# U-boat captain who shot down NZ VC-winner found



## syscom3 (Apr 18, 2007)

uboat.net - Boats - U-468

U-boat captain who shot down NZ VC-winner found 

The captain of the U-Boat whose anti-aircraft fire shot down New 
Zealand Victoria Cross winner Lloyd Trigg's Royal Air Force Liberator 
more than 60 years ago is still alive in Germany, an Auckland 
aviation researcher has discovered. 

Arthur "Digger" Arculus has also unearthed fresh details about the 
fierce Atlantic action that cost the lives of Trigg, his seven crew 
and many of the submarine's complement. 

Uniquely, it was the testimony of the enemy skipper, Klemens 
Schamong, and the other few survivors from U-468, destroyed by 
Trigg's exploding depth charges as his aircraft plunged into the sea, 
that led to the posthumous award of the Commonwealth' s highest award 
for bravery. 

Trigg and his men perished on August 11, 1943, 386km off Dakar, West 
Africa, as they attacked U-468 on the ocean surface. Shells from the 
German vessel's flak guns ripped into the Liberator but the sheets of 
flames that erupted did not deter Trigg. 

The depth charges released moments before the aircraft crashed 
exploded alongside the submarine with devastating effect. Schamong 
told Arculus they "damaged the boat to death". 

Now 90, the old seaman lives in a small town not far from Kiel where 
his U-Boat was built, and commissioned exactly a year before its 
sinking. 

When Arculus began researching Trigg's story for young Australian Sam 
Biddle, an eight-year-old grandson of a Trigg cousin, who wanted to 
know more about his famous relation, he decided to try to find out 
what had happened to Schamong. 

Arculus, 80, started his Schamong quest by e-mailing a German 
contact. The man's detective work eventually turned up a John 
Schamong, a Captain in the German Navy. More checks showed he was 
indeed the son of the old submariner and, yes, his father was still 
alive. 

Schamong Senior responded to an Arculus letter with a short note 
about the sinking and several enclosures, among them an old letter 
from the Canadian navigator of the RAF Sunderland that found the U-
Boat survivors. 

Schamong remembered the Atlantic action vividly: "We opened deadly 
fire from our `two 20mm cannons' and the first salvo at a distance of 
2000m set the plane on fire. Despite this, Trigg continued his 
attack. He did not give up as we thought and hoped. His plane. . . 
flew deeper and deeper. We could see our deadly fire piercing through 
his hull. And when Trigg was almost over us we saw his `ash cans' 
coming down on us and (they) exploded and damaged the boat to death." 

It was not surprising Schamong expected Trigg to "give up" because on 
an earlier patrol the sub's flak frightened off a Grumman Avenger 
from a US carrier escorting an Atlantic convoy. 

Schamong told Arculus that he informed interrogators after his rescue 
that "such a gallant fighter as Trigg would have been decorated in 
Germany with the highest medal or order". 

The letter said little else so Arculus asked Horst Ahrens, a friend 
in Kiel, to put a handful of questions to Schamong. Unfortunately the 
ex-skipper did not wish to go further. 

It might have ended there but Arculus has since received a copy of 
the now declassified October 1943 Naval Intelligence Division (NID) 
report disclosing what had been learned from the interrogation of 
Schamong and the other survivors after their arrival in Britain as 
POWs. 

The report said the U-Boat's shooting was so accurate the Liberator 
was on fire before she had properly lined up the sub. 

"She nevertheless ran in to attack with great determination and 
without deviating to avoid the U-Boat's sustained and heavy fire." 

The aircraft crossed the submarine behind the bridge at a height of 
just 15m, hit the sea 300m away and blew up. But as she roared over 
the U-Boat the depth charges tumbled down, two exploding with 
tremendous force within 2m of the submarine. 

"The whole U-Boat was thrown violently upward and suffered 
catastrophic damage." 

The massive blasts ruptured the hull, tore engines, motors and 
transformers from their mountings, blew the fuel tank above the 
diesels down and shook equipment off bulkheads. 

Water poured into the battery compartment and the sub filled with 
clouds of choking, killing chlorine gas, submariners' worst 
nightmare. 

The U-Boat went down inside 10 minutes, leaving 20 swimming crew 
battling the horror of sharks and barracuda, attracted by blood 
leaking from wounds. 

Then miraculously a rating found an RAF rubber dinghy floating in the 
aircraft's debris, inflated it and climbed in with two other seamen. 
Eventually, Schamong, his first lieutenant and an engineer officer 
supporting a wounded rating on his back were hauled in – seven 
survivors from a crew of 39. 

