Hell Below - Episode 1: The Wolfpack | Free Documentary History

In the early days of World War II, one of Hitler's most successful Yubo Aces, Uto Kretchmer, sinks dozens of Allied ships and fires first alone and then as part of the deadly wolf packs until a fateful mistake threatens everything in the Second World War. The subc weapon allows warriors. to fight from beneath the waves with cunning strength and tenacity his enemies fight back revolutionary but sometimes still primitive it is a desperate attempt to change the course of war his stories are legend july 8, 1940 the nazi ubot u99 has sunk a merchant ship ally just south of Ireland now a British escort becomes Pursuit when you attack the enemy you are the hunter and as soon as you are attacked by the escorts you are the prey the crew of 99 makes a dive to escape the commander of the ubot Otto kretchmer has Served in Hitler's submarine service since the beginning of World War II, he has just sunk his twelfth ship in 10 months and earned a reputation as the best torpedo boat in the German Navy.

He proves it ruthlessly offici. His motto is one torpedo, one ship. AO Crar wasn't one of your average submarine commanders, was he? He is part of an elite group that actually does most of the damage. Not only is he nice and skilled but he is also cold as a cucumber. He is only the second Kar patrol aboard the newly commissioned U99. He and his inexperienced crew face off. to an explosive initiation is the First time that Ketma's cold and calm character is virtually forged in Flames uh because it is the first time that he is attacked by allied escorts.

The warship hunting Kmer is one of Britain's new Flower-class Corvettes, 205 feet long with a displacement of 940 tons. It has been adapted from commercial whalers to hunt submarines, so when the war begins, the attack that the Germans launch on British trade is not anticipated and the British are simply not prepared materially or psychologically for it and the British have to adapt their maritime strategy. preparations to deal with the war they just aren't ready for right after 8:00 a.m. the flower class Corvette drops underwater bombs called death charges how many death charges exploded one after another look around in a submarine if something is broken it's the hole still completely intact they don't just drop a C two c o Free Salos start attacking for hours and hours u99 is a type 7 submarine first commissioned in 1936 they are 218 feet long and 20 feet wide the type seven normally carry 14 torpedoes and a crew of 45 men Germany produces more of them than any other submarine the type 7 uo It is actually a bit small.

It has been developed from the so-called UB submarine, one of the smallest submarines of the First World War. It had important maritime navigation. More than 700 capacity were built thanks to its relatively simple and economical design. The man deploying the UOTs is Carl Dirid, Hitler's submarine mastermind. I think the best way to understand Carl is that he is an accomplished professional diver. He lived, breathed submarines all the time. dut launches its uots into key shipping lanes in an attempt to strangle the British Isles. This became the central strategy of the German naval command to cut off those lifelines, those maritime lifelines fighting the convoys that were starving Britain into defeat.

Everything literally becomes what it has often been. He said a game of chess because you're matching wits with the other guy, where is he now and where will he be? you must be thinking several moves ahead jouret uses naval intelligence to assign the few submarines it has to locate ships there are not many OTS At sea, at this stage of the war, the Germans have had to make decisions in their war production and OTS was not one of those options because of course they planned to fight on land first in the west and then in the east, so he had to do it. used these small numbers and the only thing he could do was spread them over the ocean like butter on a very large sheet of bread, therefore in the early stages of World War II they were still fighting like in World War I, a submarine in A single gas early on July 8, Dut's U99 attacked the enemy alone and has been under siege for hours.

Everyone is under stress, so sweat runs down their face, and if you are under stress, you breathe without knowing how. how long will the attack last kretchmer takes measures to preserve the submarine's limited air supply the commanding officer needs to conserve oxygen and that's why people are ordered to go to bed to sleep they are given cookies and chocolate to get over the situation after hours They are probably very fatigued some crew members Dawn masks that absorb carbon dioxide in an effort to make the OT atmosphere last. It is almost impossible to imagine what these people felt at this very moment.

