EXCERPT
On Thursday, November 18, 1943, forty-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Harald Lange (1903-1967) assumed command of the U-505.[1] He was the eldest commanding officer (C.O.) of a front-line U-boat in the Unterseebootswaffe (Submarine Fleet).[2] Lange had been born in Hamburg on Wednesday, December 23, 1903. Before the war, he had been a captain of a ship on the Hamburg-American Line. He had often taken the opportunity while in the U.S.A. to visit his first cousin and boyhood friend Johannes Messmer in Indiana, and while in New York City on one of his trips, he met his future wife, Karla, a nurse who had emigrated from Germany to America.[3] Since 1935, he had been a naval reservist, but he continued to work in the merchant marine until he was called up to active duty in 1939.[4]
His first command had been a barrage-and-mine sweeper.[5] Subsequently, from May of 1940 to September of 1941, he commanded a patrol boat in the western Baltic Sea.[6] During that period, in November of 1940, he depth-charged a British submarine in the Kattegat, and seems to have damaged her.[7] One year later, he joined the Unterseebootswaffe.[8] His first experience as a submariner on the war front was as First Watch Officer on the U-180, a Type ID-D1 U-boat with experimental propulsion: six Mercedes-Benz water-cooled diesel engines.[9] This propulsion system made the U-180 faster on the surface, but there was a drawback in that the engines generated excessive heat and smoke.[10] The Commanding Officer of the U-180 was Korvettenkapitän Werner Musenberg.[11] Lange was aboard the U-180 on her historic mission from February to July of 1943, when she went around the Union of South Africa into the Indian Ocean, where she rendezvoused with the Japanese Imperial Navy’s submarine I-29 to transfer an Indian ally of the Axis Powers, Forward Bloc Party leader Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), and his adjunct Abid Hassan; receive two Japanese naval engineers, Commanders Emi and Tomonaga; receive gold for the Japanese Embassy in Berlin; and exchange information and machinery.[12]
The U-180 picked up Bose and Hassan near Laboe, a village near the German naval base at Kiel, went around the Cape of Good Hope, sank the British tanker Corbis, and at a point in the Indian Ocean northeast of Madagascar rendezvoused with the Japanese submarine cruiser I-29, the C.O. of which was Commander Mokuri Yoichi.[13] German submariners transferred Bose and Hassan, who hoped to lead a rebellion in British India. The Axis Power submarines also exchanged “new weapons, new designs, and technical data,” commented Obermaschinist (Chief Engineer) Hermann Wien, whom Ms. Melanie Wiggins interviewed for U-boat Adventures.[14] Pharmacist’s Mate Otto Dietz told Ms. Wiggins this rendezvous took place on April 23, 1943.[15] “Without any problem, we exchanged some secret war materials, designs of new weapons like the V-2 rocket and the latest jet engine, and they gave us three small Japanese one-man submarines called ‘suicide subs.’”[16] The U-180 received two of the Japanese Imperial Navy’s shipbuilding engineers – Commander Emi and Commander Tomonaga – along with two-ton boxes, oddly-shaped crates, and fifty forty-pound bricks of pure gold from the larger Japanese submarine.[17] The gold was meant for the Japanese Embassy in Berlin.[18] Due to the presence of the Japanese officers and the valuable cargo, a German destroyer met the U-180 in the Bay of Biscay and escorted her to the mouth of the Gironde River in Bordeaux.[19] After five months at sea, she arrived at the Gironde River on July 9, 1943, motored down the river and arrived at the submarine bunker, where railroad cars were ready to receive the cargo and Gestapo (Secret State Police) as well as the Military Police provided security.[20] Lange assumed command of the U-180 on a temporary basis.[21] Subsequently, he attended the school for U-boat commanders before he replaced Zschech.[22]
According to Admiral Gallery, the crew should have been broken up and distributed amongst different U-boats (after the second commandant, Peter Zschech, commited suicide), but if the crew was to remain together, Lange was the perfect man to lead them.[23] “Lange was specially selected by U-boat headquarters as being the kind of a man who could handle the tough problem in leadership that they were dumping in his lap.”[24]
In technical knowledge he was fully qualified, having commanded a similar type boat. But much more important, he was a more mature man than most current U-boat skippers. He was a reserve Officer who in peace time had been first officer on a merchant ship. He had learned to handle men without benefit of rigid military discipline by winning confidence and exercising leadership. Not being a professional naval officer, he was perhaps more tolerant of human frailties than a [German Navy] regular might be, although he didn’t pamper his men and insisted that important things be done exactly right. But he understood what this crew had been through, was informal in his dealings with them, and made allowances in small things. He was a ‘big brother’ type, which was exactly what this crew needed if it were to be kept together.[25]
I would argue that Axel-Olaf Löwe and Peter Zschech were old enough to be contemporaries of the elder brothers of the U-505 crewmen, but Harald Lange was old enough to be their father or an uncle. Many of them were the sons of World War I veterans and he was a tad too young to have fought in the war so it is likely that more than one of the crewmen had fathers with younger brothers around his age, so, if anything, he had an avuncular relationship with his men.
