Hell Below - Episode 1: The Wolfpack | Free Documentary History

in the early days of the second world war one of Hitler's most successful yubo Aces uto kretchmer sinks dozens of Allied ships fire first alone then as part of the lethal wolf packs until a fateful mistake up up threatens everything in World War II subc weapon allows Warriors to fight from beneath the waves with cunning force and tenacity their enemies Strike Back revolutionary but still sometimes primitive it's a desperate bid to change the course of War their stories are Legend July 8th 1940 go Nazi ubot u99 has sunk an Allied merchant ship just south of Ireland now a British escort turns in Pursuit when you attack the enemy you are the Hunter and as soon as you get attacked by the escorts you are the prey the crew of 99 performs a dive to escape ubot Commander Otto kretchmer has served Hitler's underwater service since the start of World War II he's just sunk his 12th ship in 10 months and earned a reputation as the best torpedo shot in the German [Music] Navy he proves ruthlessly offici his motto is one torpedo one ship AO crar was not one of the ordinary submarine commanders right he's of a he's part of an elite group to really do most of the damage not only is he Pleasant and skilled but he's cold as a cucumber it's only kar's second patrol aboard the recently commissioned u99 he and his untried crew face an explosive initiation it's the first time when the cool and calm character of ketma is virtually forged in Flames uh because it's the first time when he's attacked by Allied escorts the warship that hunts kmer is one of Britain's new flower class Corvettes 205 ft long with a displacement of 940 tons it's been adapted from commercial Whalers to hunt submarines so when the war starts the attack that the Germans launch on British trade is unanticipated and the British are simply not materially prepared for it nor are they psychologically prepared for it and the Brits have to adapt their their Maritime preparations to deal with Warfare that they just are not ready for just after 8:00 [Music] a.m. the flower class Corvette launches underwater bombs Called Death charges how many death charge exploded one after the other they look around in a submarine is there something broken is the hole still fully intact they don't not only drop one C two c or free Salos they start attacking for hours and hours u99 is a type 7 uboat first commissioned in 1936 they are 218 ft long and 20 ft wide type sevens normally carry 14 torpedoes and a crew of 45 men Germany produces more of them than any other submarine the type 7 uo is actually a bit on the small side it's developed from the so-called UB submarine one of the smaller submarines of the first world war it did have significant seagoing capacity more than 700 were built based on its relatively simple and inexpensive design [Music] the man who deploys the uots is Carl dirid Hitler's Mastermind of submarines I think the best way to understand Carl donit is he's a consumate professional Submariner he lived breathed thought submarines all the time dut launches his uots to key shipping routes in a bid to strangle the British Isles this became the core strategy of the German Naval command to cut those lifelines those maritime lifelines fighting the convoys starving Britain into defeat the whole thing turns into quite literally as often been said a chess match because you're matching wits with the other guy where is he now and where will he be you got to be thinking several moves ahead jouret uses Naval intelligence to assign the few submarines he has to locate ships there are not many OTS at sea at this stage of the war the Germans have had to make choices in their war production and OTS were not one of those choices because of course they were planning to fight on land first in the west and then in the East so he had to use these small numbers and the only thing he could do is to spread them over the ocean like butter on a very big sheet of bread therefore in the first stages of the second world war they were still fighting like in the first world war one submarine on one petrol on its own early on July 8th dut's u99 attacked the enemy alone and has been under siege for [Music] hours everybody is under stress so the sweat is coming um on their face dropping down and if you are under stress you breathe a lot uncertain of how long the attack will last kretchmer takes action to preserve The submarine's Limited supply of air the commanding officer needs to conserve the oxygen and so the people get the order to lie down to sleep they get biscuits and they get chocolate to get over the situation after hours they're probably very fatigued some of the crew Dawn masks that absorb carbon dioxide in an effort to make the ot's atmosphere last it's almost impossible to imagine what these people felt in this very moment um it must be must have been horrendous but as another Salvo hits the man who commands the ubot appears unfaced ketma was sitting very calm and reading a novel a criminal novel