In the eight Countdown to D-Day officer bio, Peter Margaritis chronicles the life of Theodor Krancke, a prominant naval officer who commanded the entirity of the Kriegsmarine in the Western Theatre.
Theodor Krancke, born March 30, 1893, in Magdeburg, joined the navy in April 1912. During World War I serving on in the IX Torpedo Boat Flotilla, attached to von Hipper’s battlecruisers, he participated in the Battle of Jutland. From 1927 to 1929, he was the torpedo officer on the pre-dreadnought battleship Schleswig-Holstein.
When World War II began, this successful Kriegsmarine officer gave up running the Naval Academy to take part in naval operations. As chief naval advisor to Admiral Raeder, he oversaw planning of the 1940 invasions of Norway and Denmark. Two months later, he was given command of the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer. In late October 1940, he began a successful 5-1/2 month North Atlantic raid, capturing three merchant ships and sinking a total of 13 merchant vessels and the auxiliary cruiser HMS Jervis Bay. In June 1941, he was appointed head of the Quartermaster Division of the Kriegsmarine, and a year later promoted to naval advisor at OKW.
On April 20, 1943, he was appointed Marinegruppenkommando West on the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Von Rundstedt’s naval counterpart, he commanded all naval surface units and coastal batteries in the Western Theatre, and as such directly answerable only to Dönitz and OKM. Krancke always remained at odds with Rommel’s naval advisor, Admiral Ruge, refusing to understand why a naval officer was attached to an army command. Ruge, in turn, resented the undertone that he should be at sea or a lackey on some naval staff.
Krancke felt that when the invasion came, it would probably be somewhere between Boulogne and Cherbourg. On June 4th, he departed for Bordeaux to wind up some mining operations in the Bay of Biscay. Because the weather was scheduled to be bad for the next few days, and because he felt a landing at this time would not occur because the tides were wrong, he suspended minelaying operations and naval patrols to the order.
When D-Day began, Krancke rushed back to his headquarters in Paris but could do little to remove the huge Allied fleet parked off Normandy’s coast.
Krancke, an ardent Nazi, had a major hand in suppressing the anti-Hitler coup attempt in Paris on July 20, 1944. When he found out that the military governor had arrested several of the SS and Gestapo, he threatened to march into Paris and go to the prison with a thousand marines to free them.
He was later given command of Naval Group Norway, which he held until April 1945. After the surrender, he remained in command, overseeing the removal of minefields and the dismantling of German naval defences in Norway. Captured by the British on August 27th, he was released on October 3, 1947, and retired to his home near Hamburg.
He died on June 18, 1973.
Theodor Krancke and his role in the defence of the Atlantic Wall is explored in the new book, Countdown to D-Day, due to be released June 2019.
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