The Burning Shore by Ed Offley Read Free Book Online

U-701’s weary crew stepped ashore for the first time in forty-four days for a fifteen-day reprieve from the Battle of the Atlantic at a seaside hotel in La Baule, ten miles west of the port. In his final entry for the first patrol in U-701’s war diary, Degen noted, “Crew and boat were strongly tested on a long voyage.” And with Operation Drumbeat in full swing across the ocean, harder tests were certainly yet to come. 6
    W HILE THE CREWMEN OF U-701 were delighting in what Gerhard Schwendel later called the “pure luxury” of real beds with clean sheets, fresh food, hot showers, and evenings touring the local bars and restaurants of La Baule, the prevailing emotions at Eastern Sea Frontier Headquarters and Main Navy in Washington were the complete opposite—a mixture of frustration, anxiety,and fear. Assigned to write Vice Admiral Andrews’s daily war diary at ESF Headquarters, Lieutenant j.g. Lawrance R. Thompson in late January penned a blunt assessment of the command’s poor performance to date against the U-boats. Tersely summarizing the U-boats’ tactics of operating alone and attacking merchant ships under cover of darkness, Thompson identified one problem that would bedevil ESF Headquarters for months: “Three of the ships sunk had been silhouetted against the lights from the shore.” But that was not the only problem, Thompson added. The Eastern Sea Frontier simply did not have the warships and aircraft required to thwart the U-boats.
    With most of the Atlantic Fleet’s destroyer force preoccupied with mid-Atlantic escort groups or special missions like Convoy AT10, Admiral Royal Ingersoll in Norfolk had no warships to loan to the Eastern Sea Frontier. Rather than redeploying the stretched destroyer force to confront the U-boats offshore, King and other senior navy officials went public with a fusillade of lies.
    A formal policy of censorship imposed by the federal government on January 15 facilitated the navy’s campaign of misinformation. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed an executive order creating a federal Office of Censorship and charged its director, former Associated Press executive news editor Byron Price, with drafting formal guidelines for press self-censorship in covering military operations and other sensitive topics. The seven-page “Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press” (and a similar manual for radio stations) called upon journalists to forswear publishing any information on troop movements, operations of navy and merchant ships, military aircraft, the location of militaryfacilities, war contracts, and even weather forecasts—unless government officials had released such information. The program aimed at protecting vital operational military secrets as the armed forces geared up for a tough war. As it turned out, it also gave the US Navy an effective cloak to hide its lack of preparedness against the U-boats when the number of attacks soared in late January. 7
    Navy Secretary Frank Knox, Admiral King, and other senior admirals must have thought their attempts to suppress or delay releasing information on the U-boat attacks were becoming insufficient to allay potential civilian doubts about the sea service’s performance. On January 23, just eleven days after the British warned of the U-boats approaching the East Coast, an unnamed navy spokesman issued a remarkable statement to reporters in Washington, DC:
There are many rumors and unofficial reports about the capture or destruction of enemy submarines. 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.
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