For the Kriegsmarine, the immediate problem after Zschech’s death became what to do with the crew. After a summary investigation and the swearing to secrecy of U-505’s officers and men about their captain’s suicide, flotilla headquarters—perhaps U-Boat Command itself— determined to keep the boat and crew together (this is discussed further in the “Crewmen” section below). The selection of a new captain became paramount. Meyer’s impressive performance notwithstanding, he had accumulated only 62 days’ sailing experience as a submariner during a year aboard U-505.35 On November 18, 1943, Oblt.z.S.d.R. Harald Lange assumed command.
At age 40, the Hamburg native became not only the oldest member of the crew, but the oldest captain of a front-line U-boat at the time. More important, he emerged from a different milieu than his predecessors. Lange also chose the sea as a profession, but as a civilian with the merchant marine. An officer with the Hamburg-America Line between the wars, Lange often visited the United States, where his first cousin and boyhood friend Johannes Messmer lived in Indiana as a contractor. Lange’s frequent visits to New York introduced him to his future wife, Karla, who had come to America as a professional nurse and might have remained had she not fallen in love with Lange and returned to Germany with him. In 1935 he joined the naval reserves, but remained a merchant sailor until activated in 1939.36
When war came Lange commanded first a barrage- and minesweeper, then took over a patrol boat in the western Baltic from May 1940 through September 1941. In November 1940 he depth-charged and apparently damaged a British submarine operating in the Kattegat, and one year later transferred to the U-boat arm. His first combat assignment as a submariner came as First Watch Officer aboard the Type IXD1 submarine U-180, which featured a unique propulsion system of six Mercedes-Benz water-cooled diesel engines—a design that provided more surface speed, but proved unusable due to the excessive smoke and heat generated. Lange participated in the historic patrol of February-July 1943, when U-180 rendezvoused with a Japanese submarine in the Indian Ocean to transfer Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose and his adjutant to their Axis ally in an effort to promote Indian discontent against British rule. After returning from this 144-day voyage Lange temporarily assumed command of U-180, then attended U-boat commanders’ school before replacing Zschech on U-505.37
Lange’s six-foot height and deep baritone voice immediately impressed his crew, but it was his character that completely won them over. “He was a father figure who quickly gained our trust,” recalled one crewman; “You could talk with him, he was very approachable,” remembered another. Crewman Hans Goebeler wrote, “Like our first commander Axel Loewe, his main concern was the good of the boat, everything else was small fish…he exuded an air of calm confidence,” to which the crew eagerly responded.38 Lange’s was truly a remarkable achievement in salvaging the morale of a crew wracked by a year’s worth of chronic technical problems, aborted missions, and their commander’s suicide. Goebeler’s comparison to Loewe is particularly revealing in view of the differences in background. Of the three executive officers (commander and watch officers) who commissioned U-505 in 1941, two were naval academy graduates and the third a reservist; two years later, none of the three were academy graduates, two were reservists and one was promoted from the ranks.
Thus U-505’s final set of officers constituted a third generation of U-boat officers encompassed by the boat’s history. Loewe represented the select professionals of the inter-war period, with direct links to the Imperial Navy; Zschech exemplified the younger breed promoted by the harsh demands for success. Now Lange and his subordinates succeeded to command, not as career officers but as reservists advanced through the decimated ranks of Dönitz’s corps. Their mission concerned much less the sinking of Allied tonnage than mere survival as a fighting force, to continue to tie down Allied resources while German scientists and technicians raced to develop a new generation of submarines to renew the battle in the future.39 That such variations existed over less than three years indicates the turmoil and turnover within an officer corps increasingly transformed into submariners and fed into the maw of superior Allied forces.
