And here we return to the unique fate of U-505. Not only the boat itself, but all save one of her crew survived the action of June 4, 1944. As with the officers, this good fortune extended as well to former crew members: of 47 senior NCOs, petty officers, and enlisted men who transferred from U-505 to other boats or commands, only nine are known to have been lost during the war.79 Combined with the officers and midshipmen, the final record reveals that of 115 officers and men identified as having been assigned to U-505, only 13 (11%) died in the conflict. As not less than 57 percent of all who served in the Donitz’s U-Boot-Waffe were killed in action, U-505 belied her reputation and proved indeed to be, at least in this regard, a very lucky boat for those who served aboard her.80
Conclusion
To conceal the submarine’s capture, American authorities did not inform the International Red Cross of the survival of her crew and denied them any mail or other communication with their families in Germany. Thus, when U-505’s crew gradually returned home in 1946-47, they truly seemed to have returned from the dead. But unlike so many of their comrades, they had come back to rebuild their lives and their society. Three of them eventually resettled in the United States: Hans-Joachim Decker, who worked as a guide at the Museum of Science and Industry where his former home became the star attraction, eventually moving to New Mexico; Werner Ludecke, who settled in Oneida, New York; and Hans Goebeler, who also resided in Chicago before moving to Florida. By 1980, the boat’s veterans had begun organizing annual reunions. Two years later 11 of them, accompanied by Frau Lange and 12 family members, visited Chicago to see once more the submarine that had defined their wartime community. As her former commander Axel-Olaf Loewe later remarked, “It is an odd feeling to consider that every month thousands of people enter the boat and stroll through the places where we so often stood while sweating out depth charges and bombs falling upon us.”81
Like their vessel, the men of U-505 were spared for a future unimaginable in the period that had brought them together. Their own lives and work contributed to forging the present, just as U-505 stands as silent testimony to their mutual past. Though time thins their ranks, the U-boat at Chicago preserves their memory, even as it symbolizes the victory of their earlier opponents. More than sixty years after her commissioning, U-505 and her crew—in their shared experiences and mysteries—remain a community bound together by fate.
Meyer immediately assumed command of U-505 in an effort to save the boat. Bold capsules were fired from the Pillenwerfer as the boat began a series of evasive maneuvers. The sonar decoy’s chemical bubble cloud hampered the enemy’s ability to track the boat. With their small window of opportunity fractionally opened, Meyer pushed through and U-505 somehow stole away to safety. At 2129, when the din of the British depth charges was nothing more than a distant murmur, a brief two-word entry into the boat’s War Diary was made—a tragic epitaph for a troubled man: “Kommandant tot.” (Commander dead).
Lawrence Paterson
From the Lion’s Roar to Blunted Axe
The War Patrols of U-505
On Saturday, May 24, 1941, the large Type IXC U-boat U-505 slid laterally down prepared ramps into the turbid waters of the Elbe. Hamburg’s Deutsche Werft had just launched the fifth of a small series of Type IX boats ordered earlier that year. Constructed as work order 295, U-505 had not yet received her finishing work and still faced three months of shipyard incarceration before she would be released into the Kriegsmarine. Workmen swarmed over the stripped hull to begin their myriad tasks to prepare the boat for frontline duty.
The country it would soon serve was about to receive news of a stunning naval victory. During their attempt to enter the Atlantic Ocean by breaking through the Denmark Strait, the battleship Bismarck, the symbol of pride for Germany’s new surface navy, together with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, were pursued by Royal Navy warships. The engagement in the frigid waters ended abruptly when the British battle cruiser HMS Hood exploded, ripped apart by German artillery fire. It went under so quickly only three of its 1,419 crewmen escaped the fatal plunge. Hood’s stunned consort, HMS Prince of Wales, retired with damage.
