Death at the equator
В stories underwater fleet Germany has only one submarine commander (U-852) who fell under the tribunal for his war crimes during World War II. This is Lieutenant Captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck.
By mid-January 1943, the Anglo-American naval blockade of Germany was gradually reducing the stocks of those strategic materials that Germany already lacked (namely rubber, tungsten, molybdenum, copper, plant materials, quinine and certain types of oils) and which were absolutely necessary for warfare. All these goods, the production of which was rather complicated, were mainly available in the Asian regions conquered by the Japanese during the war. The Indonesian archipelago, a large and wealthy Dutch colony captured by the Japanese in the spring of 1942 after a quick air-sea offensive, could provide Germany and the Axis countries with the strategic materials they needed.
In February 1943, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, Grand Admiral Dönitz proposed the use of submarines for the transport of goods.
U-852 left Keel on 18 on January 1944, passed Scotland from the north, went to the North Atlantic and, turning south, headed for the shores of West Africa. After 2 months, observing the radio silence and surfacing only at night to charge the batteries, the submarine reached the equator.
On the afternoon of March 13, 1944, U-852 was located approximately 300 miles east of the Freetown-Ascension Island line. At 17:00 pm, an observer noticed a cargo ship ahead from the starboard side. It turned out to be the ship "Peleus" with 35 crew members, registered in Greece, built by William Gray & Company in 1928. The Peleus had left Freetown five days earlier under a charter contract with the British War Department of Transportation, heading for South America.
Eck decided to catch up with the ship and attack. The chase lasted two and a half hours. In 1944, Ek launched an overnight surface attack, firing two torpedoes from his bow torpedo tubes. Torpedoes hit the "Peleus" just a few meters apart. Lieutenant Captain Eck remarked from the U-852 bridge: "The explosion was very impressive."
"Peleus" was doomed.
It is impossible to know how many crew members escaped after the flooding of the ship. By the start-up, Antonios Liosis lost consciousness for a while and fell from the bridge into the water. Rocco Said, the fireman, was on deck when torpedoes exploded. Said, who had been at sea since childhood, "it was clear that the ship would sink." The cargo ship sank so quickly that almost none of the survivors managed to put on life jackets. Those who jumped overboard clung to manhole covers, lumber and any other debris. Life rafts that were on the deck, after the flooding of the ship, swayed on the water, and some of the survivors sailed to them. The U-852 moved slowly among the wreckage. After the submarine sailed, Liosis climbed the raft.
At that time, Eck was on the U-852 bridge, his first officer was Lieutenant Gerhard Colditz and two sailors. When the submarine slowly circled among the wreckage, Eck and his crew on the bridge heard the screams of drowning. They also saw lights on some rafts. Around the same time, the ship's doctor Walter Weisspening arrived at the bridge.
If possible, the captains of the submarines should have asked the survivors questions about the ship, its cargo and destination. Eck called the English-speaking chief engineer Hans Lenz to the deck. He sent an engineer on his nose to interrogate the survivors. A second officer, August Hoffman, joined Lenz.
Hoffman changed his watch at 16: 00 evenings, an hour before Peleus was spotted. Hoffman also spoke a little English, and he was ordered to accompany Lenz.
When the two officers reached the nose, Eck maneuvered the U-852 next to one of the life rafts. On the raft he selected were the third Peleus officer Agis Kefalas, fireman Stavros Sogias, a Russian sailor named Pierre Neumann. Lenz and Hoffman questioned Kefalas. They learned that the ship was sailing from Freetown and was heading for River Plate. A third officer, Kefalas, also told them that another, slower ship followed them to the same destination. At the end of the interrogation, the officer was returned to the liferaft.
U-852 moved slowly, Eck listened to Lenz's report.
At that moment there were five officers on the bridge: Eck, his first officer (Colditz), the second officer (Hoffman), the chief engineer (Lenz) and the doctor (Weisspening). The doctor stood apart from the others and did not participate in the subsequent conversation. Hoffman also remained far enough away from the group to clearly understand what the three officers were discussing.
The conversation took a sinister turn. Eck told Colditz and Lenz that he was concerned about the number and size of the debris. Morning aerial patrols from Freetown or Ascension Island will detect debris and this will cause an immediate search for the submarine.
