U 977
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U 977 ( previous / next - all submarines ) |
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 U 977 in Mar del Plata (Argentina) |
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| Type : | VII C |
| Field Post Number : | 51 994 |
| Shipyard: | Germania shipyard , Kiel |
| Construction contract: | June 5, 1941 |
| Build number: | 177 |
| Keel laying: | July 24, 1942 |
| Launch: | March 31, 1943 |
| Commissioning: | May 6, 1943 |
| Commanders: |
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| Flotilla: |
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| Sinkings: |
no |
| Whereabouts: | interned in Argentina on August 17, 1945 |
U 977 was a German type VII C submarine ofthe Kriegsmarine . With U 530 it was one of the two submarines thatmanagedto escapefrom the Allies to South America after the German surrender ( VE Day ) in early May 1945.
Commanders
- Hans Leilich was born on February 12, 1918 in Pirmasens and joined the Navy in 1937. At the beginning of the war he served as a training officer on the training ship Schlesien , then he became a teacher at the Mürwik naval school . Following a U-boat commanders course, Hans Leilich was given command of the U 977 in May 1943 . On September 1, 1944, he was promoted to lieutenant captain. After a few training trips with the U 977 , he handed over command to his successor in March 1945
- Heinz Schaeffer was born in Berlin on April 28, 1921 and joined the Navy in 1939. From May 1942 to October 1943 he completed four patrols as an officer on watch on U 445 . After completing a U-boat commanders course with the 23rd U-Flotilla , Heinz Schaeffer commanded the U 148 school boat from November 1943 , which was under his control until December 15, 1944. In December 1943, Heinz Schäffer was promoted to first lieutenant at sea . In March 1945 he took command of U 977 .
history
From May 1943, U 977 belonged to the 5th U-Flotilla, which was stationed in Kiel . During this time, Commander Leilich undertook training trips with the boat in the Baltic Sea to train the crew. During these voyages, U 977 collided with other ships three times. The last collision damaged the pressure hull of the boat so badly that the training was discontinued. From then on, the U 977 was no longer intended for use at the front, but was used as a school boat.
After a lengthy lay in the shipyard, during which the boat was also equipped with a snorkel , U 977 received its status as a training boat again on March 1, 1945 and joined the 31st U-Flotilla, a training flotilla stationed in Hamburg . When the new commander discovered that the boat's batteries only had 70% of their capacity, he tried to have them replaced. This was rejected due to a shortage of materials. Commander Schaeffer undertook training trips from Hamburg and Kiel to prepare the boat and crew for deployment at the front. After a transfer trip from Kiel via Horten to Kristiansand , U 977 set off on May 2, 1945 for its first venture in the sea area off Norway.
Crossing to Argentina
When the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht became known , Commander Heinz Schaeffer had a vote on how to proceed. Of the 48-strong crew, 30 voted to flee to Argentina , two more would have preferred Spain, but they stayed on board. 16 NCOs, most of whom were married and fathers of families, wanted to go home. They were released in rubber dinghies off the island of Holsnøy near Bergen (Norway) on May 10, 1945 at around 3 a.m. and then registered on land as the only survivors of U 977 with the message “Boat ran into mine and sunk” . Thus the boat was entered on the loss list.
Since the old, experienced NCOs were missing, every alarm dive was a risk for the remaining crew of sailors and NCOs. So it happened that the first officer on watch forgot to retract the periscope during an alarm dive. Because the wire ropes could no longer withstand the pressure at a depth of 100 meters, the periscope fell unchecked through its shaft onto the deck, damaging its prisms. The second periscope was only used for attacks in the dark and was much too short for use on snorkeling trips, where accompanying peeking through the periscope was actually essential.
