After all his diplomatic efforts to reach an understanding with the British failed, Adolf Hitler reluctantly realized that England would have to be brought to her knees. Even so, he forever ruled out invasion, because the Fuehrer still hoped that an accord of some kind might one day be reached. Since Britain was primarily a sea-power, her defeat was left primarily to the Kriegsmarine, starting in early 1941.

Its single goal was to cut off England from her empire, thereby depriving her of all outside aid by destroying her commerce. Eventually, she must choose between starving to death or accepting Hitler’s peace proposals. To achieve this objective, the German Navy operated two battleships (Bismarck and Tirpitz), a pair of battle-cruisers (Scharnhorst and Gneisenau), two Panzerschiffe, or "pocket battleships" [actually, a new class of heavy cruisers] (Luetzow and Admiral Scheer), two heavy cruisers (Prinz Eugen and Admiral Hipper), half a dozen light cruisers, 15 destroyers, and 47 u-boats. An aircraft-carrier, Graf Zeppelin, had been launched as early as 1939, but was never completed.

These forces were opposed by the Royal Navy, the largest on Earth, with twelve battleships, three battle-cruisers, fifteen heavy cruisers, 45 light cruisers, 100 destroyers, and seven aircraft-carriers. A fleet confrontation a la Jutland was clearly out of the question. Instead, the Kriegsmarine’s surface vessels were used principally as commerce raiders, a role they performed in the beginning with great success.

On February 12, 1941, Hipper returned unscathed to Brest after sinking seven out of nineteen ships in a convoy bound from Freetown, West Africa. Meanwhile, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, sailing as a team, sank shipping totaling 115,000 tons, disrupting Britain’s entire convoy system in the process. Sinkings for February alone amounted to nearly 370,000 tons. Enemy losses throughout April and May rose to 381,000 and 436,500 tons, respectively. But by then, Hitler had come to regard most capital ships (except aircraft-carriers) as obsolete. He remembered how, during the Norwegian campaign of 1940, Luftwaffe bombers decimated the same British warships that had previously wiped out German naval units.

In that same year, R.A.F. Fairey Swordfish crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto, shifting the entire balance of power in the Mediterranean. Besides, oil used by the Bismarck during just one operational cruise could supply an entire Panzer division. His assessment was underscored on May 27, when this state-of-the-art battleship was sunk, because her location had been discovered by aerial reconnaissance, after which the torpedo dropped from a single, antiquated aircraft ruined her steering gear. Thus crippled, the helpless Bismarck was surrounded by an overwhelming combination of enemy battleships and cruisers. She took all but 110 of her 2,300-man crew to the bottom of the Atlantic. With her loss, the Kriegsmarine’s battleship force was reduced by half.

Determined that his few remaining capital ships be put to better use (the defense of Norway) and moved from Brest, where they were in imminent danger of destruction by R.A.F. bombers, Hitler envisioned a bold operation. Following his orders, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Scheer and Prinz Eugen, accompanied by an armada of smaller warships and under a broad umbrella of fighter-escorts, left their French anchorage to sail under the very noses of their enemies through the English Channel on the evening of February 11, 1942.

As almost always, the British had advanced warning, and were confident they would sink the German vessels as soon as Admiral Otto Ciliax’s squadron reached the narrows. The next morning, when the Kriegsmarine warships entered the Straits of Dover, they were attacked by a flotilla of motor-torpedo-boats, followed by half-a-dozen Swordfish.

But German defensive fire was so intense, the MTBs were forced to launch their torpedoes at extreme range and missed all their targets. The bombers fared even worse; all but one were shot down without scoring any hits. In the afternoon, Scharnhorst was brought to an abrupt halt after running into a mine. Eager to take advantage of her condition, squadrons of Royal Navy destroyers, together with Beaufort bombers and Spitfires from the R.A.F. Coastal Command, descended on the disabled battle-cruiser. They were instantly repulsed and mauled by Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs, which prevented them from getting near Scharnhorst.

As the battle raged over-head, repair crews worked frantically to get her under way again. With aircraft falling into the sea all around her, she got up steam once more, resuming her voyage to Wilhelmshaven, but not before striking another mine, as did her sister-ship, Gneisenau. By the 13th, Admiral Ciliax’s squadron arrived virtually in tact at their German ports.

The Channel Dash humiliated Churchill and undermined general confidence in him at a time when Britain was clearly losing the war at sea. There were renewed, angry calls in the House for his removal, and covert reconsideration of Hitler’s generous peace offer. Doubtless, these moves would have brought the senseless conflict to a close before the end of 1942, had not Heydrich’s murder five months later allowed Allied commanders to virtually read the minds of their German counter-parts.

But the Kriegsmarine was less vulnerable than the rest of the Wehrmacht to Ultra and Abwehr traitors, because its leaders had the good sense to completely over-haul their naval codes from time to time. Hence, it continued to win the war for the Reich long after the Army’s security had been severely compromised. U-boat successes began to decline immediately after Heydrich’s death, due to sensitive information passed by Canaris to London. But they revived soon after, thanks to German naval intelligence.

