Qualla: German submarine U-161 (1941)

German submarine U-161 (1941): Introduction

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. On the night of 9 March 1942, a German submarine slipped through the mouth of Castries Harbour on the British island of Saint Lucia - a passage narrow enough that local pilots thought it impossible for a submerged boat - torpedoed two moored vessels, and slipped back out. The commander was Kapitanleutnant Albrecht Achilles, only weeks into his command of the boat. The U-boat was U-161, a Type IXC just eight months out of the Bremen shipyards. The Castries raid and a similar strike on Port of Spain, Trinidad, two weeks earlier would earn Achilles the Knight's Cross. They also opened a run of twelve sunken ships, six patrols, and nineteen months of hunting that would end in the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil.

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-161 (1941): A Boat Built for the Long Reach

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. Her keel was laid on 23 March 1940 at the Deutsche Schiff und Maschinenbau yard in Bremen, hull number 700. Launched on 1 March 1941 and commissioned on 8 July under Kapitanleutnant Hans-Ludwig Witt, she was a Type IXC - the long-range version of the German Type IX. At 76.76 mete...

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-161 (1941): Caribbean Hunting Grounds

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. U-161 left Kiel on her first operational patrol on 3 January 1942, threaded the GIUK gap between the Faroes and Shetlands, and reached Lorient on the French Atlantic coast on 3 May. That port would remain her base. Her second patrol - the Castries raid was part of it - rolled up ...

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-161 (1941): Four More Patrols, and a Detail That Stays With You

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. The third patrol took her past the Azores and Cape Verdes to the Brazilian coast, then up the South American shoreline back into the Caribbean, sinking the sailing ship Nueva Altagracia and the San Pablo at Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. The fourth patrol, 113 days long, was her longe...

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-161 (1941): Rendezvous, Last Patrol, and 27 September 1943

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. U-161 left Lorient for the last time on 8 August 1943. On 20 August, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, she rendezvoused with the Japanese submarine I-8 and transferred two German radio technicians and a Metox radar detector - a small but telling piece of Axis cooperation b...

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5