The escape route led from Norway between Iceland and Scotland past the Cape Verde Islands and then across the Atlantic to Mar del Plata in Argentina, where the boat arrived on August 17, 1945 (14 weeks or three and a half months after the end of the war). The U 977 drove uninterruptedly submerged for 66 days, at a depth of 50 m during the day and 14 meters below the water surface with a snorkel at night . During the night, there was fresh air from the snorkel facility for the diesel engines and for the crew. The commander even allowed small groups to smoke in the diesel room during the snorkeling trip. In the remaining times of the purely electric diving trip without the use of snorkeling, one had to make do with the non-renewable breathing air enclosed in the hull. After 66 days, U 977 surfaced at night and only dived during the day. After a while in the Atlantic, it was found that diving was not necessary. The submarine was camouflaged as a small coal steamer (with the rare visual contact with other ships), the chimney being made of tin cans and the smoke being produced with oil-soaked rags.
After a journey of 100 days, U 977 reached the Argentine coast on August 17, 1945. The team was interned in Mar del Plata . Initially the Soviet Union suspected that Adolf Hitler , Eva Braun and their closest followers had been on board the U 977 and had then been brought ashore. The accusation of torpedoing the Brazilian cruiser Bahia , which sank after a mysterious explosion on July 4, 1945, was also refuted. Nevertheless, contradicting representations persist, which are also of more recent date (Salinas / de Nápoli).
Sinking
In the end, the U 977 , like its crew, was delivered to the USA. On November 13, 1946, the boat was sunk as a target ship in torpedo attempts by the submarine Atule on the east coast of the United States off Massachusetts .
Literary processing
A few years after the war, the last commander of the boat, Heinz Schaeffer, published a report about his time in the submarine weapon, which also contained a detailed description of the last voyage of the U 977 . Schaeffer focused on bravado and a thirst for adventure. According to the company, the drafting of the text was motivated by newspaper reports and other publications at the time that claimed that U 977 brought high officials of the Third Reich to South America. The book "U-977 Secret Trip to South America" was published in 1950 by Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden and in 1975 saw a second edition. In 1952 English-language editions appeared in London and New York, and a French-language edition in Paris. In 1977 the book was translated into Finnish. The Buch und Welt publishing house in Klagenfurt reprinted the book two more times until 1984. It also saw ten further editions between 1976 and 1988 by Wilhelm Heyne Verlag in Munich. Under the title “66 days under water, the long-distance submarine trip to Argentina shrouded in mystery” , an abbreviated edition of the text appeared as a large Landser volume . Although it had been Schaeffer's self-declared aim to effectively counter the rumors of a kind of secret mission to transfer high-ranking Nazis, their assets or other devotional objects to South America, or even to a base in Antarctica, with the publication of such rumors, such rumors always came back on.
See also
literature
- Janusz Piekałkiewicz : Naval War. 1939-1945. Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-517-00703-X .
- Juan Salinas, Carlos de Nápoli: Ultramar Sur. La fuga en submarinos de más de 50 jerarcas nazis a la Argentina (= Colección Biografías y Documentos. ). Grupo Editorial Norma, Buenos Aires 2002, ISBN 987-545-075-8 ( Ultramar Sul. A última operação secreta do Terceiro Reich. A fuga submarina de dirigentes nazistas para a Argentina eo afundamento do cruzador Bahia. Civilização Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro 2010 , ISBN 978-85-200-0915-4 ).
Web links
- US Navy report
- The fairy tale of Hitler's dive at one day
- Ghost convoy. Nothing to do with suicide . In: Der Spiegel 36/1950 from September 6, 1950
Individual evidence
- ↑ 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. 388.
- ↑ a b c d e Clay Blair : The Submarine War. Volume 2: The Hunted, 1942–1945. Heyne, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-453-16059-2 , pp. 783-785.
- ↑ 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. 534.
- ↑ Michael L. Hadley: The myth of the German submarine weapon. ES Mittler & Sohn, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-8132-0771-4 , p. 143.
- ^ Jürgen Schlemm: The submarine war 1939-1945 in literature. An annotated bibliography. Elbe-Spree-Verlag, Hamburg et al. 2000, ISBN 3-931129-24-1 , pp. 76-77.