Black May (45 page)

Recorded 31 May 1943
²⁷

T
LLLMANNS:
We torpedoed an eight-thousand-ton steamer carrying dynamite. It was a surface shot and the ship was blown right out of the water. We were fairly close to it… [our] control panel, electric light bulbs, everything was smashed.

Recorded 1 June 1943
²⁸

[U
NCLEAR NAME
]: I could distinguish every tree in Russia … bushes … and in America the coastal road went like this—we could see the houses of the millionaires brilliantly lighted, the lights of the cars shining. You can see the lights at the bends of the road, they shine out over the sea. You can clearly [see] the traffic there.…

S
TOCK:
Well, when our U-boat went through the Strait of Gibraltar, I can tell you, it’s damn narrow, you could spit across it.

[U
NCLEAR NAME
]: When you go through with your
U
-boats, can’t they hear you?

S
TOCK:
We go through at night, [and] we’re lit up by a searchlight. We slipped through at very slow speed on our electric motor. At that time they hadn’t so much D/F gear, et cetera.

Recorded 29 May 1943
²⁹

LINK:
How did they sink you? [Re: sinking of
U
-752 on 23 May by Swordfish “G” of 819 Sqdn. Royal Navy and Marlet “B” of 892 Sqdn. RN, both from the escort carrier
H
.M.S.
Archer]

P
LNZER:
We broke surface and got a bomb from an aircraft.

L
INK:
How many of you did they rescue?

P
LNZER:
On the destroyer where we were, there were twelve of us. About thirty-five men got out of the boat. We were up near Greenland. Well, we came up with difficulty and they [destroyer crew]
hung out ropes, rescue ladders, five in a row—but nobody could get over the railing—it was colder than in Russia. But the men on the destroyer were very decent. We were all given smokes and everything!

Six of our men were aft in the engine room, and couldn’t get out. The others all got out. There were very heavy seas running. We were only afraid that the aircraft would fire on us. Link: Why?

P
LNZER:
Because they fired right up to the last minute. We could assume that they wanted to fire because we had fired as well. We went on firing to the last round.

L
INK
: Was it at night?

P
LNZER:
No, about midday. We had submerged on account of aircraft and destroyers, then we broke surface and the Commander kept seeing an aircraft through the periscope, and they told us then that small aircraft had already spotted us under the water, at periscope depth. Then it must have kept right above us.… [We] surfaced … and suddenly: “Aircraft one hundred meters distant,” and instead of opening fire we submerged and were only at a depth of three or four meters when the bomb fell. Immediately a mass of water broke in.

L
INK:
… Where were you based?

P
LNZER:
In St.-Nazaire.

L
INK:
There’s a lot of damage there.

P
LNZER:
The town has been smashed up, but not the shelters.

L
INK:
No, not the shelters. It is the same in Lorient.

P
LNZER:
The last time they raided there they shot down fourteen aircraft during the night. They dropped bombs and in one night the town became a heap of ruins, but they did
nothing
to the shelters.

Recorded 28 May 1943
³⁰

W
EISSEFELD:
Even at sea we had to undergo punishments; we had to do “knee bends” ten times, holding heavy lumps of iron. If one had really committed some bad crime that would have been reasonable, but we were punished for nothing, for forgetting to close a valve or something, which didn’t actually endanger the boat at all. The order had been given and if you forgot, you were simply given twenty [knee
bends], I wasn’t really upset about it, I knew it was my fault. On the first patrol: when you went through the Petty Officers’ compartment at night you were supposed to take off your cap; at night they were asleep in any case, and when they are asleep, why should I take off my cap? One Petty Officer always used to watch out and once he saw a man slipping through with his cap on his head; the next day he had to do knee bends fifty times. The Engineer Officer was just as petty.… If we had been able to get home we should have had a fine time lying up for repairs, for at least three months. Everything had been damaged. All the gauges had been smashed. Those lamps, with sort of wire baskets over them, the side lamps were broken, and, of course, most of the bulbs had burst. The emergency lighting was still all right. There were leather bolsters in the bunks which were flying about the bow compartment. In a twinkling the whole boat was devastated [inside] after the first pattern of depth charges. It was only a matter of seconds before the whole boat had been turned upside down.

Recorded
17
March 1943
³¹

R
ADIOMAN FROM THE SURFACE TANKER
GERMANIA:
IS
a boat painted each time it sails?

S
PITZ:
Yes, scraped and repainted.

K
ALISCH:
[Kptlt. Siegfried] Strelow’s boat [U
-435]
once came back entirely covered with rust; he had been out for twelve or thirteen weeks. The whole boat was a reddish-brown.

R
ADIOMAN:
What kind of a boat was it, a [Type] Seven-C?

K
ALISCH: YES.

R
ADIOMAN:
Twelve or thirteen weeks? … needs supplying.

K
ALISCH:
… There are also boats which are out for sixteen weeks.… They get supplied at sea.

R
ADIOMAN:
Only [Type] Nine boats can stay out for sixteen weeks.

K
ALISCH:
The Seven-Cs too. Why shouldn’t a Seven-C remain out for sixteen weeks? Once everything has been used up, it can take on fuel, provisions and, if it needs to, torpedoes as well, at sea. Sometimes they take on torpedoes as well.

S
PITZ:
That has happened, at the most, two or three times.

K
ALISCH:
But it is possible. The sea must be calm and then they set up the gear.

… If you want to take on a torpedo from another boat, when at sea, [the other boat] lowers the torpedo into the water.

R
ADIOMAN:
Simply throw it into the water?

K
ALISCH:
Yes, it floats.

S
PITZ:
The crane has so much lifting radius that it can pick up [stuff] from another boat?

