Small vessels

Usage examples of boats.

They have new systems for locating our boats and are inflicting heavy losses on us, fifteen to seventeen U-boats a month.

I think the figure ought to be increased to forty boats, and request the Fuhrer to issue an executive order to this effect.

Suddenly the boats fell silent, disappeared from the scene without a word unless the enemy reported their destruction.

Of these 57 boats only 46 were operational and still fewer, a mere 22, were suitable for the Atlantic.

So it was that, contrary to general belief, at the start of the war only five to seven boats were on patrol in the Atlantic.

According to Rohwer an increase to around 300 boats could not have been achieved by 1942 within the framework of the accepted peacetime restrictions, even with a trash programme of U-boat construction.

The little U-boats pitched and rolled, and played at standing on end, while everyone inside clung on desperately to pipes and steel projections a foretaste of how these boats would behave in the heavy storms of the North Atlantic.

Meanwhile recovery boats are following to fish out the valuable item, all one and a half tons, as soon as it has lost momentum and come to the surface.

When the accompanying patrol boats and those that had guided us through the mine-fields had taken their leave and steamed away we were on our own for the first time a small dot in the wide North Sea.

Meanwhile, as though in peacetime, I had become a trained and experienced U-boat commander, and a whole year had passed Later, when there were more new boats but also more losses training time was curtailed and this would have its consequences.

But this number could not be shown on the outside, for its identity had to be concealed, so we did like all the other boats and chose a symbol instead, only recognisable by initiates.

This group exercised in the Baltic between Hela, Bornholm and Eckernforde, and was intended to acclimatise newly-commissioned boats to operational conditions.

If, despite everything, a U-boat did succeed in latching onto a convoy, it was not itself allowed to attack but had to maintain contact and report position, course and speed by radioed short-code signal to the C-in-C U-boats, who would call up all the boats within reach.

British, saving as they did the front-line boats a long, dangerous outward trip from Kiel round the north of Scotland to the actual area of operations, and the same long risky return from the Atlantic to home continually exposed to the British aircraft above them which kept constant patrols from their island bases.

In mid-December he had asked permission to send 12 of the so-called long-distance 1,100-ton boats of Type IX to the east coast of the USA.