U 869
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U 869 ( previous / next - all submarines ) |
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|---|---|
| Type : | IX C / 40 |
| Field Post Number : | 49 163 |
| Shipyard: | AG Weser , Bremen |
| Construction contract: | August 25, 1941 |
| Build number: | 1077 |
| Keel laying: | April 5, 1943 |
| Launch: | October 5, 1943 |
| Commissioning: | January 26, 1944 |
| Commanders: |
January 26, 1944 - February 11, 1945 |
| Calls: | 1 company |
| Sinkings: |
no |
| Whereabouts: | Sunk off New Jersey on February 11, 1945 |
U 869 was a German submarine of the type IX C / 40 , which was used in the Second World War by the then German Navy in the North Atlantic and the sea area off Great Britain.
history
U 869 sank off the North American coast in 1945 , 70 km from New Jersey, and can now be dived as a wreck.
In 1991 it was accidentally discovered by a fishing boat and in the following years it was dived several times by American divers (including John Chatterton and Richard Kohler , Steve Feldmann †, Chrissy Rouse †, Chris Rouse †) at a water depth of 70 meters.
In 1997, it could be clearly identified using a spare parts box that was located in the difficult-to-access electric motor room. Up to this point in time there was no reference in the historical documents to a German submarine that sank there, as it was assumed that U 869 had sunk near Gibraltar. After the find it was suspected that the boat had been sunk by a misdirected torpedo. This theory could not explain the damage to the boat, but there was no better one, as there were no known attacks on submarines in this region.
It was not until June 2005 that the sinking of U 869 was linked to an incident in which the US destroyers escort of the Edsall class Howard D. Crow (DE-252) and Koiner (DE-331) were involved. On February 11, 1945, they dropped depth charges on what was supposed to be a submarine. The sonar contact did not move, however, and although air bubbles and oil rose to the surface, the incident was interpreted as an attack on a wreck. Even after the war, when the Allied documents were compared with those of the Germans, there was no indication that a submarine could have been in the vicinity, so the incident was forgotten.
The wreck of U 869 is only 4.5 nautical miles from the Howard D. Crow's point of attack at the time , and estimates have shown that U 869 could have reached this position around February 11th. It is therefore certain that the Howard D. Crow U 869 sunk. (Location of the wreck: 39 ° 20 ′ N , 73 ° 12 ′ W ) The assessment that it was a wreck, probably due to the fact that one of the first depth charges had torn one of the two deadly holes in the hull.
literature
- Bernie Chowdhury: The Last Dive. Drama in the Atlantic. Translated from the English by Sven Däne and Thomas Wollermann. Ullstein, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-550-07148-5 (English original title: The Last Dive. A Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths. ).
- Robert Kurson: In the wake of the deep. How two divers solved the riddle of a lost German submarine. From the American by Thorsten Schmidt. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-455-09463-5 (English original title: Shadow Divers. ).
- Robert Kurson: Shadow Divers. The true adventure of two americans who risked everything to solve one of the last mysteries of WWII 2005 Ballentine Books, ISBN 0-345-48247-6 .
TV and movie documentaries
- Hitler's Lost Sub , broadcast on PBS in the NOVA series on November 14, 2000, as well as (in a slightly modified version) in Great Britain under the title The Mystery of the Missing U-boat and on May 25, 2001 in Germany udT Last Feindfahrt: Das Mysterious fate of U869 (SPIEGEL TV theme evening; Repeat at XXP : March 22, 2005). Hitler's Lost Sub is also available as a VHS video and DVD (2004) in the NOVA version. For a transcription of the American original text see: [1]
- In 2007, both Ridley Scott and Peter Weir announced a theatrical adaptation of the book by Robert Kurson; also under the title Shadow Divers .