Trapped Beneath the Waves: The Mysterious Discovery of German U-Boats from the World Wars
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In the cold, unforgiving depths of the North Sea, off the coast of Belgium, a ghostly relic from the First World War lies undisturbed — a German U-boat, almost perfectly intact, still guarding the remains of its 23 crewmen who never returned home.
Discovered during a routine government survey of Belgian waters in 2014 and finally identified in 2017, the UB II-type submarine rests on its starboard side at a haunting 45-degree angle, between 82 and 98 feet beneath the surface. Measuring 88 feet long and nearly 20 feet wide, the wreck sits silently just off Ostend — in waters the German navy once controlled during the occupation of the Belgian coast.
What makes this discovery so unsettling is that no record existed of any U-boat sinking in that exact location. For decades, the wreck appeared on nautical charts as nothing more than an “upturned landing craft.” Marine archaeologist Tomas Termote, however, saw something different in the sonar images: a long, cigar-shaped silhouette with pointed ends and a conning tower — unmistakably a submarine.
Termote made multiple dives to the site. He found the vessel mostly intact, though the bow showed signs of violent damage. It appears the U-boat struck a drifting mine with its upper deck. Both periscopes were mysteriously bent forward at the same angle, as if something massive had rammed the vessel while it was running near the surface. One lower torpedo tube remained eerily closed and undamaged.
Termote explained:
She’s been on the chart since 1947. In the 1980s, she was identified as an upturned landing craft, like the ones in “Saving Private Ryan”. So it didn’t sound very interesting. A sonar indicated this was obviously not a landing craft. It wasn’t shaped like a biscuit tin, but like a cigar, with two pointy ends and a tower in the middle. The surveys also give you the length, and this was 26 or 27 meters. I was like, Bloody hell! This has to be a submarine!
In November 2017, while carefully cleaning a torpedo tube, Termote freed a small 10-centimeter plaque. The inscription revealed the submarine’s identity: UB-29.
UB-29 had operated out of Bruges with the feared Flanders Flotilla. Under its first commander, the aggressive Kapitänleutnant Herbert Pustkuchen — one of Germany’s most dreaded U-boat aces — the boat had terrorized Allied shipping. After Pustkuchen transferred to another vessel (and later went down with it at the age of 27), command passed to Erich Platsch, who was only 28 years old.
On December 13, 1916, the British destroyer HMS Landrail rammed the UB-29 and dropped depth charges. The impact bent the periscopes. Limping desperately toward home, the crippled submarine apparently snagged a drifting mine with one of the twisted periscopes, sealing its fate.
The crew did not die instantly. Trapped in the steel tomb as water slowly flooded the compartments, some sailors are believed to have turned their sidearms on themselves rather than face the long agony of drowning. Their bones still lie inside the hull to this day.
German authorities requested that UB-29 and her 23 sailors remain undisturbed in their underwater grave. The exact location has never been publicly released to protect the site from looters and allow further respectful research.
Just months earlier, in 2016, another ghostly U-boat — possibly the legendary UB-85 — was found off the Scottish coast while engineers laid undersea power cables. That submarine was also remarkably intact, yet every crewman had abandoned ship. According to wartime legend, the captain claimed a monstrous sea creature had attacked the vessel the night before, damaging it so badly that it could no longer dive. The beast supposedly rose from the black depths, forcing the crew to fight it off with pistols before the British warship HMS Coreopsis finished the job.
Gary Campbell, keeper of the Official Sightings Register of the Loch Ness Monster, noted that the waters where the alleged attack occurred have a long history of strange sea-monster reports.
Two silent steel coffins beneath the waves. One filled with the quiet remains of men who never escaped. The other was supposedly emptied by something that should not exist.
Some graves, it seems, are better left at the bottom of the sea.
In the dark, oil-slicked depths of the Gulf of America lie the silent graves of more Allied ships than were lost at Pearl Harbor — all victims of a ruthless German U-boat campaign the world barely remembers.
Only one German submarine ever went down in these waters: U-166. And for nearly sixty years, its wreck — and the truth — remained hidden.
In early 1942, following their bloody successes in the North Atlantic, Germany launched Operation Paukenschlag — “Operation Drumbeat.” A wolfpack of U-boats slipped unseen into the Gulf of America. They arrived at a perfect moment: no coastal blackouts, no convoys, no escorts. By day, the submarines lurked silently on the seabed. At night, they surfaced like predators, their crews watching as American ships were clearly silhouetted against the glowing lights of coastal towns.
The Germans called it their “Happy Time.” Never had hunting been so easy. Tankers and cargo ships sailed alone, miles from shore, lit up like targets in a shooting gallery.
