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Tec Dive on U-550

Tec Dive on Uboat U-550. German submarine U-550 was a Type IXC/40 German Navy U-boat built during World War II. She was laid down on 2 October 1942 by Deutsche Werft in Hamburg as yard number 371, launched on 12 May 1943 and commissioned on 28 July under the command of Kapitänleutnant Klaus Hänert. Loss On 16 April 1944, south of Nantucket Island, she located convoy CU 21, bound for Great Britain from New York City. The Pan Pennsylvania, one of the largest tankers in the world, was unwisely straggling behind the convoy; U-550 torpedoed her. The ship quickly caught fire and began to sink. As the vessel settled, the submerged U-boat maneuvered underneath her hull in an effort to hide from the inevitable counterattack by the convoy's escorts. Convoy CU-21 was escorted by Escort Division 22, consisting of Coast Guard-manned destroyer escorts reinforced by one Navy DE, USS Gandy, which took the place of USS Leopold, which had been lost in action the previous month. The escort division's flagship, USS Joyce and USS Peterson rescued the tanker's surviving crew, while the Joyce detected the U-boat on sonar as the Germans attempted to escape after hiding beneath the sinking tanker. U-550's engineering officer later said, "We waited for your ship to leave; soon we could hear nothing so we thought the escort vessels had gone; but as soon as we started to move – bang!" The Joyce delivered a depth-charge pattern that bracketed the submerged submarine. The depth charges were so well placed, a German reported, that one actually bounced off the U-boat's deck before it exploded. According to eyewitness accounts cited in Randall Peffer's book Where Divers Dare: The Hunt for the Last U-boat, the attack severely damaged U-550 and forced it to the surface. Joyce, Peterson and Gandy circled around the submarine, firing at it. Gandy rammed U-550 abaft the conning tower and Peterson dropped two depth charges which exploded near the U-boat's hull. Two men in the U-boat's tower were killed. Meanwhile, the U-boat captain Klaus Hänert tried to reach the observation deck with a surrender flag, but he was wounded by the American shells and fell back down into the U-boat's control room. Eventually, someone aboard the submarine fired a white flare from the tower hatch. The captain of the USS Joyce, Robert Wilcox, took the flare as a sign of distress and surrender and called a cease fire. USS Gandy and USS Peterson ceased firing, too. The U-boat's crew scrambled on deck to abandon their sinking vessel. About 40 of the Germans entered the 44-degree water and tried to swim to USS Peterson, but the men were not picked up. Joyce rescued 13 of U-550's crew, including the captain Klaus Hänert, engineer Hugo Renzmann and doctor Friedrich Torge. One of German seamen later died from wounds received during the fire-fight. Joyce delivered the prisoners of war and Pan Pennsylvania survivors to the authorities in Ireland.