Nigel Cawthorne by Japanese Reaping the Whirlwind: Personal Accounts of the German, Italian Experiences of WW II Read Free Book Online Page A

fire! Tube two fire!’] The Aale [‘eels’ was the submariners’ slang for torpedoes] leave with a hissing noise … The stop-watch ticks. After three minutes there is the first explosion, immediately followed by the second … Suddenly fierce shock waves hit us like a hammer …
    The captain looked through the periscope to see that the ship had been ripped apart by the explosions. Then came what Werner Kronenberg, the engineering officer on another U-boat, called ‘the death-struggle of a ship’.
    Those squeaks, the bursting of the bulkhead, this noise when she goes down – a noise that gets into your bones. That is not a pleasant sound.
    As sailors, the U-boatmen thought about ships rather than the loss of their fellow seamen. After sinking the Danish-registered tanker
Danmark
in Inganess Bay off Kirkwall in the Orkneys on 11 January 1940, U-23’s first watch officer, Hans-Jochen von Knebel Doeberitz, said:
    We were very proud and happy. The English didn’t believe we could be so close by in the anchorage, and when the torpedo exploded they searched the air with lights because they thought we were the Luftwaffe . They were even firing into the air. Of course, for me on this first voyage, it was quite an experience. Then we turned back and again we sailed very close to the lookouts, but got out of there in one piece.
    Others grew more aware of what they were doing. Herbert Arnecke recalled:
    The war was ugly … I personally only realized that when I heard people crying in the water, because they were drowning. Until then I really focused upon the tonnage rather than the people.
    Of course, once men were in the water the attitude to the enemy changed.
Korvettenkapitän
(Lieutenant Commander) Peter ‘Ali’ Cremer said:
    For us U-boat commanders, the humane treatment of shipwrecked seamen of the enemy powers was a matter of course. They were not enemies any more, but simply shipwrecked and had to be helped as far as possible.
DEPTH-CHARGED
    After an attack, there was always the danger of retaliation and the horror of being depth-charged. Hans Börner recorded:
    After each depth-charge we were so relieved, when it was over, that nothing had happened for now. And you knew that the next would come. Often you heard the splash of it falling into the sea above us. We could hear that. But where was it? In front, aft, to port?
    Depth-charging took a terrible toll. A submariner from U-37 wrote home from captivity in the Tower of London:
    This is what happened. After an attack, we were simultaneously pummelled for three hours with terrible little depth charges by seven destroyers. The charge goes off with a most uncomfortable bang. Near the boat, they change the nature of material which breaks up into the form of atoms. We came to the surface, damaged and we were all saved by the British destroyers … Our treatment is good, and there is no need to worry. This is in itself astonishing, given the anti-German agitations stirred up in the English people by their newspapers.
    Men endured depth-charging for two or three days.
Kapitänleutnant
(Lieutenant Commander) Hartwig Looks, commander of U-264, which was sunk on 19 February 1944, described the loss of his vessel:
    We got around two hundred depth charges and they exploded beneath the U-boat. We were accustomed to depth charges exploding above us, but the full wave of the explosion came from below. I tried to shake them off by taking evasive action, but that didn’t work. Equipment broke away from the pressure hull, and there were various leaks. The water reached above our ankles and a fire was reported in the electric motor room, and when you are submerged and there’s a fire on board that’s the end. I thought, ‘There’s nothing for it – we have to surface.’ We shot out of the water like a champagne cork and found ourselves inside a circle made by Captain Walker’s submarine chasers. The crew jumped in the sea. I was on the tower holding on to the antenna to stop my