“The U-505’s Service History before Capture: From Hamburg to Lorient” by S.M. O’Connor

EXCERPT

Vizeadmiral (Vice Admiral) Ernst Wolf (1886-1964), commander of the naval base at Hamburg, commissioned the U-505 into the Unterseebootswaffe (Submarine Fleet) of the Kriegsmarine (the Third Reich’s War Navy) on Tuesday, August 26, 1941.[1] The first Kommandant (Commandant) of the U-505 was Kapitänleutnant (Captain-Lieutenant, the equivalent of a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy) Axel-Olaf Löwe. “Comrades,” Löwe addressed his men at the commissioning ceremony, “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.”[2] That month, Admiral Karl Dönitz (1891-1980) had sixty-four U-boats he could commit to the warfront and 120 more U-boats undergoing trials or with crews training aboard them.[3]

On Monday, September 1, 1941, the U-505 passed through the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kanal – now known as the Nord-Ostee-Kanal (North Sea Canal) – which runs through Schleswig-Holstein to connect the North Sea with the Baltic Sea, to undergo her shakedown cruise.[4] Axel-Olaf Löwe was born to a German father and a Dutch mother in the German port city of Kiel,[5] the capital city of Schleswig-Holstein, on Sunday, January 3, 1909.[6] In addition to his own residence in Berlin, his family owned an estate in Mecklenburg, both of which he lost in the war.[7] Service in the German Navy was something of the family business. His father had served as a gunnery officer aboard battlecruisers in the High Seas Fleet of the Kaiserliche Marine (the Second Reich’s Imperial Navy), and two of his uncles commanded U-boats in the Imperial Navy, one of whom survived the war and attended the commissioning ceremony of the U-505.[8]

Löwe entered the German Naval Academy at the age of nineteen and served aboard surface warships until the outbreak of the Second Great World War, when he volunteered to serve in the Unterseebootswaffe.[9] He belonged to the Class of 1928 (meaning his class entered the Naval Academy that year).[10] At this time, the German Navy was neither the House of Hohenzollern’s Kaiserliche Marine and nor was it Hitler’s Kriesgsmarine. Rather, it was the Reichsmarine (Realm’s Navy) as the German Navy was known under the Weimar Republic and the early years of the Third Reich until 1935.[11] He took second place amongst the thirty-nine executive officers in that class.[12] Subsequently, Löwe served aboard the cruiser Emden, the cruiser Königsberg, and the Panzerschiff (pocket battleship) Deutschland.[13]

He saw action for the first time during the Spanish Civil War.[14] [In that conflict, the Soviet Union backed the Republicans, while Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany backed the Nationalists.] In 1939, when the Second Great World War began in Europe, Löwe was at work in the Naval Academy, but he soon found himself at work as a staff officer at the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command).[15] [The Wehrmacht (literally “Defense Forces”) was the name of the official German military services, as opposed to the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s private military or paramilitary organization.] In October of 1940, he joined the Unterseebootswaffe.[16]

Löwe spent six months in the submarine school, served aboard the U-74 under Kapitänleutnant Eitel-Friedrich Kentrat, an experienced commandant, as a Kommandantenschüler (Commandant-in-training), a sort of apprenticeship, for one month, and was thirty-one years old when he commissioned the U-505.[17] A former gunner on the Seydlitz, like his father, who was chapter president of the Seydlitz veteran’s association attended the U-505 commissioning ceremony in Hamburg.[18] By the time that ceremony occurred in the Deutsche Werft shipyard, Löwe’s younger brother, an officer aboard the U-110, was already a P.O.W. in British hands, the U-110 having been sunk in May of 1941.[19]

