WOLFGANG HIRSCHFELD (34-1984) served as radioman on board several U-Boats including his last patrol, where he was the Oberfunkmeister aboard U-234 during their attempt to reach Japan with a cargo of high-tech weaponry and 560 kilos of uranium for the Japanese atomic bomb project.

Here he gives us copies of some pages of his personal diary from a patrol aboard U-109 under command of Kplt Heinrich Bleichrodt:

At dawn on 5th August 1942, the bridge watch reported the silhouette of a large passenger ship on a westerly heading and making at least 20 knots, a speed we could never hope to match in order to get in an attack. We gave chase for an hour, then Bleichrodt came down from the bridge in apparent dejection.

"Anything on the international wave lengths?" he asked me.

"No, sir - all quiet." I told him. "Pity we couldn't get that ship."

Bleichrodt gave me a melancholy smile. "Ach, Hirschfeld. Who knows if it wasn't for the best? A big passenger ship, perhaps with many women and children aboard, hundreds of miles from anywhere in mid-Atlantic. I think it was right so."

WOLFGANG HIRSCHFELD has sent us other interesting stories of his time in the U-Bootwaffe including some of the excellent books he has written. We met him first at our 1988 "Patrol in North Germany" when he came to be with us at the German Navy Memorial. His wife, a lovely lady, was with him and as I can remember, it was raining quite hard and his wife kept the umbrella over his head as we talked. He is a walking history book!

WOLFGANG, many thanks for this article and all the other history you have sent to us for our Archives.