# U-Boat Wreck Possibly Found In Canadian River- fr CBC News



## Ex-Dragoon

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2012/07/25/nl-u-boat-labrador-discovery-725.html

*German U-boat may be at bottom of Labrador river * 
Divers believe they have located WWII submarine 100 kilometres from ocean
An important piece of history from the Second World War may be sitting in a river in Labrador.
Searchers believe they've found a German U-boat buried in the sand on the bottom of the Churchill River. The discovery has yet to be authenticated.
Two years ago, searchers scoured the bottom of the Churchill River with side-scanning sonar. They were looking for three men lost over Muskrat Falls.
When they reviewed the footage from that search, they made an unexpected discovery.
"We were looking for something completely different, not a submarine, not a U-boat — I mean, no one would ever believe that was possible," Brian Corbin told CBC News.  
"It was a great feeling when we found it."
At first glance, it can be hard to spot the submarine on the sonar image of the riverbed. When you put it next to a drawing of the boat, some of the features become a lot clearer.
"It's 150-feet long, 30 metres, exactly what our side-scan sonar shows," Corbin said.
"So we're pretty sure it is, and we've filed this with receiverships and wrecks, and I think they're confirming that it is possibly a U-boat."
It's unclear how the sub may have ended up that far inland, more than 100 kilometres from the ocean.

*German reaction*
The German government says it is possible, but added that it would be "sensational and unusual," that a submarine could have ended up so far inland.
"We do know that German U-boats did operate in that region," said Georg Juergens, the deputy head of mission for the German Embassy in Ottawa.  
He notes that a Second World War-era, battery-operated weather station was found decades after being left in Labrador by a U-boat. It is now on display at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
"We must brace ourselves for surprises," Juergens told CBC News, while stressing that the submarine has yet to be positively identified.
More than a dozen U-boats may still be unaccounted for, he said.
If the mystery find is proven to be a submarine wreck, the German government does not favour bringing it to the surface.
"That would be against our tradition and our naval customs," Juergens said. "This site then would be declared a war grave at sea."
He said Canadian policy dovetails with German policy on such matters.
According to Juergens, the Newfoundland and Labrador government is now involved in efforts to authenticate the possible wreck.

*Back to the river*
If the German government agrees, Corbin wants to head back out onto the Churchill River.
He'll use a remote-operated vehicle to take a closer look – and, he hopes, answer the question of whether there is a submarine there once and for all.
Oddly enough, the story of a U-boat beaching in the Churchill River is the subject of a novel written in the early 1990s.
In that story, the crew defects. Over the years, many have taken this fictional story to be fact.
Other incidents
There have also been other recorded incidents of U-boat activity in the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador.
In 1942, a German torpedo sank the ferry SS Caribou on a run between North Sydney, N.S., and Port aux Basques, N.L., killing 136 people.
According to the Newfoundland and Labrador heritage website, submarine U-587 fired three torpedoes at St. John's earlier that year. Two of them hit the cliffs below the city's iconic Cabot Tower.
U-boats sank four ore carriers off nearby Bell Island in late 1942, killing more than 60.
When the war ended in 1945, U-190 surrendered to Canadian forces and sailed into Bay Bulls, just south of St. John's.
A piece of that U-boat stayed in Newfoundland — its periscope found a home at the Crow's Nest Officers' Club in downtown St. John's, where it remains to this day.


Follow the link to see a picture of the image detected on the side scan sonar.


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## Ex-Dragoon

Hey Cdn Aviator would you use the same tactics to hunt a sub in a river as you do the ocean?

Hypothetical question...if this is a U-Boat that made it up that far inland could not a modern day SSK such as a Kilo repeat the same feat?


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## aesop081

Ex-Dragoon said:
			
		

> Hey Cdn Aviator would you use the same tactics to hunt a sub in a river as you do the ocean?



Yes. No.


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## Maxadia

Anyone here know the title of the 1990's novel that the article mentioned?


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## chrisf

I looked at the picture for a while, and like most of the commentators on CBC's website, I couldn't see a submarine.

As I refuse to be lumped into the same category as CBC website commentators, I asked my better half, who happens to be a hydrographer, to show me the submarine.

Unfortuantely, she work mostly with multi-beam systems, and wasn't sure right away where the submarine was either... this frustrated her so she spent an hour or so lookng into it.

She came up with this

http://www.epa.gov/boldkids/images/sidescansonar/5.jpg

Which is side scan imagery of U-166.

After looking at that, she decided it was in the lower left quarter of the image, you can match up the conning tower and see the outline from there...

