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Although his first interest and his chief strength was in submarines, Grand Admiral Doenitz also had a surface fleet which he might use to lend his spring campaign additional punch: the 40,000-plus-ton battleship Tirpitz, the 26,000-ton Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, a screen of lighter ships including two pocket battleships, the Admiral Scheer and Lützow, two 10,000-ton cruisers of the heavily armed Admiral Hipper class, and perhaps ten destroyers.
These ships had yet to go into concerted action. Allied observers thought it possible that they might be used for a carefully coordinated air-surface-submarine campaign against the convoy lanes, or otherwise be held in readiness to strike directly at an Allied invasion armada.
They were a powerful trump in Doenitz' hand; for, even when inactive, they immobilized the greater part of Britain's Home Fleet, plus some U.S. vessels which could have been in action elsewhere.
The Weapon's Master. After World War I ended, Doenitz made himself a specialist in submarine warfare. By 1930, he was convinced that Hitler and the Nazis would have the strength to break the terms of the Versailles Treaty, which forbade U-boats to Germany, and he attached himself to them.
In 1933, he began to forge his weapon. Part by part, in dispersed and hidden shops, he and his men built a few U-boats and cached them in packing crates under the noses of Allied investigators. To train his first recruits, Doenitz established an institute which he blandly named "school for defense against submarines." When, in June 1935, Hitler's naval treaty with the British released the Reich from some of the Versailles restrictions, Doenitz was ready. By October his first flotilla was afloat. He was still bound to keep his visible U-boat fleet within limits, but by expanding his spare-parts system of construction he built far over the treaty ratio.
When his U-boats sailed out to war, Doenitz was a Vice Admiral commanding the most effective underwater force in any navy. And he knew how to apply the force. He introduced wolf-pack tactics (Rudeltaktik) for attacking convoys. He varied this technique with individual sorties, sometimes into enemy ports or rivers.
And he perfected a far-flung system of radio control, directing U-boats at sea from a central headquarters on land.
Doenitz knew the British well, and he had profound contempt for them at the war's start. In the last war, after service on a cruiser in the Mediterranean, he was transferred to U-boats, earned his own command. His UB-68 was sunk by the British off Malta in 1918. Rescued, Doenitz was taken to England as a prisoner of war. There he so successfully feigned mental illness that his captors kept him comfortably in a sanatorium.
His headquarters is a fantastic structure, designed to resemble a warship on land. His office has a few pieces of period furniture, a broad expanse of bookshelves filled with tomes on naval history. Scattered about are gaily colored, crude models of the ships which one of his U-boats sank on a successful cruise. On the wall behind him is a portrait of his revered predecessor, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who ardently advocated unrestricted U-boat warfare 26 years ago.