U-166

The Ger­man U-Boat U-166, under the com­mand of Hans-Günther Kuhlmann, set sail from Lori­ent, France on June 17, 1942, for the Gulf of Mex­ico as part of Oper­a­tion Drum­beat¹. Now that Hitler had declared war on the U.S., their mis­sion was to harass U.S. ship­ping, of oil and mil­i­tary sup­plies, in the Gulf.

After being under way for roughly a month, Kuhlmann and his crew scored their first kill when the inter­cepted the Domini­can schooner Car­men off the coast of the Domini­can Repub­lic on July 11. Not want­ing to waste his valu­able (and finite) sup­ply of tor­pe­does, he sur­faced and destroyed the schooner with the sub’s deck mounted guns. Two days later he struck gold again, this time with the U.S. steam freighter Oneida, off the east­ern tip of Cuba. From there he and his crew con­tin­ued west­erly along the Cuban coast.

He encoun­tered the fish­ing ves­sel Gertrude on the evening of July 16 about 30 miles north­east of Havana. The trawler was too small to use a tor­pedo on, so he sur­faced, com­mand­ing the crew into life boats before he destroyed it with the sub’s deck guns once again.

For the next 2 weeks Kuhlmann’s crew sailed north­ward into the Gulf of Mex­ico hunt­ing for prey but find­ing none until he found the mouth of the Mis­sis­sippi River, an excel­lent loca­tion to sit and wait for tankers steam­ing east­ward. Patience paid off, when on the after­noon of July 30 he encoun­tered the pas­sen­ger steamer Robert E. Lee.

The Robert E. Lee had been pressed into ser­vice by the Navy, run­ning cargo here, pas­sen­gers there. On July 30 she was car­ry­ing pas­sen­gers from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, some of which were sur­vivors of other attacks insti­gated by other Ger­man U-Boats. With the heat of sum­mer press­ing down upon the over­crowded Robert E. Lee, the cap­tain was try­ing to find a safe har­bor for his pas­sen­gers. After try­ing and being unable to dock in Tampa, Florida, he headed for New Orleans, along with his U.S. Navy escort, the U.S. sub­ma­rine chaser PC-566, where they met up with U-166.

After pick­ing up radio trans­mis­sions com­ing from the PC-566, U-166 homed in on the loca­tion of the 2 boats. Fir­ing a sin­gle tor­pedo into the freighter’s port side, the Robert E. Lee went down, tak­ing 25 lives with it.

Once the Robert E. Lee began sink­ing, PC-566 jumped into the fight, drop­ping depth 10 charges over the flee­ing U-166. After the drop­ping of the charges, an oil slick was seen ris­ing from the water, but since the other usual evi­dence that a sub was sunk (a rush of air to the sur­face) it was assumed that the sub had escaped. In real­ity the U-166 had been sunk by PC-566.

In 2001 the wreck­age of both the Robert E. Lee and U-166 were found by C&C Tech­nolo­gies while the firm was sur­vey­ing a pro­posed pipeline route for BP Explo­ration and Shell inter­na­tional. The 2 ships rest over 5000 feet down on the bot­tom of the Gulf of Mex­ico.²

1. Admi­ral Karl Dönitz ini­ti­ated this sub­ma­rine oper­a­tion, which was to tar­get all United States ship­ping on the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to the Gulf of Mex­ico. It included 5 long-range sub­marines and, all told, cost the U.S. 397 ships and roughly 5000 lives. [↩]
2. Large por­tions of this piece were researched from The Past Foun­da­tion and Wikipedia. [↩]