Lake Superior’s Nazi U-boat Wreck

Notes of UMD Professor Joseph Marrow on discovering and exploring the World War II wreck of the U-61 in the waters off Duluth, 1975:

“The shifting silts of the lake floor parted, revealing the submarine, rising from its secret history on a wave of sand 200 feet beneath the surface. Our sonar scans detected it and we dove it a week later. By the wreck of a small fishing boat, it was the U-61, the old Nazi training sub repurposed late in the war for a desperate suicide terror mission. Long regarded as a Great Lakes myth, the 150-foot-long wreck lay deep in America all along, deep enough to require technical diving skills to access it. The conning tower hatch was open and my team and I swam inside, passing our tanks ahead of ourselves to fit through. Our lights revealed human remains stirred by our arrival. A severed limb in a white jacket sleeve greeted us, the Captain’s arm had thrown its last salute. Corpses floated around dressed in German seaman’s garb — oiled leather trousers, worn pullover sweaters — suspended like bad dreams. I read their faces: shock, anguish, resignation.

“Through my dive mask, I pieced together the jumbled story of these submariners and their traumas. It looks like a hand grenade went off in a boarding attempt, damaging electricals and a pressure valve in addition to dismembering the Captain. The aging sub began sinking as water uncontrollably flooded the ballast tanks. Meanwhile this grenade-tossing invader methodically killed the crew. At the end of the sequence of bodies floated the grenade-thrower herself, the last to die, an old lady dressed like a fishing boat Captain by the aft torpedo tubes. Historical detective work identified her as Beatrice Zamzow, the widow who took over her husband’s fishing business in the interwar years, becoming notorious as the town crank known as Duluth’s Granny. The local papers often turned to her when they wanted colorful content. Near her corpse was her message, in a German wine bottle from the Captain’s quarters, cork soaked through but the writing still legible. We also retrieved the Captain’s log.”

Surviving excerpts of the Captain’s log, taken from the leaky watertight safe in his quarters (translated from the German):

“We made it through the locks into Lake Superior, thanks to our network of America-First crypto-Nazis. Loyal to America but not to democracy, imagine! … The radio-man relayed a coded transmission: our spies have been rolled up and so we are trapped in this Gott-forsaken lake … We patrol the inland sea sinking ships and raiding night ports, but our work goes unreported, or misattributed to weather, or to organized crime. No one suspects we are actually out here; we aspire to be an unconfirmed rumor … After a year we are tapped out: fired our last torpedo in June — at a tugboat, we missed … Hungry, chronically ill, mad, we successfully piloted Duluth’s midnight canal, under the Lift Bridge. Prowling the inner harbor, we raided warehouses for diesel and sides of beef, but now we are food poisoned. One shared toilet in the open between the engines is not enough when the whole crew explodes out both ends. Bunks are used in rotation among men smeared in shit and barf. The bilge pumps failed so we’ve been walking around for days ankle-deep in sloshing oily water composed mostly of vomit and sewage. It’s 100% humidity in here, condensation drips on us from every surface, evaporated shitwater. We fired Tannhauser and Sigfried out the torpedo tubes this morning, lucky bastards died of dehydration in the world’s largest lake, they get to escape this diarrhea-hole. We use the sub’s schnorkel and we surface as often as we can to air the place out. But I do not consider us combat-effective, it’s a miracle we shot down a patrolling bomber last month with our deck gun. The gun hasn’t been greased in 100 days since we’re critically low on supplies, we need the grease for the engines. That may have been our final shot … Those of us who survive suffer hallucinations. A vocal minority is convinced we are on a secret mission to find Atlantis. Weeks ago, some of those same men proposed a ludicrous plan to found a settlement on the South Shore, to melt into Wisconsin’s German-descended population. ‘We’ll call it “Herbster,”’ ensign Gunther said. I relented and dropped them off at a beach of bizarre sandstone formations. They swam to shore; I’m not convinced I didn’t imagine it but those men went somewhere. We don’t have many left … I am needed on deck, we’ve surfaced beneath a fishing boat. I will kill its crew, siphon its diesel, take its fish, and sink the craft, concealing our increasingly tenuous presence in these waters.”

Text of the scrolled message in a bottle found by the body of Beatrice Zamzow, written on a German map of Lake Superior:

“To whom it may concern: Duluth’s Granny here, so-called. This wine wasn’t bad for fascist swill, a bone-dry Riesling. To those who called me crazy all these years for hunting German subs in the lake: ha ha you pikers and nincombobs. Master race my sagging ass, this weathered light-gray Type IIC U-boat surfaced lifting my fishing boat in the air. I’d caught a Nazi sub with my gill net. Having waited for this moment for 20 years, visualizing it perhaps daily, I disembarked my boat and scaled the conning tower ladder. And they popped the hatch open right when I got there. It was the Captain himself in his peaked cap, full beard crawling with lice, and a stained white jacket with threadbare epaulets. Fingering the Luger on his belt, he called to someone below him, ‘Ich mache das schnell’ — i.e. ‘This won’t take a minute.’ I appeared from behind the raised hatch cover and tossed a grenade in the hole, saying, ‘Iss diese Ananas, Fritz!’ — i.e. ‘Eat this pineapple, Fritz!’ It bounced off his chest as it dropped, startling him so badly he fell back down the ladder, appendages leaving his body as the grenade detonated. The sub rang like a bell. Sliding down the ladder, I stormed them loaded for bear.

“The blast floored everyone as it reverberated through the superstructure, splitting seams and eardrums. I killed everybody who stood back up, those who didn’t drown in their own bile. I chased them from bow to stern.

“I expected to die in a blaze of glory, overmatched by a fierce enemy of greater numbers. Instead I found myself hunting Nazis in a filthy iron coffin, executing perhaps a dozen barely-alive sub-men. I used my Browning Model 1922, my fish knife crusty with trout scales, a one-inch-bore flare gun, and a jumbo wrench I picked up in the forward torpedo room. They got their licks in, so here I die by the aft torpedo tubes writing last words under smoky red light, air hissing from pipes, klaxon blaring at the rising water. This tub was overdue for maintenance to put it mildly. Serves them right. See you soon my love. I have avenged your death from the World War I German sub that haunted the region in 1917. Nobody believes that story, including our good-for-nothing grandkids. They’ll believe it now I bet.”

The location of the wreck has not been publicly released in order to preserve it for science.

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.