The flares were a mistake. Three red flares fired from U-66’s conning tower at 3:00 in the morning on May 6th, 1944.
A recognition signal. In German naval procedure, red flares meant, “I am a German vessel.
Identify yourself.” Commander Gerhard Seehausen was exhausted. His crew was exhausted. They’d been at sea for 112 days.
They were nearly out of fuel. They had almost no torpedoes. Their resupply submarine had been sunk eight days earlier before it could reach them.
They were drifting on the surface west of the Cape Verde Islands in bright moonlight, charging their batteries, waiting for anyone German to appear.
Something was approaching out of the darkness. Something large. Moving fast. It didn’t answer the flares.
By the time Seehausen understood what was coming at him, it was already too late to dive.
U-66 was not an average submarine. By May of 1944, she had completed eight previous war patrols and sunk 33 merchant ships, more than 200,000 tons of Allied shipping across three years of combat.
She was the seventh most successful U-boat of the entire war. She had survived depth charge attacks across multiple patrols.
She had survived sonar searches, aircraft attacks, and at least one direct engagement with Allied escorts that should have killed her.
Her previous commanders had built her into the kind of submarine that young U-boat crews talked about.
Kapitänleutnant Richard Zapp, her first skipper, >> >> had earned the Knight’s Cross on her.
His replacement, Friedrich Markworth, had extended her record through four more patrols in Caribbean waters, where the killing was rich and the defenses were improving, but not yet overwhelming.
In her most successful patrol, operating in the Caribbean in the spring of 1942, she had sunk almost 44,000 tons of Allied shipping in a single deployment.
Tankers, freighters, cargo vessels, one after another. Then, the defenses caught up. >> >> By 1944, the Battle of the Atlantic that had once tilted heavily toward Germany now tilted the other way, and it had tipped fast.
The Mid-Atlantic Gap, the stretch of ocean beyond the reach of land-based from either side of the Atlantic, where U-boats had operated with relative impunity, had been closed by the escort carriers.
A convoy that had previously moved through that gap, exposed now, moved under the aircraft from an escort carrier’s flight deck day and night, a thousand miles from any shore.
Radar technology that could detect a surface submarine from miles away at night had become standard equipment, not just on destroyers, but on the aircraft flying from escort carrier decks.
And the hunter-killer groups changed the fundamental nature of the campaign. These were not convoy escorts tied to protecting a specific group of ships.
These were offensive units. Their job was not to wait for submarines to attack. It was to go find submarines and kill them before they found a convoy.
They had the range, the persistence, and the combination of surface and air search capability to cover enormous stretches of ocean systematically.
When Allied intelligence decoded a message telling them where a German submarine would be waiting >> >> for its resupply boat, a hunter-killer group could be there waiting instead.
The Milch Cow supply submarine that U-66 depended on for this patrol, U-488, had been found and sunk on April 26th by the escort carrier Croatan’s hunter-killer group 10 days before U-66 surfaced to fire her recognition flares.
The rendezvous coordinates that Seehausen was waiting at were known. What he was waiting for was never going to come.
He didn’t know any of this. His orders were to surface, charge his batteries, and wait.
And so, on the night of May 5th and 6th, he waited. It is worth understanding what Seehausen’s crew was like by the time they fired those flares.
They had been at sea since January 16th, 1944. That was 112 days. Submarine patrols in the early years of the war had averaged around 40 days.
Resupply operations had extended that to 60 or 80 days. 112 days was the outer edge of what the human body and the mechanical limits of a submarine could endure.
The crew of a U-boat by that point in a patrol was not the same crew that had left port.
Physically, they were pale, thin, and slow. The air inside a submarine was processed and recycled, but never really clean.
The smell of fuel, food, and 47 men living in a steel tube for months permeated everything.
Their clothes, their skin, their hair. Bunks were shared in hot bedding rotation. Privacy didn’t exist.
Every system had been repaired and re-repaired until the whole boat was a patchwork of fixes held together by engineering improvisation and the determination of a crew that knew returning to port alive was the only acceptable outcome.
The National WW2 Museum’s account of this night describes U-66’s crew as pallid, haggard, and filthy.