He could have left the area on the surface at maximum speed until dawn, but by the time the sun rises, the U-852 will still be less than 200 miles from the Peleus crash site. Eck decided that in order to protect his boat and crew, he needed to destroy all traces of the Peleus.
Eck ordered two machine guns to be lifted onto the bridge. Until weapon raised, Colditz and Lenz protested against the decision of the captain. Eck listened to both officers, but dismissed their objections. According to Ekk, it was necessary to destroy all traces.
When the submarine turned back to the rafts, Lenz went downstairs, leaving four officers on the bridge. Machine guns were delivered to the deck.
What exactly was said and happened next is not entirely clear. The following events could not be fully explained at a later trial. Eck apparently told the officers on the bridge that he wanted to sink the rafts. There was no direct order to shoot at survivors in the water or at survivors on rafts. However, it was clear that survivors would lose hope of salvation. Eck suggested that the rafts were hollow and, damaged by machine gun fire, would drown.
It was about 20: 00 hours of the evening, the night was very dark and moonless. The rafts on the water looked like dark figures, their lights were put out by the Peleus crew when the submarine approached. Eck turned to Weispfening, who was standing near the right machine gun, and ordered him to shoot at the wreckage. The doctor carried out the order, directing fire at the raft, which, according to his estimates, was at a distance of about 200 yards.
The Weispfening machine gun jammed after he fired only a few bursts. Hoffman fixed the malfunction and continued firing on the raft. The doctor no longer took part in an attempt to destroy the rafts, although he remained on the bridge. Despite machine-gun fire, the raft refused to sink. Eck ordered the spotlight turned on to inspect the raft and determine why it was still afloat. Inspection carried out at a considerable distance and in poor lighting turned out to be inconclusive. The submarine continued to move slowly through the wreckage, periodically firing at the rafts. All attacks were from the starboard side, and at that moment only Hoffman shot.
The rafts did not sink, Ekk's goal of removing the debris was not achieved.
Hoffman proposed the use of an 105-mm cannon (10,5cm SKC / 32), but Ekk rejected this proposal due to fear of use at such a short distance. However, he told Hoffman to try dual 20-mm anti-aircraft guns.
The attempt to sink the rafts with the help of 20-mm guns was also unsuccessful, Eck ordered to lift hand grenades and maneuver the U-852 thirty yards from the raft.
Grenades were also useless for flooding rafts. Throughout the terrible operation, Eck believed that those who were on rafts would jump into the water when the shooting began. His assumption was incorrect.
When the shooting started, officer Antonios Lioss threw himself on the raft floor and hid his head under the bench. At the back, he heard Dimitrios Kostantinidis scream in pain as bullets hit him. The sailor crashed to the floor of the raft dead. Later, when the submarine made another pass and threw grenades, Lyossis was injured by shrapnel in the back and shoulder.
On board the other raft were a third officer, Agis Kefalas, and two sailors. Both last were killed, and Kefalas was seriously wounded in the arm. It is unclear whether these people were killed by grenade fragments or from a machine gun. Despite his injury, Kefalas descended from the raft and sailed to the boat occupied by Lyoss.
The sailor Rocco Said dived from the raft when the shooting started, and was in the water. Sailors drowned around him when they were fired from machine guns.
The chief engineer Lenz, who was engaged in reloading the front torpedo tubes, heard intermittent firing and explosions of hand grenades. At that time, he was the only person below deck who probably knew what those sounds meant.
At midnight, Colditz replaced Hofmann on duty. Together with him Lenz and the sailor Wolfgang Schwender, who was ordered to shoot the rafts, climbed the bridge. After the first turn, the machine gun jammed, after which Lenz, eliminating the malfunction, continued shooting himself.
To 01: 00 the submarine for the 5 hours waged its "difficult and strange battle." Neither rams, nor the use of machine guns, coaxial anti-aircraft machine guns and grenades, had the expected result. The rafts were riddled, but remained afloat. Without eliminating the traces, Eck left the area of the ship’s sinking and 4's survivors and headed at maximum speed south to the west coast of Africa.
