Qualla: German submarine U-745

German submarine U-745: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Of the forty-eight men aboard U-745 when she died, the sea returned one. On 10 February 1945, fishermen working the ice-edge near Föglö, in the Åland archipelago, pulled a body from the water and found it was a German naval officer. He was Wilhelm von Trotha, twenty-eight years old, the only captain the boat had ever had. He was buried three days later on a Swedish-speaking Finnish island more than 150 kilometres west of the spot where his submarine struck a mine. The other forty-seven were never found, and are still down there.

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German submarine U-745: Crew 36

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Von Trotha was born in Kiel on 7 August 1916 and entered the Kriegsmarine twenty years later with the intake the navy nicknamed the Olympia Crew, after the Berlin games of that summer. His apprenticeship was the standard one for an officer of his generation: the light cruiser Kön...

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German submarine U-745: The Ship With Five Names

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

U-745 made four patrols, 114 days at sea in total, and sank two vessels between them. The first was the Soviet minesweeping trawler T-45 Antikajnen, 140 tons, on 26 August 1944. The second, on 11 January 1945, had a stranger history than most warships accumulate in a century. She...

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German submarine U-745: Vantaa 3

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The day after T-33 sank, on 12 January 1945, two Finnish minelayers went out into the water south of Hanko and laid a barrage designated Vantaa 3. Finland had spent three years fighting the Soviet Union alongside Germany. The armistice of September 1944 required the Finns to expe...

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German submarine U-745: Unblooded Until the End

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a detail in U-745's record that reads oddly against the rest of the U-boat service. Most boats bled steadily — men lost overboard, killed by strafing aircraft, injured in accidents, invalided out. U-745 had lost nobody. Through eighteen months of commissioning, training,...

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German submarine U-745: Ten Years of Looking

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Finding a 67-metre object on a seabed as cluttered as the Gulf of Finland is not a weekend project. The Finnish wreck-diving team Badewanne, who have spent decades documenting the extraordinary density of shipwrecks in these waters, searched for U-745 for roughly ten years before...

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