Quick thinking by first watch officer Meyer enabled U-505 to escape the destroyers. The crew was informed of the captain’s death, but only those in the control room knew exactly how he had died. A few hours later, Captain Zschech’s body was buried at sea, and U-505 turned back toward Lorient.

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The third and final captain of U-505 was Lieutenant Harold Lange, an older, almost fatherly reserve officer who was hand-picked by U-boat headquarters to take over. The new commander desperately needed a morale booster for the crew, and an opportunity presented itself almost immediately.

Sailing from Lorient on December 20, 1943, U-505 was in the middle of the Bay of Biscay when the crew heard the sounds of gunfire. Sixty nautical miles away, a battle between British cruisers and a small force of German destroyers and torpedo boats was taking place. Realizing that survivors would not last long in the frigid winter waters, Donitz ordered Lange to race U-505 to the battle area on the surface. As dawn broke, the crew rescued 34 survivors from torpedo boat T-25, including the captain. The rescue of the sailors made the crewmen of U-505 heroes.

Mechanical problems continued to plague U-505, however, and the crew was stranded in the submarine base at Brest for 10 weeks while her diving planes were repaired. On March 16, 1944, the boat left Brest Harbor to prowl her old hunting grounds off Freetown, West Africa. It was to be her last patrol of the war.

Allied shipping had moved away from Freetown to the Mediterranean, leaving U-505 to her fruitless search for targets. As Lange steered back to Lorient, American aircraft buzzed the boat almost constantly. Aircraft and coastal radar alerts were so frequent that the sub could not even stay surfaced long enough to charge her batteries. As Lange suspected, the U-boat was being hounded by a carrier task group — one that had sunk two of U-505’s sister boats from Lorient only a few weeks earlier.

The carrier in question was the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal, which, in conjunction with four destroyers, formed hunter-killer Task Group 22.3. The group was commanded by Captain Daniel V. Gallery, one of the most talented and determined American sub-hunting skippers of the war. On April 9, the task force had forced U-515 to the surface and destroyed her with gunfire. The enormous amount of firepower the boat endured before she finally sank gave Gallery the idea that it might be possible to capture a U-boat before she was sunk or scuttled. Plans were drawn up, and men were trained for such an opportunity. On June 4, 1944, Gallery’s men got their chance.

On that day, shortly after 11 a.m., U-505’s faulty sound detection equipment picked up faint propeller noises. When Lange rose to periscope depth to investigate, the sight he saw made his blood run cold. U-505 was in the midst of a carrier task group and about to be attacked by three destroyers and several aircraft. The boat immediately dived, but freakish water conditions allowed the aircraft to see the sub and use bursts from its .50-caliber machine guns to mark her submerged position for the destroyers.

‘They really gave it to us!’ Goebeler remembers. ‘They fired hedgehogs and about 64 depth charges at us. The explosions were the biggest I ever heard. One depth charge was so close it damaged torpedoes stored in the upper deck. Other depth charges jammed our main rudder and diving planes. Lange managed to fire one torpedo, but soon there was nothing for us to do but surface and abandon ship before she sank for good. When we reached the surface, Lange opened the hatch but was wounded right away by the gunfire. Men started jumping overboard, but I stayed in the control room to make sure the boat sank. It was the chief engineer’s job to set the demolition charges and scuttle her, but he was already in the water, trying to save his own neck. The boat wasn’t sinking because she was hanging on the air bubble in diving tank No. 7. We tried by hand and by air pressure to open the relief valve for the tank, but it wouldn’t budge because the relief valve shaft had been bent from a depth charge explosion.

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