After the Battle, a Postscript!

“LOST MUSKET DIARY” Wednesday December 3, 2014

Rainy 61°F/16°C in Rancho Santa Margarita

Buongiorno,

                As we count down to the 73^rd anniversary of that “Day of Infamy,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it, I’m still digging into another story about World War 2, the U boat attack on my father’s ship in the Bristol Channel off the coast of Britain, later in the war than December 7^th 1941. His high seas adventure took place on a sunny summer afternoon in August 1944.

Lt. Charles Botula

               My father, Lieutenant (jg) Charles Botula, Jr, never had a chance to meet Admiral Karl Dönitz, and to my knowledge, he had never heard of Karl-Heinze Lange either. However, he certainly had a chance to witness their handiwork. The World War II “Battle of the Atlantic” got very up close and personal for my dad and the crew of his ship, the LST 920.

LST 920 at Normandy 1944

 On that long ago afternoon, it was a few minutes before 5 p.m. and the crew was getting ready for chow, when the convoy they were sailing in - EBC-72 - came under attack by the German U Boat 667, commanded by Karl-Heinze Lange. A torpedo had struck the 920’s sister ship, LST 921, breaking it in two. Then, as my father watched from the bridge, a torpedo trail headed relentlessly toward his ship, the 920. It would have struck dead amidships had it not been for the British Corvette that was escorting the convoy from Milford Haven, Wales to Falmouth, England. The Brit, LCI(L)99 took the full brunt of the torpedo’s wrath, blowing it out of the water just a short distance from its intended target, the 920.

Ill-fated LCI(L)99

               The attack was followed by a courageous move by the 920’s skipper, Lt. Harry N. Schultz, who, in a violation of the hard and fast order to stay with the convoy, ordered his ship to come about to pick up any survivors from the LST 921 and the LCI(L)99.

LST 920 Skipper Schultz

In Schultz’s mind, an ancient law of the sea trumped any contemporary rule for navigating a war zone. While the enemy sub stayed in the area, looking for an opportunity to resume the attack, the rescue effort continued into the night. As survivors were pulled from the chilly waters of the Bristol Channel, the sub stayed just out of the range of the new three inch gun Captain Lange thought the LST 920 was carrying. Lange was wrong. The 920 was equipped only with 40 millimeter weapons. Another bit of luck for the rescuers. The next day, it left the area and sailed to its home base in France to report a successful mission to Admiral Dönitz. U 667 never reached its home port. Neither my father, nor any member of his crew knew who had attacked them or what fate had in store for the enemy.

Admiral Karl Donitz

A clearer picture of what happened on August 14, 1944, comes into focus if you know a little bit more about Admiral Dönitz and his philosophy of waging war. Simply stated, it was to destroy completely the enemy’s ability to wage war, a practice by great commanders past, present and future from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Genghis Khan to Napoleon Bonaparte, to American Civil War Generals U.S. Grant and, especially William Tecumseh Sherman. Karl Dönitz learned the craft of submarine warfare during World War I, when Germany terrorized the Allied shipping lanes and initiated its own downfall with the torpedoing of the Lusitania, bringing the US into the war.

                Being an island nation had kept invaders out of Britain from the time of William the Conqueror in 1066 right up until the eve of World War 2. As Germany shook off the shackles of The Versailles Treaty, Adolf Hitler and his generals began to plan for an invasion of Britain. From the rubble of the First World War Germany had built a massive military machine with its Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’ purview would be the Navy and its fleet of unterseebooten, the dreaded U boats. When WW2 began in 1939, so did the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest naval struggle in history from outbreak to Germany’s surrender in 1945.  The Allies lost 3,500 merchant ships and warships. The Germans lost 783 of its 1153 U-boats. By the time that LSTs 921, 920, AND LCI(L)99 met up on August 14, 1944 with U 667, the war was in its final year and the Germans had already lost the Battle of the Atlantic.

                When I first heard the story about this U boat attack, it was little more than a wartime anecdote that my dad told over the Sunday dinner table as I grew up. Dad was proud of his wartime Navy service and he loved to regale his two young sons with his “war stories.” My brother and I grew up listening to them. The whole story played out over just a few days’ time in late 1944, but it took years for me to find out all the facts. Apart from the names of his own shipmates dad was in no position to learn any of the details relating to the other ships involved or their crews. It was not until after I retired that I started treating this story as I had done so many other stories that I covered during my long career as a journalist. And as I carried out my research and each new fact came to light, I was on to one hell of a war story.

