U-1274 was a Type VIIC/41, the late-war variant of the basic VIIC design that did the bulk of the Kriegsmarine's Atlantic submarine fighting. She was ordered on 13 June 1942 and laid down at Vegesacker Werft AG in Bremen on 21 June 1943, yard number 69. She launched on 25 January 1944 and was commissioned on 1 March 1944 under Oberleutnant zur See Fedor Kuscher. The VIIC/41 was bigger than her cousin the XXIII - 759 tonnes surfaced, 860 submerged, 67 metres long - with a pressure hull rated to 230 metres and an operational range of 8,500 nautical miles at ten knots. Armament was generous: five 53.3cm torpedo tubes (four forward, one aft), fourteen torpedoes, an 88mm deck gun, a 37mm anti-aircraft mount and two 20mm flak guns. Her emblem was an oak leaf with an anchor and a dagger.

Most of U-1274's career was spent in training. She joined the 8th Training Flotilla on commissioning - a holding pattern for new boats and crews while they worked up to operational standard. She took part in no wolfpacks. Late-war U-boats often did not; the Allied countermeasures had become so effective by 1944 that coordinated attacks had largely given way to lone-wolf patrols, and many boats spent their entire careers training in the Baltic without ever being committed to combat. U-1274 was transferred to the 5th Flotilla on 1 March 1945 for active operations - exactly a year after she was commissioned, and at a point when most of the German submarine arm understood that the war was lost. She was sent out on patrol anyway.

The North Sea on 16 April 1945 was a busy and dangerous place for U-boats. Allied air patrols were saturating the approaches. Surface ASW groups were running constant sweeps. Code-breaking efforts at Bletchley had been compromising German submarine traffic for years. U-1274 was operating in those waters when she was detected by HMS Viceroy, a V-class destroyer commanded by Lieutenant-Commander John Manners. The depth charges did their work. The submarine broke up at depth and the entire crew was lost - somewhere between 44 and 60 men, accounting for both the standard complement and any additional personnel embarked. The wreck site has been recorded; the cause was a depth-charge attack from a British destroyer in waters roughly off the Northumberland coast.

Lieutenant-Commander John Manners commanded Viceroy for the rest of the war and survived. His name appears in naval reference works for that command, but his other claim to fame was civilian: he played first-class cricket for Hampshire and Combined Services, becoming, after the war, one of the longest-lived first-class cricketers in English history. He died in 2020 at the age of 105. His U-1274 action is a footnote in a much longer life. For the German crew the actuarial arithmetic ran the other way. They were mostly young men in their early twenties; the war they were fighting was the only adult life most of them had known. They went into the North Sea on patrol in April 1945 and did not come back. The war did, three weeks later, end without them.