Wreck of U-232

 Second World War 1939-1945, shipwreck

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Unterseeboot 232 was a Type VIIC u-boat laid down at the F. Krupp Germaniawerft Shipyard in Kiel in January 1942, and commissioned into Kriegsmarine service in November of the same year. After five months of training and exercises in the Baltic with the 5th Unterseebootsflottille, the U-232 and her crew stood out from Kiel on May 8th, 1943 for their first War Patrol.

Operating in the mid-Atlantic after passing through the Iceland/UK gap, the U-232 formed with three separate wolfpacks to hunt Allied convoys but by July she had found no targets and shaped a course for the U-Boat base at Lorient. Joining with two fellow u-boats in wolfpack Geier 3 as they moved North along the Portuguese coast, the U-232 was running surfaced around midday on July 8th when she was attacked by an American B-24 Liberator.

The lumbering American bomber was sighted as it closed on the U-232's position, allowing her crew to quickly file below deck and execute a crash dive to evade their attacker in the deep, but the Liberator crew dropped in low over the diving submarine and released a spread of depth charges onto her position. Despite her crew's efforts to get her into deep water, the U-232 was straddled by the depth charges before they detonated, causing fatal damage to her hull and sending her to the bottom at this location with all 46 hands on July 8th, 1943.


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