(See Cover)
As American troops last week landed in Northern Ireland, German U-boats were grimly at work sinking American ships off the Atlantic Coast. The two facts suggested a reasonable connection: the Germans had set out to attack the U.S. convoy but it had slipped through their net, and having missed their first objective the Germans chose their second best.
The Battle of the Atlantic was awesomely close to the U.S. coast, and between the first and second waves of coastal sinkings the U.S. Navy indicated that the German Navy might pay a first-rate price for its second-choice attack. Reassuringly tough and sufficiently broad to keep the enemy guessing was the Navy's announcement:
"Some of the recent visitors to our territorial waters will never enjoy the return portion of their voyage. Furthermore, the percentage of one-way traffic is increasing while that of two-way traffic is satisfactorily on the decline. But there will be no information given out about the fate of the enemy submarine excursionists who don't get home, until that information is no longer of aid and comfort to the enemy. . . .
"The Nazis think themselves pretty clever in the field of psychological warfare. Secrecy surrounding the fate of their submarines is a counterblow the American people can give them which may serve to shake some of their superconfidence. ... All the people can make the same contribution. Even if you have seen a submarine captured or destroyed, keep it to yourself. . . ."
The Guesser most interested in the fate of German subs in Yankee waters is thin-lipped, seam-faced, British-hating Vice Admiral Karl Doenitz, creator and Commander of Germany's U-boat fleet.
Win or lose his end of the war, Karl Doenitz will never lose the dubious historical honor of being the man who could—and did—lay the groundwork for the greatest submarine fleet in history, in utter defiance of the Versailles Treaty and under the very noses of Allied investigating missions.
At 50 he has devoted half his life to submarines. He is a master of every phase of his subject. Just as he is convinced that continuance of unrestricted U-boat warfare in the last war would have produced a German victory by 1920, he believes that his own persistence may win this one.
Until the Nazis made him a commander of the first submarine flotilla in 1936 (he shunned formal affiliation with the Weimar regime, worked and was financed under cover), he had no official status. But years before the Nazis came to power he began preparing to rebuild Germany's U-boat Navy. There was not a single major step in the process that he did not dominate:
>He perfected a liaison system between plane and submarine.
>His improvements on supersensitive hydrophones, according to boasts of the Nazi press, is protection against Britain's deadly, effective submarine detector, the "ASDIC,"* allegedly so potent that it can spot a submerged submarine at rest with engines silent.
>His training of submarine crews emphasized democratic relationships between officers and men to avoid the difficulty with mutinous officer-bullied crews which helped break down the German U-boat service in World War I.