Asdic contact was lost at 120 yards past the point of attack, and though the point and surrounding area were reswept, contact was not regained. No debris appeared on the surface, but Hart was certain on this one: “In my opinion this U-boat was destroyed.” And he was right. The boat was U-630, commanded by twenty-eight-year-old Oblt.z.S. Werner Winkler, a native of Wilhelmshaven and a product of the “Olympic” Kriegsmarine officers’ class at Flensburg-Mürwik in 1936. A Type VIIC boat, still on her first-ever combat patrol, U-630 had one merchantman to her credit, the British frozen-meat ship Waroonga, sunk with the loss of seventeen seamen during B7's escort of HX.231 in early April. Now U-630 herself plunged into the locker with twelve unexpended torpedoes and forty-four untold stories of froth-corrupted lungs.3
At 2326, while steaming on the convoy’s starboard beam, the corvette Loosestrife obtained a radar contact bearing green (starboard) 8o°, range 4,700 yards. Lt. Stonehouse altered course to pursue and eight minutes later, sighting the contact moving from right to left on the surface, opened up with Oerlikons and one four-inch round at a range of about 800 yards. The 20mm tracers could barely be seen through the fog caroming off the enemy’s tower and upper hull, as the U-boat careened like a wraith through a catacomb, and then dived. Asdic contact was gained at 300 yards and the corvette attacked it with a ten-charge pattern by recorder trace. The NHB/MOD reassessment believes that the target was U-575 (Kptlt. Günther Heydemann), which was undamaged. With no visible result, Loosestrife resumed station at 2345. Another radar contact soon after proved to be Vidette.
At 0009, in a reshuffle on the convoy screen, Stonehouse was ordered to transfer his vessel to position “H for Harry,” starboard quarter in A.C.I.'s screening diagram N.E.6, which was his very good luck, since in that position, at 0030, he detected the boat that he would kill: U-192, a Type IXC/40 on her first patrol. Commanded by Oblt.z.S. Werner Happe, a native of Alfeld/Leine, south of Hannover, and a graduate of the “Olympic” class of 1936, U-192 had sortied from Kiel, Germany, on 13 April, and on 1 May, in qu AJ 3797, had launched a torpedo that missed one of the ONS.5 merchantmen, identity not known. Now, at 0030 on 6 May, U-192 appeared as a small pulse echo on Loosestrife’s radar set, bearing red (port) 95°, range 5,200 yards. Stonehouse rang up emergency full ahead and went after it.
Six minutes later, the blurry form of Happe’s boat came looming before the lenses of Barr and Stroud Pattern 1900A 7 x 50 binoculars on board Loosestrife, where lookouts called out the range—500 yards— which was a remarkable sighting given the fog. Just as remarkable, Happe’s lookouts apparently sighted the corvette at the same instant, since the U-boat abruptly turned to release the venom in her tail, launching two torpedoes from stern tubes, and then commenced a “violent zigzag” ahead. Loosestrife’s gun crew loaded the four-inch with H.E., but held their fire since Stonehouse’s intention was to ram.
At 0040 U-192 commenced an alarm dive on about the same course very close ahead. As she did so, Loosestrife ran directly up her wake. Failing to make ramming contact, Stonehouse fired a ten-charge pattern set shallow. When the D/Cs released their anvil-like blows, the U-boat was observed to break surface, where, seconds later, she shuddered from an interior explosion. The mortally wounded frame was enveloped in a “greenish-blue” flash, which was the description given by several on board the corvette, including two lookout numbers specially posted aft to confirm results. The officer in charge aft watch also saw debris thrown up from the U-boat. Inside the corvette’s engine room and boiler room the deck plates lifted in reaction to the explosion, leading some of their occupants to fear that Loosestrife’s stern had been blown off. After Stonehouse turned to investigate, his First Lieutenant and Yeoman of Signals saw “an immense patch of oil spreading from port hand to starboard bow” as well as floating debris. In combination, the explosion, oil, and debris constituted as definite a confirmation of destruction as Stonehouse was likely ever to get, excepting the retrieval of a Commander’s white cap. While his after-action report does not mention it, one may suppose that after so long an ordeal at sea, there was prolonged hearty cheering by ship’s company. Certainly we know there was elation among Loosestrife’s passenger list of twenty-nine survivors from Bristol City, whose Master, A. L. Webb, said: “The whole action was extremely exciting, and all my crew thoroughly enjoyed themselves.” Stonehouse then set a course of 200° to the convoy, where he resumed station at 0105.4
The next success belonged jointly to Oribi and Snowflake. First, Oribi. This EG3 destroyer was in station five miles on the convoy’s port bow when, at 0252½ her asdic operator reported, “Echo bearing green thirty—close.” Lt.-Cmdr. Ingram had to make an “instantaneous decision” whether this contact was a U-boat or the corvette Sunflower, which was thought to be nearby. Since he had no radar contacts to starboard, where Sunflower would have shown up as a blip, Ingram swung his ship to that heading, where, with huge relief, he sighted not the corvette but a U-boat sliding out of the fog about one cable (608 feet) on the starboard bow, steering from right to left. It was a perfect plot for a ram, and Ingram’s bridge braced for the impact. Oribi had been proceeding at 22 knots, but her speed now was somewhat attenuated by the drag met on turning to starboard. As the destroyer bore down, the fo’c's’le hid the U-boat’s conning tower, and the stem plowed into the enemy hull probably abaft the tower. The force of the collision slewed the boat around to port side, where, in Ingram’s words, “she heeled over with her bows and conning tower out of the water.” While a shallow D/C pattern had been ordered, there was no time to get it off; furthermore, the impact of the ramming had broken the light that illuminated the clock and plot.