Germany’s military star was in the ascendant. Much of Europe was already under the control of the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht. While German troops stood guard over conquered land stretching from Norway’s Arctic Circle to the balmy climate of the Franco-Iberian border, elsewhere the seemingly unstoppable German military machine marched unchecked. In North Africa, General Erwin Rommel led his Afrika Korps eastward across the Egyptian border, his goal of the Nile delta tantalizingly close. In the Aegean, Greece teetered on the verge of surrender, with German paratroopers and other forces poised to begin an ambitious airborne invasion of Crete. The fight at sea was also going well as Admiral Karl Dönitz continued his tonnage war of attrition against Allied shipping. His U-boats raked across convoy lanes leading to Britain and elsewhere, sending hundreds of thousands of tons to the bottom of the sea. Bismarck’s initial success augured well for surface raider operations against those same vulnerable convoys. Victory was the watchword of the hour.
On August 26, 1941, a young and energetic crew stood quietly on deck and listened while Kapitänleutnant Axel-Olaf Loewe addressed them from the conning tower of U-505 during the commissioning ceremony. A Kriegsmarine ensign was hoisted for the first time on her standard. “Comrades,” began Loewe’s concise speech, “as commandant of U-505, I have come here to Hamburg in order, with your help, to take our boat to the front after our short shake-down and combat training exercises. It will be a hard life—have no illusions about that. But with a well-disciplined crew, we’ll have our successes.”1
Though none of those listening to his words could have known it, the face of the war had already changed irrevocably against Germany in just a few short months. Soon after its victory over Hood, Bismarck’s career ended following a dramatic and protracted chase across the expanse of the Northern Atlantic. The air war was also faltering. Royal Air Force operations targeted military installations within occupied Europe, defying German proclamations that such a thing would never occur. The land war had also reached what in hindsight would be recognized as a critical phase of its operations when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of Russia. The summer advance opened on June 22 and rolled victoriously across the seemingly endless landscape of that immense country. Many German officers feared the Wehrmacht had finally taken on an adversary capable of stopping even tried and tested German tactics and skill. German casualties from the Russian campaign approached half a million men—more killed, wounded, captured, and missing than had fallen from the opening of hostilities in September 1939 to the beginning of the Russian operation.
U-505 was Loewe’s first U-boat command, but the Kiel native of German and Dutch parentage was no stranger to the sea. Loewe was a veteran naval officer and appeared well prepared to take on this new challenge. A member of The Crew of 1928, he graduated at age nineteen as Leutnant zur See when the navy was still known as the Reichsmarine.2 He had recently completed a central Atlantic war patrol aboard Kapitänleutnant Eitel-Friedrich Kentrat’s U-74 as a Kommandantenschüler (commander-in-training). Loewe’s chosen Wappen (or emblem) reflected both his own lineage and the “vintage” of his officer’s crew: a shield bearing a raging Lion (Loewe in German) clutching an axe, which was also the symbol of Crew 28. From his Dutch mother Loewe inherited a love of tea rather than coffee—a distinctly un-German trait. His unyielding desire for properly brewed tea would soon become the bane of “Toni” Walbrol, U-505’s smutje (cook), whose ongoing struggle with the alien dried leaves more often than not produced a thick bitter sludge even the most hardened U-boat man could barely stomach.
Once the commissioning ceremony was complete U-505 slipped away from Hamburg toward the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, which linked the North Sea with the Baltic. It was time for Loewe and his crew to endure months of training exercises as part of Stettin’s 4th U-training Flotilla. Together with a dozen other boa
ts and new crews, the men aboard U-505 engaged in gunnery, torpedo, and tactical exercises. “Our surface playmates even gave us our first taste of the realities of war,” remembered machinist Hans-Joachim Decker, “They dropped depth charges—Wabos, we called them—one day while we were on a submerged run. So now we knew what they sounded like.” Once this training ended, U-505 returned to the builder’s yard at Hamburg for alterations and minor repairs that consumed much of December 1941. By the end of the year the boat transferred once more to Stettin to take on fuel and torpedoes in preparation for its first journey into dangerous waters. At noon on January 19, 1942, Loewe’s boat sailed from Kiel through the canal and into the North Sea in transit from the Fatherland to its new flotilla base in Lorient, Brittany. The new submarine was attached to the 2nd Flotilla, a unit equipped entirely with long-distance Type IX boats, including those spearheading the attack against the eastern seaboard of America.”3
The voyage to France proved relatively uneventful. For Loewe it offered a final opportunity to meld boat and crew. Those unused to the harsh swells of the North Atlantic soon found their sea legs, though on some occasions only after days of torturous seasickness. Skirting the north of England and running between the Shetland and Faeroe Islands, U-505 was pounded by the worst of winter weather. These atrocious conditions, however, eliminated the threat of an air attack and rendered ineffective the few Royal Navy forces encountered. On January 25, for example, U-505 spent several minutes running in full view of a British destroyer. Both protagonists were so focused on their own struggle against the elements they were unable to undertake combat operations.4 Each day Loewe submerged his boat for two hours to allow his crew to rest and make minor repairs to components shaken loose by the atrocious conditions.
