krashkart
01-20-10, 10:55 AM
"We was practically spittin' in each others eyes!" - Lt. Bruno Kimmelman, 1921-1942
The following are excerpts from the personal memoirs of the late Werner Mahn (1907-1996), captain of the U-boat U47. In it he recalls his accounts of a particularly hair-raising patrol to the Atlantic Ocean, west of England, late in 1939.
........................
November 1939. It is our third patrol aboard U47 and nothing exciting has happened since our first outing in September. After setting out from Wilhelmshaven and hugging the Netherland/Belgium coastline, we made for the Channel, enroute to our assigned patrol grid. Nothing special to report back to Command, a few neutral sightings and ~10k tons British merchandise sent to the sea floor. All in all a routine mission with plenty of card games and pranks to fill the free time. But we had never before been sent through the English Channel, and as we sailed nearer to it the mood aboard our jolly little boat grew pensive. Some of the men began writing letters home, others were more intent on their duties.
Near England we found plenty to keep ourselves busy. We broke course several times to investigate areas close to the Southeast coast, finding and sinking two merchants and a C2 cargo ship. Adolf Conrad [Warrant Officer, night watchman] placed bets with some of the new recruits and, after asking each how long it would take for our broken adversaries to sink, he would announce his own predictions.
Conrad had been in this business a little bit longer than I, and had a knack for gauging when the last of the groaning steel would slip beneath the waves. And, quite admirably, he always returned his winnings. But his eyes would grow deadly serious. He would point a finger out to sea, saying, "Stay alive long enough...". He would return to his duties without another word, leaving many a school of guppies [junior sailors] to form their own conclusions.
........................
The majority of this chapter has been omitted here for brevity. It describes the trip to the Channel, the sinking of a British V & W destroyer, and the uneventful escape from another that had responded to the resulting distress call. After resurfacing and proceeding toward the English Channel, the crew of U47 encountered another warship. This time it was an armed trawler. Herr Mahn wrote of his confidence in destroying such an easy target. We leave you now to the critical moments of that battle.
........................
We closed to 4km and fired a bow tube. The trawler swerved briefly, returning to course after our torpedo had slipped past the stern. Damn! I ordered a second shot, a TII. Again, a miss, but that time she couldn't have seen it. I had been hasty with the gyro settings. By then we were very close to our quarry, and I had grown bloodthirsty, impatient.
"Surface the boat! Carlewitz! Prepare all guns!", I ordered. A cheer erupted from below, and the floor tilted as our boat churned to the surface. Five sailors rushed up the ladder, brushing past me as I brought the periscope back down to rest. [Sub-Lieutenant] Carlewitz emerged last from below, ensured all his men had their helmets, and grabbed an extra to take to Bruno Kimmelman. Bruno was already outside prepping the deck gun. His youthful exuberance had propelled him into the fight with no forethought of life and limb. Carlewitz sprang up the ladder, shouting after his young charge, and I followed after donning my own brain bucket.
I ordered full ahead from the Chief Engineer and checked the UZO. "Over there, Kapitan!", Carlewitz said, pointing to the trawler. I nodded and brought the vermin into my sights. She was now nearly 40 degrees to our portside, her searchlights scanning swaths around her in an attempt to roust us from our hiding place. They had yet to discover where we were. But they certainly knew we were here!
"Rudder ten degrees to port!"
The sharklike snout of our boat turned toward our prey.
"Hold your fire, men. Place your sights on their bridge and await my order.", I yelled.
The flak mounts behind me groaned lightly as the gunners swung their sights around. Ahead of me, on the casing, a shell was slammed into the breech, and all was quiet as we awaited our moment of glory. After endless seconds, adrenaline coursing through our veins, we straightened out from our turn and opened fire on the unsuspecting English. The roar from the deck gun was deafening, shattering the calm night. The flak men fired in bursts, tearing great holes in the water near the hull of the trawler.
The searchlights on the Brit trawler winked out as our initial cannon fire arced over the ship. Some of the 2cm we were firing began meeting its mark. Our flak men began shouting: More ammunition! Aim a little higher! Reload! Write your name on their hull! Our battle fever became a pyrotechnic thunderstorm that lit up the night. All would know the fury of the Germans on this night!
