Silent Hunters by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
ISBN: 9781940669007
Publisher: Savas Publishing
Published: 2013-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

The twelve survivors, many of them wounded, found themselves scattered over a radius of about 1000 feet when the American flying boat dropped a life raft and life vests among them. In the end only seven men had the strength to drag themselves onto the raft. Among the lucky survivors was the severely wounded and barely conscious Fritz Guggenberger, whom his fellow survivors managed to pull into the tiny raft by his hair. Sharks attacked and killed at least two of the others, who disappeared beneath the surface and were not seen again.

The luck of the seven survivors continued to hold when, five hours after U-513 had gone down, the Barnegat arrived on the scene to pick them up and take them to Rio de Janeiro. Guggenberger was the most critically injured of the bunch, having partially broken three vertebrae, several ribs and one of his ankles—among other problems, including blood loss and shock. After receiving initial medical attention he was flown from a Brazilian military base near Rio to Miami, Florida, and from there to Washington, D.C. At the Bethesda Naval Hospital American surgeons gradually restored his health so that by October he could be transferred to a regular POW camp in Crossville, Tennessee. In January 1944, following routine interrogations by U.S. intelligence personnel at Fort Hunt, Virginia, Guggenberger was transferred to a camp at Papago Park in Phoenix, Arizona.

At Papago Park Guggenberger met up with several fellow U-boat commanders, including three of his own Crew 34. Hans Werner Kraus’ U-199 had experienced an almost identical fate as U-513 when she succumbed to an air attack off Rio de Janeiro on July 31, just twelve days after Guggenberger’s debacle. Camp resident U-595’s Jürgen Quaet-Faslem was, like Kraus and Guggenberger, a veteran of the Mediterranean campaign. August Maus of U-185, the fourth member of Crew 34, had been captured in August 1943 in the central Atlantic after many distinguished combat missions. The Allied authorities did not realize the danger inherent in throwing together men of such resilience and ability. Unwilling to sit out the remainder of the war behind barbed wire, the U-boat veterans and old friends developed a brilliant scheme to escape from the camp with the hope of crossing into nearby Mexico, which they mistakenly supposed to be still neutral. The ultimate goal was to make it home to Germany. The result was the largest POW breakout from an American camp during the entire war, entertainingly retold by John Hammond Moore in his book, The Faustball Tunnel.29

Actually there were two attempts. In the first one on Saturday, February 12, 1944, Maus and Guggenberger—the latter playing the role of a stranded Greek sailor because of his poor English as well as his dark hair and complexion—were smuggled out of the compound by fellow prisoners in a truck on a work detail. The pair managed to make it by train to Tucson, where they learned that no buses or trains ran into Nogales, Mexico, until the following Monday. Unsure what

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