Any sonar folk want to comment on if she was close?


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## GAP

Your wife's image is discernable, the CBC one is not....


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## Pat in Halifax

RDJP said:
			
		

> Anyone here know the title of the 1990's novel that the article mentioned?


I wonder if they are referring (very loosely) to Hunt for Red October?

Anyway, this whole thing is plausible as there are upwards to 50 Uboats still unaccounted for. Be interesting to see what pans out later this year.
http://uboat.net/fates/missing.htm


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## Pat in Halifax

After going through the 'unknowns' at the above link, there would appear to be several candidates with U381 (south of Greenland) and U184 (east of Newfoundland) being the only ones specific to the western Atlantic.


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## jollyjacktar

GAP said:
			
		

> Your wife's image is discernable, the CBC one is not....


I agree, but then that's not my part ship.

I listened on radio this morning to the man who reviewed the returns.  He said that what he saw was the sail and the wires which went from the top to the bow of the boat.  What I am curious about is the depth and width of this river.  Is it big enough to have had boats operating in it back then?


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## Journeyman

Pat in Halifax said:
			
		

> After going through the 'unknowns' at the above link, there would appear to be several candidates with U381 (south of Greenland) and U184 (east of Newfoundland) being the only ones specific to the western Atlantic.


Which gets back to the problem of size -- U381 is a 67m Type VIIC and U184 is a 77m Type IXC/40 -- both twice as long as the claimed wreckage.

Still interesting though.


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## Maxadia

Journeyman said:
			
		

> Which gets back to the problem of size -- U381 is a 67m Type VIIC and U184 is a 77m Type IXC/40 -- both twice as long as the claimed wreckage.
> 
> Still interesting though.



Maybe there's only 30m of wreckage showing?


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## Journeyman

:dunno:


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## Rifleman62

http://www.uboatarchive.net/index.html

U-Boat Archive

An excellent web site, with lots of interesting info from all elements of war time sources. You can follow the action from the mission/sinking/ intelligence officer reports.


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## Chrispi

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> What I am curious about is the depth and width of this river.  Is it big enough to have had boats operating in it back then?



I had the exact same questions; checking the inter-tubes for the past 10-15 minutes has produced little success.  It's the longest river in the province, but getting depths and widths along a possible route...   

Anyone have better luck or a have a good resource to find river depths/widths?


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## Gunner98

"It's 150-feet long, 30 metres, exactly what our side-scan sonar shows," Corbin said.

I am confused by the two numbers,  30m equals 98.43 feet and not 150 ft;  150 feet is 45.72 metres.


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## Rifleman62

SECRET GERMAN WEATHER STATION ON CANADA'S LABRADOR COAST DISCOVERED 30 YEARS AFTER END OF WWII

Donna Andrew - Marine Liaison Officer - Transport Canada.

Kapitan-Leutnant Peter Schrewe was only 23 years of age when ordered by the German navy to take command of his first U-boat. Mission: to establish, in the autumn of 1943, an unmanned automatic weather station in the northern Labrador Territory of Newfoundland. Purpose; to improve western Atlantic weather analysis for the German navy and air force (Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe).

I was personally involved in helping solve this little-known mystery, when I embarked in Canada's largest icebreaker, the Louis S. St. Laurent, a Canadian Coast Guard expedition steamed through the frigid waters along the Labrador coast. Off its northernmost point, at Cape Chidley, the expedition found signs of one of the few Nazi operations on North American soil during the Second World War.

The tip-off about the covert operation came from retired German engineer, Franz Selinger. Selinger, who joined J. Y. Clarke, Canadian Coast Guard's fleet director, and Dr. Alec Douglas, official historian for the Department of National Defence, on board the St. Laurent in Dartmouth, N.S., on 12 July 1981.
Herr Selinger brought with him powerful evidence, not then wholly conclusive, that the Germans had landed on what was then the British Crown colony of Labrador, which became the Canadian province of Newfoundland-Labrador in 1949. It was obvious that if Selinger's evidence could be verified, we had a national news story on our hands. So I signed up for the trip.

For Douglas, the story began two years previously, when he received a letter from the Austrian-born Selinger, who is preparing a book on Arctic weather reconnaissance. Selinger wrote to Douglas at the suggestion of Prof. Dr. Rowher, of Germany's Stuttgart library for contemporary history. Rowher and Douglas had met at a maritime conference in Germany some years earlier.