After being buffeted about for more than two weeks Loewe brought his tired but elated men into Lorient on a cold and snowy February 3, 1942, trailing in the wake of a single Sperrbrecher and a pair of minesweepers. The port offered the crew but a brief respite of eight days to savor the delights of conquered France before new orders sent them into the Atlantic. U-505 would take part in a timely renewal of operations against shipping off the coast of West Africa in general, and the sea lanes leading to and from Sierra Leone’s main port of Freetown in particular. The most important British colonial outpost between South Africa and Great Britain, Freetown lay on the southern bank of the Rokell River estuary. Ramshackle and shabby, Freetown was hemmed on three landward sides by heavily forested and mosquito-ridden swamps. Its value was a large harbor capable of sheltering a sizable deepwater fleet. Facilities in the port enabled ships to undergo minor repairs and be watered and coaled. As a result, the harbor quickly became an important assembly and stopover point for shipping bound for points both north and south.
Freetown’s merchant traffic had been under fire since November 1940, when future ace Hans-Gerrit von Stockhausen in U-65 made the first of several outstanding patrols off the humid African coast.5 His successes made the area a popular destination for U-boats—particularly those of the 2nd U-Flotilla. Between May and June 1941, seven boats made some of the most successful sorties of the war into this region, sinking seventy-two ships for 387,671 tons. Ace Jürgen Oesten in U-106 came within a whisker of capping this performance with the sinking of a capital ship when he pumped a torpedo into the “old British battlewagon” HMS Malaya. The explosion did not sink the powerful warship but it did take her out of commission for the better part of one year. Further success there, however, eluded the U-boats. Results dwindled until there was little to be hunted in the sweltering equatorial heat. The Allies learned their lesson well (though slowly); ships were increasingly herded into well-defended convoys where once they had sailed solo and vulnerable.
The declaration of war against the United States in December 1941, however, had made escort vessels and submarine hunters an increasingly scarce resource, which prompted Dönitz to make the U-boat presence felt once more off Freetown. America’s entry marked virtually all merchant traffic steaming between Freetown, Bathurst, Monrovia, Lagos, and Takoradi as fair game. Dönitz also correctly surmised that by reopening the West African combat theater, he could pin escort vessels to that region rather than allow them to cross the Atlantic and enter the American arena of combat.6
And so U-505 sailed for Africa, escorted by a minesweeper escort from Lorient alongside Korvettenkapitän Karl-Friedrich Merten’s U-68. Land was still in sight when Loewe turned to his executive officer and said, “Nollau, throw the flowers over the side.” Nollau complied, agreeing “that be be best.” According to “sea lore, at least in German sea-faring tradition, it was bad luck to carry flowers,” explained Decker. “No hexes for us, so over the side they went.” The boats made good time through the Bay of Biscay, although forced several times to submerge in the face of enemy aircraft. Attacks from the air were becoming increasingly effective n the Bay of Biscay, which would soon be called the “Valley of Death” by U-boat crews.7 Loewe spotted a “fast” convoy but was chased off by the escorts before he could set up for a shot. Both boats reached their operational area in early March after nearly a month in transit, some of the time on one diesel engine to conserve fuel. The nearly continuous harassment by aircraft, coupled with the draining tropical heat, frayed tempers aboard the boat. The stifling temperature of the southern Atlantic was radically different than the cold Baltic waters to which the crew had become accumstomed. The hourly drudgery, too, wore steadily at the nerves of the new sailors. “It was quiet, peaceful, and desolate,” remembered Decker. “The war seemed far off.” Loewe’s quiet but firm authority held his men together as they began the difficult transition from new boat to veteran warriors.8
