How a Single American Destroyer Escort Tore a U-Boat Wolfpack Apart in 11 Minutes

It is 12:35 a.m. on the 6th of May, 1944, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic southwest of the Cape Verde Islands, and Lieutenant Commander Brent Ael stands on the open bridge of USS Buckley. A destroyer escort barely 306 ft long, watching a shape rise out of the swell 3,000 yd off the port bow. The night is black, the sea long and oily under a low moon, and the ship’s SG radar has just painted a solid pip where nothing should be.

 Below decks, sailors who were dozing in their racks are already swinging their legs out and reaching for capok life jackets because the general alarm has started clanging through the passageways. On the Fan Tale, a young son presses his headset tighter and reports a firm underwater contact, then loses it, then finds a surface target instead.

 Abel gives the order to close. Buckley’s 4-in guns swing round. Her twin 40 mm mounts crank onto target, and somewhere out there in the dark, the crew of the German submarine U66 have just spotted her, too. Within 11 minutes, one of these two ships will be a smoking wreck, taking on the Atlantic through a hole in her side, and the other will be full of holes, scorched and rammed twice, but a float.

 This is the story of how a single American destroyer Escort built cheap and fast for exactly this kind of work closed with a yubot that had spent two years hunting Allied convoys and finished the fight almost before either crew had time to be frightened. By the spring of a 1944, the Battle of the Atlantic had already turned decisively against Germany, though nobody could say the Yubot were finished.

 In 1942 alone, German submarines had sunk more than 1,100 Allied merchant ships, a rate of destruction that had genuinely threatened to starve Britain of fuel, food, and war material. Admiral Carl Dunnitz had built his strategy around the rud tactic, the wolfpack, in which a patrolled line of 10 or 15 new would shadow a convoy, radio its position back to headquarters in Laurian or Carnival, and then converge for a coordinated night attack, overwhelming escorts that could not be everywhere at once.

 But 1943 had broken that model. Convoy ONS5 in April and May of that year had cost the Germans seven Ubot for the loss of only 12 merchantmen. An exchange rate donuts could not sustain. Ultra intercepts from Bletchley Park. Centimetric radar that Hubot could not detect. Long range Liberator aircraft closing the Mid-Atlantic air gap.

 and escort carriers providing air cover far from land had together turned the hunters into the hunted. By May 1943, Dennis had withdrawn his wolfpacks from the North Atlantic convoy routes entirely. A moment German sailors still called Schwarzi Blackme after losing 41 boats in 31 days. By 1944, the Yuboat force was fighting a different, quieter war.

 Submarines like U66, a type 9 seabboat commissioned in January 1941 under a succession of aggressive commanders, had shifted from convoy interception to resupply and reconnaissance missions further south, refueling from specialized tanker Ubot nicknamed milk cows, and running desperately needed diesel, torpedoes, and mail to boats still working the shipping lane.

 planes of West Africa and South America. The United States Navy had responded by forming hunter killer groups built around small escort carriers. Each one screened by a handful of destroyer escorts, a new class of warship designed specifically to be built quickly, armed adequately, and thrown at the yubot problem in numbers. USS Buckley, commissioned in April 1943 and displacing barely 1,400 tons, was exactly this kind of vessel.

 Smaller and slower than a full destroyer, but carrying hedgehog projectors, depth charges, radar, and sonar good enough to find a yubot in open ocean and finish the job once found. By early May 1944, U66 was running low on fuel after weeks of operations and had arranged to rendevous with a resupply submarine southwest of the Cape Verde.

 American codereers and direction finding stations had been tracking radio traffic in the area for days and task group 21.11 centered on the escort carrier USS Croatan and screened by destroyer escorts including Buckley had been vetoed into the search zone. On the night of May 5th, a Crowin search aircraft spotted a surface submarine and reported the position.

Buckley was detached to run down the contact alone. What followed unfolded with a speed that surprised both crews. Buckley’s radar held the contact as U66 tried to run on the surface, using her superior surface speed to open the range in the dark. Since a submerged yubot could never outrun a destroyer escorts sonar for long, Abble pushed Buckley to flank speed, closing the gap steadily, and at roughly 12:40 a.m.

 opened fire with her 4in battery at a range of under 2,000 yd. U66 answered with her own deck gun and 20 mm cannon. Tracer fire arcing between the two ships low over the water. Shell splashes straddled Buckley’s hull as she came on, and at least one round struck home, wounding several men on her bridge and gun crews without disabling the ship.

 Abel’s response was blunt. Rather than stand off and pound the submarine with gunfire alone, he ordered Buckley to ram. The destroyer escorts boo struck for 66 a glancing blow along her starboard side near the conning tower and for a strange chaotic interval the two vessels were locked together.