Selinger's 1979 letter asked Douglas for details of two weather installation activities during the war. "There were, as we know," wrote Selinger, "contemporary actions of Germans and Canadian Forces in the same region where weather reconnaissance activities were to be observed." The first was on the German-controlled Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, north of Norway, where a Canadian raiding-force had landed in 1941, destroyed the coal-mines and evacuated the inhabitants to Britain. After the Canadian force left, German troops re-landed and operated a manned weather observation post there between October 1941 and July 1942.

"Later in the war," continued Selinger, "German U-boats landed on the coast of Labrador and established an automatic weather station that was later captured by the forces of your country." In the same letter, Selinger said that he had seen a photograph of such a station and would be "obliged" if Douglas would give him further details of the automatic weather station installed in Labrador.

Historian Douglas could tell Selinger much about Spitzbergen, but wrote back that he had no knowledge of any Labrador operation. "You get a little weary of unsubstantiated reports 40 years after the fact," explained Douglas. "All kinds of so-called sightings of Germans on Canadian shores during the war had been reported. To the last one, reports have been checked out but none of them has been conclusive: the evidence just never supports the rumor." Douglas suggested to Selinger that the automatic weather station to which he referred was "the one in Greenland, as Canada had certain interests there at the time."

Selinger was not deterred. The paper-chase was on. He wrote Douglas again. "You say there were no landings of German U-boats on the Labrador coast, but I wonder where the enclosed information comes from." In the course of his research, Selinger found and included in his letter to Douglas a photocopied reference to the WFL6 Weather Station Kurt (one of of a series of 21 wetterfunkgerat) established by a U-boat on the Labrador coast. Douglas conducted an exhaustive search. He inspected the files from the Royal Canadian Navy's Flag Officer Newfoundland. Nothing. He checked out resources of the commander in chief Canadian Northwest Atlantic; another dead end. The Eastern Air Command of the Royal Canadian Air Force had no positive authentic evidence. War diaries and military, federal, and archival records -- all were silent on the subject.

"It didn't help my search to discover that all headquarters operational records of naval intelligence had been destroyed in Ottawa five years after the war," said Douglas. "Some overzealous bureaucrat had tossed them -- all of them -- to the shredder."

Selinger, while investigating documents held by the son of a German meteorological scientist, Herr Sommermeyer, had stumbled on a series of photographs of which two in particular showed a German U-boat, and in the background, a different kind of terrain from all the others.
More importantly, there was something peculiar about the U-boat in the two pictures. The U-boat was a type IXC submarine, without the usual 20-mm. quadruple antiaircraft flak gun. [Unknown by Canadians at the time, the AA-guns had been torn off the U-boat by a fierce Atlantic storm during the voyage from Germany.]

These were important clues. First, the photos were definitely not Spitzbergen, Bear Island, or any other eastern Atlantic/Arctic site. Secondly, the type IXC boat suggested a distant operation. Such boats were selected for long-range missions. Thirdly, this boat should be easy to identify. Its armament was distinctive. Selinger thus had fresh evidence. In a search that took him through hundreds of U-boat logs, he found at last the log book of U-537 and the name of its young commander, Peter-Schrewe. There, unmistakably stated in Schrewe's meticulous recording of his 1943 mission was this entry from Kiel:
Sept. 18 1943 Leaving port for first operational cruise
09:00 h Orders are to erect an automatic weather station on Labrador Coast--Canada.

Selinger immediately phoned Douglas in Canada, who called an old friend, Jim Clarke. Captain Clarke, commanding officer of HMCS Athabaskan in the 1960s, knew Douglas as a young naval officer. Both hadd kept in touch over the years. Alec filled me in on the investigative events of the preceding two years. He told me about Franz Selinger, about Peter Schrewe's log book, about the photographs. And above all he told me about Canada's sheer ignorance in face of the facts He also knew that our Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers made routine summer Arctic deployments up the Labrador coast to Lancaster Sound. Would it be possible, he asked, for Selinger to board one of our - icebreakers to chase down this amazing piece of research?"
Clarke became convinced of the incontrovertible evidence held by the German. It was certainly possible for Selinger to take passage in a Coast Guard icebreaker up to Labrador. In addition, said Clarke, it is withinthe mandate of the Coast Guard to assist other government departments on research matters. He would arrange not only for Selinger, but for Douglas and himself, to take the trip into the Arctic. "I had intended to spend time aboard a ship of the fleet this summer," Clarke said. "That we might find a little piece of history on our way was a further incentive."

