The U-570 was only five days outbound from Trondheim, her staging post in German- occupied Norway, when an RAF Lockheed Hudson broke out of the clouds and dived on the vessel. With a freshly trained crew that included only four men with firsthand experience of the war at sea, the boat was wallowing to the surface in the wake of a handling error by a recently qualified planesman. Such potentially fatal mistakes were a constant nightmare for the submarine’s skipper, Kapitanleutnant Hans-Joachim Rahmlow. The U-570 was not only starting her maiden operational patrol, this was also the captain’s first combat mission in command. And the stress was already beginning to show.
“Flood reserve ballast! Planes hard a-dive!” Rahmlow rapped out a string of orders as he hurried to relieve the executive officer, Oberleutnant Bernhard Berndt, of the responsibilities imposed by the emergency. Lacking air-search radar, neither officer was aware that the U-570 was about to break surface directly beneath the marauding bomber. Death was only seconds away when fate chose to change its allegiance. At the critical moment, the Hudson’s release gear malfunctioned and the four torpex-filled depth charges remained secured inside its bomb bay. The airplane pulled out of its dive and climbed to regain altitude for a second attack. Blissfully ignorant of their dramatic escape, Rahmlow brought the U-boat back under control, and, sliding smoothly beneath the waves, she vanished from sight, leaving the Hudson’s pilot with only the empty blackness of the North Atlantic beneath him.
Satisfied that the submarine was now safely submerged and still on course to intercept Convoy HX-145 south of Iceland, Rahmlow ordered Berndt to retake the watch before making his way back to the curtained cubbyhole that served as the U-570's wardroom to finish his rudely interrupted breakfast.
A Mystery Man
Rahmlow remains something of an enigma. Born in 1908 and promoted to Kapitanleutnant in June 1937, he was by 1940 close to the top of the seniority list. Yet his long-awaited appointment as a U-boat commander was delayed until November 1940, despite a pressing demand for experienced officers in the fast expanding Unterseebootflotille. Even more curious, his first boat—the U-58, a small Type lie submarine—was almost immediately removed from combat operations and dispatched to the Baltic Sea as a schoolship for the growing influx of new recruits. She shared this role with a number of other similarly obsolete Type II vessels and would remain there until the final days of the Third Reich. On 3 May 1945 she was scuttled at Kiel to avoid her falling into the hands of advancing Allied forces.
Earlier in her career, however, the U-58 had seen plenty of action. During the opening months of the war she destroyed eight merchant ships in and along the shores of the North Sea. The ferocity of this underwater battle for domination of the seaborne trade routes was evidenced by the fact that, of her nine commanding officers, no fewer than five were subsequently killed in action following transfer to larger and more modern U-boats. A sixth ended the war in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp.
A possible reason for Rahmlow’s slow progress up the Kriegsmarine career ladder came to light more than 40 years later, when Otto Kretschmer, Germany’s greatest U-boat ace of World War II and by that time a rear admiral in the Federal German Navy (Dundesmarine), revealed that the young Kapitanleutnant had spent some months in a naval psychiatric hospital during 1939. That could help explain his curious behavior when later on 27 August 1941 the U-570 came under attack for a second time.
Having leisurely rounded off his breakfast with a mug of coffee, Rahmlow made his way to take over from Berndt before surfacing. Whether either officer carried out a periscope sky search during the final moments remains uncertain. But as neither Rahmlow nor Berndt was aware of the earlier abortive attack, they may have been less alert to the threat of an assault from the air than they might otherwise have been.
Hudson versus U-boat
The surfacing routine proceeded smoothly and calmly, but as Rahmlow was at the point of opening the upper hatch, another patrolling Hudson—“S-for-Sugar” from 269 Squadron—sighted the U-boat’s how and conning tower emerging amid a froth of air bubbles. The pilot, Squadron Leader James Thompson, immediately reacted to the opportunity, and four depth charges straddled the submarine as Rahmlow desperately sought shelter in the depths.