 Buckley’s high bow riding partly up over the submarine’s pressure hull while both crews kept fire firing at point blank range. German sailors, some of them scrambling out of the conning tower hatch as fire and smoke poured from below, found themselves fighting American sailors on Buckley’s own deck. close enough to use pistols, wrenches, and according to accounts from men aboard that night, whatever else came to hand in the fighting, including at least one mess attendant who flung a heavy coffee mug at an attacker rather than let him board

unopposed. This was not the abstract long range war of death charges and Azdic pings that most escort actions involved. It was handtohand combat on a steel deck in the dark ended within minutes by fire flooding and the sheer imbalance of firepower once Buckley’s automatic weapons were brought fully to bear.

 Fires took hold of midship on U66 and with her hull already opened by the ramming and by shellfire below the water line. This submarine began settling by the stern. Abel backed Buckley off to avoid being dragged down if the hubot sank suddenly, then maneuvered to finish the action, ramming a second time as U66 wallowed in the swell.

 Survivors went into the water as the submarine’s bow rose briefly and she slid under. Buckley’s crew, despite considerable damage to their own ship, including a hold bow section and casualties from the Hubot’s gunfire, launched boats and pulled 36 survivors from U66’s crew of 58 out of the Atlantic before first light.

 The whole engagement from first radar contact to the submarine sinking had run for roughly 11 minutes of direct action once the shooting started. An extraordinarily short and violent exchange by the standards of an ocean war usually measured in the patient hours of a sonar surge. If this deep dive into history is interesting to you, a quick subscribe genuinely helps more than you might think.

 For the wider German resupply network operating south of the main convoy routes, U66’s loss was more than the death of one crew. She had been due to refuel other boats and pass on fresh orders and intelligence. And her sinking disrupted a chain of rendevu points that Donut’s staff had built precisely because the North Atlantic had become too dangerous for the old Wolfpack tactics.

 American hunter killer groups like task groupoup 21.11 were by mid 1944 achieving a kill rate that the yubot arm simply could not replace. Germany had entered the war with 57 operational yubot and built roughly,00 more over the course of the conflict. But by 1944, the average yubot crews life expectancy had fallen to a fraction of what it had been in 1940.

And boats sent to the South Atlantic milk cow rendevous system were increasingly being hunted down at exactly the moment they were most vulnerable, refueling or loitering on the surface. For USS Buckley’s own crew, the aftermath was a mixture of urgent damage control and the strange business of caring for enemy survivors pulled dripping from the sea.

 The ship’s forward section had taken serious damage in the ramming. Timbers and plating buckled, and several of her own men needed treatment for wounds from the Hubot’s gunfire during the close engagement. Pharmacist mates worked through the night treating both American casualties and German survivors side by side in the same makeshift sick bay.

 A detail that says more about the practical unglamorous reality of this kind of warfare than any amount of dramatic narration could. The 36 German prisoners were transferred for interrogation once Buckley reached port, providing naval intelligence officers with fresh information on yubot resupply routers, radio procedures, and the physical condition of a force that was by then running short of experienced officers, working submarines, and any real hope of reversing the Atlantic War.

The wider consequences rippled outward through the summer of 1944. American and British hunter killer groups sank a further string of Hubot in the Mid-Atlantic and off West Africa in the following months. Each loss compounding the strain on Donuts’s remaining boats. Convoys that had once required elaborate escort screens and constant air cover were by late 1944 crossing with comparatively modest protection because the threat itself had been ground down engagement by engagement, ship by ship.

 Buckley herself returned to service after repairs and went on to fight in further Atlantic operations before the wars end. her action against U66 becoming one of the most studied close quarters naval engagements of the Second World War to afterwards as an example of aggressive decisive escort tactics rather than the cautious standoff approach many destroyer captains had previously favored.

The turning point in the end was not a single order or a single dramatic decision, but the accumulated evidence of actions like this one. American commanders had learned through Buckley and engagements like her, that closing the range and forcing a decision, even at the cost of damage to their own ship produced faster, more certain kills than long, cautious death charge searches that gave a wounded yubot time to escape or counterattack.

That lesson hardened into doctrine meant hunter killer groups across the Atlantic became progressively more aggressive through 1944 and yubot losses in the mid-Atlantic resupply zones climbed accordingly. Today, the wreck of U66 lies somewhere in the deep water southwest of the Cape Verde Islands, one of more than 700 Ubot lost during the war out of the roughly,00 that put to sea.

 USS Buckley survived the war, was decommissioned in 1946, and was eventually broken up. But her name lived on in naval history precisely because of those 11 violent minutes in May 1944, stand today on a quiet stretch of Atlantic coastline. And it is easy to forget that beneath waters like these 70 years ago and more, small, hastily built ships crewed largely by reservists and drafties fought some of the most desperate close quarters actions of the entire war.

 actions decided not by grand strategy, but by a captain’s willingness to ram, by a Sona man’s steady hands, and by ordinary sailors on both sides fighting for their lives on a rolling steel deck in the middle of the night. Lieutenant Commander Abel would later be awarded the Navy Cross for that action. But the real measure of what happened on May 6th, 1944 is simpler than any medal citation.

 A small ship built to be expendable found a dangerous enemy in the dark, closed to point blank range without hesitation, and in 11 minutes changed the arithmetic of the Atlantic War just a little further in the Allies favor.