and the guy on the herro Acoustics Castle was looking at him and he thought oh that's a great guy we are under the pressure he's just sitting around reading his novel after some minutes CLE again is looking at him and he realized the brook is upside down so he can't read and all the time he did not flip any page so kma in this case was a brilliant military leader I can take the time to just read a novel so you could keep calm too when the attacks are going on for hours crch my head to keep in mind a lot of different things the first thing is to keep the submarine in a depth where it doesn't get destroyed by the pressure uh of the water and therefore he needs propulsion and to produce propulsion he needs to use battery energy submerged 124 battery cells power 99's propellers and all its systems they can only be recharged on the surface 12 hours after the depth charge attack begins kretchmer and his crew remain pinned down ketma is told by his engineer that he's running low of battery fuel crar must make a move or u99 will be lost to the sea to wait until the battery is totally down then there's no chance of surviving during the 12 hours of depth charge attack 99 has been cruising just fast enough to maintain a constant depth to conserve power to keep his submarine moving he needs the propulsion and therefore he had to use the battery fuel in efficient way as as long as possible to keep the boat on moving for propulsion or for operations as his batteries die ketchman risks the last of his power on a course change in a final bid to escape kretchmer and his crew try to evade by zigzagging changing depth and the likes more than 14 hours after the attack began the sound of enemy propellers Fades and then they had the information that the escorts were moving away u99 survives 127 death Charges better fuel was extremely low and oxygen was nearly disposed and therefore he had to get [Music] up when they surface the escorts have moved out of [Music] sight it is said that the air is yellow greenish and the author of one famous novel about ketma he explains looking like the death leaving the submarine he was one of the first German commanding submarine officers to have an experience of a longlasting depth charge he was lucky so the escorts really [Music] disappeared to the east the man in charge of G's OTS gains a critical win Hitler's troops have invaded France durit can use its Atlantic ports to launch his submarines after the fall of France in 1940 the Germans suddenly possessed new bases ideally suited for attacks on the British convoys in the Atlantic before that they had to to to send out the the boats from from their bases in in Germany which meant uh they would spend a lot of fuel for traveling to and through those operational areas and so now in France the boats had considerably more time for actually hunting and fighting the AL convoys on October 13th 1940 jet deploys u99 from lauron France intelligence has learned 34 enemy ships transport Timber steel and other War materials and a convoy from Canada to Britain a convoy is a grouping of ships a number of ships together escorted by a number of Warships you might think that putting a lot of ships together is a lot of eggs in one basket but actually because the sea is such a big place if you concentrate shipping then it's very difficult for the enemy to even find them and when they find them they find them escorted with warships and it's a hard job to attack them kretchmer and his crew race Northwest in search of Convoy sc7 all Convoy routs have their own designation HX alifax SC slow Convoy for slow ships when they start convoys for slow ships so it normally mean something and it helps divide convoys up durit assigns more uots to join kretchmer in locating the Convoy it's one of the first mobilizations of a wolf pack a tactic that Hitler's submarines would make famous the essence of the rudal tactique the wolf tactic was to bring several submarines to Bear against the Convoy the control of the wolf pack is done ashore at T its headquarters it's on on the big board you a big plot and pins and move submarines around think of it as a kind of vast drift net of submarines at about twice the visibility distance apart one from the other deployed perpendicular to the line of advance that you'd expect convoys to follow and the idea is simply to use it as a kind of trip wire system so you can snare them another submarine to join the Hunt is U 100 the ubo is commanded by yakim shepa friend and rival to kretchmer and 99 shepa and kretchmer were among the first to complete Don's Elite submarine training 133 months into the war they rank among Hitler's uboat Aces cunning men driven to sink Britain's ships the number of uh aces in the ubot fleet is never very big and they do most of the heavy lifting if you look at the success rate for German submariners about 3/4 of the tonnage is sunk by like 20% of the of the captains because they're they're prepared to take things right to the edge but can these lone wolves hunt as a pack [Music] by fall