Lange was a physically imposing man, who stood six feet tall when that was rare and had a baritone voice.[26] Göbeler recollected, “He was a very tall man, at least a head taller than the tallest man in our crew.”[27] One crewman later said, “He was a father figure who quickly gained our trust.”[28] Another said, “You could talk with him, he was very approachable.” [29] Göbeler recalled, “Like our first commander, Axel Loewe, his main concern was the good of the boat, everything else was small fish… he exuded an air of calm confidence.”[30]
To make it up to Göbeler about the short furlough, Meyer made him exempt from duty for four days and sent with a group of sailors to “Chateau Neuf,” a resort in a forest forty kilometers southeast of Lorient.[31] [Note that I have not been able to locate this resort, but the correct spelling would be Châteauneuf.”] Göbeler wrote, “The resort was absolute heaven! It had big double-sized rooms, huge swimming pool, a fully stocked bar, there was no standing in line for food, and, best of all, the delicious meals were served to us individually by a staff of beautiful young Mademoiselles.”[32]
According to Göbeler, “On November 30, 1943, we had our first official day of duty under our new skipper… In his deep baritone voice, he explained to us that we had no time for anything except getting the boat in shape. Therefore, there would be none of the infantry training that Zschech had deemed so necessary. He also wanted us to keep a very sharp eye on any shipyard workers doing repairs on our boat.”[33]
Lange had Zschech’s insignia painted over and replaced with his own seashell emblem.[34] According to Göbeler, Lange was a chain smoker of Jan Maat cigarettes and often used the sextant for celestial navigation himself (instead of having Chief Navigator Reinig do it).[35]
Göbeler wrote that on December 12th he received a bundle of letters from home that included love letters from multiple girls as well as letters from his mother, one of which related that two days after he went through Marburg on his trip back to Lorient the town had suffered an air raid that resulted, amongst other things, in the destruction of the train station and the train he would have been on if two days had not been deducted from his furlough.[36] By contrast, many of his crewmates, especially those from big cities like Berlin or Frankfurt-am-Main, had unhappy news from home about relatives and friends who suffered as a result of Allied air raids.[37]
According to Göbeler, new crewmembers who were straight out of Submarine School commented that the U-505 smelled as sweet as a bordello because the old hands had sprinkled Colibri perfume on themselves and their clothes and he retorted, “Wait until you have to empty the pail in the diesel room a few times… You’ll wish you still smelled like a Hure after that!”[38] The U-505 crewmen were certain that the French Resistance used some of the Lorient prostitutes to gather intelligence, so the submariners had taken to giving the girls false information, and yet, Göbeler noted, there were prostitutes in the group of civilian well-wishers who bade farewell to the U-505 on December 20th.[39] “Despite our precautions, however, there were a large number of mademoiselles waiting at the dock to see us off. Who knows, perhaps one of us talked in his sleep? For whatever reason, the girls of Lorient always seemed to know as much about our sailing schedule as we did.”[40]
Between the 20th and 21st of December, 1943, the U-505 departed on an abortive war cruise and turned back because of leak she sprung on her first practice dive.[41] According to James E. Wise, Jr., the “leak [was] in the cable lead-in for the multiple hydrophones.”[42] Göbeler recalled they tracked down the source of the gurgling and hissing sounds they heard and the leak that followed, and determined “the source of the leak” was “a faulty welding seam on a cable flange,” which was clearly another case of sabotage.[43] When the U-505 returned to Bumker Skorff, most of the crewmen boarded buses for Lager Lemp, but Göbeler was part of the Board Watch that remained aboard.[44] The U-505 underwent repairs from the 21st to the 24th of December, 1943.[45]
Göbeler related the men were disappointed to have another term aborted but were pleased they would be in port for Christmas.[46] Chief Navigator Reinig, who also kept the pay records for the U-505 crew, informed the crewmen that only two of them had any money left, but he persuaded the Finance Department to give the men advances on their next paychecks.[47] Göbeler believed the men spent every pfennig (the German equivalent of the English penny) on liqueurs.[48] The 2nd U-boat Flotilla arranged for a banquet on Christmas Eve that began at noon and when they U-505 crewmen heard by order of Lange drinking would have to stop at midnight, they knew they would set out on another war patrol on Christmas Day.[49]
On the last few patrols, three of the officers, Harold Lange, Second Watch Officer Kurt Brey, and Ingeniuer (Chief Engineer) Josef Hauser, had been members of the N.S.D.A.P before joining the Kriegsmarine.[50] Hauser may have been a true believer in the Nazi Party. However, the older two men probably joined the party for more cynical or practical reasons, to advance their civilian careers before the outbreak of the war. Lange had joined the N.S.D.A.P. as member 3,450,040 on Tuesday, May 1, 1934.[51] For context, recall that this was one year after head-of-state von Hindenburg appointed N.S.D.A.P. Führer Adolf Hitler chief-of-state as Chancellor. Lange was definitely a member of the party, but he was no foaming at the mouth advocate of Hitler’s National Socialism. Timothy Mulligan reports that someone who served with Lange on the U-180 was shocked to learn Lange had had a Nazi Party member.[52] Brey, a commercial salesman, joined the N.S.D.A.P. as member 7,381,657 in January of 1940, when he was thirty-three years old.[53] It should be noted, though, that while most of the young men who served on board the U-505 were not actual N.S.D.A.P. members, and even the three officers who were party members on the last patrol of the U-505 legally had to let their party membership become dormant, the longer the war raged and the Nazi Party remained in power, the harder it was for the German Navy to resist direct party control, and because all youth had to join the Hitler Youth there is no question that Nazi views infiltrated all ranks.
Göbeler lamented, “Remembering the sense of brotherhood we felt for each other in our crowded little steel cave makes me angry to hear thoughtless people refer to us as ‘Nazi submariners.’ Who were the Nazis aboard our submarine? I never met one. When we were on duty, we followed the course set by our skipper. When we were off duty, we tried to enjoy ourselves, read letters from our loved ones, and dreamed of the day peace would return to our homeland. In this way, we were identical to the sailors from every nation who faced the hazards of war and the sea during those years. Party members or not, we performed our duties with professionalism and honor. American Admiral Chester Nimitz knew this when he put his career on the line to defend the Kriegsmarine’s wartime conduct during the Nuremburg Trials.”[54]
Of course, many lies have been told about the men of Germany’s armed forces during World War II. Some of these storytellers are Germans themselves who surely knew better, but who, of their own motives perpetuate these lies. They create the impression that there were a few ‘bad’ Germans—inhuman Nazi monsters who wanted to conquer the world, and the ‘good’ Germans—gentle little lambs who were against the Nazis and wanted peace, but were forced to fight against their will. Naturally, they always happen to be members of the second group.[55]