But another shared characteristic of U-505’s final set of officers commands even more attention: like Stolzenburg, three of the five had joined the Nazi Party prior to entering the Navy. Harald Lange entered the Party as member no. 3,450,040 on May 1, 1934. Like fellow merchant marine officer Gottfried Stolzenburg before him, pressures within his profession doubtless contributed to Lange’s decision. When Josef Hauser joined the NSDAP as member no. 6,956,390 in September 1938, he was an 18-year-old engineering student in Zweibrücken who had been only 12 when Hitler came to power. By contrast, Kurt Brey, a commercial salesman before the war, applied for Party membership at age 33 in November 1939, and was accepted in January 1940 as Party member no. 7,381,657.40
How these facts figured into the collective history of U-505 can never be fully determined. The reasons behind these personal choices accompanied their authors to the grave. For Lange, Brey and Stolzenburg the link between Party membership and reserve officer status was not coincidental, but increasingly standard throughout the Wehrmacht—a nexus of political-military relations that has not yet received the study it deserves.41 Thus, if professional concerns lay behind their political choices, the latter also advanced their military careers as reserve officers. Whether through professional pressure, opportunism, conviction, or youthful zeal, it is also true that all joined the NSDAP only after Hitler had assumed power. Neither does the available evidence suggest any proselytizing for National Socialism or overt propaganda among the crew (that Lange had even been a Party member surprised a friend and former U-180 comrade). Yet, the oft-asserted independence of the German Navy from Nazi influence appears ever less convincing, and if the four officers’ decisions to join the Party did not play a part in bringing Hitler to power, their actions nevertheless contributed to consolidating that power and National Socialism’s grip on German society. Moreover, they collectively illustrate the process of increasing politicization of the Navy and Wehrmacht as a whole as the war entered its final stages.42 As an interesting contrast, Thilo Bode’s marriage one month after he left U-505 led him into contact with German resistance circles and to undertake some discrete efforts on behalf of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of German intelligence eventually executed for treason against the regime.43
Perhaps it was thus fitting these officers led U-505, now sporting a seashell as her conning tower insignia, on her final missions. On December 25 the boat departed on patrol but was diverted three days later to search for survivors of German surface forces sunk by British cruisers in the Bay of Biscay. Lange rescued 34 survivors of torpedo-boat T25 and brought them to Brest January 2, 1944. (This rescue, ironically, returned T25’s favor nearly five months earlier in recovering survivors of another 2nd U-boat Flotilla boat, U-106, at virtually the same spot.44) Following several weeks of repair to replace the diving plane shaft, U-505 sortied on March 16, 1944, en route to familiar hunting grounds in West African waters off the ports of Monrovia and Freetown. U-505 found few opportunities there while constantly dodging Allied aircraft and warships, yet her mere presence accomplished Dönitz’s proclaimed strategic mission of tying down superior Allied forces while new U-boat models were developed.45 U-505 exemplified this strategy at the moment of her capture on June 4 by the disparity of forces involved: opposed to Lange and his 59 men was Capt. Daniel Gallery’s Task Group 22.3, comprising one escort aircraft carrier and five destroyer escorts with about 3, 000 crewmen.