It must have been horrendous, but like another Salvo. hits the man commanding the ubot appears faceless, ketma was sitting very calmly and reading a novel, a crime novel, and the Acoustics Castle hero guy was looking at him and thought, oh, that's a great guy, we're under pressure, he is just sitting reading his novel after a few minutes CLE looked at him again and realized that the stream was upside down so he couldn't read and the whole time he didn't turn any page so kma in this case he was a brilliant military leader. I can take the It's time to just read a novel so that you too can stay calm when the attacks last for hours.

Rack my brain to take into account many different things. The first thing is to keep the submarine at a depth where it will not be destroyed. by the pressure uh of the water and therefore it needs propulsion and to produce propulsion it needs to use energy from the submerged battery 124 battery cells power the propellers of the 99 and all its systems can only be recharged on the surface 12 hours after the start of the Kretchmer depth charge attack and its crew remains immobilized. His engineer tells Ketma that he is running out of fuel in the battery. Crar must make a move or the u99 will be lost at sea and will wait until the battery is completely discharged, then there will be no chance of surviving for the 12 hours. of Depth Charge Attack 99 has been sailing fast enough to maintain a constant depth to conserve energy and keep his submarine moving.

She needs propulsion and therefore had to use the battery fuel efficiently for as long as possible to keep the ship going. moving for propulsion or operations while their batteries run down. Ketchman risks the last of his power in a change of course in a final attempt to escape. Kretchmer and his crew try to evade by zig-zagging and changing depths and such more than 14 hours after the attack began. The sound of enemy propellers faded and then they had information that the escorts were moving away. u99 survives 127 deaths. The loads are better. Fuel was extremely low and oxygen was almost depleted and therefore she had to get up when they surfaced.

The escorts have moved out of sight. It is said that the air is greenish yellow and the author of a famous novel about Ketma explains it as if death came out of the submarine. He was one of the first German submarine commanders to experience a durable depth charge. He was lucky that the escorts actually disappeared to the east the man in charge of G's OTS scores a critical victory Hitler's troops have invaded France durit can use its Atlantic ports to launch his submarines after the fall of France in 1940 the The Germans suddenly possessed new bases ideal for attacking.

British convoys in the Atlantic previously had to send ships from their bases in Germany, which meant they would burn a lot of fuel to travel to and through those operational areas and now in France the ships had much more time to hunt and fight AL convoys on 13 October 1940. Lauron's U99 aircraft is deployed. French intelligence has discovered 34 enemy ships carrying timber, steel and other war materials and a convoy from Canada to Britain. A convoy is a group of ships. number of ships together escorted by several warships, you might think that putting many ships together is a lot of eggs in one basket, but in reality, because the sea is such a big place, if you concentrate shipping, it is very difficult for the enemy even find them and when they find them they find them escorted with warships and it is a difficult job to attack them kretchmer and his crew run northwest in search of Convoy sc7 all convoy routes have their own designation HX alifax SC Slow convoy to slow ships when to start convoys for slow ships so it usually means something and helps break up convoys durit allocates more uots to join kretchmer in locating the convoy is one of the first mobilizations of a wolf pack a tactic that submarines of Hitler would make famous the essence of the rudal tactic the wolf tactic was to take several submarines to Bear against the convoy the control of the wolf pack is done on land in T their headquarters is on the big board you have a big plot and set and move The submarines think of it as a sort of A vast drift network of submarines at about twice the sight distance of each other, deployed perpendicular to the line of advance the convoys would be expected to follow, and the idea is simply to use it as a kind of tripwire system to be able to trap. them, another submarine that will join the hunt is the U 100, the ubo is commanded by Yakim Shepa, Kretchmer's friend and rival, and 99 Shepa and Kretchmer were among the first to complete Don's Elite submarine training 133 months after war, are among the cunning men of Hitler's cunning submarines.