After the sinking of the Greek ship and the shooting of survivors on one of the rafts, 4 people remained wounded. They remained on the raft for 39 days. On 20 of April 1944 of the year they were discovered by the Portuguese steamer Alexander Silva. Three were still alive (Antonios Liosis, Dimitrios Argiros and Rocco Said). Agis Kefalas died 25 days after the sinking of the ship.
While the U-852 was moving, news of the execution spread throughout the boat and seriously affected morale.
“I got the impression that the mood on board was rather depressing,” Eck later said. “I myself was in the same mood.” In view of the crew’s gloomy attitude, he turned to his people on the boat’s speaker system, telling them that he had made a “heavy hearted decision” and regretted that some of the survivors might have been killed while trying to sink the rafts. He admitted that in any case, without rafts, the survivors will surely die. He warned his team about the “too strong influence of sympathy”, citing the fact that “we should also think about our wives and children who die at home during air attacks.”
Ekk was forced to run aground on the 03.05.1944 coral reef in the Arab Sea, off the eastern coast of Somalia, after the boat was damaged by an attack by British Wellington-type aircraft.
The commander of the submarine, Heinz Ekk, the ship's doctor Walter Weispfening, and Starpom August Hoffmann, were sentenced to death and shot on November 30 on November 1945.
Ship engineer Hans Lenz confessed and wrote a petition for clemency, so he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sailor Wolfgang Schwender was sentenced to seven years in prison. It was proved that he was forced to carry out the execution order.
Lenz and Schwender were released a few years later, one in 1951 and the other in 1952.
They committed war crimes and other submariners.
The commander of an American submarine, Commander Dudley Morton, after the sinking of two transports, the Buyo Maru and the Fukuei Maru, ordered all lifeboats to be shot with a machine gun and small-caliber guns. The boat was sunk in the Laperouse Strait by the Japanese 11.10.1943 anti-submarine defense forces.
U-247 submarine commander Lieutenant Gerhard Matshulat on 5 on July 1943 drowned the Noreen Mary fishing trawler with artillery fire and then ordered firing boats fired from a machine gun. The submarine was sunk 1.09.1944 by the depth charges of the Canadian frigates "Saint John" and "Swansea" in the western part of the English Channel.
Based on materials from proza.ru, uboat.net, wikipedia.org, legal-tools.org.
By mid-January 1943, the Anglo-American naval blockade of Germany was gradually reducing the stocks of those strategic materials that Germany already lacked (namely rubber, tungsten, molybdenum, copper, plant materials, quinine and certain types of oils) and which were absolutely necessary for warfare. All these goods, the production of which was rather complicated, were mainly available in the Asian regions conquered by the Japanese during the war. The Indonesian archipelago, a large and wealthy Dutch colony captured by the Japanese in the spring of 1942 after a quick air-sea offensive, could provide Germany and the Axis countries with the strategic materials they needed.
In February 1943, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, Grand Admiral Dönitz proposed the use of submarines for the transport of goods.
U-852 left Keel on 18 on January 1944, passed Scotland from the north, went to the North Atlantic and, turning south, headed for the shores of West Africa. After 2 months, observing the radio silence and surfacing only at night to charge the batteries, the submarine reached the equator.
U-852 submarine
On the afternoon of March 13, 1944, U-852 was located approximately 300 miles east of the Freetown-Ascension Island line. At 17:00 pm, an observer noticed a cargo ship ahead from the starboard side. It turned out to be the ship "Peleus" with 35 crew members, registered in Greece, built by William Gray & Company in 1928. The Peleus had left Freetown five days earlier under a charter contract with the British War Department of Transportation, heading for South America.
Eck decided to catch up with the ship and attack. The chase lasted two and a half hours. In 1944, Ek launched an overnight surface attack, firing two torpedoes from his bow torpedo tubes. Torpedoes hit the "Peleus" just a few meters apart. Lieutenant Captain Eck remarked from the U-852 bridge: "The explosion was very impressive."
"Peleus" was doomed.
It is impossible to know how many crew members escaped after the flooding of the ship. By the start-up, Antonios Liosis lost consciousness for a while and fell from the bridge into the water. Rocco Said, the fireman, was on deck when torpedoes exploded. Said, who had been at sea since childhood, "it was clear that the ship would sink." The cargo ship sank so quickly that almost none of the survivors managed to put on life jackets. Those who jumped overboard clung to manhole covers, lumber and any other debris. Life rafts that were on the deck, after the flooding of the ship, swayed on the water, and some of the survivors sailed to them. The U-852 moved slowly among the wreckage. After the submarine sailed, Liosis climbed the raft.