All of this is pure self-serving fantasy! Whether one was a Party member or not didn’t matter a bit. Everyone I knew, without exception, was willing and eager to fight. The reasons were quite simple. First and foremost, our country was literally in a life or death struggle with Soviet communism. Depending upon our success on the battlefield, our nation was ‘to be or not to be.’ Like Admiral Dönitz told us many times, we were fighting to save our country, not for a particular leader or political party. Second, almost everyone had family members who had been killed in the bombings or on the battlefield. We wanted to avenge ourselves against the gangsters who had brought about their deaths. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a depth charge exploding over your head did not care about your politics or religion. So, doing your duty to the best of one’s ability was the best means of self-preservation.[56]
On Saturday, December 25, 1943 (Christmas Day), the U-505 left Lorient, only to be directed on the 28th to rescue survivors of the German torpedo boat T-25, which had been sunk by the British in the Bay of Biscay during a battle between German torpedo boats and British destroyers.[57] According to Admiral Gallery, after surfacing to conduct a five-hour-long search, the U-505 picked up thirty-three survivors from nine lifeboats.[58] One of those survivors was Korvettenkapitän (Corvette-Captain, the equivalent of a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy) Wirich von Gartzen.[59] The survivors of the T-25 recorded a short account of their rescue by the U-505 and signed their names in the U-505’s guest book.[60] Admiral Gallery copied their entry in Chapter 14 of Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea: The Daring Capture of the U-505.[61] [Ironically, the T-25 had rescued survivors of the U-106, which was part of the 2nd U-boat Flotilla like the U-505, at nearly the same spot in the Bay of Biscay five months previously.[62]] Instead of going to Lorient, the U-505 went to another Breton seaport, Brest, where she arrived on January 2, 1944.[63]
Admiral Gallery related that on New Year’s Day of 1944, the U-505 War Diary had notations that an inrush of water in the Electric Motor Room had caused a short circuit that sparked a fire they had to put out with fire extinguishers.[64] A main propulsion motor burned out.[65] According to Mulligan, while docking, a starboard side diving plane and shaft were damaged.[66] The U-505 had gone a total of 865 nautical miles: 651 nautical miles surfaced (75.3%) and 214 submerged (24.7%).[67] The boat was laid up in the dockyard for ten weeks.[68] From the 2nd of January to the 16th of March, 1944, the U-505 received new crewmen and three of the new T-5 acoustic homing torpedoes.[69]
Decker stated, “On the 28th we got orders for a special rescue mission nearby. British light cruisers had sunk our torpedo boat, T-25. We were going to try to rescue the crew. That night in the middle of the Biscay, our small searchlight playing over the water, we recued 32 crew members and the captain of the T-25. We arrived with them at Brest on 2 January 1944. There, as luck would have it, we burned up our port maneuvering controller and the armature of the port main motor. This called for a major repair job in one of the Brest U-Boat bunkers. At the end of January the repairs were completed. Our exec, Meyer, took the conn when we moved over to another bunker. Then on our way into the repair bunker for inspection, we crashed again, ripping off the after port diving plane and bending the port shaft. This meant another month in port. We had given up hope of getting out long before this, though.”[70]
Göbeler’s Account of Rescuing the T-25 Crewmen
According to Göbeler, the U-505 set out with three minesweepers as escorts on December 25th and the test dive went well but when they resurfaced and engaged the diesel engines, the starboard diesel engine burst into flames.[71] They extinguished the fire, blew the smoke out of the U-boat, and Lange submerged.[72] Diesel Chief Petty Officer Otto Fricke was able to fix the engine by that evening.[73] The men spit on the engine for good luck.[74] Around two o’clock in the afternoon on December 28th, the U-505 heard a battle at sea and at 7:10 p.m. the U-505 was one of four U-boats that received orders to proceed to Sea Square BE6938.[75] At 8:42 p.m., the U-505 received more detailed orders that related a group of German destroyers and torpedo boats had been in a battle with a superior force of British warships in Sea Square BE6930, as a result of which the destroyer Z-27 was “dead in the water” in Sea Square BE3938.[76] [Note that in the Battle of the Bay of Biscay, which took place on December 28, 1943, two British Royal Navy light armored cruisers, the H.M.S. Glasgow and the H.M.S. Enterprise engaged the German Navy destroyer Z-27 and a flotilla of torpedo boats, including, which were supposed to escort the German blockade runner Alsterufer back to port.[77] The victorious British cruisers sank the destroyer Z-27 and the torpedo boats T-25 and T-26.[78]] The U-505 entered Sea Square BE3938 early on December 29th and around 1:40 a.m. a red flare astern of the U-505 alerted the men on watch that two German sailors (from the surface fleet) in pipe boats, which Göbeler explained were “one-man life rafts designed to help men survive winter sea conditions.”[79] To warm them up, the U-505 crewmen put them in the Electric Motor Room to warm up, stripped off their clothing, rubbed them dry, gave them warm clothes to wear, and out them in bunks.[80] Lange stood on the bridge himself, chain-smoking, as he led the U-505’s part of the search, which took the form of a zig-zag pattern through the sea square as ten-foot-tall swells crashed over the Upper Deck.[81]
Before sunrise, one of the men on watch on the bridge noticed an assembly of seven life rafts that had been lashed together.[82] Lange moved the U-505 in such a way that the Conning Tower would shelter the men before they were pulled out of the sea.[83] The last man to be rescued was T-25 skipper Wirich von Gartzen, whose torpedo boat had earlier rescued crewmen from the U-106.[84] At 5:45 a.m., another red flare went off on the portside of the U-505’s bow, but by the time she arrived in the area, whomever had fired the flare was gone.[85] Conditions became so bad that Lange dove to forty meters beneath the surface.[86] About 9:30 a.m., Lange took the U-505 up to periscope surface and cursed “Verdammte Tommies!” (“Damned Tommies!”).[87] He later explained he saw the U-505 pass a sizable number of empty life vests.[88] While Lange used the attack periscope to look for survivors on the surface, von Gartzen used the navigation periscope.[89] Von Gartzen checked the condition of each of his men before he allowed himself to rest.[90]
Before dusk, the U-505 surfaced, someone spotted a light, and Lange ordered, “Rettungskommando aud due Brücke!” (“Rescue crew to the bridge!”).[91] A lookout discovered two rafts which held a total of five men.[92] These men were too weak to catch a line, so the rescue crew used hooks to pull the lifeboats up.[93] The rescue crew lifted the men onto the Upper Deck and then took them within the U-505, and placed them between the diesel engines to warm up.[94] The U-505 had saved thirty four sailors from the surface fleet.[95]
Lange took the dangerous step of turning on the U-505’s searchlights overnight.[96] Later that night, the U-505 received a radio message that emergency lights had been spotted in three different Sea Squares.[97] Still later, the U-505 received a second radio message that a neutral Irish merchantman was searching for survivors.[98] [Éire (the Republic of Ireland) had only recently gained independence from the United Kingdom and was neutral during the Second Great World War.] Around eight o’clock that night, the U-505 spotted the Irish steamship, concluded the Irishmen were being diligent in conducting their search for survivors, and avoided contact.[99]
