Tragedies to treasures: What sunken U-boats teach about humanity

Recent pictures of the wreck of U-576, taken a couple of weeks ago, more than 700 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic, bring home the lessons available in North Carolina’s coastal waters. On July 15, 1942, U-576 sank the freighter Bluefields, part of a convoy, before she was sunk by depth charges fired by the convoy’s escort. Both ships rest on the sand about 30 miles from Cape Hatteras.

On Aug. 24, a submersible exploration of the site, sponsored in part by UNC’s Coastal Studies Institute, brought the submarine into view for the first time since its sinking. One of the questions the investigators sought to answer was what had happened to the crew. All were known to be lost, but only when they saw the hatches closed were they, in the words of NOAA archaeologist Joe Hoyt, “immediately aware that it’s a tomb” for the 45 men aboard.

Our waters abound in wrecks. The waters off Hatteras were known during the Battle of the Atlantic as “Torpedo Alley,” where German subs sank over 400 vessels, often within sight of land, and the area has long been known as “The Graveyard of the Atlantic” because of the loss of thousands of vessels caused by notoriously difficult weather and navigation. Not to mention the occasional pirate.

Those same waters have much to teach us. For my part, as I read the description of the U-576 resolving into view, I was reminded of my own U-boat encounter in North Carolina waters.

On a chilly Easter day 10 years ago, I dived the wreck of the U-352, about 25 miles out from Beaufort. She sits in 115 feet of water, a popular destination easily accessible to divers of only moderate skill.

I remember seeing the sub appear as I reached 50 feet, as though a curtain had been parted. Seeing it, I can see U-576; both were Type VIIC boats with a list to starboard on the bottom.

The dive lasted – for boring, technical reasons – about 25 minutes, in which time I was able to explore the length of the vessel. I’m not at all religious, but seeing the reef that had developed from this engine of death, it was hard not to think of resurrection on that Easter morning.

I was a relatively inexperienced diver at the time, and in my haste to enter the water I left my camera on board the boat. In the end this was a good thing, allowing me to experience the wreck without the lens as an intermediary.

They became human to me

I had the same realization as Hoyt, that as I thrilled to the life around me, I was on a gravesite as well. When U-352 was sunk in May 1942, she went down with 14 men on board. Their bones were long gone, but this was where they died.

The ages of the dead ranged from 18 to 27, younger than I was even then. They lived in a world bounded by metal, a tube 220 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 30 feet tall, needing to surface for air so that in seeking life they risked death, their compartment stinking of diesel fuel and the wastes of unwashed men.

We know little of their motivations. Their captain was a Nazi to be sure, but among the crew and the dead must have been men who would have preferred to be somewhere, anywhere, other than beneath the waves. They became human to me.

This is the gift of historical work, to make the persons of the past into flesh-and-blood people. The crews were our enemy, but they were also human beings.

So the tragedy of the past can become a treasure in the present. More real and valuable than gold and silver because, unlike those things, the lessons we learn cannot be taken from us. Each wreck in the graveyard could tell a similar story of war, or hubris, or plain old bad luck.

These sites also teach us that as long as evil men build machines like these, we must be prepared to face them. U-576 and U-352 needed sinking. But we can celebrate their sinking while still lamenting the loss of life. We can do this, sympathize with people while abhorring the causes for which they fight, because of our common humanity. If truth is the first casualty of war, the humanity of the enemy must be second. Somewhere down the line we risk our own as well.

Perhaps that’s the most important lesson we can take away from sites like these – how fragile a thing our humanity is, and how important it is to hold on to it lest it, too, vanish beneath the waves of an unforgiving sea.

This story was originally published September 17, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Tragedies to treasures: What sunken U-boats teach about humanity."