U-2 War Journal

[Bosje]

thanks feindfahrt 5 journal entry coming soon

[Bosje]

February 5th, 1940. U-2, grid AN48 (North Sea, north of Doggersbank)


-6:00 am
We have finished our 24-hour patrol of grid AN48 on this, our 5th Feindfahrt. No contacts with any English vessels so far. We are relocating closer to the English coast now, it has proven a great hunting ground for us on our previous 4 patrols. The RAF is still not much of a threat, we hardly ever see any of these airplanes which are continually putting so much pressure onto the other boats, or so we are told. We've been transferred: our flotilla is the 7th out of Kiel now. As the tonnage war is growing in intensity, several boats have already been lost at sea but the yards are building new fleet boats at a good rate. I am scheduled to commission one, probably before the spring is over, or so the rumor goes. Finally!


We have had some mutations in the crew as well; as we docked in Wilhemshaven a month ago, Adolf my 1. WO got his promotion and he is now back to school for his final training as kaleun. Standard practice is that a new captain takes one of these coastal subs out on a couple of short patrols to get comfortable with commanding the boat and then we are sent to the Atlantic in a fleet sub as 'veterans'. I am so far the most successful Type II rookie in the flottila and together with my officers and men we make a good team. We always have been by the way, we've known each other since we were roommates in the Academy.


Otto, Fritz and me. I am terrible at math and all the technical stuff but I seem to have an instinct for taking the right course of action when the game is on. Fritz could drive a ton of bricks as long as it has propulsion and steering, Otto will find anything anytime, whether it is something exotic from the supply depot or a precise location on the charts. The three of us graduated in the same year and between us we got the trophy for most successful completion of the wargame exercises. I call the shots, Fritz gets it done and Otto will tell you where you are and where everything else is, without having to look at the map. I got my commission as Kaleun of U-2 in 1938 after serving as 1.WO for a couple of years on an old boat left over from '14-'18, the brass were obviously aware of our academy achievements and I found Fritz and Otto welcoming me when I first inspected the boat.

Udo joined us a week later as the expert in destroying things with the weapons we have at our disposal, he has his torpedo officer qualification now and the house of lords has become a lot more efficient since our first patrol. And now the most recent addition to our staff is a new watch officer after Adolf left. The file on this guy was not very promising but we didn't have much choice in the matter and after 5 days at sea, it turns out he is actually not so bad.


Freiherr Beckman is an aristocrat from a nest of military tradition, some decades ago he would have been career officer in command of the noble cavalry charge, now he is just a 3rd grade lieutenant with no chance of a career unless he get his chest covered with medals. He applied for a position on an aggressive and successful combat unit, dreaming about a destroyer or schnellboot racing across the sea and raiding enemy shipping. Instead he is 'demoted' (as he sees it) to sardine and has to report to the U-pens. He walked up to the boat with an arrogant but very authoritative look in his eyes, giving the tub a demeaning glance. This was a man who has authority and power before he is even born, and he knows it. Until the party took over, of course. He hates the national socialists and he never took the trouble to hide it, he sees his placing on my boat as a personal dispute between himself and the brass which he insulted. 'This ship smells' were his first words and he was greeted with a choir of indignant voices: 'it's a boat!' I told him to never insult our sardine can again and he got his living quarters sorted out after a correct salute. A bit too correct in fact. We did not get off on the right foot, I must say. But I have a feeling we will get along very well when push comes to shove, he looks like a good man to have when under fire.


He is arrogant and, like me, quite cocky, so in that respect he fits right in. He knows little about the submarine war yet but he is very smart and he has the best pair of eyes I ever encountered. Hunting and commanding men comes natural to him, now he just has to get used to living in a can of sardines, which is a far cry from his family estate. I'm sure he will make a brilliant kaleun some day but with a little luck, his political views will prevent his promotion for a long time to come which means that until then, I have a brilliant 1.WO. We call him the Duke, which he doesn't like. But then he doesn't seem to like much at all.




February 6th, 1940. U-2, grid AN47 (inside the shipping lanes off the English coast)


-7:15 am
Well, we are waiting once again so I am killing the time with my pen as the crew keeps the rooster in check. I say the rooster because that is now our unofficial name. We are of course still the can of sardines and the boat and the tub and the rest of it, but we have an identity and a personality now. As most boats do. It's all because of that stupid grin of mine, acting the cocky boy part whenever the enemy is in range. Udo and his lordships have painted a white cockerel on our conning tower. They did it last night while we were charging our batteries in perfect clear weather. Very risky, very cocky, very much in style. It was the first time I saw the the Duke display a hint of a smile and I just grinned and gave the boys ration of gin. The gin is our current drink of the house which we recovered from a sealed box among the wreckage of our last kill, on new year's day. Obviously the sea dogs took is as a great reward from higher forces and I can hardly tell them it's just a lucky find. Most of us don't even like the taste but we all say we love it because we took it from the English as spoils of war. Otto is our official keeper of the gin-key and it is to be saved for special occasions.


