Threat Gathered

For the first time since Jutland, a German navy could look forward to operations on blue water, not as skulking submarine raiders, nor like the Graf Spec and Bismarck, running for their lives before the pursuing British, but as a force that could stand and fight, or leap to a kill. Now, once again, Germany had a fleet in being. That fleet was small, but it was well built, new and powerful. It was gathered in the north, where it could strike as a unit.

Under the towering, snow-swatched cliff in conquered Norway's Trondheim Fjord the Tirpitz lay, 35,000 tons or more of naval might. No R.A.F. bomb or torpedo had yet shaken her.

Near her in the quiet fjord lay the crack 10,000-ton cruiser Prinz Eugen. She had been badly shaken. But Britain's airmen made no bet that the Eugen would not soon be ready for work again.

Like the Eugen, the 26,000-ton battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, known to Britons as S & G, had been continuously plastered in French ports. With the badgered Eugen, they had finally come out of their pit, had dashed through England's own Channel in February, dealing worse wounds to British pride than the damage they took themselves. Now the Gneisenau lay in Kiel. She seemed to have been hurt, as she had also seemed at Brest. But now she was in German home waters. So was the Scharnhorst.

So were the two pocket battleships and the big cruisers Admiral Hipper, Seydlitz and Derfflinger. So were Germany's two new carriers Graf Zeppelin and Deutschland. Finally, there was a brand-new 40,000-ton battleship, probably Friedrich der Grosse, and a few cruisers newly completed in German and occupied yards.

To the navies of the United Nations, convoying, fighting subs, mixing in swirling battles with the Jap in the Indian Ocean, watching a hundred naval rat holes from Trondheim to Surabaya, this concentration of the German surface fleet had a sinister look.

Map & Jap. German naval strategy had partly brought about this change, but only partly. Her submarines had forced the Allied fleets to spread themselves thin, searching for the answer to a vast global problem of logistics that had consistently kept the superior surface force on the defense. Germany had partly brought the change about by starting to build her surface fleet during the starvation days of the Weimar Republic, and keeping up the program even when the pinch of war put the emphasis on U-boats.

But the biggest part of the change had been brought about by the Jap. He had engaged the mighty U.S. Fleet, but in the Pacific; and from his coldly brilliant attack on Pearl Harbor to his thrust into the Indian Ocean he had stretched the U.S. Fleet thin, halfway around the world. More than that, he had snatched the British Far Eastern bases, and was now sucking British units toward India to head off the final rupture of the Empire. Meanwhile the Italians, who still had nuisance value, were-with the help of German airmen-holding other great British units in the Mediterranean.

The Germans had other nuisance value to thank, as well: the Vichy Fleet in the Mediterranean and the French African ports. By German naval standards, Vichy's was still an imposing force: five battleships under varied stages of repair or building, four heavy and seven light cruisers, some 40 destroyers, some 60 submarines. As the Nazis were well aware, Vichy's fleet was potentially of much greater than nuisance value; it could become a terrifying addition to the Axis naval might.

Altogether, it was a strange situation. On the surface, the German Fleet was hiding in its snuggeries. The paradox under this fact was that the Nazi Fleet was actually on the offensive, the British Fleet on the defensive.

The Nazi dispositions against the European supply lines of the United Nations were now complete. From the North Cape to the Cape of Good Hope, those supply lines were threatened from German bases all along the Atlantic profile (see map).

From Dakar to the English Channel, short-range U-boats prowled. Above the Channel, the Nazi surface warships (and more subs) were dispersed against the threat of British bombers. But all were within a few hours' steaming of the supply line up the Norwegian coast to Russia. Their dispersion gave them more than protection from air raids: it also made them hard to watch.

Further, their dispersion was in a relatively small area: they might go out as a fleet, to destroy a superior enemy in detail. In a swift hit-&-run battle in the fogs of the North Sea, a well-fought engagement might strike a body blow to the British Home Fleet.