Clarke, Selinger, Douglas, and I left Dartmouth on July 16, 1983, aboard the Coastguard patrol vessel 'Louis S. St. Laurent', under the command of Captain M. S. Tanner and at 14,000 tonnes the largest icebreaker in the Coast Guard fleet. Destination: Martin Bay, 32 kilometers south of Cape Chidley, due south of Baffin Island on the northern tip of the Labrador coast. On July 21, early in the Arctic morning, the icebreaker dropped anchor16 nautical miles from the rock-bound coast.

With Selinger's wartime photos showing prominent land features, and Peter Schrewe's navigational records, we boarded the St.-Laurent's helicopter and flew towards the coast. Making just a single pass around the mountain, we traced what must have been U-537's path up through the channel between Home and Avayalook Islands,-thence over Martin Bay.

"There it is," cried the chopper's pilot Les Bennetts, "Down there, on-the left." As carefully as a baby put down to sleep, the Bell 206LI set us down on a rocky ledge. Twenty meters away lay the remains of the German weather station.

The discovery has since been widely recorded in the national and international news media. Peter Schrewe had indeed successfully completed, through a navigational nightmare, his mission to erect a weather station in Martin Bay, Labrador.

KaLu Schrewe later died on another U-boat mission, when U-537 was sunk with all hands by torpedoes launched from the American submarine "USS Flounder" off Java in 1944. He could never know that 38 years later the drama and danger of his mission were uncovered by a fellow German. Nor would he ever know that his mission would create international headlines and make him a public name in his homeland. 

We found the corroded remains of that station, intact except for the transmitter, parts of the encoding device, and one of the module canisters. German manufacturers' labels were visible on batteries and assorted devices.

Someone had been there before us, though whoever it was had probably dismissed it as a Canadian relay station. For Peter Schrewe's crew had convincingly carved on one of the weather canister heads the falsified inscription "Canadian Weather Service."

Like the layer upon layer which form the spectacular pack-ice of the Canadian Arctic, this story contains others within it. There is the story that captured international headlines. How a Canadian Coast Guard team located the first known evidence that this Nazi installation had been established on North American shores, 38 years after the event.

There is the story -- a highly technical one -- of how in the early 1940s, Germany held the state-of-the-art technology in radio communications.
There is a jigsaw story to delight any armchair military buff's sense of battle and history. Just how did this automatic station, transmitting weather information for the Germans during the late 1943 and early 1944, affect the timing and events of a most crucial phase of the U-boat war in the Atlantic?
There is a story to authenticate. Who dismantled the station in Martin Bay and when? [Subsequent research established that the radio device had not been dismantled; it simply ceased to transmit weather information only a few months after it was set up.] Did the Germans come back? Was it a casual Inuit hunting party? Was it a Canadian search and destroy team? Why was the transmitter taken? And who left behind a single undated .303 rifle cartridge shell, with the inscription "British Dominion?"

But the real story belongs to Peter Schrewe and Franz Selinger. It is “KaLu” Peter Schrewe, young and green, who guided his large submarine across an enemy-infested ocean and snaked past rocks and shoals to the barren shores of Martin Bay. Unwittingly, he made history in 1943. And it was Selinger, in pursuit of the facts, like a terrier chasing a fox to earth, who brought Canadian history back to Canada.


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## Rifleman62

Two more photos. One is possibly a contemporary photo with the author of the article, rather than a photo of the U-Boat crew.


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## Blackadder1916

RDJP said:
			
		

> Anyone here know the title of the 1990's novel that the article mentioned?



I don't think it was a best seller.  Possibly they mean:

HARD AGROUND 
Sellars, Walter 
St. John's, Breakwater, 1992. 93pp, paper, $9.95, ISBN 1-55081-014-6

Information from this review of the work http://www.umanitoba.ca/cm/cmarchive/vol20no5/revhardaground.html

and some background on the author here


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## GR66

The automatic assumption seems to be that this is a U-Boat.  As far as I can tell this sub is also approximately 150' in length, and based on the threat faced by the owners in this thread (http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/106806.0.html), it makes perfect sense for them to disperse their assets in preparation for an inevitable counter-attack!




We now return to your regular programming...


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## Old Sweat

At this stage we can't rule anything out, but it does sound implausible, like finding an UFO on the sea bed in the Baltic. First question - why would a submarine venture over 100 kms up a fairly major river in the first place? What would have been the aim and the objective? Why the assumption that it was German, although that might be a logical starting point?


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## fraserdw

Honestly, looking at the better picture, if that black thing is a conning tower on it's side it is very German like in appearance.  I would love to be on the expedition team even it means washing dishes!