Anyway we are The Rooster boat and we are going to sink our spurs into their shipping very shortly, because Karl reported a sound contact which we are now intercepting.


-7:40 am
The Duke was the first to spot her. It looks like a coastal merchant and he claims he can see a polish flag but nobody else can confirm and personally I doubt it's humanly possible to have that kind of eyesight. We'll get a positive identification soon enough as we are in AK pursuit. We were expecting her to the starboard but the Duke calmly reported a silhouette through the morning fog at 260 degrees. I wonder how she managed to slip past us but never mind, we can outrun her. It won't be long before the sun comes up and it looks like it's going to be a perfect day for flying so we are going to action stations and I have a ordered a full watchcrew to keep an eye on the skies, the game is on!


-2:15 pm
I have found out how to get the Duke smiling. Get him into a fight! At 8:00, at the first hint of daylight, he reported a plane on the horizon. Coastal Command is pretty green though, they took a dive at us a couple of times but our flak was giving them the good news. Bombs were dropped but they never even got close while we raced straight for the merchant which was still at 5 kilometers distance. Standard operating procedure is to crash dive on an airplane sighting but they have not impressed me yet and I wanted to sink this Polish freighter (the Duke was right about the flag, I'm impressed). As I was fixing a solution through the uzo for a spread shot with fast running torpedoes, he was guiding the flak gun to keep the hurricanes from landing a pill on our boat. He was clearly in his element and so was I.


Nobody expects a submarine to attack on the surface while aircraft are attacking it so instead of zigzagging, the polish ship just ran a straight course out of the area. Either that or she never even knew we were there. A little hard to believe with all the shooting and bombing going on but perhaps the lookouts were just getting a cup of coffee from the cook. Either way my 3 degree spread missed because she did not zigzag. Can't have been more than a couple of meters but the torpedoes ran past her, just off both the bow and stern. She sailed on entirely unimpressed. I launched the third eel right at her smokestack and that did the trick. She went down and so did we. Enough excitement for the day, I think. The Duke had never really believed a word of the crew's tales of the cocky kaleun but as we climbed down the ladder into the control room he turned to me and said 'I like your style, Herr Kaleun'. 'I'm glad it meets with your approval, Einz WO', I grinned and I added: 'You seem to enjoy the hunt, well you are in luck because hunting is our game. Welcome aboard U-2, Freiherr Beckman.'


February 7th, 1940. U-2, grid AN51


-2:30 am
I am somewhere between miserable and happy. It is a beautiful clear winter night, all the stars are out and it's freezing cold but there is also a tremendous gale blowing which means we are all covered in ice from the spray. We just got down from the bridge in a bad state, frozen to the bone and now the warm blood starts flowing again which hurts like hell. All the same I was thoroughly enjoying the ride, plowing through the monstrous waves, ducking down each time the bow launched a fountain of ice shards onto us as it crashed down. However entertaining though, we can't expect to see a thing if we keep our heads down so we just took the boat under to give Karl a chance instead. And he got something immediately, a merchant coming our way directly south of us and a patrolling warship on our stern. The warship is moving away so we'll just have a go at this merchant instead. We still have 2 torpedoes left and I am going to listen to the screws again.


-3:30 am
After an hour, Karl and Otto are pretty sure she is going due north, about to pass us some 8 kilometers to our west. So we are going in for the kill, all hands at action stations once more, the Duke is getting ready for some more fun on the bridge and the waves are still enormous. The Duke has just spotted her at 7,5 kilometers, we are still ahead of her so we will charge in on the surface, running at flank speed as Otto is putting us straight abeam.


-4:20 am
A great example of teamwork. Otto and Karl had been spot on the mark, the Duke called it and Udo got the torpedoes in right under the bridge. She was a big one, classified as C-3 Cargo. The only thing that went wrong is that she did not go down. She just sat there, dead in the water but still afloat. The crew were abandoning ship but I spent my last torpedoes and did not have the means to put as much as a dent in here except if I rammed her. As she outweighs us by god knows how many times, that is not an option either. Getting a man on the flak gun is impossible with the heavy seas and after I smoked my cigarette, pondering our bad luck, I came to no conclusions other than to simply send off a radio message on her position and on our plan to return to Kiel after having spent all torpedoes. We set off on a course straight home when Karl shouted he heard bulkheads collapsing. She was out of sight behind us but is sounded like she was going down after all. We'll get confirmation later, I am sure, from BdU who monitor all the English communiques to confirm our reported kills. The Rooster crows and proudly strides home, or something like that.