of 1940 a new era of submarine warfare has begun Admiral KL durit counts on Aces kretchmer and sheepa to deliver on his new Wolfpack tactic Germany has only 27 operational submarines nearly a third of Donut's active Fleet is at stake his strategic objective is tonage sunk for ubot day at Sea it's also a logical strategy it's just about the only one they've got but it means you do have to sync ships you have to destroy their carrying [Music] capacity attacking a convoy presents the perfect opportunity the 34 Merchant ships of slow Convoy 7 are protected by only four escorts their main weapon for detecting ubot is sonar an active pinging system also known as AIC Echo bearing green 20 drawing right AIC was invented towards the end of World War One it uses sound pulses called pings to search the ocean for submarines the big innovation in the fall of 1918 was the introduction of an active acoustic location system developed primarily by the French and then shared with the British so what you have is that stuff you see in in Hollywood movies where a sound goes out it hits something and it comes back and you measure the distance and that gives you some idea of how far away the object is it was the key to the existing anti-submarine tactics of the royal Navy a submerged submarine in fact was vulnerable but the biggest drawback is that it doesn't work against surface vessels and when a submarine becomes a low hardto detect surface vessel at night it soon proves to be a very dangerous enemy indeed after Convoy sc7 is intercepted kretchmer and the rest of the wolf pack close in and then the order would be given that at the right moment in the dark of night you're free to attack and then the pack would come in there's a lot at stake not simply in Sinking the ships but in creating that shock effect and demonstrating to the British that they can sink their shipping at will shepa and the other commanders prepar to fire from outside the Convoy but kretchmer has his own plan at 10 p.m. u99 slinks past the escorts to Ambush the enemy from where they least expected prma has this this Killer Instinct he is a perfectionist so he finds a way of sneaking in on the surface into the Convoy he manages coldblooded to sail inside the Convoy and then starts to torpedo the merchant vessels [Music] fire oh for first knowledge they have there's an attack taking place is when an explosion strikes a ship and flares start to go up then the escort has to react the Allies Target the Convoy's perimeter where the OTS usually prow others in the wolf pack are forced to dive [Music] [Music] but inside the Convoy kretchmer stays on the attack [Music] it turns into a pyrotechnic nightmare they're just sinking ships terrifying for the men in the Convoy just terrifying no one thought that they would actually get inside the Convoy in the dark of night and spit death and destruction over both ends at a high speed in the early hours of October 19th u99 fires the last of its 14 Torpedoes Convoy loses 20 ships while in transit 80,000 tons of shipping is lost to the war effort shepa claims three ships kretchmer 7 many more than any other Ace and one of Germany's first Wolfpack offensives it's a radically new kind of use of submarines that the Brit simply do not have defenses for once the Wolfpack snares a convoy it's chaos for the Allies a few days later u99 docks to a cheering crowd kretchmer and his fellow commanders are celebrated as Idols the German ubot Aces were used by the by the German war propaganda of course as propaganda Heroes you can almost like them to the pop stars of their days in any War it's very much the same you need Heroes you need successes to raise the spirit of your own folk in Britain war strategists raced to thwart Germany's new ubo tactics the British Empire's a maritime Empire and it relies on shipping now that's a strength because it means that the British can access the world as far as supplies are concerned but on the other hand it means Britain must control the Sea The Royal Navy reassigns warships guarding the British Coast to the Atlantic to protect convoys it must not allow the enemy to deny it the use of the sea efforts are also underway to apply a new tech technology called radar radio waves used to detect enemy airplanes to the seas in the process of having to make this adjustment Britain is being bombed ports are being destroyed from the air the blitz is being launched it's a very trying period for [Music] Britain March 1941 Nazi wolf packs have dominated the battle of the Atlantic for 5 months now con HX 1112 steams in transit from Halifax to Britain HX Halifax HX 1112 was the 112th fast inward-bound Convoy it was composed of different kinds of ships tankers cargo ships Etc and one of the features which makes this Convoy interesting and significant is that for the first time the uots are facing a well trained escort group overseeing The Seven escorts that guard the 41 ship Convoy is Commander Donald McIntyre McIntyre has proved a shrewd Hunter since he captained his first British Patrol vessel