Korvettenkapitan Reinhard Hardegan Part 1
Korvettenkapitan Reinhard Hardegan Part 2

SHARKHUNTERS: Let’s go back a moment to the North Carolina coast and the sinking of the CITY OF ATLANTA. Do you recall that event – how you saw the vessel, how you approached it and made the target?

Captain HARDEGEN: No, I don’t remember the CITY OF ATLANTA as special at all. It was near the coast and I sunk her but I have at the moment, no special remembrance of it.

SHARKHUNTERS: You had two very successful visits here to the United States. When you came back the second time, did you expect it to be as unprotected as it was the first time?

Captain HARDEGEN: No. The second time it was a little bit more difficult. They had more airplanes and more destroyers and so on. It was not so easy as it was the first time at all.

SHARKHUNTERS: When you came back, you were very well received, you received your honors, they even made a film about U-123. What was it like to be a star?

Captain HARDEGEN: Oh, I was not a star. I can’t say it.

SHARKHUNTERS: Shortly thereafter, you were told that you were not going to be going to sea again as a U-Boat Skipper. How did you feel at that time? You had wanted to stay at sea, I believe.

Captain HARDEGEN: How did I feel? I got a new command in Germany. At first I was educating the new submariners in Gotenhafen/Gdynia and afterwards I was in torpedo school, I was in the headquarters and a lot of other commands, nothing special.

SHARKHUNTERS: If you were advising students, what would you advise a Skipper to look for in his Number One; in his personal assistant on the boat? What kind of qualities would make for a good Number One?

Captain HARDEGEN: You have very difficult questions. I cannot answer this.

SHARKHUNTERS: You commanded both a Type II and a Type IX U-Boat and I’m sure that you had many friends who commanded Type VII U-Boats. Can you tell us something about the way submarine commanders felt about these different boats and about the differences in operating them?

Captain HARDEGEN: At first I made two patrols on the Type IX-B, that was U-124 as a Watch Officer and then I was commanding a Type II-D. It was a small boat and it was not so comfortable as a XI-B, and I was on this boat around the coast of England, the Orkneys and so on and I sunk one ship and then I commanded U-123, also a Type IX-B…..and it was much more comfortable. I never served on the Type VII. The first Type VII I was on board, I was advising the submarine commanders in Gotenhafen so afterwards I was on the Type VII but not before. There were very few of the Type II and IX boats.

EDITOR NOTE – Captain HARDEGEN was Kommandanten Schüler or Commander in Training on board U-124. The ship he sank with U-147, the Type II-D, was the 4,811 ton Norwegian steamer AUGVALD, sunk 150 miles NW of Loch Ewe.

SHARKHUNTERS: Did you like your Type IX?

Captain HARDEGEN: Yes. Of course.

SHARKHUNTERS: What about its long range?

Captain HARDEGEN: Yes, a long-range boat and you had much more possibilities. With a small boat – a Type II, we had only five torpedoes but on the big boat we had eighteen or twenty so had much more possibilities.

SHARKHUNTERS: Let’s talk about your battle with the Q-Ship, the CAROLINE. That was the only example of a Q-Ship in the Second World War. It was very common in the First World War. Tell us about this from the beginning.

EDITOR NOTE – A Q-Ship is a steamer, usually a freighter, loaded with disguised armament that is hidden. The crew is double its normal size and it is usually running alone. Its purpose is to look too easy, to lure a U-Boat to the surface to utilize the deck gun rather than waste a torpedo on what would appear to be an easy victim. The hold would be loaded with ping-pong balls or balsa wood or similar to keep her floating in spite of heavy damage. Once attacked and hit, the crew would set fires in tubs on deck to make it appear as if the ship were sinking, they half the crew, the normal amount of crew, would abandon the ship so it would appear deserted. This was known as the ‘panic party’. Once the U-Boat was lured to the surface, the other half of the crew would get the ship moving again, and the hidden guns would be uncovered and then U-Boat would be sunk. At least, that was the way it looked in the planning stages.

Captain HARDEGEN: I saw a small freighter and I torpedoed her and she didn’t sink at once and she was so small that I said, there is no need for a second torpedo, so I wanted to kill her with shells. When I surfaced and had my gun crew on deck, suddenly I saw that she had a little bit of speed already and she changed her course a little bit – but the crew had left already and I was astonished that she had changed her course because the crew was in the boats. I was very near in my boat and I started to shell her. I saw canvas come off heavy guns and they were shooting with big guns and they were throwing depth charges and near like to Hell and I sped off with full speed ahead and I was very lucky because my diesel engines made a lot of smoke and so perhaps they could not hit me exactly, but a midshipman at my side was severely wounded, and he died two hours later. We had a lot of hits, but no hit was deadly for the boat and we could dive and all was okay. And then I went back underwater and torpedoed her, and she sunk. I later read that when I sunk the Q-Ship, there were two destroyers to the north. I went off to south and so I was lucky that I didn’t come in contact with the two destroyers. But they had another Q-Ship, the EVELYN, and I met her afterwards off the coast of Florida and I saw her, she was a very small ship, and she made a radio call with the name EVELYN and it was such a small ship, only about 3,000 tons and I saw another, bigger ship and so I sunk two other ships in that night and after the war, I met an officer of the EVELYN and he said that I was lucky that we didn’t engage. I said you were lucky that I didn’t attack you because you never sunk a submarine but I sunk a Q-Ship. They had only two Q-Ships. I met them both and sunk one.

