked Göring for more Kondors he was refused them, and for all the inspiring language of Directive No. 23 he had to rely on the twelve Kondors of Squadron KG40. These were nothing like enough, and as he later noted: ‘Here the flaw in the conduct of the war was revealed with painful clarity.’25 The call-up of 25,000 skilled dockyard workers to fight on the Eastern Front was another blow to Raeder and Dönitz, and when two years later