Black May (43 page)

Recorded 19 May 1943
⁹

N
avigator from the surface ship
R
EGENSBURG:
They search the Bay of Biscay, I suppose, don’t they?

A
PEL:
They must have a regular sort of patrol there. One formation relieving another, because they know all the U-boats have to go through there. For the most part we proceed submerged there. You only surface for fresh air and in order to charge the batteries and even
then
you are disturbed a few times. On our last patrol we were in difficulties on the return trip. We were already near land, we could see the French coast, but we were rather far south in the Bay of Biscay and we had to proceed northwards along the French coast. We still had four hours before getting to the German patrol boat, and then we were located by an aircraft. Now the water was only about sixty-five meters deep, added to which the whole area was covered with wrecks, perhaps even old ground mines, which were lying below. In any case, we couldn’t dive. It [the aircraft] located us continually, but we were lucky right until we met the escort, and after that it didn’t come back.

Recorded 21 May 1943
¹⁰

A
PEL:
We had followed a convoy across from America. We followed it over nearly to England. Then we had warning of an aircraft; it had been seen rather late. We immediately opened the air vents, that is to say, we dived; the bow and the conning tower were submerged. Do you know how we dive? The English, Italians, and Japanese all come on under power, stop both engines, and let themselves go down. We, the Germans, were the first to hit on the following idea.… We are moving along, the alarm is given, and down we go at full speed; you have to hold on to prevent yourself from falling flat. Both hydroplanes right down. Down at three-quarters speed. Occasionally—the Engineer Officer sees to it, that it never occurs too markedly—but this time we had a tremendous list. We were down by the bows, and lying at an extreme angle. And this list is intensified by the fact that the last air vent of the last diving tank is opened up later, and through that the boat goes down still more by the bows. Now the bow and conning tower were submerged; the stern still showed. Then five bombs fell directly over the boat and shook us terribly. Everything flew about. As a result of the fact that we weren’t so … deep
and the bombs were so near; all mechanical and electrical installations failed. The light was out, we were in darkness. Both the engines and the electric motor[s] were put out of action. The main switchboards were blown out, the automatic fuses were burnt out. Our hydroplane motor was out of order. The hydroplanes were still right down. If the engines [electric motors] had gone on working we should inevitably have carried on down with the hydrophones in fixed position until there was a crash. But perhaps we might have been able to crank up the hydroplane at the right moment by hand, but that always takes time and the high speed … we should have certainly gone right down out of control. The hydroplane position gauge—we had a mechanical and an electric gauge—was put out of action, too. So we would have had no idea, if the button had been pressed, in what position the rudder would have been. The main rudder was out of action. In short, all sorts of safety installations and everything were not working. The light soon came on again, just switched over. Then the light was on, we let in the main switch, the engines turned again, the motors were repaired; it all went quickly; in any case the boat was again ready to submerge. Just a matter of luck.

Recorded 19 May 1943
¹¹

A
pel: Our boat was sixty-eight meters long. Every conceivable corner was stuffed with provisions. Every few days you’re done out of your sleep. Either the torpedoes have to be brought up, or a convoy is reported, or there are destroyers or something about, or the W/T operator reports propeller noises.

My U-boat was the first German U-boat that managed to get through up there between Iceland and Ireland without interference and without being spotted. After that every other boat up there got done in. But we owe it to the extremely bad weather alone that we weren’t spotted by any aircraft. A number of U-boats have been destroyed there.… [Pause] German espionage is very much up to the mark. We knew about practically every convoy, we knew when it put out from New York or wherever it was, and exactly of what it consisted.

