Hi Fred,

Good luck figuring all that out.

Oskar Mantel was on U-1229 (not U-1228) when it was sunk but I have no idea exactly where they actually intended to land him or why they picked that place. He was supposed to infiltrate American scientific circles to find out about our advanced technology but he was hardly qualified for it – he had been a bar tender and ladies’ hairdresser before the war. U-1229 didn’t even leave Kiel until after the K-14 incident in July of 1944.

The two agents landed 29-30 November 1944 from U-1230 were Erich Gimpel and William Curtis Colepaugh (both equally as unqualified as Oskar Mantel) and their mission was similar to Oskar Mantel’s.

Source: Showell, Jak P. Mallmann. U-boats at War Landings on Hostile Shores. Shepperton: Ian Allan Publishing Ltd., 2000. ISBN: 1-55750-864-X. Copyright: Jak P. Mallmann Showell, 2000.

I read somewhere (not in Showell’s book) that Gimpel claims his mission was specifically to find out how far American had gotten with the atomic bomb project and to ascertain by what means its production could be stopped.

Given the poor qualifications of these three guys their missions were laughable.

You can find the daily position of U-boats for July, 1944 at [www.uboatarchive.net]. Perhaps that will help.

There is always the possibility that the holes in the blimp that “looked like bullet holes” were actually caused by shrapnel from the two depth charges they dropped too, reports of gunfire (that the surviving crew of K-14 apparently didn’t hear) notwithstanding.

Regards,

Ken Dunn