On the night of August 28, 1942, Lieutenant Hal Lawrence of the Royal Canadian Navy climbed down through the conning tower hatch of a German submarine into total darkness. He was one of only two Canadians who actually entered the hull of U-94, and inside they encountered two German sailors charging toward them. Lawrence ordered them to halt. When they did not stop, the Canadians fired. It was the climax of one of the war's most unusual naval engagements: a boarding action, the kind of thing that belonged to the age of sail, carried out against a submarine that had terrorized Allied shipping for nearly two years.
U-94 was a Type VIIC submarine, the workhorse of the German Kriegsmarine's Atlantic campaign. Laid down on September 9, 1939, just days after Germany invaded Poland, she was built at the Krupp Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel and launched on June 12, 1940. Her first commander was Kapitanleutnant Herbert Kuppisch. At 67 meters long with a surface displacement of 769 tonnes, she carried five torpedo tubes (four forward, one aft) and fourteen torpedoes, plus an 8.8 cm deck gun and a 2 cm anti-aircraft gun. On the surface, her twin diesel engines could push her to 17.7 knots and carry her 8,500 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 10 knots. Submerged, battery-powered electric motors gave her 7.6 knots and a range of 80 nautical miles at 4 knots. Her crew numbered between 44 and 60 men, packed into a steel tube that could dive to 230 meters.
U-94's first patrol began on November 20, 1940, a transit from Kiel to Lorient, France. She announced herself almost immediately, sinking the Stirlingshire on December 2 northwest of Ireland's Bloody Foreland, followed by the Wilhelmina and Empire Statesman before reaching her French base on New Year's Eve. Patrols two and three took her west of Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland, adding more merchant ships to her tally. On her fourth patrol, escorting convoy OB 318 dropped 98 depth charges on her over four hours. U-94 survived and kept attacking, sinking two more ships. She participated in six wolfpacks across 1941 and 1942 with names like Seewolf, Brandenburg, and Hecht, the Kriegsmarine's strategy of massing submarines against convoys. By mid-1942, her ninth patrol south of Greenland proved the most destructive: seven ships sunk in barely a month, including a sailing vessel, the Maria da Gloria.
What made U-94 remarkable was not just her kill count of 26 ships across ten patrols, but her capacity to absorb punishment and keep fighting. The fourth patrol's bombardment by convoy OB 318's escorts in May 1941 was extraordinary: nearly a hundred depth charges over four hours, each one a 300-pound canister of high explosive designed to crush a submarine's pressure hull through hydraulic shock. The boat's crew endured the experience in near-darkness, listening to the charges detonate around them, watching for leaks, hoping their hull would hold. It did. On her sixth patrol, operating southeast of Cape Farewell, Greenland, she sank three ships in a single day. Against the San Florentino on October 1, 1941, she fired five torpedoes; three struck home, breaking the ship in two. The bow section refused to sink, so U-94's crew finished it with their deck gun.
In early 1942, U-94 crossed to the western Atlantic as the Kriegsmarine expanded operations along the American eastern seaboard, a campaign known as the Second Happy Time. She sank the Empire Hail east of St. John's, Newfoundland, then worked south, torpedoing the Cayru roughly 130 nautical miles from New York and the Hvoslef just two miles off Fenwick Island near Delaware Bay. Allied merchant sailors died within sight of the American coast, their ships burning against skies still illuminated by the lights of shore cities that had not yet implemented blackout regulations.
U-94 departed St. Nazaire for the Caribbean on August 3, 1942, under the command of Oberleutnant zur See Otto Ites. On August 28, she was operating against convoy TAW-15 off Haiti when an American PBY Catalina flying boat spotted and bombed her. Canadian corvettes closed in, and depth charges forced the submarine to the surface. The corvette Oakville rammed U-94 twice. Then came Lawrence's boarding party, eleven Canadian sailors leaping onto the hull of a surfaced enemy submarine in the dark Caribbean night. Only two men went through the hatch into the hull. After the confrontation inside the conning tower, the remaining German crew surrendered. But the boarders quickly realized the Germans had already opened the scuttling valves. The submarine was flooding. The Canadians evacuated, and U-94 slid beneath the surface for the last time, taking nineteen of her crew with her. Oakville rescued 26 survivors, including Ites. The wreck lies in Caribbean waters off Haiti, at roughly 17.67N, 74.50W, a steel coffin from a war that reached even these tropical seas.
U-94's wreck site lies at approximately 17.67N, 74.50W, in the Caribbean Sea south of Haiti near the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba. The closest major airports are Toussaint Louverture International (MTPP/PAP) in Port-au-Prince, roughly 90 nm to the east, and Antonio Maceo Airport (MUCU/SCU) in Santiago de Cuba, about 100 nm to the northwest. The area is open Caribbean water with no surface features marking the wreck. Best appreciated conceptually at any altitude while transiting the Windward Passage, imagining convoy routes and the U-boat war that extended into these waters.