Early on the morning of December 30th, the men aboard the U-505 heard two bombs dropped from aircraft explode in what Göbeler described the “moderate distance,” which rattled the surface fleet men, but the U-505 crew took with nonchalance.[100] Before sunrise, the U-505 attempted to surface to recharge the batteries, but an alarm went off that signaled an aircraft’s approach, with the result that the U-505 dove and did not resurface until nightfall, by which point the presence of the extra men had brought the carbon dioxide to a dangerous level and the human waste buckets were long past needing to be dumped overboard.[101] That night, the U-505 received a radio message from the Chief of U-boat Western Command to proceed with the passengers to destination codenamed Eisbär (literally meaning “Icebear,” which is what Germans call polar bears).[102] This was the Breton port-city of Brest, which was home to the 1st and 9th U-boat Flotillas.[103] By this point, several T-25 crewmen were suffering from diarrhea, catarrhs and other inflammations, and cysts.[104] Lange mostly traveled to Brest submerged, surfacing only to get fresh air, dump human waste buckets overboard, pump out the bilges, and check the stars.[105] Around noon on January 1, 1944, the U-505 surfaced so Chief Navigator Reinig in order to fix the boat’s position with the sextant only for him to realize they were thirty miles off course.[106] Lange confirmed the accuracy of Reinig’s computations and they later discovered the direction finder was malfunctioning.[107] They were twelve hours out from Brest and radioed for help.[108] The 1st U-boat Flotilla used beacon fires and searchlights to help the U-505 reach Brest.[109]
According to Göbeler, when the U-505 arrived in the outer harbor of Brest, a barge full of war correspondents greeted them, and whilst the journalists were onboard the U-505 the electrical fire occurred.[110]
They were getting some fine footage of the sardine can conditions inside our boat when suddenly, a blinding lightning-like flash erupted from the electric motor room. A huge blue-white bolt of electricity was arcing out from the starboard motor. A great cloud of white smoke, then evil-smelling black smoke, billowed from the motor. Moments later, flames began licking up from the motor housing.[111]
This dramatic electrical display caused an immediate panic among the war correspondents, who stampeded like a herd of frightened cattle toward the control room. The T-25 survivors joined them when the choking cloud of smoke began to make its way through the boat. We crewmen knew immediately what had happened because it had happened before: it was another short in our electrical control panel. The boys in the motor room used the CO2 fire extinguishers to good effect, and within a few minutes the fire was out. The Diesel Chief switched the Jumbos [as Göbeler translated the nickname for the diesels engines] to internal air intake. Before long, the big nine-cylinder engines had inhaled all of the smoke. It took a while before our stoic attitudes had any effect on our guests, though. The lingering odor of burned rubber, and our guests’ nervousness, persisted for some time.[112]
Two small steam-powered tugboats guided the U-505 through the outer harbor into the inner harbor, toward the complex of U-boat pens.[113] About noontime, the U-505 reached the inner harbor, the tugboats went to the moorings where they belonged, and the U-505 went to the pier before Bunker C-1.[114] The commanding officers of both the 1st U-boat Flotilla and Torpedo Boat Flotilla, staff officers, sailors, and soldiers were present to receive them, as was a naval band.[115] A group of T-25 crewmen who were overeager to get out of the U-505 scrambled up the ladder from the Control Room into the Conning Tower to get up and out onto the Bridge, one of whom fell onto and broke the helmsman’s steering mechanism.[116] Consequently, the U-505 made a starboard swerve into the pier and broke off one of her own diving planes.[117]
Later that afternoon, U-505 was lifted up on rails into dry dock for a close inspection. There, it was discovered that our boat’s diving plane shaft had been bent, necessitating at least two weeks for repair. It took two full days of backbreaking labor just to extract the shaft from its housing. Once out, a committee of shipyard engineers decided the shaft was beyond repair and had to be replaced. Unfortunately, there was no spare shafts to be found either in Brest or Lorient. Until another one could be found, U-505 was stuck in port.[118]
Note that Mulligan agreed with Göbeler that it was a starboard diving plane that broke off, whereas Decker had stated it was the aft portside diving plane that broke off.
Lange heard about a spare diving plane shaft at Bordeaux and dispatched Göbeler to retrieve it.[119] Göbeler took his authorized for a sidearm to the arsenal and speculated whether he would be given a Luger or a Walther only to be presented with a “an enormous, ancient-looking French revolver.”[120] He took this gun back to the barracks and his friend Willi drunkenly played with it as if he was an American cowboy, and Göbeler wrestled with him it.[121] “Willi’s finger was on the trigger and before we knew it, the old pistol let loose with a tremendous BANG!” [122] Nobody was hurt, but the bullet went through the bathroom wall and took a chip out of the toilet. [123] Acting quickly to avoid anyone going to the brig, an artillery mechanic who bunked with them found a bullet that fit the pistol, they found a new cartridge, they disguised the hole in the wall with a pillow, someone blew away the smoke that wafted from the gun barrel, and then wiped the gun with a rag.[124] Engineering Officer Josef Hauser, whom Göbeler called the Raccoon, entered and demanded to know who fired a shot. [125] The enlisted men insisted Göbeler’s sidearm had not been fired. [126] He demanded to know if they had not fired the shot, who had and one of the men pointed to a sailor who was running across the barracks square.[127] Hauser dismissed this accusation as ridiculous but merely frowned at them before he left.[128] Willi spent the rest of the night getting the wall and toilet fixed.[129]
At six o’clock the next morning, he went to the carpool where he was assigned a truck and two drivers whom, he noted, were armed with “more respectable weapons than my embarrassing antique,” and they loaded the truck with “several spare gas cans.”[130] To avoid the prospect of an ambush by partisans on a route where several ambushes had taken place, they were warned to only travel during daylight hours.[131] Göbeler and the two drivers switched places at the steering wheel every 150 kilometers and they stayed overnight at “a small anti-aircraft base.”[132] In “a small forest near La Rochelle… some men in civilian clothes suddenly appeared and opened fire” but none of their shots touched the truck.[133] When they arrived at the German submarine base at Bordeaux, they were informed the diving plane shaft “was a few hundredths of an inch too thick and would need to be machined down on a giant lathe” which would take two or three days.[134] The three men rapidly set out for the “entertainment district” without hesitation and Göbeler initially thought his naval uniform was what drew attention to him at the tavern where he stopped to eat only to find out later “the establishment was off-limits to German personnel.”[135] According to Göbeler, he had an affair with a young housewife who approached him at the tavern and brought him back to her house, unbeknownst to her husband, whom he described as grotesquely fat and a “foolish old man.”[136] It does not seem to have occurred to Göbeler that some readers might find it troubling that he depicted himself as being proud of making a cuckold of another man.