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## The Bread Guy

<fiction tangent>
The 1941 movie "49th Parallel"  (starring a Raymond Massey, Leslie Howard and younger Larry Olivier, doing a cheesy French accent - all reportedly working on 1/2 pay for the war effort) is based on a fictional U-boat landing on Hudson Bay - interesting trivia on the flick here.
</fiction tangent>


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## jollyjacktar

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> <fiction tangent>
> The 1941 movie "49th Parallel"  (starring a Raymond Massey, Leslie Howard and younger Larry Olivier, doing a cheesy French accent - all reportedly working on 1/2 pay for the war effort) is based on a fictional U-boat landing on Hudson Bay - interesting trivia on the flick here.
> </fiction tangent>


Seen it.  God is it ever cheesy, throughout.  But that was to be expected of the times and propaganda needs of the day.


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## Journeyman

From the trivia:


> The 49th Parallel of the title is the circle of latitude 49th parallel north or 49 degrees north. As the film mentions, it represents the border between USA and Canada, the latter of which where most of the film takes place. The 49th Parallel also crosses Europe, Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the Atlantic Ocean.


Really?   :facepalm:


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## Old Sweat

The last point of the trivia page is out to lunch, where it states correctly that the Niagara River flows south to north. It goes on to claim the United States is on the west side of the river. A glance at a map shows this to be bassackwards, as those of us who grew up in the Niagara region can attest.


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## Oldgateboatdriver

GAP said:
			
		

> Your wife's image is discernable, the CBC one is not....



You are bang on GAP.

The CBC picture is as nice and clear a sidescan picture as you can get, but the wreckage that is showing is far from identifiable as anything in particular at this point. And if you look under the two scraggly "wire" thingies right aft (forward?) of what is claimed to be the sail of the submarien, it looks strangely smooth to me. I suspect there is a good deal of something burried deep in the sand there. 

Considering the size claimed by the dicoverer (30m.), the various elements we can see, etc. I would be willing to bet a bottle of Screech that, once this is properly uncovered, it turns out to be a WWII long range patrol plane or large bomber.


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## chrisf

They've since added a video to the article, which includes a picture of a u-boat over-laid on the sonar image.

Not even close to where my resident hydrographer picked it out at.


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## Journeyman

a Sig Op said:
			
		

> Not even close to where my resident hydrographer picked it out at.


Don't make me take the MilPoints away for having been informative!         ;D

If anything, that overlay makes their claim a bit more dubious.


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## Ex-Dragoon

I know I can't pick the bloody thing out.


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## Dirt Digger

Ex-Dragoon said:
			
		

> I know I can't pick the bloody thing out.



You just gotta relax your eyes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_f8ayQQx4I


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## chrisf

I love how CBC (the video more so than the article) is reporting it as "U-boat found at the bottom of the chuchill river!" rather then "Somthing was found, it looks vaguely like a u-boat, but we really have no idea what it is, and now we're curious"


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## Old Sweat

The National Post has picked up the story, but takes a generally wait and see attitude. It is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act.

Check the link for some interesting images:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/26/search-team-returning-to-churchill-river-after-release-of-sonar-images-showing-suspected-nazi-submarine/

Search team returning to Churchill River after release of sonar images showing suspected Nazi submarine

Jake Edmiston  Jul 26, 2012 – 11:35 PM ET | Last Updated: Jul 26, 2012 11:37 PM ET 

Until this week, proof of a sunken Nazi submarine in Labrador was confined to old rumours of dark shadows in the Churchill River.

The stories go back decades, suggesting that German U-boats had snaked along the river bottom and deep into Labrador.

Now newly released sonar images depicting a mysterious submerged shape near Happy Valley-Goose Bay have generated excitement among those who believe the old tales and skepticism among those who don’t.

The images were taken in the summer of 2010, when Brian Corbin volunteered to spend several weeks looking for the bodies of three drowning victims. He was using a sonar device beneath the boat when what looked like a large chunk of metal appeared on his screen.

Mr. Corbin noted the anomaly and moved on.

But when a film crew showed up in the area this month ­— chasing the local myth of a sunken submarine — Mr. Corbin decided to revisit the images he had stored on a computer.

With the help of colleague Junior Pinksen, Mr. Corbin compared old U-boat diagrams to a peculiar, 30-metre protrusion at the bottom of the river.

Most of the object appears to be covered by sand, but the pair say they can make out the deck of the ship, cables typically attached to the top of U-boats, a gun mount and a set of snorkels used to bring in air without surfacing.

