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Bosje · 04-08-08, 11:38 AM

May 28th, 1940. U-51, grid (Pas de Calais)

-10:00 pm
The Rooster is out on patrol again, itching to live up to its reputation. Our last patrol was as much a testrun as it was a war patrol and the boat needed a lot of work when we made it back home. After a month of welding and tinkering, she is good as new. Hasse, the boatswain, is satisfied with the work done by the boys from the yard and together we inspected her before we set out, 4 days ago. She no longer smells like a new piece of oily machinery. The first patrol left its mark. A remnant mixture of diesel, rotten food, sweat and tobacco fumes linger all throughout the boat. It smells like home, which is good. We are all confident about this boat now and it is time to get cocky with her.

A lot of crews on other boats have good luck talismans and superstitions, their boat is always 'the lucky boat' because they need to believe the boat will pull them through if they get in trouble. I sense a different approach from our boys: as long as we behave like the naughty schoolboys which we are said to be, we will come out just fine. Well we will soon find out because we are about to run straight through the Pas de Calais, at full speed on the surface. Straight through the patrol areas of the English guard dogs. Our orders are to patrol St George's Canal which is sure to be target rich and extremely dangerous. The boys are joking about the rooster taking a peck in Churchill's backyard and the staff join in the joking, if only to keep morale up. I am grinning while stand in the control room or on the bridge, but deep inside I am scared.

We could of course go all the way around Scotland and Ireland but that will cost us most of our fuel, besides it does not seem to be the thing to do for a proudly impertinent rooster. Well, it is time to make the run. It's as dark as can be expected this time of the year and thankfully, visibility is poor. We will just need a sharp lookout so we don't get a nasty surprise from a destroyer running straight at us from close range, but I have the Duke to take care of that.

May 29th, 1940. U-51, grid (just off Cherbourg)

-12:00 am
We can see the Cherbourg docks to our port, the channel dash has gone well so far but there are plenty of aircraft and destroyers about. As long as the weather is terrible we will stay on the surface, getting as much ground covered as we can. The crew are feeling miserable and the boat is an absolute mess, we are thrown around something awful by the heavy swell but we will simply have to deal with that later. If we get to our patrol zone we will likely spend most of time submerged, listening out for enemy shipping. They can all sleep then and so can I.

May 31st, 1940. U-51, grid AM97 (St George's Canal)

-5:30 am
We are here, the boat is sitting quietly at 25 meters, we are doing 90 rpm on both electrics just to maintain our heading and depth and now it's all down to Karl and Martin, the sound room boys. The rest of the crew are resting and cleaning up the mess after the storm but they have to be quiet. The sea is still very rough but the sky is quite clear. Good conditions for a submerged attack, our periscope will be pretty much invisible in the waves while we have the advantage of decent visibility. Now it is just a matter of waiting for a ship to sail along our path. My bed is in the soundroom so I'm sitting next to Karl as I am writing this. I have to be somewhat careful, they must never get to read this stuff; if they know how many times I've had doubts or been scared, the magic of the cheeky Kaleun who gets away with murder will be instantly forlorn.

-9:40 pm
Being cocky paid off and the crew are happy and proud. We sank a destroyer. This afternoon Karl reported fast screws closing, most probably a simple patrolling warship. We listened for a while and then did a quick surface run to a projected interception. Again we got it right, I'm gonna put Otto up for a medal for this. Smoke on the horizon, a destroyer at first glance and heading towards us. I could save our torpedoes for the big fat merchants but I reckon BdU will be just as pleased if we rid the Royal Navy of their anti submarine capabilities. Our positioning was excellent, I fired 2 shots for magnetic detonation with electric eels and we still had some headway to shoot our remaining torpedoes as things developed. Good call because the destroyer increased speed and started to turn as one torpedo exploded before even getting close, what happened to the other torpedo I will never know but it certainly did not hit the enemy warship. I had taken precautions for exactly this eventuality and immediately fired a fastrunning steam torpedo set for impact detonation, it could not miss from 600 meters and it didn't. The destroyer was classified as V or W class and the Duke took some photographs of her trough the observation periscope as she went down. If we make it back to Kiel I might be able to add them to this journal.

