I was resting in my bunk in the rear torpedo room. Suddenly an ear-shattering explosion and I am propelled out of my bunk. With my senses bluntened in total darkness the survival nerves of my body take control and I bounce like a rubber ball to the round hatch which leads to the E-room and from there to freedom. Before I can swing through the hatch, I am stopped by the fiery gas of the torpedo which had hit our boat midships, breaking it in two, and the next moment a metre-thick water jet sluices into our quarters. In just a few seconds our room is flooded, leaving enough breathing air trapped whilst our crippled half of U-859 sinks to the bottom of the sea.

With the rising water I am groping above me until my searching hands find the opening wheel of the torpedo loading hatch. Now my brain takes over from the control of the instinctive survival nerves and I am ready to make plans.

"What was the latest echo-sounding?" I scream into the surrounding blackness and wince because my voice sounds unfamiliar. I sounded more like Donald Duck.

"Fifty metre" an equally distorted voice sounded back.

I am relaxed now. My brain assures me that I am not going to die. Lady Luck had let us down, but at least she let us reach a survivable depth before she turned her thumb down on us. Two days earlier and we would have had a thousand metre of water under the keel. Now I am thinking..I realise that I can not open that hatch because then all air would escape and all men but I would drown. I have to give them time to find their survival gear which is stowed underneath the mattress in their bunk. I, myself have the choice whether to go and find my own survival gear somewhere in the blackness under water, or stay up here and be the first to exit. I decide to stay foot and escape with the last air.

After the "All clear" I open the hatch and slide out with the escaping air bubble into the tropical warm water. It was a long way up whilst all the way I release the pressure from my lungs. The air in them seems unexhaustable, but then I carried five times the normal capacity of air in my lungs. At long last I reach the surface to see the sun once more again.