“A lot of people will actually talk about their grandparents who saw the dark shadows,” said Mr. Corbin. “Everybody thought it was foolish. It’s a bunch of lies. It’s made up.”
The object reportedly sits 60 feet below the surface of the murky river, full of sand and silt that Mr. Corbin says kept the find secret for decades.

German submarines were known to roam off the Eastern Canadian coast during the Second World War, destroying 23 Allied cargo vessels and warships in the St. Lawrence River. In the 1980s, remnants of a German weather station were discovered in Northern Labrador.

One of the most famous Nazi attacks in the Western Atlantic destroyed a passenger ferry, the S.S. Caribou, between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island in 1942, killing about 140 passengers.

But the recent sonar images come from a portion of the Churchill River that is more than 200 kilometres from the ocean — a fact local historians are finding problematic.

The theory that the images depict a German sub is largely based on local folklore stemming from the 1992 novel Hard Aground.

The story refers to a German U-boat captain who is fed up with the war’s bloodshed and scuttles his vessel in the Churchill River, allowing his crew to escape safely.

There are some U-boats that essentially vanished without anyone knowing the cause It’s fiction, says the author, 93-year-old veteran Walter Sellars, who was stationed in Goose Bay during the latter part of the Second World War.

Mr. Sellars returned to the area in the 1960s to reconnect with two Inuit hunters who saved his life in a severe blizzard during the war. They told him about seeing dark shadows moving under the surface of the river.

“I have no other proof at all,” says Mr. Sellars. “I think the present search will not find a submarine there.”

The search team plans to revisit the site next week to photograph the peculiar object using a remote-control vehicle.

Canadian historians and academics who are following the story are anxious to see what comes from the mission.

“I’m always skeptical. This is only based on a shape in a sonar,” said Mike O’Brien, a history professor at Memorial University in St. John’s. “I’m only saying it’s not impossible.”

A spokesperson for the German Embassy in Ottawa told CBC News that about a dozen U-boats remain unaccounted for.

According to the Canadian War Museum, radio communications became compromised halfway through the war and many U-boat captains were warned not to report their whereabouts to headquarters for fear of being intercepted by Allied forces.

“There are some U-boats that essentially vanished without anyone knowing the cause,” said Jeff Noakes, the War Museum’s Second World War expert.

However, there is no evidence of submarine conflict in the Churchill River, and experts are questioning what a submarine would be doing so far from the Atlantic and how it would have sunk.

“I’d be surprised if a submarine wound up there,” said Mr. Noakes.

The search team has submitted its sonar images to the Canadian authority for sunken ships, the Receiver of Wrecks, which is also conducting an investigation.

And until further evidence surfaces, the mystery of the Churchill River shadows is likely to stay wedged between fiction and fact.


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## Wookilar

Now, I am not very knowledgeable about underwater exploration of anykind, but isn't 60' kind of shallow?

Instead of all these cameras and sonar and such, why don't we get a couple of divers in dry suits with some big honking flashlights and a shovel go down there and have a peek?

Of course, not much self-generating press in that I suppose ....


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## Colin Parkinson

Divers are expensive and generally annoying....  ROV's aren't


A couple of the U-boat classes were 45m but whre meant as coastal boats.


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## exspy

An English language news report on the found U-Boat from a German news service.

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120729-44037.html


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## The Bread Guy

> A search for a suspected Second World War German submarine in a Labrador river has turned up only a sandy mound of frustration and an unresolved military mystery.
> 
> A remote-operated vehicle was used for two days to probe the deep, murky depths of the Churchill River, where a sonar image has suggested that a U-boat may have sunk.
> 
> The search over the past week, however, not only didn't add new information to what a prior search had uncovered, it found that the object — first identified two years ago, but not made public until last month — has subsequently been buried by sand and clay that had eroded from nearby cliffs.
> 
> Still, diver Brian Corbin says the lack of new evidence hasn't shaken his belief that the object may have been a U-boat.
> 
> "We believe what we have is a German submarine," Corbin told CBC News. "We're still getting raised elevation there — there's something there." ....


CBC.ca, 7 Aug 12




A German U-boat is superimposed over a sunken mass that some believe is a German submarine sitting at the bottom of the Churchill River in central Labrador. (CBC )


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## Old Sweat

And the lost U Boat won't go away. Rather than start a new thread, I decided to continue the one from last year. While the whole thing is long on speculation, missing only chemtrails to bring it up to date, it probably will never go away. It is reproduced from the National Post site under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act.