This was about 5 hours ago and we had a nasty surprise afterwards. We surfaced to get some fresh air and to charge the batteries but most of the staff was off-duty, getting some rest before our next action. All of a sudden it was pandemonium, ALAAAAAARM and the watch crew came scrambling down the hatch as the boat took a nosedive and I ordered hard starboard rudder at a wild guess. Konrad stood panting before me in the control room as he reported an MTB coming at us fast, bearing 30 dergrees port. The MTB won't give us any trouble while we are submerged but I can picture the commander giving an excited contact report of a U-boot diving 1000 meters in front of him. We are going to run away from here fast before the hunters get to us. Karl is keeping his ears out for fast screws and I am sitting beside him, scribbling away once more.

Today's lesson: constant vigilance while on the surface! We don't all have the Duke's eyesight. Being cocky is one thing, letting them creep up on a sleepy watchcrew is quite another. I gotta come up with a tighter watch circulation to keep the 1st, 2nd and third watches organized and sharp.

June 2nd, 1940. U-51, grid BF11 (western approaches, south)

-11:00 pm
Tankers are flying into our mouth today. This morning we sank a small tanker and just now we put 2 torpedoes in an American T3. They are officially neutral but this oil would have gone straight to the RAF I am sure so tough luck for the Amis. Besides, we got orders from BdU at the start of our patrol that all shipping from the western approaches down to the Bay of Biscay is fair game.

Gert is constantly expressing his worries about our fuel situation. We have been running at full speed through the channel and over the past couple of days we have constantly relocated in search for a nice fat convoy. It is at least 4000 kilometers back to Kiel and if we have to make another dash through the channel we need to save enough to make the run at high speed. But then, we have 8 torpedoes left and I am determined to put them to good use.

June 11th, 1940. U-51, grid AM73 (Irish west coast)

---
U-51 to BdU
110640 AM73
convoy NNW approx341 6kts 3 escorts
sunk 2x 6000tons 1x 5000tons
damaged 1x 5000tons
be advised escorts detect U-boot above 100rpm regardless schleichfaht
1 torpedo remaining, course set for return Kiel through Channel
---

-2:00 am
Above is an excerpt of the message I just sent off to BdU. The staff, Hasse and me just sat at the table in the officer's mess for an hour, discussing the possibilities and we can come to no other conclusion than that the frigate must have heard our screws as we were getting to 2 knots. We were silent as a mouse and Udo insists he and his boys in the stern torpedo room were absolutely quiet once the boat went silent.

We survived the attack, thankfully, because the frigate started pinging us. It served as a warning signal. But before the first ping caused everyone's heart to miss a beat, she was sailing in a straight line on the tail of the convoy which continued it's journey after having left behind 4 large merchants. This is what happened:

Finally after days and days looking for targets, we got the contact report on the convoy. We set on an intercept course but they must have changed their heading during our pursuit. Either way, we could not find a trace of smoke on the horizon, nor a whisper of screws on the hydrophones and we had a discussion with the staff. Gert insisted we head back home but we have a little fuel to spare yet and in the end, I call the shots. Fritz and the Duke agree with me anyway, we need to get out there and do all we can to hurt their shipping. We can really use something to grin about once more, morale is low after days and days of playing the floating cork in the empty ocean.

We took up a position along the most likely course the convoy was taking, sailing up along Ireland's western shore. 3 hours ago, we struck gold. Karl gave an excited shout and we went to action stations. We have all tubes loaded and 2 spare eels in the forward room, I deliberated with Udo for a while and he claims he can get both torpedoes loaded in under 15 minutes. I think the rooster on our conning tower agrees that the plan is quite stylish: We stay surfaced and launch 2 torpedoes from 2500 meters at the nearest fat boys. We then speed up and get to periscope depth by the time the torpedoes are due for impact. This should bring the escorts in looking for us but we will be almost inside the convoy while they search the empty seas from where we first launched. Meanwhile the house of lords is doing a lot of very un-lordly sweating and swearing as they get the tubes reloaded. Now inside the convoy, we use all four bow tubes to pick off the biggest targets which come through my periscope view while we use the sterntube to either finish off a crippled ship from the first strike or we pick out any opportunity targets. After having fired 7 torpedoes in 15 minutes, we dive underneath the convoy, go silent and we'll just go from there.

