U 559
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U 559 ( previous / next - all submarines ) |
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| Type : | VII C |
| Field Post Number : | M 38 782 |
| Shipyard: | Blohm + Voss , Hamburg |
| Construction contract: | October 16, 1939 |
| Build number: | 535 |
| Keel laying: | February 1, 1940 |
| Launch: | January 8, 1941 |
| Commissioning: | February 27, 1941 |
| Commanders: |
Oblt.zS / Kptlt. Hans Heidtmann |
| Flotilla: |
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| Calls: | 10 activities |
| Sinkings: |
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| Whereabouts: | Sunk off the coast of Egypt on October 30, 1942 (7 dead submarine drivers, 43 prisoners of war; 2 dead British) |
U 559 was a submarine from the Type VII C , which in World War II by the German navy was used. It sank 5 merchant ships with 12,871 GRT and 1 warship with 1060 t, whereby several hundred people died. The boat was badly hit on October 30, 1942 in the eastern Mediterranean by depth charges and fire, killing seven people. The following self- sinking was carried out inadequately, because U 559 sank too slowly.
The boat was best known for the fact that after it was hijacked by British forces, cryptographic material such as short signal booklet and weather short key could be stolen without the knowledge of the crew, which was the decisive factor for the Allies in deciphering the Enigma M4 cipher machine. Various historians attach essential importance to this fact for the further course of the war. The 43 surviving submarine drivers, including the commander Hans Heidtmann , were captured and did not learn of the capture of the documents by the enemy.
history
U 559 was laid on keel at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg on February 1, 1940 and began active service in the Navy on February 27, 1941 under Lieutenant zur See Hans Heidtmann .
The boat was assigned to the 1st U-Flotilla as a training boat until June 1941 and made trips in the Baltic Sea from Kiel to train the crew. After that it was part of the 1st U-Flotilla in Brest until October 31, 1941 . After being transferred to the Mediterranean , U 559 was initially assigned to the 23rd U-Flotilla in Salamis and finally to the 29th U-Flotilla in La Spezia . As a boat badge, it had the coat of arms of its sponsored city Solingen on the tower. During the affiliation to the 23rd U-Flotilla, its flotilla symbol, which represented a white, leaning donkey, was also used as an emblem.
Calls
U 559 left Kiel on June 4, 1941 on its first patrol and reached Saint-Nazaire on July 5, 1941 . No ships were sunk or damaged during this 32-day voyage in the North Atlantic. The next voyage began on July 26, 1941 and took the boat to the western foothills of the Bay of Biscay . A British ship was sunk there on August 19, 1941. U 559 entered Saint-Nazaire three days later .
On the next voyage, U 559 moved into the Mediterranean as part of the Goeben group and as one of the first boats ever . It reached Salamis in occupied Greece on October 31, 1941 . From there, the boat operated against Allied ships off the coasts of Egypt and Libya to support Rommel's campaign in North Africa .
During these patrols, U 559 sank five Allied freighters and the Australian sloop HMAS Parramatta . Another Allied ship was so badly damaged by torpedo hits that it later had to be declared a total loss. There were a total of more than 480 deaths.
Use statistics
- Successes on ten ventures
- August 19, 1941: Sinking of the British Alva (1,584 GRT , traveling in convoy OG-71). There was one dead and 24 survivors ( Lage ).
- November 27, 1941: sinking of the Australian sloop HMAS Parramatta (1,060 ts). There were 138 dead and only 24 survivors ( Lage ).
- December 23, 1941: Sinking of the British prison ship Shuntien (3,059 GRT). The ship in convoy TA-5 had 88 crew members and gunners, 40 guards and an estimated 850 German and Italian prisoners of war on board. There were about 700 deaths. ( Location )
- December 26, 1941: sinking of the Polish freighter Warszawa (2,487 GRT). There were 23 dead and 445 survivors (it was a troop transport). ( Location )
- June 10, 1942: sinking of the Norwegian tanker Athene (4,681 GRT, convoy AT-49). There were 14 dead and 17 survivors. ( Location )
- June 10, 1942: sinking of the British steamer Havre (2,073 GRT).
Downfall
It was its own downfall that made U 559 known. On the night of October 30, 1942, the British destroyer HMS Petard forced the boat to surface off the coast of Egypt after it had been discovered while sneaking into a convoy. Depth charges from the destroyer HMS Pakenham and the destroyer escorts HMS Hurworth and HMS Dulverton supported the Petard in their efforts. The crew of U 559 was forced to give up, seven crew members died in the attacks from the explosions and the flooding of the boat.