At that time, Eck was on the U-852 bridge, his first officer was Lieutenant Gerhard Colditz and two sailors. When the submarine slowly circled among the wreckage, Eck and his crew on the bridge heard the screams of drowning. They also saw lights on some rafts. Around the same time, the ship's doctor Walter Weisspening arrived at the bridge.
If possible, the captains of the submarines should have asked the survivors questions about the ship, its cargo and destination. Eck called the English-speaking chief engineer Hans Lenz to the deck. He sent an engineer on his nose to interrogate the survivors. A second officer, August Hoffman, joined Lenz.
Hoffman changed his watch at 16: 00 evenings, an hour before Peleus was spotted. Hoffman also spoke a little English, and he was ordered to accompany Lenz.
When the two officers reached the nose, Eck maneuvered the U-852 next to one of the life rafts. On the raft he selected were the third Peleus officer Agis Kefalas, fireman Stavros Sogias, a Russian sailor named Pierre Neumann. Lenz and Hoffman questioned Kefalas. They learned that the ship was sailing from Freetown and was heading for River Plate. A third officer, Kefalas, also told them that another, slower ship followed them to the same destination. At the end of the interrogation, the officer was returned to the liferaft.
U-852 moved slowly, Eck listened to Lenz's report.
At that moment there were five officers on the bridge: Eck, his first officer (Colditz), the second officer (Hoffman), the chief engineer (Lenz) and the doctor (Weisspening). The doctor stood apart from the others and did not participate in the subsequent conversation. Hoffman also remained far enough away from the group to clearly understand what the three officers were discussing.
The conversation took a sinister turn. Eck told Colditz and Lenz that he was concerned about the number and size of the debris. Morning aerial patrols from Freetown or Ascension Island will detect debris and this will cause an immediate search for the submarine.
He could have left the area on the surface at maximum speed until dawn, but by the time the sun rises, the U-852 will still be less than 200 miles from the Peleus crash site. Eck decided that in order to protect his boat and crew, he needed to destroy all traces of the Peleus.
Eck ordered two machine guns to be lifted onto the bridge. Until weapon raised, Colditz and Lenz protested against the decision of the captain. Eck listened to both officers, but dismissed their objections. According to Ekk, it was necessary to destroy all traces.
When the submarine turned back to the rafts, Lenz went downstairs, leaving four officers on the bridge. Machine guns were delivered to the deck.
What exactly was said and happened next is not entirely clear. The following events could not be fully explained at a later trial. Eck apparently told the officers on the bridge that he wanted to sink the rafts. There was no direct order to shoot at survivors in the water or at survivors on rafts. However, it was clear that survivors would lose hope of salvation. Eck suggested that the rafts were hollow and, damaged by machine gun fire, would drown.
It was about 20: 00 hours of the evening, the night was very dark and moonless. The rafts on the water looked like dark figures, their lights were put out by the Peleus crew when the submarine approached. Eck turned to Weispfening, who was standing near the right machine gun, and ordered him to shoot at the wreckage. The doctor carried out the order, directing fire at the raft, which, according to his estimates, was at a distance of about 200 yards.
Shot from the movie "U-571"
The Weispfening machine gun jammed after he fired only a few bursts. Hoffman fixed the malfunction and continued firing on the raft. The doctor no longer took part in an attempt to destroy the rafts, although he remained on the bridge. Despite machine-gun fire, the raft refused to sink. Eck ordered the spotlight turned on to inspect the raft and determine why it was still afloat. Inspection carried out at a considerable distance and in poor lighting turned out to be inconclusive. The submarine continued to move slowly through the wreckage, periodically firing at the rafts. All attacks were from the starboard side, and at that moment only Hoffman shot.
The rafts did not sink, Ekk's goal of removing the debris was not achieved.
Hoffman proposed the use of an 105-mm cannon (10,5cm SKC / 32), but Ekk rejected this proposal due to fear of use at such a short distance. However, he told Hoffman to try dual 20-mm anti-aircraft guns.