To keep the German in check, the British had to short-change their forces against the Jap. Like a bridge team caught with fat hands between two opponents with bare suits and plenty of small trumps, the United Nations were being whipsawed into the imminent danger of losing their contract.

Faith & Works. For this favorable situation, pious Nazis thanked their landlubber Fuehrer, who had built ships when Goring was bawling for more airplanes and Guderian for more tanks. But they also thanked a short-legged pouter pigeon of a man named Erich Raeder.

Erich Raeder's religion has always been the German Navy. Today, as Commander in Chief of the Navy and one of Adolf Hitler's favorites among his top fighting men, he can justify all his actions of the past 30 years in terms most Germans can understand and applaud. For a good end he stooped to low means. He shucked dignity, closed his eyes to principles, was alternately sycophant, stout leader, wheedling trimmer and belligerent hell-roarer. The method worked. Few years ago his Navy was "the ugly little stepchild of the Government." Today the stepchild is a favorite, Germans can look on its face and find it shining and full of promise.

Its strutting, bemedaled little commander is tall with honor.

Skagerrak to Scapa Flow. Erich Raeder was a young officer, and not a very promising one, when he was assigned in 1910 to his first important post: navigating officer of the Imperial yacht Hohenzollern. It was a job that might have broken the spirit of an already proved officer. To the unproved Raeder, who had spent 16 years in such jobs as writing thoughtful screeds for the German naval journal, Marine Rundschau, it was a job that led on to destiny.

Destiny's agent was a Bavarian officer named Franz Hipper: an opportunistic Raeder recognized the agent. For his superior's approval he worked with selfless care, charted courses down to a minnow's fin, was everything that a junior officer should be-except in his pint size. Franz Hipper often boomed to his bantam favorite: "When I become an admiral, I'll make you my chief of staff."

Six years later the promise was made good. As the German scouting force put out into the Skagerrak, leading the High Seas Fleet, heading into the greatest battle in modern naval history, Jutland, Vice Admiral Hipper paced the bridge of the scouting force flagship Luetzow, with his binoculars dangling on the breast of his blue greatcoat. In the chart room near by stood Franz Hipper's chief of staff: Erich Raeder, brave in the four stripes of a captain.

Erich Raeder had grown. He grew vastly more in the next 48 hours. In that cataclysmic, overcast afternoon and black night, the Luetzow was in the forefront of action. She was finally so battered that she had to be abandoned. Cool and unhurried, Officer Raeder oversaw the transfer of his chief's flag to another battle cruiser, the Moltke, then through the retirement picked up the pieces of his job and went methodically on with it.

The little man was now a proved man.

But he had to prove himself still further. The further cataclysm that gave Raeder his burning, hard-eyed religion was the dying days of the war, when the German Navy was ordered out to sea-and men mutinied. The fleet did not go out. To Raeder's grooved, naval mind, the realization that his idol had a Communist brain and no muscle was the final, hardening blow. On the June afternoon when a faithful few scuttled 74 ships of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow, he dedicated himself again.

He had more than mere fervor to dedicate to the job ahead. At 66, Erich Raeder can tell himself that he did not get to his present place from having been, like Himmler or Ribbentrop, a product of Nazi politics, thrown suddenly into jobs where all the emphasis was on ruthlessness or adroitness rather than craftsmanship. British and U.S. Navymen consider him an able officer, profound rather than brilliant, a deep-water seaman and organizer rather than a technical expert. He is the German nation's living link with the proud traditions of bearded old Alfred von Tirpitz, father of the blue-water Navy.

More than any other of the crack relicts of the old Navy who now serve under him, Raeder has always been a man of one idea: the Navy must be rebuilt, must again fight on (and not only under) the sea.

