On February first, 1943 the United States Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) launched a war of words against Grandadmiral Dönitz’ Unterseebootefloote. Operated out of the innocuously-named ‘Special Warfare Branch’ of ONI, a group of naval officers aided by expatriate Europeans fluent with the ways and minds of Nazi Germany, created a series of weekly propaganda broadcasts in German. From February, 1943 until V-E Day in May, 1945 the men and officers of the U-Boat fleet at sea, in their bases, and all over Germany and its occupied countries were exposed to a propaganda war unprecedented in the U.S. Navy.

ONI’s Special Warfare Branch (OP-16-W) created a character and gave him the nom de quere ‘Fregattekapitän Robert Lee Norden’. The voice of the radio propagandist belonged to a U.S. Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander named Ralph G. Albrecht. His background and career suited him for this unique role. A partner in the prestigious New York law firm specializing in international law, Albrecht spent nearly 20 years successfully representing several American companies suing Weimar Germany for damages related to German sabotage in the United States during World War I. Albrecht knew Germany from the inside out and was idiomatically fluent in German, if spoken with an American accent.

As a Naval Reserve ‘observer’ in London early in World War II, LCDR Albrecht studied British POW camps and their methods of extracting information from interned German naval officers and men. Albrecht saw how this information was used by Section 17z of the British Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division in its war of words against Nazi Germany. Impressed, Albrecht returned to Washington, and helped persuade the Office of Naval Intelligence to mount a similar campaign specifically against the U-Boat fleet.

Special warfare had only limited access to U.S. Navy combat and strategic intelligence. In its place, they developed their own network and sources of information. One was to intercept mail going to German naval POWs in Canadian camps, and extract whatever information they could. OP-16-W’s primary source of information came from German naval officers and men being processed at Fort Hunt, a unique top secret POW center near Mount Vernon, Virginia.

As in the British camps, the rooms and common areas at Ft Hunt were wired with hidden microphones, and everything was recorded and transcribed. The American camp guards were friendly to their ‘guests’ and had an ample supply of cigarettes and a pot of coffee going in case the ‘U-boatfahren felt like ‘chatting’. And they did.

Every scrap of information was cataloged, indexed, cross-referenced and used in the radio programs broadcast weekly by ‘Commander Norden’.

Norden had several favorite themes. One was that if putsch came to shove, the U-Boat Offizieren would not stand by their men. To the officer corps Norden hinted that even they would be ‘sold down the river’ by the German Naval high command. Another theme was that U-boat officers fabricated tonnage-sunk figures in order to earn the Knights Cross or get a cushy shore position. Norden was especially derogatory about the number of Admirals in the German navy. There were enough, he claimed, to station five on each remaining warship and U-boat - - if they could be pried away from their ‘Pult-boote’ - their desk-boat commands.

Was Norden speaking the ‘truth’? It didn’t matter. His objective was to create doubt in the minds of his listeners. If the American propaganda specialists could sow discontent, so went their reasoning, this might lead to a mutiny on board a U-boat, or a U-boat commander defecting to the Allies. This never happened. In fact, Special Warfare could count only on limited success of their propaganda campaign.

By the middle of 1943, the Special Warfare Branch had compiled dossiers on dozens of U-boat commanders, ready to be used should an opportunity arise. That the information might be gossipy, personal, inaccurate or planted disinformation didn’t trouble Special Warfare: after all, it was not truth they were after but disinformation.

One such opportunity did come up in July. OP-16-W had been following the career of Kapitänleutnant Heinz-Eberhard Müller, then commanding U-662. Müller graduated the Naval Academy’s celebrated but decimated 1936 ‘Olympic’ crew.

According to OP-16-W’s dossier, Kplt Müller had served an unremarkable career in U-boats. One intelligence assessment said ‘Although pleasant enough to talk to, he does not seem to have enjoyed the absolute loyalty of his men.’

Enroute to an operating area off the coast of South America in late July, 1943 on its 4th feindfahrt (war patrol) U-Müller stayed on the surface most of the time. The crew enjoyed a rare break to sun themselves, and practiced firing their newly-installed quad-mounted 20mm gun. Results were described as ‘poor’. Kplt Müller himself was usually on the bridge during the evening hours.

The events which happened on the morning of July 21st are the stuff of which ‘CDR Norden’s’ propaganda broadcasts were made.

Commander Norden: Part 2 (# 119)

Excerpted exclusively for KTB from THE NORDEN BROADCASTS: America’s Ace in the Hole, by J. Wandres. Copyright. All rights reserved.