Yanagi by Mark Felton

Author:Mark Felton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
Published: 2005-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Gruppe Monsun Heads South – The First Wave

On 9 June 1943 Dönitz ordered eleven U-boats to sail into the Indian Ocean, to be supported by two U-tankers. This group of boats, the first of the so-called Gruppe Monsun, was due to arrive in the Indian Ocean at the beginning of September, the start of the tropical monsoon season or monsun in German. Both U-tankers were lost en route to the Indian Ocean necessitating the diversion of some Monsun boats to refuel one another. Even U-boats returning from patrols in the Atlantic were used for refuelling. Eventually Gruppe Monsun was reduced to five U-boats by the time the flotilla reached the South Atlantic. One Type IXD2 boat, U-200, which had departed from Norway on 11 June, was sunk in the Iceland-Faroes Gap by a Catalina flying boat from US Navy Squadron VP-84. Its supposed mission before entering the Indian Ocean had been to land a special unit of German troops, called Brandenburg Commandos, in South Africa, presumably to ferment trouble between the Afrikaans-speaking Boers and the British South African authorities. As the Catalina dived in to attack the U-boat, accurate defensive flak damaged the aircraft’s port wing and fuselage, causing hydraulic problems and a leak in the fuel tank within the wing itself. The Catalina managed to dump only two depth charges over the U-boat, but the subsequent explosions caused U-200 to sink rapidly. Of the estimated fifteen crewmen who went into the water, none was picked up. U-200’s commander, Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Schönder, who had been awarded the Knights Cross in August 1942, perished along with sixty-one U-boatmen and an unspecified number of Brandenburgers.

Three of the Type IXs sent as part of Gruppe Monsun were also lost while making for the Indian Ocean. The first was the Type IXC U-514, which had departed from Lorient on 3 July. Kapitänleutnant Hans-Jürgen Auffermann was taking U-514 on her fourth war patrol since the boat’s commissioning in January 1942. His first war patrol in late summer 1942 had seen the boat operating off the mouth of the Amazon River, and Auffermann had successfully sunk six ships over all four patrols. On 8 July 1943, U-514 was attacked by an RAF Liberator bomber of No. 224 Squadron north-east of Cape Finisterre, an experimental aircraft fitted with rockets and Fido homing torpedoes. The pilot flew into the heavy flak screen being thrown up by the U-boat and fired eight rockets, hitting the German with six, and U-514 sank immediately. The pilot decided to make sure, and released a Fido homing torpedo. This top-secret weapon ran out of control, forcing the pilot to destroy it with two depth charges to prevent its recovery by Franco’s Spanish government, and the technology inevitably being made known to the Germans. The experimental rocket attack resulted in the loss of all fifty-four men on board. At the time of her sinking, U-514 was in the midst of a flotilla of neutral Spanish fishing boats, but this did not deter the determined British attack that followed.

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