The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander

by Erich Topp

  The destroyers keep at it all day long without a pause. Every half hour or so one of our pursuers moves slowly across our position, listening and sounding, before loosening its load that threatens to blow us up. It seems as if the boat has come to rest in a shallow depression so that the pressure waves of the detona tions pass overhead. We have no other explanation for the fact that none of the depth charges has yet torn us apart.

  Unbearably slowly the minutes and hours tick away. The crew is ordered to lie down to consume as little oxygen as necessary. Each of them carries a potassium cartridge around his chest. Potassium neutralizes the lethal carbon dioxide. Every half hour I check to make sure that no one's tube has dropped from his mouth. The oxygen in the boat is almost used up.

  Some men are sleeping. What nerves the boys must have! Hour after hour the air in the boat becomes more difficult to breathe. Outside the explosions go off, again and again. Slowly the enemy's propellers are milling overhead. Then a shock; the boat lifts up slightly before settling back to its former position. The men are thrown about in the dark. Something scrapes along the hull from stem to stern. The suspense is almost impossible to endure. "Search cables," the executive officer whispers into my ear. The propellers keep on milling, their sound gradually wandering off into the distance. Apparently the enemy is combing the bottom for us. In between, more depth charges. Nothing in the boat seems undamaged; cracking noises and leaks are everywhere, and none of our pumps works properly any more.

  It is night again, inside and out. Inside the boat we have not seen light in 24 hours; everything is wet, cool, and the air suffocating, as if we were miners hopelessly cut off in an underground shaft after an explosion. So far we have counted more than 200 depth charges. Fortunately, none of them has hit close enough to give the boat a fatal blow.

  We plan to surface at 11 P.m. Using all means at our disposal we repair the main bilge pump until it works halfway reliably. All is quiet. At 10:50 em. more depth charges, but farther away. We have to wait some more, at least until midnight. Things remain quiet. "Compressed air on the central trim tank!" The boat does not stir. It has taken on too much water. No buoyancy. "Compressed air on all tanks!" Still the boat does not move. Has it become a steel coffin for all of us? The men in the central control room look at me with wide eyes. Perhaps the keel is stuck in the sea bottom. I give the order to go slow speed ahead with our electric engines. A trembling goes through the boat. Our eyes are glued to the depth gauge. Slowly at first, then faster, the boat floats free and rises. Once we are all the way to the surface we adjust the air pressure. It is as if our ears are being torn apart.

  The conning tower hatch flies open and we savor the deliciously fresh, clean air. The night is completely dark, the swell considerable. Astern a destroyer, little more than a faint shadow. It is too dark for the enemy to see our low silhouette. Very slowly we crawl away, using the most favorable combination of speed and noise. Our compass is still out of order and the sky overcast so that we cannot get a proper bearing from the stars. The storm still blows from the northwest, so we simply steer straight against the seas, for that must be the direction that will lead us out of this trap. All the while the crew is feverishly at work to repair the damage we sustained in our ordeal.

  Toward morning we dive and load our two reserve torpedoes into the now empty tubes. Then we go up for a look around. Straight ahead an aircraft; beyond it, barely above the horizon, an inbound convoy. With maximum underwater speed I manage to bring U 57 into position for an attack on a tanker, the hindmost ship in the convoy. Both torpedoes are fired simultaneously, and in an enormous red fireball the tanker blows up, sending a huge, ever-expanding black cloud skyward. This takes away the shock the men suffered in our recent ordeal. A submarine chaser pursues us and showers the boat with depth charges, some eighty altogether. The boat bucks and shakes every time the charges go off, but we are relatively safe at 250 feet. At last our pursuer gives up and things get quiet. I let the boat sink to the bottom and enjoy along with my men an extended period of rest.

