German submarine U-22 (1936)

German World War II submarine

German submarine U 22 was a Nazi German Type IIB U boat which was commissioned in 1936 following construction at the Germaniawerft shipyards at Kiel. Her pre war service was uneventful, as she trained crews and officers in the rapidly expanding U boat arm of the Kriegsmarine following the abandonment of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles two years before.

German Type IIB submarines were enlarged versions of the original Type IIs. U 22 had a displacement of when at the surface and while submerged. Officially, the standard tonnage was , however. The U boat had a total length of , a pressure hull length of , a beam of , a height of , and a draught of The submarine was powered by two MWM RS 127 S four stroke, six cylinder diesel engines of for cruising, two Siemens Schuckert PG VV 322/36 double acting electric motors producing a total of for use while submerged. She had two shafts and two propellers. The boat was capable of operating at depths of up to
The submarine had a maximum surface speed of and a maximum submerged speed of When submerged, the boat could operate for at ; when surfaced, she could travel at U 22 was fitted with three torpedo tubes at the bow, five torpedoes or up to twelve Type A torpedo mines, and a anti aircraft gun. The boat had a complement of twentyfive.

During the Second World War, she was mainly deployed for coastal work, a role enforced by her small size and endurance. Thus she was useful for operations in the North Sea and against the British coastal convoys, particularly along the north east seaboard of Great Britain. It was in this region that she scored her first successes, after fruitless operations off the Polish coast during the invasion of that country and a patrol against British shipping coming from Norwegian ports. On 18 November 1939, she scored her first kill, sinking the trawler Wigmore off the Scottish coast. In December 1940 she laid mines off Blyth, in Northumberland, which claimed two coastal freighters and a naval patrol minesweeper in less than a week. She was then used directly against Scottish convoys in the Moray Firth, during which she achieved her greatest success, torpedoing the British destroyer , which went down with all hands, the cause of her loss only discovered by the British after the war. Shortly afterwards, in thick fog, she sank a Danish ship from the same convoy. These were her final direct victims, although she later claimed another with a mine laid sometime before. The submarine failed to return from her seventh patrol, for which she had departed on 20 March 1940. There is some indication that she was lost due to an unexplained mine detonation in the Skagerrak. Some suggested, that she might have been rammed by the Polish submarine , which reported crashing into something, but it was a month later (20 June) and newest analyses show, that the Wilk most probably collided with a buoy. Whatever the cause, U 22 and her 27 crew were never seen again, lost somewhere in the North Sea in March 1940.