The brain-numbing shockwaves of the quadruple underwater explosions rolled the U-boat onto her beam ends. As she came back onto an even keel, Rahmlow, alarmed by the hiss of escaping air and detecting a faint whiff of chlorine gas from the batteries, hurriedly brought the submarine back to the surface and ordered the crew topside. Thompson saw the U-570 emerging from the waves and, as the sailors clambered up through the hatch, assumed they were making for the submarine’s antiaircraft gun. Coming in at low altitude, he had the sergeant manning the Hudson’s dorsal turret rake the U-boat’s decks with his guns while the aircraft carried out a series of four sea-level passes. Thompson employed his two fixed forward-firing machine guns to increase the weight of attack. A hail of .303-inch bullets clattered against the steel deck plating leaving five of the U-570's crewmen with superficial wounds. In reality, the majority of the shots missed the submarine and splashed harmlessly into the sea.
Unwilling to stand and fight, and uncertain of his ability to escape by diving, Rahmlow seemed to have overlooked that the enemy airplane had already expended its full load of depth charges and was, effectively, weaponless if he chose to take a chance and submerge. Shouting down the hatchway, he grabbed a large square of white cardboard, which an unknown hand passed up to him, and, raising his arms, the U- 570’s captain held it aloft as a token of surrender.
Thompson could hardly believe what he was seeing and presumed that his attack had so seriously damaged the enemy boat that she was unable to submerge. His astonishment was understandable, for this was only the second time in history that a submarine had been captured after capitulating to an airplane, the first occurring on 5 May 1940 when the captain of the crippled British minelayer Seal surrendered his boat to two Luftwaffe seaplanes in the Kattegat (see book review, Fatal Ascent, p. 69). On that occasion, the aircraft had actually landed on the water alongside its prize. (The Royal Navy’s Shark had also surrendered to German airplanes on 5 July 1940 but was so badly damaged she sank before she could be boarded the next day.) Unlike the Seal, the U-boat was undamaged and had all her weapons intact and battle worthy.
The Deal is Closed
The solitary Hudson circled its prize, while the plane’s radio operator transmitted an urgent report to the commander-in-chief, Western Approaches. Within minutes, a number of other aircraft were diverted to provide support, and the Royal Navy’s nearest ships, the trawlers Northern Chief and Kingston Agate, altered course and, thrusting their bows into the teeth of an Atlantic gale, increased speed to provide much-needed naval assistance to the RAF. The former reached the U-570 at 2050 and found the captain and crew huddled in the lee of the conning tower. They were obeying instructions to remain on deck, flashed to them by signal lamp from the pilot of a 209 Squadron Catalina flying boat, which had taken over guard duty from S-for-Sugar.
Lieutenant N. L. Knight, the skipper of the Northern Chief, gave rather more robust orders over the bridge loud- hailer as he came abeam of the submarine. He told the Germans not to scuttle their boat and warned them that, if they disobeyed, they would not be rescued. He also threatened to open fire on their rafts if they tried to abandon ship. It was hardly in accordance with either the spirit or the letter of the Geneva Conventions, but it served its intended purpose admirably, and the U-570's captain and crew waited meekly for whatever fate had in store.
Two British destroyers, the former U.S. Navy lend-lease four- stackers Niagara and Burnell, together with a pair of armed trawlers, the Westwater and Windermere, arrived at dawn. In accordance with standard practice, Rahmlow, as commanding officer of the enemy vessel, was brought off by boat to make his formal surrender and to answer pertinent questions about his boat’s condition. Berndt, meanwhile, remained on board the submarine and was in nominal command during his captain’s enforced absence.
Berndt and the rest of the crew were taken off during the early afternoon, although for some unexplained reason the second officer, Leutnant zur See Walter Christiansen, apparently left the boat after Berndt. Then, despite the worsening weather conditions, the abandoned sub was taken in tow and, by dint of superb seamanship, shepherded to Iceland, where she was beached.