K
ALISCH:
The boats can’t get as close as all that to each other. The swell would bump them against each other. It lowers the torpedo into the water, you pull the torpedo alongside, put a sling round it and haul it up. The only thing is, you mustn’t be taken by surprise, or there would be a hell of a mess!

Recorded 16 May 1943
³²

A
PEL:
Corvettes are far the best thing against U-boats, far better than destroyers. We can’t get at them because they are built with a shallow draft.

Recorded 21 May 1943
³³

S
CHMELING:
The good times of U-boat sailing are past.

T
LLLMANNS:
I’ve been in U-boats since April 1938.

S
CHMELING:
My cousin was drowned between the twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth of June last year, up there in the “Rose Garden” between Scotland and Iceland. We picked up W/T messages from him and then he was gone; nothing more came through. It was six weeks before his parents got the news: “The boat has been overdue for some time and must be presumed lost.” And it wasn’t until four weeks after that that they heard he’d died a sailor’s death on active service. “He gave his life for Greater Germany.”

Recorded 28 May 1943
³⁴

The second section of extracts focuses on weaponry and detection gear, both German and Allied. There were many more conversations on
these and other technical matters than the few extracts reproduced here would suggest, but on the belief that most readers would not want to get caught up too much in the whirring world of machinery and electrons, only six sample conversations on technical matters are extracted here. Less concentrated on May, these conversations stretch from March to August. The favorite subject was the new zigzagging FAT torpedo.

B
RÖHL
[Re:
FAT,
or “convoy” torpedoes]: It’s quite a normal torpedo which has a setting device, so that after traveling a certain distance—

F
IGHTER PILOT, F
.W. 190: What distance?

B
RÖHL:
It varies. It’s adjustable, so that when it goes past the target it doesn’t run straight out to the end of its course and then explode, but, after passing the target, it turns round and zigzags, so there is a possibility that after passing it at first, it will still find the target. I can estimate how far away the target is. Then I say it shall be set at twenty-five hundred meters and from there the torpedo makes zigzags.

P
ILOT:
… How many zigzags does it make?

B
RÖHL:
It can go on to the end of its course.

P
LLOT:
How far does such a torpedo run?

B
RÖHL:
Seventeen thousand meters.

P
ILOT:
I presume they are electric torpedoes?

B
RÖHL:
Air torpedoes, too.

P
LLOT:
Oh, I see, they’re just ordinary torpedoes which run straight. There is this mechanism in them and that’s probably what he [Interrogation Officer] meant.

B
RÖHL:
It’s possible he’s talking about a different one altogether.

P
ILOT:
The torpedo that you had on board is the “convoy” torpedo, isn’t it?

B
RÖHL:
Yes.

P
ILOT:
And what does that mean?

B
RÖHL:
Spring mechanism (
Federapparat).

P
LLOT:
I presume then that this spring mechanism is built into the ordinary torpedo.

B
ROHL:
Yes.

P
ILOT:
The spring mechanism is simply a thing which can be set, like my [Luftwaffe] automatic pilot.

B
rÖh
L:
Technically it is rather complicated, making it so that it zigzags and so on. You can set it. For example you usually fire this torpedo at convoys, where several ships are sailing together. Assuming you fire at a particular ship, it [the torpedo] curves around, and if you fire two, three, or four of these, you can say with ninety percent certainty that one of them will hit. With a quadruple fan salvo it is certain, for three or four ships usually sail together.

P
ILOT:
Why did you only have six of these with you?

B
RÖHL:
They were probably not quite ready, or perhaps they gave some to each U-boat for practice.

P
ILOT:
How is the setting done?

B
RÖHL
[Draws]: … The basic idea is this: … I have a torpedo, it runs for such-and-such a time and for such-and-such a distance. If I fire at five hundred or a thousand meters, the remaining sixteen thousand meters are quite useless. So how can we make use of them somehow or other?

P
ILOT:
Well, supposing it turns, makes a curve of 1800 when it is ready. What’s the setting then?

B
ROHL:
I can make the setting according to my own judgment of what the position is.

P
ILOT:
Let us assume there are three ships at a range of three thousand meters, a few hundred meters apart—you fire at the center one—

B
ROHL:
I fire at the first ship, which is farthest ahead and lies in the most favorable position. That is three thousand meters, and I set it for thirty-five hundred, and if it goes past it begins to zigzag.

P
ILOT:
Yes, how does it zigzag, does it come back on the same track?

B
RÖHL:
… It makes perfectly ordinary turns on a reciprocal course the whole time. The torpedo travels, we’ll say, one thousand meters back, that is, it travels to and fro within the area of the steamer’s course. You can set it in several different ways.

P
ILOT:
IS
it worked by a spring mechanism?

BRÖHL: That’s purely a code name. There probably is a spring in it.

P
ILOT:
… If a torpedo goes past a ship, they think it’s all over and finished with. And then suddenly it comes back from the other side?

B
RÖHL
: They can’t see the track.

P
ILOT:
Because it’s an electric torpedo; that means it can’t be an air torpedo.

B
RÖHL
: It can be built into the air torpedo, and then you simply fire those at night, when you can’t see the wake of the torpedoes.

P
ILOT:
The mechanism must be pretty big, mustn’t it?

B
RÖHL
: It’s a sort of box, about thirty by thirty centimeters [n.8 by n.8 inches].

P
ILOT:
It’s inside the torpedo; don’t you have to take the torpedo out of the tube to set it beforehand?

B
RÖHL
: It’s set by means of a pin.

P
LLOT:
By the Commander or by you?

B
RÖHL
: By me. There’s a pin which goes down into the torpedo and adjusts the setting and then drops out before the torpedo is fired. The torpedoman’s mate is responsible for the setting. I give him the data.…

P
ILOT:
You must have to take care not to be hit by your own torpedo.
BROHL
: Yes.