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by Paul M. Lawton Esq (Author)
This book is about Germany's development of secret rocket launching U-Boats - "Operation Teardrop" - Hitler's Raketen U-Boote (rocket submarine) and the mysterious death of Kapitanleutnant Friedrich Steinhoff during World War II. During the final days of German belligerence in World War II a little known chapter in Naval history took place just off the American Northeast Coast. In response to the perceived threat of a U-boat launched missile attack against New York City, the U.S. Navy mobilized one of the most comprehensive anti-submarine operations of the war. For nearly six decades the story of the final patrol of the German U-boat U-873, and the mysterious death of her commander, Kapitanleutnant Friedrich Steinhoff, have been little more than a footnote in naval history. The memory of those events, however, and American concerns for national security, will forever remain as a prophetic vision of the terrorist attacks that wreaked havoc across the United States on September 11, 2001.On May 11, 1945, the U.S.S. Vance and the U.S.S. Durant had orders to look for the surrendering German U-Boat U-873. The U-873 was boarded and escorted to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Base, arriving there on May 16-17th. According to the surface group Commander of the U.S. Navy's Eastern Sea Frontier's Northern Group, Captain Alexander W. Moffat, Commander: "Steinhoff was a tough, truculent Nazi. When he came aboard (U.S. Coast Guard Cutter) Argo (CGC-100) he refused to talk to me. Through an interpreter he said only: 'I am obeying orders of a higher authority.' Then he sneered at me and turned away." rom recently declassified handwritten U.S. Naval Prison notes taken during the initial interrogation of U-873 Officers and crewmen while held in the Portsmouth Naval Prison, it is clear the interrogators also learned that Commander Steinhoff had previously been the Commanding Officer of "U-511 as C.O. on first patrol June 42" during which Germany's first successful submarine rocket-firing tests were conducted. Steinhoff's first brutal two and a half hour long interrogation took place in an isolated dungeon-like cell known by the prison's Marine guards as "The Pit." Upon discovery of Steinhoff's involvement in the secret research and testing of submarine launched rockets, and his insistence that no such U-boats were ever deployed, it is likely that Steinhoff's interrogations, while "lashed to a wooden chair" grew increasingly more brutal.Commander Steinhoff, two German officers and 47 crewmen were transferred in several heavily guarded Navy buses to Boston, Massachusetts, where they were handed over to the First Army Command authorities and temporarily held at the Suffolk County Jail on Charles Street.A few days later, German Navy Prisoner of War Officer, Kapitanleutnant Steinhoff was discovered dead in his cell. The official ruling was that he had committed suicide. But the evidence, covered-up by the U.S. Naval authorities, pointed to a very different conclusion.