The plan worked like clockwork, unlike the torpedoes and we only sank 3 ships for 7 eels. Still, it is better than nothing and we can be proud of our daring and successful attackrun. An estimated 17.000 tons off the list and one large merchant heavily listing but still keeping up with the convoy, last time I saw her. We went deep and quiet, 2 escorts were searching the sea way off in the distance, where we had launched our first shots and a third escort stuck with the convoy. It was this last escort which came quite close to our position as it followed the stricken convoy but out of the blue, a terrifying PING went through the boat. We were not making any sounds at the time, Udo was now working in the stern torp room to get our last eel ready and we had been getting deeper and deeper very slowly, engines creeping along at 90 rpm which should effectively be silent.

Karl reported the fast screws of the trailing frigate and I ordered schleichfahrt but standard operating procedure for this is to sneak at a speed of 3 knots. I failed to take this into account and Gert had his boys very gently increase the rpm to meet the schleichfahrt. This is when the pinging started.
It's not Gert's fault, he just followed my order to the letter. Next time we are being hunted, I am sure everyone will keep a sharp eye on the revolutions. Other than accidentally detecting us, the frigate crew was rather clumsy. Their first pattern tossed the boat around a bit, but Hasse reported all compartments uncompromised and the ping had given him away so it was AK voraus, hard steuerbort und tiefenruder auf tauchen before the first charges went off. After an hour of dropping the cans at the same spot, he took off after the convoy. And now we are going home, back through the channel. Otto reports enough fuel for 4500 kilometers at slow speed and we have 4000 to traverse. This is going to be a tight run and it is going to take us a while but the grin is firmly stuck on my face.

Leutnant zur See Vom Bosch
Kaleun Type VIIb U-51

June 20th, 1940. U-51, Kiel.

-8:30 am
I usually do not write in the journal unless we are at sea but this is a special occasion. France has surrendered 2 days ago and we have promotions and medals to celebrate. Tonight there will be a party but after almost a month at sea, we are all completely exhausted. The Duke had the pictures developped first thing when we docked and they look good.

(September 23rd, 1940, Brest
The photos have suffered a bit from the heavy flooding after we hit that mine, especially the second one, but Naval Intelligence reports they intercepted a communique from the British Admiralty that HMS Wild Swan of the V&W class has been lost in those waters on may 31st so we can safely say that these are her last moments)

Photographs taken by Freiherr Beckman, Oberfahnrich zur See U-51, may 31st 1940 16:01

