German submarine U-22 (1936)

"Unterseeboot 22", or more commonly "U-22" was a German submarine or U-boat which was commissioned in 1936 following construction as a Type IIB submarine at the Germaniawerft shipyards at Kiel. Her pre-war service was uneventful, as she trained crews and officers in the rapidly expanding U-boat arm of the Kriegsmarine following the abandonment of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles two years before.

War Patrols

During the Second World War, she was mainly designed for coastal work, a role enforced by her small size and endurance. Thus when war came she was useful for operations in the North Sea and against the English coastal convoys, particularly on the North West coastline. It was in this region that she scored her first successes, after fruitless operations against the Polish coast during the Invasion of Poland and a cruise against British shipping coming from Norwegian ports.

On November 18 1939 she had her first achievement, sinking the tiny coastal cargo ship SS "Parkhill" off the Scottish coast. This was followed on her fourth cruise with two mine barrages off Blyth, which claimed two coastal freighters and a naval patrol minesweeper in less than a week. She was then used directly against Scottish convoys in the Moray Firth, during which she achieved her biggest success, torpedoing the British destroyer HMS "Exmouth", which disappeared with all hands, the cause of her loss only discovered by the British after the war. Shortly afterwards, in thick fog, she sank a Danish ship from the same convoy. These were in fact her final direct victims, although she later claimed another with a mine laid sometime before.

The submarine failed to return from her seventh patrol, for which she had departed on March 20 1940. There is some indication that she was either lost due to an unexplained mine detonation in the Skagerrak, or possibly as the result of a collision with the Polish submarine "Wilk", which reported crashing into something on March 23, and whose bow showed signs of a collision with an unidentified ship. Whatever the cause, "U-22" and her 27 crew were never seen again, lost somewhere in the North Sea in March 1940.

Raiding career

ee also

*Unterseeboot 22 for other submarines named "U-22"

*List of U-boats

References

* Sharpe, Peter, "U-Boat Fact File", Midland Publishing, Great Britain: 1998. ISBN 1-85780-072-9.
* [http://www.uboat.net/boats/u22.htm uboat.net webpage for "U-22"]
* [http://www.ubootwaffe.net/ops/boat.cgi?boat=22 ubootwaffe.net webpage about "U-22"]
* [http://www.u-boot-archiv.de/dieboote/u0022.html u-boot-archiv.de webpage for "U-22"]