On October 31, 1943, the German submarine U-584 met its end in the North Atlantic, north of the Azores. Commanded by Kapitänleutnant Joachim Deecke, the U-boat was spotted alongside U-91 by an American Avenger aircraft flying from the escort carrier USS Card (shown). The pilot shadowed the submarines while reinforcements approached. U-91 submerged and escaped, but U-584 was attacked with FIDO acoustic homing torpedoes and sank with all hands.
The submarine’s destruction closed a remarkable chapter connecting the Atlantic war to America’s shores. Sixteen months earlier, in June 1942, U-584 had transported four Nazi saboteurs to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, as part of Operation Pastorius. Edward Kerling, Herbert Haupt, Werner Thiel, and Hermann Neubauer came ashore with orders to attack American infrastructure. The operation collapsed before they could carry out their mission: all four were captured, convicted by a military commission, and executed on August 8, 1942.
U-584’s final encounter illustrated the increasingly dangerous conditions facing German submarines in the Atlantic. Carrier-based patrol aircraft could locate and shadow surfaced U-boats, summon additional aircraft, and attack with acoustic torpedoes designed to home on underwater sound. The submarine that had once delivered saboteurs to an American beach was ultimately destroyed far out at sea—not in a documented act of retaliation, but in the expanding Allied campaign against Germany’s U-boat fleet.
