During WWII the German Navy and Luftwaffe Fought a Furious Battle at Sea, With Each Other

Friendly Fire incidents, also called Blue on Blue attacks are a fairly common occurance in armed conflict. They occur on land, at sea and in the air. During WWII, B-17s and B-24 bombers flying in “box” formation to allow for mutual coverage of their .50 cal machine guns shot each other down as excited and target fixated gunners would rake one of their own bombers as they shot at a German fighter that passed near it.  In France an air force bombing strike landed on US troops instead of the Germans when clouds covered the target and their navigation was off.  At sea during the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, a close and confused fight in the dark with the Japanese Navy saw our Navy ships shooting at each other briefly resulting in the death of a US Admirals when the disabled light cruiser USS Atlanta drifted in front of the guns of the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco who mistook her for a Japanese warship.

There was a similar incident in the waters off France during WWII, when the German Luftwaffe and the German Kreigsmarine(navy) fought a furious battle with each other, not in the confusion of the night, but because of a series of bureaucratic snafu’s, organizational structure and faulty communications.

Germans’ Kriegsmarine

Within the vision Hitler had to rebuild the might of Germany was this: To build a Navy as badass as the Britain’s Royal Navy, but the treaty that ended WWII stood directly in the way. The Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germany from building submarines and they could only build a surface fleet of very limited size in terms of ships and their size. Germany decided to simply ignore it and embarked on a building program that saw the Kriegsmarine grow rapidly in through 1939 under a massive ship-building program called Plan Z. Under the plan, Germany would have a navy of 230 ships, including 13 battleships and battle cruisers, 4 aircraft carriers, 15 pocket battleships, 5 heavy cruisers, 13 light cruisers and 68 destroyers. Germany did not produce nearly enough oil to keep a fleet like this at sea so the plan itself made it obvious that Hitler and Germany would have to secure reliable sources of oil from somebody and that would probably involve conquest.

However, the program stopped when WWII broke out, and the Kriegsmarine was left out. If anything, Luftwaffe commander and Hitler’s second in command Hermann Göring was most to blame. He convinced Hitler that Germany could win the war with airpower and the Luftwaffe operating from shore would be enough to stop the Royal Navy. To make sure of this, he made sure that the Kreigsmarine would not have any aircraft to fly that it could call its own.  Every coastal aircraft squadron and group asssigned to the Kreigsmarine was under the direct control of Goring and the Luftwaffe, even float planes on battleships like Bismark and Tirpitz, they were all flown by Lufwaffe pilots. If the German navy put to sea it would have to ask the Luftwaffe to provide air cover for them. The arrangement seemed to work okay until somthing called Operation Wikinger occured.

Operation Wikinger

It was February 1940 when the Kriegsmarine received reports of British fishing vessels’ activities around the Dogger Bank located in the North Sea about midway between the UK and Denmark. In the North Sea, the German navy engaged in extensive offensive mind laying operations to keep the Royal Navy from raiding the French coast.  The Germans suspected these British vessels were engaged in mine laying themselves or were clearing German mines from their defensive mine fields in these waters.  a recon aircraft also reported the appearance of a submarine suggesting the Brits were using the Dogger Bank to replenish their subs.  The Bank itself is just an area of shallow water concealing a very large sand bar.  It has no land you can walk on.

Kreigsmarine HQ decided they would interdict this intrusion upon their mine fields and dash 6 destroyers to the bank, destroy the fishing boats and then scoot back to their ports before the Royal Air Force could attack them. They sortied the destroyers Friedrich Eckoldt, Richard Beitzen, Erich Koellner, Theodor Riedel, Max Schulz, and Leberecht Maass. Along with those were two land-based Luftwaffe bomb fighters that the German Navy requested to provide air cover for the destroyers when the headed out to sea and then return the next day to escort them back into port again.  For whatever reason no Luftwaffe fighters showed up to protect them on the journey out.

The comms procedure would see the Destroyer Flotilla Commander sending a request for air cover up the chain of command to Kreigsmarine HQ, which would then make the request of Lufwaffe main HQ, which would then send the order down its own chain of command to a squadron of planes to go support the navy. If it had the planes and pilots to do so. The time taken to do all this would have been pretty long by modern standards making these operations difficult to coordinate on the fly. They were using telex machines which were like typewriters connected by radio-telephone signals.  A typed message would be prepared, proof read and signed off on and encoded. Then a Telex operator would carefully type the coded message out on a keyboard that punched holes in a paper tape,  The paper tape would then be inserted into a feed slot and the operator would dial the phone number of the recipient and when the connection was made the press of a button would send the tape back through the machine which would cause the typewriter on the recipient’s side of the connection to type the same message along with sending a received message back to the originator..  The message would then be logged by the recipient, decoded and copies made and delivered by hand to various persons in the HQ to read. Telex machines were loud and were located in one room insulated against the noise, sometimes in a different building.

And unless the Kreigsmarine needs the Luftwaffe or vice versa, they really didn’t share details of their operations with each other as a matter of routine to deconflict their operations.

