Qualla: German Submarine U-166

German Submarine U-166: Introduction

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For 59 years, the Navy insisted Herbert Claudius was wrong. On July 30, 1942, the skipper of the patrol craft PC-566 reported that he had depth-charged a German U-boat to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, moments after it torpedoed the passenger steamer SS Robert E. Lee south of the Mississippi River Delta. His superiors didn't believe him. They criticized his tactics, reprimanded him, and pulled him from seagoing command. Credit for sinking U-166 went instead to a Coast Guard Widgeon aircraft that had attacked a different submarine entirely. Claudius died in obscurity. Then, in 2001, a pipeline survey crew found both wrecks -- the Robert E. Lee and U-166 -- lying less than two miles apart on the seafloor, exactly where Claudius said the action happened.

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German Submarine U-166: A Short, Violent Career

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

U-166 was a Type IXC U-boat, built at the Seebeckwerft shipyard in Bremerhaven and commissioned on March 23, 1942, under Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Gunther Kuhlmann. She carried a crew of 52, was armed with six torpedo tubes and 22 torpedoes, and mounted deck guns fore and aft. Af...

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German Submarine U-166: Twelve Minutes in the Gulf

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The engagement lasted barely longer than it takes to brew coffee. U-166 fired a torpedo into the Robert E. Lee, a passenger steamer under Navy escort. PC-566 turned to attack immediately, approaching from outside the U-boat's periscope arc. Claudius ordered two sequenced depth ch...

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German Submarine U-166: Found by Accident, Vindicated by Science

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The truth waited on the seafloor for nearly six decades. In 2001, archaeologists Robert Church and Daniel Warren from C&C Marine were surveying the seabed ahead of a natural gas pipeline when their sonar picked up two large sections of wreckage amid a debris field -- the unmistak...

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German Submarine U-166: Setting the Record Straight

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On December 16, 2014, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus posthumously awarded Herbert Claudius the Legion of Merit with a Combat "V" device for heroism. "Seventy years later, we now know that his report after the action was absolutely correct," Mabus said. "His ship did sink that U-...

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