Diary of Manfred Bollmann, 2nd January 1941, U-104, somewhere in the Atlantic.
We reached our designated patrol area yesterday in the morning. Captain said he knew there was prey close, so he set up quite a fast patrol route. For 24 hours it looked like we were burning fuel for nothing, then BdU sent me a contact very, very close to us. The message said it was a British ship, slowly moving away from us west.
It took just 15 minutes to find it – the captain spot it first, even though there wasn’t much light in the morning. Again he insisted that we get close and personal with our deck gun – the ship was moving away, and our batteries wouldn’t be enough to close the distance before they would be empty. Again, there was no return fire. But there was fire. Loads of it. At least the men who were up there said so. With more 5000 tons on us, we were pretty happy to look forward to the way back home.
But – we weren’t going home. The captain explained that we were supposed to be on a major shipping lane, which has to bring us some prey for our yet unused torpedoes. So we’re sailing along the supposed shipping lane towards Canada. The crew isn’t very happy about that. I am not very happy about that. We were ordered not to engage American ships, so what is he hoping to find here? I hope he finds it soon – I have never been this far from home. I never wanted to be on a tiny tin can in middle of the Atlantic. We are sailing away from the patrol area – in the wrong direction…
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