The 8.8cm began meeting her mark, blasting shredded sheets of steel from the bow of our adversary. The Brits had regained their senses and turned to speed toward us. Her deck gun opened up, landing an incredible blow to the sea just forward of her own bow. Then another... again creating a catastrophic waterspout between us. Some smaller calibre fire peppered the water near us, a few rounds landing on our hull and spraying bits of shattered metal into the air around us.
I was none too sure of my own fate, nor that of my crew. But I was certain of the fate the little English boat would meet tonight. We pressed on into the fight with stern resolve. Yet the trawler's gun crews had corrected their fire. Shells from their forward gun were landing ever closer to our thin-skinned Uboat, finally blasting a hole in our prow. A short cry came from the casing, but the crew slammed another shell into the breech. They returned the favor by removing a search light from the deck of the trawler. Carlewitz informed me that the loader had taken shrapnel in his leg, but refused to be relieved. I breathed a little easier as I tried to line our boat up for a torpedo shot, but the Brits were closing too quickly. There was no room left. 600 meters. 500...
"Back emergency!", I shouted down the tube. The great engines below slowed to idle. My face pressed into the UZO as they throttled back up, the props tugging away at U47's forward momentum. The trawler began steaming again to our portside, opening the profile of our ship to their guns. Several more of their shells had landed aboard and smoke choked our throats and lungs. Still we fought. 2cm shells were zipping over my head to chatter rapidly against the trawler. The muzzle blast from our flak guns singed the hair on my neck, and I could feel the heat of it wash up inside the helmet and over my scalp.
I ducked down briefly and looked over at Carlewitz, who had done the same. He pointed over his shoulder to the flak men, grinning admirably. I nodded in appreciation. He had trained them well. In the ambience of muzzle flashes and explosions I could see the fever of battle in his eyes. His teeth were gnashed together in the heat of the pitched exchange of fire. Another British shell landed aboard. The entire length of our boat shuddered in anguish. One of our flak guns fell silent.
"Keep firing!", I demanded as I looked up to the silence. The gunner came forward.
"That last shell struck close to the gun casing, Kapitan!", he shouted. He returned to his post and his twin flak guns burst angrily back to life.
Carlewitz hollered down the hatch, calling our medic to the conning tower. Then he slapped me on the shoulder as he made his way around the flak mount to the ladder behind it. I went back to the UZO, staying low enough for my flak men to deliver their fury. Only a matter of seconds had passed. We had begun backtracking in our own wake, the trawler now within three hundred meters. I ordered full starboard rudder as another British shell slammed into the submarine. Their smaller automatics raked along the hull, creating a myriad of small flashes and more swarms of pulverized metal that zipped past our heads and into our clothing. I hadn't felt the bits that had grazed my right cheek, nor the ones that had come to rest in my chin and the bridge of my nose. I would later realize, after many years and a trip to a radiologist, how close I had come that dark morning.
Our deck gun again roared into service, sending a shell straight into the trawler's side. By then our damage control team had sprung to their duties. They had been waiting for this moment the way cats wait for mice. Calls began coming up the tube. Fire in the forward quarters! Damage to the radios! Fire in the battery compartment! My blood surged. I wanted to throw myself at the enemy, to destroy them with my own might. Even at the old age of 32 that primal drive clawed at me, and I drove it away.
Our fire was beginning to decimate the trawler. Several 8.8's had slammed into the English deck gun. It had fallen silent as more rounds exploded inside their bridge. Our boat was perpendicular to their port side, nose-on. I resisted the urge to ram our submarine into them. Much of their small caliber fire now tore at the water around us. A few more successive shots from our 8.8 knocked out their port guns and blasted holes in the waterline. She had slowed nearly to a halt, smoke and fire erupting from the bow, the bridge had become a howling blast furnace. An explosion burst from the rear deck, sending shredded steel and soft man aloft, and that was the end of it.
I remember, only ever very briefly, hearing the cries of English sailors that had survived long enough to feel the sharp bite of the freezing waters surrounding us. Of those we could find, none could have been saved. There were no life boats, only a blazing slick across the water and a menagerie of floating debris. Our own boat had suffered tremendous damage. The bow quarters had burned so badly that we had to throw all of the bedding and personal items overboard. Our batteries, critical for underwater operations, would take several days to repair. However they would only hold a small portion of their normal peak charge and would have to be replaced. The hull leaked in places all the way back to Germany.
