They recognized each other immediately that Monday afternoon in May of 1992 as one of them stepped off the train at the small railway station in Leicestershire perhaps because both men were wearing the traditional attire of navy veterans; Blue blazers and grey trousers. Or was it that both men were of the same age or that they had a few things in common? Whatever it was, both men embraced, they hugged each other and if a bystander had bothered to look more closely, he would have discovered tears in their eyes.

Both men were navy veterans alright, but their service had not been in the same navy. One man, Sid James, had served in the ROYAL NAVY while I, the other man, had been in the KRIEGSMARINE, the GERMAN NAVY. Forty eight years ago in 1944, Sid was the hydroplane operator in the British submarine which sank a German ship on which I happened to be.

Five years earlier, in 1939, Sid, then a young lad of nineteen years, joined the ROYAL NAVY because he thought that it was his duty in time of war. He joined the navy although his father had been an army soldier in the trenches of France in the First World War.

I'd enlisted in the GERMAN NAVY a year earlier and was about to get my first shipboard assignment when the war broke out. My father had been an army soldier also. He was wounded during the Battle of the Marne in September 1914.

Sid's first shipboard assignment was the cruiser HMS GALATEA. When his ship was torpedoed & sunk by a German U-Boat off the coast of Cyrenaica one week after Pearl Harbor, on the 14th of December, 1941, Sid was one of the few survivors. Following his rescue he returned to England where he underwent training for service in submarines. (HARRY'S NOTE - HMS GALATEA was initially attacked by the Italian submarine DAGABUR under Capitano di Corvette Alberto Torri, and they heard two detonations after a torpedo run time of 1 minute, 45 seconds. Then U-557 under Kapitanleutnant Ottokar Paulshen finished her off with additional torpedoes.)

During the Norwegian Campaign and later in the English Channel I saw action serving with the 3rd R-Boat-Flotilla. When in November of 1940, I became seriously ill, I returned from LeHavre, France to a military hospital in German for treatment.

Following special training and a stint as an instructor, I ended up at a radio station on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean. The station was one of a network from which British radio and other electronic communications were monitored.

As far as the war in the Mediterranean was concerned, Crete was very much an 'out of the way' place. The German paratroopers who had conquered the island in May of 1941 had long since left. At first, the island was meant to be a staging area for troops and supplies to help Rommel move into Egypt, but as the British succeeded in regaining sea and air superiority, it became more and more difficult for the Germans to keep open even the most paltry supply routes.

For the soldiers and sailors it meant that, except for emergencies, leave was cancelled. If it hadn't been for the fact that my parent's townhouse in the Rhineland city of Aachen was completely destroyed in a British air raid on 11 April 1944, I wouldn't have had a chance to leave Crete during the two years I was stationed there.

In late summer 1944 it became obvious that Crete had lost its strategic value. A partial evacuation of military personnel got underway, most of it by aircraft under the cover of darkness. We received orders to blow up our monitoring station and, mid-September 1944, were flown to Athens. There, our unit was officially dissolved, and each of us received new orders.

Whether it was the official goal of the British High Command in the eastern Med or whether it was only my impression at the time, the fact is that the British had invaded mainland Greece from the west. It looked to me as though their objective was to occupy Greece before the Soviets did. In the process, they made things miserable for the Germans.

This was not only a matter for the British ARMY, as I was soon to find out, the ROYAL NAVY was in on it too. Together with the Free French submarine CURIE, HMS UNSWERVING (a U-CLASS submarine) was deployed to hunt German ships trying to make it from Piraeus, the port of Athens, to northeastern Greece.

The Skipper of UNSWERVING was LT M. D. Tattersall, RNVR, who was known to his fellow submariners for always wearing a red turtleneck sweater under his tunic. Sid James was the hydrophone operator, and Bill Prytherch was the leading torpedoman - I was to find out many years later.

In September/October 1944, UNSWERVING was operating out of Alexandria in Egypt, a relatively short distance to where she was deployed.

On 29 September 1944, Herbert Schuett, my former Station Boss in Crete, and I received orders to go to Piraeus, the port of Athens, and to embark onboard BERTA, an old tanker of about 2,000 tons which had been pressed into service as a transport. Apparently her tanks had been removed to make room for other cargo. As we were waiting to go on board, all kinds of equipment and artillery ammunition were loaded into her holds. When the military, most of them travelling on individual orders were allowed on board, they were told to sit down wherever there was room. There must have been several hundred soldiers and sailors, and most of them sat down on the hold covers. Herbert and I managed to find a place aft of the ship's wheelhouse.

Kriegsmarine: They Met Again: 1
Kriegsmarine: They Met Again: 2
Kriegsmarine: They Met Again: 3