Word: u-boats
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...nearby ships went a victory message: "Scratch one hearse! Scratch one hearse!" (In Navyese, a U-boat is a hearse.) As an afterthought, the message added: "Pallbearers in the water...
...Kill. The Spencer was turning. The port guns ceased. The sub was dead ahead, so close it could be rammed. But there was no need to ram when it could be smashed with gunfire. The starboard guns took up the battle, blazing at close range. The U-boat's conning tower by now was badly smashed. A lone man, his back toward the Spencer, clung desperately to the conning tower as though being crucified. A shell hit him squarely in the back. He crumpled, slumping down over two other corpses on the narrow deck...
From Captain Berdine came an order to pick up survivors. Latticed cargo nets were slung over the stern sides. Single lifelines dangled from the forward decks. Several bobbing Germans drifted within range, shouting "Kamerad! Kamerad!" A few hundred yards away the U-boat rocked and rolled, waves washing higher & higher over its knife-slim deck. She began to settle by the stern...
...Prisoners. Next day six German officers paced the wet, misty quarter-deck while armed guards stood by. All six were over 5 ft. 8, sturdily built, healthy-looking without any trace of the fatigue or pallor that comes from malnutrition or too lengthy duty on submarines. The U-boat's captain had been killed, so the executive officer had become their commander. He marched first in line on their daily turns around the quarterdeck. Whatever the leader did, the rest did. When they halted in the lee of a gun shelter to light cigarets, he got the first match...
Allied shipping tonnage losses during May dropped to the lowest figure for any one month since 1940. Even German communiqués reported a total of only 372,000 tons. German U-boat losses rose to the highest figure since the start of the war: nine sunk, four probably sunk, two possibly sunk - not including those destroyed at bases and assembly plants...