The Wolves Come Slinking In

This time Germany had no surface fleet to warrant a show like last war's scuttling at Scapa Flow. Her two largest combat vessels still afloat were cruisers, the Prinz Eugen and the Nuernberg. They signed off by shelling Copenhagen, then gave up to the British in Copenhagen harbor--along with scores of smaller warships and 160,000 tons of merchant shipping. Several destroyers surrendered in Norway.

But Germany did end the war with a powerful fleet of U-boats, and they fought to the end. In March and April, several U.S. ships were sunk or damaged in the western Atlantic, with a loss of some 100 lives.

P: On May 5--one day after Admiral Doenitz ordered his U-boats to cease hostilities--a convoy bound for Boston battled with a wolf pack and lost the collier Black Point, with twelve dead. One sub which dived to the bottom, 130 feet down, was destroyed by depth bombs.

Last week Reuters reported from London that on May 7--several hours after the Nazi surrender at Reims--a British and a Norwegian ship were sunk out of a convoy off the northeast British coast. Two British lives were lost.

The Black Flag. On V-E day, there were 100 U-boats in German ports, many of them scuttled. Seventy others were loose in the Atlantic, 20 of them on the North American side. Allied naval authorities ordered them to surface and stay surfaced, fly a black surrender flag,* radio their positions, proceed to Allied ports as instructed.

The first one to slink in was the U-249, which put in at Weymouth harbor, in southern England, with ten unfired torpedoes aboard. Soon others were moving to English and Scottish ports; two came in to Gibraltar. The first surrender in the western Atlantic occurred when a patrolling R.C.A.F. Liberator spotted a U-boat and summoned surface craft to bring it in to Shelburne, N.S.

The U-858 surrendered off Cape May. N.J., claiming to have sunk 16 ships in its last eight weeks at sea. Other captives were awaited along the U.S. seaboard. Meanwhile convoying will be continued in the Atlantic until the last of the wolf pack has been accounted for.

* Possibly for visibility reasons; it is a common signal in maneuvers showing that a combat unit has been refereed out of action.

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