U-979 was a standard Type VIIC, the workhorse of the Kriegsmarine submarine fleet. The class accounted for more than seven hundred boats over the course of the war and bore the brunt of the wolfpack campaigns against Allied convoys. By the numbers she was unremarkable: 769 tonnes surfaced, 871 submerged, sixty-seven metres long, capable of seventeen and a half knots on the surface and a little under eight submerged. Five torpedo tubes - four forward, one aft - with fourteen torpedoes aboard. One 8.8-centimetre deck gun. A twin 2-centimetre anti-aircraft mount that her gunners would have used more often than the torpedo tubes by the time she finally sailed. A complement of between forty-four and sixty men, mostly young, mostly drafted late in the war.

Construction was Blohm and Voss yard number 179. The keel went down on 10 August 1942, a year before her launch on 15 April 1943. The shipyard in Hamburg was already a priority target for Allied bombers, and the city itself was about to undergo the firestorm of Operation Gomorrah that July - a raid that destroyed much of the residential districts but largely missed the yards. U-979 was commissioned on 20 May 1943 under Oberleutnant zur See Johannes Meermeier. From May 1943 to August 1944 she trained with the 5th Flotilla in the Baltic, then transferred to the 9th Flotilla for active service. She never participated in a wolfpack, an unusual gap in the service record of a Type VIIC.

Her last days play like the closing minutes of a long, unsuccessful campaign. By spring 1945 the U-boats that had not been sunk were scattered, often submerged for days at a time to avoid Allied aircraft, slipping back toward German ports as the Reich collapsed. On 8 May the Wehrmacht signed the unconditional surrender. Operation Regenbogen - the planned mass scuttling of the surviving fleet - was officially cancelled by Admiral Doenitz, but many crews did it anyway rather than hand their boats over. U-979 ran aground in the shallows off Amrum on 24 May. The crew opened the valves. She settled into the sand near 54.63 N, 8.38 E - close to the same waters where, fifty-three years later, the cargo ship Pallas would also break apart.

The hull was eventually broken up, but the position lingered in the records and in local memory. U-979 was one of dozens of U-boats scuttled in the last weeks of the war along this coast - a quiet, half-buried geography of war that the Wadden Sea has been folding into itself for eighty years now. The men aboard her - forty-four to sixty draftees and their officers - came home, mostly. Meermeier survived. The boat itself stayed where she was put. Most flying over this stretch of the North Sea today see only the Kniepsand and the lighthouse. Beneath the tide line a few kilometres east, in the silt, what remains of U-979 is just one more piece of a coastline that has spent centuries collecting wrecks.