EDITOR NOTE - Captain HARDEGEN refers to Captain KEN BEYER (1156-1989), then a young Ensign aboard EVELYN. He was with us on one of our “Patrols” in Germany and the two men became friends. Remember our motto – “Yesterday’s Enemies are Today’s Friends”.

SHARKHUNTERS: Let’s go on now. I’d like to ask you about Admiral Dönitz; your relationship with him as a Skipper and also his importance to the U-Bootwaffe. As a tactician, he was very famous but he was also a leader.

Captain HARDEGEN: He was the best leader we could have because he was a very impressive person and he had always a very personal contact to every commander. For instance, every time I came back from holiday to France, he at first asked me what about the wife, what about your two sons. He knew all. At that time I had two sons. Later, I had two children more. He was a man – a very good leader

SHARKHUNTERS: I know he contributed strongly to the success of the U-Boats in the Second World War, but when you came back from patrol, he would meet you, is that correct?

Captain HARDEGEN: Yes, yes!

SHARKHUNTERS: What kinds of things did you talk about in those meetings?

Captain HARDEGEN: We had to talk about our patrol and all things what happened and what we thought to make it better and so on. He asked all things and he had read our KTB (log book) before, and so he knew all.

SHARKHUNTERS: You did most of your service in the Atlantic in 1942, right at the time when the war was changing. In the course of your service, did you see any technological changes?

Captain HARDEGEN: When I came back from my second patrol, from the United States, it was the first times the airplanes had radar. That was the first change. Then I brought my boat back to Germany because the boat had been attacked by a destroyer a lot of things were broken and it was not possible to repair the boat in France and so I had to bring her to Germany. As I went back around England, always the planes came through the clouds. It was terrible – I didn’t know why they always found me, and I didn’t know that they had radar but I learned it when I came back.

EDITOR NOTE – He refers to the time when U-123 was severely attacked off Jacksonville Beach and nearly sunk. They took a severe beating that day.

SHARKHUNTERS: We are interested in the kinds of qualities that you felt would make a good U-Boat commander. Do you think that leadership or cunning or will power – what sort of man?

Captain HARDEGEN: Two things. First, you must learn your job very good and you must know what to do and then you must have the respect of the crew and the crew must think that the commander knew everything and had everything in his head.

I’ll tell you one story. When we had depth charges by a destroyer, I was sitting by the hatch to the central room and I had my book, a criminal book, and I did so as if I was reading this interesting book and I did it so that the crew would think that if the Captain is reading the book, it can’t be worse and can’t be so very bad and he has time for reading his book. And suddenly my Chief Officer, von Schroeter (5430-LIFE-1997), he was later time Vice Admiral of the Bundsmarine, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Captain, you must put your book in the right way.”

I had it in the wrong way (upside down) but I did it to show the crew that if the Captain can read this very interesting criminal book, it can’t be very bad. That’s the thing. You must have the confidence of the crew.

SHARKHUNTERS: As I understand, during the war, all of you men who commanded U-Boats, having shared this experience, felt that you were part of a special group. Did you have meetings with other commanders and did you talk about your patrols with each other? Tell us about the kinds of friendships you had.

Captain HARDEGEN: We had a lot of good friends, friends who were other commanders, but we didn’t talk very much about our special patrols, only about special things we recognized for instance British radar, or when I sunk the Q-Ship I told them that they must be very careful because we didn’t know how many other Q-Ships they (the Americans) had and those things.

EDITOR NOTE – Even today, Captain HARDEGEN and other Skippers meet monthly for lunch, which they call the ‘Captain’s Table”.

SHARKHUNTERS: For most of us who didn’t serve in the submarines, our only experience of the U-Boat War would be ‘Das Boot’. Did you enjoy that film?

EDITOR NOTE – That’s a BAD question to ask a U-Bootfahrer in Germany!

Captain HARDEGEN: No. From the U-Bootwaffe we don’t like the book and don’t like the film because, I say, if the reality would be the same way as the film, the U-Boat War would be finished in two or three weeks because a crew, which is one day before leaving the port, is full drunk and so on and what they did with the Captain – they p$@@ed against the Captain’s car in a drunken way and when the first depth charges came, the engineer was……didn’t want to do his job and the Captain took his pistol that he had to do his work – impossible! With such a crew you cannot have any success. And also we don’t like Buchheim. He was a guest on board a boat; he was from the Propaganda Kompanie, to make pictures and he was not a submarine man and he has only one god – that is money; and the second – money, and money and he always want to make money and so he makes the book and he makes the movie, but he is not a good man.

EDITOR NOTE – Buchheim rode aboard U-96 under HEINRICH LEHMANN-WILLENBROCK (120-+-1985). His principal duties were as a sketch artist, and he was quite talented. He also took a lot of photos and collected more photos during and after the war. He became quite wealthy after the war and probably doesn’t care much about people’s impressions of him. Remember what Liberace used to say; he would laugh all the way to the bank.

Tape Info:
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More Hardegan:
Korvettenkapitan Reinhard Hardegan Part 1
Korvettenkapitan Reinhard Hardegan Part 2
Korvettenkapitan Reinhard Hardegan Part 3