About noontime on the third day in Bordeaux, Göbeler and the other two men loaded the diving plane shaft and spare parts and the truck.[137] They stayed overnight with a Panzer unit on the way back to Lorient.[138] When they reached Lorient, Göbeler turned in his sidearm, and Lange assembled the U-505 crew to tell them to keep a sharp eye on the shipyard workers, to examine everything they brought aboard the U-505, and keep track of their comings and goings as they installed the replacement shaft.[139] When they finished with the installation of the replacement diving plane shaft, a process that took a day-and-a-half, they discovered multiple battery cells also needed to be replaced, which caused another delay of several days.[140]
Göbeler recalled the Soldatenheim (Soldier’s Home) at Brest “was really first class. There were all sorts of activities to be enjoyed there. An all-girl band, for some reason, stands out in my memory.”[141]
My favorite place for fun, however, was the Rue de Pasteur in downtown Brest. It had all of the attractions that a young sailor in port looks for. To our surprise, we met a number of girls we remembered from Lorient, back in the days before the bombs turned that city into a ghost town. We spent the months of January and February there in Brest, working hard in the daytime, and exerting ourselves even more at night.[142]
The U-505 crewmen were short of money, and were fortunate that the brother-in-law of Torpedo Mechanic Chief Petty Officer Hermann Knöss “was in charge of refitting boats there in Brest. Being a veteran of the U-boat service in World War I, he understood the sorts of things a submariner in port needs to be happy. Through him, we received cartons of cigarettes, boxes of Scho-ka-kola chocolates, and most prized of all, Colibri deodorant and cologne. These commodities kept us quite popular with the ladies of Rue de Pasteur, despite our lack of money.” Göbeler also wrote in his memoirs that he became involved in a menáge à trois with two young women he met in Brest in February.[143]
Otto Dietz Joins the U-505 Crew
When Lange went to the sick bay in Brest, he ran into Sanistaatsmaat (Pharmacist’s Mate) Otto Dietz, whom Lange had met aboard the U-180, on which Lange had been the Executive Officer.[144] Dietz later joked Lange was there to “chase one of the nurses” but in reality he was there because the U-505 had rescued survivors from the aforementioned sinking of a German torpedo boat and brought them back to Brest.[145] [Note that Ms. Wiggins stated “Lange’s U-boat had picked up thirty-six survivors of a German torpedo boat in the Bay of Biscay.”[146] By contrast, Admiral Gallery, Decker, and Dr. Mulligan stated there were thirty-three survivors and Göbeler stated there were thirty-four.] When Dietz explained to Lange that he was bored at the headquarters of the 9th U-Boat Flotilla, Lange offered to make him Pharmacist’s Mate of the U-505.[147]
Otto Dietz had joined the Kriegsmarine in 1939 at the age of seventeen and studied in the Naval Medical School at Wilhelmshaven.[148] He thereafter served aboard the submarine repair boat Cameroon, and after some pleasant days spent in German-occupied Norway, he volunteered to enter the Submarine Fleet.[149] Subsequently, he served aboard the U-180.[150] In British waters, they heard radio interviews of Führer Adolph Hitler conducted by the aforementioned Subhas Chandra Bose and his aide Abid Hassan.[151] Dietz commented, “These were supposedly live interviews, but they had been recorded and rebroadcast to make people think they were still in Germany.”[152] Later, Dietz met Bose, and Bose revealed after he interviewed Hitler, he no longer believed Germany would win the war.[153]
“After the long patrol, we all tried to enjoy life as much as possible, and because I got drunk and missed the daily test dive, they punished me very hard,” Dietz told Ms. Wiggins.[154] His punishment was severe. After a few days in the stockade, he went to the Russian Front in a Heer punishment battalion.[155] A Soviet sniper shot him in the chest, and he spent the rest of 1943 in a hospital near the frontlines.[156] When he recovered his health, he was dispatched, after a demotion, to work in the sick bay at the headquarters of the 9th U-boat Flotilla in the Breton port-city of Brest, where Lange found him.[157]
There is a picture of Dietz on page 211 of Steel Boat, Iron Hearts. Göbeler wrote, “It was during this period that someone who would become of my closest, life-long friends were transferred to our crew… Otto Dietz… and I immediately became good friends, and we remained so until his death in May of 1994.”[158] Göbeler related that Dietz took him to all the best night life spots were in Brest, and their favorite haunt was Le Cheval Blanc (“The White Horse”), which was the last tavern before the drawbridge they had to cross when they returned to the naval base.[159] “It was a mysterious place, especially popular among those elements living on the fringes of proper society. While most of Europe was starving, this place was always filled with the most exotic of goods: Jamaican rum, Japanese sake, pork hams, fresh butter by the hundred-weight, and every imaginable delicacy that most people could only dream about. There was a whiff of danger about the place, and I was always excited and a bit uneasy when we were there.”[160]
Unlike me, Otto seemed to be in his natural element in Le Cheval Blanc. He was always the adventurous leader and I was always his wary, sometimes reluctant, follower…[161]
Göbeler recounted that one night Dietz whispered something to the bartender, who appraised Göbeler with a skeptical eye, moved some baskets to uncover a trapdoor, and then led them downstairs.[162] It quickly became apparent to Göbeler that the basement of Le Cheval Blanc was a black market bazaar.[163] “A thick haze of strange, spicy-smelling smoke filled the room, and I could see dozens of people crowded about tables, drinking, gambling, and trading in every conceivable type of goods. A babble of every language I had ever heard, and a few I hadn’t, filled the room.”[164]
It took some prompting from Dietz for Göbeler to purchase anything, because Göbeler was uneasy and his inclination was simply to stand against a cold wall and observe what was going on, but he purchased “a few packs of Gaulloise black tobacco cigarettes” before a tumult above caused everyone in the basement to conclude the place was being raided by the Military Police.[165] In a panic, the black market merchants frantically grabbed their wares.[166] Dietz grabbed Göbeler, pulled aside what looked like a heavy cabinet to reveal a secret passageway that led to a back alley, glanced both ways down the alley, and ran to the main street “as if the devil himself was chasing us.”[167] On the main street, they saw the drawbridge which was not like a castle drawbridge with a single bridge that that pulls upward into a castle gatehouse but like the drawbridges of Chicago which split in half with two halves that each turn upward – as seen in The Blues Brothers (1980) – was turning upward.[168] Dietz and Göbeler leapt across the widening gap and ran all the way back to the barracks.[169]
The Last War Patrol of the U-505
On Thursday, March 16, 1944, the U-505 departed Brest on her twelfth and last patrol for the Kriegsmarine.[170] Decker reflected, “Only a few people saw us off. There was no band, there were no hurrahs, and no flowers this time. In fact, many of us wondered if whether we would ever again see those bright stars that shone overhead on our way out.”[171] She carried a crew of fifty-nine: five officers, four chief petty officers, thirteen petty officers, and thirty-seven non-rated enlisted men.[172] Her operational area was to be an area off the west coast of Africa between the port city of Freetown and Monrovia.[173] Göbeler wrote that the U-505 crew had heard rumors that while their boat was undergoing repairs for ten weeks in Brest, the Unterseebootswaffe had lost around forty-eight U-boats, and calculated as a result that the chances of them making it back to port were only about 30%.[174]
Personally, I had no qualms about our chances. Perhaps I was merely fooling myself, but at the time, I had absolutely no doubt that we would return safely from this patrol. Not only that, I still had total faith that Germany would win the war, I was far from alone in this belief. We placed most of our hopes on the new generation of weapons our scientists were developing like rockets, jets, and guided missiles. Of course, my comrades and I spent many hours trading scuttlebutt about the new U-boats, too. It was said they could travel underwater indefinitely and could sail circles around the fastest destroyers. I dreamed of the day when our new boats would sweep the ocean clean of the hated enemy and bring a victorious end to the war.[175]
German propaganda called these advanced weapons Wunderwaffe (Miracle-weapons) and English-speakers have often called them “Wonder Weapons.” Fortunately, some of these Wonder Weapons remained prototypes that never saw combat and others only reached the battlefield too late in the war and too few in number to turn the tide back in favor of Nazi Germany.