A Sunderland, searching for the missing Liberator crew, spotted the 
dinghy the following day, its crew understandably jumping to the 
conclusion the waving men were their RAF mates. 

Arculus' research trail led recently to Patrick Dempsey, 84, the 
Sunderland's Canadian navigator, now living in Florida. 

Dempsey says he remembers watching sharks circling the dinghy and 
some swimming under it. "We could see them very plainly from the 
air." 

He worked out the position of the dingy, radioed it to base "and then 
we prepared to drop two emergency supply packs which were about the 
size of a man each". 

The Sunderland made two runs, the first so accurate the package 
almost hit the dinghy, scaring the Germans out of their wits. The 
second was much further away – too far away to recover because there 
were no paddles in the survivors' dinghy. 

The patrolling aircraft dropped marker dye and headed home. HMS 
Clarkia arrived the next day and took the Germans aboard. 

The NID report called Schamong "a civilised type with considerable 
poise and charm, in marked contrast to many U-Boat officers. He 
nevertheless had very firm ideas of the duties of a German officer in 
captivity, was constantly on his guard and divulged nothing 
concerning his boat except the story of the sinking". 

Arculus was unable to discover anything about Schamong's postwar life 
until he got an unexpected e-mail recently from Wolfgang Schamong, a 
nephew, who unravelled this small mystery. 

The younger man revealed his uncle became a lawyer after the war, 
eventually joined Germany's Defence Ministry and in the mid-1970s 
headed a liaison team in Paris working on German-French naval ships. 
He and his wife had son John and twin daughters. 

Schamong also told Arculus an astonishing story about his uncle's 
mother, a devout Catholic. 

"Now, the same day when the `Atlantic' fight took place she was at 
home in Cologne asleep and suddenly woke hearing the noise of water 
streaming into the room. She first thought of some damage to the 
water pipes but then said to her husband, `It's not here. I see 
Klemens' U-Boat sinking but he and some others are safe'." 

A mother's intuition perhaps. 

Oberleutnant zur See Klemens Schamong, who joined the German navy in 
1938, was the only skipper of U-468 and it was his first and last 
command. 

The U-Boat didn't have much luck as she hunted with submarine packs 
in the North Atlantic during her first two patrols, sinking only one 
Allied ship, a small empty west-bound tanker. 

She left La Pallice, on France's Atlantic Coast, on her third patrol 
on July 7, 1943, and was sunk by Trigg barely a month later. 
Schamong's fuel-short boat was returning to base when Trigg found 
her, creeping along the West African coast. 

Flying Officer Lloyd Allan Trigg, born at Houhora, Northland, in May 
1914, was about four years older than Schamong. He farmed, then 
became a salesman before enlisting in June 1941. 

Trigg trained in Canada and after reaching England was posted to 200 
Squadron in West Africa flying Hudsons. 

He did about 50 operations – shipping reconnaissance, convoy patrols, 
anti-submarine flights – on the twin-engined aircraft before flying 
to the US in May 1943 for a conversion course to fly Liberators, much 
bigger four-engined American bombers. 

The New Zealander died not knowing he had already been awarded the 
Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for two determined attacks on U-
Boats in March 1943. Notification had not reached his squadron before 
his death. 

Four of the other seven airmen killed with him were New Zealanders – 
Ivan Marinovich (navigator), 26, from Auckland, Arthur Bennett 
(wireless operator), 29, Lower Hutt, Lawrence Frost (gunner), 22, 
Auckland, and Terry Soper (gunner), 21, Takaka. 

Marinovich and Bennett were in Trigg's original Hudson crew and 
together the five hugely experienced New Zealanders collectively 
totalled more than 250 ops. Frost had done no fewer than 65. Two 
Britons and a Canadian made up the rest of the crew. All eight are 
commemorated on the Malta Memorial to the air war dead. 

The final two sentences of Trigg's citation declare that the 
Liberator captain's exploit stood out in the Battle of the Atlantic 
as an "epic of grim determination and high courage. His was the path 
of duty that leads to glory". 

The same could be said too of all his crew.


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## timshatz (Apr 18, 2007)

Wow. Amazing.


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## comiso90 (Apr 18, 2007)

Now find the Avenger pilot who was scared off!


.... good post thanks


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## Gnomey (Apr 18, 2007)

Very interesting post.


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## Wildcat (Apr 19, 2007)

Great story.


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## DerAdlerIstGelandet (Apr 19, 2007)

Very interesting.

 to both of them.


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