The commander Hans Heidtmann gave the order to leave the hopeless submarine and to sink it yourself . However, the valves were damaged by incorrect operation because the locking pins were not removed. The chief engineer Günther Gräser noticed this too late, and the seawater only entered the boat slowly through the damaged valves. Convinced that their ship would sink, the crew of U 559 jumped overboard. The commander Heidtmann and his officers failed to destroy the code books ( signal booklet and weather code ) and the Enigma machine on board . The 43 surviving men - among them Commander Heidtmann - were picked up by British troops and quickly taken below deck as prisoners of war . Then the British sailors Colin Grazier , Tony Fasson and Tommy Brown swam quickly over to the slowly sinking boat and were able to recover important secret material and bring it to their ship. It was brought to Bletchley Park and was an invaluable success for the Allies. The British probably also dismantled an Enigma machine of the improved four-roller type introduced in 1942, but were unable to recover it. The 19-year-old submarine driver Hermann Dethlefs was brought into the boat by the boarding command and was a prisoner witness of the boarding. He was kept isolated by the British and tried in vain to tell his parents about the boarding in a letter that was intercepted. Even after his return to Germany, he did not make his experiences public for decades. Until the end of the war and beyond, the German naval command and the public did not find out anything about the capture of the documents and the fact that more and more German submarines were being sunk. It even came to that Heidt man when he was detained in a British prison camp, still on 12 April 1943 by the Navy leadership for its sinking success with over a thousand dead - with - including several hundred dead German and Italian POWs Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross awarded has been. In 1967, Heidtmann stated that he had sunk the boat himself in accordance with regulations.
Two men of the three-man boarding party, Grazier and Fasson , returned to the submarine and drowned when it finally sank ( situation ). The two were posthumously awarded the George Cross , the surviving Brown the George Medal . Originally the three had been proposed for the Victoria Cross ; however, this honor was rejected because the service was not performed “in the face of the enemy”. Another assessment says that the awarding of the Victoria Cross would attract too much attention from the German secret service and thus the capture of the Enigma could have become known.
The attempted recovery of the machine was one of many events that inspired the makers of the film U-571 .
See also
literature
- Stephen Harper: Battle for Enigma. The hunt for U-559. Mittler, Hamburg et al. 2001, ISBN 3-8132-0737-4 .
- Georg Högel: Emblems, coats of arms, Maling's German submarines 1939–1945. 4th edition. Koehler, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-7822-0826-9 .
- Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The submarine war 1939-1945. Volume 1: The German submarine commanders. Preface by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Rohwer, Member of the Presidium of the International Commission on Military History. ES Mittler and Son, Hamburg / Berlin / Bonn 1996, p. 93. ISBN 3-8132-0490-1 .
- Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The submarine war 1939-1945. Volume 2: Submarine construction in German shipyards. ES Mittler and Son, Hamburg / Berlin / Bonn 1997, pp. 40, 223. ISBN 3-8132-0512-6 .
- Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The submarine war 1939-1945. Volume 3: The German submarine successes from September 1939 to May 1945. ES Mittler und Sohn, Hamburg / Berlin / Bonn 2008, p. 238f. ISBN 978-3-8132-0513-8 .
- Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The submarine war 1939-1945. Volume 4: The German submarine losses from September 1939 to May 1945. ES Mittler und Sohn, Hamburg / Berlin / Bonn 2008, p. 63f. ISBN 978-3-8132-0514-5 .
- Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung, Martin Maas: The German warships 1815-1945. Volume 3: Submarines, auxiliary cruisers, mine ships, net layers. Bernhard & Graefe Verlag, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-7637-4802-4 .
- Clay Blair : The Submarine War - The Hunters 1939–1942 . Heyne Verlag, 1998. pp. 367, 371, 405, 469, 647, 752. ISBN 3-4531-2345-X .
- Clay Blair: The Submarine War - The Hunted 1942–1945 . Heyne Verlag, 1999. pp. 183, 251f., 258, 405, 411, 415f., 604. ISBN 3-4531-6059-2 .
Web links
- German submarines 1935–1945, U 559
- U-559, Uboat.net
- The Capture of the Wetterkurzschlussel and Kurzsignalheft from U-559 (English) accessed on December 21, 2017
Notes, additions and individual references
- ↑ One German short signal booklet for weather reports and one for reporting enemy ships and combat events could be recovered.
- ↑ Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The U-Boat War 1939-1945. Volume 2: U-boat construction in German shipyards. ES Mittler und Sohn, Hamburg et al. 1997, ISBN 3-8132-0512-6 , p. 40.
- ↑ Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The U-Boat War 1939-1945. Volume 2: U-boat construction in German shipyards. ES Mittler und Sohn, Hamburg et al. 1997, ISBN 3-8132-0512-6 , p. 371.
- ^ Georg Högel: Emblems, coats of arms, Malings German submarines 1939-1945. 5th edition. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-7822-1002-7 , p. 122.
- ↑ Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The U-Boat War 1939-1945. Volume 3: German submarine successes from September 1939 to May 1945. ES Mittler und Sohn, Hamburg et al. 2001, ISBN 3-8132-0513-4 , pp. 238-239.
- ^ Heikendorf (Möltenort), Plön district, Schleswig-Holstein: U-Boot-Ehrenmal Möltenort, U-559, type VIIC, 29th U-Flotilla, front boat. Online project Fallen Memorials
- ↑ Clay Blair : The Submarine War. Volume 2: The Hunted, 1942–1945. Heyne, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-453-16059-2 , pp. 121-125.
- ^ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (2000): Enigma - The Battle for the Code. Pp. 218-224.
- ↑ Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939-1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 374.
- ^ Georg Högel: Emblems, coats of arms, Malings German submarines 1939-1945. 5th edition. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-7822-1002-7 , p. 122.
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