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Survival Surviving from a sunken U-boat © Arthur Baudzus 2004
Arthur Baudzus was a U-boat man on one of the Monsun boats, U-859. He is a member of a fairly exclusive club - he escaped from his sunken U-boat. Arthur is the author of a book based on his experiences at sea, his book is called U-859. Arthur welcomes questions or comments via the forum. |
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U-boat men are well aware that a U-boat can sink and become their coffin; but this knowledge is pushed far away into the remotest corner of their brain and does not bother them. All that remains in their conscious and subconscious mind, is that the quickest exit is through the conning tower hatch.
When a sailor is turned into a U-boat man, he learns survival technique at the U-boat school at Neustadt. There is a mock-up central control room of a U-boat with a ten metre water column on top of it. The students enter the control room and the room is then flooded. Now the water rises up to one metre from the ceiling, where breathing air is trapped by a skirt which drops from the exit hatch above. After they are instructed in the use of the swim vest and the Draeger breathing apparatus, they dive one by one under the skirt and swim the ten metre to the surface.
Piece of cake.
Nobody tells the men that nearly always the depth of the ocean where the U-boat operates is not ten metre, but such that this escape procedure is impossible. At last the U-boat designers got the message, and in the later boats such skirt was deleted. The exhibition Boat in Laboe Germany has no such skirt.
So what happens when a U-boat sinks? I have experienced that and can remember the procedure well. I was on U-859, a long-range IXD2 boat, which after 20000 miles at sea was one hour from reaching its destination. Ten miles outside Penang in the Malakka Strait, Lieutenant Commander Hezlet lurked behind the periscope of his submarine and fired a salvo of three torpedoes at us.