Unterseeboot 47 (U-47) was a German type VII B U-Boat (submarine). She was laid down on February 25, 1937 at Krupp Germaniawerft in Kiel and went into service on December 17, 1938.[1]
U-47 became famous when, on October 14, 1939, under the command of Günther Prien, she managed to enter the base of the British home fleet at Scapa Flow through a hole in the defence line, and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak.
The Royal Oak was in Scapa Flow in a largely unprepared state, although the Second World War had recently begun.
U-47s first two salvos did nothing more than sever an anchor chain. After reloading the bow tubes the last salvo of three torpedoes struck the battleship causing severe flooding. Taking on a list of 15 degrees, her open portholes were submerged worsening the flooding and the list to 45 degrees; she sank within 15 minutes with the loss of over 800 men.
U-47 carried out ten combat patrols and spent a total of 238 days at sea. She sank 30 enemy merchant ships (164,953 tons) and damaged eight more. She did lose a sailor, Heinrich Mantyk, overboard on September 5, 1940.
U-47 had a displacement of 761 metric tons, 865 tons submerged. She was powered by two 1400 PS (1 MW) diesel engines and two 375 PS (280 kW) electric motors. Her speed was 17 knots (31 km/h) on the surface and 7.6 knots (14 km/h) submerged. Her underwater armament consisted of four torpedo tubes in the bow and one in the stern. The deck artillery consisted of an 88 mm gun and a 20 mm anti-aircraft automatic cannon. The vessel’s range was 6500 nautical miles (12,000 km).
U-47 went missing on March 7, 1941 and she was once thought to have been sunk by the British destroyer HMS Wolverine west of Ireland, but it turned out that the ship attacked there was actually the U-A, part of the Foreign U-Boats corps. To date, there is no official record of what happened to the U-47 or her 45 crewmen, though a variety of possibilities exist, including mines, a mechanical failure, a victim of her own torpedoes, or possibly a later attack that didn’t confirm any kills – by the corvette team of HMS Camellia and HMS Arbutus.
Many years later, in September 2002, one of the unexploded torpedoes that the U-47 had fired off-course during the attack on HMS Royal Oak rose to the surface from its resting place at the bottom. The unexploded torpedo, minus its warhead, gradually drifted towards the shore, where it was spotted by a crewman aboard the Norwegian tanker Petrotrym. A Royal Navy tugboat intercepted the torpedo, and after identifying it as belonging to the U-47 63 years earlier, EOD personnel detonated it a mile from shore.