At Brest, the U-505 had taken aboard T-5 Zaunkönig (“Wren”) acoustic-homing torpedoes.[176] Göbeler wrote, “These complex, electrically-propelled eels were nicknamed ‘Destroyer Killers’ because, it was hoped, we could fire them in the general direction of the enemy escorts and they would automatically chase down our tormentors. Unfortunately, they contained delicate instrumentation that required constant attention and maintenance from the torpedo mechanics. Every 24 hours they had to be withdrawn from the tubes, dried, and adjusted. Lamentably, since the fore and aft torpedo rooms doubled as our crew’s sleeping quarters, the mechanics had to fold up our bunks out of the way in order to perform their daily maintenance on the torpedoes. We quickly learned to sleep sitting, or even standing upright. Even so, the days and nights began to merge into a sleep-deprived blur.”[177]
Göbeler continued to spend his free time reading English books.[178] Inspired by Jack London, his daydreams were full of the mountains and forests of Alaska. [179] Much to his regret, some of his crewmates pronounce the word “queen” because he found the q consonant difficult to pronounce, and they began to address him as “Queen.”[180] Even Lange did it a couple of times before the crew grew tired of the joke.[181]
Over the two day period of the 19th and 20th of March, 1944, the U-505 had to crash-drive five times to avoid aircraft due to Naxos warnings, while transiting through the Bay of Biscay.[182] Admiral Gallery pointed out that to get through the Bay of Biscay took the U-505 twelve days on this cruise, as she ran submerged for 228 hours and surfaced for sixty hours, whereas the first time the U-505 went to the Freetown area, under Löwe, she had run submerged for thirty-four hours and surfaced for 258 hours for the first twelve days of that cruise.[183] “This tells an eloquent story of how the tide had turned in the meantime. Submarines were no longer prowling surface raiders that submerged occasionally. They were underwater fugitives that popped up for brief periods when they hoped the coast was clear.”[184]
Decker recalled that the U-505 reached open water on Tuesday, March 21, 1944.[185] According to him, on Thursday, March 23, 1944, the U-505 rendezvoused with the U-154 to transfer to her radio codes.[186] “We learned from her that U-66 had had great luck a few days earlier just to the south, sinking five freighters in no time at all. The area was now under heavy search. We heard, too, for the first time of the new Allied hunter-killer groups, composed of small aircraft carriers and destroyers, that were raising havoc with our U-Boats.” [187]
Göbeler and Mulligan related a similar story. According to them, on Friday, April 7, 1944, the outbound U-505 rendezvoused with the inbound U-123 to transfer cipher keys, having received an order to do so on April 4th.[188] Oberleutnant zue See Horst von Schröter (1919-2006), who had formerly been X.O. of the U-123 whilst Korvettenkapitän Reinhard Hardegen (1913-2018) was C.O., was now C.O. himself.[189] [Note that later in 1944, when the Allies liberated France, the U-223 was unable to evacuate to Germany with the other U-boats based in France because she was stuck in dry dock in Lorient due to a lack of batteries for her electric motors, and in the postwar years the French Navy rechristened her the Blaison.[190] She served the French Navy until 1953, when she was scrapped. [191]] The U-505 X.O., Paul Meyer rowed over to the U-123 and back over the course of half an hour.[192]
As the U-505 entered warmer waters without encountering targets, the crewmembers began to lose their tempers.[193] Göbeler recalled, “Soon, we began to see an increase in arguments and scuffles. We knew this was another onset of the well-known Blechkoller, the mild sort pf madness that gripped submarine crews when boredom and overcrowding became unbearable.”[194]
Little did Lange know that on April 9th and 10th, Hunter/Killer Task Group 22.3, under the command of Captain Daniel V. Gallery, sank two U-boats of the 2nd U-boat Flotilla in the area through which the U-505 had just passed.[195] On Monday, April 24th, Lange began searching for viable targets in his operational area, as far eastward as Grand Bassam on the Ivory Coast, then checked Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia; Harpers Village (now simply known as Harper), the capital of Maryland County, Liberia; Port-Bouët, Ivory Coast; and Grand-Lahou, Ivory Coast; but found nothing.[196] Between the 24th of April and the 23rd of May, 1944, the U-505 encountered few possible targets and attacked none of them.[197]
The U-505 encountered no targets for a whole month and the one ship it did encounter was a 9,000-ton neutral Portuguese passenger ship.[198] Lange chose to surface, though, thirty-five miles behind the passenger ship to test the U-505’s newly-installed FuMO radar and once they raised its antenna Lange and the crew were disappointed to discover it did not detect the presence of the huge vessel.[199]
Lange ran the U-505 silently by turning off the diesel engines and drifted along with the current.[200] Once every hour, Lange would take the U-505 up to periscope depth and look for targets.[201] He had the crewmen lay silently in their bunks when they were off-duty to keep down noise and conserve oxygen consumption.[202] On April 27th, they drifted past Monrovia and only saw a fishing fleet of twenty single-masted sailboats.[203]
One of the problems that hamstrung the U-505 was that Torpedo Tube II had a jammed bow-cap.[204] Consequently, they could not dive deeper than twenty meters beneath the surface.[205]
Several mechanical systems broke down, and Lange could have returned to base but chose instead to have them repaired at sea.[206] While Lange was patrolling off Las Palmas, he ran at periscope depth during the day and ran sat the surface at night.[207] In early May, the Naxos device failed.[208] Lange had two men don artificial lungs and dive to three meters beneath the surface to fix the Torpedo Tube II outer hatch, a job which took twenty hours to complete.[209] On May 24th, Lange concluded he should begin the dangerous trip back to home port.[210] [According to Decker, the U-505 began to return to port on May 27th.[211]] If Hunter/Killer Task Group 22.3 had not captured the U-505 on Sunday, June 4, 1944, Lange would have returned to base without having sunk anything, but his crew would have received credit for ninety days on the frontline and would no longer be an embarrassment to the 2nd U-boat Flotilla.[212]