Those words are not dramatic embellishment. They’re clinical description. The sixtant.net reconstruction of U-66’s final patrol, based on survivor interrogation records, notes that the boat had already survived three depth charge attacks from Allied destroyers during the patrol.
She had lain on the bottom at 80 to 100 m for 6 hours on one occasion to evade detection.
She had taken damage to a torpedo from one of the depth charge attacks. She had five or six torpedoes left and almost no fuel.
And now their resupply submarine wasn’t coming. They were waiting in open ocean on the surface charging the batteries they’d need to dive and run if anything hostile appeared sending out cautious radio contacts to U-boat headquarters asking where the supply boat was.
The answers they received amounted to keep waiting. Seehausen had radioed on May 6th at 5:15 in the morning just before the engagement began with a message to headquarters.
Luden not met. Supplying impossible since we have been direction found constantly since the 26th.
Still 20 cubic meters of fuel, eight days provisions. The message was never answered. By the time headquarters could respond, U-66 was already gone.
The flares were fired by men who had been at sea for 112 days who were nearly out of fuel and food who hadn’t received resupply and who desperately wanted the approaching ship to be something that could help them.
4 miles away in the darkened combat information center of the destroyer escort Buckley Lieutenant Commander Brent Abel was reading the radar plot.
Abel was 38 years old. He had graduated from Harvard College as a French major then Harvard Law School then spent the early years of the war commanding convoy escorts in the Caribbean.
He was not a career naval officer. He was an estate lawyer from San Francisco who had been called to active duty and eventually selected to command the Buckley, the lead ship of her class of destroyer escorts, because someone in the Bureau of Personnel decided he knew what he was doing.
He had a reputation among his crew for evenhandedness and practical judgment. Naval History Magazine, writing about Abel in 1988, included a detail that the crew apparently treasured.
During a liberty stop at Bermuda on a shakedown cruise, a sailor was brought aboard by shore patrol, naked from the waist down, carrying a live jackrabbit.
Abel considered the situation and concluded that since the jackrabbit appeared unharmed, the man had committed no punishable offense.
He let it go. His crew liked him. He was part of Task Group 21.11, built around the escort carrier Block Island.
Their mission on this cruise was to operate west of the Cape Verde Islands hunting submarines.
Above him, at 2:16 in the morning, one of Block Island’s Avenger torpedo bombers, a night owl aircraft, stripped of its weapons and fitted with extra fuel tanks so it could stay aloft for 14 hours, had picked up a radar contact about 20 mi out.
The pilot, Lieutenant Junior Grade Jimmy Sellers, couldn’t attack. He had no weapons, but he could watch.
He stayed overhead and began relaying the submarine’s course changes to Buckley by radio. Abel ordered flank speed and toward the contact.
Buckley ran at 23 and 1/2 knots through the dark water, Sellers updating him every few minutes.
Still on the surface, heading this way, bearing changes slightly to the left, now back right.
For 45 minutes, Abel closed on a submarine that didn’t know he was coming. Buckley’s crew was already at general quarters.
The gun crews were loaded. The depth charge racks were ready. Abel ordered a foxer deployed, >> >> an acoustic decoy towed behind the ship to confuse any German acoustic homing torpedoes.
Then, he made a decision that would define the rest of the night. He held his fire.
He kept the ship dark. He kept the speed high. He was going to get as close as possible before U-66 knew he was there.
The idea was audacious. A destroyer escort closing on a surface submarine at full speed in bright moonlight, relying on the submarine not realizing what was approaching.
Able gambled that Seehausen, expecting a German supply ship, would look at a large vessel approaching on the surface and see what he was waiting for.
That gamble paid off at exactly 3:08 in the morning when U-66 fired three red flares, recognition signals.
The submarine was announcing its position and identity to the ship it believed was coming to save it.
Able didn’t respond. He kept coming. At 4,000 yd, the recognition flares still hadn’t been answered.
Inside U-66’s conning tower, the picture changed. Seehausen could see the ship now in the moonlight, moving too fast, far too fast for a supply submarine, and it wasn’t returning the recognition signal.
He gave two orders in rapid succession. “Fire a torpedo. Open fire with the machine guns.”
The torpedo launched. Able saw it, or someone on his bridge saw the wake in the moonlight, and he ordered a turn that brought it down the starboard side, close enough that crew members topside later said they watched it pass alongside the hull.
