Chapter 7 07. The grave of a sailor will not bloom flowers

By the end of 1944, among the large surface ships of the German Navy, the pocket battleship "Graft Spey", the "Bismarck-class" battleships "Bismarck" and "Tirpitz" had been buried in the seabed; Battlecruiser Gneisenau severely damaged in air raids; pocket battleships Admiral Scheer and cruisers Nuremberg exhausted in the Baltic; heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen torpedoed by British submarine The battlecruiser "Luzov" was lying in the dock for overhaul; the remaining battleships could not go to sea to fight, so they had to be downgraded to training ships.Those who could fight were killed, and the rest were old, weak, sick and disabled.

In the Atlantic route, after 1943, the Allied forces installed anti-submarine radars on ships and aircraft, which greatly reduced the number of merchant ships sunk, while the German U-boats were sunk in large numbers.The "wolf pack tactics" that made the limelight in the early days of the war were also forced to withdraw from the stage of history. The Battle of the Atlantic ended with the defeat of the German Navy. According to statistics, during World War II, the German Navy sank more than 2,500 Allied merchant ships, with a total tonnage of more than 14 million tons, accounting for more than two-thirds of the total tonnage of allied ships during the war.

Ironically, the person who signed the unconditional surrender of Germany was the new head of the Nazi Empire, admiral of the navy, and inventor of "wolf pack tactics". After Germany's unconditional surrender, the Allied forces broadcast to request all German submarines operating at sea to surface and sail to designated ports to surrender to the Allied forces. At the end of the war, the death rate of the officers and soldiers of the German submarine force had exceeded 80%, and the surviving submarine officers and soldiers staged another amazing scene. The officers and soldiers of the submarine force repeated the scene when they were defeated in World War I: They violated the order not to destroy weapons and self-sink warships, and once again privately spread the secret operation code-named "Rainbow". More than 200 German submarines surrendered to the Allies After that, it scuttled itself.Among the self-sinking submarines, the proportion of new submarines accounted for nearly 60%.The Germans' super awareness of intellectual property protection shocked the world.

However, the officers and soldiers of the German submarine force understand that the glory days of U-boats have passed.At the end of World War II, more sailors compared U-boats to "living coffins".At this time, in the war, U-boats were being sunk continuously, and the survivors who were covered in oil and clinging to the life rafts hummed an old song in a creepy tone: the grave of the sailor... No flowers will bloom.