On the afternoon of 6 May 1945, a line of trucks pulled up between the storage sheds of the Japanese Navy’s repair depot at Seletar, on the north shore of Singapore Island. Armed troops climbed down beside two of Admiral Dönitz’s submarines. The boats were U-181 and U-862, both long-range Type IX submarines, both in the middle of an overhaul. On their sterns, the old ensigns came down and Japanese battle flags went up in their place.
Germany had not yet formally surrendered. On 4 May, Dönitz had signaled every U-boat at sea to cease fire at once. On the 5th, the German naval attaché in Tokyo, Admiral Paul Wenneker, passed a single code word to every U-boat in Asia: “Lübeck. ” It meant Germany had stopped fighting.
That evening, Kurt Freiwald, captain of U-181, gathered both crews and the base staff at Seletar and told them Hitler was dead and the war in the west was over. The instrument of surrender would not be signed at Reims until the early hours of the 7th, and the final version in Berlin later still. At Seletar, the Japanese moved on the 6th. What they did first was feed the Germans.
Earlier that day, Vice Admiral Fukudome Shigeru, commanding the 10th Area Fleet, arrived at the depot with other admirals and their staffs, called in the German officers, and told them that since Germany had capitulated, they were now interned. Then he invited them to a festive dinner, served in European style, and thanked them for their part in the war. Freiwald remembered the Japanese fleet commander telling them something else at that meeting, in all seriousness: the Japanese armed forces, he said, would reconquer Germany. Nobody at the table appears to have asked him for a date.
The trucks came that same afternoon, after the dinner. The German crews had spent months in the Indian Ocean as guests of an ally, and by evening they were guests of a different kind, with new flags on their boats and new sentries on the quay. That left a question hanging over the harbor that neither side answered for months: the Imperial Japanese Navy had just acquired a pair of large German submarines, with more to follow across Asia, and it had no crews that had ever handled one. U-862 had come a long way to end up under a Japanese sentry.
She first reached Penang in September 1944, where a Japanese rear admiral met her and a band played both national anthems. Her captain, Heinrich Timm, then took her farther than any other German submarine went. At Christmas 1944, off the coast of New South Wales, she torpedoed the American Liberty ship Robert J. Walker, making her the only U-boat of the war to sink a ship in the Pacific Ocean.
She went on to scout the harbor at Gisborne, New Zealand, and came back through the Sunda Strait in February 1945. U-181 had a pedigree of its own, having made its name under Wolfgang Lüth, one of the most successful U-boat commanders of the war, before Freiwald took her over. The same scene was already playing out elsewhere, with local variations. At Surabaya on the eastern end of Java, the German base commander, Konrad Hoppe, mustered his men and told them Hitler was dead.
Tied up in the harbor was U-195, a large boat converted to carry cargo, which had put in for repairs in March after failing to make it home to Europe. Its crew lowered their battle flag themselves. Then the captain of a Japanese patrol boat came aboard and raised the Rising Sun ensign over it. The Germans walked off to an open camp nearby.
At Batavia, now Jakarta, the boat was U-219, a minelayer turned cargo carrier loaded with rubber and tin for a voyage back to Germany. It was now never going to make it. Intercepted signals add an odd detail: Allied code breakers in Melbourne broke a Japanese Navy message timed at half past five on the afternoon of the 5th, reporting that the German naval officer at Jakarta had himself given orders concerning U-219 and the German tanker Bogota. The decrypt loses one word in the middle.
The word that survives is “interned. ” The Germans at Batavia may have seen what was coming and decided to do it to themselves first. The strangest case was at Kobe, in Japan itself. Two boats sat in the shipyards there, both in dock for overhaul, and neither had been built in Germany.
They had been Italian. The Comandante Cappellini and the Luigi Torelli had sailed to Asia as blockade runners for the Italian Navy. When Italy signed its armistice in September 1943, the Japanese seized them in port. The Cappellini’s crew threatened to blow her up if anyone boarded.
The Germans took both over and recommissioned them as UIT-24 and UIT-25 with mixed crews, many of the Italians having chosen to keep fighting for Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. In March 1945, a B-29 raid on Kobe killed one of the Torelli’s German ratings. On the 9th or 10th of May, the day after Germany’s surrender took effect, the Japanese took both boats. That made them the only submarines of the war to serve under all three Axis flags.
The Germans at Kobe were not sent to a jungle camp. One of them, a machinist named Heinz Reese, later recalled that they lived outside the city in a small hotel the German Navy had bought, and that the mood around them was turning. Hostility toward Westerners, he said, rose as the American air raids grew heavier. So, in the space of about five days, from Singapore to Java to Kobe, every German submarine in Japanese hands changed flags without a shot.
The accounts the crews left describe it as polite and prompt. What most of them never saw was how long it had been in preparation. On 30 April, a week before the trucks reached Seletar, Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had adopted a paper titled Outline of Measures in Case of German Surrender. Hitler shot himself that same afternoon in Berlin, though nobody in Tokyo knew it yet.