Their cousin, Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp (1913-1941), the Commandant of the U-110,[20] a type IX-B U-boat, had died when the British destroyers H.M.S. Bulldog and H.M.S. Broadway captured his U-boat. [In September of 1939, while in command of the U-30, Lemp had sunk the passenger ship S.S. Athenia, which was a war crime that resulted in the deaths of 117 civilian passengers and crewmen.] Though seriously damaged, the U-110 was captured intact. The British initially shot at his men as they abandoned ship because they were under the misimpression that the submariners intended to shoot back at them with the U-110’s deck gun. Once they saw how many men were scrambling out, they ceased fire. When Lemp realized his U-boat was not sinking, he swam back to destroy her and the secret materials inside, but he was never seen again. Sub-Lieutenant David Balme (1920-2016), a navigator from the Bulldog, headed the first boarding party.[21] After the war, the German press alleged the British had murdered him (in revenge for the Athenia) but the British Royal Navy denied that the boarding party had shot him and countered Lemp may have committed suicide. Lemp and fourteen of his men died. William Stewart Pollack, a former radio operator who was part of the second boarding party, was able to grab an Enigma machine and Kurzsignale (Short Signal Codebook) he found in the radio room. However, the British Royal Navy cannot show off the U-110 today the way the U.S. Navy can show off the U-505 as a war prize at the Museum of Science and Industry (M.S.I.) because the U-110 sank while under tow as she was en route to the British Royal Navy base in Scapa Flow, a body of water between the Orkney Islands, north of the Scottish mainland. Thirty-two submariners were captured alive and held prisoner at P.O.W. Camp 23 at Monteith, Iroquois Falls, Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Mulligan named his chapter in Hunt and Kill “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505” in reference to a comment by Grand Admiral Dönitz that “a U-boat crew [w]as a Schicksalsgemeinschaft (‘a community bound by fate’).”[22] Over the course of her three-year-long service history, eleven officers and about 100 non-commissioned officers (N.C.O.s) and other enlisted men served aboard the U-505.[23] According to Rear Admiral Dan Gallery, who commanded Hunter-Killer Task Force 22.3, which captured the U-505, only three of Löwe’s fifty-six enlisted men had previously served aboard U-boats.[24] Two Maschinenmaate (Machinist’s Mates) came to the U-505 directly from the Scharnhorst,[25] which was a battleship or battlecruiser. In 1982, at a reunion of the U-505’s crew and the men of Hunter-Killer Task Force 22.3, Hans Göbeler told Studs Terkel (1912-2008) in an oral history interview that the U-505 started out with a crew of forty-nine men and on her last cruise she had fifty-nine men.[26] According to Dr. Eric C. Rust, IX-C U-boats were designed to carry a total of forty-eight men with four officers and fifteen petty officers, but after 1943 the High Command authorized up to twelve additional men to fire the anti-aircraft guns.[27] In a letter Löwe wrote ten years after the war had ended, he told Admiral Gallery “I tried to follow the principle of the British Admiral Nelson and make my ship a happy band of brothers.”[28]

Mulligan pointed out that Löwe benefited from having an experienced Chief Engineer and two competent Watch Officers.[29] In addition, Löwe had two officer candidates, Fähnrich zur See Horst Dödens and Fähnrich zur See Werner Jacobi, who both joined the U-505 at Danzig on Friday, September 26, 1941.[30] These midshipmen were subordinate to the watch officers like the non-coms and served aboard the U-505 until May of 1942.[31] Dödens rose to become Second Watch Officer on the U-845, and survived to become a P.O.W. when she was sunk on Friday, March 10, 1944.[32] Jacobi, who incurred the wrath of Oberleutant zur See Herbert Nollau (1916-1968), the First Watch Officer (often identified by Americans as the Executive Officer or X.O.), when he failed to provision the U-505 with sufficient soap before a patrol, later requested a reassignment when he found out he had been assigned as a watch officer on the U-534, which Nollau commanded.[33] Unfortunately for Jacobi and his family, this understandable decision cost him his life because he died aboard the U-973 in March of 1944.[34]

Maschinengefreiter (Apprentice Machinist) Hans Göbeler recounted in his autobiography Steel Boat, Iron Hearts his experience of training to become one of the U-505’s original crewmen, to serve aboard her, and be captured with her. Hans Jacob Göbeler was born on November 9, 1923 in Bottendorf, near Marburg, which is a university town in western Hesse.[35] [Note that English-speakers call Hesse Hessia and associate the province with the Hessian mercenaries who fought for the British in the American War of Independence, some of whom later immigrated with their families to the U.S.A.] In 1939, he tried to volunteer for the Kriegsmarine at the age of fifteen and the recruiter advised him to learn a technical trade and try again in a couple of years.[36] He completed the Master Motor Mechanics course in two years, got a driver’s license, and, in his spare time, began to learn English.[37] This time, when he volunteered again at the age of seventeen in August of 1941, the Kriegsmarine accepted him, and he underwent basic training at the Luitspold Barracks in Berloo in German-occupied Belgium.[38] He stated the Unterseebootswaffe only offered the chance to serve on a submarine to 10% of naval recruits, and he believed they selected him because of his enthusiasm and small stature.[39]

Göbeler underwent submarine training at Wilhelmshaven, and to mask this fact his orders and travel pass listed a false destination.[40] Upon his arrival at the naval base on the North Sea, he had to pass a battery of medical examinations and written tests.[41] After a month, he went to the base at Neustadt on the Baltic Sea where submarine physical training involved potential submariners becoming accustomed, inside pressure chambers, to pressure changes they might undergo in the future inside real submarines and learning, inside deep dive tanks, how to escape from a sinking U-boat.[42] Eighty-to-ninety men emerged to attend the 1^st Ubootschule (Submarine School) at the seaport of Pillau in East Prussia, where instructors would further toughen them up physically and psychologically as well as given them advanced technical training.[43] [After the war, the Red Army turned the German naval base at Pillau into a Soviet naval base.[44]] Göbeler estimated, “In the end, only about nine or ten out of every hundred candidates graduated from the school. The ones who did not pass were assigned to other parts of the Navy. When I received word that I had successfully graduated, I was ecstatic. It was the proudest day in my life.”[45]

