by Clay Blair
This was the last U-boat kill by the U.S. Navy’s Fairwing 7. Since its arrival in southwest England in the summer of 1943, the wing had sunk four U-boats and shared credit for two others.* From January 1 to April 30, 1945, the wing’s aircraft flew 1,549 ASW missions, requiring 14,513 hours, almost all over water. These planes doubtless harassed many U-boats and forced many into evasive actions that thwarted attacks on Allied shipping. On May 17, Admiral King ordered the wing † to return to the States.
By April 1945, the American 12th and British 21st Army Groups, commanded by Omar Bradley and Bernard Montgomery, had crossed the Rhine River into Germany proper and were striking toward the prearranged stop line at the Elbe River. Soviet armies, commanded by Georgi Zhukov, were surrounding Berlin and fighting in the suburbs.
Notwithstanding this chaotic situation, what remained of the U-boat force carried on with loyalty and verve. Twenty-eight VIIs sailed from Norway in April to carry out war patrols in waters of the British Isles, eight in the last week of the month. Twelve were new boats or transfers from the submarine school. Four were commanded by new skippers. All told, these boats sank four ships for 20,000 tons. Ten of the twenty-eight boats, manned by about five hundred men, were lost, including forty-six captured (from U-1206) and one hundred interned (from U-963 and U-1277) by the Portuguese. As ordered, eleven other VIIs of the April group manned by about six hundred men put into British naval bases to surrender.
Some April patrols in brief:
The U-1055, commanded by Rudolf Meyer, making his second patrol, sailed from Norway on April 5. On April 23, the boat reported her position from the southwest tip of Ireland, but nothing further was ever heard from her. Niestle writes that the cause of her loss is not known.
The U-486, commanded by Gerhard Meyer, who sank the troopship Leopoldville, a big British freighter, and sank or wrecked two British destroyer escorts (Capel, Affleck) on his first patrol in December, sailed from Bergen for another patrol in the English Channel on April 7. The snort broke four days later and Meyer aborted the patrol.
At that time, the big new 1,300-ton British submarine Tapir, commanded by John C. Y. Roxburgh, who had earlier commanded the submarine United in the Mediterranean, was patrolling off Norway. In the early hours of April 12, Tapir detected U-486 running on the surface, inbound to Bergen. Roxburgh fired a full salvo from his eight bow tubes. One or more torpedoes hit and blew the U-boat to pieces with the loss of all hands.
During his earlier action as commander of United, Roxburgh had sunk the Italian destroyer Bomdadière and the big Italian submarine Remo, plus a number of Italian and German freighters. Highly decorated for these successes and for sinking U-486, Roxburgh rose to lofty positions in the Royal Navy in the postwar years and retired with the rank of vice admiral.
• The new U-1206, commanded by Karl-Adolf Schlitte, left Kristiansand on April 7. Her task was to relieve U-778 off the east coast of Scotland between Moray Firth and the Firth of Forth, concentrating on Peterhead.*
Schlitte navigated by Elektra-Sonne. Three days out, the supercharger on the port diesel failed. After the boat reached the area off Aberdeen on April 13, the starboard diesel failed. Forced to run on batteries while the crew worked feverishly to get the diesels back on line, Schlitte had to let pass what he described as an 8,000-ton freighter.
The next day, April 14, the U-1206 suffered another mechanical failure, this one with devastating results. The outboard valve of the forward head (toilet) gave way and the bow torpedo compartment flooded. Because the main bilge pump and other auxiliary machinery also failed, Schlitte could not check the flooding. Faced with this calamity, he fired the torpedoes in the tubes and destroyed the others, as well as all secret materials, then surfaced to scuttle and abandon ship. Three men were lost but local small craft rescued thirty-six survivors and ten others reached the shore at Aberdeen in a raft. All forty-six Germans were promptly escorted to British POW interrogation centers.
• The U-245, commanded by Friedrich Schumann-Hindenberg, sailed on April 9 from Heligoland for a second hazardous (Brutus) patrol to the mouth of the Thames River. In shallow water off Harwich on April 17, he came upon coastal convoy TAM 142 and sank two freighters with new and experimental, extremely long-range acoustic torpedoes. The victims were the 4,900-ton British Filleigh and the 5,000-ton Norwegian Karmt. A T-5 shot at a escorting corvette missed. When Germany collapsed, Schumann-Hindenberg returned U-245 to Bergen.