Otto, our radio operator, had been terribly wounded by an explosion in the radio compartment. A penetrating hit from the English. The sonar man, incredibly, had come away with only minor injuries. The Brit shell had impacted above and just behind his sonar station. Nobody could believe it. In light of Otto's injuries and U47's battered hull, we had to scrap the patrol and return to Wilhelmshaven.
[Otto Grau would survive, though his war was over. He returned to his wife in Memmingen, spawned many kinder, and lived until 1977.]
Much later in life, as my health began its slow march downhill, I was urged by my family -- all of them -- to visit a doctor. I hadn't been to one since the end of the war. A radiologist (last name Conrad, no less), informed me that he had found something unusual. At first I thought perhaps it was a tumor; the headaches I had privately suffered over the years had been unbearable at times. But when he showed me the images he had taken with his xray machine, he pointed to a tiny, rough fragment of metal. A fragment that had somehow found its way to a point very close to the inner surface of the right half of my brain.
"Could you explain to me how that happened, Herr Mahn?", he asked me. His eyes were wide with a mixture of concern, disbelief and innate curiosity. My wife and eldest son were seated in the room, having never known of the things I had done for the Reich. The things we do for country in times of war. And I remembered then how, after sinking a British trawler in the English Channel some years ago, I had noticed a small spot of blood on the bridge of my nose. A spot of blood, with a sting ever so slight, that I had wiped away without a second thought...
The End
........................
Hi. I'm krashkart and I have lurked here at the subsim forums for some time. After having played Dangerous Waters many times over, I am now also a budding fan of Silent Hunter III. Several days ago I joined the forums to take advantage of the Downloads section (mods, you know. Can't really live without them :rock:), and I have been waiting for the right time to make my first post to your great and mighty boards. At last, I found that opportunity.
Enroute to grid BF17 my sub encountered this trawler, and sure as heck I would fire some torpedos at the sucker without hitting anything. So I did what any good U-Boat captain would do: surface the boat and wipe out a small, heavily armed warship! I knew I had to write about it, so, there it is. :D
krashkart <--- teh suck with torpedos :yeah:
The following are excerpts from the personal memoirs of the late Werner Mahn (1907-1996), captain of the U-boat U47. In it he recalls his accounts of a particularly hair-raising patrol to the Atlantic Ocean, west of England, late in 1939.
........................
November 1939. It is our third patrol aboard U47 and nothing exciting has happened since our first outing in September. After setting out from Wilhelmshaven and hugging the Netherland/Belgium coastline, we made for the Channel, enroute to our assigned patrol grid. Nothing special to report back to Command, a few neutral sightings and ~10k tons British merchandise sent to the sea floor. All in all a routine mission with plenty of card games and pranks to fill the free time. But we had never before been sent through the English Channel, and as we sailed nearer to it the mood aboard our jolly little boat grew pensive. Some of the men began writing letters home, others were more intent on their duties.
Near England we found plenty to keep ourselves busy. We broke course several times to investigate areas close to the Southeast coast, finding and sinking two merchants and a C2 cargo ship. Adolf Conrad [Warrant Officer, night watchman] placed bets with some of the new recruits and, after asking each how long it would take for our broken adversaries to sink, he would announce his own predictions.
Conrad had been in this business a little bit longer than I, and had a knack for gauging when the last of the groaning steel would slip beneath the waves. And, quite admirably, he always returned his winnings. But his eyes would grow deadly serious. He would point a finger out to sea, saying, "Stay alive long enough...". He would return to his duties without another word, leaving many a school of guppies [junior sailors] to form their own conclusions.
........................
The majority of this chapter has been omitted here for brevity. It describes the trip to the Channel, the sinking of a British V & W destroyer, and the uneventful escape from another that had responded to the resulting distress call. After resurfacing and proceeding toward the English Channel, the crew of U47 encountered another warship. This time it was an armed trawler. Herr Mahn wrote of his confidence in destroying such an easy target. We leave you now to the critical moments of that battle.
........................
We closed to 4km and fired a bow tube. The trawler swerved briefly, returning to course after our torpedo had slipped past the stern. Damn! I ordered a second shot, a TII. Again, a miss, but that time she couldn't have seen it. I had been hasty with the gyro settings. By then we were very close to our quarry, and I had grown bloodthirsty, impatient.