Worried about damage to his bows, Ingram ordered slow both engines and asked for reports. The forepeak and lower central store were flooded, he learned, but the flooding was contained by a still watertight bulkhead abaft. The asdic dome it was found by trial was slightly damaged, but there was no interior evidence of underwater damage to the hull. At 0310 a still seaworthy Oribi turned to port and searched for wreckage from the U-boat. Visibility had improved to about two cables, but lookouts found no sign of the ramming victim except for “a very strong smell of oil over a very wide area,” indicating a puncture of the U-boat’s portside fuel bunkers. At 0314 the asdic operator reported both asdic and hydrophone contact with a U-boat at green 50°, range 1,100, and Ingram pursued, though at a reduced speed of 12 knots, since the forward bulkheads had not yet been shored. At 0318, by stopwatch, Oribi dropped a single charge, set deep, on the last estimated position. At 0332 the search was abandoned, and Ingram shaped course to resume station, at which he had no further actions during the night.
Said Ingram in his report of the ramming: “Taking into account own ship’s speed and the damage sustained by herself, together with the force and angle of impact I have no doubt whatsoever that this submarine was sunk.”5 It was a perfectly reasonable conclusion, one that was concurred in by the Admiralty’s U-Boat Assessment Committee, on 21 June 1943. In fact, however, the U-boat struck, Type IXC U—125(Folkers), survived the ramming, though with serious damage rendering her unfit to dive.6 At 0331, Kptlt. Folkers reported his plight to BdU: HAVE BEEN RAMMED—AM UNABLE TO DIVE. QU AJ 8652. REQUEST ASSISTANCE. COURSE 90 DEGREES; and heard back assurances from nearby boats U-552, U-381, U-413, U-260, U-614, and XJ-402 that they were proceeding to his succor.7 Three hours later, at 0625, BdU ordered only the first four boats named above to tend to the needs of Folkers and his crew; the latter two were to remain on operations. The four rescue boats hunted for Folkers until the morning of the 7th, when they reported failure and broke off to refuel from the tanker U—461 in the adjoining Marinequadrat AK 89 directly to the east.8
Enter Snowflake, which made the BdU rescue order moot. This corvette earlier, at 0231 and 0238, had dropped three heavy charges on U-107 (Gelhaus) as scare tactics. At 0330, while in station R, on the port quarter, Lt. Chesterman received a radar echo bearing 030°, range 4,100 yards, and, after advising Tay, commenc
ed a chase. Fog had closed the visibility to one mile, and starshells were useless, so when he had closed to gun range, Chesterman directed four-inch fire at the target by radar alone. At 0340, the U-boat, which had been working to southward, dived before being sighted. Snowflake immediately obtained asdic contact at a range of 400 yards. Running over the contact at 0341, Chesterman dropped his penultimate D/C, a heavy charge set to 140 feet.
At the moment of dropping, Snowflake acquired a second radar contact bearing 170°, range 2,400 yards, moving rapidly left. Chesterman altered course to intercept and again engaged with the four-inch. While firing, Snowflake received yet a third radar echo bearing 185°, range 1,000 yards. Fearing a torpedo attack by this third, nearby boat, Chesterman broke off his gun action against the second boat and turned to attack the third, which immediately dived. With asdic contact bearing 16o°, range 700 yards, Chesterman began a run in with his last D/C, but for some reason the asdic operator lost the contact before an attack could be made. Meanwhile, at 0349, Tay, to whom Chesterman had been reporting his three pursuits, signaled by R/T: “Sunflower assist Snowflake.”
