U 664

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
U 664
( previous / next - all submarines )
Coat of arms Gaggenau.svg
Coat of arms of Gaggenau, sponsored city of the boat
Type : VII C
Field Post Number : 05 024
Shipyard: Howaldtswerke , Hamburg
Construction contract: August 15, 1940
Build number: 813
Keel laying: July 11, 1941
Launch: April 28, 1942
Commissioning: June 17, 1942
Commanders:

OlzS Adolf Graef

Flotilla:
Calls: 5 patrols
Sinkings:

3 ships (19,325 GRT, 76 dead)

Whereabouts: Sunk by air raid west of the Azores on August 9, 1943 (7 dead, 44 prisoners of war)

U 664 was a submarine of type VIIC . It was used by the Kriegsmarine in submarine warfare during World War II . On its five ventures it was able to sink three ships with 19,325 GRT, whereby 79 people died. On August 9, 1943, it was sunk in the Atlantic, killing 7 men and making 44 US prisoners of war .

Construction and technology

From the beginning of the war, Hamburg's Howaldtswerft was completely geared towards submarine construction and planned for an annual output of 16 submarines. From mid-1943 this margin was increased to 22 boats per year - but these numbers could never be reached. By the end of the war, the Hamburg Howaldtswerke delivered a total of 33 Type VII C submarines to the Navy. Such a submarine was 67 m long and displaced 865 m³ under water. Two diesel engines enabled a speed of 17 knots when sailing above water . During the underwater journey, two electric motors propelled the boat to a speed of 7 knots. The armament consisted (until 1944) of an 8.8 cm cannon and a 2 cm flak on deck, as well as four bow torpedo tubes and a stern torpedo tube. Usually a VII C-boat carried 14 torpedoes with it. On the tower, U 664 bore the coat of arms of its godfather town Gaggenau and the flotilla symbol of the 9th U-Flotilla, the sawfish.

commander

Adolf Graef was born in Flensburg on April 22, 1916 and joined the Navy in 1936. After completing his submarine training in the summer of 1941, he was the first officer on watch on U 652 and received command of U 664 on June 17, 1942 . Adolf Graef was a prisoner of war on 1 October 1943, Lieutenant promoted.

Commitment and history

The sawfish mark of the 9th U-Flotilla

On October 20, ran U 664 from Kiel made his first business venture. This first mission was also a transfer trip to Brest , the base of the 9th U-Flotilla. The pilot of a Catalina of the US Navy , that of Iceland from patrolling, spotted U 664 south of the island and attacked the boat with depth charges. U 664 , which had only been at sea for almost two weeks, was so badly damaged that commander Graef decided to break off the patrol and to call the base on the northern French Atlantic coast ahead of time, where U 664 arrived on December 5th.

Pointy and impetuous

The British destroyer HMS Firedrake secured ON 153

U 664 left Brest on December 5th . The intended area of ​​operation was the sea area west of Ireland. Karl Dönitz had grouped the submarines that were in service in the North Atlantic into three submarine groups that were supposed to form search strips and ambush the Allied convoys moving eastwards: buffalo, bully and impetuous - the latter was U 664 . Commander Graef succeeded in sinking a Belgian steamer from the convoy ON 153 comprising 38 merchant ships , which was secured by seven British escort ships.

  • December 16, 1942 Belgian steamer Emile Francqui with 5859 GRT sunk (46 dead and 41 rescued) ( Lage )

On December 22, U 664 was assigned to the Spitz submarine group , which formed a search strip south of Iceland to track down a convoy announced by the B-Dienst . U 664 was the southernmost boat, so Commander Graef discovered the convoy ONS 154 , which was traveling particularly slowly and had set its course far south as a precautionary measure. Also U 662 reported the convoy, but lost contact after it was discovered by escort aircraft and forced to dive. Commander Graef, for his part, kept in touch according to the pack tactics and guided U 662 again and two other submarines in addition to the convoy. In the convoy battle that followed between ONS 154 and the thirteen boats of the Spitz and Ungestüm submarine groups , fourteen ships were sunk. A German boat, U 346 , was sunk by Canadian escort ships. On December 31, the German submarines finally lost sight of the convoy. So that U 664 could begin its march back to France, it was necessary to take fuel from another submarine, which was done on January 5th by U 662 . On January 13, U 664 entered La Pallice , from where the third operation began a month later.

Burgrave and battering ram

This time the area of ​​operation was between Greenland and Newfoundland , where the Burggraf submarine group was to be formed according to the instructions of the submarine commander . On the approach to this sea area on February 21, Commander Graef sighted the south- west of Ireland traveling convoy ONS 167. Graef reported this convoy, which he believed to be a convoy of ten steamers, but which actually consisted of 25 ships, those of two British ones and two Polish destroyers and three Free French ships were protected. U 664 kept in touch and led the U 758 , coming from northern France , which had also only been on patrol for a week, to the convoy. As soon as his commander Manseck confirmed contact with the convoy, attacked Commander Graef and sank two ships.

  • February 21, 1943 American steamer Rosario with 4659 GRT sunk (33 dead and 30 rescued) ( location )
  • February 21, 1943 Panamanian tanker HH Rogers with 8807 GRT sunk (all 73 men on board were rescued) ( Lage )

The submarine command ordered further submarines to this sea area, and put together the Sturmbock submarine group , which was to attack ONS 167 continuously. The British reconnaissance learned of this plan through decrypted Enigma messages and navigated ONS 167 out of the danger area, while its escort ships constantly forced the submarines U 785 and U 664 in contact with them. As a result of the convoy's radical change of course, the submarines of the Sturmbock group lost contact with the convoy. On March 28th, 41 days after the start of the operation, U 664 entered Lorient , from where exactly one month later another operation started.