"Surface the boat! Carlewitz! Prepare all guns!", I ordered. A cheer erupted from below, and the floor tilted as our boat churned to the surface. Five sailors rushed up the ladder, brushing past me as I brought the periscope back down to rest. [Sub-Lieutenant] Carlewitz emerged last from below, ensured all his men had their helmets, and grabbed an extra to take to Bruno Kimmelman. Bruno was already outside prepping the deck gun. His youthful exuberance had propelled him into the fight with no forethought of life and limb. Carlewitz sprang up the ladder, shouting after his young charge, and I followed after donning my own brain bucket.
I ordered full ahead from the Chief Engineer and checked the UZO. "Over there, Kapitan!", Carlewitz said, pointing to the trawler. I nodded and brought the vermin into my sights. She was now nearly 40 degrees to our portside, her searchlights scanning swaths around her in an attempt to roust us from our hiding place. They had yet to discover where we were. But they certainly knew we were here!
"Rudder ten degrees to port!"
The sharklike snout of our boat turned toward our prey.
"Hold your fire, men. Place your sights on their bridge and await my order.", I yelled.
The flak mounts behind me groaned lightly as the gunners swung their sights around. Ahead of me, on the casing, a shell was slammed into the breech, and all was quiet as we awaited our moment of glory. After endless seconds, adrenaline coursing through our veins, we straightened out from our turn and opened fire on the unsuspecting English. The roar from the deck gun was deafening, shattering the calm night. The flak men fired in bursts, tearing great holes in the water near the hull of the trawler.
The searchlights on the Brit trawler winked out as our initial cannon fire arced over the ship. Some of the 2cm we were firing began meeting its mark. Our flak men began shouting: More ammunition! Aim a little higher! Reload! Write your name on their hull! Our battle fever became a pyrotechnic thunderstorm that lit up the night. All would know the fury of the Germans on this night!
The 8.8cm began meeting her mark, blasting shredded sheets of steel from the bow of our adversary. The Brits had regained their senses and turned to speed toward us. Her deck gun opened up, landing an incredible blow to the sea just forward of her own bow. Then another... again creating a catastrophic waterspout between us. Some smaller calibre fire peppered the water near us, a few rounds landing on our hull and spraying bits of shattered metal into the air around us.
I was none too sure of my own fate, nor that of my crew. But I was certain of the fate the little English boat would meet tonight. We pressed on into the fight with stern resolve. Yet the trawler's gun crews had corrected their fire. Shells from their forward gun were landing ever closer to our thin-skinned Uboat, finally blasting a hole in our prow. A short cry came from the casing, but the crew slammed another shell into the breech. They returned the favor by removing a search light from the deck of the trawler. Carlewitz informed me that the loader had taken shrapnel in his leg, but refused to be relieved. I breathed a little easier as I tried to line our boat up for a torpedo shot, but the Brits were closing too quickly. There was no room left. 600 meters. 500...
"Back emergency!", I shouted down the tube. The great engines below slowed to idle. My face pressed into the UZO as they throttled back up, the props tugging away at U47's forward momentum. The trawler began steaming again to our portside, opening the profile of our ship to their guns. Several more of their shells had landed aboard and smoke choked our throats and lungs. Still we fought. 2cm shells were zipping over my head to chatter rapidly against the trawler. The muzzle blast from our flak guns singed the hair on my neck, and I could feel the heat of it wash up inside the helmet and over my scalp.
I ducked down briefly and looked over at Carlewitz, who had done the same. He pointed over his shoulder to the flak men, grinning admirably. I nodded in appreciation. He had trained them well. In the ambience of muzzle flashes and explosions I could see the fever of battle in his eyes. His teeth were gnashed together in the heat of the pitched exchange of fire. Another British shell landed aboard. The entire length of our boat shuddered in anguish. One of our flak guns fell silent.
"Keep firing!", I demanded as I looked up to the silence. The gunner came forward.
"That last shell struck close to the gun casing, Kapitan!", he shouted. He returned to his post and his twin flak guns burst angrily back to life.
