Post script to the sinking of U 461 by U/461
On Tuesday 3rd June, 1986, my wife Rosemary, Silvia Marrows and Harry McIver and I arrived in Munich to meet Wolf Stiebler, the captain of U461.
On the flight to Munich, I was beset with not a little trepidation - how does one greet a man whom you once did your damnedst to kill? However, I need not have worried. We recognised each other immediately. His handshake was firm, his smile was genuine.
"Peter," he said, "We last met in the Biscay!" and laughed.
We all got on wonderfully well. Wolf spoke reasonable English, Silvia spoke German quite well, and as Harry and I had spent the previous 12 months going to German classes once a week, we could communicate quite well. Wolf could detect - and got great amusement from - our Australian accent.
Dudley Marrows (captain of U/461), Wolf Stiebler (captain of U-461) and Peter Jensen, Australian War Memorial, 1988
In our discussions with Wolf, he gave his version of what has been described as the greatest battle of the war involving U-boats. U461, U462, and U504 left Lorient on the evening of 29th July 1943. As senior officer, Wolf was in charge of the group. He ordered that they cruise on the surface all night and rendezvous at a point in the Biscay next morning.
U461 and U504 made the rendezvous, but U462 was missing. They stayed on the surface as long as they dared and Wolf was about to give the order to submerge when they saw flashes against the rising sun. It was U462 signalling with his searchlight.
They sailed back to him to discover that he had been submerged all night and had flat batteries. Using his searchlight had flattened them further, so it was impossible for him to submerge.
Wolf had to make a decision. He knew to remain on the surface during the day was dangerous. So should he stay with U462 and protect it, or submerge and leave it to its fate? He decided to remain surfaced, and was soon spotted and the battle began.
Our depth charges broke U461 in two, something on Wolf's clothing caught, and he was dragged down to a considerable depth before he was released and came to the surface. We had seen a Halifax bomb U462 and saw the crew abandon the boat and had assumed that it had been hit. Apparently this was not so. The bomb had missed and the crew had merely scuttled the boat.
We dropped one of our dinghies to the survivors of U461 (the crew of U462 all had one-man dinghies) and Wolf and the other survivors swam to it. They put three or four wounded men into the dinghy and the rest stayed in the water, holding on to the edge of the dinghy.
The sloops now arrived and U504 submerged. The sloops began depth charging about 800 to 1000 meters from the U461 survivors. According to Wolf, the men in the water suffered excruciating pain. They pulled themselves out of the water as far as they could but, (in Wolf's words), his stomach was forced into his chest and his eyeballs felt as if they were being forced out of his head. He honestly thought he was dying.
Wolf is very bitter over the whole affair. As he put it, he sacrificed two good boats and two good crews to save a boat which merely scuttled itself.
Silvia asked him if he had a good crew. "Yes," he said simply, "the best!"
After all these years it still rankles with him. He has never joined the U-boat association, but is a member of the "Cape Horners" (those who have rounded Cape Horn under sail).