Hitler’s U-Boat War- The Hunted 1942-45

by Clay Blair

  Control ordered Ackermann in U-1221 to patrol off Halifax, Nova Scotia. While inbound to that place on September 24, a bizarre event occurred. A disgruntled troublemaker in the crew, Emil-Heinz Motyl, went up to the bridge and leaped overboard. Ackermann did not believe—or did not wish to admit—that Motyl was a suicide, but he offered no plausible explanation. In any event, the patrol of U-1221 was a notable failure. Ackermann spotted numerous warships, troopships, and cargo vessels and attacked several from a distance, but hit none. Upon his return to Flensburg on November 26, completing a barren patrol of ninety-nine days, Control criticized Ackermann for his failure to close and attack more aggressively.

  Control directed the other boat, Kneip in U-1223, to patrol the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Off Pointe des Monts on October 14, he hit the Canadian frigate Magog with one of two T-5s and blew off sixty feet of her stern, killing three men. Other warships and tugs towed Magog to Quebec City, where she was decommissioned and eventually sold for scrap. In the same area about three weeks later, on November 2, Kneip hit the 7,200-ton Canadian grain ship Fort Thompson with a torpedo, but she survived the blast, which the Canadians initially ascribed to a mine. Kneip returned to Flensburg on December 14, completing a patrol of 109 days.

  The IXC40 U-865, commanded by Dietrich Stellmacher, which, as related, had aborted three times in July and August, finally got away on September 8. It was thought that twelve days later, September 19, a B-24 of British Squadron 206 sank U-865. The aircrew reported seeing “about twenty” German survivors in dinghies, but none was ever recovered. In a postwar reassessment, the Admiralty withdrew credit for the kill and declared that U-865 was lost to unknown causes.

  The IXC40 U-867, commanded by Arved von Mühlendahl, age thirty-nine, sailed from Norway on September 12. His mission was to plant another automatic weather station on Labrador. However, the boat came under air attack and also had severe mechanical failures. On the eighth day, von Mühlendahl radioed Control that both diesels were out, his battery was completely dead, and he needed a tow back to Norway.

  Control mounted a rescue mission by other U-boats to get the crew of U-867 and the weather station, but it failed. A B-24 of British Squadron 224, piloted by P. M. Hill, hit one of the rescue boats, the IXC40 U-1228, commanded by Friedrich-Wilhelm Marienfeld, age twenty-four. Limping into Norway, his snort failed and felled him and most of the crew. Meanwhile, another B-24 of British Squadron 224, piloted by H. J. Rayner, found and sank the helpless U-867, reporting “fifty survivors in dinghies.” None was ever recovered.

  • The IXC40 U-1227, commanded by Friedrich Altmeier, age twenty-four, sailed from Bergen on September 12. When the boat surfaced on September 30 south of Iceland, Control directed her to patrol in the area between Gibraltar and the Azores.

  En route to that place on October 4, Altmeier came upon convoy Outbound North (Slow) 33, composed of fifty-two ships and six escorts. In an astonishing display of aggressiveness and boldness, he commenced a lone night surface attack on the convoy by the light of a full moon. Predictably, an escort detected U-1227 and with several others pursued her for an hour, firing star shells. In defense, Altmeier shot a T-5 at one of the “destroyers,” which was, in fact, the 1,400-ton Canadian frigate Chebogue. The T-5 hit and inflicted severe damage, but the Canadian frigate Kibble and Canadian corvettes Arnprior and Chambly and some British vessels came to her assistance and got her under tow. Seven days later, on October 10, a full gale struck the crippled ship in St. George’s Channel near Swansea Bay. The Chebogue grounded at Port Talbot, Wales, and was not repaired.

  Pressing southward, Altmeier in U-1227 had a lively patrol. Aware of her mission from Enigma decrypts, Tenth Fleet put the Card hunter-killer group on her track. On October 12, two destroyer escorts of the Card group harassed U-1227 with gunfire, depth charges, and Hedgehogs for three hours but Altmeier finally shook them. While snorting two hundred miles west of Gibraltar on October 31, Altmeier came upon “one large and one small warship” that may have been out hunting U-boats. He fired all four bow torpedoes, but two misfired and the other two missed.

  Nine days later, the U-1227 very nearly came to grief during an attempt to attack another convoy on November 8. While she was at periscope depth, escorts detected and pounced on the boat with depth charges. These inflicted such heavy damage that Altmeier had to withdraw westward to make repairs. Three days later, another hunter-killer group found U-1227 snorting and attacked with depth charges. The additional damage forced Altmeier to abort to Norway. Near Rockall Bank the snort broke down, but the crew repaired it and U-1227 reached Bergen on the day after Christmas, completing a stressful patrol of 106 days.

  • The IXC40 U-1230, commanded by Hans Hilbig, age twenty-seven, sailed from Kiel on September 26. Her first task was to land two more Abwehr agents, William C. Colepaugh and Erich Gimpel, at a remote site on the coast of Maine. Thereafter she was to conduct an antishipping patrol off Halifax, Nova Scotia. En route to Norway, Hilbig incurred many snort malfunctions, causing nosebleeds and other discomforts. One snort failure knocked out eight men in the engine spaces and, unknown to Hilbig, popped open the entire canned milk supply, a calamity that was not discovered until much later at sea.

  Hilbig sailed from Norway on October 8 and fifty-one days later, made a landfall on Cape Cod on November 27, and proceeded to Frenchman’s Bay in the Gulf of Maine. In the late evening of November 29, two crewmen of U-1230 rowed Colepaugh and Gimpel ashore in a rubber dinghy at Hancock Point. From there, the two agents trudged through snow to a road. A high school senior, Harvard Merrill Hodgkins, who was returning by car from a dance, noted these strangers and their unusually thin clothing considering the weather. The next day he told his father (a deputy sheriff of Hancock County) about the men and later, the FBI, which was aware from Enigma decrypts that U-1230 was to carry out a “special task” and suspected another agent insertion.

  Colepaugh and Gimpel eluded the manhunt and reached New York City by train with $60,000 in cash and ninety-nine small diamonds. They rented an apartment, bought new clothes, and partied. Apparently regretting his spying role, Colepaugh, who was born and raised in New England, revealed his mission to a childhood friend, then, on the evening of December 26, gave himself up to the FBI. Following leads provided by Colepaugh, FBI agents found and arrested Gimpel in New York City on the evening of December 30. Both agents were tried for espionage, found guilty, and sentenced to death, but in the postwar years, President Truman commuted the death sentences.

  During the extensive interrogations of Colepaugh and Gimpel, the Americans got the impression that perhaps Germany had developed U-boats capable of firing big rockets and that a fleet of these U-boats might attack the United States in early 1945. This was not true and technically infeasible, but the Americans took the news seriously and laid elaborate plans to track and intercept the fleet, just in case. This disinformation, which caused the diversion of considerable numbers of American ships and manpower, was the only known service Colepaugh and Gimpel performed on behalf of the Third Reich.

  After landing the two agents, Hilbig in U-1230 sank the 5,500-ton Canadian steamship Cornwallis. American ASW forces, including the “jeep” carrier Bogue hunter-killer group, scoured the Gulf of Maine, but Hilbig took U-1230 north to the waters off Nova Scotia and eluded his hunters. He returned to Flensburg in late January 1945 and did not sail on another war patrol.

  • The IXC40 U-1226, commanded by August-Wilhelm Claussen, age twenty-five, sailed from Norway to Canada on September 30. However, when Claussen reported on October 22 that the snort lifting gear failed and he had to raise it by means of block and tackle, Control directed U-1226 to cancel the trip to Canada and serve as a provisional weather boat in the area well south of Iceland from about October 27. He was to try to get the snort upright for the trip home but not to try to snort in his remote corner of the Atlantic.

  Nothing further was ever heard from U-1226. In spite of repeated reminders from Control that weather reports
were “urgently needed,” she broadcast none. Finally it was presumed that the boat was lost by accident south of Iceland, probably due to the defective snort.*

  • The IXC40 U-1228, which had been hit by a British B-24 in September during the futile attempt to rescue the crew of the lost IXC40 U-867, resailed from Norway for Canada on October 12. Having been badly bombed during trials in the Baltic as well, the skipper, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marienfeld, was properly respectful of Allied ASW aircraft and patrolled with due caution.

  Control directed U-1228 to operate in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Shortly after midnight on November 25, Marienfeld came upon the veteran Canadian corvette Shawinigan inside the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and hit her with a T-5. The warship blew up and sank with the loss of all eighty-five hands. Thereafter, Marienfeld, ignoring new orders to patrol off Halifax, reversed course and left the gulf through Cabot Strait to the open Atlantic, and on December 8, reported his success, as well as a snort and compass failure, and his decision to terminate the patrol. By radio to all U-boats, Control “publicly” rebuked Marienfeld for failing to reach the St. Lawrence River notwithstanding snort and other problems. This unhappy boat reached Flensburg on January 4, 1945, completing a patrol of eighty-five days. Marienfeld retained command.

  • The IXC40 U-1231, commanded by Hermann Lessing, age forty-four, the oldest U-boat skipper on active service, sailed from Norway to Canadian waters on October 15 to continue the U-boat campaign in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.

  Owing to winter weather and to the ice buildup and the curtailment of convoys between Quebec City and Sydney and vice versa, Lessing had a frustrating time. His snort “constantly iced up” and his “torpedoes malfunctioned.” In the St. Lawrence River off Matone, he shot three torpedoes at a freighter and others at an escort, but all were duds, he reported.

  Control, on December 2, gave U-1231 freedom to leave the gulf and patrol off Halifax if Lessing so desired. He withdrew via Cabot Strait, but owing to an overly pessimistic miscalculation of the fuel supply by the chief engineer, he set a course for home. When the error was discovered, Lessing backtracked to Halifax, having lost six days. Patrolling off Halifax at Christmastime, Lessing chased ships in the freezing cold but had no luck at all. On January 3, he headed for home a second time and arrived in Norway on January 30, completing an utterly fruitless patrol of 108 days.

  • The IXC40 U-806, commanded by Klaus Hornbostel, age twenty-eight, sailed from Norway on October 30 to patrol off Halifax. After a diversion to weather reporting, the boat arrived in the assigned area on December 13, a voyage of four thousand miles in forty-five days.

  Hornbostel nudged U-806 very close to the marked channels leading in and out of Halifax. He navigated by the glare of the city lights, the nearby lighthouses and lightships, and the channel buoys that the officers named for their spouses or girl friends. On the night of December 21, he fired a salvo of two torpedoes at a 7,200-ton British freighter, the Samtucky. These and a finishing shot missed but a T-5 hit. Although damaged, Samtucky was able to beach herself near Halifax and was later repaired and returned to service.

  Hornbostel found plenty of action over the next seventy-two hours. On December 22, he shot three torpedoes at a freighter and her corvette escort, but all missiles malfunctioned or missed. On Christmas Eve, the U-806 sighted two converging convoys. Hornbostel shot a T-5 at one of the convoy escorts, the 672-ton Canadian minesweeper Clayoquot. It hit and destroyed this small warship, which sank in nine minutes. Another torpedo aimed at a freighter exploded harmlessly on the Cat Gear of the Canadian minesweeper Transcona, which then pulled seventy-six of Clayoquofs eighty-four-man crew from the frigid waters. Hornbostel eluded a massive ASW counterattack and slipped away submerged southeasterly to celebrate Christmas.

  After that busy period, the U-80&S luck ran out. On January 4, her snort-lifting gear failed, making it impossible to lower the mast and forcing Hornbostel to abort. Eastward of Newfoundland Bank his men got the snort back in working order, but because of a diminishing fuel supply, the boat headed for Norway. Control again diverted the boat to weather reporting and, as a result, she did not reach Norway until February 22, completing an arduous voyage of 116 days, of which about ninety-three days were spent in transit and reporting weather.

  • The IXC40 U-1232, commanded by Kurt Dobratz, age forty, sailed from Norway to Halifax on November 12. She was the last U-boat to reach the Nova Scotia area in 1944.

  A onetime Luftwaffe pilot, Dobratz was an enthusiastic skipper with a great sense of humor. He arrived off Halifax after Christmas, when Hornbostel in U-806 and Lessing in U-1231 were still in the area. Determined to outdo all the U-boat skippers who had sailed to Canada in the fall of 1944, Dobratz took up a favorable shooting station in shallow water off Chebucto Head, practically athwart the main channel leading into Halifax.

  He found no shortage of action. In the period from January 2 to 3, he shot a T-5 at a “destroyer” and three other torpedoes at the big Dutch troopship Nieuw Amsterdam. He claimed sinking the “destroyer,” but it was not confirmed in Allied records. The torpedoes he shot at the Nieuw Amsterdam exploded harmlessly in her wake, leading Control to believe that she and other important Allied troopships towed a noisemaking decoy, but that could not be confirmed.

