I just recently finished a story to my kids, which I find other people seem to be interested in. On the odd chance that you might also be interested, I am enclosing a copy for you. Wherever possible, I have documented the happenings with copies of deck logs etc. so the info is as well documented as I can make it, even though some of it is sure outlandish…..but then again, a lot of what happened during the war is sure strange.

As far as I can determine, I am the only US Navy sailor that ever successfully removed a Captain from command of his ship at sea. Not only that, I am also the only US Navy sailor to promote a Nazi to command of a submarine on the high seas of the North Atlantic. Of course, this was a Captain of a German submarine, but I did remove him from command and replaced him by promoting the Executive Officer (I.W.O.) who I later found out was a rabid Nazi. After boarding the submarine in mid-Atlantic during some serious weather from a whaleboat from the USS NEAL A. SCOTT (DE 769), I and the other twelve men in the prize crew spent six days bringing the sub to Portsmouth, NH. Long after the war, I attended a reunion of the German crew of the submarine and had dinner with the German Executive Officer. He told me that he is on the State Department’s list of unreformed Nazis that are not permitted into the USA. By the way, not all the crew agreed with the outlook of the Executive Officer – not many were out and out Nazis. I spoke to them at some length during the trip to Portsmouth. The German crew even though that surely the Americans would refit the sub so that they could take it into the Pacific to sink Japanese ships – really!!!

It can take days of showers to remove the dank diesel smell of a submarine crew from your skin. It can if it is a German U-Boat. I know, because I spent six days on U-1228 bringing her in from the middle of the North Atlantic iceberg region to Portsmouth, NH on 17 May 1945.

The reason that I was part of the Prize Crew was that I was the only man on USS NEAL A. SCOTT (DE 769) that could speak German. After all, I was born in Germany and came to America when I was seven years old! As it turned out, no one on U-1228 could speak English either, so on the sub I was IT, the point of contact between the German crew and our Prize Crew.

The Captain of U-1228, Oberleutnant zur See Friederich Wilhelm Marienfeld, had chosen to surrender his ship upon receiving a radio message from Großadmiral Dönitz declaring an end to hostilities.

Thirteen men from USS SCOTT boarded the U-boat, and two officers and twenty-eight of the German crew were sent back on board the SCOTT. All the remaining German crew moved to the forward torpedo room, which was now empty of torpedoes. The American crew took over the Petty Officers quarters – fancy they were, too, with wooden paneling and a swastika emblazoned on the punch bowl. The main shortcoming was that the bunks were too short and too narrow for me to be comfortable.

The German Captain & I did not hit it off well. When I interrogated him as to numbers of crew and how many are needed to operate the sub., he pretended not to understand me and became quite difficult to get along with. I got a bit teed-off myself, so I ordered him off the sub and into the whaleboat. He turned purple in the face and sputtered in German,

“If this was the German Navy taking over an American ship, they certainly would not remove the Captain from command of his ship!!!”

Well, by this time, I had all I wanted to hear from the German Captain and again ordered him off the conning tower and into the whaleboat. As a consequence of this act, I am the only man in the US Navy that has ever successfully removed a Captain from command of his ship at sea and got away with. Well, it WAS an enemy Captain, but oh well…………

Then I asked for the second in command. The German Executive Officer (I.W.O.) was just behind me with his head sticking out of the main hatch. I guess he could see which side of the toast the butter was on as he had no trouble understanding me and we got along just fine for the remainder of the trip. Thus I am the only man in the US Navy that promoted a Nazi to command of a submarine on the high seas! As later noted, this man was not only a Nazi, but enough so that he is still on the list of people not allowed to enter the USA!

Looking back at the time and all the circumstances at play, I can see why, especially the German officers, may have acted the way they did. All the Germans were dressed to the hilt, with all their medals pinned on etc. while we were rather disreputable looking in our dungaree work clothes and no insignia or medals showing. After all, American sailors never wore medals at sea, but the Germans sure did, even on the submarine. They placed great importance in such things as medals. To them, we must have looked like a swarm of rats invading their boat. They may have even wondered how the heck such a scruffy bunch could have beaten them.

After settling which Germans should stay on the sub to operate it, and who should go over to USS SCOTT, we attached a chain with a lock to something solid on the conning tower and dropped the chain down the hatch and with another lock, secured the other end of the chain. This insured that the sub could not dive with us in it because the main hatch could not be closed.

Next we checked the torpedo tubes (they were empty) and no other torpedoes were left aboard. After that, we opened every locker and cabinet. I had a German crewman on each side of me whenever I opened a locker. Nobody got nervous and no booby traps were found. We did find a case of hand grenades, which we threw over the side. The sub was now secure and ready to follow USS NEAL A. SCOTT to Portsmouth, NH.

