I read shadow divers ages ago... great book.
IIRC the boat was headed for one patrol area and re-routed to another, but never received the message to do so.
her fate is currently credited to these two boats - and rightly so i believe
http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-cp/history/...ow_Koiner.html
Im quite sure that these U-boat sailors were being depth charged for quite some time
after they had already been killed as the two boats continued their depth charge runs with great aggression.
what an increadibly helpless feeling it would have been to be sitting on the bottom with those loud pings blasting away at you. The report claims that with the depth setting of the depth charges one or more of the charges would have likely exploded within one or two feet of the hull! Though it is highly unlikely that you would survive that sort of blast - on the off chance that you did survive you would see the boat fill with water almost entirely within a few seconds. even if you could swim to the surface the depth charges continued to be dropped for quite a while after the boat was probably already destroyed.
Its just shameful that the war was so close to being over. The bravey of these U-boat sailors facing their odds by this point in the war cannot be overstated - im surprised that more U-boats didnt beach themselves on american shores by early 1945 just to surrender to the locals. Surely these sailors knew they were fighting a war that - at this point - could not be won... but they faced their duty anyway.
what more can you ask of your men?