7thth September – 17th January 1940 - The ‘Phoney War’
The phrase ‘Phoney War’ was best not mentioned in earshot of anyone serving in the British Merchant Marine in those opening months of World War II. Between September and December 1939 the Germans sank more than three hundred ships, with a commensurate loss of life. Some two thousand French troops had been killed or wounded during the abortive Saar Offensive and for the people of Poland the grim reality of occupation would make itself felt as the Nazis began to put into effect their plans to not merely erase Poland from the map of Europe but destroy the Poles as a people. Those under the control of the Soviets would fare only a little better, with those officers considered too dangerous to Soviet rule being ruthlessly massacred in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Soviet military action in 1939 did not stop at Poland. On November 30th, taking advantage of the secret terms included in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR invaded Finland and started what has become known as the Winter War. The Finns would take some seventy thousand casualties, the Soviets between three and four hundred thousand by the time it ended in early 1940. The poor performance of the Red Army during the Winter War would simply confirm the low opinion of them held by the Wehrmacht and encourage Hitler’s plans for conquest in the east. On the Soviet side it would lead to a reorganization that restored conventional ranks and discipline, while reducing the role of the political commissars. This reform process would not be completed by the time Hitler decided that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had outlived its useful and put Operation Barbarossa into motion.
Scapa Flow had been reactivated as an anchorage for the Home Fleet with the outbreak of war. It was soon deemed too vulnerable to air attack and by the night of 13th-14th October much of the fleet had been dispersed to other harbours until the air defences could be upgraded. This was a fortuitous decision, though the attack that struck Scapa Flow was carried out not by the Luftwaffe but by the Kriegsmarine.
U-47 was commanded by Korvettenkapitän Gunther Prien, who would go on to become one of the premier U-Boat aces before U-47 was sunk in March 1941 with the loss of all hands, he made his name with the bold attack on the ships anchored at Scapa Flow. Just after midnight
U-47 entered the harbour and soon sighted two warships, one identified as a
Revenge Class Battleship and the other as a
Renown Class battlecruiser. Prien launched a spread of three torpedoes at the battleship and two struck home to devastating effect. Within minutes
HMS Royal Oak was sinking, with its bewildered crew leaping overboard, many clad in nothing except their night clothes. Such was the confusion that it was initially assumed the ship had fallen victim to an internal explosion, so no search was launched for
U-47. Realizing he was not being hunted Prien took the bold decisions to press home an attack on the Battlecruiser. This time only one of four torpedoes fired found its mark and struck the bows of the ship. This still did considerable damage but did not sink her, though Prien claimed otherwise, believing he had sunk both the battleship
Royal Oak and the battlecruiser
Repulse. At this point the base began to realize the harbour had been penetrated and Prien had to make good his escape. His insistent claim to have sunk
Repulse and not merely damaged her was academic in any case as the ship in question was not
Repulse or even a Battlecruiser, it was a World War I seaplane tender the
Pegasus. The damage to the ship was severe enough that it was sent to a breakers yard in December [1].
The military impact of the attack was not significant for the Royal Navy. The sensational newspaper headlines it generated both in Britain and neutral countries, especially the USA, was another matter. Naturally there was elation over the success of the attack in Berlin, with Prien receiving the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and being nicknamed ‘The Bull of Scapa Flow’. For Doenitz this an important success, he didn’t see an immediate increase in U-Boat production, but he did now have Hitler’s attention, which was the prerequisite to get anything done in the Third Reich. All this elation probably explains the failure of anyone, other than Prien himself, to question why half of
U-47’s torpedoes had failed to hit home against anchored targets. It would be quite some time before the issues with the Kriegsmarine’s torpedoes were recognized, let alone fixed.