Driven to sink British ships, the number of Uh Aces in the Ubot fleet is never very large and they do most of the heavy lifting. If you look at the success rate of German submariners, about 3/4 of the tonnage is sunk by about 20% of captains because they are prepared to push things to the limit, but can these lone wolves hunt in packs? By the fall of 1940, a new era of submarine warfare has begun. Admiral KL durit counts on Aces kretchmer and sheva to fulfill his new tactic Wolfpack Germany has only 27 operational submarines almost a third of the active Donut fleet is at stake its strategic objective is the tonnage sunk for the day of the ubot at sea It's also a logical strategy, it's almost the only one they have, but it means you have to synchronize the ships, you have to destroy their carrying capacity, attacking a convoy presents the perfect opportunity.

The 34 merchant ships of slow-moving Convoy 7 are protected by only four escorts. Your main weapon to detect ubot is sonar, an active ping system also known as. AIC Eco in green 20 drawing on the right The AIC was invented towards the end of the First World War. It uses sound pulses called pings to search the ocean for submarines. The big innovation in the fall of 1918 was the introduction of an active acoustic localization system developed primarily by the French and then shared with the British, so what you have is that thing you see in Hollywood movies where a sound comes out, hits something and it comes back and you measure the distance and that gives you an idea of ​​how far away the object is.

It was the key to the Royal Navy's existing anti-submarine tactics. In fact, a submerged submarine was vulnerable, but the biggest drawback is that it does not work against surface ships and when a submarine becomes a surface ship difficult to detect at night. soon proves to be a very dangerous enemy after Convoy sc7 is intercepted, kretchmer and the rest of the wolf pack approach and then the order is given that at the right time in the dead of night you are

free

to attack and then the stakes are high not only in sinking the ships, but also in creating that shock effect and proving to the British that they can sink their ships at will.

Shepa and the other commanders prepare to fire from outside the convoy, but Kretchmer has his own plan at 10 p.m. u99 sneaks past the escorts to ambush the enemy from where they least expect it. prma has this Killer Instinct. He's a perfectionist, so he finds a way to sneak onto the surface of the convoy. He cold-bloodedly manages to sail into the convoy and then starts torpedoing the merchant ships firing, oh the first knowledge they have that an attack is happening is when an explosion hits a ship and the flares start going off, then the escort has to react.

Allies target the perimeter of the convoy where the OTS usually bows to others in the wolf. The herd is forced to dive, but inside the convoy, Kretchmer remains on the attack, it becomes a pyrotechnic nightmare, they are just sinking ships. It's terrifying for the men in the convoy. She is terrifying. No one thought that they would actually enter the convoy in the dark. night andSpitting death and destruction at both ends at high speed in the early hours of October 19 u99 fires the last of its 14 torpedoes Convoy loses 20 ships while in transit 80,000 tons of shipping are lost due to war effort Shepa claims three Kretchmer ships 7 many more than any other Ace and one of Germany's first Wolfpack offensives, it is a radically new type of submarine use that the British simply have no defenses for, because once the Wolfpack traps a convoy, it is chaos for the Allies ones. days later, u99 docks to a cheering crowd, kretchmer and his fellow commanders are celebrated as idols, the german ubot aces were used by german war propaganda, of course, as propaganda heroes, the stars of the war can almost like them pop from his days in any war, it's very similar.

You need heroes, you need successes to raise the spirit of your own people in Britain. War strategists raced to thwart Germany's new ubo tactics. The British Empire is a maritime Empire and is now dependent on shipping. That is a strength because it means that the British can access the world. when it comes to supplies, but on the other hand it means that Britain must control the sea. The Royal Navy reassigns warships guarding the British coast to the Atlantic to protect convoys. He must not allow the enemy to deny him the use of the sea. Efforts are also underway to apply a new technology called radar radio waves which is used to detect enemy aircraft to the seas in the process of having to make this adjustment Britain is being bombed ports are being destroyed from the air it is being launching the bombing is a very difficult period for Britain March 1941 Nazi wolf packs have dominated the Battle of the Atlantic for 5 months HX 1112 has been sailing in transit from Halifax to Britain.