Between the 30th of May and the 2nd of June, 1944, the U-505 had to crash-dive eight times to avoid aircraft after Naxos and Wanze warnings.[213] According to Göbeler, as the U-505 approached Monrovia again they had several close calls with bombers and flying boats before they realized both the FuMO and the Naxos devices were malfunctioning.[214] Other devices began to break down, as well, and they were unsure if these were further examples of sabotage or signs of declining quality in war material, but they were able to fix the Naxos, although it was not restored to fully functioning condition.[215]
Over the night of May 29th/30th the U-boat had to dive to evade aircraft.[216] The first time Lange dove was at 10:16 p.m. after a Naxos warning about an approaching aircraft.[217] For the rest of the night, almost every time he re-surfaced to re-charge his batteries, the Naxos warned again about approaching aircraft, with the result that the U-505’s batteries had less and less power.[218] Göbeler recalled, “The air inside the boat grew so stale we were forced to don the hated re-breathing devices to stay alive. Even worse, our battery charge was reaching a critically low level. We had to get out of the area, but how?”[219]
Consequently, on Tuesday, May 30, 1944, Lange set course to go due east toward French West Africa and headed east for two days, eighty-four miles in forty-two hours, before he switched course back northward.[220] At this point he thought the aircraft carrier task group that was after him was about 300 miles away, but it was actually about 600 miles away, to the southwest, as Captain Gallery later realized.[221]
For the next five days, Lange dove over and over again because of Naxos warnings.[222] He guessed that the Naxos warnings he received were set off by carrier-based aircraft rather than shore-based aircraft, but he was mistaken.[223] The U-505 was crossing under the air-lane between South America and Africa, which was full of U.S. Army Air Force transports.[224] By noon on May 31st, the batteries were so depleted that Lange was in danger of running out of electric power entirely and had to resurface for three-quarters of an hour and run at top speed to recharge the batteries to run submerged until nightfall.[225]
Around eight o’clock in the night on May 31st, Lange recorded the U-505 heard depth charges dropped from aircraft “in the far distance.”[226] Gallery later observed his planes were 550 miles away at this point.[227] At midnight, the U-505 resurfaced for six hours to recharge batteries.[228] Lange switched course northward before he re-submerged to stay parallel with the West African coastline.[229] By noon on June 1st, Hunter/Killer Task Group 22.3 was 420 miles southwest of the U-505.[230] Lange was northbound, about sixty miles off the coast of Cape Blanco, resurfaced around midnight, only to dive an hour later due to a Naxos warning, and resurfaced at 3:30 a.m., only to dive sixteen minutes later due to a second Naxos warning.[231] At that point, Gallery’s planes were 280 miles away to the southwest.[232]
Decker and Göbeler gave diametrically opposing versions of what happened on Friday, June 2, 1944. According to Decker, “On 2 June Lange tried to stay on the surface longer than usual to bring the batteries up to full charge.”[233] By contrast, according to Göbeler, from 3:30 a.m. onward on June 2nd, Lange was forced to dive every time he ran at the surface to charge his batteries and air out his sub.[234]
At 3:15 a.m. on June 3rd, Lange recorded aircraft depth charges “in the far distance.”[235] At this point, Gallery later commented, his planes were bombing a “noisy sonobuoy at least sixty miles away.”[236] By 1:38 p.m. on June 3rd, Lange had spent 45 ¼ of the past 48 hours submerged.[237] Lange was forced to resurface in broad daylight for two hours and two minutes to recharge his batteries, get his men fresh air, and fill his compressed air tanks.[238] According to Göbeler, Lange spent those two hours at the surface running at full-speed toward the coast of West Africa, hoping to outrun the aircraft carrier they had surmised was chasing them.[239] That night, the U-505 ran at the surface for four hours until 2:13 a.m. on June 4th.[240] According to Decker, Lange started to maneuver the U-505 toward the “Cape Verde Islands in order to shorten the homeward trip.”[241] Neither of them knew it, but just after Lange dove, one of Gallery’s planes flew over that exact spot.[242] Before Task Group 22.3 captured the U-505 on the morning of Sunday, June 4, 1944, at a point 150 west of Cape Blanco, she had gone 7,977 nautical miles: 6,044 nautical miles surfaced (75.8%) and 1,933 submerged (24.2%).[243]
Figure 1 U-505 Machinist Hans Goebeler wrote the autobiography Steel Boats, Iron Hearts (with help from Dr. John Vanzo). Oral history interviews Studs Terkel conducted with Goebeler and James Sanders, a junior flight officer on the U.S.S. Guadalcanal – the flagship of the task group which captured the U-505 – were published in The Good War and My American Century. One of the German submariners Melanie Wiggins interviewed for U-Boat Adventures Firsthand Accounts from World War II was U-505 Pharmacist’s Mate Otto Dietz.
I purchased the books consulted at the U-505 Gift Shop at the Museum of Science and Industry, from Amazon.com, and at O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd. Founded in 1882, O’Gara & Wilson was the oldest bookshop in Chicago, and was formerly located on 57th Street in Hyde Park, but is now located in Chesterton, Indiana.
ENDNOTES
[1] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
See also Decker, p. 44
[2] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[3] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[4] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[5] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[6] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[7] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[8] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[9] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[10] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[11] Wiggins, p. 102
[12] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
See also pages Melanie Wiggins, U-boat Adventures: Firsthand Accounts from World War II. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press (1999), pages 92-98
[13] Wiggins, pages 92-97 and 103
[14] Wiggins, p. 97
Born in 1916, Wien volunteered to join the Reichsmarine and served aboard torpedo boats. In 1937, he volunteered to serve in the new Unterseebootswaffe.
