The U-Boat War: The Real Das Boot

Local departure by coach or Door-to-Door service, then to Belgium or Holland for an overnight stay.

We continue to Bremen for four nights. En route we stop at Deventer for lunch, and also to discuss the 1945 battles in the Netherlands, which involved ground troops from the German Kriegsmarine. We also see the road bridge here which was used as Arnhem Bridge in the film ‘A Bridge Too Far’.

We start the tour in the Wilhelmshaven area and start at a huge air raid bunker on the site of one of the original U-Boat barracks, We then visit the German Naval Museum, which tells the story of the war at sea from bases here in two World Wars. We also look at the Allied bombing of the port, including the first RAF raid on Germany on 4th September 1939, seeing the fascinating Bunker Museum. Afterwards we visit the church in Wilhelmshaven which contains memorials to the U-Boat crews who died in the war. Later we see the Ehrenfriedhof, the military cemetery of Wilhelmshaven, that contains U-Boat memorials and also the crew of a U-Boat lost in 1940.

Today we have an early start and travel to Kiel, from where the famous Kiel Canal was constructed before WW1 to take German shipping into the North Sea in the Naval Arms Race of that period. Here we see the massive Laboe Naval Memorial, the U-Boat Museum where you can go inside an original WW2 period U-Boat U-995 that has been brought onto dry land, getting an insight into how the crews lived. We then visit the U–Boat crew’s memorial which lists the name of every sailor who died at sea in a U-Boat and commemorates their 30,000 dead. We also look at the bombing here during WW2 and visit the British Bomber Command graves in Kiel War Cemetery.

In Bremen we look at the U-Boat bases and a massive concrete bunker, which was built to act as a factory building German U-Boats. Allied bombing stopped this and now it is open as a visitors centre. Later we travel to Bremerhaven and see the Wilhelm Bauer U-Boat Museum. Here we see a salvaged 1944 U-Boat which was later restored for training purposes and serves as a superb example of what life in a WW2 U-Boat was like. We then visit Fort Kugelbake at Cuxhaven, which was part of the defences of this region and was used in WW2. Mines were a great part of the war at sea, and clearing them up after WW2 was a big problem. We end with a look at this story during our visit to Cuxhaven where we see the memorial to the deminers who cleared the seas and paid a high price.

We return to Belgium for an overnight stay. En route we stop at Sage War Cemetery to visit the graves of RAF crew killed in the attack on Wilhelmshaven and then continue to Nijmegen for our lunchtime with an opportunity to see Nijmegen Bridge and the visitor’s centre: Kriegsmarine divers attacked the bridges here in 1944.

Return home.