Robber Count

The area of ​​operation of the fourth company of U 664 was the North Atlantic and the sea area southeast of Cape Farvel . The boat was assigned to the Raubgraf submarine group on this voyage . This submarine group was put together in March 1943 to lie in wait for Allied convoys south of Greenland within the so-called "gap". This region of the Atlantic was beyond the reach of the Allied aircraft, so the protection of the convoys was solely the responsibility of the escort ships. At first, Raubgraf was quite unsuccessful. The convoy ONS 169 bypassed the position of the submarines to the south and the immediately following ON 170 successfully maneuvered the German submarines, which through false and ambiguous position reports did the rest to the fact that the contact with the convoy was lost. In mid-March, the B-Dienst deciphered radio messages with which two more convoy trains were to be diverted around Raubgraf's position so that the submarine command could in turn instruct the submarine group to intercept them. In the following convoy battle between convoy HX 229 and the Raubgraf submarine group , more than a dozen Allied ships were sunk or damaged. However, Commander Graef achieved no success here or in the further course of his journey. The boat returned to Brest on June 9th.

Sinking

USS Card
The USS Borie picked up the survivors of U 664

U 664 left Brest for its last venture on July 21, 1943. The mid-Atlantic west of the Azores was planned as the area of ​​operation. On August 8, during an attack on the US aircraft carrier USS Card , the boat's crew managed to shoot down aircraft, an Avenger and a Wildcat . In this battle, the second officer on watch, Lieutenant d. R. Heinz Boehme and the boat mate Helmut Jenteleit killed. Some of the Wildcat's bombs , which it had dropped in the companionway, damaged the bow torpedo tubes of U 664 , although this initially went unnoticed. On the same evening the bridge watch of U 664 discovered a very large ship in the dark. Commandant Graef identified it as a tanker and thus contradicted his first officer on watch, Lieutenant d. R. Herbert Stahn, who thought the ship was an escort. In fact it was one, namely the USS Card , whose inattentive escort escaped the surfaced submarine, which is why Commander Graef was able to fire several torpedoes at the card - but all of them went wrong - before the submarine was forced to dive by hurrying guards . At noon on August 9, U 664 , which was on the surface to recharge its batteries, was tracked down again by patrolling aircraft from the USS Card and attacked. A surviving crew member later blamed the first officer on watch of U 664 , who was unable to close the tower hatch in time during the subsequent alarm dive, for having thereby contributed to the loss of the boat. When two depth charges hurled the alarm submarine back to the surface, some crew members misinterpreted the suggestion made by the chief engineer Dieter Martin to the commandant to abandon the boat as an order to climb through the tower onto deck. The sailor Corporal Stoiber was shot down by the machine gun volleys of an approaching Wildcat while trying to man the flak , while four men were torn apart by a bomb. In the meantime, Commander Graef had ordered another dive, but had already broken off at a depth of 15 meters and then reappeared to surrender. U 664 sank ( location ) at 2:30 p.m., but with the exception of the seven seamen mentioned, all crew members were rescued: The 44 submarine drivers were taken on board by the USS Borie and thus became US prisoners of war . They were on USS Card transferred and on August 17, 1943 in Casablanca ( French Morocco brought) on land. While two seriously wounded remained there, 42 prisoners were taken to the United States, where they arrived on September 25, 1943. Of these, 18 were interrogated intensively.

literature

  • Clay Blair : The Submarine War. Volume 2: The Hunted, 1942–1945. Heyne, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-453-16059-2 .
  • Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The submarine war 1939-1945. Volume 2: U-boat construction in German shipyards. ES Mittler und Sohn, Hamburg et al. 1997, ISBN 3-8132-0512-6 .
  • Rainer Busch, Hans-Joachim Röll: The submarine war 1939-1945. Volume 4: German submarine losses from September 1939 to May 1945. ES Mittler und Sohn, Hamburg et al. 1999, ISBN 3-8132-0514-2 .
  • Georg Högel: Emblems, coats of arms, Maling's German submarines 1939–1945. 5th edition. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-7822-1002-7 .
  • Bernard Ireland: Battle of the Atlantic. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD 2003, ISBN 1-59114-032-3 .
  • Paul Kemp: The German and Austrian submarine losses in both world wars. Urbes Verlag, Graefelfing before Munich 1998, ISBN 3-924896-43-7 .

Web links

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ B. Ireland: Battle of the Atlantic. 2003, p. 108.
  2. ↑ U 365 and U 441 .
  3. ↑ C. Blair: The Submarine War. Volume 2: The Hunted, 1942–1945. 1999, p. 243.
  4. ↑ C. Blair: The Submarine War. Volume 2: The Hunted, 1942–1945. 1999, p. 321.
  5. ↑ Two FAT torpedoes , one of which even got stuck in the tube - damaged by a previous water bomb detonation - and a T-4 torpedo from the stern torpedo tube , which also did not find its target.
  6. ↑ C. Blair: The Submarine War. Volume 2: The Hunted, 1942–1945. 1999, p. 469.