Recorded 20 May 1943
¹²

A
PEL:
On the last patrol but one we had two destroyers at our heels. They forced us to remain submerged for twelve hours and dropped their depth charges—we counted thirty-six of them, which fell quite close to us—the others were farther off, we didn’t count them. He [one of the destroyers] dropped depth charges, which made a terrific noise. The destroyer was sailing at three-quarters speed, and at that moment they couldn’t hear anything themselves. Every U-boat always makes good use of that moment if depth-charges are being dropped. We were at three-quarters speed, helm hard over, and above all we made it a habit, when we were depth-charged, immediately to rush to the bilge suction pumps, because they couldn’t hear us and we kept trying to get a little water out of the trim regulator. We never had any luck, air kept … in between.… Suddenly, after about ten hours, one of the crew and I succeeded. The pump sucked in and we were able to expel a thousand liters of water in all, out of two tanks. The boat became so light again that, without any difficulty and without changing the speed, it could remain at a uniform depth. There was no need to alter the speed now. We proceeded silently, very gently, and he could no longer hear us; he lost us and proceeded in a completely different direction. We made our escape.… We once had an alarm owing to aircraft, a Sunderland flying boat. The fellow succeeded in forcing us to remain submerged for seven hours. He dropped a bomb every ten minutes to the second, and always near us. We couldn’t surface. Either it was the same aircraft, though I don’t imagine so, or it may have been relieved at intervals. A Sunderland. In the middle of the North Atlantic. We were about half-way between North America and Ireland. Exactly every ten minutes he dropped a bomb. It was quite extraordinary. The devil even tracked us from the air. That is an entirely new English discovery and I don’t know if we know [about] it, at any rate it was quite unknown to us.…

N
AVIGATOR FROM THE SURFACE SHIP
R
EGENSBURG:
Did the steamer get away?

A
PEL:
The steamers? Oh, they had all gone! [Pause] I know of one boat where the Commander was absolutely determined to score a proper hit. He approached so close to the ship before he fired that his
boat sustained such serious damage from the explosion of his own torpedoes, that he only got home with great difficulty.

Recorded 19 May 1943
¹³

K
LOTZSCH:
… The fellows are supposed to defend themselves against aircraft.

A
RENDT:
Yes.

K
LOTZSCH:
Proceeding on the surface on a zigzag course is more successful than submerging.

A
RENDT:
Yes, actual flak cruisers are being built now—U-flak cruisers for the Bay of Biscay.

K
LOTZSCH:
Well, it’s not much good if they are only being built now. They ought to have been ready at the beginning of the war.

Recorded 14 May 1943
¹⁴

A
RENDT:
We had the cross.

K
LOTZSCH:
We had the fixed G.S.R.

A
RENDT:
With the [magic] eye on it?
KLOTZSCH
: Yes.

A
RENDT:
a Funkmaat of our flotilla invented that, at sea. He got the Iron Cross, Class One, for it, and five hundred Reichsmarks.

K
LOTZSCH:
Good Lord, how stingy!

A
RENDT:
Well, it doesn’t work properly. They’ve got something else now.

K
LOTZSCH:
We couldn’t locate anything with the [magic] eye, but only listen, in the same way as the old G.S.R. used to work.

A
RENDT:
When we were on our journey home from our last patrol, on the last night but one, we were suddenly right in the beam of a searchlight. A Steuermann happened to be on watch. He came rushing down.

K
LOTZSCH:
Did you submerge?

A
RENDT:
Yes and got away. They had a … searchlight. They came from straight ahead. He [the pilot] must have miscalculated, perhaps he hadn’t got his bombs quite ready and only the lamps in the petty officers’ quarters came down; nothing else was broken. He dropped four bombs. It was just the same when we sailed out there. We submerged
and got away and he, too, dropped his bombs quite wide. He didn’t hit anything at all. We always got through safely, without any damage, except for the last two times, the last patrol, when we were coming into port, and this time, when we were setting out. Before that we never had any aircraft.

