He Took His Submarine Into A Convoy On The Surface. It Set A Record No One Beat.

In the autumn of nineteen forty, a German submarine commander did something no one thought possible. He took his U-boat into the middle of an Allied convoy on the surface, at night, and fired torpedoes from inside the formation while the escorts searched for him underwater. His name was Otto Kretschmer, and his boat was U-99. Using a method he called one torpedo one ship, Kretschmer sank forty seven ships totalling over two hundred and seventy four thousand gross register tons, more than any other submarine commander in the entire Second World War. His record was never beaten. On one devastating night in October nineteen forty, he sank six ships from Convoy SC-7 in a single engagement, part of the worst forty eight hours of shipping losses in the Battle of the Atlantic. He attacked armed merchant cruisers that fired back and sank them too. His secret was simple and terrifying. He stayed on the surface where sonar could not detect him, slipped between the columns of merchant ships, and fired at point blank range. They called him Silent Otto because he refused to transmit by radio, making him nearly impossible to track. His career ended in March nineteen forty one when a depth charge attack by the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Walker forced him to the surface and into captivity. What happened next, including a remarkable post-war friendship between Kretschmer and the British commander who captured him, is one of the most extraordinary stories of the war at sea. This is the full story of the man who set a submarine record that still stands, told through verified historical accounts from both sides of the Atlantic war. Sources uboat.net, Otto Kretschmer, Commander Profile and Patrol Records https://uboat.net/men/kretschmer.htm uboat.net, U-99 Patrol Log and War Diary https://uboat.net/boats/u99.htm United States Naval Institute, Three Aces Trumped, Proceedings, September 1956 https://www.usni.org/magazines/procee... Imperial War Museums, Battle of the Atlantic https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-ba... U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, The Battle of the Atlantic https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-b... The National WW2 Museum, The Battle of the Atlantic https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war... Legion Magazine, A Tale of Two POWs https://legionmagazine.com/a-tale-of-... Donald Macintyre, U-Boat Killer, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956 Terence Robertson, The Golden Horseshoe, The Story of Otto Kretschmer, Evans Brothers, 1955 Lawrence Paterson, Otto Kretschmer, The Life of the Third Reich's Highest Scoring U-Boat Commander, Greenhill Books, 2018 Jurgen Rohwer, Axis Submarine Successes of World War Two, Naval Institute Press, 1999 Veit Scherzer, Die Ritterkreuztrager, Scherzers Militaer Verlag, 2007