04-08-08, 11:38 AM	#7
Bosje Seasoned Skipper Join Date: Apr 2008 Posts: 732 Downloads: 89 Uploads: 0	May 28th, 1940. U-51, grid (Pas de Calais) -10:00 pm The Rooster is out on patrol again, itching to live up to its reputation. Our last patrol was as much a testrun as it was a war patrol and the boat needed a lot of work when we made it back home. After a month of welding and tinkering, she is good as new. Hasse, the boatswain, is satisfied with the work done by the boys from the yard and together we inspected her before we set out, 4 days ago. She no longer smells like a new piece of oily machinery. The first patrol left its mark. A remnant mixture of diesel, rotten food, sweat and tobacco fumes linger all throughout the boat. It smells like home, which is good. We are all confident about this boat now and it is time to get cocky with her. A lot of crews on other boats have good luck talismans and superstitions, their boat is always 'the lucky boat' because they need to believe the boat will pull them through if they get in trouble. I sense a different approach from our boys: as long as we behave like the naughty schoolboys which we are said to be, we will come out just fine. Well we will soon find out because we are about to run straight through the Pas de Calais, at full speed on the surface. Straight through the patrol areas of the English guard dogs. Our orders are to patrol St George's Canal which is sure to be target rich and extremely dangerous. The boys are joking about the rooster taking a peck in Churchill's backyard and the staff join in the joking, if only to keep morale up. I am grinning while stand in the control room or on the bridge, but deep inside I am scared. We could of course go all the way around Scotland and Ireland but that will cost us most of our fuel, besides it does not seem to be the thing to do for a proudly impertinent rooster. Well, it is time to make the run. It's as dark as can be expected this time of the year and thankfully, visibility is poor. We will just need a sharp lookout so we don't get a nasty surprise from a destroyer running straight at us from close range, but I have the Duke to take care of that. May 29th, 1940. U-51, grid (just off Cherbourg) -12:00 am We can see the Cherbourg docks to our port, the channel dash has gone well so far but there are plenty of aircraft and destroyers about. As long as the weather is terrible we will stay on the surface, getting as much ground covered as we can. The crew are feeling miserable and the boat is an absolute mess, we are thrown around something awful by the heavy swell but we will simply have to deal with that later. If we get to our patrol zone we will likely spend most of time submerged, listening out for enemy shipping. They can all sleep then and so can I. May 31st, 1940. U-51, grid AM97 (St George's Canal) -5:30 am We are here, the boat is sitting quietly at 25 meters, we are doing 90 rpm on both electrics just to maintain our heading and depth and now it's all down to Karl and Martin, the sound room boys. The rest of the crew are resting and cleaning up the mess after the storm but they have to be quiet. The sea is still very rough but the sky is quite clear. Good conditions for a submerged attack, our periscope will be pretty much invisible in the waves while we have the advantage of decent visibility. Now it is just a matter of waiting for a ship to sail along our path. My bed is in the soundroom so I'm sitting next to Karl as I am writing this. I have to be somewhat careful, they must never get to read this stuff; if they know how many times I've had doubts or been scared, the magic of the cheeky Kaleun who gets away with murder will be instantly forlorn. -9:40 pm Being cocky paid off and the crew are happy and proud. We sank a destroyer. This afternoon Karl reported fast screws closing, most probably a simple patrolling warship. We listened for a while and then did a quick surface run to a projected interception. Again we got it right, I'm gonna put Otto up for a medal for this. Smoke on the horizon, a destroyer at first glance and heading towards us. I could save our torpedoes for the big fat merchants but I reckon BdU will be just as pleased if we rid the Royal Navy of their anti submarine capabilities. Our positioning was excellent, I fired 2 shots for magnetic detonation with electric eels and we still had some headway to shoot our remaining torpedoes as things developed. Good call because the destroyer increased speed and started to turn as one torpedo exploded before even getting close, what happened to the other torpedo I will never know but it certainly did not hit the enemy warship. I had taken precautions for exactly this eventuality and immediately fired a fastrunning steam torpedo set for impact detonation, it could not miss from 600 meters and it didn't. The destroyer was classified as V or W class and the Duke took some photographs of her trough the observation periscope as she went down. If we make it back to Kiel I might be able to add them to this journal. This was about 5 hours ago and we had a nasty surprise afterwards. We surfaced to get some fresh air and to charge the batteries but most of the staff was off-duty, getting some rest before our next action. All of a sudden it was pandemonium, ALAAAAAARM and the watch crew came scrambling down the hatch as the boat took a nosedive and I ordered hard starboard rudder at a wild guess. Konrad stood panting before me in the control room as he reported an MTB coming at us fast, bearing 30 dergrees port. The MTB won't give us any trouble while we are submerged but I can picture the commander giving an excited contact report of a U-boot diving 1000 meters in front of him. We are going to run away from here fast before the hunters get to us. Karl is keeping his ears out for fast screws and I am sitting beside him, scribbling away once more. Today's lesson: constant vigilance while on the surface! We don't all have the Duke's eyesight. Being cocky is one thing, letting them creep up on a sleepy watchcrew is quite another. I gotta come up with a tighter watch circulation to keep the 1st, 2nd and third watches organized and sharp. June 2nd, 1940. U-51, grid BF11 (western approaches, south) -11:00 pm Tankers are flying into our mouth today. This morning we sank a small tanker and just now we put 2 torpedoes in an American T3. They are officially neutral but this oil would have gone straight to the RAF I am sure so tough luck for the Amis. Besides, we got orders