U-584
U-584’s unique short mission into the region was for the purpose of landing enemy saboteurs on the Florida coast, an achievement the submarine pulled off on the 17th of June (German time), 1942 as part of Operation Pastorius (in conjunction with U-202 landing saboteurs on Amagansett beach, New York on the 13th of June). As with U-98 which mined nearby Jacksonville earlier, this was a one-off type of raid, but the patrol did not result in sinkings.
On a patrol of 89 days out of Brest in which the submarine made its way safely back to Brest, U-584 spent more days off Cape Hatteras than the four days devoted to the region north of the Bahamas. On a singular and focused patrol in the region, the submarine entered several hundred miles east of the Georgia/South Carolina border on the 16th of June, deposited the team via small boats as well as their sabotage equipment on the night of the 16th/17th, and was heading northbound out of the area on the night of the 19th June. The boat was refueled by U-460 west of the Azores in early July and returned to Brest on the 22nd of July.
Kapitänleutnant Joachim Deecke turned 30 years of age ten days after leaving the region, on the 29th of June. This would have made the rendezvous with fellow-U-boat U-460 more celebratory. A member of the crew of 1933, he was promoted from Oberleutnant zur See in April, 1941 and a year later earned the Iron Cross First Class (an award of the German Cross in Gold was given posthumously).
Deecke accrued an impressive 328 days at sea on nine patrols, all of the in U-584 which he commissioned at the end of 1941 (U-9, on which he served, did not go on war patrols). His career total was 18,684 tons for four ships sunk, including a Soviet ship of 206 tons and the American West Madaket in convoy ONS-5. U-584 was lost in the North Atlantic during an attack from US Avenger aircraft armed with homing torpedoes which launched from the USS Card on 31 October, 1943. All hands – including Deecke, by then 31 years old – were lost.
SOURCES: Gudmundur Helgason, Rainer Kolbicz, www.uboat.net, 2011, Kenneth Wynn, U-boat Operations of the Second World War, Volume 1 and Volume 2, 1997