The machine gun bullets hit the water short at first, then walked up to the ship’s hull as the range collapsed.
Able responded by ordering all guns to open fire. At 3:20 in the morning, the Buckley’s 3-in guns opened on U-66’s forecastle, and what followed was a brief, ferocious gun duel at collapsing range.
Think about the geometry of this. A destroyer escort roughly 306 ft long, weighing over 1,000 tons, and a submarine roughly 220 ft long, both on the surface in flat, calm water in bright moonlight.
Guns blazing at each other from a distance that kept shrinking. By the time the Buckley’s bow came over U-66’s deck, they were close enough that some of the Buckley’s crew said later they could hear Germans shouting.
The submarine’s guns were firing high, mostly missing. The destroyer escort’s guns were not missing.
In 2 minutes of sustained fire, 20-mm cannon, 40-mm guns, the 3-in batteries, the Buckley hit U-66 repeatedly across the conning tower and forward deck.
Over the course of the engagement’s gun phase, Buckley fired 105 rounds of 3-in shells, 2,700 rounds of 20-mm ammunition, and 418 rounds of 40-mm shells.
At close range, against a submarine that could not dive, this was punishing in a way that went beyond mechanical damage.
Survivors pulled from the water afterward described the conning tower as almost unrecognizable. The periscope’s gone.
The plating scored and buckled. The hatch mechanism damaged. U-66 fired another torpedo. Abel maneuvered it away, but U-66 was still afloat, still fighting.
Her crew still on the guns and at the diving controls despite everything that had hit them.
The problem for Seehausen was the diving required a watertight and pressure-worthy hull. The hits his conning tower had taken were turning that prospect from difficult to impossible.
Every second on the surface meant more hits. More hits meant less chance of ever going under safely.
He was stuck in a position where staying on the surface guaranteed being destroyed and submerging would likely kill everyone aboard by flooding.
The only remaining option was to close the range to where the Buckley’s guns couldn’t depress far enough to hit him.
And that meant ramming. Able ordered hard right rudder first. The Buckley’s bow rode up over U-66’s forward deck at 3:28 in the morning, grinding metal on metal, and the two ships locked together.
The impact shook both vessels hard. On U-66, men who had survived three depth charge attacks across 112 days at sea were thrown against the boat’s interior.
On the Buckley’s bow, American sailors looked down at a submarine directly below them, close enough to see individual faces.
In the action report he filed afterward, Able described what came next in language that his crew noted had never been heard in the United States Navy since the year 1814.
Stand by to repel boarders. What happened in the next 2 minutes is recorded in the Buckley’s official action report, cross-referenced against the accounts of survivors from both sides.
U-66’s first officer, Klaus Herbig, led a boarding party up through the conning tower hatch and across the bow of the submarine onto the Buckley’s forecastle.
This was not a rescue attempt. It was a deliberate diversion. Herbig and his men would draw American attention and weapons while Seehausen and the engineering crew worked below to separate the two ships.
The Americans were not expecting men to come over their bow. There were no established protocols for this situation aboard a World War II destroyer escort because nothing like this had happened in the Atlantic theater of operations.
Able’s crew improvised. One boatswain’s mate drew his .45 caliber pistol and shot a German sailor.
The 3-in gun crew had empty shell casings stacked at the ready mount. They picked them up and threw them.
Several sailors had tin mugs from the general >> >> mess coffee station. They threw those.
One German sailor made it inside the ship to the wardroom passageway before a steward’s mate beat him back with a coffee pot.
One American sailor punched a German sailor hard enough to knock him off the deck and into the water.
He broke his hand doing it. That was the only injury on the American side.
The action report is precise about the weapons expenditure. 300 rounds of .45 caliber, 60 rounds of .30 caliber, 30 rounds of double aught buckshot, two grenades, and as the report dryly notes, “Ammunition expended at this time included several general mess coffee cups which were on hand at the ready gun station.”
Able wrote afterward, “The commanding officer is proud of the fighting spirit, coolness in action, and thoroughgoing teamwork by all hands.”
It was these characteristics, more than the individual brilliance or heroism of any one officer or man, which concluded the action successfully.
The Germans came over the bow and the Americans threw coffee cups at them. That’s in the official record.
