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Everybody knows the USA captured a U-boat (the U-505) as well as the Royal Navy (the U-559; the RN's capture of an enigma machine aboard the sub allowed them to crack the enigma code) but did you know the Germans also captured an allied submarine during the war?
In May of 1940 the submarine HMS Seal was captured while laying mines off the coast of Denmark. She struck a mine and was severely damaged to point that she was unable to submerge. The HMS Seal was soon spotted by two German Arado 196 Floatplanes and attacked.
After the sub's AA jammed, the crew of the Seal hoisted a white surrender flag... the crew's mess table cloth. The Arados landed nearby on the water and the aircraft's crew took the sub into custody, making the Captain and chief petty officer swim out to the planes and remaining on the scene until a German anti-submarine ship could arrive to take the rest of the crew and tow the damaged sub away. The British crew made attempts to scuttle the sub but they failed miserably and the Germans managed to get the Seal back to port.
The Germans repaired the Seal at great expense and renamed her the U-B, where she served as a German training boat and propaganda tool until 1945.
Naturally this incident would have been a source of embarrassment for the allies and the Royal Navy in particular, so it's no surprise it was left out in the official "Grand Tale" of the war... but it was extremely important for the Kriegsmarine.
Early in the war, the Germans had trouble with their torpedoes functioning properly and the superior British torpedoes inside the captured sub held the key to the problem's quick resolution. That mistake likely cost the lives of tens of thousands of allied sailors during the Battle of the Atlantic.
Speaking of torpedoes, in the 1930s the US Navy produced a magnetic detonator that would allow a torpedo to sink a ship with a near-miss. But in the tropics the magnetic field flattenned so that the torpedoes went off a thousand feet or more from target. The skippers took to shutting off the new-fangled magnetic detonators and falling back to the old contact detonators--only to discover the torpedoes often did not go off at all. Suspecting there was something wrong with the depth gages one skipper ordered depth set at zero. This worked and word spread among submariners. Rather than check their torpedoes, the Navy insisted the sailors didn't know how to handle them properly and ordered an end to such practices. The submariners disobeyed the order and continued to sink Japanese ships with torpedoes set at zero depth and using the old contact detonators. There was a lot of arguing before the Navy's Ordinance Bureau at last grudgingly agreed to waste some money and test a few torpedoes by firing them at nets and seeing where the holes were made. As the skippers had insisted, the depth gages were ten feet lower than the depth they were set at.
I read this many years ago in a book about true war stories so I might have some of the information wrong but here is basically what happened.
On an island in the Pacific, an American lieutenant got separated from his men and was chased thru the jungle by three Japanese soldiers,one carrying a sword. The lieutenant turned as he was running and got one shot off from his .45 before falling backwards into a ditch. He laid in the ditch for a minute expecting the Japanese to come and finish him off and when they didn't, he poked his head up to see why not. He found the three of them on the ground, one dead,one unconscious and the third one bleeding from the throat. Some more Americans showed up and the medic worked on the one with the throat wound. The captain told them that he only fired one shot and didn't get to see what happened. The medic showed him the bullet he removed from the wounded man's throat, it was split in half. The unconscious soldier had a gash across his forehead and his sword had a chunk missing from the blade. The medic then removed the bullet from the dead man, it was the other half of the .45 slug. Here is what they say happened;
The three Japanese were charging the lieutenant with the one carrying the sword in the middle of the other two, when the lieutenant fired, his bullet struck the sword driving it back into the soldiers head and knocking him out. The bullet split in half off the blade and each half struck the other two men. The lieutenant kept those bullet halves and the sword as souvenirs. That's better than picking the 7-10 split in bowling,ain't it? I know it sounds far fetched but that was one of the stories in the book.
American soldiers in the South Pacific encountered diseases unknown to Western medicine and therefore incurable. Obviously they could not be sent back home to infect their loved ones. An isolated island was found and they were taken there, made as comfortable as possible, and left to die.
... when the lieutenant fired, his bullet struck the sword driving it back into the soldiers head and knocking him out. The bullet split in half off the blade and each half struck the other two men.
Not a WWII story, but a personal experience that validates the above. When he was in high school, my son accidentally discharged my 1911 into his bed. It did not go all the way through. Much later, when we were moving his bed to another room, I heard things rattling around inside the box springs. I located the items, cut a slit in the bottom, and out fell both halves of the .45 slug. Apparently it had struck one of the springs dead center, and split.
Joseph Beyrle was an American soldier who was taken prisoner by Germany after jumping into occupied France on D-Day. His adventures including being wounded by shrapnel when Allied planes attacked his POW column, three escape attempts (being wounded by small arms fire during one of them), and Gestapo torture (before being 'rescued' by Luftwaffe personnel who looked down on the behavior of the Gestapo, and considered captured paratroops their charge).
His third escape attempt was successful, and he immediately made his way towards the nearest Allied lines - in his case, since he was being held in eastern Germany, the lines of the advancing Red Army. He ended up convincing a Soviet armor battalion commander (a woman) to let him serve in the unit, and he did so for a month (even liberating the very POW camp from which he had escaped) before being wounded in a Stuka attack, and was evacuated to a Soviet military hospital in Poland. When General Zhukov visited the facility, he took an interest in the American and intervened to facilitate his passage to Moscow, where Beyrle could arrange repatriation. Since he had long been declared KIA, the embassy kept him under Marine guard before they could ascertain that he was who he said he was.
Quote:
Joe Beyrle, 81, a World War II paratrooper whose gung-ho zest for leaping out of planes earned him the nickname "Jumpin' Joe" and who was the only man to fight both for the United States and the Soviet Union, died Dec. 12 of congestive heart failure in a hotel room in Toccoa, Ga., the small town where he had trained. He was in Toccoa to speak to school and veterans groups and to promote a book about his life.
I remember a story about the Civil War where an exploding shell set a poppy field on fire putting an end to a battle because both the Union and Confederate forces were stoned out of their gourds. I can't find it on the internet, does anyone remember this?
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