The paper planned to annul the treaties tying the two countries together and laid down how the government was to speak about its ally once the end came. Japan, it said, should take heed not to blame Germany for its breach of the Tripartite Pact, but praise the German government and people alike for their struggle to the bitter end. Set beside that sentence, the admiral’s dinner at Seletar looks a good deal less spontaneous. The thanks, the courtesy, and the talk of reconquest all fit a line Tokyo had written down before a single German boat changed hands.
After that, the handover proceeded in stages. On 5 May, Foreign Minister Tōgō Shigenori had already handed the German ambassador a formal note accusing Germany of abandoning its ally. On the 15th, Japan broke off diplomatic relations altogether. Ambassador Heinrich Stahmer was taken to the Fujiya Hotel at Hakone, a mountain resort west of Tokyo, and kept there until Japan itself surrendered.
Admiral Wenneker, the attaché who had sent the code word, stayed on in Japan too, and did not leave American custody until November 1947. In June, the German crews at Singapore went on trucks again, this time to a former British rubber plantation at Batu Pahat in southern Malaya, and were interned among the trees. But not all of them went. A party of Germans had stayed behind at Seletar, and the reason was the question that had hung over the harbor since 6 May.
On 15 July 1945, all six boats were commissioned into the Imperial Japanese Navy and given Japanese numbers in the 500s, from I-501 to I-506. At Singapore, the two Type IXs received new captains, both from the Navy’s medium submarines, and a German boat was new to every one of the newcomers, captains and crews alike. Someone had to teach them. The crew of U-862 was split into two 30-man parties and put to work teaching their replacements how to handle her.
On 5 August, the chief of staff of the 10th Area Fleet reported to Tokyo that the crews of both boats had been instructed and the ships fitted out, adding, in a phrase the code breakers in Melbourne copied down, that this had been done largely by the Germans. Each submarine, he said, would carry sixteen torpedoes. It was a real piece of work. German engineers and petty officers who months earlier had been running these hulls across the Indian Ocean on their own account were now taking a foreign crew through a machine designed and built in Germany, down to the last valve and trim tank.
The Japanese submariners were not beginners. They were experienced men from their own service, learning an unfamiliar boat from the people who knew it best. By the middle of August, the lessons were nearly done. The Japanese crew took U-862 out for her first trial run on 15 August 1945, the day the emperor’s voice came over the radio to tell Japan the war was over.
The two boats surrendered at Seletar the next day. One of them moored beside the heavy cruiser Myōkō when British forces reached Singapore in September. The Germans from Batu Pahat ended up in Changi jail, where the Japanese had held British prisoners, and reached England in July 1946. Heinrich Timm, who had commanded U-862, was among the last of them released, in April 1948.
The Italians fared a little better. In October 1945, 28 Italian sailors and technicians were still sitting in Changi, and early the next year they reached Taranto aboard the Italian sloop Eritrea. On Java, the war did not end in the usual sense. The Indonesian independence struggle broke out around the ports, and for a time Indonesian fighters seized U-195 at Surabaya until British Gurkha troops restored order.
After that, the boat’s former German crew were set to running its diesel engines to generate electricity for the city. Their commander did not see the end of it. Friedrich Steinfeld died of dysentery in a hospital in Jakarta at the end of November 1945 and was buried in the hills south of the city, where his grave still stands. At Kobe, Heinz Reese ended up running a power station near the city for the United States Army and was not sent home to Germany until 1947.
The former Italian boats had one more story attached to them, never proven. An Italian gunner named Raffaele Sansio later claimed that the machine guns of his submarine shot down an American bomber over Kobe in late August 1945 and that he received a Japanese decoration for it. The versions do not agree on which boat, which day, or even which type of aircraft. The Italian Navy’s own historical bulletin reports it only as his own account, surfaced in newspaper articles in the 1990s, and nobody has matched it to a known American loss.
Under the Allied arrangements, every surrendered German submarine was to be destroyed, but the two boats at Kobe were handled separately. The Americans held that, having been commissioned into the Japanese Navy, they were Japanese submarines and fell outside the arrangements for German ones. So they stayed afloat until April 1946, when the United States Navy took them out into the Key Channel and sank them. Everywhere else, the British took charge.
The Dutch destroyer Kortenaer sank U-219 with gunfire and depth charges south of the Sunda Strait on 3 February 1946. The two Type IXs from Seletar were towed out into the Strait of Malacca in the middle of February, and British frigates sank them there with anti-submarine mortars. At Surabaya, the officer in charge had asked for time to unload a cargo of tungsten still aboard U-195. At a quarter to ten on the morning of 14 February 1946, the British naval commander-in-chief for the East Indies sent him an answer: “Sink U-195 forthwith, and report when sunk.
No delay is acceptable. Acknowledge. “