It happened. Herbig’s boarding party bought Seehausen the minutes he needed. U-66 pulled free of the Buckley’s bow, but the submarine couldn’t dive.
The gun hits across the conning tower had destroyed the periscopes and damaged the pressure hull in ways that made submerging fatal.
Seehausen had a crippled submarine on the surface in bright moonlight with an armed destroyer escort 20 yards away and climbing onto his forward deck.
He had no good options. He chose the one that might still hurt the enemy.
U-66 turned and rammed the Buckley at full speed driving her bow into the American ship’s engine room compartment on the starboard side.
The impact broke the Buckley’s starboard propeller shaft and punched a hole in her hull.
For a moment, it seemed like U-66 might do enough damage to take the Buckley down with her.
An American sailor with a grenade ended that calculation. While U-66 was alongside and locked against the Buckley again, one crewman ran to the rail and threw a grenade down into the burning gap in the submarine’s conning tower.
The fire that was already in the tower reached whatever was below it. Seehausen gave the order to scuttle.
The submarine backed away and settled stern first. At 3:41 in the morning, 13 minutes after the Buckley first rode over her deck, U-66 went under.
Gerhard Seehausen was not among the 36 men pulled from the water in the 3 hours that followed.
24 of his crew died with him or in the water afterward. Most of the 36 survivors had shrapnel wounds or worse.
They were transferred to the Block Island’s medical facilities and later delivered to Casablanca. Several senior American naval officers reviewing the action report in the weeks that followed described it as the most exciting anti-submarine kill in the entire Battle of the Atlantic.
They were not wrong. What none of the participants knew in the immediate aftermath was a detail that Abel only discovered 43 years later when he was shown U-66’s logbook in a restaurant in Frankfurt.
In August of 1942, Abel had been commanding the subchaser PC 592 operating out of Curacao in the Caribbean.
He had received intelligence about a German submarine that had mined the harbor of St.
Lucia. A particularly brazen attack that had damaged two British motor torpedo boats and create significant disruption to Allied naval operations in the area for weeks afterward.
Mines in a defended harbor were a different kind of threat than a submarine hunting on open water.
They persisted. They were hard to find, and they forced expensive, time-consuming sweeping operations before the harbor could be considered safe again.
Abel set out to find the submarine that had laid those mines. He spent a full day searching the area where she was believed to be operating.
Working the sonar contacts and the last known positions in a systematic sweep. He never made contact.
The submarine that mined St. Lucia was U-66. It was Seehausen’s predecessor, Friedrich Marquardt, who had actually commanded the boat on that mission.
Seehausen didn’t take command until the final patrol. But the boat was the same. The serial number was the same.
And here’s the particular strangeness of it. When Abel received his assignment to the Buckley and eventually to task group 21.11, he had no way of knowing that the boat he failed to find 2 years earlier in Caribbean waters was the same boat he was about to find in far more final fashion off the Cape Verde Islands in the spring of 1944.
He found out from the log. Herbig showed it to him at dinner in Frankfurt.
When the 1987 reunion brought Abel and eight of U-66’s survivors together, Klaus Herbig, the first officer who had led the boarding party that climbed across the Buckley’s bow had organized it.
He had tracked down several of the Buckley crew over the years, written letters asking whether they would consider meeting the Germans who had tried to board their ship.
And when Abel agreed, he organized the dinner in Frankfurt himself. At the table that night, between the former enemies who had tried to kill each other in the Atlantic over 40 years before, Herbig produced the wartime log and showed Abel the entry for the Saint Lucia mining operation.
Abel had read the dates. He’d done the math quietly. He said later that it took a moment to register.
He had been a young man on a subchaser in the Caribbean in the summer of 1942 hunting a submarine he never found.
And then, he’d been a not quite so young man on a destroyer escort in the spring of 1944.
And the submarine had fired recognition flares at him by mistake. And he’d closed at 23 and a half knots in the moonlight and finished it.
Abel said afterward that he wished he could have saved more of U-66’s crew. He had stayed in the area for 3 hours after the submarine went down pulling men from the water.
There were no more men left to pull. 23 days after Buckley and U-66 finished their engagement, the escort carrier that had launched Sellers and his unarmed Avenger was still on patrol west of the Cape Verde Islands.