News of the surrender and capture of the U-570 meanwhile reached the Kriegsmarine officers being held at Grizedale Hall—Britain’s Prisoner-of-War Camp No. 1, situated in the beautiful surroundings of the Lake District National Park—by way of the English newspapers delivered daily to the camp’s staff. The senior officer, Korvettenkapitan Otto Kretschmer—a U-boat ace with a tally of more than 260,000 tons of Allied shipping to his credit who had been taken prisoner following the destruction of U-99 on the night of 17 March 1941—was aghast at the dishonor of Rahmlow’s apparently spineless capitulation. He was convinced that the undamaged U'570 could have dived and escaped before the arrival of surface forces made such a course impossible.
It was reasonably certain that the U-boat’s four officers, including Rahmlow himself, would be sent to Grizedale Hall following interrogation. And the Korvettenkapitan decided that they should answer for their conduct at a court of honor—euphemistically referred to as a “council of honor” to circumvent the Geneva Conventions’ ban on any form of court-martial by POWs on their fellow prisoners.
Indeed, despite its doubtful legality, such a council was authorized in the official Kriegsmarine publication MPA 2300-Wahrung der Ehre (Maintaining Honor), which set out the regulations for its constitution and procedures. The mandatory three-man council at Grizedale Hall was to be headed by a lawyer, Kapitanleutnant Horst Hesselbarth of the U-99, who would ensure that the hearing abided strictly by German military law. Two other officers would sit alongside him, one of whom had to be of the same rank as the accused. Kretschmer took no part in the judicial proceedings.
A Question With No Answer
In the event, only three of the submarine’s officers arrived at Grizedale Hall on the appointed day— Berndt, Christiansen, and the engineer, Leitender Ingenieur Erich Menzel. Rahmlow had remained behind in London for further questioning but was expected later in the week. His absence did not, however, lead to a postponement of the council of honor’s hearing. Christiansen and Menzel, the two subordinate officers, were examined first. Although in theory all of LJ'570’s officers were regarded as equally culpable, it was submitted and accepted that the two junior men acted under orders. They were both swiftly acquitted of any taint of cowardice, even though neither officer offered any plausible answers to Hesselbarth’s questions. Indeed, Christiansen had chosen to remain silent when asked why he had not assumed command after Rahmlow and Berndt had been taken off the U-boat.
Oberleutnant Berndt appeared before the council the following morning and was duly sworn in by Hesselbarth. “I swear this holy oath by God that I will implicitly obey the leader of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and that, as a resolute sailor, I will be willing to stake my life at any time for this oath.”
As accurately as he could, Berndt answered 15 minutes of low-key factual questions about the tactical situation and the condition of the U-570 at the time of her surrender. He was then asked if he was familiar with the Kriegsmarine’s Battle Instructions. He confirmed that he was.
“And with the paragraph which states that a U-boat must never be allowed to fall into enemy hands?” Hesselbarth queried.
“Yes, sir.”
“But no attempt was made to scuttle U'5707’
“No, sir. Kapitanleutnant Rahmlow gave no orders.”
“But you know the Battle Instructions. You have just said so,” Hesselbarth reminded him. “Why did you not put Kapitanleutnant under arrest and take command of the submarine yourself?”
This was an unfair and totally unrealistic question. What officer would dare relieve his captain in the face of the enemy when the maintenance of order and discipline of an inexperienced crew was of prime concern? In addition, if taken after the act of surrender, such action could be construed as an abuse of the white flag convention and contrary to international law. Unable to offer a sensible answer to an impossible question, Berndt remained silent.
Misplaced Responsibility
Further cross-examination confirmed that the undamaged U-boat could have dived and escaped without difficulty, especially as the Hudson had expended its full load of depth charges and no surface vessels capable of attacking a submerged submarine was on the scene at that crucial time. Indeed, Rahmlow’s reaction to the situation was appearing more and more inexplicable in the light of the details being laid before the court. But, by mischance, the Kapitanleutnant was not facing the council of honor that morning, and the unfortunate Berndt found himself being arraigned before it as if he were responsible for his captain’s bizarre behavior.
