Joe,

No one is saying that anyone other than te commander who laid the mines should get credit. Rather, what's happening here are database issues. There are four separate issues actually:

The uboat.net ships hit database is based upon Yves and my personal databases, circa 2003. We didn't at the time -- and I still don't -- have a field for the commander responsible for sinking etc. And no, we didn't type in a numeric code for to assign credit to a specific commander for all 7,500+ ships. Rather, the system did this automatically, based upon the CO dates entered in at the time. There are three separate problems:

1. In cases like HMT Kirkland (since fixed), which was sunk after a new commander took over the mninelyaer responsible, it assigns credit to the wrong commander. I vaguely remember working through the UC boats to fix this problem for those boats asome time ago, The UEI could/are still a potential problem in this regard.

2. The system credited a random commander if the U-boat was sunk before a ship hit a mine laid by that U-boat. This bug has been fixed, but it's possible that we haven't found and fixed all the resulting misattributions yet. (This bug crops up in other situations as well.)

3. Obviously, if we made a typo on when an officer commanded a specific boat, the wrong CO could get credit.

4. It's also possible that that our typing was correct, but Spindler wasn't. That's the case here.

Best wishes,
Michael