Two patrols. Zero sinkings. Forty-eight dead. The arithmetic of U-246 is the arithmetic of the late U-boat war reduced to a single boat. Her commander, Kapitanleutnant Ernst Raabe, made his last radio report on 7 March 1945 while approaching his operational area in the Irish Sea. After that, silence. Ten days later a British antisubmarine trawler called HMS Lady Madeleine put depth charges on a contact off the Isle of Man, and somewhere on the seabed beneath them a steel hull stopped answering. Raabe and his entire crew - forty-eight men - had been killed.
Friedrich Krupp Germaniawerft laid down U-246 at Kiel on 30 November 1942, late in the year that the Battle of the Atlantic turned. By the time she launched on 7 December 1943, the German U-boat arm had already passed its peak and entered a long, costly decline. Commissioned on 11 January 1944 under Raabe, U-246 was a standard Type VIIC: 67 metres long, twin diesels, twin electric motors, five torpedo tubes and an 88-millimetre deck gun, with a wartime crew of forty-four to sixty. The Type VIIC was the workhorse of the U-boat war - more than 500 built - and by 1944 her acoustic signature was familiar to every Allied sonar operator from Halifax to Liverpool.
Raabe took his crew through working-up trials with the 5th U-boat Flotilla at Kiel and was then assigned to the 3rd Flotilla on 1 August 1944 for front-line service. Before U-246 could sail on her first combat patrol, the 3rd Flotilla was disbanded - one of many wartime administrative shuffles as the U-boat command compressed itself toward Norway and the war's end. On 1 October 1944 the boat was reassigned to the 11th Flotilla, based at Bergen on the Norwegian coast. By then the Bay of Biscay bases at Lorient and Saint-Nazaire had been overrun, and Bergen was one of the few sanctuaries left for U-boats heading out to fight the Atlantic war. From Bergen, Raabe took U-246 out twice.
Her second patrol began on 21 February 1945 from Bergen, with orders that sent her around the north of Scotland and down into the Irish Sea - the same waters that had already swallowed U-1051 the previous month and would, before April was out, swallow U-1024 as well. On 7 March, somewhere in the approaches to her operational area, Raabe made a routine signal report. No more were received. For decades the Royal Navy credited the sinking to HMS Duckworth on 29 March, but post-war historians revised the attribution: most modern accounts attribute U-246's loss to depth charges from the British antisubmarine trawler HMS Lady Madeleine on 17 March 1945, in the Irish Sea. The boat went down with all forty-eight hands.
By March 1945 the U-boat service was losing roughly three of every four men who put to sea. Most went down with their boats, asphyxiated or drowned in steel cylinders pressed against a shallow seabed - and the Irish Sea, with its sandbanks and 50-metre depths, offered no escape route. The men of U-246 were young - average age in the low twenties, conscripts and volunteers from the towns and farms of a Germany that was already crumbling at its edges. They had grown up under a regime that the world is right to remember with horror, and most of them never had the chance to grow out of it. Their names are listed at the German Submarine Memorial at Moltenort. The wreck of their boat lies somewhere in the Irish Sea, in waters now crossed by ferries and lined with wind turbines.
U-246 was lost at approximately 53°40'N, 4°53'W in the Irish Sea, west of the Isle of Man and northeast of Anglesey - the same compact stretch of water that holds the wrecks of U-1051 and U-1024. The position is under the busy Liverpool-Dublin air corridor. Best viewed from 5,000-15,000 ft on clear days; the Isle of Man and the Welsh coast are useful visual landmarks. Nearby aerodromes: Isle of Man Ronaldsway (EGNS) 20 nm north, Anglesey/Valley (EGOV) 30 nm south, Liverpool (EGGP) 55 nm east, Dublin (EIDW) 60 nm west. March weather over the Irish Sea is typically blustery, with frequent squalls and limited visibility.