HX Halifax HX 1112 was the 112th fast entry convoy, it was made up of different types of tankers, cargo ships etc., and one of the features that makes this convoy interesting and significant is that for the first time The uots face a well-trained escort group overseeing the seven escorts guarding the 41-ship convoy is Commander Donald McIntyre McIntyre has proven to be a cunning hunter since captaining his first British patrol boat in 1935 McIntyre focused on killing yubo that's what he wanted to do, he wanted submarines SN McIntyre took command of HMS Walker a few weeks ahead of the lead destroyer and one of the first British convoys dedicated to the protection of Fleet Escort Group Five.

It was a very risky business not only to serve on a warship or a merchant ship, but also to travel across the Atlantic, there was also the constant threat of being attacked by a UO and facing a gruesome death 150m south of Iceland McIntyre faces the first assault against Convoy HX 1112 a ubot paralyzes one of the precious convoys Oil tankers are critical fuel for Great Britain's war effort. Burns tankers are always spectacular targets, they crash in big FL attacks and this tanker was no exception, it had a big impact on McIntyre who said "You know what it was", it was quite a depressing sight to see.

A large explosion occurred and showed that the uots were mounting effective attacks before submerging. LMP transmits the coordinates of convoy HX 1112 to ubo headquarters. Donits deploys kretchmer and shepa in a wolf pack to intercept all the first round draft picks. All the key characters are there. in this convoy battle, but one of the Convoy Escorts also carries a new weapon designed to thwart Yubo's tactics. McIntyre's fleet of warships includes the HMS Vanok recently equipped with radar, a technology that allows ships to locate submarines on the surface. Vanok was one of the first destroyers to be equipped with a radar system and this was completely new and a new threat to the ubot could now be detected at night on the surface without realizing this critical development the main submarine commanders of Germany prepare to attack they have had great successes against poorly escorted convoys Now the tide is beginning to turn, but they don't know it yet.

On March 16, 1941, having located the Kretchmer Convoy plots, he has infiltrated HX 1112 99. The Commander scans the fog with premium binoculars made for an ace like an ace submarine. He has presented himself to Commander Kretchma. with a significantly higher standard of binoculars than other captains and they are part of his ability, especially at night, to capture surface targets and it is a very important part of Keter's self-image that he has them. Kretchmer must use his sharp eyes to avoid an accidental collision with an enemy ship, the North Atlantic in March is not a very hospitable place, uh, and there is fog and such, so it will be quite difficult to attack, but Kretchmer was a person to the one who liked to take risks, she wanted to enter the convoy, that was her tactic, enter the surroundings of the convoy objective, sink everything in sight and try to do it despite the weather conditions at 10 p.m. u99 sails through the fog to land inside Enemy Lines, where none of the Convoy Escorts would expect to find a Nazi submarine avoiding detection underwater and shrouded in darkness.

Kretchmer and her crew are ready to fire, attacking at night on the surface when the penthouse does not. It doesn't work, the flight doesn't work and therefore they create chaos, they create a certain amount of shock effect and a large number of ships have exploded in rapid succession aboard the lead British escort. McIntyre scans the perimeter for the ubot that is devastating his ships. If the escort smells it, he can hit the pack, he can push it and maybe make it through the night with very few losses, but at 1:00 a. m. another submarine is detected. McIntyre's fighting shepin in usual position outside the convoy, the British destroyer sails. towards her objective at 34 knots, almost double the speed that the U 100 can reach, almost surpassed on the surface.

Shep's only option is to try to hide under the waves in such a battle situation that you can't think for hours on end about what to do. He then made this split-second decision to evade an attack from the destroyer by submerging. McIntyre summons HMS Vanor to join him in a deadly charge attack. Depth charges are very large explosions and if they occur near the submarine, they cause a lot of damage. become onti water leaks in the controls burst light bulbs all kinds of damage is inflicted the damage is overwhelming it leaks so much that if it doesn't come out it will probably sink the ship McIntyre HMS Walker the sonar operator struggles to ping U 100 Con the attic system in an ocean distorted by explosions, the sea is a very complicated environment and of course if you are launching depth charges it is quite difficult to separate the depth charges from the submarine.

