I was aboard the Zanpuckett bound for Liverpool coming back from Sydeny. ( where I was on Temporary duty for the Admiralty ) at about 3 AM, there was a loud Boom that brought us running to the boat rails . A U boat had just sunk one of the convoy ships. Our Escort the HMS Daisy fired off a star shell in the German direction then closed. After what seemed like hours the Depth charges started going off then it was quiet for the rest of the night.

Reminds me of one of my favorite novels The Bone Collectors, by Brian Callison, now avail on Kindle:

Early 1941: the 'Happy Time' for Hitler's U-boats; the most savage, punishing time for the North Atlantic convoys. A time when antiquated merchant ships, mostly unarmed, invariably slow and with pathetically few escorts crawled doggedly in fixed lines like iron ducks in a shooting gallery across what the Allies called the 'Air Gap' and the U-boat men christened Das Todesloch - 'The Death Hole'.

There were no specialist rescue ships provided in those, the bloodiest days. Instead the last ship in each column was nominated to fall back and attempt to save their fellow seafarers forced to abandon. The U-boat men had another ghoulishly apt nickname for such a suicidally-exposed steamer. They called her der Knochensammler - the Bone Collector.

This is the story of one of them: of one of those Bone Collectors - the British Steamship Olympian - and of what happened to her while the North Atlantic killing was at its peak. It is a novel of ordinary Merchant Navy convoy men as seen though the eyes of Olympian's Chief Officer during the hours of one night's massacre, when the Unterseeboote wolf packs finally converged on Slow Convoy SC-whatever-number-it-was in the graveyard of Das Todesloch.

Never has the life - and death - of the World War II convoy been evoked more vividly, more poignantly than in this, Brian Callison's rich, enthralling, and now timelessly classic novel of war at sea.

HeinKill, you are a wealth of information. I will look for the book U have mentioned.

Thank you, on my list for the next Amazon buy ! Everybody knows the famous " The Cruel sea" I suppose (not that known in France) ?

Kaa

U might find : The Sea Shall not have them on U tube interesting.

I'll give it a look, thank you for the tip !