At 20:13 on the evening of May 29th, the German submarine U-549 slipped through the Block Island’s escort screen undetected.
It was U-549’s first war patrol. She put two torpedoes into the Block Island in quick succession, one into the bow, one into the stern, which struck an ammunition magazine.
A A torpedo hit 10 minutes later. The escort screen responded immediately. The destroyer escorts Arp Robert I.
Paine and Eugene E. Elmore dropped depth charges on U-549’s last known position and kept working the contact until they were satisfied.
U-549 never surfaced again. She went down with all 58 men aboard in the same waters where her target was sinking.
The hunter-killer concept that had sent Block Island to sea ended the patrol of the submarine that finally caught her.
The only American aircraft carrier sunk [snorts] in the Atlantic theater went down an hour and a half after the attack.
Six of her crew died. 951 were rescued by the escort screen. 1,013 men had gone to sea on Block Island.
951 came home. Most of the 12 who didn’t were killed in the initial torpedo detonations in the machinery spaces and magazine areas that the second and third torpedoes hit.
The survivors of Block Island were kept together as a crew, transferred to a replacement escort carrier then under construction on the West Coast, and commissioned together on the new vessel in December of 1944.
The new ship bore the same name. When the surviving crew walked aboard the second Block Island, same captain, same men, new hull.
They were the only carrier crew in the war to serve together on two ships with the same name.
Sellers, the Avenger pilot who had guided Abel to U-66 with an unarmed aircraft and a radio, survived the war.
He had done his part that night and handed it off. What happened on the Buckley’s deck was never something he could have seen from 4 miles overhead at 2:00 in the morning.
He knew from the radio traffic and the debrief that something had gone right.
The details came later. Brent Abel went back to San Francisco after the war. He retired from the Navy Reserve as a captain in 1960.
He went back to the estate law practice he’d left in 1941. He served as president of the San Francisco Bar Association.
He served as president of the California Bar Association. He was, by the accounts of colleagues, an excellent estate lawyer and a fair-minded bar president who had a talent for resolving disputes before they became litigation.
His office was decorated with memorabilia from the Buckley engagement. Most of his colleagues in the firm didn’t know what any of it referred to.
A photograph of a ship, a few framed documents. There was no plaque on the wall explaining that the mild-mannered estate lawyer had once ordered his crew to repel German boarders with coffee cups and shell casings in the middle of the night on the Atlantic.
In 1987, he sat down to dinner in Frankfurt with eight men who tried to board his ship in the middle of the night and they talked about it in the way that only people who were actually there can talk about things like that.
Klaus Herbig, who had led the boarding party across the Buckley’s bow while Seehausen worked to free the sub below, had requested the meeting.
He had spent 43 years thinking about the American crew that had pulled 36 of them out of the water afterward.
He wanted to say thank you in person. Abel, when asked what he remembered most clearly about the fight, reportedly thought for a moment and then said he remembered the coffee cups, >> >> the 3-in gun crew throwing shell casings, the steward’s mate with the coffee pot, the sailor who broke his hand.
He said it was chaos, but it was controlled chaos, which was the best kind.
Chaos and controlled chaos. That was the distinction he’d made in the action report, too.
Not brilliance, not heroism from any single man. >> >> Teamwork. The kind that holds in the dark when nobody’s giving orders fast enough to cover what’s happening.
And everyone does what needs doing without being told. He died in 2005. He was 89 years old.
His Navy Cross was among the memorabilia in the office. Gerhard Sechausen had been posthumously promoted to Kapitänleutnant on June 1st, 1944.
26 days after U-66 went down. He was 26 years old. He had been at sea on his first command for 112 days.
His two previous boat commands had both been training assignments. The ninth patrol of U-66 was the first war patrol he had ever commanded.
He sank four ships on it. 36 of his crew came home because the man who sank him stayed in the water for 3 hours in the dark pulling men out.
The rest are still down there. West of the Cape Verde Islands. About 4,000 m.
They’ve been there since 3:41 in the morning on May 6th, 1944. The Buckley sailed home under her own power with a bent bow and one working propeller shaft.
She was repaired. She served out the rest of the war. She was decommissioned in 1946 and eventually scrapped.
The coffee mugs were not recovered.