  U-Boat Command orders us to return to Kiel. Off Bergen [southwestern Norway] the transmission of our remaining diesel breaks down. The engineering personnel manages to shift the "reverse" position to "forward" so that we are able to make Bergen safely. There the transmission is fixed and we replenish our fuel supply. We continue on toward the Elbe River estuary. Off Brunsbuttel we are already in touch with the signal station at the entrance to the Kiel Canal when the gates of the locks open and a Norwegian steamer slowly leaves the basin to enter the river. U 57 is ready for the final approach to the locks. Suddenly the Norwegian vessel, its stern still inside the locks and thus without effective use of its rudder, is caught in the tidal currents of the Elbe River and pushed onto the Uboat. "Full speed astern!" But the electric motors do not have enough power; the collision becomes inevitable. Then a cry from below: "Boat is flooding!" The executive officer stands next to me on the bridge, his head turned back as if waiting for additional cries. I shout: "All hands out of the boat!"

  Then I am gripped by a feeling of hopeless exhaustion. It seems as though I am floating in a vacuum. Sentiments without echo. Something terrible is happening to us in seconds, and all that in an all-enveloping darkness. Invisible forces fight it out with one another; a blind fury, an incomprehensible brutality crushes us all. All horrors, all moments of despair give way to a deep sense of bitterness, to a peculiar state of weightlessness that descends upon me like a layer of fog.

  Suddenly my consciousness is reawakened by a terrible metallic crunch. The steamer's bows press and cut into our conning tower. I see the outline of its superstructure rising up above me like a wall. The boat sinks away from me-our boat that had carried us through all dangers and deadly depths. Our boat, our world deserts us and abandons us to an abysmal solitude. My life was saved, but what it had stood for, my boat, died.

  Reality is stronger than all dreams and illusions. It is a parting without struggle in a way I had never imagined it. Death, whose urgent presence we had encountered and suffered so many times and who had been a constant companion to us, came here quite unexpectedly and struck its blow.

  The music of the band standing by at the locks to welcome us home, its sounds already reaching our ears, dies away. Rescue parties and the coast guard are being put on alert. During the night the search is not easy. At dawn the survivors assemble. Six men are missing. One man reports that he tried eight times to leave the sunken boat and make it to the surface. The boat lay slightly tilted on its side in rather shallow waters. The man was standing in the radio room, his head precariously held in a bubble of air. Complete darkness, no sense of orientation, the first try to get out failed. Like Theseus with the help of Ariadne's thread he made his way back to the air bubble in the radio room. Seven times he repeated his quest without avail. On the eighth try he finally managed to get to the sur face. Unconscious and totally exhausted, he was swept ashore and found by a search party.

  That was the end of our patrol, which we had begun on a Friday.

  Comment:

  The official inquiry into the disaster could not establish with certainty whether the Norwegian vessel caused the collision deliberately or whether the incident was the result of inadvertent circumstances beyond anyone's control. It was also decided to raise the boat.

  The salvage vessels Wille and Kraft passed cables under the boat and brought it up until the conning tower was above the surface. I was the first man to enter the boat. The sight that greeted me still haunts me in my nightmares. Two bloated corpses, grotesquely twisted in their agony, blocked my way from the conning tower into the central control room. I could not make out their identity since their faces were disfigured by the black oily slime. After we had secured the leak and pumped out most of the water, I inspected the boat for a second time. Instruments, engines, everything was covered by a blackish-gray liquid, the water still kneehigh above the floor plates. Water? It was a dirty, oily fluid, a vision of the river of the underw
orld on which we had already embarked but which we managed to escape at the very last moment.

  COMMANDING OFFICER, U 552

  On December 4, 1940, 1 commissioned U 552 at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg.

  After we had left base for our first war patrol-we were already in the North Sea-I noticed that my chief navigator, usually a lively, humorous man, seemed very quiet and looked somewhat pale. It was his turn to stand watch and I involved him in a conversation to find out why he was so quiet. At first he did not want to talk about it, but when I pressed him he finally said, "Sir, it is not important, but I forgot something at home." I asked him, "What did you forget?" After hesitating for a while he at last confessed that on all his previous patrols he had taken along his wife's wedding wreath, which he then kept under a glass cover as is the custom in many middle-class families. This time he had left the wreath at home.