The U-boat’s executive officer was next asked why he did not give orders to scuttle the boat—an instruction he could have issued without the captain’s authority once Rahmlow had surrendered to the enemy. Berndt again referred to the severe weather conditions and explained that his main concern was for the safety of the crew that, he pointed out, was made up almost entirely of young, inexperienced, and frightened boys sailing on their first combat patrol.
“So you regarded the lives of yourself and the crew as more important than safeguarding the secrets in your boat—secrets which, in the hands of the enemy, could cause the deaths of many hundreds of German sailors? Is that what you are saying?”
“Yes, sir,” Berndt replied in a low voice.
Following this final exchange, the verdict of the council was in little doubt. Berndt was found guilty of cowardice in the face of the enemy, a conclusion that had not been sup- ported by a single shred of evidence. Kretschmer, as camp leader, ordered Berndt placed under close arrest pending Germany’s confidently expected occupation of England in the very near future. At that time, he would be handed over for formal trial. No one at Grizedale Hall entertained the slightest doubt that a sentence of death was inevitable.
From Victim to Hero
A few days later, the POWs received reports that the Royal Navy had brought the U-570 to Britain, and she was now berthed at Barrow-in-Furness—a mere 25 miles from Grizedale Hall. The news dramatically changed the situation. It was suggested, possibly by Kretschmer, that Berndt could redeem his honor by escaping and making his way to sabotage the captured U-boat. The Oberleutnant’s eager acceptance of the challenge belied the council’s scathing slur on his moral fiber, and within hours he found himself transformed from an ostracized victim of overhasty judgment to a gallant would-be hero. Other accounts suggest that Berndt personally volunteered to undertake the hazardous task, risking his life to redeem his honor.
Every clandestine asset at Grizedale Hall was mobilized in support of the venture. Maps were prepared, false papers printed, and the camp’s amateur tailors made up the appropriate civilian clothes. Needing a new identity to match his forged paperwork, Oberleutnant zur See Bernhard Berndt became a nondescript Dutch merchant seaman—a disguise necessary to account for his heavily accented English. Ostensibly, he was on his way to rejoin his ship at Liverpool after hitchhiking a lift in the wrong direction in the wake of a drunken night out in Blackpool.
A few evenings later, with all the preparations completed and under cover of a raucous community sing-along by the other prisoners, a hole was cut in the barbed-wire fence, and Berndt wriggled through it to freedom.
Despite his courage, his mission was never accomplished. The next day, after he had traveled barely two miles from the camp, a British civilian Home Guard patrol stopped him. Although they accepted his false papers and believed his cover story, they decided to take him to Grizedale Hall for identification. Realizing that the game was up, Berndt made a dash for it as the group passed through some trees. The patrol shouted a warning, but when the fleeing figure ignored it, a single rifle shot echoed across the valley. The Oberleutnant staggered and fell to the ground with a bullet in his back. He died before the village doctor could reach him.
Kretschmer was shocked by Berndt’s untimely death and, eager to atone for the misplaced verdict of the council of honor, requested the camp commandant, a Major Veitch of the Coldstream Guards, to allow the Oberleutnant to be buried with full military honors. Permission was granted without hesitation, and three days later 12 senior U-boat officers, headed by Korvettenkapitan Kretschmer, accompanied the funeral procession to the small cemetery at Hawkshead. In a gesture of chivalry to a respected foe, a Royal Navy White Ensign was draped over the coffin, and a British honor guard fired three volleys in a final salute at the graveside.
The Captain Escapes the Council
By ironic coincidence, Rahmlow arrived at Grizedale Hall on the very morning of the funeral. Taken to meet the camp leader, he came face to face with Kretschmer, who coldly informed him that he would be brought before a council of honor the next day to answer the charge of cowardice in the face of the enemy and to explain why, if escape was impossible, he failed to scuttle his boat.
This time, unlike the earlier occasion, news of the illegal trial reached British authorities. By the time the council convened the following day, Rahmlow was traveling north under guard in an army truck to his new, and he hoped safer, home in a POW camp for Luftwaffe officers near Carlisle. The Kapitanleutnant was never persuaded to explain publicly his reasons for surrendering the U-570.