The top-ranked graduates were assigned directly to a frontline U-boat crew … [and] graduates who… performed less well were sent to the shipyards to witness the final construction of their submarine…[to] reinforce… in their familiarization with the structure and functions of their future boat… I was gratified to learn that I had done very well. The sleeve insignia on my uniform now designated me as a Maschinengefreiter (Machinist Second Class). After a short furlough home, I was given orders to report for active duty to… Lorient, France.[46]

The U-505 went through training and shakedown cruises from Wednesday, August 27, 1941 to Monday, January 19, 1942.[47] From Sunday, August 31, 1941 to Friday, October 3, 1941, the U-505 went through acceptance and silent running trials in Kiel, off Bornholm, an island that belonged to German-occupied Denmark in the Baltic Sea; and in Danzig Bay (now Gdańsk Bay) in the Baltic Sea.[48] Between the 4^th and 15^th of October, 1941, the U-505 went through operational training off the German port-city of Danzig (now the Polish port-city of Gdańsk) and the German town of Hela (now the Polish town of Hel), both of which are in Pomerania.[49] From Thursday, October 16, 1941 to Monday, November 10, 1941, the U-505 practiced torpedo-firing, artillery, and depth-charge exercises with the 25^th U-boat Flotilla, which was based in Danzig.[50] Then, from the 11^th to the 22^nd of November, 1941, the U-505 went through tactical training in the Baltic Sea with the 27^th U-boat Flotilla.[51] The crew trained aboard her during her shakedown cruise in the Baltic Sea for approximately four-and-a-half months, during which time they tested her torpedoes and guns, tested both normal dives and crash dives, ran drills with the U-505 submerged at both full speed and the slowest possible speed to evade Allied warships and warplanes, tested erratic maneuvers to which they would only resort in an emergency, simulated injuries, and simulated machinery being wrecked by depth charge attacks.[52] The radio operators learnt how to get the bearings on merchant ships that made radio transmissions.[53] Sound crews learnt how to determine how far away a ship was based on the noises her screws made and distinguish between the noises made by a merchant ship they should hunt down and sink and a warship they should avoid.[54]

Some of the men learnt to shoot through a device called a Pillenwerfer (“pill-thrower”) at the back of the U-boat aluminum BOLD canisters that contained wire bags of calcium and zinc, which would mix with seawater that seeped in via hydrostatic valves and thus produced hydrogen gas bubble clouds that would sound like U-boats to Allied sonar operators.[55] A BOLD canister was designed to stay around thirty meters deep.[56] A properly functioning BOLD would emit a nearly solid bubble mass for a period of nearly one-half hour.[57] [The word BOLD was derived from kobold, a sprite in German folklore.[58] Note that Gallery seems to have confused the Pillenwerfer device with the BOLD tablet as he referred to the BOLD tablets as Pillenwerfers.] On Monday, November 24, 1941, the U-505 passed her operational readiness examination and returned to Deutsche Werft’s shipyard at Hamburg to be overhauled – to undergo alterations as well as minor repairs – and loaded with live torpedoes.[59] The U-505 was tied up at Hamburg from Thursday, November 27, 1941 to Thursday, January 8, 1942.[60] She was then outfitted for operations in the seaport of Stettin (now Szczecin), on the Oder River, south of the Stettin Lagoon (now Szczecin Lagoon), and the Bay of Pomerania, which is a basin of the Baltic Sea, from the 12^th to the 15^th of January, 1942.[61] Part of being outfitted in Stettin included receiving fuel and torpedoes.[62] From the 17^th to the 19^th of January, 1942, final preparations were made for the U-505 to depart in Kiel.[63] Around one o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, January 19, 1942, the U-505 left Kiel, passed through the Kiel Canal again, past Heligoland, into the North Sea to join the 2^nd U-boat Flotilla based in Lorient, Brittany, France, where she arrived on Tuesday, February 3, 1942.[64]

In June of 1941, the 2^nd U-Boat Flotilla had transferred from Wilhelmshaven[65] to Lorient and in 1942 the 10^th U-boat Flotilla followed.[66] Admiral Karl Dönitz moved his BdU headquarters near Lorient, in a villa in Kernevel, across from the Keroman peninsula.[67] The 2^nd U-boat Flotilla was named the “Saltzwedel Flotilla” in honor of Oberleutnant zue See Reinhold Saltzwedel (1889-1917), who had commanded five U-boats over the course of the First Great World War, sank 111 ships, and won the Pour le Lerite (“Blue Max”).[68]

