Thank you, Michael: an open mind, of course.

What we do now have is a statement from the beach that there was a shell hit before stranding and that has to be squared away. A shell hole under military inspection is there in plain sight in some of the unused pictures held by ecpad. There are also three different versions of events from Commander Gerth, none wholly convincing. Why would Gerth not have mentioned a shell hit - before or after stranding?

Military authorities in Calais were alerted within 20 minutes of the discovery in the fog ('so quiet that voices would carry more than a mile' - 'plus d'un mille') and, at about the same time (within minutes), the u-boat was blown up by its crew and, to do this, they were all busy on board. Allied signal traffic was heavy and excited. French patrol vessels were first on the scene at sea within half an hour of summons and they saw a fire had already started and then witnessed the explosion. The commander of the French vessels reported that they arrived hoping for a fight and how disappointed they were that it was not necessary. The town had moved to the beach to witness the spectacle and crowd control was an immediate preoccupation. The patrol vessels were told to leave by signals from the beach because they were not needed. The u-boat men were taken quickly to Wissant town hall for interrogation.

Nobody, anywhere, mentions a gun being fired in the midst of all these people. If it was fired while UC-61 was at sea, it would have come from open water. If it was fired after stranding, the current best trajectory would have been from near the church tower (stationary target, stuck fast, but more work to be done here). I have several feelers out for other contemporary reports.

One of the problems might be that the currently-accepted narrative (largely correct if dramatically presented) was written by Albert Chatelle in 1929. He was a popular and successful jobbing author who toured French sea towns over many years, picking up hundreds of events from contemporary newspaper reports and turning them into war commemoration books such as 'Calais (or Boulogne, Dunkirk, Le Havre) during the war'. He never witnessed his stories. His principal source for UC-61 was an undisclosed, censored, contemporary report in the Paris edition of 'Le Petit Journal', lifted in part word for word.

So, if there was any report of a sea action that night ...

Thank you for replying (and for all of your help over time) and best wishes
Chris Heal