Comments by "Kevin Kennelly" (@Kevin_Kennelly) on "The Drydock - Episode 102" video.

  1. In regards to U-Boats shelling the refinery on Aruba. I suggest "The U-Boat War in the Caribbean" by Gaylord Kelshall. The oil is in Venezuela (which you can see from Aruba). The refinery is on Aruba (I stood at the gates). The Brits, being clever empire-builders, did not want the Venezuelan's having full control of 'production of oil'. So they put the refinery out of their grasp. This necessitated a fleet of tankers to schelpp the crude between the two points. Venezuela has a shallow coastline. So the tankers were 'shallow bottom', custom-made, tankers. There were 10 of them in the fleet. Now for the fun part. The U-Boats sank one of the 10. Had Doenitz appreciated the situation, he should have gone after the other 9. Their sinking would have crippled the operation and denied Britain a large percentage of their 'empire oil'. One other bit from Kelshall's book. A U-Boat attacked a freighter in the Carib. They watched as the freighter-crew abandoned ship faster than they'd ever seen happen before. So fast that they left one of their shipmates aboard the sinking freighter. So the U-Boat pulled up and took the sailor on board. The sailor was very nervous...natural for a POW, the U-Boat commander assumed. It wasn't until the freighter sank below the waves that the truth came out. The freighter was hauling ammo. And it went BOOM. It almost sank the U-Boat. No word on how the POW was treated on his trip back to Germany. These experts are from memory. I apologize for inaccuracies. The book is OK. It does shed light on a neglected theater of war. I'd give it a half-hearted recommendation.
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