I went into the sub’s radio ‘room’ which was actually a tiny cubicle to send a message back to my ship by Morse code on their radio, that everything was secure and under control and that we would follow behind the SCOTT back to the USA. Each day I sent another message with a key word, which was sequenced by prior agreement that would assure our Captain that the Prize Crew was still in charge.

The German submarines had developed special equipment to detect our 2 gigahertz SA radar early in the war so they could detect our approach from well over the horizon. Our ship had a new SU radar, operating at 6 gigahertz, which we felt certain that the Germans could not detect, so we thought we would be able to catch them on the surface especially at night when they would be charging their batteries. As a result, we never used the SA radar at all. In spite of our new SU radar, we never did catch a sub at the surface either day or night. All our contacts with subs were made using the underwater sound gear.

The German radio operator showed me why we could never catch them on the surface with our SU radar. The Germans had built a very simple hand-held device that could detect our SU radar. It consisted of a funnel that looked like a production milk funnel, with a Germanium crystal at the apex and a two tube audio amplifier and batteries on a belt with earphones on his head. The procedure was for the operator of the SU radar detector came on deck first, turned around slowly, listening for the distinctive 600 hertz buzz of an SU radar. If he heard the buzz and it was loud enough, they would immediately dive. If none was heard, they knew it was safe to stay on the surface for a while.

Of course, the radioman spent the watch turning around and around…..such a simple little counter measure to thwart our secret new radar. The sub also had a 2 gigahertz radar on it, but it was rusted stiff from lack of use.

After I had boarded the whaleboat to go over to the submarine, a neat trick given the sea conditions, one of the officers on the USS SCOTT tossed me a bottle of whiskey - I’m sure for the medicinal purposes only. As it turned out we did not need it. The U-Boat was full of schnapps! We filled the punch bowl with schnapps and cherry juice. We played poker with German cards, and the winner got a cupful. This tended to equalize the winners.

There was a galley on the sub, but no cook. I guess he escaped to the SCOTT on the whaleboat. So there was no one to cook for us aboard. Throughout the sub, in every nook and cranny, were stored cans of food. Trouble was, there were no labels on them! But we found numbers indented into the lids. As we found new numbers, we cut off the lids to discover what was in them. I made a list of numbers and contents of cans by carving this information into the wood paneling of the Petty Officer’s compartment that we had taken over. Everything was in cans – bread, butter, peas, eggs, potatoes, meat, cherries etc. At first it was a big surprise every time a can was opened but soon we could assemble a meal whenever the thought occurred to us. Mostly we drank schnapps and sneaked a little food once in a while.

The first time I went into the galley, I found a hunting knife. The Germans said it was their butter knife. I decided to confiscate it. I didn’t want to find it in someone’s back. Upon looking closely at the knife, I noticed that the blade had “BIG CHIEF” engraved on it along with the face of a handsome Indian chief. Solingen was stamped on the tang of the knife. This is a German city which is renowned for fine steel for knives. The German crewmen had gotten the knife while on liberty in Norway. The story is that the knife making factory in Solingen had taken an order before the war from a company in the USA, then could not sell them in Germany once the war broke out so they sold them in Norway, which Germany had invaded. The Norwegians liked the idea of a knife with “BIG CHIEF” on it, and so did the German crewmen from U-1228. I still have the knife.

The Germans were intensely interested in gangsters, as Hitler had filled them full of tales about gangsters and how depraved the US society was. We had one of our crew that loved to joke around, so he told the Germans that he was a gangster. That worked, and the Germans would not come near him. After all, we were all wearing .45 cal pistols and the watch also carried .45 cal Thompson sub machine guns.

The next episode was that one night, one of our crew (who shall remain unnamed) went into the forward torpedo room and cut all the medal and insignia off a coat that was hanging there. That morning, a sea bag was sent across to USS SCOTT and the medals were in it. When the German that owned the coat discovered what had happened, all hell broke loose among the German crew. They started to discuss scuttling the sub! I could hear this through the open hatch.

So in I went to discuss the disposition of our men of watch and that our plans were that if too much water showed up, exactly twelve men would exit the conning tower hatch and no more – and that they would all be Americans. I also told them that the medals were no longer on the sub. Well, they listened politely and I suddenly realized that there was nothing more I could say, so I went back to the card game. I didn’t win as often as I am a lousy poker player.

Time went by and they kept on plotting. Finally, the German E.O. got wind of the plot, walked through our compartment and into the torpedo room. We heard lots of crashing sounds, glass breaking etc and shortly thereafter, here comes the German E.O., nodding curtly in our direction and back into his quarters. It was really quiet, so I stuck my head in to see what had happened. Not a soul in sight, they were all in their beds pretending to be asleep. Well, that ended the mutiny.

