Irish Examiner
30 December 1939

Ireland’s close encounter with German U-Boat
Ryle Dwyer

AT 530 on the evening of Wednesday, October 4, 1939, the residents of Ballymore, a fishing village three miles west of Dingle, noticed a strange craft heading for the rock at Ventry Harbour. They rushed towards the shore and to their amazement found that members of the crew of the German submarine, U 35, were landing two Greek sailors from a rubber dinghy.
Young Jimmy Fenton had just returned home after school.
“I spotted a submarine on the surface of the sea at the entrance to Ventry Harbour, which was steaming towards land from the southwest,” he remembers. After landing the men, the German sailors rowed back to the U Boat and brought in two more men, and they continued to make the trip until 28 men were put ashore. They were survivors from a Greek freighter, Diamantis, which had been bound from Freetown to Barrow on Furness with 4,000 tons of iron ore when it was intercepted by the U Boat off south of Ireland the previous day. The sea was so rough at the time that one of their life boats was overturned and in a rare show of chivalry, the German commander, Kapitaenleutnant Werner Lott, ordered his crew to rescue the Greek sailors.
All 28 seamen from the Diamantis were brought on board the U 35. The Greek crew were offered beds and told to make themselves comfortable. The Germans supplied them with cigarettes, tea, and other refreshments. Some of the men later expressed their keen appreciation of the way in which they had been treated.
“When the Greek sailors said good bye to me on the conning tower they went on their knees and kissed my wedding ring as if I was a bishop,” Lott recalled. “I did not want this but they said ‘we owe our lives to you. You have treated us very nicely’.”
Young Jimmy Fenton was amazed at the attitude of the Greeks towards their German captors. They kept saying: “German skipper, goot man,” even though he had sunk their ship.
Paderas Panagos, the master of the Diamantis, explained that the Germans treated them with the greatest courtesy.
“They gave us their beds,” he explained. “The gave us their food and their cigarettes. They could not do enough for us. Lott asked us where we wished to be landed and we told him England. But he refused.”
“No, to Ireland, our friend,” said the German commander. “He then told us he would take us into Dingle Harbour and that we would be picked up by one of the fishing boats there,” Panagos said.
The U Boat came about a 100 yards from the shore and a number of people witnessed the ferrying of the Greek seamen to the beach. The ship wrecked crew gave some of the German cigarettes to the local people and they were treated hospitably at Maurice Cleary’s in The Cuisin, Ballymore. Five of the crew were suffering from shock and they were taken to Dingle hospital, where they spent the night.
After dropping off the Greek seamen, the U Boat left Ventry Harbour at a very slow speed. Some of the men, all of whom looked young, walked about the deck wearing oilskins and sou’westers. Others were on the conning tower. They waved to the crowd on shore before the U Boat submerged.
Much to the embarrassment of the Dublin government, the story was reported not only in the local newspapers but also in the international press. It actually made the cover story of Life Magazine on October 16, 1939. The owners of Life were anxious to keep America out of the war, so depicting Captain Lott and his crew in their true light tended to counter stories of Nazi brutality.
From the Taoiseach Eamon de Valera’s standpoint, however, the report was embarrassing because it gave credence to rumours that German U Boats were being succored by the Irish. Winston Churchill, the new First Lord of the Admiralty, had already warned the Deputy Chief of Naval Staff of the danger of German submarines off the Irish coast.
“There seems to be a good deal of evidence, or at any rate suspicion that U Boats were being succored from West of Ireland ports by the malignant section with whom de Valera dare not interfere,” Churchill wrote some days earlier. “If the U boat campaign becomes more dangerous we should coerce Southern Ireland.”
At a cabinet meeting on October 24, 1939 Churchill argued that the Dublin government should be told that “the use of the ports in Ireland by the Royal Navy was essential to the security of the Empire, and that the present attitude adopted by Ireland in that matter was intolerable”. He wanted to seize Irish bases, but Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rejected the idea by warning that this “would have most unfortunate repercussions in the United States.”
When U 35 returned to Germany, Lott was reprimanded by Admiral Karl Donitz, the head of the German Navy, for endangering the life of his crew. But he was still in charge of U-35 on its next tour of duty.
At dawn on November 29, 1939, U 35 was cruising on the surface in the North Sea, east of the Shetland Islands when she was spotted by the British destroyer HMS Icarus. Blinded by the rising sun, the crew of U-35 failed to see the Icarus approaching until it was too late. The submarine managed to submerge but was hit and badly damaged in the ensuing depth charge attack. The Icarus was joined by other destroyers under the direction of the Captain of HMS Kelly, Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Realising that their vessel was doomed, Lott ordered the boat to surface. As U 35 flooded, the crew took to the water. HMS Kashmir fished four officers and 27 men from the frigid waters, while HMS Kingston picked up Lott and the other 11 members of his crew - all 43 of whom survived the ordeal.
Normally the British would not wait to rescue German sailors, because the British ships would be sitting targets for any other U boats in the vicinity, but on this occasion Mountbatten ordered that all of the German sailors be rescued.
Lott sought him out when they reached England. “I thanked him for the extraordinary efforts his destroyer made to pick us up,” Lott recalled.
“That is how life is,” Mountbatten replied. “You were extraordinary picking up the Greeks.”
In early 1940 the German prisoners were transferred to Canada, where they remained for the remainder of the war. After the conflict Lott made friends with Mountbatten and they corresponded with one another until Mountbatten was murdered by the Provisional IRA in bomb blast on his boat off Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, in 1979.