U-Boats off Bermuda: Patrol Summaries and Merchant Ship Survivors Landed in Bermuda 1940-1944 by Eric Wiberg

Author:Eric Wiberg [Wiberg, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Fonthill Media
Published: 2017-08-03T21:00:00+00:00

23

8–30 May 1942: Thirteen U-boats

Korvettenkapitän Ernst Kals spent sixteen days in the Bermuda area in May 1942, fruitlessly seeking targets. Starting on 8 May and homeward bound, U-130 entered south of Bermuda, heading north-east for four days. Then, it jogged south for a day, then north-west, then south-west and west, until 16 May, which found it south-west of and within 200 miles of Bermuda. After that, Kals headed due north till the 19th, and finally north-east until the 23rd, when U-130 exited the area north-east of the island, heading for France. Born in 1905 and a member of the Crew of 1924, Kals obtained the rank of Kapitän zur See in 1944, following which he was awarded the Knight’s Cross. Kals began his career as a Sea Cadet; he ended it with a tally of seventeen ships sunk for 11,249 GRT, three auxiliary warships sunk for roughly 35,000 tons, and another ship sunk for just shy of 7,000 GRT. Kals went on to command the 2nd U-boat Flotilla in Lorient from January 1943 to the end of the war; in retribution, the French detained him for three years. He lived until age seventy-four, dying in Emden, Germany, in 1979.1

Korvettenkapitän Alfred Manhardt von Mannstein conned the Type VIIC U-753 into the region for eight days both inbound and outbound between 10 May and 9 June. To start with, from the north-east, U-753 headed south-west, passing quite close to the island on the 13th. The sub exited the region west of Bermuda on 15 May, the day after Bigalk entered just west of him on U-751. After an active patrol in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, U-753 returned to the region around Bermuda when it skimmed the south-east corner of the box between 8 and 9 June, homeward bound. Having left La Pallice on 22 April, the boat refueled from U-459 500 miles north-east of Bermuda in early May.2 In the US Gulf, U-753 sank two Allied ships and damaged another two for a total of 20,677 GRT. Attacking every two days from 20 May, it struck the George Calvert (sunk), damaged the British schooner the E. P. Theriault of 326 tons with gunfire and charges (requiring the sub crew to board the ship), damaged the Haakon Hauan, and sank the Hamlet on the 27th. This was the first boat to sail to and from La Pallice for the 3rd U-boat Flotilla. U-753 was caught by a Whitley bomber in the Bay of Biscay, which damaged the boat on 23 June.

A member of the crew of 1928 and aged thirty-three at the time, Von Mannstein was promoted to Fregattenkapitän in May of 1943 just prior to his death on the 13th of that month at the hands of the HMCS Drumheller and HMS Lagan and a Canadian Sunderland aircraft in the North Atlantic. The entire crew of forty-seven were killed during the ‘Black May’ of 1943—a period during which the Allies counterattacked the U-boats so decisively as to turn the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic in their favor.

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