In U-505’s brief final action, American gunfire badly wounded Lange in his face and both legs; he survived but eventually lost his right leg at mid-thigh. By incapacitating Lange, these wounds prevented him from overseeing the sub’s scuttling and thus probably secured the U-boat’s capture. Meyer also received a wound (to his scalp), but the other officers passed into captivity unhurt. To conceal the boat’s capture from German authorities, no mail was sent or receive
d by U-505’s crew at Camp Ruston, Louisiana, where they were held as prisoners of war, and thus their families in Germany knew only that all were missing in action. Karla Lange maintained contact with the families, encouraging them that her husband would do everything he could to look after their sons and husbands and save them. Events did not prove her wrong.46
In a combat branch distinguished by the death in combat of more than half of all who served, association with U-505 proved most fortunate for its officers. Of the 11 officers regularly assigned to duty aboard the U-boat over the course of the war, only one—Zschech—died, and that by his own hand. The five officers captured in June 1944 gradually returned home after war’s end. None of the officers who departed U-505 for other assignments suffered death or capture during the conflict. Herbert Nollau survived the sinking of his own command, U-534, on May 5, 1945, and eventually took a position with the German Postal Service in Frankfurt; ironically, his U-534 was salvaged in August 1993 and is currently being restored at Birkenhead outside Liverpool. Thilo Bode took command of the Type IXC/40 U-858 on September 30, 1943, which he led through the end of the war, surrendering at sea to US destroyer escorts Carter and Muir on May 9, 1945. After returning from captivity he became a journalist, a profession that eventually took him to India, Singapore, and London. Kaptlt. (I) Fritz Förster, U-505’s original chief engineer, returned to Krefeld after the war as an engineer for an industrial firm.47
Harald Lange returned to his native Hamburg in May 1946, eventually becoming the docks and warehouse manager for a fruit import company. In 1964 he returned to the United States for ceremonies commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the boat’s capture. The first commander, Axel-Olaf Loewe, became naval liaison officer to Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments in August 1944 and remained there until the war’s last month, when he briefly commanded a naval ground unit in Schleswig-Holstein. With his own home in Berlin destroyed and his family’s estate in Mecklenburg lost to Soviet occupation, Loewe gradually worked his way back from a farmhand to the manager of a sawmill near Flensburg, then moved to the Ruhr and eventually became an executive with a housing construction firm in Duisburg.48
Crewmen
The NCOs and enlisted men constituted the great majority of the men who served aboard U-505. Collectively identified as a single entity, individually they varied greatly in background, experience, age, rank, shipboard function, and even in number. Reflecting the general turnover in U-boat crews, many men departed for additional training and reassignment, their places taken by new men. Still, a core of veterans remained intact aboard throughout the submarine’s history. Together they not only represent the “below decks” story of U-505, but offer a study of the men of the U-boat service in microcosm. Our purpose here is to identify where these two stories come together, and differentiate where the two stories divide.
In terms of numbers, the crew size constantly grew over the boat’s history. As of early 1942, U-505 carried a crew of four officers, four senior NCOs (Feldwebel or Oberfeldwebel, depending on the rank, collectively also designated Unteroffiziere mit Portepee, “noncommissioned officers with sword-knot”), two midshipmen whose official status equaled that of the senior NCOs, 12 petty officers (Unteroffiziere), and 28 enlisted men (Mannschaften), for a total crew of 50. By early 1943, that total had only increased by two, but altered in structure with the departure of the midshipmen and one Feldwebel, the increase in petty officers to 13, and the addition of four enlisted men. Beginning in the late summer and autumn of 1943, each Type IXC crew grew by about 10 men, to provide more radiomen to monitor the fragile, idiosyncratic radar detectors that became standard equipment aboard German submarines, and to provide needed gunners for the expanded anti-aircraft platforms added to each bridge.49 In addition, a naval surgeon often joined the crew because of the extended length of Type IXC patrols and the increased risk of casualties among flak gunners. Thus, on its final patrol U-505 carried a total of five officers (including a naval surgeon), four senior NCOs, 13 petty officers, and 37 enlisted men for a total of 59. Throughout U-505’s career, however, individual crewmen were constantly reassigned or transferred while new crewmen came aboard. Altogether a review of the available data indicate approximately 101 NCOs and enlisted men served on U-505 from the time she completed training to the boat’s capture in June 1944. Forty-seven of these 101 crewmen eventually transferred to other subs or commands, but 11 were aboard from beginning to end.50
Such turnover derived in part from the organization of NCOs and enlisted men in the submarine service. Every U-boat crew was roughly equally divided between seamen (Seemänner), the most common classification in the German (or any other) navy, and technical specialists, who included engineering personnel (officially designated Techniker), radiomen, and torpedo mechanics. Even within the cramped confines of a submarine, a crewman most commonly interacted with others of their career-track who shared onboard responsibilities. The seamen usually stood four-hour watches, standing as lookouts on the bridge while surfaced, performing maintenance work on torpedoes, manning the steering controls when submerged, and preparing meals. Engineering personnel stood six-hour watches operating and maintaining the two 2200-hp MAN diesel engines, the two electrical motors, and performing a variety of associated functions. Radiomen (Funker) worked variable watches ranging from four to eight hours in the radio and sound rooms, sending and receiving signals, listening to the hydrophones when submerged, and monitoring the all-important radar search receivers and primitive radar that provided warning of approaching Allied aircraft. Torpedo mechanics, who bunked and worked with the regular seamen, supervised the maintenance and operation of the U-boat’s torpedoes. Near the end of U-505’s career artillery mechanics also joined the crew to man the anti-aircraft guns on the platform extension of the bridge.