Another problem was that when the penis is facing forward and your weapons were dropped on the turmoil at the rear of the ship, which means that when you are attacking a submarine there is a gap between you losing contact and the depth charge on reality is falling and then you have to reacquire the nearby objective. HMS Vanok uses Ella's first-generation radar to search for U 100 in case the new technology can offer a target, but its application is limited. The first radar they put into service is a type 286, which is a 1.5M radar fixed to the mast.

The essential problem with the type 286 radar is that the target had to be in a straight line, you couldn't rotate the antennas, you had to point the ship just after 3:00 a.m. m., Shepa appears a thousand meters from the escorts, betting that she can repair the flood. and she limps towards Safety in an incredible spinning contact. J ahead, she lands directly in front of the first radar system capable of detecting it if they've been a little to the left or right or somewhere else where the 286 would probably be at the head of the mast. Having detected that Vanok is running ahead, the commander decides to ram the Yoat after having detected a ubo on the surface on his newly installed radar system, the British ship Vanor resorts to a standard WWI tactic and charges at the damaged submarine, the Destroyer. hits the uboat U 100, aid ships and destroys the Corning Tower and shapy is crushed with his legs between the hull and the Periscope is thrown into the water and dies and the ybot is lost aboard the u99 kretchmer does not realize the fate of his Ace companions, without torpedoes, the crew of the 99 clears the convoy to head home.

This is a classic ketma attack. Five ships sunk, so it seems okay, but now Escort Force training arrives and they carry out what they can of a systematic search. As u99 sneaks away, Keter's lookout sees McIntyre's destroyer in a panic, the crewman is convinced that they have been discovered thanks to the crewman's warning, the submarine dives when he saw this Destroyer very close, he was simply hoping that they had been detected by the Destroyer and did so. this split-second decision to evade a destroyer attack by submerging. McIntyre's lookouts weren't aware of u99, but when the submarine descends, the destroyer's sonar comes into play, they're listening the whole time and they're playing this kind of deadly cat game. and mo the sub is down here and it's listening to you ping from it and at some point because the sonar beam is fixed it will sweep the new contact range of the sub 400 and once it can be picked up in the attic it can be attacked deeply. charges McIntyre's crew launches their underwater bonds and in an attempt to sink the submarine they launched the deadly charges and they detonated near the ubot causing extreme damage.

The controls failed in their equipment and the gauges destroyed Kretchmer and her crew plummeted to the bottom of the sea and seriously injured one. submarine, they had two options at that point, you blow ballast and get out or you become a bottom feature. The cr crew tries to expel water to lift their plummeting ubot, the only way to escape was to return to the surface, so this was the decision crma simply made. to save the lives of his crew, but the air valve is stuck, they force him to go down, in fact, he falls very deep, in fact, it seems as if the submarine is going to be crushed.

The crew monitors their descent, horrified, they fall deeper and deeper. feet below the crush depth, the valve finally gives the ubo begins to rise to the surface a determined McIntyre waits for the submarine as soon as it surfaces he is faced with gunfire, a certain amount of damage is inflicted and it appears that he has U99's time has come to be abandoned but since the sinking submarine Hitler's top ubot Ace orders a final transmission after his luck runs out ketma is still this professional sends a last message to duts very brief it simply says load of depth two destroyers 53,000 tons per crma that last message Shipments from the submarine have sunk several ships of about a thousand tons leaving the submarine kretchmer um that's just an indication of what was actually a cool customer more than 5 hours after U99 launches its attack, Kretchmer orders his crew on deck to prepare for surrender. kretchmer, I think to calm his crew he lights a cigarette just to show that he is still in charge, he signals to the British to take his crew away and the British will do it because there is not much hatred between men, man to man. man, once the submarine. sunk that's the job done kretzmer is the last one to board the British destroyer McIntyre claims the binoculars aces as his prize ketma is treated very well aboard the HMS Walker plays bridge he has promised whiskey they are very happy to have captured someone so distinguished kretchmer spends the rest of the war as an allied prisoner the battle against convoy they lose them all in a very short period but there are still many very capable young submariners coming with the german submarine fleet is by no means finished.

I'm really just getting started