Group on mission to prove there is truth in legends that Nazi submarines went far inland from Canadian coast
Tristin Hopper | 13/04/19 | Last Updated: 13/04/20 2:33 PM ET

It was the fall of 1944 and the Canadian navy corvette HMCS Arrowhead had just finished escorting a convoy into Goose Bay, Labrador when its skipper, Lester Hickey, ordered the vessel to stop outside the Inuit community of Rigolet.

The skipper tossed an explosive over the side and when a school of stunned cod rose to the surface, he scooped them up, cut off their heads and threw the prime fillets and the rest of the fish back into the sea. All he wanted was the critical ingredient for his signature cod head soup.

“The soup went down pretty good,” said Glenn Martin, 90, a former Arrowhead crew member now living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.


Fast forward to 1954 and Mr. Martin is a young machinist in Prince Albert getting a routine chest x-ray from a Czechoslovakian-born doctor.

The men began chit-chatting about the war and, upon learning that Mr. Martin was aboard the Arrowhead, the doctor said, “Remember the time you went fishing off of Rigolet?”

The doctor had also been off the Labrador coast that day, he explained, hiding just beneath the waves in a German U-Boat. “He was watching us through the periscope,” said Mr. Martin.

This month, Mr. Martin’s story of a sub lurking at the mouth of the Churchill River became valuable evidence for an East Coast group on a mission to prove that a strange protrusion recently discovered near Muskrat Falls in central Labrador is a long-lost Nazi submarine that went down nearly 200 kilometres inland from the coast; much farther into Canadian territory than any German U-Boat is known to have gone during the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

It is a theory that has long lingered in the minds of elders who swore they saw dark shadows floating under the surface of nearby Lake Melville and the author of a 1992 novel about a war-weary German crew that scuttles their submarine in the river before escaping to safety. “What was fiction is becoming fact in our mind,” Perry Trimper, one of the alleged sub’s discoverers, told the Prince Albert Herald last week during a visit to Mr. Martin.

However, with the claim flying in the face of every conceivable scrap of historical evidence, experts fervently maintain it is just another Canadian U-Boat legend.

Almost since the opening shots of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Maritimes and the coast of Quebec have abounded with legends about U-Boats that prowled the East Coast in the latter half of the Second World War.

“German sailors, the stories go, were everywhere,” writes Michael L. Hadley in the introduction to his 1985 book, U-Boats Against Canada.

Future prime minister Pierre Trudeau hiked into the Gaspé region in 1943 and 50 years later told in his memoirs the local tales of U-Boat crews coming ashore to buy provisions from genial Quebec shopkeepers.

During the war, records hold that a Newfoundland woman called in a report of a flying U-Boat. Other villages around the Gulf of St. Lawrence yielded “people who claim flat-out that they were out in their fishing vessel and they went aboard a u-boat and they were held there for several days — very convincing stories,” said Roger Sarty, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of the recently released War in the St. Lawrence.

Even Mr. Martin has his own story of a Nazi close encounter. In 1944, he and his crewmates were drinking at a Quebec City tennis club, when, several tables over he remembered hearing the distinctive guttural inflections of a group of men speaking German, although he dismissed it at the time.

Looking back at Canada’s light coastal defences – and Quebec’s reputation as a province that was not altogether unsympathetic to the Axis cause – Mr. Martin thinks it is entirely within the realm of possibility.

“There was nothing to stop them, there was no police on the shores.… It would have been the easiest thing in the world.”

‘To these parochial communities, speaking Norwegian would be all the same as speaking German’
.Mr. Hadley, a former Navy Reserve captain and Germanic Studies professor, is well-regarded as the Canadian expert in the movement of U-Boats through Canadian waters during WWII.

Over a matter of many years, he dug up every available U-Boat log, every German navy dispatch record and every confirmed Royal Canadian Navy U-Boat sighting, and meticulously plotted the data on maps that now hang in the collection of the Canadian War Museum.

His conclusion? “The closest they got to what you could call the Canadian heartland is within 172 miles of Quebec City in the St. Lawrence River,” he said.

The farthest-inland U-Boat, thus, would have come roughly within sight of Baie-Comeau just as a young Brian Mulroney was taking his first steps.

As for Germans stepping ashore, “it’s all nonsense; what people were confusing is flight trainees from Norway,” said Mr. Hadley. “To these parochial communities, speaking Norwegian would be all the same as speaking German.”

U-Boat crews themselves have had a similar reaction to Canadian tales of German naval dash.

One of the more persistent East Coast U-Boat legends concerns U-190. Only days after the submarine sank the HMCS Esquimalt just outside Halifax harbour, the vessel received word that the war was over and surrendered to Canadian corvettes, including Mr. Martin’s HMCS Arrowhead.

