Blohm & Voss laid down U-1024 on 20 May 1943 at their Hamburg yard, hull number 224 - one of an enormous run of Type VIIC/41 boats, an improved version of the workhorse VIIC with thicker pressure-hull steel allowing safer dives to 250 metres rather than 230. She launched on 3 May 1944 and commissioned on 28 June 1944, eighteen days after the Allies came ashore in Normandy. By then the U-boat war had become a salvage operation. Production continued because German naval doctrine had no better answer, and because the new Type XXI elektroboot was not yet ready. The men who took U-1024 to sea did so in a boat already obsolete, against an enemy who had taken five years to learn how to hunt them and could now do it almost at will.

Gutteck took U-1024 through training with the 31st Flotilla through the second half of 1944, then on 1 February 1945 the boat joined the 11th Flotilla for operational service. She sailed for the Irish Sea - the same hunting ground where U-1051 had been lost three weeks earlier, where the convoys feeding Liverpool offered the only targets still worth the risk. By April 1945 the situation was hopeless. Allied air patrols saturated the western approaches. Hunter-killer groups equipped with Hedgehog and squid worked the shallow water like terriers. Snorkel-equipped or not, a U-boat in the Irish Sea was now a hunted animal, and her crew knew it. The orders to sail came anyway.

On 12 April 1945 British frigates HMS Loch Glendhu and HMS Loch More caught U-1024 west of the Isle of Man and held her down with depth charges. Nine of Gutteck's crew were killed. The damage was severe enough that surfacing under fire was, paradoxically, the safer option. When the U-boat blew her tanks and broke the surface, the Royal Navy boarding party scrambled across before she could sink again. Thirty-seven survivors were taken off and made prisoners of war. The boat itself was a prize - a more or less intact late-war U-boat, the kind of thing British intelligence had been trying to get its hands on for years. They took her under tow and started for Holyhead.

She did not make it. The next day, 13 April 1945, U-1024 took on water and sank while under tow, somewhere in the same stretch of Irish Sea where she had been captured. The damage to her pressure hull was simply too great. Her wreck lies in shallow water, joining U-1051 and U-246 in the small constellation of German submarines lost in these waters during the war's final months. For her surviving crew the loss of the boat was no loss at all - they were prisoners, alive, and the war ended for them in May. Most went home to a defeated and partitioned Germany. The boats they had served stayed where they fell, in waters that ferries now cross several times a day, between Liverpool and Belfast and Dublin, beneath wings that climb out of Anglesey and the Isle of Man.