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The Class VIIC mortal ship was a Nazi-engineered gem. The small submarine, only 67 meters long, with a crew of 44 members, was Kriegsmarine (German Navy) the most terrifying weapon.
Generously produced (568 units), with only 14 torpedoes carried, these ships raised legitimate fears for the crews of military and merchant ships.
Fast, maneuverable, generally does not navigate alone U-bots it is not afraid to attack selected targets. Attacks can attack both day and night. They were almost invisible when submerged. And if anyone noticed, they could dive deeper until danger passed.
In early 1943, one of the last ships of the VIIC generation was launched. At that time, it didn’t seem like difficult times were coming for the Germans.
U-1206 was tested for almost a year, until it finally fell into the hands of Lieutenant and Lieutenant Karl Adolf Schlit in the summer of 1944. The crew entrusted to him prepared for service at sea.
Finally, in late March 1945, they were allowed to carry out operations. He moved from Kiel to Kristiasand in Norway. One of the few countries conquered by the Nazis that was still under Reich control. From here, the submarines attempted to stop the ships arriving in Scotland.
Scanpix photo / German submarine
April 14 started with a calm underwater. No potential targets were seen. There is no shortage of work on board, but normal service is carried out under such conditions. No one barred him from stepping down if a natural matter arose.
Normally, going to the bathroom is not a process that requires much scientific knowledge. Done, clicked, washed. However, when you are in a submarine that is underwater, the process becomes complicated.
External forces press the helmet from all sides. If we made a hole in the housing, the water would start to flow through it. They would simply push him inside. This is due to different environmental pressures.
When the normal toilet didn’t work, the submarine crews at that time had to live with the remaining smell until they surfaced. The toilet, which worked on the usual principle, could remove natural materials.
The Germans did not like it. For the convenience of the arias, a sophisticated system was developed that allowed pressure manipulation. The contents of the toilet were sucked. He traveled through various cameras controlled by different valves until he was finally shot into the environment like a torpedo.
Convenient but challenging. It was necessary to unscrew and tighten the required valves at the right time. The cost of the error could have damaged the ship’s systems. For an expert crew, such a process would not be new, but this was still a novice.
The fateful man became the young commander of the ship, who was only 27 years old. Unable to make proper use of the toilet, he had to call an engineer for help. They both did something wrong. Instead of being pumped, they began to let the seawater into the interior of the ship.
The screeching water stopped quickly. The ship stopped sinking, but the ship’s batteries were installed right next to the toilet. The latter are used by electric motors when underwater.
The water in the acid batteries started an unfavorable chemical reaction. Now the environment has started to poison the released chlorine gas.
On the eighth day, the submarine, which was on duty, had fuel tanks, ammunition stacks, and food. Therefore, getting rid of the ballast alone was not enough to bring it to the surface.
Scanpix Photo / sunken submarine
Part of the torpedoes had to be fired to compensate for the resulting imbalance due to the ingress of water.
When the crew appeared to have escaped the worst, it turned out that they had been spotted by a British patrol plane. They were very close to the Scottish coast, only 14 kilometers from the coast.
The first submarines had weapons to fight while on the surface. The U-1206 is no exception. It had a duplicated 20mm C / 30 anti-aircraft gun. There was also a FlakM42 37mm caliber anti-aircraft gun.
And although resistance is possible, the practice was different. The submarines’ hulls were easily damaged, so the submarines had to dive underwater as soon as possible when they saw the plane.
Even if the shots from the planes did not drill, the damage could later open up when submerged under enormous environmental pressure.
Attacking the plane, losing a crew member, unable to sink, and knowing that British radio ships had been warned of the discovered ship, had to make a difficult decision. Sensitive documents and coding equipment were destroyed and the ship sank.
The sailors and the captain boarded the rubber dinghy and headed for shore. Three people drowned in the stormy weather.
Part of the crew was rescued by a single-masted British sailing ship taken from an overcrowded ship. Others had to make it to shore on their own.
The sunken ship was rediscovered in the 1970s during the construction of an oil pipeline. The abandoned ship continues to rest at a depth of 70 meters.
While there are claims that the ship sank due to a factory defect, such a version is probably not true. Captain Schlit survived the war and died in 2009.
He didn’t mention the toilet in his version of the incident, but left a note in the report that the flooding of the ship started at the same location where the unfortunate toilet was installed. And were it not for the series of failures, the war certainly could have continued.
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