The U.S. government kept the slaughter secret. Reports of sinkings and death tolls were blacked out so German naval headquarters would never learn just how devastating their campaign had become. In total, the U-boats sank 58 ships to the bottom and damaged 19 more.
One of the most haunting incidents occurred in July 1942. The American tanker Benjamin Brewster was torpedoed just two-and-a-half miles off Grand Isle, Louisiana, by U-67. Twenty-five sailors died in the blast. Survivors rowed desperately to shore while the ship burned furiously for nine straight days, a floating funeral pyre visible for miles.
U-67 would go on to meet its own fiery fate. It sank on July 16, 1943, in the Sargasso Sea, southwest of the Azores, by depth charges from a Grumman TBF Avenger aircraft (VC-13, USN) operating from the escort carrier USS Core. Of her crew of 51, 48 died; three survivors were rescued by the USS McCormick.
However, during the summer of 1942, it continued to patrol the Gulf waters along with other U-boats.
Three weeks after the Benjamin Brewster was sunk, on August 4, the passenger steamer Robert E. Lee — escorted by the Navy patrol boat PC-566 — steamed toward the Mississippi River. Without warning, a torpedo slammed into her engine room. The ship plunged beneath the waves in just fifteen minutes.
PC-566’s crew had spotted the U-boat’s periscope. They sounded the alarm and dropped five depth charges directly over the spot. After rescuing the survivors from the Robert E. Lee, the captain was convinced he had destroyed the attacker. Instead, he was reprimanded — accused of setting the charges too deeply.
For decades, the official story stood: the U-boat escaped.
That changed in 2001. While surveying a pipeline route, researchers discovered both the wreck of the Robert E. Lee and, lying nearby on the muddy bottom, the long-lost U-166, about 45 miles off the Mississippi River passes. Evidence strongly suggests that one of PC-566’s depth charges detonated a torpedo inside the submarine, triggering a catastrophic secondary explosion that tore the U-boat apart.
In 2014 — thirty years after the captain’s death — the U.S. Navy finally admitted its mistake. Captain Herbert G. Claudius and his crew received long-overdue recognition. His son accepted the posthumous decoration on his behalf.
Somewhere in the silent Gulf, the hull of U-166 still rests, a steel coffin holding the remains of its German crew. What really happened in those final terrifying moments remains locked beneath the waves — a wartime mystery the ocean refuses to surrender.
But there is another mystery, or perhaps more of an urban legend, tied to the sinking of U-166 or another unreported U-boat sent to the bottom of the Gulf waters. It has to do with some of the 52 German sailors aboard U-166. It appeared in The Dispatch, which described the following:
“My interest was stirred by stories I recalled being told years ago about Germans coming ashore on the Alabama coast during World War II and purchasing beer from a secluded waterfront bait shop.”
Many detractors of this story point out that U-166 did not make landfall close to Alabama. However, there are verified stories of U-boats coming close to the mainland to allow saboteurs or spies to make it to shore and carry out their mission.
On the night of April 25, 1942, a shadow slipped from its pen at Lorient and turned its bow west into the dark Atlantic. She was U-213, a Type VIID minelayer, and at her helm stood a young officer barely twenty-eight — Oblt. Amelung von Varendorff — bound for a coastline few of his countrymen had ever seen.
Three weeks passed in silence beneath the waves. Then, on the evening of May 14, 1942, the submarine surfaced off a lonely, unpeopled stretch of shore called Great Salmon River — ten miles from the sleepy village of St. Martins, where the tides of the Bay of Fundy carve their secrets into red stone cliffs. There, under cover of darkness, a lone figure was rowed ashore: Kriegsmarine Leutnant M.A. Langbein of the Abwehr, sent to keep watch over the convoys sailing from Halifax, that vital artery of the Atlantic war.
He buried his radio transmitter in the soft earth above the tideline — a secret entrusted to the soil — and vanished into the Canadian countryside wearing another man’s name: Alfred Haskins of Toronto. He walked the road into St. Martins, calm enough to browse the shelves of the village store, then thumbed a ride to Saint John and boarded a train east to Montreal, and finally settled in Ottawa, where he lived quietly on funds smuggled in with him — a spy hidden in plain sight, in the very capital of the nation he’d been sent to watch.
For two and a half years he kept his silence and his secret. Then, in late 1944, as the tide of the war itself began to turn, he walked into a Canadian government office and gave himself up. And in a final twist worthy of the strange tale itself, the authorities let him go unpunished — for in all his time among them, he had never once lifted a hand against them.