The British gained a large measure of revenge on the Kriegsmarine when a force of Royal Navy cruisers composed of
HMS Ajax,
HMS Achilles,
HMS Exeter, and
HMS Cumberland intercepted
the Graf Spee off the River Plate on the 13th of December. In the battle that followed the
Exeter would suffer fatal damage, sinking on the morning of the 14th after being abandoned the previous night. This was not enough to save
Graf Spee. The attacks pressed home by all four Royal Navy vessels managed to damage
Graf Spee’s steering controls, leaving her stuck in a slow turn to port. This allowed the three surviving Cruisers to hit Graf Spee with salvo after salvo, with one shell scoring a direct hit on the bridge, killing the
Graf Spee’s captain, Kapitän zur See Hans Langsdorff, along with most of the ship’s senior officers. With
Graf Spee badly damaged and lacking firm direction with the loss of Langsdorff the crew took the decision to scuttle their ship, in no small part because of a mistaken sighting that convinced them more Royal Navy ships were closing in. The smoke they spotted was in fact from the
Exeter now just over the horizon, meaning that
Exeter could claim to have played a vital part in the destruction of the German Pocket Battleship. British propaganda emphasized it was the gunfire of the cruisers that sank Graf Spee and the claims of the crew to have scuttled her were disputed for years, only being settled when Oceanographer Bob Ballard located her in 1994 [2].
One aspect of the battle that the British did their best to keep out of the media was that when the British ships began to recover survivors, they found British sailors among their ranks. These were the crews from of some of the merchant ships the
Graf Spee had sunk and it was soon clear that many of them had perished in the battle. Others had been luckier in that they had been transferred to the German Merchantman
Altmark well before the battle and were on their way to be interned in Germany, though they would not reach a German port and the circumstances of their rescue would have significant consequences for the Allies, the Axis, and neutral Norway [3].
One of the stranger incidents of the period occurred near Mechelen in Belgium, when a German Me108 crashed at the airfield there. The pilot, Major Erich Hoenmanns, survived and between his interrogation and inspection of the wreckage it was established that not only had Hoenmanns become lost, he had also somehow cut off the fuel supply to the engine by mistakenly moving a lever in the cockpit. Given this unlikely chain of events some even speculated that Hoenmanns was trying to defect and had lost his nerve at the last moment, a claim vehemently denied by Hoenmanns himself.
It was only years after the war that evidence emerged that the ‘Mechelen Incident’ could have been far more serious for the Wehrmacht than the loss of one officer. Being interviewed for a history of the Battle of France Major Helmuth Reinberger claimed that the evening before the incident he had been having a drink in the officer’s mess and run into Hoenmanns, who had offered Reinberger a ride since he was planning to log some flying hours the following day and Reinberger was facing a tedious train journey to Cologne for a staff meeting. This offer was very tempting according to the account Reinberger gave the interviewer. However, Reinberger also stated that he had concluded that given the amount Hoenmanns was drinking he would be in no fit state to fly in the morning and so he declined the offer. This was not only fortunate for Reinberger, assuming the incident would still have happened with him aboard, but according to him also avoided the highly classified documents he was due to carry from falling into Belgian hands, among which were papers detailing parts of the German plan for the attack in the west, Case Yellow.
Naturally the idea that the French might have gotten their hands on a copy of the German battle plan in January sparked a great deal of interest and Hoenmanns was asked to verify the story, which he did, with the exception that he claimed it had been Reinberger who had gotten drunk and failed to wake up in time having accepted the offer. It must be said though that a hangover would be a more plausible explanation for Hoenmanns actions on the 17th of January than a botched defection, though in either case it was clear that Reinberger missed the flight by luck more than judgement. Surviving Wehrmacht records confirm that Reinberger did indeed attend a staff meeting in Cologne around that time and that in his capacity as the supply officer for 7. Flieger-Division he did carry papers dealing with the Division’s objectives for Case Yellow [4].
As dramatic as such an intelligence coup might seem its true value remains a matter of debate, with a strong case being made that it would have made only a marginal difference in the Battle of France, barely altering the existing Dyle Plan in May, and having no effect whatsoever on the events of July and August 1940 [5].
[1] In OTL Prien did not make an attack on Pegasus, which had indeed bee misidentified as a Battlecruiser.
[2] So in OTL
Cumberland didn’t arrive until after the battle. Here with somewhat more RN resources available she was part of the hunting group, which presses Graf Spee harder, resulting in more damage to Exeter, which survived OTL, and the Graf Spee being scuttled at sea rather than when leaving Montevideo.
[3] Which will be the subject of the next update.
[4] So all those elements happened in OTL, Reinberger just ran into Hoenmanns in the mess, Hoenmanns happened to be flying the next morning, got lost and accidentally cut off fuel to the engine. I decided it would take a very small butterfly to break the chain of circumstance and I chose the one that I liked best, though at one point I did consider having Hoenmanns not cut off the fuel and make a last-minute escape.
[5] Yes July and August, make of that what you will…