Snowflake then began an asdic and radar sweep through the last known positions of the three submerged boats. Chesterman commanded the operation from his action post in the center of the compass platform with, to his left, voice pipes to asdic and plot, and to his right, voice pipes to radar and plot. At 0354, radar picked up a fourth boat— on the surface, low in the water, and apparently stopped, since the range was closed rapidly. Visibility was bad. At 0400, when range had decreased to 100 yards (!), Chesterman ordered on the starboard searchlight. Its sword of white light revealed directly ahead a U-boat heavily damaged about the conning tower, under power though, working rapidly to starboard. Chesterman ordered the wheel put hard-a-starboard with intent to ram, and opened fire with every available weapon that could be brought to bear, scoring a number of hits. The U-boat averted being rammed head-on, but Snowflake, maneuvering inside the U-boat’s turning circle, came to dead slow alongside its starboard side, where only a few feet separated the two vessels, and illuminated its tower and deck with the port searchlight and ten-inch Signal Projector.
That close, Chesterman could see that the enemy boat was down by the stern, the tower was crumpled, the periscope standards were warped, the flak guns were crippled, and the after hatch cover had been blown off. That close, too, Snowflake ‘s guns could not be depressed enough to continue fire, so Chesterman ordered a slow withdrawal. As the corvette drew back, the U-boat settled farther by the stern, causing air bubbles to rise from the submerging after hatch. Some German crewmen abandoned the boat at this point; some others lined the foredeck; but a few, more determined and belligerent, or perhaps more desperate, made for the forward deck gun. That endeavor was frustrated by Snowflake s port Oerlikon and 40mm pom-pom guns. An officer was seen on what remained of the tower, waving his arms as a sign of ceasefire or surrender. When this was ignored, the rest of the crew went into the sea.
The U-boat’s sinking led Chesterman for a time to think that in coming alongside, his port bilge keel had rammed the U-boat’s starboard side, but on closer view he found that this was wrong. Suddenly five scuttling charges were heard from the sinking U-boat, the first charge louder than the rest. Sweeping with lights through the survivors, Snowflake saw some in a small dinghy, but most swimming singly through a large oil patch. Since Sunflower was now present, Chesterman thought that the survivors might be taken on board the two corvettes and delivered to St. John’s for interrogation, and he so suggested to Tay. Rescue, no doubt, was what the German crew was expecting when they scuttled. Sherwood’s reply by R/T was as fatal as it was laconic: “Not approved to pick up survivors.” Though Sherwood offered no reason, it is probable that he considered it too dangerous for the corvettes to remain stationary, rescuing survivors in the middle of an ongoing battle.
In the following minutes one of Snowflake s searchlights revealed Sunflower dangerously nearby, and both corvettes put wheel hard to avoid collision, which would have been a doubly sad event, since the Australian Chesterman on Snowflake and the Canadian Plomer on Sunflower commanded “chummy” ships, so much so that in B7 they had become known as Snowflower and Sunflake. Leaving then the forty-eight-man crew of U-125, for it was the same boat that had been rammed by Oribi, to bob upon the corpse-ridden sea, Snowflake, with Sunflower, steamed off to other echoes.9 The panische Angst felt by the U-boat crew, who watched from meager flotage the withdrawal into fog of their only earthly hopes, is, of course, beyond verbal expression.
Snowflake’s R/T log for the attack period fairly crackles with the teamwork displayed by the two corvettes:
TO TAY FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“R.D.F. contact eight o’clock.” 0330.
“U-boat dived, chasing another.” 0340.
“Second U-boat dived, chasing third.” 0345.
“Am attacking with charges—last charge.” 0346.
TO GROUP FROM TAY:
“Sunflower assist Snowflake.” 0349
TO TAY FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“Not attacking with charges. All three dived. Am not in contact. Resuming station.” 0330.
TO SNOWFLAKE FROM SUNFLOWER:
“Do you wish my assistance?” 0332
TO SUNFLOWER FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“Yes. R.D.F. contact bearing two-six-zero degrees, three thousand yards from me.” 0334.
TO SNOWFLAKE FROM SUNFLOWER:
“I will pass round you and investigate.” 0336.