Carlewitz hollered down the hatch, calling our medic to the conning tower. Then he slapped me on the shoulder as he made his way around the flak mount to the ladder behind it. I went back to the UZO, staying low enough for my flak men to deliver their fury. Only a matter of seconds had passed. We had begun backtracking in our own wake, the trawler now within three hundred meters. I ordered full starboard rudder as another British shell slammed into the submarine. Their smaller automatics raked along the hull, creating a myriad of small flashes and more swarms of pulverized metal that zipped past our heads and into our clothing. I hadn't felt the bits that had grazed my right cheek, nor the ones that had come to rest in my chin and the bridge of my nose. I would later realize, after many years and a trip to a radiologist, how close I had come that dark morning.
Our deck gun again roared into service, sending a shell straight into the trawler's side. By then our damage control team had sprung to their duties. They had been waiting for this moment the way cats wait for mice. Calls began coming up the tube. Fire in the forward quarters! Damage to the radios! Fire in the battery compartment! My blood surged. I wanted to throw myself at the enemy, to destroy them with my own might. Even at the old age of 32 that primal drive clawed at me, and I drove it away.
Our fire was beginning to decimate the trawler. Several 8.8's had slammed into the English deck gun. It had fallen silent as more rounds exploded inside their bridge. Our boat was perpendicular to their port side, nose-on. I resisted the urge to ram our submarine into them. Much of their small caliber fire now tore at the water around us. A few more successive shots from our 8.8 knocked out their port guns and blasted holes in the waterline. She had slowed nearly to a halt, smoke and fire erupting from the bow, the bridge had become a howling blast furnace. An explosion burst from the rear deck, sending shredded steel and soft man aloft, and that was the end of it.
I remember, only ever very briefly, hearing the cries of English sailors that had survived long enough to feel the sharp bite of the freezing waters surrounding us. Of those we could find, none could have been saved. There were no life boats, only a blazing slick across the water and a menagerie of floating debris. Our own boat had suffered tremendous damage. The bow quarters had burned so badly that we had to throw all of the bedding and personal items overboard. Our batteries, critical for underwater operations, would take several days to repair. However they would only hold a small portion of their normal peak charge and would have to be replaced. The hull leaked in places all the way back to Germany.
Otto, our radio operator, had been terribly wounded by an explosion in the radio compartment. A penetrating hit from the English. The sonar man, incredibly, had come away with only minor injuries. The Brit shell had impacted above and just behind his sonar station. Nobody could believe it. In light of Otto's injuries and U47's battered hull, we had to scrap the patrol and return to Wilhelmshaven.
[Otto Grau would survive, though his war was over. He returned to his wife in Memmingen, spawned many kinder, and lived until 1977.]
Much later in life, as my health began its slow march downhill, I was urged by my family -- all of them -- to visit a doctor. I hadn't been to one since the end of the war. A radiologist (last name Conrad, no less), informed me that he had found something unusual. At first I thought perhaps it was a tumor; the headaches I had privately suffered over the years had been unbearable at times. But when he showed me the images he had taken with his xray machine, he pointed to a tiny, rough fragment of metal. A fragment that had somehow found its way to a point very close to the inner surface of the right half of my brain.
"Could you explain to me how that happened, Herr Mahn?", he asked me. His eyes were wide with a mixture of concern, disbelief and innate curiosity. My wife and eldest son were seated in the room, having never known of the things I had done for the Reich. The things we do for country in times of war. And I remembered then how, after sinking a British trawler in the English Channel some years ago, I had noticed a small spot of blood on the bridge of my nose. A spot of blood, with a sting ever so slight, that I had wiped away without a second thought...
The End
........................
Hi. I'm krashkart and I have lurked here at the subsim forums for some time. After having played Dangerous Waters many times over, I am now also a budding fan of Silent Hunter III. Several days ago I joined the forums to take advantage of the Downloads section (mods, you know. Can't really live without them :rock:), and I have been waiting for the right time to make my first post to your great and mighty boards. At last, I found that opportunity.
Enroute to grid BF17 my sub encountered this trawler, and sure as heck I would fire some torpedos at the sucker without hitting anything. So I did what any good U-Boat captain would do: surface the boat and wipe out a small, heavily armed warship! I knew I had to write about it, so, there it is. :D
krashkart <--- teh suck with torpedos :yeah: