All language subtitles for Hell Below - Episode 1, The Wolfpack

in the early days of the second world

war one of Hitler's most successful yubo

Aces uto kretchmer sinks dozens of

Allied

ships

fire first alone then as part of the

lethal wolf

packs until a fateful mistake up up

threatens

everything in World War

II subc weapon allows Warriors to fight

from beneath the waves with cunning

force and tenacity their enemies Strike

Back revolutionary

but still sometimes primitive it's a

desperate

bid to change the course of

War their stories are

Legend July 8th 1940

go Nazi ubot

u99 has sunk an Allied merchant ship

just south of

Ireland now a British escort turns in

Pursuit when you attack the enemy you

are the

Hunter and as soon as you get attacked

by the escorts you are the prey the crew

of 99 performs a dive to escape

ubot Commander Otto kretchmer has served

Hitler's underwater service since the

start of World War

II he's just sunk his 12th ship in 10

months and earned a reputation as the

best torpedo shot in the German

[Music]

Navy he proves ruthlessly offici

his motto is one torpedo one

ship AO crar was not one of the ordinary

submarine commanders right he's of a

he's part of an elite group to really do

most of the damage not only is he

Pleasant and skilled but he's cold as a

cucumber it's only kar's second patrol

aboard the recently commissioned

u99 he and his untried crew face an

explosive

initiation it's the first time when the

cool and calm character of ketma is

virtually forged in Flames uh because

it's the first time when he's attacked

by Allied

escorts the warship that hunts kmer is

one of Britain's new flower class

Corvettes

205 ft long with a displacement of 940

tons it's been adapted from commercial

Whalers to hunt

submarines so when the war starts the

attack that the Germans launch on

British trade is unanticipated and the

British are simply not materially

prepared for it nor are they

psychologically prepared for it and the

Brits have to adapt their their Maritime

preparations to deal with Warfare that

they just are not ready

for just after 8:00

[Music]

a.m. the flower class Corvette launches

underwater bombs Called Death

charges how many death charge exploded

one after the other they look around in

a submarine is there something broken is

the hole still fully

intact they don't not only drop one C

two c or free Salos they start attacking

for hours and

hours u99 is a type 7

uboat first commissioned in

1936 they are 218 ft long and 20 ft

wide type sevens normally carry 14

torpedoes and a crew of 45

men Germany produces more of them than

any other

submarine the type 7 uo is actually a

bit on the small side it's developed

from the so-called UB submarine one of

the smaller submarines of the first

world war it did have significant

seagoing

capacity more than 700 were built based

on its relatively simple and inexpensive

design

[Music]

the man who deploys the uots is Carl

dirid Hitler's Mastermind of

submarines I think the best way to

understand Carl donit is he's a

consumate professional Submariner he

lived breathed thought submarines all

the time dut launches his uots to key

shipping routes in a bid to strangle the

British

Isles this became the core strategy of

the German Naval command to cut those

lifelines those maritime lifelines

fighting the convoys starving Britain

into

defeat the whole thing turns into quite

literally as often been said a chess

match because you're matching wits with

the other guy where is he now and where

will he be you got to be thinking

several moves

ahead jouret uses Naval intelligence to

assign the few submarines he has to

locate ships there are not many OTS at

sea at this stage of the war the Germans

have had to make choices in their war

production and OTS were not one of those

choices because of course they were

planning to fight on land first in the

west and then in the

East so he had to use these small

numbers and the only thing he could do

is to spread them over the ocean like

butter on a very big sheet of bread

therefore in the first stages of the

second world war they were still

fighting like in the first world war one

submarine on one petrol on its own

early on July 8th dut's u99 attacked the

enemy

alone and has been under siege for

[Music]

hours everybody is under stress so the

sweat is coming um on their face

dropping down and if you are under

stress you breathe a

lot uncertain of how long the attack

will last kretchmer takes action to

preserve The submarine's Limited supply

of

air the commanding officer needs to

conserve the

oxygen and so the people get the order

to lie down to

sleep they get biscuits and they get

chocolate to get over the

situation after hours they're probably

very

fatigued some of the crew Dawn masks

that absorb carbon dioxide in an effort

to make the ot's atmosphere last

it's almost impossible to imagine what

these people felt in this very moment um

it must be must have been

horrendous but as another Salvo

hits the man who commands the ubot

appears unfaced ketma was sitting very

calm and reading a novel a criminal

novel and the guy on the herro Acoustics

Castle was looking at him and he thought

oh that's a great guy we are under the

pressure he's just sitting around

reading his

novel after some minutes CLE again is

looking at him and he realized the brook

is upside down so he can't read and all

the time he did not flip any page

so kma in this case was a brilliant

military

leader I can take the time to just read

a novel so you could keep calm

too when the attacks are going on for

hours crch my head to keep in mind a lot

of different things the first thing is

to keep the submarine in a depth where

it doesn't get destroyed by the pressure

uh of the water and therefore he needs

propulsion and to produce propulsion he

needs to use battery

energy submerged 124 battery cells power

99's propellers and all its

systems they can only be recharged on

the surface

12 hours after the depth charge attack

begins kretchmer and his crew remain

pinned

down ketma is told by his engineer that

he's running low of battery

fuel crar must make a move or u99 will

be lost to the

sea to wait until the battery is totally

down then there's no chance of

surviving during the 12 hours of depth

charge

attack 99 has been cruising just fast

enough to maintain a constant depth to

conserve power to keep his submarine

moving he needs the propulsion and

therefore he had to use the battery fuel

in efficient way as as long as possible

to keep the boat on moving for

propulsion or for

operations as his batteries die ketchman

risks the last of his power on a course

change in a final bid to

escape kretchmer and his crew try to

evade by zigzagging changing depth and

the

likes more than 14 hours after the

attack began

the sound of enemy propellers

Fades and then they had the information

that the escorts were moving

away u99 survives 127 death

Charges better fuel was extremely low

and oxygen was nearly disposed and

therefore he had to get

[Music]

up when they surface the escorts have

moved out of

[Music]

sight it is said that the air is yellow

greenish and the author of one famous

novel about ketma he explains looking

like the death leaving the

submarine he was one of the first German

commanding submarine officers to have an

experience of a longlasting depth charge

he was lucky so the escorts really

[Music]

disappeared to the east the man in

charge of G's OTS gains a critical

win Hitler's troops have invaded

France durit can use its Atlantic ports

to launch his

submarines after the fall of France in

1940 the Germans suddenly possessed new

bases ideally suited for attacks on the

British convoys in the Atlantic before

that they had to to to send out the the

boats from from their bases in in

Germany which meant uh they would spend

a lot of fuel for traveling to and

through those operational

areas and so now in France the boats had

considerably more time for actually

hunting and fighting the AL

convoys on October 13th 1940 jet deploys

u99 from lauron

France intelligence has learned 34 enemy

ships transport Timber steel and other

War materials and a convoy from Canada

to Britain a convoy is a grouping of

ships a number of ships together

escorted by a number of Warships you

might think that putting a lot of ships

together is a lot of eggs in one basket

but actually because the sea is such a

big place if you concentrate shipping

then it's very difficult for the enemy

to even find them and when they find

them they find them escorted with

warships and it's a hard job to attack

them kretchmer and his crew race

Northwest in search of Convoy

sc7 all Convoy routs have their own

designation HX alifax SC slow Convoy for

slow ships when they start convoys for

slow ships so it normally mean something

and it helps divide convoys up

durit assigns more uots to join

kretchmer in locating the

Convoy it's one of the first

mobilizations of a wolf pack a tactic

that Hitler's submarines would make

famous the essence of the rudal tactique

the wolf tactic was to bring several

submarines to Bear against the

Convoy the control of the wolf pack is

done ashore at T its headquarters it's

on on the big board you a big plot and

pins and move submarines around think of

it as a kind of vast drift net of

submarines at about twice the visibility

distance apart one from the other

deployed perpendicular to the line of

advance that you'd expect convoys to

follow and the idea is simply to use it

as a kind of trip wire system so you can

snare them

another submarine to join the Hunt is U

100 the ubo is commanded by yakim

shepa friend and rival to kretchmer and

99 shepa and kretchmer were among the

first to complete Don's Elite submarine

training 133 months into the war they

rank among Hitler's uboat Aces cunning

men driven to sink Britain's ships

the number of uh aces in the ubot fleet

is never very big and they do most of

the heavy

lifting if you look at the success rate

for German submariners about 3/4 of the

tonnage is sunk by like 20% of the of

the captains because they're they're

prepared to take things right to the

edge but can these lone wolves hunt as a

pack

[Music]

by fall of 1940 a new era of submarine

warfare has

begun Admiral KL durit counts on Aces

kretchmer and sheepa to deliver on his

new Wolfpack

tactic Germany has only 27 operational

submarines nearly a third of Donut's

active Fleet is at

stake his strategic objective is tonage

sunk for ubot day at Sea it's also a

logical strategy it's just about the

only one they've got but it means you do

have to sync ships you have to destroy

their carrying

[Music]

capacity attacking a convoy presents the

perfect

opportunity the 34 Merchant ships of

slow Convoy 7 are protected by only four

escorts

their main weapon for detecting ubot is

sonar an active pinging system also

known as

AIC Echo bearing green 20 drawing right

AIC was invented towards the end of

World War

One it uses sound pulses called pings to

search the ocean for

submarines the big innovation in the

fall of 1918 was the introduction of an

active acoustic location system

developed primarily by the French and

then shared with the British so what you

have is that stuff you see in in

Hollywood movies where a sound goes out

it hits something and it comes back and

you measure the distance and that gives

you some idea of how far away the object

is it was the key to the existing

anti-submarine tactics of the royal Navy

a submerged submarine in fact was

vulnerable but the biggest drawback is

that it doesn't work against surface

vessels and when a submarine becomes a

low hardto detect surface vessel at

night it soon proves to be a very

dangerous enemy

indeed after Convoy sc7 is intercepted

kretchmer and the rest of the wolf pack

close

in and then the order would be given

that at the right moment in the dark of

night you're free to attack and then the

pack would come in

there's a lot at stake not simply in

Sinking the ships but in creating that

shock effect and demonstrating to the

British that they can sink their

shipping at

will shepa and the other commanders

prepar to fire from outside the

Convoy but kretchmer has his own plan

at 10 p.m. u99 slinks past the escorts

to Ambush the enemy from where they

least expected prma has this this Killer

Instinct he is a perfectionist so he

finds a way of sneaking in on the

surface into the

Convoy he manages coldblooded to sail

inside the

Convoy and then starts to torpedo the

merchant vessels

[Music]

fire

oh for first knowledge they have there's

an attack taking place is when an

explosion strikes a ship and flares

start to go up then the escort has to

react the Allies Target the Convoy's

perimeter where the OTS usually

prow others in the wolf pack are forced

to dive

[Music]

[Music]

but inside the Convoy kretchmer stays on

the attack

[Music]

it turns into a pyrotechnic nightmare

they're just sinking ships terrifying

for the men in the Convoy just

terrifying no one thought that they

would actually get inside the Convoy in

the dark of night and spit death and

destruction over both ends at a high

speed in the early hours of October 19th

u99 fires the last of its 14

Torpedoes Convoy loses 20 ships while in

transit 80,000 tons of shipping is lost

to the war

effort shepa claims three ships

kretchmer

7 many more than any other Ace and one

of Germany's first Wolfpack offensives

it's a radically new kind of use of

submarines that the Brit simply do not

have defenses for once the Wolfpack

snares a convoy it's chaos for the

Allies a few days later u99 docks to a

cheering

crowd kretchmer and his fellow

commanders are celebrated as

Idols the German ubot Aces were used by

the by the German war propaganda of

course as propaganda Heroes you can

almost like them to the pop stars of

their

days in any War it's very much the same

you need Heroes you need successes to

raise the spirit of your own

folk in Britain war strategists raced to

thwart Germany's new ubo

tactics the British Empire's a maritime

Empire and it relies on shipping now

that's a strength because it means that

the British can access the world as far

as supplies are concerned but on the

other hand it means Britain must control

the Sea The Royal Navy reassigns

warships guarding the British Coast to

the Atlantic to protect

convoys it must not allow the enemy to

deny it the use of the sea efforts are

also underway to apply a new tech

technology called radar radio waves used

to detect enemy airplanes to the seas in

the process of having to make this

adjustment Britain is being bombed ports

are being destroyed from the air the

blitz is being

launched it's a very trying period for

[Music]

Britain March 1941 Nazi wolf packs have

dominated the battle of the Atlantic for

5 months now con HX 1112 steams in

transit from Halifax to Britain HX

Halifax HX 1112 was the 112th fast

inward-bound Convoy it was composed of

different kinds of ships tankers cargo

ships

Etc and one of the features which makes

this Convoy interesting and significant

is that for the first time the uots are

facing a well trained escort

group overseeing The Seven escorts that

guard the 41 ship

Convoy is Commander Donald

McIntyre McIntyre has proved a shrewd

Hunter since he captained his first

British Patrol vessel in

1935 McIntyre was focused on yubo

killing that's what he wanted to do he

wanted to SN

submarines McIntyre took command of HMS

Walker a few weeks before the lead

destroyer and one of Britain's first

dedicated Convoy protection Fleet escort

group

five it was a very Risky Business not

only to serve on a warship or or a

merchant vessel but also to travel the

Atlantic there was also this constant

threat of being attacked by a uo and

facing facing a gruesome

[Music]

death 150 m south of

Iceland McIntyre faces the first assault

against Convoy HX

1112 a ubot cripples one of the Convoy's

prized oil tankers critical fuel for

Britain's war effort

Burns tankers are always spectacular

targets they go up in huge bouts of FL

and this tanker was no exception it made

a great impact on McIntyre who said you

know it was it was rather a depressing

sight to see this huge explosion taking

place and it showed that the uots were

mounting effective

[Music]

attacks before diving LMP transmits the

coordinates of Convoy HX 1112 to ubo

headquarters donits deploys kretchmer

and shepa in a wolf pack to

intercept all the the first round draft

picks all the key characters are in this

Convoy

battle but one of the Convoy Escorts

also carries a new weapon rigged to foil

yubo

tactics McIntyre's warship Fleet

includes the HMS vanok recently fitted

with

radar a technology that allows ships to

locate submarines on the

surface vanok was one of the first

destroyers to be equipped with a radar

system

and this was entirely new and a new

threat to the ubot now they could be

detected at night at um the

surface unaware of this critical

development Germany's top submarine

commanders prepare to

attack they have had great successes

against poorly escorted convoys now the

tide is beginning to turn but they don't

know that

yet March 16th

1941 having located the Convoy kretchmer

plots has creep into HX

[Music]

1112 99's Commander scans the fog with

prize binoculars made for an

ace as an ace submarine Commander

kretchma has been presented with a

rather higher standard of binoculars

than uh other captains and they're part

of his ability especially at night to

seize Targets on the surface

and it's a very important part of

keter's self-image that he has

them kretchmer must use his sharp eyes

to avoid an accidental crash with an

enemy

ship the North Atlantic in March is not

a very hospitable Place uh and you get

Mists and fog and so on and therefore

it's going to be quite difficult to

attack but kretchmer was a person who

liked taking risks he wanted to get

inside the Convoy that was his tactic

get inside the Convoy Target environment

sink everything in sight and he tries to

do this despite the weather

conditions by 10 p.m. u99 navigates the

fog to land inside Enemy Lines where

none of the Convoy Escorts would expect

to find a Nazi

submarine avoiding underwater detection

and cloaked in darkness kretchmer and

his crew are ready to

strike fire

they attack at night on the surface when

the atic doesn't work the soar doesn't

work and therefore they create chaos

they create a certain amount of shock

effect and large numbers of ships have

blow up in in quick succession

aboard the lead British escort McIntyre

scans the perimeter for the ubot that's

ravaging his

ships if the escort gets a sniff it can

strike against the pack it can push it

off and maybe get through the night with

very few

losses but at 1:00 a.m. another

submarine is

detected McIntyre's fought shepin in the

customary position outside the

Convoy the British Destroyer steams

toward its Target at 34

knots nearly twice as fast as U 100 can

speed

nearly overtaken on the surface Shep's

only

option is to try and hide beneath the

waves in such a battle situation you

can't think for hours and hours over

over what to do next and so made this

Split Second decision to evade an attack

by the destroyer by diving

McIntyre summons HMS vanor to join him

in a death charge

attack depth charges are very large

explosions and if they occur close to

the

submarine then they do a lot of

damage vves become onti

water leaks in controls burst bulbs

burst all kinds of Damages are

[Music]