from BdU at the start of our patrol that all shipping from the western approaches down to the Bay of Biscay is fair game. Gert is constantly expressing his worries about our fuel situation. We have been running at full speed through the channel and over the past couple of days we have constantly relocated in search for a nice fat convoy. It is at least 4000 kilometers back to Kiel and if we have to make another dash through the channel we need to save enough to make the run at high speed. But then, we have 8 torpedoes left and I am determined to put them to good use. June 11th, 1940. U-51, grid AM73 (Irish west coast) --- U-51 to BdU 110640 AM73 convoy NNW approx341 6kts 3 escorts sunk 2x 6000tons 1x 5000tons damaged 1x 5000tons be advised escorts detect U-boot above 100rpm regardless schleichfaht 1 torpedo remaining, course set for return Kiel through Channel --- -2:00 am Above is an excerpt of the message I just sent off to BdU. The staff, Hasse and me just sat at the table in the officer's mess for an hour, discussing the possibilities and we can come to no other conclusion than that the frigate must have heard our screws as we were getting to 2 knots. We were silent as a mouse and Udo insists he and his boys in the stern torpedo room were absolutely quiet once the boat went silent. We survived the attack, thankfully, because the frigate started pinging us. It served as a warning signal. But before the first ping caused everyone's heart to miss a beat, she was sailing in a straight line on the tail of the convoy which continued it's journey after having left behind 4 large merchants. This is what happened: Finally after days and days looking for targets, we got the contact report on the convoy. We set on an intercept course but they must have changed their heading during our pursuit. Either way, we could not find a trace of smoke on the horizon, nor a whisper of screws on the hydrophones and we had a discussion with the staff. Gert insisted we head back home but we have a little fuel to spare yet and in the end, I call the shots. Fritz and the Duke agree with me anyway, we need to get out there and do all we can to hurt their shipping. We can really use something to grin about once more, morale is low after days and days of playing the floating cork in the empty ocean. We took up a position along the most likely course the convoy was taking, sailing up along Ireland's western shore. 3 hours ago, we struck gold. Karl gave an excited shout and we went to action stations. We have all tubes loaded and 2 spare eels in the forward room, I deliberated with Udo for a while and he claims he can get both torpedoes loaded in under 15 minutes. I think the rooster on our conning tower agrees that the plan is quite stylish: We stay surfaced and launch 2 torpedoes from 2500 meters at the nearest fat boys. We then speed up and get to periscope depth by the time the torpedoes are due for impact. This should bring the escorts in looking for us but we will be almost inside the convoy while they search the empty seas from where we first launched. Meanwhile the house of lords is doing a lot of very un-lordly sweating and swearing as they get the tubes reloaded. Now inside the convoy, we use all four bow tubes to pick off the biggest targets which come through my periscope view while we use the sterntube to either finish off a crippled ship from the first strike or we pick out any opportunity targets. After having fired 7 torpedoes in 15 minutes, we dive underneath the convoy, go silent and we'll just go from there. The plan worked like clockwork, unlike the torpedoes and we only sank 3 ships for 7 eels. Still, it is better than nothing and we can be proud of our daring and successful attackrun. An estimated 17.000 tons off the list and one large merchant heavily listing but still keeping up with the convoy, last time I saw her. We went deep and quiet, 2 escorts were searching the sea way off in the distance, where we had launched our first shots and a third escort stuck with the convoy. It was this last escort which came quite close to our position as it followed the stricken convoy but out of the blue, a terrifying PING went through the boat. We were not making any sounds at the time, Udo was now working in the stern torp room to get our last eel ready and we had been getting deeper and deeper very slowly, engines creeping along at 90 rpm which should effectively be silent. Karl reported the fast screws of the trailing frigate and I ordered schleichfahrt but standard operating procedure for this is to sneak at a speed of 3 knots. I failed to take this into account and Gert had his boys very gently increase the rpm to meet the schleichfahrt. This is when the pinging started. It's not Gert's fault, he just followed my order to the letter. Next time we are being hunted, I am sure everyone will keep a sharp eye on the revolutions. Other than accidentally detecting us, the frigate crew was rather clumsy. Their first pattern tossed the boat around a bit, but Hasse reported all compartments uncompromised and the ping had given him away so it was AK voraus, hard steuerbort und tiefenruder auf tauchen before the first charges went off. After an hour of dropping the cans at the same spot, he took off after the convoy. And now we are going home, back through the channel. Otto reports enough fuel for 4500 kilometers at slow speed and we have 4000 to traverse. This is going to be a tight run and it is going to take us a while but the grin is firmly stuck on my face. Leutnant zur See Vom Bosch Kaleun Type VIIb U-51 June 20th, 1940. U-51, Kiel. -8:30 am I usually do not write in the journal unless we are at sea but this is a special occasion. France has surrendered 2 days ago and we have promotions and medals to celebrate. Tonight there will be a party but after almost a month at sea, we are all completely exhausted. The Duke had the pictures developped first thing when we docked and they look good. (September 23rd, 1940, Brest The photos have suffered a bit from the heavy flooding after we hit that mine, especially the second one, but Naval Intelligence reports they intercepted a communique from the British Admiralty that HMS Wild Swan of the V&W class has been lost in those waters on may 31st so we can safely say that these are her last moments) Photographs taken by Freiherr Beckman, Oberfahnrich zur See U-51, may 31st 1940 16:01 __________________ And when an 800-ton Uboat has you by the tits... you listen! Last edited by Bosje; 04-09-08 at 04:18 AM.