The Wolfpack Commander

Karl Doenitz joined the German navy at eighteen years old. With his idealistic views of life at sea formed by the novels he read as a child and the fact that he had become distanced from his family over the years, the navy offered an ideal career path as well as a new family for him to grow into moving forward. At the age of 25, two years into the first World War, Doenitz was trained and transferred to the U-boatwaffe where he joined the crew of U-39. There he learned U-boat warfare under the ace Kapitänleutnant Walter Forstmann, who had the highest hit rates of any captain at sea. Forstmann’s tactics made a deep impression on him; he crept much closer to his targets than other captains would to create a better chance of a torpedo hit, which with the technology at the time needed to be angled and aimed by eye. A year later Doenitz was given command of his own U-boat; however, within just 10 months his vessel experienced technical difficulties, and he and his inexperienced crew were captured as prisoners of war.

After taking time to sulk and think on his mistakes, Doenitz began to develop a U-boat tactic that he believed would change the entire course of the war at sea. He continued to develop this tactic in his mind even as he was sent back to Germany after the first World War had ended. Two years before World War II, Doenitz compiled his thoughts into a paper detailing how it might work. All he had to do now was to convince his superiors that it worked, and for that he had a game.

Wargames were commonly played both during and outside times of conflict within the military. They allowed for officers to test and train for various high-level strategies in imaginary, but very realistic, scenarios without the actual consequences of warfare. Now in the early days of 1939 before the war started, the Die Rudeltaktik, or rather the Wolfpack Tactic, which Doenitz had developed for years was to be put to the test in a scenario set four years into the future, when Germany would most definitely be at war with Britain. The tactic’s name and strategy derived from how wolves would work together to bewilder and take down larger prey. Officers were split into two teams, one of which (the red team) was to represent five convoys of Allied merchant ships that would be escorted to Britain by over 140 battleships and destroyers. The blue team was to represent the German force consisting of only 22 U-boats and ships with the objective of stopping the convoys from reaching their destination. This disparity in forces was excessive to the extreme, but necessary for Doenitz to test how the Allies would react at sea and how he could stop them.

Predictably, the blue team of German forces lost, the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean proved impossible to parse by the small force of U-boats at their disposal—almost no merchant ships were found. The few times that they did spot a merchant convoy, they were quickly located by the escort destroyer ships and taken out. Doenitz had confirmed what he already knew: that the current German U-boat force at sea was nowhere near the size that

During the 10 months that Doenitz spent at a British prisoner-of-war camp, he began to show signs of insanity, playing childish games with himself and even pretending to be a U-boat at one point. He was transferred to Manchester Lunatic Asylum as a result, but years later claimed that his actions had all been a ploy.