Leutnant zur See Vom Bosch,
KaptanLeutnant Type IId U-2

[Penelope_Grey]

I do believe it was Bill and Ted who said something like

"EXCELLENT!!!" *Que quick plucking of the guitar*

[Brag]

Wow! Another budding scribe. Keep at it.

[Bosje]

March 23rd, 1940. U-51, grid AM38 (35 kilometers NE from Loch Ewe)


-8:00 pm
This is our 7th day at sea on the 6th Feindfahrt but only now do I find the time to scribble in this journal. It will not be a long entry but I just want to say that the crew are reloading the sterntube. U-51 is a Type VIIB fleet U-boot and I am her commanding officer. More soon, we are very close to the 'secret' Royal Navy base of Loch Ewe and we are surrounded by patrolling warships. They still do not know where we are even though we sunk a merchants and a destroyer this afternoon.


-9:45 pm
We are heading back out to sea. We have spent 6 torpedoes already on this patrol and we still have 8 left but Loch Ewe is well defended and I dare not risk the boat on her first patrol. After all, we still have to get fully familiar with how she handles, the only similarity with the old U-2 is the rooster on the conning tower. Otto has set a course for the western approaches and we will see if we can intercept a convoy there.




March 25th, 1940. U-51, grid AM29 (western approaches northern route)


-2:30 pm
Convoy contact report. Interception course set for contact in about 8 hours, the plan is to set up a night surface attack. Which gives me some time to talk about our new boat. She is big and she is beautiful compared to our old U-2. Twice the number of crewmen, thrice the number of torpedoes, we have an 88 mm deck gun, a 20 mm flak gun, an improved KDB hydrophone and a sterntube. A machine truly fit for war. I loved her on sight.


I got my first look at her a month ago, me and my staff went to the sub pens like an excited group of boys who are about to inspect the new sweetshop in town. We climbed in and around her all day, pressing all the buttons and working all the handles to see how it all fits together, we had to get to know her very quickly because it would not be long before we took this baby out on war patrol. A couple of afternoons cruising around the harbor was all we had time for, the rest of the time was spent loading her up and getting her ready for combat. I have a new boatswain who served on Type VIIs before, he is my walking manual and he showed us all the gadgets and dials, I have a new officer on the staff as well, Gert is the chief engineer who keeps the diesels and electrics in working order while Fritz is learning all about the trimming and driving controls. This boat can go all the way into the Atlantic and patrol there for over a month, a far cry from the weekend trips we had on the U-2.


Patrol orders came through on march 14th, we were to be the kriegsmarine ambassador in grid AN28, off the Norwegian fjords. On the way to the patrol area we would be able to take the boat for a full test drive and get to grips with all her peculiarities but this was no pleasure cruise, we are still at war. The boat is brand new so chances were that we'd run into the odd malfunction or construction flaw but we would simply have to deal with them as events unfolded. We left Kiel 2 days later, march 16th. On the 18th we took our test runs shortly before reaching our patrol grid. The boat can do 18 knots on the surface, 8 knots submerged and we took her down to 200 meters without any water coming in through major leaks. The crew did not like that little adventure but I want to know what she can hold before we are being forced into the cellar by the enemy. So far she is holding together perfectly.


We spent 2 days cruising the Norwegian coast but all we ever came across were Norwegian fishermen. We set off for more dangerous waters, sank a large cargo north of Scotland and then we had our previously mentioned killing spree near Loch Ewe. A successful patrol so far, the plan is to engage this convoy, not take too many unnecessary risks with the new boat and get back home to celebrate an excellent maiden voyage.


-7:55 pm
Otto has come through true to form. We do not see any smoke on the horizon yet but we just went in for a quick dip and Karl got more screws than he can count at 25 degrees. The sun has just set, it is still a little too bright for my taste but it also means the Duke will get a fix on them from many miles away. The last contact report we received was an hour ago, I don't know who the shadowing boat is but the report says a large convoy traveling 9knots SSE and we are going to action stations.


-9:05 pm
Typical, as we got into attack position, submerged because it was still quite bright, we saw a frigate on the horizon which can only be the convoy picket ship. After 5 minutes it suddenly changed course at high speed and Karl reported all screws fainting away towards the northeast. The convoy changed course 10 kilometers away from us. They are not getting away from us that easily so we are running at full speed to get into a new position. It is good news, really, because the sky is getting darker with each minute, we will be looking at a surface attack after all.




