Gunther Schmidt was treading water in the Gulf of Oman. He had no life jacket. The officer who had opened the conning tower hatch as U-533 sank to sixty meters was unconscious in his arms. Schmidt held him afloat for an hour before the officer died. Then Schmidt swam alone for twenty-eight hours until a vessel rescued him near Khor Fakkan. He was the only survivor from a crew of fifty-three. The war, for him, was over. He would spend it in internment in Sharjah, then a quiet Trucial State on the Persian Gulf.
U-533 was a Type IXC/40 U-boat, slightly larger than the standard Type IXC, designed for long-range patrols. Laid down at the Deutsche Werft yard in Hamburg on February 17, 1942, launched on September 11, and commissioned under Kapitanleutnant Helmut Hennig on November 25, the submarine displaced 1,144 tons surfaced and 1,257 tons submerged. She carried six torpedo tubes, twenty-two torpedoes, a 10.5-centimeter deck gun, and anti-aircraft weapons. Surfaced, she could travel 13,850 nautical miles at 10 knots. She was built to cross oceans, and that is exactly what she did.
U-533's first patrol, departing Kiel on April 15, 1943, was a lesson in Allied air dominance. On April 24, a Hudson bomber from No. 269 Squadron RAF attacked, moderately damaging the boat. The next day, an American PBY-5A Catalina struck again, injuring three gunners. On May 20, a Halifax bomber from No. 502 Squadron RAF made a third attempt without inflicting serious damage. The submarine limped into Lorient, her new home port in occupied France, after forty grueling days at sea. She had not sunk a single ship. The Atlantic in 1943 belonged to Allied aircraft, and U-boats were dying at an unsustainable rate.
On July 5, 1943, U-533 sailed from Lorient on an extraordinary voyage. Her orders placed her in the Monsun Gruppe, a small flotilla of U-boats assigned to operate in the Indian Ocean, far from the killing grounds of the North Atlantic. The route took her through the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up through the Indian Ocean to the mouth of the Persian Gulf. It was a journey of thousands of miles through waters where German submarines were rare and unexpected. The Monsun Gruppe was an act of strategic desperation, an attempt to disrupt Allied shipping in a theater where defenses were thinner.
On October 16, 1943, in the Gulf of Oman, a British Bisley light bomber from No. 244 Squadron RAF spotted U-533 and dropped depth charges. The attack was swift and lethal. The submarine sank with fifty-two of her fifty-three crew members. Only Schmidt and an officer in the conning tower survived the initial explosion. The officer managed to open the hatch even as the submarine descended past sixty meters. Without escape sets, the water pressure ejected both men to the surface. Schmidt's twenty-eight hours in the water, alone, without flotation, remains one of the most remarkable survival stories of the U-boat war.
U-533 lay undiscovered on the floor of the Gulf of Oman for sixty-six years. In 2009, divers located the wreck at a depth of 108 meters, roughly 25 nautical miles off the coast of Fujairah. The submarine rests in the darkness where warm Gulf waters meet the cooler Indian Ocean, a boundary zone of currents and temperatures. Her hull, her torpedoes, her deck gun -- all remain where the depth charges sent them. Schmidt, who sat out the war in comfortable internment in Sharjah, survived to tell a story that almost nobody heard. The wreck gives it a location, a place on the map where the Second World War touched a corner of the world most people associate with entirely different conflicts.
Coordinates: 25.47N, 56.83E, in the Gulf of Oman approximately 25 miles off the coast of Khor Fakkan, UAE. The wreck is not visible but the approximate location is in open water between the UAE east coast and the Strait of Hormuz. Best referenced from Fujairah International Airport (OMFJ) or Khor Fakkan's coastline. The Gulf of Oman waters here are deep and blue-green. Clear conditions typical.