Additional Photos and Illustrations

The overall wreck, showing some meter marks on the border.

Illustrated Account of the Sinking.

The vessel sits dead in the water sending a high priority encoded transmission when K-25 is sighted. When the K-25 begins her attack run the U boat Commander briefly opens fire on the Airship with his 20 mm gun. After unsuccessfully attempting to scare the Airship off its attack run, the U boat Commander orders forward on the engines and prepares to dive shallow to avoid becoming a large target.

As the U boats conning tower begins to go awash, the K-25 drops two #350 depth charges, one of which detonates next to the stern 5" armored mount. This blast rips open the hull just above the submarines galley and dislodges the large gun mount off its reinforced support.

The type XI-B U boat rolls over onto her starboard side as she fills with water, jarring loose the gravity-mounted forward 5" gun, which detaches and falls to the bottom. The armored mount lands upside down in the sand and is quickly covered by the soft bottom.

The vessel drfits with the outgoing tide another 600 feet until she settles onto the bottom along the base of a large sand ridge running northwest to southeast. In time, the wreckage is covered with huge amounts of sand, with only an average of approximately 20% of the vessel's upper casing exposed on the sea bottom.

Click to continue . . .

A blowup of the Conning Tower array, (which is viewed essentially from above). Notice the drop-down to the main casing at the after end of the con... the knife edge under what was the aft 20mm AA stand.

A blowup of the forward end of the wreck, showing the sand convergence over the bow, with the starboard hydroplane outline clearly visable at the upper left of the screen.

One of the additional side-scan sonar images taken from a different angle. Note the sub-silhouette picked up in the survey boat's wake at the bottom of the screen. This is due to double-refraction of sound signals, which in essence causes a 'silhouette' of the object being insonified to appear.

The hard contact at the top is the actual wreck, with a slight curviture of the con. visible amidships. The bow is to the left (we have laid a scaled black-line arrangement plan alongside the hard contact for comparison, scaled to the same as the sonar image - 115. meter long wreck). Wreck was insonified with 100kcys. at 100 meter range.

Watch for an update as more information becomes available. You can also visit Trident Research own web site at Mall of Maine.