German submarine's secret WWII ship-sinking mission to NZ

[Subdeacon Joe]

http://mobile.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.php?c_id=1&objectid=11386999

 

 

U-boat avoided running aground as it entered Gisborne Harbour with only 1m of water under its hull - and remained undetected

Seventy years ago today, a German submarine entered Gisborne's port on an unsuccessful search for ships to sink in New Zealand waters.

Kriegsmarine U-boat U-862 entered Gisborne harbour on the surface at midnight on January 15, 1945.

 

 

Crazy stuff!

[Earl Brasse, SASS #3562]

Truth is stranger than fiction.

 

The next amazing thing is that any of the crew are still alive considering the survival rate for u-boat crews.

[Shawnee McGrutt]

There are stories ( don't know if they were true or not, before my time ) of German U-boats surfacing to refresh the air in the vessel, amongst the small islands just off shore from where I live. One story is that one U-boat got sunk, and in the debris they found, was bread from a bakery in town.

[Sedalia Dave]

Thanks for sharing. Hats off the the crew for surviving this long

[Subdeacon Joe]

The helmsman and navigator must have been sweating bullets with only a few feet of water under the keel.

[Cat Brules]

My understanding is that those early subs could set down on the sea floor if it were not especially uneven. However, maybe some knows for sure.

[Four-Eyed Buck,SASS #14795]

Our boats did the same thing towards the end of the war. Japanese ships were few and far inbetween by 1945. Our subs had to really beat the bushes and be pretty creative to find any

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

imagine if the tide was going out while they were in the harbor. Oh, Scheiße

[DocWard]

There are stories ( don't know if they were true or not, before my time ) of German U-boats surfacing to refresh the air in the vessel, amongst the small islands just off shore from where I live. One story is that one U-boat got sunk, and in the debris they found, was bread from a bakery in town.

 

While I don't know if they found bread from a bakery, it appears they did more than surface to refresh air off the coast of Maine.

 

http://www.someoldnews.com/?p=954

 

 

The U.S. Navy was secretive about just how close the U-boats were to Maine civilians during the war. On April 23, 1945, the U. S. Navy sub-chaser USS Eagle exploded three miles off Cape Elizabeth, tragically killing 49 of her crew and injuring 13. For more than half a century the Navy insisted that a boiler had exploded onboard, but recent exhaustive research proved that the vessel was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

Eye-witnesses recall the night the wreck of the USN sub-chaser blimp K-14 was salvaged at Southwest Harbor. She was “riddled with bullet holes,” but to this day, the Navy blames pilot error for the loss of the dirigible.

When Nazi Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery was the largest American submarine base on the Atlantic coast. Four German U-boats operating in the Gulf of Maine surrendered at the shipyard. One of the subs was displayed in the Piscataqua River and thousands of Mainers travelled miles to see what had so long been the object of their terror.