When the captured German crew members stepped ashore in Halifax, say accounts of Royal Canadian Navy veterans that lingered until the 1980s, they carried in their pockets Halifax streetcar tickets, Canadian cigarettes and even pictures of Canadian girls.


FilesThe U-190, a German U-boat, which was surrendered to the Canadian navy in 1945 and later commissioned as HMCS U190, one of Canada's first naval submarines...Werner Hirshmann, a crew member of U-190 who later immigrated to Canada, dismissed the claims as “the product of an overactive imagination” in a 2004 memoir.

From the perspective of a submarine commander, many of the Canadian stories just do not make strategic sense. U-Boats were vulnerable to even the smallest hole in the hull; a strong motivation to steer clear of the shoreline for something so frivolous as a night of drinking.

Snaking up narrow rivers, similarly, is unnecessarily risky, particularly when they had a whole Atlantic Ocean in which to hunt Allied ships. “U-Boats ultimately abandoned even the St. Lawrence River.… With airplanes regularly over top, they were just paralyzed and useless,” said Mr. Sarty. “They alway preferred deep water.”

Which is not to say that U-Boats were not a regular presence along the Canadian shore. U-Boats sunk 23 vessels in the St. Lawrence and, in 1942, in a mission to drop off a spy, a U-Boat skulked so close to shore that it was briefly caught in the headlights of a passing car, although the driver did not notice.

The spy, Werner von Janowski, was quickly captured, although not before he checked into a New Carlisle, Que. hotel and attempted to pay for his room with large out-of-circulation bills from 1917.

In his book, Mr. Hirshmann told of an emergency that forced the U-190 to surface just outside Halifax harbour for more than two nerve-wracking hours. “Today, I find it hard to believe that we could spend so much time on the surface near one of the busiest ports in the world and not be discovered,” he wrote.

A year later, a U-Boat crew stepped ashore into Northern Labrador to install an automated weather station that would remain undiscovered until the early 1980s.

The supposed Churchill River U-Boat first emerged in 2010 when crews were scanning the waters below Muskrat Falls for signs of three drowning victims when they came upon a mysterious shape.

A sweep of the area with a remotely operated vehicle in August proved inconclusive because the object had subsequently been buried with sediment and clay from nearby cliffs. Still, said diver Brian Corbin st the time, “there’s something there.”

For years, the people of P.E.I. spoke proudly of an obscure 1943 battle in which quick-thinking air and naval units sunk a U-Boat that was attempting a brazen mission to rescue a breakout of German prisoners of war from an island POW camp.

A U-Boat did indeed attempt the manoeuvre, but there are no records of any battle. Naval corvettes were indeed seen turning sharply offshore, but it was simply because of a navigational error. Locals heard explosions, but it was merely a live-fire exercise. There was low-flying aircraft in the area, although they were conducting a routine patrol.

“Myths,” wrote The Beaver (now Canada’s History) in a 2007 account of the supposed battle, “must always be treated with caution.”

As for Mr. Martin’s mysterious doctor, he did not catch his name nor the vessel’s and the doctor was transferred to another hospital before the two veterans could trade war stories over coffee.

And the question remains; if a U-Boat spotted the HMCS Arrowhead sitting idle at the mouth of the Churchill River, why did they not sink it?

In 1993, Mr. Martin shared a table with the U-190′s Werner Hirshmann at an event in Halifax where the former submariner expressed pride in seeing his crew survive the war, a rare feat for a German submarine crew.

Similarly , Mr. Martin thinks his life may have been spared by a commander who wanted to assure his crew a similar fate.

“If those guys would have attacked us, then somebody would have attacked them,” said Mr. Martin. “I don’t think they were in a fighting mood.”


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## Good2Golf

Old Sweat said:
			
		

> ...This month, Mr. Martin’s story of a sub lurking at the mouth of the Churchill River became valuable evidence for an East Coast group on a mission to prove that a strange protrusion recently discovered near Muskrat Falls in central Labrador is a long-lost Nazi submarine that went down nearly 200 kilometres inland from the coast; much farther into Canadian territory than any German U-Boat is known to have gone during the entire Battle of the Atlantic...



Having been to Muskrat Falls and knowing how shallow the Churchill is from the Base westward to Muskrat Falls, I would be incredibly skeptical that a U-boat could even navigate the waters, much less the Captain actually want to take his boat that far inland.

#subtrails

Regards
G2G


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