After days spent dodging heavy air cover their threadbare patience was finally rewarded when lookouts spotted the British steamer SS Benmohr on the evening of March 5. Belonging to the Ben Line, Benmohr was approaching Freetown from Durban on the second leg of a journey scheduled to end in Oban, Scotland. The ship’s large cargo included silver bullion, pig iron, and rubber. Loewe set up his prey but missed with an initial two-torpedo spread. His roaring diesels ran the 5,920-ton Benmohr down and he hit the vessel with a third shot under a brightly shining moon. The British Master, David Boag Anderson, knew his vessel was done for when it slowly began to list. All hands were ordered to abandon ship after a swiftly morsed distress signal. Loewe conned U-505 closer while the merchant crew made good their escape from the crippled steamer. Although holed, the ship stubbornly refused to go completely under. Once the sailors were clear Loewe decided to finish the ship off instead of risking the chance salvage tugs might save the crippled freighter. His fourth torpedo hit and snapped Benmohr’s spine, sending the doomed cargo vessel on a “long death glide” to the seabed below. Now only debris and a forlorn shipwrecked crew floated on the gentle Atlantic swell. Loewe ensured the lifeboats were provisioned and watertight before backing his boat away and making good his escape. He did not want to linger in the area lest the moonlight reveal the U-boat to Allied forces responding to Benmohr’s SOS. The success restored spirits aboard U-505. “We took it as a good omen and hoped for more like it,” Decker recalled.9 With their first sinking behind them the crew—who just days before had argued over the slightest provocation—were once again the closest of comrades. Infractions against one another, real or imagined, were forgotten and morale soared as U-505 slipped away to seek new targets.
Loewe sank another ship the next day when the 7,600-ton Norwegian tanker SS Sydhav, engaged on a voyage from Trinidad to Freetown, crossed his path. Torpedoes smashed into the ship, the first into the engine room and the second a bit forward. Unbenownst to the Germans, Sydhav carried 11,400 tons of oil. She exploded in a massive fireball of bright flame and thick black smoke. The blast engulfed U-505 (Decker remembered it as a “gentle” shock wave) which luckily received nothing more than minor damage to its clutch. Sydhav, meanwhile, sank so quickly her crew was forced to jump overboard. Many were pulled under by the suction of th
e sinking ship. Captain Nils O. Helgesen and eleven of his thirty-five men never resurfaced. The two dozen survivors were subjected to the terrifying prospect of being eaten alive when sharks arrived. The predators made their presence known by dragging a man clinging to a mattress to his death. The others, meanwhile, managed to right a lifeboat and bail out the seawater. They rowed back and forth until darkness fell, calling out the names of their missing comrades. Loewe surfaced nearby and gave the survivors fresh water, food, and bandages to treat their burns. When a Sunderland was spotted Loewe ordered U-505 to dive for cover. The lifeboat rowed north and the men were picked up by a British escort ship on March 7.10
Both U-505 and Merten’s U-68 became the victims of their own success. British authorities feared Vichy-controlled Morocco was about to be handed over to the Germans and had begun to thicken the defence of Freetown traffic against potential threats from that quarter.11 After U-505’s two sinkings, newly established RAF planes began air patrols to hunt down the German submarines. A decision was also made to put a stop to ships sailing alone from Freetown in order to form convoys that could be more effectively protected. These moves cleared the eastern Atlantic of potential targets and forced Loewe into frequent crash dives to escape the eyes of circling bombers. The danger from the skies kept the majority of the crew confined to the boat’s damp, mildewed interior. The only respite from the RAF “bumble bees” (as they were called by the crew) was the brief torrential tropical rainstorms, which added a different misery for the men. Days passed without even a glimpse of a surface ship. A foul mood spread through the boat. Loewe’s request to cross the Atlantic and hunt in Brazilian waters was denied by BdU because of the fragile political situation in that country. The pro-American government of Brazil had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany on January 27, and Dönitz was concerned sinkings off the coast would aggravate an already volatile situation.12
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