Destroyed by a long Civil War, starving and stifled any attempt at rebellion by Franco's harsh repression, Spain remained a neutral territory during World War II. But the dimensions of the terrible armed conflict were so enormous that some battles were fought a short distance from our coasts.
One of them happened in the waters that separate the coast of Alicante from the Balearic Islands, an area where the U-77 submarine belonging to the German Kriegsmarine fleet operated, one of the assets of the Nazi navy that had given the most headaches to the allies.
The U-boats sank more than 3,000 merchant ships and numerous warships, and Churchill himself confessed that they were his main concern for a long period. Although the final balance was devastating: three out of every four men who served in the almost nine hundred that were launched during the war did not see the end of the war.
As recounted in the book The Sinking of U-77 in Spain, by César O'Donnell, the underwater ship managed to avoid up to 16 air and anti-submarine attacks, but on its fifteenth war cruise through the Mediterranean, at the end of March 1943, "his luck changed and he was seriously hit in three successive air attacks by three British anti-submarine planes, which ultimately caused his sinking."
Initially, it was said that the submarine had sunk east of Cartagena, but numerous testimonies from fishermen who fished in the area claimed that it went to the bottom in the waters of Calp. This was confirmed when the wreck was filmed at a depth of about 85 meters in 2004, on a bed of mud and sand and covered with fishing nets, nine miles southeast of the Peñón de Ifach.
Local historian Andrés Ortolá recounts what happened in one of the entries on his website historiadecalp.net: "on March 28, 1943 at 11:25 a.m., U-77 was sighted and attacked with bombs by a plane belonging to the 48th squadron with base in Gibraltar, which partially damaged the submarine although it did not prevent it from submerging and thus losing its trail.
According to his story, the first aviator "requested help and at 5:45 p.m. another plane from the 233rd squadron also based in Gibraltar arrived, a Lokheed A-28 Hanson, which located U-77 on the surface at a distance of 30 miles from the first attack and for an hour and ten minutes he dedicated himself to harassing him. Four depth charges launched from just 30 meters high exploded so close to the ship that they ended up causing it to sink.
Although the crew abandoned the submarine, only nine of them saved their lives when they were rescued by the fishing boat Peñón de Ifach; Two never appeared and other boats fishing in the area recovered 36 bodies. Of them, 31 were buried in Alicante. An image of the ceremony - the one that heads this article - is on display at the Alicante Civil War Interpretation Center. The other five were initially buried in Altea, but since 1981 all of them have been found in the German cemetery of Cuacos, in Extremadura.
Since 1981, the remains of 180 German soldiers who died during World War I and II in Spanish territory or near its coasts have been found in this small necropolis since 1981. The proximity to the Yuste monastery, the last resting place of Emperor Charles V, was the reason that prompted the German government to choose this location.
In the book The German Military Cemetery of Cuacos de Yuste, by Violat, Verdú and Ruzafa, published in 2015 by the El Brocense Cultural Institution and the Provincial Council of Cáceres, the story of U-77 and its commander Otto Hartmann is told, among many others. , who was 25 years old when he died.
According to the testimonies collected by the authors, he was the youngest of four siblings in a family from Stuttgart. He graduated from the Kiel Marine Cadet School and within a few years rose to commander. On his last mission, he had set sail a few weeks earlier from La Spezia (Italy), with the mission of controlling naval traffic in the western Mediterranean. After torpedoing two Allied ships, an RAF squadron put an end to his biography. His body appeared in the spring of 1943 on the coast of Altea.
The sailors of the fishing boat Peñón de Ifach, which rescued the survivors of the U-77, were rewarded by the naval attaché of the German embassy, who gave them a wristwatch and a life preserver for each one, plus a thousand pesetas to distribute among all.
