Qualla: German submarine U-246

German submarine U-246: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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German submarine U-246: A Boat Built in Kiel

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 1...

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German submarine U-246: A Bureaucratic Limbo

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 administr...

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German submarine U-246: The Silent Patrol

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, ...

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German submarine U-246: Forty-Eight Names

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 r...

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