This is the Wilhelm Gustloff marked as a hospital ship. I don't know how easily this would have been seen by a sub commander at night. All the Allied hospital ships I've seen have large crosses amidships near the waterline.
Posted on 02/01/2015 2:57:53 AM PST by Paid_Russian_Troll
Over 9,000 people died in the Baltic Sea on January 30, 1945, in an attempt to evade the Red Army. The Wilhelm Gustloff was the largest shipwreck in history, but little is known about the catastrophe seven decades on.
At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner "Wilhelm Gustloff," as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler's address, but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren't listening to the Führer now.
They wanted one thing - to be rescued. Only very few, 1,252 to be precise, made it off the steamer alive, of the well over 10,000 - mostly women and children, but also navy sailors. The ship had been hit by three Soviet torpedoes within an hour; the temperature outside was minus 18 degrees Celsius.
The solace offered by the Wilhelm Gustloff was enormous for the passengers who boarded the ship at Gotenhafen. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians had wanted to embark on ship in the port near Gdansk, in what is today Poland. The Red Army was on their heels and their thoughts were of Nemmersdorf. It was the first village in German territory reached by the Soviets and there were already rumors circulating of the draconic revenge on the part of the Soviets for German war crimes. Only the navy could rescue them now.
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.de ...
The particular event you're describing took place off of Daytona Beach, I believe it was.
From the Univ of South Florida Museum of WW II:
German U-Boats sank over twenty-four ships off of Florida's Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Many ships could be seen burning from areas along the coast by Floridians and tourists. In late February 1942, German submarines attacked four merchant ships right off the east coast of Florida near Cape Canaveral.
All of these attacks took place after we entered the war. The Kriegsmarine had an insufficient number of long-range submarines to mount patrols off the U.S. coast until shortly after war was declared.
The Florida coast and off Cape Hatteras were favored hunting grounds for months, as merchant ships traveled without escorts and we weren't equipped to mount effective anti-submarine patrols.
The formation of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) was one of the outcomes of this situation. My father, who wasn't eligible for the draft and owned a light plane, flew from Oklahoma down to Galveston, TX and was part of a patrol unit stationed there.
Nice picture; what was interesting in WWI (and to a lesser extent WWII) was Germany’s use of surface ships as “commerce raiders”. The use of U-boats came about because the Royal Navy made them fairly ineffective.
In an old Time/Life book my family had when I was younger, there was a story of one of them (the Emden?) and its struggle to get back to Germany at the onset of WWII (IIRC); when the war started they may have been near Australia.
100% agree.
Furthermore, I've two sister-in-laws. One whose mom is originally Russian, when marrying a German guy (my sister-in-law's father) was apparently asked, several yrs after the war ended, if she would be "willing to marry a German".
Lots of crazy things went down as that war was nearing its end.
Last night on AHC I watched a show about “The real Inglorious Bastards”. The nazi leadership at Innsbruck surrendered to Hans Wijnberg who they had been torturing less than 24 hours earlier.
Thanks for the info; I assumed they could be sinking non-neutral (non US) ships along our coast before the war. The early days of the war against us were called the “happy times” by U-boat crews; their operation “Drumbeat” involved getting as many ships over here as quickly as possible because our freighters were sitting ducks.
When my father was a child in NYC they had blackouts; officially they were told it was to prevent ships from being silhouetted against the city lights. After the war it was revealed that it had been done to prevent NYers from seeing the damaged ships come in (with the related implications for public morale).
The General Slocum.
Anything and everything was, well, if not necessarily "fair game", at least "game".
In any event, an enemy-flagged ship sailing in a declared war zone (which the Baltic certainly was) was presumably (almost certainly) carrying military personnel or material.
As, indeed, the Wilhelm Gustloff was doing.
The loss of civilian life was regrettable but one of those so-called collateral costs of war. In fact, the Soviet submarine commander probably didn't give it a moment's thought.
Yeah, well, am glad I don’t live in those times.. and I meant “sisters-in-law” not “sister-in-laws”! — late at night here :)
This is the Wilhelm Gustloff marked as a hospital ship. I don't know how easily this would have been seen by a sub commander at night. All the Allied hospital ships I've seen have large crosses amidships near the waterline.
The loss of the Wilhelm Gustloff was a small part of a huge evacuation mounted by Germany called Operation Hannibal:
Wikipedia: Over a period of 15 weeks, somewhere between 494 and 1,080 merchant vessels of all types, including fishing boats and other craft, and utilizing Germany's largest remaining naval units, carried between 800,000 and 900,000 refugees and 350,000 soldiers across the Baltic Sea to Germany and German-occupied Denmark. This was more than three times the number of people evacuated in the nine-day operation at Dunkirk.In addition to the Goya, Wilhelm Gustloff, and General von Steuben, 158 other merchant vessels were lost during the 15-week course of Operation Hannibal (January 23 – May 8, 1945).
I remember when the JAG added to the battle staff. Glad I was retired by then.
No wonder that no one knows about it. The commies did the dirty deed. If the US has done this, there would be no end to it.
By 1945 the ship had been painted naval gray and was sitting idle as a barracks ship for sub tenders.
I have sort of looked into CAP and hopefully go try to get a pilot’s license going into spring or summer depending on the money situation.
As is shooting down a civilian airliner filled with hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. The Ruskis haven't changed their stripes much in seventy years.
If the Soviet commander was aware of what the Axis had done in the USSR (I don’t know what was concealed from them), I’d think he couldn’t care less about the civilians.
I understand; I didn’t know the timing of the sub attack along the beach in terms of oue entry into the war (and didn’t assume the victim was a US ship).
The economic war at sea was fascinating; the Germans must have known they were finished when convoys launched their own planes - game over.
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