The Burning Shore by Ed Offley Read Free Book Online Page A

a phase of the game of war secrecy into which every American should enter enthusiastically. . . . The press and the radio have made a great, patriotic contribution by voluntarily disciplining themselves in the matter of reporting such incidents as may have come to their attention unofficially. All the people can make the same contribution. Even if you have seen a submarine captured or destroyed [!], keep it to yourself. Let the enemy guess what happened. . . . By this conduct every American can make his contribution to the Navy’s worldwide effort to eliminate the enemy submarine menace.
    The Associated Press article containing the navy’s keep-it-to-yourself policy quoted Secretary Knox reaffirming the secrecy guidelines. The article added that Knox had “relaxed his rule of silence only once,” and that had been to say on November 21, 1941, that the US Navy had either sunk or damaged fourteen U-boats to date during the unofficial clash at sea in the North Atlantic. This was a total fabrication.
    The navy also took a more proactive stance when it felt compelled to obscure the horrific statistics. On Wednesday, January 28, Aviation Machinists Mate 1st Class Donald F. Mason was piloting a PBY-5A Catalina seaplane on patrol off Newfoundland when he spotted a U-boat down on the surface. Throwing the ungainly aircraft into a dive, Mason dropped a spread of depth charges as the U-boat hastily submerged. Mason duly noted his attack on the enemy, but by the time his report reached Navy Headquarters, someone had penned the eloquent, inspiring—and fictional—message that within hours became a national sensation: “Sighted Sub; Sank Same.” The New York Times , among dozens of other newspapers, trumpeted the alleged sinking and characterized the report as having a “brevity worthy of Oliver Hazard Perry, whose message after the Battle of Lake Erie was the laconic ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’”
    In fact, the US Navy had yet to sink a single U-boat. 8

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    PARANOIA
    T HE SPRING OF 1942 WAS AN UNRELENTING DISASTER FOR THE Anglo-American alliance at sea. During the two-month period spanning February and March, the Allies suffered four major setbacks that caused merchant shipping losses to soar. First, on February 1, Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz changed his command’s Enigma system by deploying a new encryption machine on U-boats and ashore. The new M4 Marine Funkschlüssel-Maschine utilized four rotors instead of three to scramble the text. As a result, the decryption bombes at Bletchley Park suddenly went silent, and British code breakers lost their detailed situational awareness of U-boat deployments in the North Atlantic and elsewhere. Second, by mid-February the German code breakers at B-Dienst had significantly broken into Naval Cypher No. 3, gleaning invaluable intelligence on Allied convoy movements. Third, on February 18, U-boat Force Headquarters opened up a second front in the Caribbean that later expanded to the Gulf of Mexico. This new U-boat campaign against North American shipping provided the U-boat commanders with a target-rich environment to rival that of the still-undefended Canadian andAmerican coastal waters. The fourth Allied setback was the continued failure of the US Navy to reinforce the hamstrung Eastern Sea Frontier (ESF)—and now the Caribbean Sea Frontier as well—with sufficient destroyers and long-range patrol bombers to mount an effective defense against the marauding U-boats. 1
    The loss of naval Enigma was a serious blow to the British and American antisubmarine warfare effort. It took the three-rotor bombes twenty-six times longer to find the daily settings of a four-rotor Enigma machine than it had for the older, three-rotor models, rendering obtaining timely intelligence from U-boat message traffic impossible. In fact, apart from isolated—and minor—breakthroughs, the new Triton network used by Atlantic U-boats would remain impenetrable for most of 1942. While British code