TO SUNFLOWER FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“Have rammed U-boat. Please join me.” 0401.
“Areyou in contact with me?” 0403.
TO SNOWFLAKE FROM SUNFLOWER:
“Am proceeding in your direction.” 0403.
TO TAY FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“Shall I pick up survivors?” 0407.
TO SNOWFLAKE FROM SUNFLOWER:
“Am in contact with you, three-one-five degrees, three-five-zero-zero yards.” 0410.
TO SUNFLOWER FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“Investigating another echo and leaving survivors.” 0411.
TO SNOWFLAKE FROM Tay:
“Not approved to pick up survivors.” 0412. TO SNOWFLAKE FROM SUNFLOWER:
“Am in your immediate vicinity.” 0413 [the time of the near collision].
TO SUNFLOWER FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“Sorry. Am resuming my station. Glad none of yours hurt. Have one charge for one more.” 0417.
TO SNOWFLAKE FROM SUNFLOWER:
“Nice work. Don’t mention it. Where shall we go next?” 0418.
TO SUNFLOWER FROM SNOWFLAKE:
“Investigating underwater contact.” 0419.
TO SNOWFLAKE FROM SUNFLOWER:
‘You bear zero-nine-zero, two thousand yards. Am following you.” o423.10
After that exchange, Snowflake dropped the last D/C in her stowage and resumed station.
Since Offa’s five attacks earlier that night from 2039 to 2218, this EG3 destroyer had rejoined the convoy on the starboard bow; assisted Vidette, who was giving three U-boats a headache around the midnight hour; proceeded over to the convoy’s port bow to provide cover for an alteration of course to 156° at 0200; gained, regained, then lost a radar contact; and finally, at 0300, regained and held the contact, bearing 258°, range 4,400 yards. The amplitude of the echo received on Off as Type 272 RDF equipment plainly indicated a U-boat, which the destroyer’s plot showed to be proceeding at 12 knots on a course of 190°. Captain McCoy increased speed to 20 knots and set a course of 210° to intercept. At 0312, with range at 500 yards, radar contact disappeared in the ground wave, but hydrophone effect picked up the characteristic high-pitched rattle of fast diesel engines on the same bearing. At 0314, the effect grew fainter, leading McCoy to assume that the U-boat had dived. Offa altered course slightly to starboard, and soon after, lookouts sighted a wake. The boat had not dived after all, and hydrophone effect became loud again. McCoy hauled out to port clear of the wake, took a course parallel to
that of the boat, and at 0315 ordered the twenty-inch Signal Projector switched on.
Brightly illuminated on the starboard bow at 100 yards was a light gray-painted Type VIIC U-boat, trimmed down, with after casing awash. Abaft the tower was “a metal framework,” which would have been the Wintergarten. Immediately, Offa opened fire with the starboard Oerlikons, the main armament and pom-poms being unable to depress enough to gain aim, and several hits were observed against the conning tower. At 0316, when the U-boat began a crash dive, McCoy ordered the wheel put hard-a-starboard to ram. The ship’s bows began the turn, but the U-boat’s dive, at about eight knots, was very steep and the conning tower was observed to be disappearing safely under the ship about level with the bridge. McCoy himself could see the hull of the U-boat under the surface as Offa passed over and ahead. In his after-action report he described what happened next:
Then I gave the order to fire [D/Cs]. This order most unfortunately miscarried. During the hunt I had twice given orders for the throwers:—in the first instance: “Ready Port,” and in the second instance: “Ready Starboard”; but at the moment when I put the helm over it became obvious that the starboard throwers only would be required and I gave the order “Ready Starboard.” These were fired correctly but when I followed this up with an order to “fire everything” the man at the pump lever to the traps was so obsessed with the order to fire the starboard throwers only that he failed to fire the traps and so the barrage from the traps, which would have been laid down in a curve over the U-boat, was not dropped and certain destruction was not obtained.
Though the failure to fire was “lamentable,” as McCoy stated elsewhere, and whereas Admiral Horton himself lamented later “the failure of a rating to carry out an order at the critical moment,” the CinCWA judged McCoy to have conducted this operation “in a very able manner.” And while neither man would know it at the time, the detonations of the starboard throwers were sufficient to cause slight damage to the U-boat involved, which, it turned out in a recent reassessment, was U—223 (Oblt.z.S. Karljüng Wächter). That boat, which had a bit of ginger taken out of her this time, would be rammed later, on 12 May, but survive again, until finally succumbing to four British warships on 30 March 1944.11
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