Qualla: SM U-39

SM U-39: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two men who served aboard this single submarine would leave marks on the twentieth century impossible to set side by side. One became the Grand Admiral who commanded Hitler's navy and, for three chaotic weeks after Hitler's death, the last head of the Nazi state. The other became a pastor whom that state threw in prison, remembered ever since for a few lines about the cost of staying silent. SM U-39 carried them both, in the same years, through the same war.

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SM U-39: The Second-Deadliest Boat

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

U-39 was one of the most destructive warships of the First World War. A German Type U 31 boat, double-hulled and built for the open ocean, she sank 149 merchant ships totalling more than 404,000 tons across her career, which made her the second most successful U-boat of the entir...

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SM U-39: Two Men, One Wardroom

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From January to the middle of 1917, U-39's coxswain was Martin Niemöller. A submariner then, he became a Protestant pastor afterward, grew into an outspoken enemy of the Third Reich, and was imprisoned from 1938 until 1945. He is remembered today for the confession he wrote in 19...

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SM U-39: The Chase off Cartagena

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

U-39's own war ended not in triumph but in a scramble for shelter. On 27 April 1918 she sailed from Pola under Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Metzger for the western Mediterranean, and on 17 May she sank the British steamer Sculptor north of Oran. The next afternoon two French seaplane...

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SM U-39: Interned, Surrendered, Scrapped

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There her war simply stopped. Spain interned U-39 for the remainder of the fighting, and the submarine that had sunk nearly a hundred and fifty ships spent the last months of the conflict tied up in a Spanish port, going nowhere. In March 1919, under the terms of the armistice, s...

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