Recorded
13
May 1943
¹⁵

K
LOTZSCH:
On the trip before, we were at a depth of only eighteen meters. The aircraft was very near. Our present First Officer of the Watch was on duty and he saw it too late, gave the alarm, and the aircraft banked and came towards us and dropped its load and they exploded at eighteen to twenty meters off. We were forced up to the surface by the blast and then the boat went down out of control. We were forced up twenty meters so that the whole boat was on the surface, and then went down again, right down deep, and then we regained control, and then we blew the tanks so that the boat rose, and then we flooded them again, but we couldn’t flood them quickly enough, and we remained on the surface for seven minutes with the conning-tower hatch closed down. The Commander went straight back to the periscope and said: “Flood the tanks, he’s making another approach, flood the tanks!” It [the diving system] was all out of action. “He’s making another approach, flood the tanks!” And he behaved like a madman up in the conning tower, shouting: “Flood them, flood them, he’s making another approach, Chief Engineer!” You can’t imagine what it was like. I was standing in the control room and thought: “Now one more bomb on us and it will be all up!” He had gotten plenty of time to aim, we were a fine target, floating about on the surface with our conning-tower hatch closed, but he hadn’t any bombs left, so he just fired at us with his guns and scored a few hits on the upper deck, in the woodwork and covering of the conning tower. If he had had any bombs we should have been done for, all right. That’s the worst of all—when you just wait without being able to defend yourself.

Recorded 3 May 1943
¹⁶

K
LOTZSCH:
Soon we shall have reached the point where we shall have built a thousand U-boats and if about fifty U-boats go for a convoy—
even if it is escorted by twenty destroyers—they will be able to do nothing against them [the U-boats]. They’ll exhaust their supply of depth charges, without knowing where to drop them. You saw that in this convoy, when we shot up three hundred thousand tons [sic].
CHIEF RADIOMAN FROM THE SURFACE SHIP
SILVAPLANA:
You weren’t there yourself, were you?

K
LOTZSCH:
No. But people who actually participated in this witch’s caldron said that not one of the English who had lived through this bombardment would ever sail again. It was such a hell of fire, flames, noise and explosions, dead bodies and screams, that none of all the ships’ crews will ever go to sea again. That is definitely one up to us, a clear moral victory, if the enemy’s morale should deteriorate to such an extent that he should have no further desire to go to sea. But if they really get short, they will force the crews to sail, exactly as we do.

R
ADIOMAN:
They [the English] are forced to do that already.…

K
LOTZSCH:
One U-boat was depth-charged off Finisterre and let in a tremendous amount of water. She sank immediately down to a depth of one hundred fifty meters and settled on the bottom. The crew were standing up to their knees in water and they waited until all was quiet above and then they pumped out the water with bilge pumps and came to the surface again, and in the night they did some welding on the upper deck and got back safely.

On a former patrol we suffered more serious damage than on this one. We remained at a depth of two hundred meters from two o’clock in the afternoon until eleven o’clock at night with battery gas escaping in the boat, which we trimmed only by moving the crew. [Pause]

Near Barbados, off Kingston harbor, we saw English officers strolling on the beach with native women.

Recorded 6 May 1943
¹⁷

K
LOTZSCH:
We get twenty-five hundredweight of fresh potatoes. Of these I throw ten hundredweight away. Then everything tastes of oil. Fresh vegetables last perhaps eight days. We can’t take any more with us, otherwise [they] would go bad. Then fresh bread lasts fourteen
days at the most; the stuff lies all over the place in the boat.… It is everywhere, in the bilges. The bread lies under the diesel, the sugar and the flour behind the electric motor, everything in tins, flour, rice, eggs, semolina, and everything imaginable. We get about thirty-five hundred tins of milk and about four thousand eggs. We get two eggs every morning and when they begin to go bad, two every evening as well, so that they get eaten up instead of our having to throw all the bad ones overboard. Then the bad eggs smell and they are lying all over the place! Ten cases, each containing three hundred sixty, is three thousand six hundred eggs. Therefore, towards the end, the bad ones are already beginning to smell and then, naturally, one can’t find and take out the eggs which are lying right down in the middle, so they too begin to smell. There is always a smell somewhere. Both the “heads” always stink, and everything else, too. There is such a stink, such a fug, such muck and filth, and then on top of all that you start eating this tinned stuff! Then there’s all the pill-swallowing business, which nearly lays you out, against scurvy or pyorrhea [inflammation of the gum and tooth sockets causing loosening of the teeth], then against.… So that the keenness of his eyesight should not be affected the bridge lookout is given pills to take.