The attempt to sink the rafts with the help of 20-mm guns was also unsuccessful, Eck ordered to lift hand grenades and maneuver the U-852 thirty yards from the raft.
Grenades were also useless for flooding rafts. Throughout the terrible operation, Eck believed that those who were on rafts would jump into the water when the shooting began. His assumption was incorrect.
When the shooting started, officer Antonios Lioss threw himself on the raft floor and hid his head under the bench. At the back, he heard Dimitrios Kostantinidis scream in pain as bullets hit him. The sailor crashed to the floor of the raft dead. Later, when the submarine made another pass and threw grenades, Lyossis was injured by shrapnel in the back and shoulder.
On board the other raft were a third officer, Agis Kefalas, and two sailors. Both last were killed, and Kefalas was seriously wounded in the arm. It is unclear whether these people were killed by grenade fragments or from a machine gun. Despite his injury, Kefalas descended from the raft and sailed to the boat occupied by Lyoss.
The sailor Rocco Said dived from the raft when the shooting started, and was in the water. Sailors drowned around him when they were fired from machine guns.
The chief engineer Lenz, who was engaged in reloading the front torpedo tubes, heard intermittent firing and explosions of hand grenades. At that time, he was the only person below deck who probably knew what those sounds meant.
At midnight, Colditz replaced Hofmann on duty. Together with him Lenz and the sailor Wolfgang Schwender, who was ordered to shoot the rafts, climbed the bridge. After the first turn, the machine gun jammed, after which Lenz, eliminating the malfunction, continued shooting himself.
To 01: 00 the submarine for the 5 hours waged its "difficult and strange battle." Neither rams, nor the use of machine guns, coaxial anti-aircraft machine guns and grenades, had the expected result. The rafts were riddled, but remained afloat. Without eliminating the traces, Eck left the area of the ship’s sinking and 4's survivors and headed at maximum speed south to the west coast of Africa.
After the sinking of the Greek ship and the shooting of survivors on one of the rafts, 4 people remained wounded. They remained on the raft for 39 days. On 20 of April 1944 of the year they were discovered by the Portuguese steamer Alexander Silva. Three were still alive (Antonios Liosis, Dimitrios Argiros and Rocco Said). Agis Kefalas died 25 days after the sinking of the ship.
While the U-852 was moving, news of the execution spread throughout the boat and seriously affected morale.
“I got the impression that the mood on board was rather depressing,” Eck later said. “I myself was in the same mood.” In view of the crew’s gloomy attitude, he turned to his people on the boat’s speaker system, telling them that he had made a “heavy hearted decision” and regretted that some of the survivors might have been killed while trying to sink the rafts. He admitted that in any case, without rafts, the survivors will surely die. He warned his team about the “too strong influence of sympathy”, citing the fact that “we should also think about our wives and children who die at home during air attacks.”
Ekk was forced to run aground on the 03.05.1944 coral reef in the Arab Sea, off the eastern coast of Somalia, after the boat was damaged by an attack by British Wellington-type aircraft.
The commander of the submarine, Heinz Ekk, the ship's doctor Walter Weispfening, and Starpom August Hoffmann, were sentenced to death and shot on November 30 on November 1945.
Ship engineer Hans Lenz confessed and wrote a petition for clemency, so he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sailor Wolfgang Schwender was sentenced to seven years in prison. It was proved that he was forced to carry out the execution order.
Lenz and Schwender were released a few years later, one in 1951 and the other in 1952.
* * *
They committed war crimes and other submariners.
The commander of an American submarine, Commander Dudley Morton, after the sinking of two transports, the Buyo Maru and the Fukuei Maru, ordered all lifeboats to be shot with a machine gun and small-caliber guns. The boat was sunk in the Laperouse Strait by the Japanese 11.10.1943 anti-submarine defense forces.
U-247 submarine commander Lieutenant Gerhard Matshulat on 5 on July 1943 drowned the Noreen Mary fishing trawler with artillery fire and then ordered firing boats fired from a machine gun. The submarine was sunk 1.09.1944 by the depth charges of the Canadian frigates "Saint John" and "Swansea" in the western part of the English Channel.
Based on materials from proza.ru, uboat.net, wikipedia.org, legal-tools.org.
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