[15] Wiggins, p. 103
[16] Wiggins, p. 103
[17] Wiggins, pages 97 and 98
[18] Wiggins, p. 103
[19] Wiggins, pages 99 and 100
[20] Wiggins, p. 100
[21] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[22] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[23] Gallery, p. 233
[24] Gallery, p. 233
[25] Gallery, pages 233-234
[26] Göbeler, pages 186 and 188
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 37
[27] Göbeler, p. 188
[28] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” pages 37 and 239 Endnote 31
[29] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” pages 37 and 239 Endnote 31
[30] Göbeler, pages 186-189
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[31] Göbeler, pages 187 and 188
[32] Göbeler, p. 188
[33] Göbeler, pages 188 and 189
[34] Göbeler, p. 190
[35] Göbeler, pages 193, 195, and 200
[36] Göbeler, p. 190
[37] Göbeler, p. 190
[38] Göbeler, p. 191
[39] Göbeler, p. 191
[40] Göbeler, p. 191
[41] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[42] Wise, U-505: The Final Journey, p. 64
[43] Göbeler, p. 191
[44] Göbeler, p. 192
[45] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[46] Göbeler, p. 192
[47] Göbeler, p. 192
[48] Göbeler, p. 192
[49] Göbeler, p. 192
[50] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate,” p. 38
[51] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate,” p. 38
[52] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate,” p. 39
[53] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate,” p. 38
[54] Göbeler, p. 218
[55] Göbeler, p. 218
[56] Göbeler, p. 218
[57] Gallery, p. 234
See also Decker, p. 44
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 39
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
See also Wise, U-505: The Final Journey, p. 64
[58] Gallery, pages 234-236
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 39
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[59] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[60] Gallery, p. 235
[61] Gallery, pages 235 and 236
[62] Göbeler, p. 196
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 39
[63] Gallery, p. 236
See also Decker, p. 44
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 39
[64] Gallery, p. 236
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[65] Gallery, p. 236
[66] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[67] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[68] Gallery, p. 236
[69] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[70] Decker, p. 44
[71] Göbeler, p. 192
[72] Göbeler, p. 192
[73] Göbeler, p. 192
[74] Göbeler, p. 192
[75] Göbeler, p. 193
[76] Göbeler, p. 194
[77] Wise, U-505: The Final Journey, p. 64
[78] Wise, U-505: The Final Journey, p. 64
[79] Göbeler, p. 194
[80] Göbeler, pages 194 and 195
[81] Göbeler, p. 195
[82] Göbeler, p. 195
[83] Göbeler, p. 195
[84] Göbeler, p. 196
[85] Göbeler, p. 196
[86] Göbeler, p. 196
[87] Göbeler, p. 197
[88] Göbeler, p. 197
[89] Göbeler, p. 197
[90] Göbeler, p. 197
[91] Göbeler, p. 197
[92] Göbeler, p. 197
[93] Göbeler, p. 197
[94] Göbeler, p. 197
[95] Göbeler, p. 197
[96] Göbeler, p. 198
[97] Göbeler, p. 198
[98] Göbeler, p. 198
[99] Göbeler, p. 198
[100] Göbeler, p. 199
[101] Göbeler, p. 199
[102] Göbeler, p. 199
[103] Göbeler, p. 199
[104] Göbeler, p. 200
[105] Göbeler, pages 200 and 201
[106] Göbeler, p. 201
[107] Göbeler, pages 201 and 202
[108] Göbeler, p. 202
[109] Göbeler, p. 202
[110] Göbeler, p. 202
[111] Göbeler, p. 202
[112] Göbeler, pages 202 and 203
[113] Göbeler, p. 203
[114] Göbeler, pages 203 and 204
[115] Göbeler, p. 204
[116] Göbeler, p. 204
[117] Göbeler, p. 204
[118] Göbeler, p. 204
[119] Göbeler, p. 204
[120] Göbeler, p. 205
[121] Göbeler, p. 205
[122] Göbeler, p. 205
[123] Göbeler, p. 205
[124] Göbeler, p. 205
[125] Göbeler, p. 206
[126] Göbeler, p. 206
[127] Göbeler, p. 206
[128] Göbeler, p. 206
[129] Göbeler, p. 206
[130] Göbeler, p. 206
[131] Göbeler, p. 206
[132] Göbeler, p. 206
[133] Göbeler, p. 206
[134] Göbeler, p. 207
[135] Göbeler, p. 207
[136] Göbeler, pages 207 and 208
[137] Göbeler, p. 208
[138] Göbeler, p. 209
[139] Göbeler, p. 209
[140] Göbeler, p. 209
[141] Göbeler, p. 210
[142] Göbeler, p. 210
[143] Göbeler, p. 212
[144] Wiggins, pages 102 and 103
[145] Wiggins, p. 103
[146] Wiggins, p. 103
[147] Wiggins, p. 103
[148] Wiggins, p. 101
[149] Wiggins, pages 101 and 102
[150] Wiggins, p. 102
[151] Wiggins, p. 102
[152] Wiggins, pages 102 and 103
[153] Wiggins, p. 103
[154] Wiggins, p. 103
[155] Wiggins, p. 103
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 45
[156] Wiggins, p. 103
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 45
[157] Wiggins, p. 103
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 45
[158] Göbeler, p. 210
[159] Göbeler, p. 210
[160] Göbeler, p. 210
[161] Göbeler, p. 210
[162] Göbeler, pages 210 and 211
[163] Göbeler, p. 211
[164] Göbeler, pages 211 and 212
[165] Göbeler, p. 212
[166] Göbeler, p. 212
[167] Göbeler, p. 212
[168] Göbeler, p. 212
[169] Göbeler, p. 212
[170] Gallery, p. 236
See also Decker, p. 44
See also Göbeler, p. 213
See also Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” p. 39
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[171] Decker, p. 44
[172] Mulligan, “A Community Bound by Fate: The Crew of U-505,” pages 41 and 42
[173] Gallery, p. 236
See also Decker, p. 44
See also Göbeler, p. 215
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[174] Göbeler, p. 213
[175] Göbeler, p. 214
[176] Göbeler, p. 215
[177] Göbeler, p. 215
[178] Göbeler, p. 216
[179] Göbeler, p. 216
[180] Göbeler, p. 216
[181] Göbeler, p. 217
[182] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[183] Gallery, pages 236 and 237
[184] Gallery, p. 237
[185] Decker, p. 44
[186] Decker, p. 44
[187] Decker, p. 44
[188] Göbeler, p. 219
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[189] Göbeler, p. 219
[190] Göbeler, p. 220
[191] Göbeler, p. 220
[192] Göbeler, p. 219
[193] Göbeler, p. 221
[194] Göbeler, p. 221
[195] Gallery, p. 237
[196] Gallery, p. 237
[197] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[198] Göbeler, p. 223
[199] Göbeler, p. 223
[200] Göbeler, p. 224
[201] Göbeler, p. 224
[202] Göbeler, p. 224
[203] Göbeler, p. 224
[204] Göbeler, p. 224
Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
[205] Göbeler, p. 224
[206] Gallery, pages 237 and 238
[207] Gallery, p. 238
[208] Göbeler, p. 225
[209] Göbeler, p. 225
[210] Gallery, p. 238
See also Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 230
Mulligan gave the date as May 23rd.
[211] Decker, p. 44
[212] Gallery, p. 238
[213] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 231
[214] Göbeler, p. 226
[215] Göbeler, p. 226
[216] Gallery, pages 238-240
See also Göbeler, p. 227
[217] Gallery, p. 238
[218] Gallery, p. 238
[219] Göbeler, p. 227
[220] Gallery, pages 238-240
[221] Gallery, pages 240 and 241
[222] Gallery, p. 240
[223] Gallery, p. 240
[224] Gallery, p. 240
[225] Gallery, p. 241
[226] Gallery, p. 241
[227] Gallery, p. 241
[228] Gallery, p. 241
[229] Gallery, p. 241
[230] Gallery, p. 241
[231] Gallery, pages 241 and 242
[232] Gallery, p. 242
[233] Decker, pages 44 and 45
[234] Gallery, p. 242
[235] Gallery, p. 242
[236] Gallery, p. 242
[237] Gallery, p. 242
[238] Gallery, pages 242 and 243
[239] Göbeler, pages 227 and 228
[240] Gallery, p. 243
[241] Decker, p. 45
[242] Gallery, p. 243
[243] Mulligan, “Appendix B: U-505 Combat Chronology,” p. 231
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