Ping list
„At 10 a.m. on October 30, 1939, Wilhelm Zahn was commander of U56 when he managed to avoid detection by the 10 destroyers (among them Intrepid, Ivanhoe, Icarus, Kelly, Impulsive, Firedrake), and battle cruiser Hood protecting the Home Fleet west of the Orkneys and came within striking distance of HMS Nelson and Rodney. Unbeknownst to Zahn, aboard the flagship HMS Nelson were First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes and admiral Sir Dudley Pound who was the First Sea Lord at the time.
Three cruisers were heading straight toward his U-boat’s position, making any attack by him almost impossible, when suddenly they veered by twenty to thirty degrees from their previous course opening the field of attack and bringing him into a direct line of fire with HMS Nelson and HMS Rodney. Rodney was the lead ship of the convoy and Zahn decided to wait until it passed and concentrated his sights on the Nelson.. The U-boat came within the point-blank range of 800 meters of the ship and Zahn’s chances of striking and sinking it were high.
He fired three torpedoes from U56’s three torpedo tubes toward the flagship. All three struck the hull of the Nelson but failed to explode, although the sound of the impact with Nelson’s hull was picked up by the sonar operators of U56.
After the attack, Zahn ordered the U-boat to descend to a deeper level to avoid depth charges since the destroyers had by now detected its presence. In the evening Zahn ordered U56 to surface and subsequently sent a radio report to Berlin listing the targets in the group including HMS Rodney. The delay in the transmission of the information was caused by Zahn’s depression caused by missing his target. Had this delay in Zahn’s report not happened, the German command could have sent U58, which was in the area at the time, to renew the attack on the British targets.“