Dear All,

Several Internet sites and books about the Type XXI U-Boats show pictures of U-2502 in a dry dock in the latter half of 1945. One caption indicates that the photos were taken when U-2502 was in the Vickers Shipyard in Barrow, and another even suggests that the photos were taken during U-2502’s original assembly in a German shipyard.

However, all the captions are incorrect, and the post-war history of U-2502 is as follows:

Surrendered in Horten, Norway on 9 May 1945.

Transferred from Horten to Lisahally on 3 June 1945.

Selected by the Royal Navy for Type XXI First of Class trials and moved from Lisahally to Holy Loch in south-west Scotland in early July 1945. It arrived there on 6 July, where it was moored alongside the accommodation ship SS Al Rawdah.

U-2502 then needed to be docked and inspected before its trials could commence.

It was therefore sent south to the Cammell Laird Shipyard in Birkenhead for inspection and any necessary rectification before the trials could take place.

U-2502 arrived in Birkenhead on 22 July 45 prior to its planned docking and inspection in Cammell Laird's No 4 Graving Dock from 24 to 29 July 45.

On 23 July 45 the starboard main motor insulation caught fire and the starboard auxiliary motor suffered from overheating, the result being that U-2502 would have needed 4 to 6 weeks in the dock to repair the defects, as well as it being a complicated and expensive process.

The proposed Royal Navy trials with U-2502 were therefore cancelled on 28 July 45, and the U-Boat was returned to Lisahally for storage before eventually being sunk in Operation Deadlight on 3 January 1946.

Thus, the real story is that all the various photos of U-2502 in dry dock were taken in No 4 Graving Dock at the Cammell Laird Shipyard in Birkenhead in July 1945 before the U-Boat was returned to Lisahally, where it arrived on 2 August.

I hope this clarifies a “cloudy” situation.

Yours aye

Derek