Hohenzollern to Hitler. After Versailles, Germany found herself with a navy of 15,000 men and a few barnacle-bogged vessels barely fit to sail the Baltic. Erich Raeder went to work. He trimmed to the Socialists, who must have made his authoritarian flesh crawl. (When he suspected that the monarchy might be restored, he discreetly cheered.) But politics was a strictly extracurricular nuisance. Every hour he could, he worked with his old comrades at the uphill job of rebuilding his idol. Carefully selected men were enlisted for the long twelve-year hitch, and trained to become officers-some day. Shorn of good ships, the Germans concentrated on fine fire-control equipment, sweated long over their gunnery. They began to train a new batch of naval cadets, starting them in the hard school of sail where German naval officers still start their careers.

When Admiral Raeder became Chief of the Naval Command in 1928, he took over one new and three nearly complete cruisers, twelve torpedo boats, and a number of old hulks perilously close to scrap iron. Submarines were still forbidden Germany. Somehow, in spite of national poverty and naval lethargy, by polishing any apple for any promising politician, the Navy's trap-mouthed, hot-eyed boss managed to get naval building going. By the time Adolf Hitler had come to power, Raeder had completed the pocket battleship Deutschland (now the Luetzow), was building the Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer.

Adolf Hitler could not overlook such a man. He took over Raeder, and Raeder was very willing to be taken over. The best he had hoped for was a raiding navy; Adolf Hitler gave him battleships. And when Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Pact in 1935 (allowing Germany to build up to 35% of Britain's strength). Raeder danced a private German version of the hornpipe.

Submersibles, Unsinkables. Now he could surround himself with talent. He got plenty of pickings from the old Navy. There was dog-faced Admiral Otto Schnie-wind, now Commander in Chief of the Fleet; Vice Admiral Guenther Luetjens, who afterwards went down on the Bismarck. There was Admiral Alfred Saalwaechter, with eyes set far apart like the base of a rangefinder. There were Admiral Hermann Boehm, now commander in Norway, and Admiral Rolf Carls, a trim, bearded, rakehell character who looks like a Corsican bandit in uniform. There were thousands of ex-naval officers to be called back, thousands of bright-faced new officers to be trained.

Soon the yards were alight all night with the building of Germany's new fleet. The emphasis was still on submarines. Germany would never have many battleships, nor more than a handful of cruisers. Those they did build, they built with loving care. Their battleships were so carefully compartmented that they were thought to be unsinkable-until a torpedo plane crippled the Bismarck and left her a target for surface craft. Even so, German protection was still the best in the world.

Probably German fire control was, too. Raeder put the accent on speed and protection in his ships, sacrificed gunpower and made it up by fire control. The Tirpitz, like the Bismarck, has a main battery of eight 15-in. guns, while the North Carolina of the U.S. Navy, with nine 16-in. guns, throws a 25% heavier broadside. In the hit-&-run battles that German seamen still count on fighting, speed and protection are their trump cards, accuracy their no-trump aces. It was thus the Bismarck sent the Hood to her grave. Like the Graf Spee, it was only when her fire-control machinery was smashed that she lost her punching power.

With the fleet now ready for sea again, Grand Admiral Raeder, who carries a field marshal's baton and is heavy with Nazi authority, may well ponder the death of the Bismarck and Graf Spee. In those engagements, the British Navy may well have put a calculating finger on a fatal weakness of the new German Navy. Erich Raeder knows all about the threat of air power to ships. He has the air strength to protect his own. But how to protect the vital cortex of fire coordination is the problem he must ponder well.

But if other famed Germans spoke truly, it will take a greater man than Raeder to remedy another German defect. "The German people have never understood the sea," said old Tirpitz after Jutland. "In their hour of destiny they failed to use their Navy properly." Kaiser Wilhelm II, grandson of Queen Victoria, put it more flatly to his cousin, George V, before 1914. Said he: "Germans are landlubbers. They are afraid of water."

Nevertheless, to the men who love the sea and consider themselves masters of it, the men who fear water have suddenly become an anxiety.

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