in 1935 McIntyre was focused on yubo killing that's what he wanted to do he wanted to SN submarines McIntyre took command of HMS Walker a few weeks before the lead destroyer and one of Britain's first dedicated Convoy protection Fleet escort group five it was a very Risky Business not only to serve on a warship or or a merchant vessel but also to travel the Atlantic there was also this constant threat of being attacked by a uo and facing facing a gruesome [Music] death 150 m south of Iceland McIntyre faces the first assault against Convoy HX 1112 a ubot cripples one of the Convoy's prized oil tankers critical fuel for Britain's war effort Burns tankers are always spectacular targets they go up in huge bouts of FL and this tanker was no exception it made a great impact on McIntyre who said you know it was it was rather a depressing sight to see this huge explosion taking place and it showed that the uots were mounting effective [Music] attacks before diving LMP transmits the coordinates of Convoy HX 1112 to ubo headquarters donits deploys kretchmer and shepa in a wolf pack to intercept all the the first round draft picks all the key characters are in this Convoy battle but one of the Convoy Escorts also carries a new weapon rigged to foil yubo tactics McIntyre's warship Fleet includes the HMS vanok recently fitted with radar a technology that allows ships to locate submarines on the surface vanok was one of the first destroyers to be equipped with a radar system and this was entirely new and a new threat to the ubot now they could be detected at night at um the surface unaware of this critical development Germany's top submarine commanders prepare to attack they have had great successes against poorly escorted convoys now the tide is beginning to turn but they don't know that yet March 16th 1941 having located the Convoy kretchmer plots has creep into HX [Music] 1112 99's Commander scans the fog with prize binoculars made for an ace as an ace submarine Commander kretchma has been presented with a rather higher standard of binoculars than uh other captains and they're part of his ability especially at night to seize Targets on the surface and it's a very important part of keter's self-image that he has them kretchmer must use his sharp eyes to avoid an accidental crash with an enemy ship the North Atlantic in March is not a very hospitable Place uh and you get Mists and fog and so on and therefore it's going to be quite difficult to attack but kretchmer was a person who liked taking risks he wanted to get inside the Convoy that was his tactic get inside the Convoy Target environment sink everything in sight and he tries to do this despite the weather conditions by 10 p.m. u99 navigates the fog to land inside Enemy Lines where none of the Convoy Escorts would expect to find a Nazi submarine avoiding underwater detection and cloaked in darkness kretchmer and his crew are ready to strike fire they attack at night on the surface when the atic doesn't work the soar doesn't work and therefore they create chaos they create a certain amount of shock effect and large numbers of ships have blow up in in quick succession aboard the lead British escort McIntyre scans the perimeter for the ubot that's ravaging his ships if the escort gets a sniff it can strike against the pack it can push it off and maybe get through the night with very few losses but at 1:00 a.m. another submarine is detected McIntyre's fought shepin in the customary position outside the Convoy the British Destroyer steams toward its Target at 34 knots nearly twice as fast as U 100 can speed nearly overtaken on the surface Shep's only option is to try and hide beneath the waves in such a battle situation you can't think for hours and hours over over what to do next and so made this Split Second decision to evade an attack by the destroyer by diving McIntyre summons HMS vanor to join him in a death charge attack depth charges are very large explosions and if they occur close to the submarine then they do a lot of damage vves become onti water leaks in controls burst bulbs burst all kinds of Damages are [Music] inflicted the damage is overwhelming it leaks so badly that if it doesn't come up it's probably going to sink on McIntyre ship HMS Walker the sonar operator struggles to Ping U 100 with the atic system in an ocean distorted by explosions the sea is a very complicated environment and of course if you're dropping depth charges it's it's quite hard to actually separate the depth charges from the submarine another problem was that as dick face forwards and your weapons were dropped over the stir the rear of the ship so this means that when you're attacking a submarine there is a gap between you're losing contact and the depth charg is actually being dropped and then you have to re acquire the target nearby HMS vanok uses its first generation radar to scan for U 100 in case its surfaces the new technology could deliver a Target but its application is limited the first radar they put in service is a type 286 which is a 1.5 