And this was exactly what was going on in this case.  The Luftwaffe’s Fleigerkorps X, a coastal defence unit was conducting air operations in the waters these destroyers were passing through with orders to sink any shipping they encountered.  Fleigcorps X did let Kreigsmarine HQ know that their bombers would be in the skies that night but that HQ did not send it down the level of the destroyer flotilla steaming out into those waters.  Kreigsmarine HQ did not specifically inform the Luftwaffe that they would be sending 6 destroyers deep into the North Sea that night but did request that they send three aircraft from three different Luftwaffe units to aid the destoyers. One plane was requested to do forward recon ahead of the destoyers, fighters were requested from another to cover their departure from port and finally, a request that Fleigerkorps X send bombers to protect their return the next day.

A Major at Fleigerkorps X put it together that German destroyers and aircraft might encounter each other without knowing either was going to be there and made a call Marinegruppe West, the local Kreigsmarine HQ to see if there would be a conflict.  Since the bombers were already in the air, a warning could not be sent to them without breaking radio silence and revealing the location of the 6 destroyers and the Kreigsmarine failed to inform the destroyers as well for reasons that are inexplicable.

The Disaster

A Luftwaffe He-111 twin engine bomber on a mission to locate British merchant traffic discovered the 6 destroyers sailing at high speed, their bright wakes shining on the clear moonlit night.  His mission was to locate and report back so other aircraft in the sky could converge on any targets he found. Unsure of their identity, he over flew the formation twice under 2,000 feet to see if they might flash recognition signals at his plane. The black ships below him took no evasive manuevers but did not signal him by radio or blinker lights.  Below him, the ships were equally confused about whether the bomber above might be a British reconnaissance aircraft vectoring Royal Navy ships or RAF planes to their location, they had no knowledge of any Germans planes operating in the area To the German bomber above.

On the second low pass one of the German destroyers opened fire with its 20mm guns, the tracers flying up at the bomber convinced the pilot that the ship was a hostile and its own machine guns fired at the destroyers in return as it rapidly turned away.

The bomber climbed to about 5,000 feet and made a diving bomb run astern dropping four 100lb bombs on the dark shape in the water. The first two splashed in the water and now all 6 destroyers opened fire on the unseen bomber blindly filling the sky with tracers and shell bursts.

Then at least one bomb hit the destroyer Maas just behind the bridge.  As the plane passed by members of her crew could clearly see she had German markings. This was seen by the crews of two other destoyers as well.  The Maas began radioing the other destroyers that she had been hit and needed assistance and four of them began to reverse course to help her, when the flotilla commander ordered them back in formation, sending the Eckoldt to go and help the Maas. As she approached to either take off survivors or a attach a tow line, the AAA guns of the Maas suddenly fired again into to sky at an unseen and unheard aircraft.  The Mass was then broken in two as she was shattered by two exploding bombs.  The survivors of her crew of 330 began to leap into the freezing cold water in their lifejackets.

Now all the destroyers approached the wreckage slowing to send motor boats over the side to recover the crew of the Maas,  Then an explosion rocked another destroyer, the Schulz sending up a huge fireball.  At the time no one realized which other destroyer had been hit or how badly in the dark night. On the destroyer Reidel the sonar operator called out detection of a submarine to starboard, which was send out over the radio to the other ships. The destroyer Koellner rung up flank speed to evade the submarine with one of her crewed motor launches in the water but still attached to the ship, the boat was bashed against the side of the destroyer as the bosuns furiously tried to raise her with the davits to no avail, the launch flipped over spilling the crew into the water and into the destoyers churning propellers killing them all.

The Reidel attempted a depth charge run on the phantom submarine which detonated prematurely in the shallow water jamming her rudder causing her to steam in circles.

Suddenly, look out were seeing periscopes in every wave and torpedos coming at them from all directions.  The destroyers all churned the waters at high speed unable to rescue the crews of two sinking destoyers in freezing water.

The first bombing occurred about 7pm in the evening and by 8:30 the ‘battle’ was over.  The flotilla commander ordered a withdrawl and the destroyers returned to the location of the Maas sinking to recover their left behind rescue boats.  It was then discovered that the Schulz was  not answering any radio calls and was missing. The remaining four destroyers searched for her for a while but found no trace of her.

There were no survivors from among the crew of the Max Schultz and only 60 were found from the Leberecht Maas. When it was all said and done, some 578 German sailors were dead and two destroyers sunk.

Back at their respective headquarters, the admirals and generals began to get reports of the battle.  The destroyers reported that they were under air attack and the bomber crew reported that they were attacking ships that fired at them. Both duly reported to the other the activity reports they were getting.

This is when they realized that something very bad was happening. Phone calls began to fly between the two commands that quickly devolved into blaming each other for the debacle;

“Tell your bombers to stop attacking our ships!” was met with,

“Tell your ships to stop shooting at our bombers!”

The investigation by the Luftwaffe and the Kreigsmarine was done in secret given it was wartime and the results revealed what was already generally know, that the navy having no aircraft of its own was forced to go through a laborous and complex communications system that resulted in a breakdown of communications and information that resulted in a disaster that cost two ships and nearly 600 lives. Nothing was done to change the situation.  Hitler consistently backed Goring and the Luftwaffe over the navy and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. The German navy would not be getting any airpower it could command for its own operations and the hierarchical order of command and control would be preserved.