The German U-boat went missing after being damaged by the Royal Navy vessel HMS Balfour in July 1944. A diving team from Plymouth, Devon discovered it
A Nazi submarine that vanished during WW2 has been found 82 years on. The German U-boat went missing after being damaged by the Royal Navy vessel HMS Balfour in July 1944.
Diving team Gasperados, based in Plymouth, has now discovered the U-672 about 20 miles (32km) off Salcombe in Devon at about 230ft (70m) deep. The wreckage lay unlocated for so many years because a navy log recorded incorrect coordinates.
German WW2 historian Dr Axel Niestle said “due to a clerical error in the documents” the location differed “some 46 miles (74km) from the actual position”.
Gasperados diver Dominic Robinson described the moment his team came across the sunken vessel. He said: “I saw the conning tower, all those kinds of things – I knew that we were going to get the video needed to identify it. So I was really pleased about that.”
The 52-man submarine crew survived the attack, were taken to a prisoner of war camp and returned to Germany after the war. Mr Robinson said they “managed to get it to the surface” before getting into their life rafts and were found “bobbing around in the sea”.
He has spoken to the skipper’s family, who said he lived a “long and happy life”. Mr Robinson said: “They just said how proud he would have been and how pleased he would have been to know that it had been found at last.”
He added: “We were only down there about 25 minutes, but it took three hours because of having to decompress and compress due to the pressure of being that far down. When we first got down, I saw this angler fish with all its teeth – we followed that down to see a rope with an octopus who ran into a school of fish – that’s when we knew we had found the wreck.
“When you are trying to identify a wreck you need to get a good look for what could be an iconic sign of a specific boat. For us that included things such as a unique Schnorkel system – that really pointed towards being a U 672.”