Within these classifications, however, the same structure of ranks prevailed. At the top stood the Feldwebel and Oberfeldwebel, senior NCOs whose experience and expertise were essential to the functioning of men and machinery. (In the U.S. Navy of World War II, these ranks were equivalent to warrant officers and some chief petty officers.) The senior NCOs exercised their authority through the petty officers, always designated in rank by the suffix Maat (Mate). The enlisted men mostly held the ranks of Seamen or Firemen 1st or 2nd Class, expressed in German as Matrosen- / Maschinen-obergefreiter or -gefreiter. The accompanying Table 1 (below) provides an overview by classification and rank, with approximate U.S. Navy equivalents, of the 54 crewmen aboard U-505’s last voyage as a German warship.
With this overview of onboard rank and function, we may organizethe total number of 101 crewmen who served on U-505 as follows:
Senior NCOs = 4 (two Seamen, two Engineering)
Petty officers = 24 (nine Seamen, ten Engineering, three Radio, two Torpedo)
Enlisted Men = 73 (28 Seamen, 32 Engineering, 6 Radio, 6 Torpedo/Artillery, 1 Medical)
From this data, it is evident the greatest amount of turnover occurred among the largest category—enlisted men. Only four men from the ranks remained aboard from the first patrol to the last, indicating the nearly complete change in enlisted personnel over two and one-half years. Several crewmen who joined after the first patrol had already transferred off before the final mission. Most went to other U-boats, and some doubtless rose to petty officer rank. Those so promoted did not return to U-505, almost certainly a standard Kriegsmarine practice to provide new boats with proven crewmen. From early 1942 to March 1943, 20 of the original 28 enlisted men departed U-505.
A somewhat different picture emerges for the petty officers. Over the same year that saw nearly 75% of the enlisted men transfer, only one-third of the 12 original petty officers moved on to new assignments. Even by the time of U-505’s final patrol, five of the original 12 Unteroffiziere remained on board (one of whom had been promoted to a senior NCO). Of greater significance in transfers was the particular career-track: the torpedoman’s mate, one of the radiomen, and both of the original Seemänner pett
y officers served on U-505 from beginning to end, but six of the seven engineering petty officers who began the submarine’s career had departed before the end. Again, the overriding demand for qualified specialists in the most technical of warships ensured the constant movement of personnel within the U-boat arm.
These conditions prevailed almost from the beginning of the war. Although the prewar submarine force represented an all-volunteer, hand-picked elite of 3,000 officers and men, Donitz quickly drew upplans for a massive expansion of the U-boat fleet that necessitated a more general recruitment of submariners from within the Navy. Drafted in October 1939, the expansion plans called for 881 U-boats to be commissioned by autumn 1943, with precise timetables for training specific numbers of needed officers, NCOs and petty officers, and enlisted men among the seamen, engineering, radio, and torpedoman classifications. To meet these goals required such measures as shortening U-boat training, culling surface units for new submariners, accelerating the promotion of petty officers, and a regular turnover of 15% of each U-boat crew after every second patrol.51
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