KEY POINTS:
The captain of the U-Boat that shot down New Zealand Victoria Cross winner Lloyd Trigg's Royal Air Force Liberator during World War II is still alive in Germany, an aviation researcher has discovered.
Aucklander Arthur "Digger" Arculus has also unearthed fresh details about the fierce Atlantic action that cost the lives of Trigg, his seven crew and many of the submarine's complement.
Uniquely, it was the testimony of the enemy skipper, Klemens Schamong, and the other few survivors from U-468, destroyed by Trigg's depth charges as his aircraft plunged into the sea, that led to the posthumous award of the Commonwealth's highest award for bravery.
Trigg and his men perished on August 11, 1943, 386km off Dakar, West Africa, as they attacked U-468 on the ocean surface. Shells from the German vessel's flak guns ripped into the Liberator but did not deter Trigg.
The depth charges released moments before the aircraft crashed exploded alongside the submarine with devastating effect. They "damaged the boat to death", Mr Schamong told Mr Arculus.
Now 90, the old seaman lives in a small town not far from Kiel where his U-Boat was built and commissioned exactly a year before its sinking.
When Mr Arculus began researching Trigg's story for young Australian Sam Biddle, an 8-year-old grandson of a Trigg cousin, who wanted to know more about his famous relation, he decided to try to find out what had happened to Mr Schamong.
Mr Arculus, 80, started his quest by emailing a German contact. The man's detective work eventually turned up a John Schamong, a captain in the German Navy. More checks showed he was indeed the son of the old submariner and, yes, his father was still alive.
Mr Schamong senior responded to an Arculus letter with a short note about the sinking and several enclosures, among them an old letter from the Canadian navigator of the RAF Sunderland that found the U-Boat survivors.
Mr Schamong remembered the Atlantic action vividly: "We opened deadly fire from our 'two 20mm cannons' and the first salvo at a distance of 2000m set the plane on fire.
"Despite this, Trigg continued his attack. He did not give up as we thought and hoped. His plane ... flew deeper and deeper. We could see our deadly fire piercing through his hull.
"And when Trigg was almost over us we saw his 'ash cans' coming down on us and [they] exploded and damaged the boat to death."
It was not surprising Mr Schamong expected Trigg to "give up" because on an earlier patrol the sub's flak frightened off a Grumman Avenger from a US carrier escorting an Atlantic convoy.
Mr Schamong told Mr Arculus that he informed interrogators after his rescue that "such a gallant fighter as Trigg would have been decorated in Germany with the highest medal or order".
The letter said little else so Mr Arculus asked Horst Ahrens, a friend in Kiel, to put some further questions to Mr Schamong. Unfortunately the ex-skipper did not wish to go further.
It might have ended there but Mr Arculus has since received a copy of the now declassified October 1943 Naval Intelligence Division report disclosing what had been learned from the interrogation of Mr Schamong and the other survivors after their arrival in Britain as POWs.
The report said the U-Boat's shooting was so accurate the Liberator was on fire before she had properly lined up the sub.
"She nevertheless ran in to attack with great determination and without deviating to avoid the U-Boat's sustained and heavy fire."
The aircraft crossed the submarine behind the bridge at a height of just 15m, hit the sea 300m away and blew up. But as she roared over the U-Boat the depth charges tumbled down, two exploding within 2m of the submarine.
"The whole U-Boat was thrown violently upward and suffered catastrophic damage."
The U-Boat went down inside 10 minutes, leaving 20 crew battling the horror of sharks and barracuda.
Then miraculously a rating found an RAF rubber dinghy floating in the aircraft's debris, inflated it and climbed in with two other seamen. Eventually, seven survivors from a crew of 39 scrambled into the dinghy.
A Sunderland, searching for the missing Liberator crew, spotted the dinghy the following day, its crew understandably jumping to the conclusion the waving men were their RAF mates.
Mr Arculus' research trail led recently to Patrick Dempsey, 84, the Sunderland's Canadian navigator, now living in Florida.
Dempsey says he remembers watching sharks circling the dinghy and some swimming under it. "We could see them very plainly from the air."
He worked out the position of the dingy, radioed it to base "and then we prepared to drop two emergency supply packs which were about the size of a man each".
The Sunderland made two runs, the first so accurate the package almost hit the dinghy, scaring the Germans out of their wits. The second was much further away - too far away to recover because the survivors had no paddles.
The patrolling aircraft dropped marker dye and headed home. HMS Clarkia arrived the next day and took the Germans aboard.
Mr Arculus was unable to discover anything about Mr Schamong's postwar life until he got an unexpected email recently from Wolfgang Schamong, a nephew, who unravelled this small mystery.
The younger man revealed his uncle became a lawyer after the war, eventually joined Germany's Defence Ministry and in the mid-1970s headed a liaison team in Paris working on German-French naval ships. He and his wife had son John and twin daughters.
Wolfgang Schamong also told Mr Arculus an astonishing story about his uncle's mother, a devout Catholic.
"Now, the same day when the 'Atlantic' fight took place she was at home in Cologne asleep and suddenly woke hearing the noise of water streaming into the room.
"She first thought of some damage to the water pipes but then said to her husband, 'It's not here. I see Klemens' U-Boat sinking but he and some others are safe'."
A mother's intuition perhaps.
Oberleutnant zur See Klemens Schamong, who joined the German navy in 1938, was the only skipper of U-468 and it was his first and last command.
The U-Boat didn't have much luck as she hunted with submarine packs in the North Atlantic during her first two patrols, sinking only one Allied ship, a small, empty west-bound tanker.
She left La Pallice, on France's Atlantic Coast, on her third patrol on July 7, 1943, and was sunk by Trigg barely a month later. Mr Schamong's fuel-short boat was returning to base when Trigg found her, creeping along the West African coast.
Flying Officer Lloyd Allan Trigg, born at Houhora, Northland, in May 1914, was about four years older than Mr Schamong. He farmed, then became a salesman before enlisting in June 1941.
Trigg trained in Canada and after reaching England was posted to 200 Squadron in West Africa flying Hudsons.
He did about 50 operations on the twin-engined aircraft before flying to the US in May 1943 for a conversion course to fly Liberators, much bigger four-engined American bombers.
The New Zealander died not knowing he had already been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for two determined attacks on U-Boats in March 1943. Notification had not reached his squadron before his death.
Four of the other seven airmen killed with him were New Zealanders - Ivan Marinovich (navigator), 26, from Auckland, Arthur Bennett (wireless operator), 29, Lower Hutt, Lawrence Frost (gunner), 22, Auckland, and Terry Soper (gunner), 21, Takaka.
Marinovich and Bennett were in Trigg's original Hudson crew and together the five hugely experienced New Zealanders collectively totalled more than 250 ops. Frost had done no fewer than 65. Two Britons and a Canadian made up the rest of the crew. All eight are commemorated on the Malta Memorial to the air war dead.
The final two sentences of Trigg's citation declare that the Liberator captain's exploit stood out in the Battle of the Atlantic as an "epic of grim determination and high courage. His was the path of duty that leads to glory".
The same could be said too of all his crew.