March 26th, 1940. U-51, grid AM29


-0:30 am
Running due east at 15 knots, 4000 kilometers from Kiel unless we go straight through the Orkneys which we will certainly not be doing. The boat has taken some serious damage but we sank 3 C2 merchants. To summarize I can say that I am grinning again but the puddle under the observation scope which is my personal ashtray is full of cigarette butts. We still have 2 torpedoes but going back in for a second run on the convoy is just too much of a risk, the chief says the hull can not be trusted anymore at great depth and I am sure he is right. We just spent an hour at 110 meters and she was moaning and squirming so much we all felt sorry for her. It worked well though, the depthcharges never really got close, according to the boatswain. I wouldn't know, it's the first time for all my old U-2 comrades. The boat wobbled a little at the first run, after that they clearly lost us because the kept trowing the cans half a kilometer behind us, where we had dived. Being cocky does not work quite as well on convoy attacks. That is today's lesson.


I still don't know how they did it, but the gunners on that little corvette sure earned their pay. Their fire was bracketing us straight away and we took 2 hits under the waterline in quick succession before we got the boat into the cellar. Of course it was only their retaliation, I had drawn first blood. 1 torpedo for each large freighter in front of our bow, all 3 came to a stop as the rest of the convoy made a sharp turn to port. Tube 4 finished the closest cripple and we turned away at flank speed, finishing the second cripple with our sterntube. I ordered immediate reloading for the three remaining eels because the escorts were still quite far away but as I turned the boat back into the convoy, the little corvette opened fire from what must have been at least 3 kilometers. Before I knew it we were all swept from our feet on the bridge by the severe shock from the first impact, we crashdived but before the hatch was closed behind me we took a second hit. Initial damage reports revealed no mayer system malfunctions, we still have propulsion, steering and the leaking seems to be minor. After a quick inspection however the chief was increasingly worried about the effect on our pressure hull and fuel tanks. Both seem to be holding together so far, thankfully. The corvette was going after us but the other escorts, which we had only heard, not yet seen, seemed more keen to protect the rest of the convoy.


After the shells and the crashdive and the most urgent repairs we immediately went quiet and took a hard turn to port, the corvette followed us to port and as the first pattern of depthcharges splashed in the sea I ordered hard to starboard and flank ahead for 10 seconds. They exploded aft to our port, we went silent again and after that they never got close. It was scary enough from where I am standing but Hasse says he's seen worse. We submerged after an hour of making sure the corvette was back on his way to the convoy and then we surfaced, finished the third and last crippled merchant and ran the hell out of the area. Now we are going home for some well deserved rest en recreation while we get the boat ready for her second patrol.




March 29th, 1940. U-51,grid AN26 (North Sea)


-2:30 pm
We are 1500 kilometers from Kiel, no further incidents after our encounter with the convoy. Aircraft were spotted on the horizon as we cruised around Scotland but I agreed with the Duke that we should give our flak gun a try before immediately diving from them. They never got closer so that was the end of it. If the RAF are getting their stuff together just like the escorts seem to be doing, our days of charging in with a grin will soon be over. The rooster is proudly crowing on our conning tower but the war is savage and serious in the Atlantic. U-boots are not reporting in and presumed lost, convoys are getting through to England and the army are sitting quietly back home. I really wonder where this war is going, so far we are the only ones doing any fighting.


We just turned away from a Norwegian merchant. Too bad, she was a big one, but we are not at war with Norway and I don't like the Rooster becoming an indiscriminate murder party. The Duke agrees, we hunt for specific targets, not just any old schooner which happens along our path. It's almost a sport as far as he is concerned.




March 30th, 1940. U-51, grid AN35 (Skagerak)


-8:30 pm
Well we certainly found a good use for our last 2 torpedoes after all. A contact report came in on a large merchant steaming westbound from the Skagerak. I was sure she would be Scandinavian and I almost turned away when we saw a red flag but the Duke was convinced it was the red ensign. We came in close, the weather is rather miserable, but he seems to be right! We fired our last eels at her smokestack and she went up with a big bang. Almost identical to my first ever kill, but this time we blew her out of the water after a quick and accurate setup. We are certainly improving our skills.


That is it, all torpedoes expended and we are 2 days sailing from Kiel. The journal is going back in my locker and I am going to sleep for a week. Rooster signing off.




Leutnant zur See Vom Bosch,
KaptanLeutnant Type VIIb U-51

[Jimbuna]

BE MORE AGGRESSIVE!!