laststandonzombieisland

When the Germans took to realizing in 1940 that their ports and strategic manufacturing centers were very much capable of being targeted by Allied bombers, they began to move all sorts of things underground and hidden in the trees. In the Hartz Mountains there was a hidden airfield on a mountain top where new Messerschmidts would take off from just hours after being built. Other sites hid rocket construction. At Hamburg, Bremen, and Heligoland, giant covered bunkers for U boats were constructed, followed quickly by even more massive sites on the French Atlantic coast.

The Hamburg U-boat pen complex, Elbe II on the southern bank of the Elbe river at the Vulkanhafen, included covered locks, construction bunkers where new boats were made in dry dock, fitting out areas for after they were launched, and magazine and fueling piers.

In 1945 when the Brits took the port, they blew up the 20+ foot thick concrete roofs that had withstood multiple bomber attacks. In 1985 a group of researchers penetrated the bunker area, which was still filled with water at low tide, and found a trio of Uncle Donitz’s bad asses, the ultra-modern Type XXI U-boat, still at the docks.

These ships, U-3506, U-2505 and U-3004, had never seen service and had been in use mainly as training ships. That wasn’t unusual for the class as of the 118 that were built/building, just four actually saw a combat patrol. When the Allies got close to the bunker, their crews scuttled them on 2 May 1945 and they were largely unusable when the roof came down anyway.

If you don’t know about the Type XXI, it was among the most advanced of its day, with a 2000-ton submersible that could submerge to over 700-feet, travel 15,500 nautical miles, remain underwater for weeks due to their novel new snorkel systems, and hear 360-degrees due to their large sonar array. In fact they were so well made that the U.S. Navy took all the good parts of these boats and added them in GUPPY upgrades to Gato and Balao class subs while the Soviets and Chinese later just copied the whole design as the Whiskey, Zulu and Romeo/Ming series smoker boats of the Cold War era.

But don’t get your hopes up about going to Hamburg and getting to see this lost trio of Nassy subs. They were raided over the years by scrappers unknown who largely walked off with anything they could manhandle up a ladder, and in the 1990s the entire bunker, which today rests under a parking-lot, was filled solid with gravel and concrete, turning it into a sarcophagus.

Meh…

More on the Elbe bunker here,  here and here

The former massive pens at Brest in France are off-limits as they are still on an active naval base but here is a video of them:

The Valentin submarine pens in Bremen, are still around too but don’t have any subs in them.

However the North Koreans and Chinese still operate a bunch of WWII-era technology Romeo/Mings, and they really do look fun…