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During the last days of the war, the Germans sent a submarine to Japan with some very valuable cargo. What was the name of the sub?

U-234. The "boat" was loaded with documents on nuclear fission, German nuclear physicsts and over 100 lbs of Uranium 235, everything you need to make the atom bomb. Luckily for us, the war ended in Europe before the boat got very far.

During "Operation Cerberus" in 1942 the German Navy did something that hadn't been attempted - in defiance of the Royal Navy - since the late 16th century. What was it?

Passing through the Channel. The objective of Cerberus was to ferry the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (battlecruisers) away from the French port of Brest and into the safer German Baltic ports. During the operation the Germans were not immune, though they did enjoy aircover from Luftwaffe bases in France. British Motor Torpedo Boats attacked several times, a great deal were destroyed. But even more amazing, the real weakness of British Naval Airpower was revealed, the elderly Swordfish biplanes were hacked out of the sky by German fighter pilots whose only complaints were that it was hard to go as slow as the Swordfish without stalling!

What was the biggest German capital ship to survive the war?

Heavy Cruiser Prinz Eugen. The Prinz Eugen was involved in every major German surface action in the entire war. She was with the Bismarck on the latter's fateful voyage (there are suggestions that she might have sank the Hood). She was in Operation Cerberus, and she shelled Russian positions on the North Sea coast. She was finally sunk when she survived two H-bomb tests and foundered while being towed!

Günther Prien is known for making a daring raid on Scapa Flow and sinking the Royal Oak. What U-boat did he do it in?

U-47. Prien was given command of the mission by Admiral Karl Doenitz. The Admiral spent months scouting the location with high altitude reconaissance aircraft, he was determined to do this right.

The H.M.S. Barham was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1941. What U-boat sank the ship?

U-331. The H.M.S. Barham was photographed listing heavily to port before blowing up in a "gratifying" (for the U-boat) explosion. The three photos capture the moments. I would recommend looking at them sometime, you can find them in some WW2 Encyclopedias.

There was only one class of ship that the German Navy never really took a liking to, the carrier. However, the Germans were producing a heavily armed carrier to combat growing British naval airpower. What was this carrier called?

Graf Zeppelin. There were only two major powers in the war that did not pursue carriers, one was Germany and the other was the Soviet Union. Hitler had served in the army during WWI, and Hermann Goering, one of his earliest followers, had served in the Air Service. So the Navy was something of a poor relation in the Wehrmacht (Armed Forces). Stalin, on the other hand, had no real need for carriers. Carriers were for countries that weren't being invaded. A carrier would be a waste of materials compared to the fifteen destroyers that could be built with the same resources, besides, the Soviets really had no need to protect their shipping, all their raw materials could be transported by rail to themselves, not other allied nations in America's case.

The German company Fiesler developed a torpedo plane for the carrier under construction at that time, what was the designation of the plane?

Fi-167. The Germans had their Fi-167, the British had their Swordfish, the Japanese had their B5N "Kate", and the U.S.A. had the TBD Devestator. But they all had two things in common. All were pretty slow, and even worse, all were very vulnerable. Early carrier doctrine dictated that the torpedo bombers were to draw the fire of the target and escorts while the dive bombers sank the target!

German coastal craft were very effective at giving the Allies a headache. Most people think of the E-Boot, but there were actually two types, the R-Boote, and the class that stole the headlines. What was this boat called?

S-Boot. There is one instance were German coastal craft spotted a huge Allied Armada in late May 1944. It was the invasion fleet on maneuvers, the Germans saw their oppurtunity and struck. They sank some landing craft and damaged a couple transports inflicting over 2000 casualties. The Allies hid this catastrophe from the public until long after the war.

During the Norweigan Campaign of April-June 1940 the Germans lost one of their brand-new cruisers. What was this cruiser called?

Blücher. The Oscarbourg was acutally the aging Norweigan fort that put two torpedoes into the Blücher forcing the remainder of the German squadron to withdraw.

At Nuremburg, Admiral Karl Doenitz was sentenced to ten years in prison for ordering his U-boats to *not* do what in the N. Atlantic?

Rescue survivors. American naval commanders actually stepped forward to oppose the verdict. Doenitz ordered the ceasing of rescuing survivors because many of his U-boats were being sunk by enemy aircraft while in the process. However, the Russian side was in no mood to go easy on the former Kriegsmarine commader and pushed for the ten years in prison.