M radar fixed to the Mast head the essential problem with with type 286 radar is Target had to be straight ahead you couldn't turn the antennas you had to point the ship just after 3:00 a.m. shepa pops up a thousand yards away from the escorts betting he can repair the flooding and limp away to Safety in an incredible twist contact J ahead he lands directly in front of the first radar system able to detect him if they've been a little bit left or right or some other place the 286 on the Mast head probably wouldn't have picked it up vanok races head on that the commander decides to Ram the [Music] yoat having picked up a surfaced ubo on its newly installed radar system the British ship vanor resorts to a standard first world war tactic and charges to Ram the damaged submarine the Destroyer hits the uboat U 100 Aid ships and it smashes the Corning Tower and shapy is crushed with his legs between the hull and the Periscope is thrown into the water and is killed and the ybot is lost aboard u99 kretchmer is oblivious to the fate of his fellow Ace out of torpedoes 99's crew clears the Convoy to head for home this is a classic ketma attack five ships sunk so he seems to be doing well but now the training of the escort Force comes in they carry out what what they can of a systematic search as u99 slinks away keter's lookout spots McIntyre's destroyer in a panic the crewman is convinced they've been discovered on the crewman's warning the submarine Dives when he saw this Destroyer extremely near he simply expected that they would have been detected by the Destroyer and so made this split-second decision to evade an attack by the destroyer by diving McIntyre's Lookouts were unaware of u99 but as the submarine descends the Destroyer sonar comes into play they're listening all the time and they're playing this kind of deadly game of cat and mo the sub's down here and he's listening to you ping off him and at some point because the sonar beam is fixed it's going to sweep over the sub new contact range 400 y once it can be picked up on atic it can be attacked with depth charges McIntyre's crew launches its underwater bonds and a bid to sink the submarine [Music] they threw the death charges and they detonated near the ubot causing extreme damage I with controls failing their equipment and gauges shattered kretchmer and his crew plunge towards the sea floor and a severely wounded submarine they got two options at that point you blow ballast and get out or you become a bottom feature cr's crew attempts to blow out water to raise their plummeting ubot the only way of escaping was returning to the surface so this was the decision crma made simply to to save the life of his crew but the air valve is jammed he's forced down in fact he goes down very deep indeed it looks as if the submarine is going to be crushed [Music] the crew monitors their descent to their horror they drop deeper and deeper 20 ft below Crush depth the valve finally gives the ubo begins to climb on the surface a determined McIntyre waits for the submarine as soon as she surfaces she's engaged with gunfire a certain amount of damage is inflicted and it seems as if the time has come for u99 to be abandoned but from the sinking submarine Hitler's top ubot Ace orders a final transmission after his luck has run out ketma still is this professional he sends a last message to duts very short simply says depth charge two destroyers 53,000 tons a crma that last message he sends from the submarine have sunk a number of ships some a thousand tons leaving the sub kretchmer um that that's just an indication of what a cool customer actually was more than 5 hours after u99 launched its attack kretchmer orders his crew on Deck to prepare for surrender kretchmer I think to calm his crew lights a cigar just to show that he's still in in charge he signals to the British to take off his crew and the British will do that because there isn't much hatred man man to man uh once the submarine sunk that's the job done kretzmer is the last one pulled aboard the British Destroyer McIntyre claims the aces binoculars as his prize ketma is treated very well on board HMS Walker he plays Bridge he's pled with whiskey they're very uh uh pleased that they've captured somebody so distinguished kretchmer spends the rest of the war as an Allied prisoner the battle against Convoy they lose them all in a very short period but you still got lots of young very capable submariners coming along the German submarine Fleet is by no means done it's really just getting started [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 436,630

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, History Documentary, History of World War II, World War II, Second World War, Submarine Warfare, German U-Boat Documentary, Naval Warfare, Kriegsmarine, Das Boot, U-Boot, U boot Documentary, U Boat Documentary, Submarine, World War 2 Submarines, Battle of the Atlantic, Wolfpack Tactic

Id: cMId5uxZrDc

Length: 42min 15sec (2535 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024