inflicted the damage is

overwhelming it leaks so badly that if

it doesn't come up it's probably going

to

sink on McIntyre ship HMS Walker the

sonar operator struggles to Ping U 100

with the atic system in an ocean

distorted by

explosions the sea is a very complicated

environment and of course if you're

dropping depth charges it's it's quite

hard to actually separate the depth

charges from the submarine another

problem was that as dick face forwards

and your weapons were dropped over the

stir the rear of the ship so this means

that when you're attacking a submarine

there is a gap between you're losing

contact and the depth charg is actually

being dropped and then you have to re

acquire the

target nearby HMS vanok uses its first

generation radar to scan for U 100 in

case its surfaces the new technology

could deliver a Target but its

application is limited the first radar

they put in service is a type 286 which

is a 1.5 M radar fixed to the Mast head

the essential problem with with type 286

radar is Target had to be straight ahead

you couldn't turn the antennas you had

to point the ship

just after 3:00

a.m. shepa pops up a thousand yards away

from the escorts betting he can repair

the flooding and limp away to

Safety in an incredible twist contact J

ahead he lands directly in front of the

first radar system able to detect him if

they've been a little bit left or right

or some other place the 286 on the Mast

head probably wouldn't have picked it up

vanok races head on

that the commander decides to Ram the

[Music]

yoat having picked up a surfaced ubo on

its newly installed radar

system the British ship vanor resorts to

a standard first world war

tactic and charges to Ram the damaged

submarine

the Destroyer hits the uboat U 100 Aid

ships and it smashes the Corning

Tower and shapy is crushed with his legs

between the hull and the Periscope is

thrown into the water and is

killed and the ybot is lost

aboard u99 kretchmer is oblivious to the

fate of his fellow

Ace out of torpedoes 99's crew clears

the Convoy to head for

home this is a classic ketma attack five

ships sunk so he seems to be doing well

but now the training of the escort Force

comes in they carry out what what they

can of a systematic

search as u99 slinks away keter's

lookout spots McIntyre's

destroyer in a panic the crewman is

convinced they've been

discovered on the crewman's warning the

submarine

Dives when he saw this Destroyer

extremely near he simply expected that

they would have been detected by the

Destroyer and so made this split-second

decision to evade an attack by the

destroyer by

diving McIntyre's Lookouts were unaware

of

u99 but as the submarine

descends the Destroyer sonar comes into

play they're listening all the time and

they're playing this kind of deadly game

of cat and mo

the sub's down here and he's listening

to you ping off

him and at some point because the sonar

beam is

fixed it's going to sweep over the sub

new

contact range 400 y once it can be

picked up on atic it can be attacked

with depth

charges McIntyre's crew launches its

underwater

bonds and a bid to sink the submarine

[Music]

they threw the death charges and they

detonated near the

ubot causing extreme

damage I

with controls failing their equipment

and gauges shattered kretchmer and his

crew plunge towards the sea floor and a

severely wounded

submarine they got two options at that

point you blow ballast and get out or

you become a bottom

feature cr's crew attempts to blow out

water to raise their plummeting ubot the

only way of escaping was returning to

the surface so this was the decision

crma made simply to to save the life of

his

crew but the air valve is

jammed he's forced down in fact he goes

down very deep indeed it looks as if the

submarine is going to be crushed

[Music]

the crew monitors their

descent to their horror they drop deeper

and

deeper 20 ft below Crush

depth the valve finally

gives the ubo begins to climb

on the surface a determined McIntyre

waits for the

submarine as soon as she

surfaces she's engaged with

gunfire a certain amount of damage is

inflicted and it seems as if the time

has come for u99 to be abandoned

but from the sinking submarine Hitler's

top ubot Ace orders a final

transmission after his luck has run out

ketma still is this professional he

sends a last message to duts very short

simply says depth charge two destroyers

53,000 tons a

crma that last message he sends from the

submarine have sunk a number of ships

some a thousand tons leaving the sub

kretchmer um that that's just an

indication of what a cool customer

actually was more than 5 hours after u99

launched its attack kretchmer orders his

crew on Deck to prepare for

surrender kretchmer I think to calm his

crew lights a cigar just to show that

he's still in in

charge he signals to the British to take

off his

crew and the British will do that

because there isn't much hatred man man

to man uh once the submarine sunk that's

the job

done kretzmer is the last one pulled

aboard the British

Destroyer McIntyre claims the aces

binoculars as his

prize ketma is treated very well on

board HMS Walker he plays Bridge he's

pled with whiskey they're very uh uh

pleased that they've captured somebody

so distinguished kretchmer spends the

rest of the war as an Allied prisoner

the battle against Convoy

they lose them all in a very short

period but you still got lots of young

very capable submariners coming along

the German submarine Fleet is by no

means done it's really just getting

started

[Music]