U-565 was a Type VIIC U-boat, the most common class of German submarine built during the Second World War. She was laid down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg on 30 March 1940, launched on 20 February 1941, and commissioned on 10 April 1941 under Oberleutnant Johann Jebsen. The Type VIIC was 67 meters long, displaced 769 tons on the surface, and could dive to 230 meters. She carried five torpedo tubes, fourteen torpedoes, and a deck gun. Her crew numbered between forty-four and sixty men. The boat began her service with training as part of the 1st U-boat Flotilla. On 1 January 1942, she was transferred to the 29th Flotilla in the Mediterranean, where she would remain for the rest of her operational life.

The Mediterranean campaign was never the central theater of Germany's submarine war — that was the Atlantic — but the 29th Flotilla operated there throughout the conflict, targeting Allied shipping in a sea that had strategic significance for supply lines to North Africa and Southern Europe. Over twenty patrols, U-565 sank three merchant ships and two warships, and damaged two additional merchant vessels. The total tonnage of the sinkings is not fully recorded in the available sources. She participated in two wolfpack operations: Arnauld, from 5 to 18 November 1941 (before her Mediterranean transfer), and Wal, from 10 to 12 November 1942. What the records do not capture — what no record fully captures — is the human cost on the other side: the merchant sailors and naval personnel who died when those ships went down, people doing their jobs in a war they did not start.

By late 1944, Germany's position in Greece had become untenable. Allied forces were advancing and the Axis occupation of Greece, which had brought catastrophic suffering to the Greek population since 1941, was collapsing. U-565 had been operating in a sea increasingly dominated by Allied air power. On 19 September 1944, US aircraft found her near Skaramanga and dropped bombs. The boat was badly damaged. A second strike on 24 September compounded the destruction. With no possibility of repair and no safe harbor to reach, the crew scuttled the submarine on 30 September 1944. Scuttling — deliberately sinking your own vessel to prevent it from falling into enemy hands — was the final act of a crew that had served three and a half years on a submarine in wartime. What happened to the men afterward is not detailed in the available record.

Skaramanga Bay sits on the western edge of the Attic coast, part of the greater Athens metropolitan area. The shipyard at Skaramanga has a long industrial history; today it is a significant facility. U-565 lies somewhere in those waters, one of many Second World War wrecks scattered across the Mediterranean — a sea that saw the loss of thousands of ships and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of sailors, soldiers, and civilians between 1939 and 1945. She is not a celebrated wreck or a tourist dive site. She is, more simply, what remains of a machine built for war that finished where wars often finish: underwater, in a foreign sea, far from where it began.