Qualla: German Submarine U-672

German Submarine U-672: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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German Submarine U-672: A Type VIIC Out of Hamburg

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 con...

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German Submarine U-672: Training in a Closing War

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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German Submarine U-672: Eighteen July 1944

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 gro...

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German Submarine U-672: What Stays Under

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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