To go from Kiel to Lorient, the U-505 went up through the Kattegat (the body of water between German-occupied Denmark and neutral Sweden) and Skagerrak (the body of water north of Denmark, south and southeast of German-occupied Norway, and west of Sweden), west through the North Sea, around Scotland, between the Faeroe Islands (an autonomous country under the Danish Crown) and the Kingdom of Iceland (then in personal union with the Kingdom of Denmark),[69] down into the Bay of Biscay to Lorient.[70] On the way to Lorient, the U-505 passed through a point around 200 miles south of Iceland, where Captain Daniel V. Gallery had just taken command of the U.S. Navy Fleet Air Base at Reykjavik,[71] which is the capital and largest city on the island. On Sunday, January 25, 1942, the U-505, while surfaced, passed within full view of a British Royal Navy destroyer, but conditions were so volatile in the North Atlantic that the commanders of the U-boat and the warship chose to ignore each other.[72]

This was the first operational cruise of the U-505.[73] She had traveled a total of 2,562 nautical miles, of which she traveled 2,371 miles while surfaced (92.5%) and 191 while submerged (7.5%).[74] The 2^nd U-boat Flotilla was comprised entirely of Type IX U-boats like the U-505.[75]

The U-505 arrived at Lorient during a snowstorm on Tuesday, February 3, 1942, in the wake of a Sperrbrecher (mine barrage breaker), which was a merchant ship converted into an auxiliary warship, and two minesweepers.[76] The officers and crew of the U-505 were greeted by a military band and a large party that represented the 2^nd U-boat Flotilla stood on the quay.[77] Front and center stood Korvettenkapitän Viktor Schütze (1906-1950), Chief of the 2^nd U-boat Flotilla, a U-boat ace who had been awarded the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves.[78] Decker recounted how Löwe formally reported for duty, Schütze hailed the crew, Löwe hailed Schütze on behalf of the crew, and the party ashore cheered for the U-505 before the officers and enlisted men from both groups began to mingle.[79]

Lorient was quite a place in those days. Sixteen huge concrete bunkers with reinforced roofs twenty-two feet thick housed the U-boats in port, rehabilitation camps Prien and Lemp with facilities unparalleled in the German Wehrmacht and all just for us and our comrades, a massive command center where… Admiral Doenitz… directed his boats to hunt and attack at sea. Lorient was home to the 2^nd and 10^th U-Flotillas. Others were based at St. Nazaire, La Pallice, Brest, and Bordeux.[80]

At Lorient, Göbeler met Löwe aboard the U-505, where the skipper interviewed Göbeler.[81] According to Göbeler, at the end of the interview, Löwe said, “Göbeler, I see from your records that they trained you in electrical motors, even though you had a Master’s certificate in diesel engines. The Navy wanted two-in-one. Well, I want three-in-one. If you agree to the assignment, I will appoint you to duty in the Zentrale (control room)… What do you say?”[82]

Göbeler jumped at the chance to work in the Control Room and expected other crewmen to be jealous of him, but was pleasantly surprised to find that was not the case.[83] “The skipper had already established a reputation for assigning men to do the job they fit best, rather than what the regulation book said.”[84] There were positions to fill aboard the U-505, Göbeler explained, because there were men who had been part of the original crew whom Löwe had concluded were not meshing as a team by the time the U-505 arrived at Lorient.[85]

ENDNOTES

[1] Hans Joachim Decker, “404 Days! The War Patrol Life of the German U-505,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings, March, 1960, Volume 86/3/865, p. 34

See also Timothy P. Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology.” Hunt and Kill: U-505 and the U-boat War in the Atlantic. Edited by Theodore P. Savas. New York City, New York: Savas Beatie, L.L.C. (2004), p. 224

[2] Decker, p. 34

Italicized words in quotes from Decker were italicized in the original text.

See also Lawrence Paterson, “From the Lion’s Roar to Blunted Axe: The Combat Patrols of U-505.” Hunt & Kill: U-505 and the U-Boat War. Edited by Thodore P. Savas. New York City, New York: Savas Beatie LLC (2004), p. 58

[3] Timothy P. Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505.” Hunt and Kill: U-505 and the U-boat War in the Atlantic. Edited by Theodore P. Savas. New York City, New York: Savas Beatie, L.L.C. (2004), p. 31

[4] Daniel V. Gallery, Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea: The Daring Capture of the U-505. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press (1956, 2001), p. 59