Qualla: German submarine U-164 (1941)

German submarine U-164 (1941): Introduction

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. On the morning of January 6, 1943, a US Navy PBY Catalina patrol aircraft spotted a surfaced submarine 125 nautical miles northwest of the Ceara coast. The pilot, from squadron VP-83, pressed the attack. When the depth charges detonated, U-164 broke apart. Fifty-four crewmen died in the wreck. Two survived. The boat had been at sea on its second patrol for less than a week. Its commander, Otto Fechner, was among the lost, along with most of a crew that had commissioned the submarine in a Bremen shipyard barely fourteen months earlier. A Type IXC U-boat's Atlantic war could be measured in weeks.

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-164 (1941): Built for Long Distance

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. The keel for U-164 was laid down on June 20, 1940, at the Deutsche Schiff- und Maschinenbau yard in Bremen, assigned yard number 703. She was launched on May 1, 1941, and commissioned on November 28, 1941, under Korvettenkapitan Otto Fechner. The Type IXC class was designed for l...

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-164 (1941): The Caribbean Patrol

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. After training with the 4th U-boat Flotilla, U-164 joined the operational 10th flotilla on August 1, 1942, and set sail from Kiel on July 18 for her first war patrol. The route took her across the North Sea and out into the Atlantic through the gap between Iceland and the Faroes....

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-164 (1941): The Brageland Incident

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. U-164's second and final patrol took her back into the tropical Atlantic. On January 1, 1943, she stopped the Swedish merchant Brageland, a ship from a neutral country. Under prize rules, a U-boat was supposed to inspect neutral shipping and release it if no contraband was found....

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-164 (1941): The Catalina and the End

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. Five days later, the PBY Catalina of VP-83 found her. The squadron was operating from northern Brazil as part of an expanding US Navy anti-submarine presence in the South Atlantic, a theater where German boats had been preying on Allied shipping running along the Brazilian coast....

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5

German submarine U-164 (1941): The Crews Behind the Numbers

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremy Atherton, CC BY-SA 2.5. A submarine lost with most of its crew is easy to reduce to a statistic, especially when the war it served has been so thoroughly condemned by history. But every U-boat sailor was a person: young men, some teenagers, mechanically skilled, pressed into service by a regime many of ...

Image: Jeremy Atherton | CC BY-SA 2.5