U-66’s crew seized the moment. Wounded men vanished below. Fresh ones climbed out, gripping their flak guns. A silent oath pulsed through the steel hull: they would not die without a fight.

Then the American guns roared again.

THE LAST TORPEDO

Seehausen knew he was losing the gun duel. His only hope lay in one final weapon.

“Heading 210,” he ordered. “Fire last torpedo!”

The tube thudded. The fish shot forward—U-66’s last desperate strike.

On Buckley, sonar warned: “Torpedo starboard bow!”

“Full starboard rudder!” Abel shouted.

The destroyer escort leaned violently as the helm obeyed. Men clung to rails. Tools slid across deck. Seconds stretched. Water churned white below the bow.

And the torpedo slipped past—missing by yards.

“Last torpedo gone,” Seehausen muttered. “They will finish us now.”

He ordered the inevitable.

“Abandon ship.”

RAMMING SPEED

Several German sailors scrambled topside to dive into the sea. But in the darkness, Buckley’s crew could not see them. To them, U-66 still fought on.

“Ram it,” Abel ordered.

The helmsman spun the wheel. Buckley surged forward, bearing down on the crippled U-boat.

On U-66, panic overtook the bridge.

“All to starboard! Hard to starboard!”

Too late.

Buckley collided with the submarine in a grinding shriek of metal—a 1,400-ton blunt instrument scraping across U-66’s deck.

Then something no American crew expected happened.

“STAND BY TO REPEL BOARDERS!”

As Buckley rode up along the U-boat’s hull, German sailors—initially emerging to abandon ship—found themselves face-to-face with American crewmen just feet away.

Gunfire erupted. Sailors leapt the gap. Pistols and knives flashed. A fistfight broke out at sea—something out of the age of sail, not modern anti-submarine warfare.

Abel heard the shouts and gave an order that would be etched forever into naval history:

“Stand by to repel boarders!”

It was the first time an American warship had received that command in more than a century.

The melee was chaos. Spent shell casings, rifle butts, and even scalding coffee were used as improvised weapons. Germans clung to Buckley’s railings as the destroyer escort ground backward across U-66’s hull.

Then a sailor—identity unknown—grabbed grenades and hurled them onto the U-boat.

The explosions bloomed stark and brilliant.

Silence followed.

THE END OF U-66

Buckley pulled away as water poured into gaping wounds in the submarine’s hull. Minutes later, a final eruption broke the surface. U-66 rolled, split, and vanished beneath the Atlantic.

The battle was over.

Buckley and her crew saved 36 German survivors, hauling them aboard as the sun rose. Not a single American sailor was killed.

Commander Brent Abel would receive the Navy Cross for his leadership in one of the strangest and most brutal ship-to-ship encounters of the war.

Captain Gerhard Seehausen, only twenty-six years old, went down with U-66—a commander fighting to the last moment in a doomed, lopsided duel.

A BATTLE WITHOUT EQUAL

The engagement remains one of the most unusual naval battles in U.S. history:

• A destroyer escort ramming a submarine.
• German sailors boarding the American ship.
• Hand-to-hand combat on the high seas.
• Grenades thrown across decks only feet apart.
• A U-boat sunk in a battle closer to the Age of Nelson than World War II.

It was the final chapter of U-66—once one of Germany’s deadliest hunters—brought down not by stealth or torpedoes, but by a destroyer escort that refused to let its prey slip into darkness.

On that moonlit Atlantic night, modern warfare briefly reverted to something ancient and primal:
men fighting at touching distance, steel against steel, life against death, courage against the chaos of war.