Of course the Germans assumed that only a gangster could possibly do such a thing as stealing somebody’s medals. Actually, someone else had done it. So next we see ‘Ernie’, the victim of the robbery, come into our cabin, ramrod stiff and he marched right up to the ‘gangster’, obviously expecting to be shot, and in the best of his English/German mixture, demanded his medals back!!! The ‘gangster’ was nonplussed and did not know what to do. It was clearly a face-off-on-main-street. Suddenly, our ‘gangster’ had a bright idea how to ameliorate Ernie’s feelings, and get Ernie off his back. We had taken over the Petty Officer’s quarters on rather short notice, so we found lots of stuff under mattresses etc. so the gangster reached under his mattress and pulled out a box of stubby cigars. He tried to placate Ernie and offered him a cigar.

Up until then, Ernie was ramrod stiff and six inches from the ‘gangster’s’ face and obviously expecting to be shot at any second. When Ernie saw the proffered cigars, his shoulders slumped and a strangled cry came from his lips. He yelled, “My cigars!”

It was too much for him. He was a broken man. He turned around and went back into the torpedo room. Being offered his own cigars to placate him for having his medals stolen was entirely out of his ability to comprehend. Death yes, but such an insult he did not know how to handle. Now I cannot find Ernie on the crew roster of U-1228, but that is the name I remember him by. His courage, facing up to a self-professed gangster in a showdown is truly remarkable & I’ll always remember him as a man of great courage.

The paths of USS NEAL A. SCOTT and the German U-1228 crossed at least three times during the hostilities. The first time that I know of was while we were in a Hunter/Killer group scouting line and we were low on fuel, so we were taking on fuel from an aircraft carrier. Shortly after starting to take on fuel, the carrier turned its ‘bull horn’ toward us to order an emergency termination of fueling.

That meant making a real mess when the men standing by with axes cut all cables AND the fueling hose. Our TBS radio notified us that we were under attack from a sub that had crept in behind us as we moved up from the carrier’s port quarter screening position to take on fuel. Another destroyer escort spotted the submarine as it moved into position to torpedo the carrier and us while we were fueling and unable to maneuver.

The Skipper of U-1228, Friederich Wilhelm Marienfeld, stated that he had seen a destroyer escort with the number 769 on the bow, fueling from the carrier. His torpedo run was interrupted and he had to crash dive when another destroyer escort attempted to sink his submarine.

As a sidelight to this event, some of the carrier crew, whose flight deck towered high above our little DE, started throwing containers of ice cream for our crew to try to catch. Since the carrier was blocking the wind and the carrier deck was much higher, the ice cream cups easily spanned the distance between the ships.

I guess the carrier crew had done this before, because they made sure to get a case of ice cream early enough to insure that the ice cream was mushy. No matter how hard our crew tried to ‘soften’ the catch, invariably there would be an explosion of ice cream all over the unfortunate catcher. Now this was no small matter – we never had ice cream aboard. Oh well, we tried hard to catch the ice cream cups right up until the order to cut cables.

About a week before the end of the war in the Atlantic, I was in the CIC when the SU radar operator spotted a weak target halfway between our ship and the next ship in the Hunter/Killer group. The radar operator immediately reported the contact to the bridge and a plot was started on the plotting table. We soon discovered that the target was moving at 5 knots in exactly the reverse direction of our Hunter/Killer group. Twice more the target was reported to the bridge. No attack was ordered, perhaps because the bridge look-outs could not spot the target. The sound room also could not verify a target.

During discussions with U-1228 crewmembers, they exulted that they had spotted 5 ships in a row a week before and attempted to run between the ships using their new snorkel which allowed them to use diesel power underwater. I am certain those 5 ships were our Hunter/Killer group. I have no idea why our sound gear did not get a ‘ping’ from them as our ship spacing was intended to give a full sound sweep.

While the submarine could have gone faster than five knots, I suspect they were trying to keep from making too much of a wake with their snorkel. So this was the second time we’d crossed paths.

EDITOR NOTE – a snorkeling submarine must not make too much speed, as the snorkel head sometimes dips goes underwater in the wake. As the diesels are still running, they tend to create a very low pressure in the boat in an instant. The men have been known to have blood running from mouth, eyes, ears and nose when this happened.

While U-1228 and USS SCOTT may have encountered each other many times, I am certain for only three. The third time being boarding the submarine. As the ‘Fortunes of War’ have decreed, the crews of both ships survived the war.

We’ll pick up this great first person story of the war at sea in KTB #179 next month. First person stories like this are priceless history!

Part 2: Six Days in a German Submarine
Part 3: Six Days in a German Submarine