  I sensed that along with this talisman his confidence in a happy, successful patrol had been left behind. I gave the order to return to base, we picked up the talisman, and for the rest of the mission the navigator remained cheerful and wholly reliable.

  This much I had learned from my experience on U 57: The personal feelings of my men-faith, superstition-play a vital role in exercising command successfully.

  In retrospect, two of my many war patrols appear particularly remarkable to me: First, the operations against the Gibraltar convoy HG 84, whose escort was commanded by our distinguished opponent, Commander F. J. Walker of the 36th Escort Group; and second, the surprise attack of the Canadian corvette Sackville against U 552 on August 3, 1942.

  HG 84 departed Gibraltar on June 9, 1942, the very same day that we sailed from our base in St. Nazaire. The convoy's departure was reported by German spies who monitored Gibraltar from Spanish territory. On the other hand the enemy, too, knew that we had put to sea. The French resistance was quite active and had its girls in the bars of St. Nazaire and La Baule, which were frequented by our sailors. But there were also traitors in our ranks, as the following incident that happened after our departure illustrates.

  One night a watchman attached to our patrol flotilla, which always escorted us out into the Bay of Biscay, observed emergency signals from a vessel out in the roadstead. He alerted the flotilla, which in turn sailed immediately to check things out. It turned out that the signals came from one of the flotilla's vessels on patrol offshore. The leading vessel went alongside; one officer and two men jumped over the railing and ran up to the bridge. Not a human soul in sight, but a peculiar chaos prevailed as if the bridge had been abandoned in a hurry. In the meantime more men had come on board and spread out all over the vessel. At the entrance to the engine room one of them discovered a man lying in a pool of blood.

  What had happened? Two black men had stormed the bridge, practically sawed the commanding officer in half with their automatic pistols, and also killed the radio operator. Then they had moved on to the crew's quarters. Through a skylight they threw hand grenades into the room until everyone seemed dead and nothing moved any more. The quarters of the engine personnel were then neutralized with heavy padlocks so that no one could get out. Nevertheless, one man in the crew's quarters was still alive. When he heard the diesel engines of the boat being warmed up, he dragged himself to the entrance of the engine room. Looking inside he saw the two black men, armed to their teeth, getting the engine ready. He killed them both with hand grenades, fired the emergency signals, and then collapsed. The two were crew members who had blackened their faces with oil and soot. They had intended to get the boat under way and deliver it to the British who were waiting for it out at sea. The British secret service had planned well but had to wait in vain.

  The Stalking of HG 84

  11 552 was one of several boats operating as "Group Endrass" against the convoy bound from Gibraltar for England. The convoy could practically choose any course up the eastern Atlantic to reach its destination. The vantage point from the conning tower of a submarine is very low, and thus our chance that we would run into the convoy was small.

  At this point the I.K.G. 40 (First Group of Bomber Wing 40) based in Bordeaux came to our assistance. One of its aircraft spotted the convoy on June 13, reported its composition, and transmitted radio signals that would allow us to home in on the enemy. It gave us the proper direction to the convoy but unfortunately not the distance. Assuming that the enemy was steering northerly courses at a speed of 10 to 12 knots, we plotted a course that would take us into its vicinity.

  In the late afternoon hours of the following day we saw an airplane low over the horizon, certainly not one of the I.K.G. 40's Focke Wulf (FW) 200s. We had to be careful now. Was the convoy accompanied by an aircraft carrier? Eventually the aircraft turned away and did not return. We learned later that one of the vessels in the convoy was equipped with a catapult. It could launch Hurricane fighter planes for reconnaissance and to take on the FW 200s. Not long thereafter we observed trails of smokethe convoy itself.