Dad, Mom and me June 1944

I have distant memories of a June day in 1944, when my mother took me to Boston by train from New York. My father had already been away from home for almost a year by then. I was about four and we were in Massachusetts to attend the commissioning of my dad’s brand new ship. By the time the new crew took its new ship out on its shakedown cruise, the LST 920 was sporting a brand new camouflage paint job and was getting ready to head to the Pacific. But orders changed at the last minute and it headed to Philadelphia to pick up a “secret cargo.” The 920’s sister ship, LST 921 received the same orders and the two new ships headed to Philadelphia toward the end of July to pick up their mysterious cargo. Both received new paint jobs, literally overnight, along with new orders – to join a one-thousand-ship-convoy off Nova Scotia and head across the North Atlantic. At about the same time, July 22, 1944, U 667 set sail from its base at St. Nazaire, France with its new commander, Kapitan Leutnant Karl-Heinze Lange in search of allied shipping. Along with its new skipper, U 667 had been outfitted with the new

                By August 9, 1944, Convoy HXM 301 with the LST’s 920 and 921 had successfully crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Liverpool, England. As the long journey ended for them, their nemesis, the U 667 was already drawing blood. The day before, on August 8^th, U 667’s new skipper had scored his first kills; a US Liberty ship, the SS Ezra Weston and a Canadian escort vessel, HMCS Regina.

HMCS Regina

The Ezra Weston took the first torpedo, and, as the Regina came to the stricken ship’s aid, it too was torpedoed. One officer and 27 men aboard the Regina were killed; the ship’s commander and 65 crewmen were saved, although two of the survivors died before they could reach a hospital. All 71 crewmen aboard the Ezra Weston survived the attack. Now, on the afternoon of August 14, 1944 the two LSTs were en route from Milford Haven, Wales to Falmouth, England toward their ultimate destination – Omaha Beach in Normandy. U 667 spotted their convoy in the Bristol Channel.

The Attacker U 667

U 667 was one of 1153 German submarines commissioned in World War II. It was a Class 7C submarine which first saw action in 1942. Its first Captain, Heinrich Schroteler, was in command for four missions. While U 667 is credited with shooting down an RAF bomber, it did not score any “kills” against Allied shipping. on his next command, the U 1023, Schroteler did sink a British minesweeper and a Norwegian tanker in the waning days of the war in 1945. His successor on U 667, Captain Lange, had better luck, scoring four kills within two weeks in August 1944. The Weston and Regina on August 8, and LST 921 and LCI(L)99 on August 14th.  Later, as Lange and U 667 steamed away from the site of their latest victory, neither the Captain or his crew could know that their luck was about to change.

U 667's Captain Lange

                In all of the research I did for this story, the archives of the Navies, US and German, revealed only that U 667 struck a mine on or about August 25^th on the way back to a hero’s welcome at its home base at La Rochelle, France. I found the answer on a specialty internet site uboat.net, which is devoted to the archives of the Kriegsmarine and especially it’s Unterseebooten.

                According to the archives, the RAF had carried out a series of aerial mine-laying missions off the coast of France right about the time that U 667 was carrying out its last deadly mission. Mine-laying had been carried out by both sides in the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel. The Germans to keep the Allies away, and the Allies to keep the Germans bottled up in their home ports or to snag them on the way home. In a report on the August 1944 mine laying sweep, the map coordinates of the area sown match the location where the wreckage of the U 667 was finally located and examined by diving crews. The loss of the U 667 was recorded by the Kriegsmarine when it missed a scheduled radio check-in on August 25^th. By then, Admiral Dönitz and his high command had begun to assume that if a scheduled check-in was missed by one of his U-boats, it meant that the sub had been lost. In fact, U 667 did become a war grave less than two weeks after it’s most recent victory. Ironically, none of the survivors of its last wartime attack ever knew what happened to the submarine that had so impacted their lives.

Ciao, MikeBo