Unlike the Army General Staff, the Kriegsmarine was free of treason, and preserved its integrity longer. For example, in July, 1942, the Allies dispatched their largest convoy of aid to Stalin. Twice the size of earlier convoys, PQ-17 comprised 33 freighters and a tanker, escorted by six destroyers, two anti-aircraft ships, four corvettes, three mine-sweepers and two submarines, with support from two battleships, an aircraft-carrier, six cruisers and an additional seventeen destroyers. This formidable task-force heavy-laden with precious stores for the hard-pressed Soviets was attacked by Luftwaffe bombers and torpedo-planes on the 4th flying out of Norwegian bases. Steaming to join them from their Trondheim anchorage the previous day was Tirpitz, Hipper and Scheer.

As soon as word of their course-heading reached the British Admiralty, its commanders panicked, and recalled their numerically superior support surface forces, leaving the merchant vessels far less well protected. In any event, the three German warships were not able to intercept the convoy, which lost twelve freighters in 24 hours to torpedoes and bombs of u-boats and anti-shipping aircraft. By the time the ragged remnants of PQ-17 limped into Archangel, all but ten vessels had been lost, and even these were badly damaged. For the loss of five German bombers and no u-boats, 3,350 armored vehicles, 430 tanks, 210 aircraft and several thousand tons of oil were swallowed by the sea. The National Socialist victory stopped all convoys to Russia, engendering calamitous consequences for Soviet fortunes.

By September, however, Luftwaffe orders were being regularly intercepted by British intelligence, and PQ-18 sailed to the USSR. Although 13 freighters were sunk, together with a destroyer and mine-sweeper, German losses were too high: 41 aircraft and three u-boats. With all their plans delivered before each battle to the enemy, pilots and captains could no longer effectively engage the fat convoys feeding the Red hordes. But where operations were still strictly under Kriegsmarine control, German naval successes flourished throughout the year and into 1943, primarily because of the M4 Enigma aboard each u-boat.

These were the code-machines that continued to defy the best efforts of Churchill’s 5,000 cryptographers. Following the loss of nearly 315,000 tons of Allied shipping in February, the British Chiefs of Staff concluded in a top secret situation report that the war at sea had been virtually lost. Indeed, Britain was being steadily strangled to death, and the projected U.S. build-up in England for an invasion of France was not possible. With the Americans kept at bay and Churchill out of the picture, Hitler could devote most of his forces to achieving victory on the Eastern Front. After the Soviet Union was defeated, he would then be able to deliver the coup de grace to Britain and settle F.D.R.’s hash.

In the first ten days of March, u-boats sank 41 Allied vessels in the North Atlantic. From the 15th through the 19th, Anglo-American east-bound Convoys HX229 and SC122 were attacked by 37 submarines organized into three groups. Of the heavily-defended 98 merchant vessels, 21 were sunk, with the loss of one u-boat. By the end of the month, 540,000 tons of Allied shipping went to the bottom. The British First Lord of the Admiralty conceded that nothing could stop the freighters from being sunk at an exponential rate, and all convoys to Russia were again canceled, this time for the next six months. Even abandoning the convoy system itself, which was tantamount to admitting defeat, was seriously considered.

But by spring, the Kriegsmarine’s Enigma code was broken. From now on, the u-boats’ positions, numbers, distribution of forces, even arrival times in immediate combat zones, were disclosed to Allied destroyer captains. The ocean which once hid German submarines had become suddenly transparent. Navy chief Admiral Karl Doenitz and his officers never guessed that cryptographers in London were reading every word that passed between all u-boat commanders at sea and their headquarters on the Continent. The calamitous results literally turned the tide in the North Atlantic from on-going victories to irreversible retreats during a single engagement.

In spring, 1943, a huge naval confrontation began to develop when four convoys sailed for England from America’s eastern seaboard. Admiral Doenitz dispatched 40 submarines to stop them, and, at first, they achieved the same kind of good success enjoyed over the previous two-and-a-half years, sinking a dozen merchant ships beginning on May 4th. But during the following day, two u-boats were lost, one to a Canadian Catalina sea-plane, the other under the depth-charges of a destroyer. On the 6th, large reinforcements of destroyers suddenly arrived to protect ONS5, sinking four more submarines with no additional losses to the convoy. Despite huge opposition, the u-boats relentlessly pushed their attack. Although they sank four ships in SC130 without further casualties, in attacking ONS7 and SC129 they could only get close enough to destroy three vessels for the loss of as many of their own.

Throughout May, Allied sinkings fell to 300,000 tons for 41 submarines lost. They would continue to destroy ships for the duration of the war, but in decreasing numbers and in more distant seas against an ever-more-powerful enemy who knew every move the u-boat commanders made.

In 1944, for example, a single German submarine was beset by an entire U.S. task-force, consisting of an escort aircraft-carrier, auxiliary cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer-escorts. During this overwhelmingly uneven struggle, and unable to escape the continuous barrage of depth-charges hurled at her for hours, U-505 arose in the midst of her enemies to fight it out on the surface. The seas had just cleared her hatches, when crew members dashed to man their 88-mm deck-gun and 37-mm anti-aircraft against the enemy flotilla ranged all around them.

Every gun of the warships fired on the hopelessly defiant u-boat, disabling her, killing every man that was top-side and many below. The captain tried to activate the vessel’s self-destruct mechanism, but it failed, so he did what he could to save what was left of his crew. Americans boarded the crippled U-505, then towed her to the U.S., a cheaply-won trophy of their inglorious, lop-sided victory over a lone submarine.

Ten years later, she was purchased and put on public display by Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Ever since, many thousands of visitors from around the world have been guided through her interior, exactly preserved from her last war-time voyage.

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