  We kept in touch and radioed our position for the benefit of the other boats in our group. Active escort vessels forced us to keep our distance for a while, but we did not lose contact and managed to close in again. This game continued until nightfall. In the meantime we had taken the measure of our enemy. We knew it was a relatively small but wellprotected convoy, some twenty merchantmen altogether.

  June days are long days. Any attack before midnight was out of the question. The weather favored the defenders, since the escort vessels enjoyed good visibility even after dusk. Wherever the sea was disturbed by the bows of boats and ships, or churned up by propellers, the water shone in silvery-golden cascades and trails-marine phosphorescence. At a distance of about 3,000 yards we could barely make out the silhouettes of the ships, but all the more visible were their silvery wakes. Our boat, too, left behind such a brilliant trail, something we as mariners would have enjoyed and found fascinating in normal times, but which under the given circumstances burdened our attack, ideally undetected by the enemy, with additional risks. To attack with some prospect of success on a bright night and in comparatively calm seas while two corvettes patrolled dangerously close by meant a precarious balancing act.

  We fired four torpedoes from our forward tubes against four different vessels, then turned around quickly to loosen a fifth torpedo from our stern tube. It would take the torpedoes some three minutes to reach their targets, long minutes indeed if you are waiting for possible hits and find yourself chased by a corvette. The latter had detected us as we showed her our broadside prior to firing our last torpedo and was now bearing down on us at full speed. We had just enough time to contemplate the fluorescent spray of our pursuer's bow wave, which was closing in ever so rapidly. We sped along with maximum speed, having even revved up our electric engines to boost the power of our two diesels. The boat trembled and shook under this ultimate performance a U-boat can deliver on the surface.

  Today, through modern television we are quite used to exciting scenes where a smuggler or a criminal is being chased by a police car, the distance between hunter and hunted diminishing all the time as suspense rises to the point where it becomes almost unbearable. Then, suddenly, the pursuer has to abandon the chase for a totally unforeseen reason, perhaps because the police car's radiator gives out.

  I had already sent everyone else down into the boat except myself and prepared for an emergency dive, well knowing that we would be in for a lengthy and potentially lethal treatment of depth charges, at the very least the possibility of sustaining irreparable damage. What came next sounds almost incredible. Our pursuer had slowly but persistently closed the distance between himself and us. I could already make out details on the corvette's superstructure. Suddenly an immense mountain of water, seemingly a gigantic pile of tiny pearls due to marine fluorescence, welled up behind the corvette and a terrific explosion shook our boat.

  What had happened? Our pursuer had dropped a load of depth charges at a spot where, correctly anticipating our moves, he thought
we had actually dived away. Of course we continued to run on top of the water, flying away at maximum speed and after a while creating the illusion (through our exhaust fumes and a veil of water vapors) that we had dived, since the enemy could no longer see us. Something else added to the enemy's confusion. The corvette-it was H.M.S. Stork-had us on her radar. When at a distance of some 500 yards the echo suddenly disappeared, the operator deduced that we were no longer on the surface. We would never again experience a depth charge attack at such a safe distance.

  After our torpedoes had found their marks, the sky over the convoy lit up as if a fireworks display was under way. It revealed all the vessels as if they were set up on a chess hoard. Three of them were about to go down. Bright flares were descending slowly on their parachutes; colorful signals were fired into the air; flashlights reached out searching for us. Oil leaking from a tanker began to burn. The light of the flickering fire, reflected eerily in red-brown colors on the restless seas, reached us in frightful impulses.

  The Stork had hove to in order to scan the sea for debris from the supposedly destroyed U-boat. Commander Walker thought he had scored his thirteenth kill of a German submarine. We opened up our distance to the convoy to load the reserve torpedoes hanging ready from their rails. At 4 A.M. the mechanics reported all tubes reloaded. By 4:30 A.M. we had regained a favorable position to strike. The convoy, at full alert, awaited our attack. The escort forces chased around like nervous thoroughbred horses, changing their courses constantly and making it hard for us to come into close range of the convoy.