The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander Read online

  The Odyssey of a

  U-Boat Commander

  The Odyssey of a

  U-Boat Commander

  Recollections of Erich Topp

  ERICH TOPP

  Translated by Eric C. Rust

  To my grandchildren

  Philip, Dirck, Erik, Matthias, Christoph, Johannes, Clemens, Charlotte, Benjamin, Gabriel, David

  Contents

  Preface ix

  1. The Sinking of the Reuben James 1

  The Political Dimension 1

  The Human Dimension 4

  2. Before the War 9

  Childhood and Adolescence 9

  Basic Infantry Training 13

  Nautical Training on the Gorch Fock 14

  Midshipman on the Karlsruhe 25

  Participation in the Spanish Civil War 45

  Early U-Boat Days 52

  3. War 55

  A Retrospective Assessment 55

  Executive Officer, U 46 59

  Commanding Officer, U 57 69

  Commanding Officer, U 552 74

  Commander, 27th U-Boat Flotilla 87

  The End of the War 104

  Commanding Officer, U 2513 106

  4. After the War 121

  The Fate of a Family 121

  Ordinary Seaman 134

  Studying Architecture 139

  Freelance Architect 156

  West German Navy 168

  Epilogue 227

  Index of Names, Places, and Ships 233

  Preface

  I did not write this book of memories to escape from them, for what would my life be without them?

  I let my diaries speak for me, without modification, unedited. By doing so I may run the danger of leaving the sphere of the real. After all, these journals, written decades ago, seem to come from a different world. But they are genuine. They bring back youthful dreams, the years of deadly games, the times of terror and grief. I will try to interpret my diaries based on everything I know today, well aware that such judgments can never be entirely sure-footed and that no memory is perfect.

  This book is meant as a commentary on the ambivalence of the human condition. It seeks an answer to the question why we followed the siren songs of a totalitarian regime whose deeds even today hover over us like dark shadows. My journal stands for all the faith and hopes, the errors and transformations of a human life.

  Hegel saw human history as a unitary process, forever moving toward higher levels of freedom according to God's plan, a design he called the Weltgeist. Marx and Engels appropriated from Hegel this belief in the procedural unity of history; however, they viewed the process as being purely of this world and materialistic. Thus, for both Hegel and Marx, past human actions were of mere preliminary character and were interpreted accordingly from a preplanned and desired future condition. In other words, our understanding of the world depended on the light cast upon the past by the present and the future, not on the illumination of the present and the future by the light of experiences past. Tocqueville, in contrast, wrote in the 1830s, "Since the past has ceased casting its light upon the future, the human spirit wanders in darkness."

  Who is right?

  We have experienced in our century at least two attempts to provide history with a narrow teleological meaning and to transform it into an instrument for political purposes. Under Lenin's Bolshevism all history became a struggle between classes. From this notion Stalin later deduced the right to spread world revolution, even if it meant mass destruction for those who dissented. Hitler justified his genocide by reducing history to a struggle between races. Both believed they fulfilled the purpose of history after having carefully defined for their own ends what such purpose should be. Consequently, history and the past lost their function as teachers and enlighteners and instead became mere servants in efforts to create a perfect world.

  I do believe history is a magistra vitae, and therefore we must ask again and again what lessons the past offers to guide us. I am also convinced that human history is open-ended and not predestined. It is from this personal insight that I draw the authority to present this book.

  Erich Topp

  Remagen, September 1990

  1

  The Sinking of the

  Reuben James

  I would like to begin my otherwise chronological narrative with a wartime experience that placed me in a political borderline situation and that has determined how I look back on my life from a moral perspective. An excerpt from the war diary of the U-Boat High Command:

  In the morning hours of October 31, 1941, U 552 sighted the British convoy HX 156 in the central Atlantic. Its screen consisted of five destroyers. At 0834 the commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Topp, sank one of the escorts, U.S.S. Reuben James, in position ]at. 51 ` 59' N, long. 27° 05'W. The U.S. destroyer belonged to the escort of the British convoy even before the United States entered the war on December 11, 1941.

  THE POLITICAL DIMENSION

  Adolf Hitler had hinted at his expansionist intentions as early as in Mein Kampf. Later, according to the so-called Hossbach Protocol in 1937, he provided details about his designs. This does not mean that Hitler acted according to a carefully prepared plan. His determination to expand Germany's borders, however, made war inevitable. The war was prepared and carried out in such a way that it took a coalition of world powers six years to bring Germany down militarily.

  After the Blitzkriege against Poland and the West, Hitler's territorial acquisitions remained unrecognized under international law. For this reason Hitler felt driven to keep up the momentum of conquest, to add expansion to expansion, just as others had done before him: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon. In addition, there was racial hubris and the notion of a "people without space." I compare Hitler to Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and other empire-builders only in terms of their determination to conquer territory, certainly not with regard to their overall personality or historical stature.

