U-58 was small. At forty-four metres long, with a complement of twenty-five men and three torpedo tubes, she belonged to the class of coastal submarines the Kriegsmarine called Einbäume - dugout canoes. She was launched on 12 October 1938 at the Deutsche Werke yard in Kiel and commissioned the following February. The first eight months of her war passed without incident. Then her luck changed on New Year's Day 1940, when she sank a neutral Swedish merchantman off Scotland and began a run that ended with seven ships at the bottom of the North Sea.
The Type IIC was an enlarged version of the original 1930s coastal U-boat designs - a stretched hull with more fuel and range, but still tiny by Atlantic standards. U-58 displaced 291 tons surfaced, 341 submerged. Two MWM diesel engines pushed her along at twelve knots on the surface; two Siemens-Schuckert electric motors gave her seven knots underwater. She carried five torpedoes or up to twelve mines and a single twenty-millimetre anti-aircraft gun on deck. Range on the surface was 3,800 nautical miles. She was designed for the North Sea and the Baltic - close-in waters where she could slip out, attack, and return - and that is where she fought her entire combat career. Her first commander was Oberleutnant zur See Herbert Kuppisch.
U-58 made twelve war patrols. The first three, during her workup, were uneventful North Sea cruises. The fourth, in late December 1939 and early January 1940, brought her first kills. On New Year's Day she sank the neutral Swedish steam merchant Lars Magnus Trozelli with a single torpedo. Two days later she sank Svartön, also Swedish, traveling with convoy HN-6. On 3 February 1940 she sank the Estonian merchantman Reet with a single torpedo - no survivors. Her eighth patrol claimed a British Boom Defence Vessel of 8,401 GRT, hit by three torpedoes; 101 of the 105 aboard were rescued. Her ninth patrol bagged the Norwegian merchant Gyda even while a Sunderland flying boat - a known U-boat killer - escorted her. The tenth patrol sank the Greek ship Pindos off Ireland; twenty-nine of her thirty-two crew got into lifeboats. The eleventh sank the British Confield. Seven ships in total.
By 1943 U-58 was no longer on combat duty. She had been transferred to the 22nd U-boat Flotilla and was being used as a training boat. That August, the Deutsche Werke yard pulled her into another role - test platform. The yard had built a new flooding-valve schnorchel head in June, a device that would let submarines run their diesel engines while submerged, drawing air through a snorkel pipe and exhausting through it. The flooding valve was the critical part: if a wave came over the top, it had to seal automatically or the diesels would suck water and kill themselves. U-58 had her aft periscope removed and the schnorchel head installed in its place. The trial was successful. The next step was a collapsible schnorchel forward of the bridge for the Type VIIC - the workhorse U-boats that fought the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1944 the Kriegsmarine had a real underwater fleet, in a war it had long since started to lose.
U-58 spent the rest of the war as a training boat under various commanders. On 3 May 1945, with Allied forces advancing on Kiel and the war days from ending, her crew scuttled her in the harbour. Mass scuttling of U-boats at this time was part of Operation Regenbogen - Operation Rainbow - the Kriegsmarine's effort to prevent its remaining fleet from falling into Allied hands. Hundreds of submarines were sent to the bottom of German ports in the last week of the war. After the surrender, U-58 was raised from the harbour mud and broken up for scrap. She had killed at least one merchant crew outright - the Estonians on Reet - and she had been the platform that proved a piece of technology which, deployed earlier in the war, might have changed it. None of which she lived to see.
Coordinates 58.23N, 1.60W - in the North Sea east of the Scottish coast, roughly the operating area for U-58's wartime patrols between Scotland and Norway. U-58 was built and scuttled at Kiel, but her combat career was fought across the North Sea. Nearest airports for the operating area are Wick (EGPC) about 50 nm west and Kirkwall (EGPA) about 70 nm northwest. Cruise altitude 3,000-5,000 ft offers a sense of the open water she patrolled. Weather is North Sea typical - persistent wind, often hazy or low cloud.