[krashkart]

^^ Thanks jimbuna for the link to those photos.

It's a shame they had to dismember her and leave it all rusty inside.


EDIT: Pulling a quote from the second link jimbuna posted. I hope that's okay to do.

One winter's day in mid-Atlantic, a destroyer escorting the convoy in which my father's ship was sailing detected a submerged U-boat, shadowing the convoy until nightfall, and called in two corvettes to join in the attack. The U-boat commander must have been taken by surprise and his boat was mortally wounded by the first salvo of depth charges. My father's ship arrived at the scene just as the U-boat's stern rose out of the water at a steep angle, poised there momentarily before her death-plunge.

Everyone on deck was cheering and applauding. As he saw the U-boat's stern disappear beneath the waves, my father, a sensitive, compassionate man, could only say to himself, "Poor buggers". After the war, when he saw newspaper articles using the term "Nazi U-boat" he would say to me, "They weren't Nazis, they were sailors and, thanks to politicians, they were in the @#$%& just the same as we were - and little more than kids, most of 'em", just like most of our lot". My dad would tell me, if I asked him, how he saw the grey paint on
the U-boat's hull, the black paint underneath, the propellers still turning, and the two rudders. "That sight", he would say, "is burned into my brain. When I saw topedoed sailors horribly burned and coughing up black oil and you knew they were going to die, it didn't make me feel any better about the U-boat,
just worse; equally brave men, good men, on both sides, dying horribly."