The VIIC41 U-1017, commanded by Werner Riecken, making his Second patrol, sailed from Trondheim on April 14. Two weeks later, in the early afternoon of April 29, while snorting off Malin Head at the entrance to North Channel, an aircraft spotted the snort wake and smoke. This was a B-24 of the renowned British Squadron 120, piloted by H. J. (“Pop”) Oliver, a protégé of the U-boat killer “ace” Bryan Turnbull. Oliver pounced promptly on the snort, dropping four depth charges. Per doctrine, he then laid out a pattern of sonobuoys at the site of his attack. These picked up “loud and long-drawn-out explosions” and transmitted the noise to the B-24, providing fair proof of a kill, confirmed later by Allied intelligence. There were no German survivors.
The new VII, U-1105, commanded by Hans-Joachim Schwarz, sailed from Kristiansand on April 13. Two weeks later, close off the west coast of Ireland near Donegal Bay, Schwarz shot torpedoes at the American-built British destroyer escort Redmill, which, with American-built British sister ships Byron and Fitzroy, had sunk the VII snort boat U-722. The torpedo hit the stern of Redmill, leaving her a total wreck. Salvage vessels towed her into port, but she was never repaired. The British eventually returned the hulk to the U.S. Navy, as well as her sister ships Byron and Fitzroy. Per orders, Schwarz surrendered and concluded his brief patrol at Loch Eriboll, Scotland, on May 10.
Among the last VIIs to sail from Norway were the. new VIIC41, U-1277, commanded by Ehrenreich-Peter Stever, and the veteran VIIC, U-963, commanded by Rolf-Werner Wentz, making his second patrol as skipper. Stever was to patrol the English Channel and Wentz was to lay a minefield. Neither boat carried out its mission. Both scuttled off the Portuguese coast, Wentz on May 21, Stever on June 3. Portuguese authorities interned both crews and later turned them over to Allied authorities.
Soon to become somewhat famous (or infamous) and the cause of wild speculation in the tabloids, the U-977, commanded by a new skipper, Heinz Schäffer, age twenty-four, sailed from Kristiansand on May 2 to patrol in the English Channel Commissioned on March 31, 1943, in Kiel by Hans Leilich, age twenty-five, she had not previously made a war patrol. During workup in the Baltic, according to Allied intelligence documents, U-977 rammed (or was rammed by) other vessels three times. In the last incident, she incurred so much damage to the pressure hull that German authorities relegated her to school boat status.
In early 1945, Heinz Schäffer, crew of 1939, assumed command of the boat in Hamburg, where on February 20 she entered the yards to be fitted with a snort. Schäffer had made four war patrols, including one in the Gulf of Guinea, as a watch officer on the U-445, based in France. From December 1943 to December 1944, he had commanded the Type IID school duck U-148.
Schäffer said later that he regarded his new command as a “means of escape” from the Allies, rather than a combat vehicle. When Germany surrendered, the U-977 was outbound in Norwegian waters. Schäffer thereupon decided to cruise to Argentina and surrender to what he believed might be more hospitable authorities. “One of my main reasons in deciding to proceed to the Argentine,” he later said in an official statement to the Allies, “was based on German propaganda, which claimed that the American and British newspapers advocated... that all German men be enslaved and sterilized.... It was absolutely my intention to deliver the boat undamaged into Allied hands, while doing the best I could for my crew. I felt the ship’s engines might be a valuable adjunct to the reconstruction of Europe.”*
Having reached the decision to flee, Schäffer said, he then gave the married crewmen a choice of going ashore or going to Argentina. A
bout a third of the crew—sixteen men—voted to go ashore. On May 10 Schäffer ran in close to the Norwegian coast at the island of Holsenöy, unintentionally grounded the boat on some rocks, and put over the sixteen men in dinghies. He then sallied the boat off the rocks and set off for Argentina, about seven thousand miles away. All three of his officers † and twenty-eight enlisted men remained on board. The sixteen men who left the boat were subsequently taken into custody by the British.
The voyage to Argentina was hideous. Schäffer remained completely submerged for a record sixty-six days—from May 10 to July 14—snorting for about four hours a day. The boat crawled southward into ever greater summer heat and many men, Schäffer remembered, were on the edge of nervous breakdowns. He stopped for four hours in the Cape Verdes for a swim call and then proceeded on the surface using one diesel to St. Paul’s Rocks, making good about 150 miles a day. When the boat crossed the equator (July 23) Schäffer authorized the customary initiation ceremony. Finally, on August 17, after a patrol of 108 days and 7,644 nautical miles, Schäffer put into Mar del Plata.
Latin American newspapers soon published stories stating that U-977 had secretly brought Adolf Hitler to Latin America to live out his life incognito. That false story spread to the tabloids worldwide, provoking a good deal of speculation as to whether or not it could be true.
It is improbable that Hitler—or any other high Nazi official—chose to escape on U-977. Given the high rate of loss of U-boats in the spring of 1945 (50 percent plus), the chances of survival on a fleeing submarine were extremely dim. Even if Hitler or some other high Nazi had chosen this risky means of escape, in all likelihood he would have demanded a bigger Type IX snort boat or an IXD2 U-cruiser snort boat, rather than a cramped VIIC. Moreover, young Heinz Schäffer was an unlikely choice of skipper for such an exalted mission. He had never made a war patrol in command of a U-boat and had not served in the Atlantic since October 1943. Furthermore, neither Schäffer nor his crew had any snort experience; U-977 had only recently been fitted with one.
Even if Hitler, notoriously prone to seasickness, chose to flee in a Type VII and to endure the hideous voyage that entailed, he would not have picked this particular VII, which had been thrice rammed in the Baltic and, because of pressure-hull damage, reduced to school-boat status. Moreover, while the U-977 was in the Hamburg shipyard to be fitted with a snort, Schäffer wrote later,* the batteries “were only running at 70 percent efficiency.” He had requested new batteries, but “for want of material” his requests “had been rejected.” None of the thirty-two men on U-977 has come forward to confirm that Hitler (or his ashes), Martin Bormann, or other high-ranking Nazis traveled to Argentina in U-977. In the journalistic climate of the 1990s, an authentic story of that type would be worth millions.
After undergoing close interrogation by the Americans and British, in 1950 Schäffer returned to live in Argentina.
Toward April, a few of the big Type XXI electro boats began to sail from Kiel to Norway. As related, the first XXI, U-2511, commanded by Adalbert Schnee, arrived in Norway on March 23 with snort and periscope problems. Schnee also reported that the maximum safe diving depth of U-2511 was 570 feet, about half of her designed depth limit. On April 18, Schnee sailed from Kristiansand, but his diesel engines were not working properly and he aborted and put into Bergen on April 21, after eluding a British submarine. He resailed on May 3, made a practice approach on a British cruiser, withheld fire, and returned to Bergen.
Several other Type XXIs sailed to Norway. Among them was the U-2513, commanded by Erich Topp, who wore a Ritterkreuz with Oak Leaves and Swords.† Yet another was the U-2506, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Horst von Schroeter (from the Drumbeater U-123). On April 19, an as-yet-unidentified British aircraft hit the U-2506 but von Schroeter took her on to Bergen and was there when the war ended. Still another was the U-2529, commanded by Fritz Kallipke, whose earlier Type XXI command, U-2516, had been destroyed by an air raid on Kiel.
British aircraft destroyed or damaged a number of Type XXIs in the Skagerrak and Kattegat en route to Norway. These included the U-2502, commanded by Ritterkreuz holder Heinz Franke, whose earlier XXI command, U-3509, had been abandoned in Bremen. Although damaged by RAF Mosquitos, Franke got the U-2502 to Horten and was there when the war ended. Hans Hornkohl, the former skipper of U-3512, destroyed in an air raid on Hamburg, got his new XXIU-3041 to Horten. Eleven British Beaufighters hit the U-2503, commanded by Karl Jürgen Wachter, in the Kattegat. Rockets and cannons savaged the boat and killed Wachter. Others took charge and ran the boat onto a beach to save themselves. On the same day in the Kattegat, British typhoon aircraft damaged the U-3030 and sank the U-3032, commanded by twenty-four-year-old Bernhard Luttmann and twenty-two-year-old Horst Slevogt, respectively.
THE ARCTIC
The Allies continued to sail Murmansk convoys to Kola Inlet in the dark and stormy winter months of 1944-45. The Commander, U-boats, Norway, Reinhard Suhren, maintained Combat Flotilla 14 at Narvik, commanded by Helmut Mohlmann, to attack these convoys.
As Dönitz had long pointed out, the returns from these Arctic boats were too small to justify the force. In the year 1944, the Allies sailed 243 loaded ships to Kola Inlet. The U-boats sank merely three, all from convoy JW 56A in January: two American Liberty ships, Penelope Barker and Andrew G. Curtin, and the British Liberty ship Fort Bellingham* Yet Hitler insisted that the Arctic force of about twenty U-boats keep patrolling.
These convoys in brief:
• JW 62 (thirty ships) sailed from Loch Ewe on November 29, 1944. By then D6nitz had persuaded Hitler to order the Luftwaffe to strengthen its forces at air bases in northern Norway to help the U-boats find the convoys. The German air men located JW 62, but the convoy eluded the planes and the U-boats and there were no losses.
The return convoy, RA 62, had a tougher time. The U-365, commanded by Diether Todenhagen, fired a T-5 at the British destroyer Cassandra and blew off its bow. Salvage vessels towed Cassandra back into Murmansk. Twice during the voyage torpedo-equipped JU-88s attacked RA 62 but they failed to do any appreciable damage. Two Swordfish aircraft from the new (1944) “jeep” carrier Campania † piloted by W. J. Hutchinson and M. W. Henley, sank Todenhagen’s U-365 with the loss of all hands on December 13.
• JW 63 (thirty-five ships) sailed from Loch Ewe in early January. The flag ship was the carrier Vindex, sister ship of Campania. No U-boat or enemy aircraft attacked this convoy and it arrived safely at Murmansk. The return convoy, RA 63 (thirty ships), sailed from Kola Inlet on January 11. This convoy likewise eluded U-boats and Luftwaffe aircraft and arrived safely at Loch Ewe. After these ships proceeded to new destinations, the British closed Loch Ewe to save manpower. Inasmuch as the fleet carriers of the Home Fleet had sailed to the Far East to join in the attack on Japan, there was now room in the Firth of Clyde to assemble and sail Murmansk convoys.
• JW 64 (twenty-six ships) sailed from the Clyde on February 2. The escort carriers Campania and sister ship Nairana; a cruiser; and seventeen destroyers, sloops, and corvettes served as escort. The Germans found and shadowed JW 64, but the shadower’s radio failed and forty-eight torpedo-equipped JU-88s that came out to attack the convoy on February 7 could not find it. Three days later, the Luftwaffe tried again with a massive flight of JU-88s. One of these, romping ahead of the main flights, fired a torpedo at the new (1944) Canadian destroyer Sioux, but missed. This action alerted all hands and when the JU-88s arrived, they met a murderous antiaircraft reception and achieved nothing noteworthy.*
The Germans deployed group Rasmus, composed of eight boats, on a line near Bear Island, but the convoy eluded the group. When the Germans realized this, these boats raced eastward to Kola Inlet, where four other U-boats, including Hess’s U-995, were already waiting. One of the Rasmus boats, the U-992, commanded by Hans Falke, shot a T-5 at one of the convoy escorts and hit the British corvette Denbigh Castle, The British corvette Bluebell towed the severely damaged Denbigh Castle into Kola Inlet, but the
British did not repair her. All other vessels arrived safely.
These fourteen U-boats loitered off Kola Inlet, waiting for the return convoy, RA 64, to sail. While waiting, four of the U-boats tore into a local Soviet convoy. All four claimed sinkings or hits on nine ships, but only two were confirmed: the American Liberty ship Horace Gray, sunk by the Ritterkreuz holder Hans-Günther Lange in U-711, and the 8,129-ton Norwegian tanker Norfjell, wrecked by Otto Westphalen in U-968.
RA 64 (thirty-four ships) sailed in the early hours of February 17. An advance ASW sweep off Kola Inlet found the veteran U-425, commanded by Heinz Bentzien, who had commissioned the boat on April 21, 1943. Fitted with a snorkel and Hohentwiel radar, U-425 was out on its eighth patrol, but Bentzien had yet to sink a ship. The British sloop Lark and corvette Alnwick Castle savaged the U-boat with depth charges, Hedgehogs, and Squids. Fatally damaged, the boat sank out of control to 853 feet, then Bentzien blew ballast tanks to surface and scuttle.
The U-425 came up between the sloop and corvette, with the crew scrambling on deck. Both ships opened fire, raking the boat from stem to stern. As the U-boat sank stern first, the crew jumped into the water. Although wounded, one very determined German, Herbert Lochner, survived. The Alnwick Castle rescued him after fifty minutes in the water.
Two U-boat skippers added to their laurels. Otto Westphalen in U-968 wrecked the British sloop Lark with a T-5, mere hours after she had helped sink U-425. A salvage vessel towed Lark into Kola Inlet but the British did not repair her either. The Soviets did, however, renaming her Neptun. Westphalen then wrecked the American Liberty ship Thomas Scott, which Soviet vessels towed back into Kola Inlet. Westphalen also claimed a hit on a destroyer, but that could not be confirmed. Lange in U-711 sank the British corvette Bluebell All but one of the Bluebell crew perished in this sinking.