Fifty-two men climbed out of a damaged U-boat in the Channel, and every one of them lived. That is not how stories about submarine warfare usually end. The math of underwater combat in 1944 ran against the Kriegsmarine: of the roughly 1,150 U-boats commissioned during the war, around 800 were lost, and tens of thousands of submariners died, most of them young, most of them never recovered from depths that hide their bones still. U-672, sunk on her fourth patrol north of Guernsey on 18 July 1944, is the rare exception. Every man on board survived. They were picked up the next day by British lifeboats.
U-672 was laid down on Christmas Eve 1941 at the Howaldtswerke yard in Hamburg, the same yard where, twenty months earlier, the auxiliary cruiser Komet had been converted for war. She was a Type VIIC, the workhorse of the U-boat war, the design that filled the Atlantic in the convoy battles of 1942 and 1943. Sixty-seven meters long, 6.2 wide, a pressure hull rated for 230 meters of depth. Two Germaniawerft diesel engines for surface running, two Siemens-Schuckert electric motors for submerged work. Top speed 17.7 knots on the surface, 7.6 underwater. Five torpedo tubes, fourteen torpedoes, an 8.8 cm deck gun, two twin 20 mm anti-aircraft mounts. Complement between forty-four and sixty men. She was launched on 27 February 1943 and commissioned on 6 April under Oberleutnant zur See Ulf Lawaetz.
U-672 was assigned to the 5th U-boat Flotilla based at Kiel, the training command. She finished her workups on 30 September 1943 and was passed to a front-line unit. By that date the Battle of the Atlantic had already turned. Black May 1943 had cost the U-boat arm more than forty submarines in a single month, and Admiral Karl Doenitz had withdrawn his wolfpacks from the North Atlantic. The boats that came afterward operated under air cover that did not exist, against escorts that now had sound-detection equipment and homing torpedoes the Germans had no answer for. A Type VIIC commissioned in April 1943 went to war knowing the odds. U-672 sailed three patrols, sank nothing, and was on her fourth when the British found her.
She was operating north of Guernsey in the Bay of the Seine, part of the German effort to attack the Allied supply lines feeding the Normandy beachhead. By mid-July those waters were among the most dangerous in the war, hunted constantly by frigates of the Royal Navy's escort groups and patrolled by Coastal Command aircraft. On 18 July the British frigate HMS Balfour, an American-built Captain-class destroyer escort, made contact and attacked. Depth charges did the damage. U-672 was holed and could not stay submerged. Lawaetz brought her to the surface, his crew gathered topside, the seacocks were opened, the boat slipped under, and the fifty-two men of her complement found themselves in the Channel without their submarine. The next day British life-boats picked them up. Every one of them spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.
U-672 is one of the U-boats that survived as men if not as a hull. The Type VIIC was a brutal machine designed for a brutal job, and most of her sisters carry their crews still, lying in dark water from the Caribbean to the Arctic. The wreck of U-672 lies somewhere on the Channel bed in waters fished by recreational divers, but the boats that rest here are rarely visited. The men who scuttled her went home in 1945 or 1946. Their submarine remains where they left her, an artifact of a war fought close enough to French and English shore towns that swimmers can sometimes still find small pieces of it washed up in storm seasons. The closing chapter of the Atlantic submarine war happened in these waters, and U-672 is one of its footnotes.
U-672's last position lies in the central English Channel north of Guernsey, near 50.05 deg N, 2.50 deg W, in waters typically 60 to 80 meters deep. The Channel Islands of Guernsey and Alderney are visible to the south in clear weather. Cherbourg-Maupertus (LFRC) lies thirty-five kilometers southeast on the French side; Guernsey Airport (EGJB) is forty kilometers south. The Cotentin Peninsula is unmistakable from altitude, a square chunk of land protruding north into the Channel.