Ulrich Mohr

Continuing a theme. This is one of the many histories of WWII events published in the 1950s then reprinted as cheap paperbacks in the 1970s. Since I’m a little strapped for book money right now, cheap paperbacks from used bookstores are just the thing, and this was $1.75 from Black & Read.


Atlantis took 21 Allied ships; this book calls her the “most successful German raider”, although other records show Pinguin as taking more vessels for more tonnage. The “auxiliary cruisers” (converted merchant ships) were very cost effective – the Atlantis sank more tonnage than any of the warship raiders, at around 1% of the cost (it could, of course, be argued that it would have been more cost effective still not to send the raiders out at all and use the money for something else).


Unlike some of the other Nazi-era raiders (notably the Widder and Michel) the crew of the Atlantis was generally acknowledged as behaving properly in her captures and subsequent treatment of prisoners. Atlantis captain, Bernhard Rogge, was rehabilitated enough to go on to a career in the Bundesmarine and eventually retired as an admiral. Sea Raider Atlantis first author is Ulrich Mohr, Atlantis EO, who spends a noticeable but not objectionably long part of the book distancing himself from “The Party”.


Atlantis experienced some atypical adventures (although nothing quite as dramatic as the mutual sinking of Kormoran and HMAS Sydney). Short of fresh water, she put into the Kerguelen Islands and promptly ran hard aground on a rock, despite having sounded the channel in advance with small boats. She was able to patch the hole with concrete and remove bent hull plates by pulling them off with anchored cables. A sailor died on Kerguelen and is buried in the “southernmost German war grave”. She also engaged in some actual trade – a Norwegian tanker loaded with aviation gasoline was captured in the Indian Ocean, then outfitted with a prize crew and sailed to Yokohama. The avgas was traded to the then-neutral Japanese for Diesel and the Atlantis met a Japanese tanker in the Marianas and refueled. The prize captain took ship to Vladivostok, crossed the still-neutral Soviet Union by train, and returned to Atlantis by U-boat (why didn’t he meet up in the Marianas, I wonder? Probably some legal technicality).


The Atlantis had the typical problem of all raiders – what to do with prisoners? She sent back a batch on the prize Tirranna; tragically Tirranna made it all the way back to occupied France but was torpedoed by HMS Tuna while waiting for minesweeper to clear a channel into the Gironde. A second prize ship, the Yugoslav Dormitor, barely made it to Italian Somaliland – the prize captain discovered the ship’s fuel records were falsified and she had to sail at extremely slow speed to conserve enough to make it in, leading to considerable suffering (water shortage) among the prisoners; it didn’t help that the cargo holds, where prisoners were held, were full of salt.
On her way back to Germany, the Atlantis was detailed to refuel a U-boat at sea and “accidentally” met up with the British cruiser HMS Devonshire; Atlantis played out her role as a neutral freighter to the bitter end and didn’t fire back as the Devonshire sank her. The Devonshire then left Atlantis’s crew adrift in their boats since there was obviously a U-boat in the area. U-126 eventually surfaced and took the life boats in tow to meet up with the supply ship Python, which was then promptly sunk by HMS Dorsetshire, which just happened upon her refueling two more U-boats. What was actually going on, of course, and was still classified when the book was originally written, was ULTRA; over the vehement protests of the code breakers the Royal Navy was using ULTRA intercepts to sink raiders and U-boat supply ships by having cruisers “accidentally” appear on scene. Mohr and his crewmates were suspicious of their two successive sinkings but speculated there were spies at work back in Germany; in an epilogue, Captain A.W.S. Agar of the Dorsetshire, either still unable to reveal ULTRA or possibly not in on it himself, explains that the German supply ships were intercepted by patrolling Atlantic areas known to have periods of calm suitable for at sea refueling.


The now combined crews of Atlantis and Python made an extremely uncomfortable trip back to Germany packed into two U-boats, relieved somewhat when they rendezvoused with an Italian submarine and transferred some of the passengers (especially on discovering the Italian captain had an excellent cook and a collection of erotic French literature).


In the tradition of books explaining the enemy’s side of things in WWII, and good enough for the genre; could use a map of the voyage and a plan of the Atlantis and is, of course, handicapped because the authors didn’t know about ULTRA.… (mais)

Ulrich Mohr and A V Sellwood show that the German surface fleet mostly stayed in port during WW2 with the greater part of the action being "covert" through U Boats attacks and the not so well known Surface Raiders that are the subject of this book.

It was surely preferable for an Allied merchant ship to be engaged by a chameleon like Ship Sixteen captained by Bernard Rogge and his ADC Ulrich Mohr than a U Boat, since they were usually given a chance to surrender when the "German Raider" identity was revealed within firing range. There was a learning process here. Rogge originally tried a shot across the bows but found that they continued to send radio SOS messages. He then tried ordering them to halt and not broadcast but that usually didn't work either (they turned to escape and continued to send SOS messages) so eventually he showed a large illuminated message quickly followed by shellfire against the radio room if there was any evasive action or broadcasting.

In any event Rogge's ship kept changing its identity with flags, lettering, paint, wooden structural alterations etc. to look for the most realistic matches with ships registered around the world and eventually managed to sink more Allied shipping (21 ships over 661 days) than any other surface ship. An interesting feature was Rogge's "Admiral Colombo" wall map of the Indian Ocean, with the subtitle "Think like your opposite number". He spent a good deal of time making reasonable assumptions about the whereabouts of Ship Sixteen based on existing knowledge and making sure he was somewhere else.

The book almost reads like a novel (better really) especially the episode when they were almost shipwrecked on the remote Kerguelen Islands near the Antarctic circle.… (mais)