  Historians disagree whether a politically consolidated continental Europe, based on a generous peace with France and a confederation of states, would have been feasible. Sebastian Haffner, for one, seems to think so. Others, like Joachim Fest, point out that England, backed by the United States, would not have accepted such a concept of Europe. In reality Hitler did not achieve any such political solution. Prodded on by the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, he felt condemned to ex- tend--indeed, to overextend-his expansionist drive. This was a strategic mistake, considering the fatal gulf between Germany's means and objectives. Hitler's dilemma was rendered worse by countless political miscalculations and senseless crimes, not to mention his pathological determination to carry them out regardless of consequences. In the Napoleonic era world power status hinged on hegemony over the continent, including Russia, and on the defeat of England. By the twentieth century it also meant the destruction of American power.

  For a while Hitler was careful enough not to provoke the United States. To the contrary, he deliberately put up with provocations from the other side, as these examples bear out:

  September 1940: Delivery of fifty destroyers to England.

  March 1941: Lend-Lease Act, enabling England to buy U.S. weapons without paying cash.

  April 1941: Extension of the already unusual, 300-mile-wide "Pan-American Security Zone" into the central Atlantic (to 30° West longitude). Inside this zone U.S. forces shadowed and reported German ships until they could be seized by the British. This behavior was difficult to reconcile with a policy of neutrality.

  Since April 1941: U.S. forces escort British convoys in the western hemisphere.

  April 10, 1941: The U.S. destroyer Niblack attacks a German U-boat.

  J
uly 7, 1941: U.S. forces occupy Iceland as a military base.

  September 4, 1941: A British aircraft sights a German U-boat, drops depth charges, and reports its position to the U.S. destroyer Greer. The latter pursues the U-boat. The submarine in turn fires two torpedoes against the Greer under the assumption that she is a British warship. The Greer responds with eleven depth charges. Even though the U.S. President was informed that the German U-boat did not know the destroyer's nationality, Navy Secretary Frank Knox issued orders to use all available means to seize and destroy German surface and underwater "pirates."

  Compared to President Roosevelt's "short of war" policy, the German Naval High Command exercised extreme restraint in its actions toward the United States.

  Then, in the dawn hours of October 31, 1941, 1 attacked and sank an escort vessel out of a British convoy. A short while later we learned by monitoring radio broadcasts that the destroyer belonged to a country with which we were not at war: the Reuben Jaynes of the United States.

  I immediately remembered Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare as the occasion for the U.S. entry into World War I and was thus aware how politically explosive the sinking of the destroyer might become. Until we reached our base I was alone with my thoughts. As far as international law was concerned, I felt no qualms whatsoever. After all, I had attacked a British convoy screened by warships. Nevertheless, I felt bewildered. The tension a man endures when he thinks he is making history, however unintentional, is indeed enormous.

  Only much later did I learn that the political course had already been laid out, that history would merely shrug its shoulder over an incident such as the sinking of the Reuben Jaynes. Of course, I was ordered to Paris where I had to describe in every detail the attack and the sinking to Admiral Karl Donitz of the U-Boat High Command. I also began to realize that Germany's declaration of war against the United States after Japan's actions of December 7, 1941, was not merely the result of irrational expectations one encounters in the course of all great territorial expansions, but that political forces were likewise at work. 16 this one must add the underestimation of U.S. resources in terms of manpower and economic potential. I can still hear today the snide comments Hitler made in his table talks at the Fiihrer Headquarters. lie made fun, for example, of Roosevelt's physical paralysis and of "Liberty" and "Victory" ships being allegedly so poorly designed that they could not withstand Atlantic storms.

  From time to time, moral arguments have entered the debate over the origins of Hitler's hubris. His racial mania and its consequences, his genocide of the Jews, and the enslavement of the Slavic peoples are said to have pushed the world into a total war against Germany. However terrible and incomprehensible this genocide based on racism will remain, one must understand that it was not the moral reason behind the U.S. entry into the war on the Allied side. Today we know that neither the Americans nor the British helped the Jews when it would have been possible; indeed, they refused to do so in specific cases. In the end it was Germany's (and also Japan's) territorial aspirations, and the Allied refusal to give in to such expansionist drives, that made the war both total and global.

  The political dimension of the sinking of the Reuben James is not with out ambivalence. The U.S. media used the incident deliberately to incite the public mood in favor of entering the war against Germany. They did so, not by analyzing the legitimacy of the attack under international law following a political and military provocation on part of the United States, but by emphasizing the national challenge posed by those "Hitler pirates." Even Woody Guthrie, as early as November 1941, wrote a song about the sinking of the Reuben James that was sung everywhere: "Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?" According to the second and third verses, the destroyer "watched for the U-boats, and waited for the fight," and "now our mighty battleships will steam the mighty main." I will not equate poetic license with political will, but it seems easy to prove that already in this critical phase of the war the media and the politicians worked closely together on all sides.

  On November 14, just two weeks after the Reuben James had gone down as the first U.S. warship lost in World War II, Roosevelt asked Congress to pass legislation that would allow the arming of U.S. merchant vessels. Reflecting the country's mood, Congress agreed to the request by a vote of 212 to 194. With this measure the Neutrality Acts became history and the U. S. entry into the war occurred de facto.