  The next day, January 4, Dobratz found better shooting. A coastwise Canadian convoy, SH 194, en route from Sydney to Halifax, suddenly hove into view. It was composed of the small Canadian tanker Nipiwan Park and two small freighters, escorted by the corvette Kentville and an aircraft. Dobratz missed the lead freighter, Perast, but hit the 2,400-ton Nipiwan Park and the 1,600-ton Norwegian freighter Polarland. The tanker broke in half and the freighter went straight down. Dobratz claimed he saw both halves of the tanker sink, but, in fact, tugs salvaged her stern and towed it into Halifax. Dobratz claimed two ships for 13,500 tons, but in actuality he sank or destroyed two ships for 4,000 tons.

  Allied ASW forces mounted a massive hunt for U-1232, but Dobratz slipped away and, as he said later, “laid on the bottom for ten days.” During that nerve-racking, uncomfortable time, the 18,000-ton hospital ship Llandovery Castle, en route from Halifax to Naples, Italy, passed directly overhead. Dobratz rose to periscope depth to have a look, but upon establishing the identity of the ship, he let her pass unmolested.

  Finally, on January 14, Dobratz crept back to the shooting grounds off Chebucto Head, bedeviled by the constant icing up of the snort and periscope. He was rewarded, however, almost immediately by the appearance of a convoy, BX 141, en route from Boston to Halifax, composed of nineteen merchant ships, plus escorts. Boldly closing this tempting formation, Dobratz shot torpedoes at four different ships, two tankers and two freighters. He claimed sinking all four for 30,400 tons, but in actuality he hit three. These were two British tankers, the 7,000-ton British Freedom and the 8,800-ton Athelviking, and one American Liberty ship, the 7,200-ton Martin Van Buren. The two tankers sank; the Liberty beached, a total wreck.

  This attack very nearly led to the loss of U-1232. One of the escorts, the Canadian frigate Ettrick, counterattacked and ran down the U-boat. Before Dobratz could get deep, Ettrick rammed her upper works. The collision bent the periscope flat over, tore up the bridge, and carried away the radio-antenna wires. Allied ASW forces again mounted a massive hunt, but Dobratz slipped away and set a course for Norway.

  When U-1232 reached the open waters of the Newfoundland Bank, Dobratz reported his actions and damage to Control. Granting his claims (three tankers and three freighters for 43,900 tons plus a “destroyer”), Dönitz happily awarded him a Ritterkreuz by radio on January 23. His confirmed score was five ships: three for 17,400 tons sunk (Polarland, British Freedom, Athelviking) and two for 9,500 tons wrecked. This was the best patrol of any Type IX sailing from Norway in the six months from July to December 1944, and far and away the best of the Type IX patrols to Canada. Dobratz reached Norway on February 14, completing a patrol of ninety-six days.

  • The IXC40 U-8
70, commanded by Ernst Hechler, age thirty-seven, sailed from Kristiansand on November 12 to the Gibraltar-Azores area to report the weather for Hitler’s December 16 Ardennes offensive. To avoid Allied ASW measures, Hechler remained well west of the French and Portuguese coasts. However, by the time he reached his assigned area, on December 17, weather reports were no longer vital and Control directed Hechler to close the Strait of Gibraltar and attack shipping.

  Hechler, another onetime Luftwaffe pilot who had never made a war patrol, carried out an aggressive first cruise. West of Lisbon on December 20, he attacked a special convoy of American landing craft and escorts. He claimed a corvette and two LSTs for 6,000 tons sunk. Allied records confirmed the 1,400-ton LST359 sunk and a severely damaging hit on the American destroyer escort Fogg, which killed four men and wounded two. Subsequently, Fogg’s stern sheared off, but a skeleton crew got her into the Azores under tow. Still later, tugs towed her to Boston, where she was repaired. An aircraft of the Azores-based British Squadron 220 attacked U-870, but Hechler eluded the plane and two British hunter-killer groups.

  Closing the western approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar, Hechler was not shy. On January 3 he attacked a convoy en route from Gibraltar to the United States, GUS 63, and damaged the 7,200-ton American Liberty ship Henry Miller, which, however, reached Gibraltar under tow. In the period from January 8 to 10, Hechler boldly attacked three more convoys. He claimed a corvette, a 6,000-ton tanker, and a 4,000-ton freighter sunk and damage to a 6,000-ton freighter. Allied records confirmed as sunk only a 335-ton ex-American patrol craft in service with the Free French, L’Enjoue (an escort of the Gibraltar-Casablanca convoy GC 107) and the 4,600-ton freighter Blackheath (in the British Isles-Mediterranean convoy KMS 76), which beached at Cape Spartel.