"What Manner of Men Were They?" A Veteran of the North Atlantic Convoy Escorts Reflects upon the U-Boat Men He Fought... The enemy was seldom seen, though his presence was often evidenced by burning ships, a shadow in the night, a small pip on the radar scope, a returning beep on the underwater Asdic detection gear, or the high-pitched chirp of his radio transmissions. What went on in the U-boats during those nights of fire and blood and terror? Who had fired the torpedoes that blasted a fine ship and 60 men to eternity? What was the reaction of the U-boat crews to our counterattacks as we dropped tons of depth charges that tore the ocean apart while they attempted to evade us 600 feet below the surface? What manner of men were they? During their days of ascendency, the Uboat men were never far from our wakeful thoughts, but at first we knew little of them , and they at times seemed eight feet tall. Later, when the tide had turned and our superiority in weapons, numbers, and tactics had clearly established a mastery that would not again be challenged , we had learned a great deal about them by studying them carefully, as any good hunter studies his quarry. The wet, dazed, and shocked Uboat suvivors fished from the sea were less imposing than we had earlier imagined , yet throughout their terrible two years of agony following their 1943 defeat, the spirit of the Kriegsmarine remained high and until the bitter end they sailed. Their story, as well as that of the escort men who defeated them , deserves to be objectively told. CAPTAIN JOHN M. WATERS, JR . Bloody Winter (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, rev. ed. 1984)
. . .and a U-Boat Skipper Tells What It Was Like The destroyers were signalling to one another. The right-hand one was zig-zagging continually while the left kept to a straight course. I had my periscope up again, hoping it would not be noticeable in the light motion of the sea, when suddenly I saw an aircraft flit past my lens barely 30 meters above the water. At the same moment the locating signals of the enemy Asdic struck the U-boat's side with their horrible pingping-ping-ping, so loud I might have sent them out myself. We had been discovered . Involuntarily everyone held his breath. The left escort, it turned out to be the frigate Exe, was already turning towards us and in a moment was so close I could distinguish details on deck. I intended to fire a spreading salvo of three into the convoy and had already ordered "salvo ready," meaning after previous misses to let the 24
ships come closer, despite the menacing frigate whose sailors I could now see running to and fro. I was still staring obstinately through the periscope when a pattern of ten depth charges exploded with a deafening roar round the boat. We had got into the middle of a carpet. The effect was terrible and is hard to describe. Suddenly everything went black and everything stopped, even the motors. In the whirl of the shock waves the rudderless boat was seized like a cork and thrust upwards . There was a cracking and creaking noise, the world seemed to have come to an end, then crashes and thuds as the boat was thrown onto its side and everything loose came adrift. I managed to grab the steel strop on the periscope, then my legs were pulled from under me. We had collided with the frigate's bottom which was now thrusting away above us, steel against steel. ...The swaying boat reared up, struck the hull of the Exe with its conning tower, and the control room and listening compartment immediately flooded . The water quickly rose above the floor plates. The light of a torch lying on the chart table showed a picture of devastation. All the indicator gear was hanging loose, the glass was splintered, light bulbs had burst. Cable ends spread in bundles through the control room, the emergency lighting accumulators had tom free. Before I even got to the depthkeeping controls the boat was again shaken by the heaviest depth charges. Like a stone we slipped backwards toward the ocean bed which lay 5,000 meters below. From the engine room the hydrostatic external pressure, indicating depth , was passed on from mouth to mouth and the fall of the boat stopped by blowing tbe tanks with compressed air. It rose slowly, then faster and faster until it had to be flooded again so as not to shoot out of the water like an arrow.... Fortunately the switchboard was still dry, there was no short-circuit. We could put back the knife switches which had fallen out and in feverish haste got the electric motors working. Though the noise of the port propeller shaft showed that damage had been caused, its turning again was music in our ears. My log says: " Decide to hold the boat by all possible means and slowly go deeper. Damage very great and cannot yet be assessed." We had ourselves drop from 60 to 140 meters. Meanwhile the entire convoy in its whole length went thumping past us overhead. In such a situation that is about the safest place for a stricken U-boat, particularly as any hydrophone contact is lost in propeller wash. Nothing can touch one, unless perhaps a ship is torpedoed and falls on one's head . But hardly was the mass of the ships past
Four hundred feet below the surface, still under attack, the crew of U 333 work to shore up the starboard diesel, knocked from its mountings by the violence of the first depth-charge attack.
than we were overwhelmed with a drumfire such as I had never yet experienced . And that is saying a lot. It began at mid-day and went on till 2055 like a continuous thunderstorm, now close, now further away, the heavy-sounding depth charges and the lighter Hedgehogs. And each time we thought , "Now there'll be a direct hit." But as the explosions detonated further away, we wiped the cold sweat from our faces. And when finally the torture ended and the great silence began we refused to believe it, but stood there wide-eyed, gasping and struggling for breath, waiting for the next series. Air was running out and it had to be improved with potash cartridges and oxygen. There was a stink of battery gas -the ventilation lines had been broken- and of watery oil. Eventually the fug became chokingly thick, and compressed air was getting short. After nine hours of depth charging which had thoroughly shaken the boat and had necessitated our repeatedly blowing the tanks to maintain station, there was hardly any compressed air left. I had to go up regardless, and so, one hour after the last charge had exploded and the great, perhaps deceptive silence had fallen , I brought U 333 to the surface .... The diesels would not start. Despite repeated blowing , the boat would not stay on the surface but slowly sank downwards by the stern. We had to submerge again so as not to drown on the bridge .... Things were against us-as though a renewed attempt was being made to do away with us. After many experiments we finally got the port diesel going-it began to function "slow ahead" -and eventually the starboard diesel started as well. The ballast tanks were no longer airtight, but with the exhaust gases we blew into them we could roughly keep a balance with the water coming in . But the boat was still more or less unstable and threatened to drop away under our feet. And somewhere water was continually dribbling inboard where we struggled with the damaged pumps. We had no alternative but to move "dynamicall y" and gently get away. Next day already on the way home I wrote in the log : "Surfacing goes better," and the day after, "considerably better, which means I have got accustomed to the condition of slowly sinking." COMMANDER PETER CREMER
U-BoatCommander(Navalinst. Press, '84) SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1985