  When Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese raid against Pearl Harbor, he did so not as a result of American public opinion but under political pressure. I believe his need to extend his territorial conquests played a vital role.

  What mattered for me was the nagging notion of being caught up in the making of world events, the need to work out what the sinking of the Reuben James meant in political terms. I had the feeling of being somehow involved in weighty political decisions, which, given the experience of World War I, seemed most ominous to me.

  THE HUMAN DIMENSION

  The hit, as observed from the boat's conning tower in the dawn's gathering light, appeared to us as follows: "An explosion some 1,000 yards away. The rear part of the ship sank first, its unsecured depth charges detonating in a huge secondary explosion and throwing tall columns of water skyward. A nearby destroyer picked up survivors. We left the scene."

  Many years later I read details about the end of the Reuben James and her men in Patrick Abbazia's book, Mr. Roosevelt's Navy:

  The explosion broke the spine of the Reuben Jaynes, and she cleaved in two. ... Quartermaster Bill Appleton was blown from the helm through the top of the wheelhouse . . . into the sea. Everyone else in the forward sec tion of the ship ... was killed almost immediately by the blast, fire, and onrushing sea... .

  The men aft had more chance. Seaman Dan del Grosso was asleep in his bunk when the force of the explosion flung him to the deck; bent lockers were on their sides, and bunks and mattresses were crisscrossed in a tangled shambles in the narrow passageway. . . . Topside, flames burned across metal surfaces, feeding on paint; ruptured fuel tanks spewed thick, black oil into the water. The stern was settling. Del Grosso did not have to dive overboard; he merely stepped off the deck into the sea.... Last to go were the wounded and burned, who knew that they had little hope in the water; finally, as the heat grew too intense, they gamely helped each other off the black and slippery deck into the sea. . . .

  The sailors were black with oil and shivering from the cold; some were choking and gagging, vomiting oil and salt water.... Some ... suffocated in the oil, or died of their wounds and burns, and a few drowned. The bodies of the dead bobbed inertly on the black swells.

  It was quiet on the water. . . . Then from inside the destroyer came the screams of badly wounded or dazed men who had not been noticed amid the tangle of wreckage below and were now drowning as the stern sank. Soon it was quiet again.

  As the stern went under . . . several of the destroyer's ready depth charges exploded, and the sea erupted in a huge, shuddering blast.... [Its flipped rafts into the air and ripped and crushed the bodies of swimmers; jagged slivers of steel and debris whirred through the chill air, splashing in the water.... About one hundred men died on and in the water around the old Reuben James on that bitter Halloween morning.

  This formative impression stood at the very beginning of my wartime experiences, and it changed my life. Since then I have often had occasion to contemplate a famous quotation from Jacob Burckhardt's Reflections on History: "You cannot draw lessons from history for the next time around, but you can become wise for all times!" I have never attained this high level of insight. To the contrary, I have learned that the passing of decades does not cushion anything. As years go by they may eat up the words of the past, but they cannot stop the onslaught of the images. These images continue to haunt me; they take away my sleep.

  Long after the war, when I was visiting San Diego in 1962, the commanding officer of an LSD (Landing Ship, Dock) invited
me for lunch. He sent a boat and received me with the usual ritual at the gangplank. It turned out he had been a watch officer aboard the destroyer Niblack, the vessel entrusted with the task of picking up the survivors of the Reuben James. His best friend had been a watch officer on the Reuben James. In vain he had looked for him among the men in the water. I will never forget my conversation with him as he told me about the search for survivors and for his friend in the twilight of the breaking day, about the slowly heaving swell covered with a thick layer of oil from which debris and human beings were tossed up and pulled down as if in a scene from Dante's inferno.

  In the course of our talk I received the impression that we all had lost a very special person in that officer on the Reuben James. He must have been an individual endowed with great talents, a creative man who never sat in the shade and who, like a flower, always and instinctively turned toward the light. He was a gift for his friends, his comrades. He radiated cheerfulness. Whatever he did, however he treated his men, whether he spoke, wrote, or clowned around: he appeared complete, perfect. That is how the commanding officer of the LSD portrayed him.

  What would have become of his best friend had he lived? Perhaps he would have been a successful destroyer captain, a charismatic leader of his men; perhaps a squadron commander later on. Or he may have reawakened the chorus of the Eumenides, filled out old pictures with new meaning and new colors, or used his words to create a new world atop foundations a thousand years old. Perhaps he would have opened new dimensions in the ways we express ourselves so that our creative genius may better spread its wings and take the human soul on a lofty ride, if only for a while. Who will ever know? These were the thoughts that went through my mind.

  I thought of my wife's brother who had always wanted to become a stage director. He had studied acting, was a superb painter, and played the piano as few others could. Totally opposed to National Socialism, he studied theology instead and joined the Confessing Church, only to be relieved of his duties after his inaugural sermon and sent to the front. There he stayed for the balance of the war until he was felled by a partisan's bullet on January 9, 1945, on the eastern front in Courland.