Posted on 07/05/2018 10:56:27 AM PDT by Gamecock
Four months after the Pearl Harbor attacks, Kapitanleutnant Reinhard Hardegen decided that Americans should see for themselves what war with Adolf Hitler's Germany was going to look like.
He began with Florida sunbathers. On April 11, 1942, Hardegen's submarine, U-123, torpedoed the tanker SS Gulfamerica off Jacksonville. He maneuvered U-123 around the flaming wreck and surfaced between the SS Gulfamerica and the beach. He sank it with U-123's deck gun.
Hardegen later wrote in his log: "All the vacationers had seen an impressive special performance at [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt's expense. A burning tanker, artillery fire, the silhouette of a U-boat -- how often had that been seen in America?"
Hardegen was one of the few "Unterseeboot" commanders to survive the war. Most did not, as the U.S. turned to the convoy system and sonar to devastate the "wolfpacks" and keep open the supply lines to Britain.
(Excerpt) Read more at military.com ...
I’ve been to that exhibit twice in my life...once in junior high school when the U-Boat was sitting outside the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (in the snow and ice), and again maybe 7-8 years ago when the (very nice) exhibit had been moved inside. Just don’t remember a lot about it.
Per Wiki...
“In her uniquely unlucky career with the Kriegsmarine, she had the distinction of being the “most heavily damaged U-boat to successfully return to port” in World War II (on her fourth patrol) and the only submarine in which a commanding officer took his own life in combat conditions (on her tenth patrol, following six botched patrols).[5]
She was one of six U-boats that were captured by Allied forces during World War II. She was captured on 4 June 1944 by United States Navy Task Group 22.3 (TG 22.3). All but one of U-505’s crew were rescued by the Navy task group. The submarine was towed to Bermuda in secret and her crew was interned at a US prisoner-of-war camp where they were denied access to International Red Cross visits. The Navy classified the capture as top secret and prevented its discovery by the Germans. Her codebooks, Enigma machine, and other secret materials found on board helped the Allied codebreakers.[6]
In 1954, U-505 was donated to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois. She is now one of four German World War II U-boats that survive as museum ships, and, along with U-534, just one of two Type IXCs still in existence.”
Well worth a visit.
In the early '50s I served on two WWII fleet boats - USS Cobia (SS245) and USS Picuda (SS382).
I came aboard the latter as she was being converted to a Guppy (snorkel) boat up in Kittery, ME. Nearby the U-505 was moored and they let anybody go aboard.
I had the same reaction as you. Our boats had air conditioning, hydraulic systems and nine watertight compartments. The U-505 had no air or hydraulics and only five compartments. You'll see vids of the crew hauling down on a lever to open the deck vents to dive - our guys just flipped a lever. We could still surface with one flooded compartment; they had no window of survival if one of theirs flooded.
We ended up with a grudging admiration for the guys who went to war in those boats.
Pops was sunk by U-132. Film crews even did a short documentary onboard U-132 with what believe is the same crew. I wish my father lived long enough to see the internet. He would have been fascinated.
How much hot racking in the Guppy’s?
Yeah, well, they didn't want the Germans changing their naval codes so close to the invasion.
As I recall, Hardegen had a chronic health problem that eventually got him beached for the last part of the war. Probably the only reason he survived.
He did 10 years in Spandau.
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Much better than having his neck stretched or people wondering who actually fired the ‘mystery’ bullet.
Maybe we was just foolin' with him ...
None. AFAIK, all the old fleet boat (Gato class) crew had their own bunks. Mine was in the forward room, atop a torpedo and next to the bowplane motor. Interesting times when the guy on the bowplanes put them down so much they hits the stops - big blue flash gets your attention every time.
Forgot about the hot-bunking. I understand the Brits did that even on their corvettes and maybe destroyers.
Way back in my college days a friends father had served in a Guppy don't know which one.
From what he said it was miserable duty with more batteries and equipment crammed into what was already a cramped boat.
I presumed they had to go to hot racking for the extra manpower.
Yes, in the post Nazi world, very few admitted being Nazis. It really doesn’t matter in his case if he considered himself one: sinking Allied ships did Nazi bidding.
His descendents now share a country with Islamists and Leftists though, so there’s that.
"Ever give any thought to what the world would look like today if they had won?"
Where the hell is that coming from? Who here is waxing poetic about the thought Nazi or Tojo-ist victory? Nobody.
Despite the evil of the regimes we fought and defeated, millions of good men, a very large portion of them Christians, served the country God saw fit to place them in honorably and within the confines of the rules of war. Now they're dead, and while this isn't a topic of particular interest to me I also see no reason to groundlessly indict millions of honorable soldiers.
#17 Too bad he didn’t follow the lead of Captain Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp.
Maybe he could not sing? : )
Serving on the Picuda (Guppy) screwed up my hearing. One guy got a cold and it went through the boat like wildfire. Clogged me up four ways to Sunday.
We did a high-speed snorkel run and the idiots on the planes lost control and we dipped the pipe. Running full out on diesels we went below periscope depth and those engines sucked the air out of the boat in record time. Went from a surface atmosphere to 5,000' before they cut out.
There were three of us in the forward room who couldn't clear out ears in time and the others said it looked like we were marionettes - all sitting up at the same time with hands over our ears. Felt like someone shoving an ice pick my ears. There went my high frequency hearing. For the last 60 years I have had to watch peoples' lips when they talked. I could hear OK but it was gibberish.
Our radarman was having eyesight problems at the time and the running joke was that we had a blind radarman and a deaf sonar guy on board. The humor escaped me.
God bless your father. Kraut bastards were trying to destroy us
Brave men? Are you serious? These bastards were serving an evil regime that sought to dominate the world F**k them.
In my hometown of Kearny , NJ is a Catholic church, St. Stephens Church. It;s located on Washington Avenue. It's named after Father John Washington. Do you know who he was? Did you ever hear the story of The U.S.S Dorchester and the Four Chaplains? Did you? Read that read story pal and then tell me all about the ''brave men'' in the f**king U-boats because I have nothing but CONTEMPT for those heartless bastards.
That they were. Yet the great evil of Nazi Germany subverted itself and led to America’s rise to become a global superpower. The result has been a long era of prosperity, freedom, and relative peace for the world.
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