- 6 hours ago
At 21, Canadian pilot Kenneth Moore flew straight into German submarine fire—and sank two U-boats in just 22 minutes. As the D-Day fleet faced a desperate underwater threat, Moore and his mostly Canadian crew took a Liberator out over the moonlit Channel on a night when their squadron had already lost two crews.
This World War II military history documentary follows the daring patrol, revealing how Moore attacked low beneath the enemy guns, used moonlight instead of a searchlight, and saved half his depth charges for a second target. Discover the story of Kenneth Moore, Coastal Command, and the aircrews defending the Normandy invasion. A compelling listen for fans of WW2 history, aviation stories, D-Day documentaries, and detailed accounts of courage and leadership in wartime.
This World War II military history documentary follows the daring patrol, revealing how Moore attacked low beneath the enemy guns, used moonlight instead of a searchlight, and saved half his depth charges for a second target. Discover the story of Kenneth Moore, Coastal Command, and the aircrews defending the Normandy invasion. A compelling listen for fans of WW2 history, aviation stories, D-Day documentaries, and detailed accounts of courage and leadership in wartime.
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LearningTranscript
00:00June the 8th, 1944. A little after two in the morning, off the island of Ushant, where the
00:07English Channel opens into the Atlantic, Kenneth Moore is bringing a four-engine liberator in
00:13over the sea so low that his crew will later put the height at 50 feet. Asked about it many
00:21years
00:21afterwards, Moore said maybe twenty. Ahead of the nose, in the silver path the moon lays across the
00:29water, there is a black shape. A conning tower. A German U-boat on the surface, running for Normandy,
00:37where two days earlier the largest invasion fleet in history had put an army ashore. On the U-boat's
00:46deck, men are running for the guns. Up to eight of them, the crew will report. A U-boat that
00:52June did
00:53not always dive when an aircraft came at it. It stayed up, and it fought. Its anti-aircraft guns
01:00could put a wall of shells across the one straight line a bomber had to fly to drop its depth
01:07charges.
01:07And this bomber is on that line at a hundred and ninety miles an hour, with nowhere to turn,
01:15and no height to trade. In the nose turret, a Saskatchewan man named Alec Gibb opens fire on
01:23the conning tower. Behind and above him, Moore holds the aircraft straight. He does not climb.
01:31Kenneth Owen Moore. The crew call him K.O. He is 21 years old, from Rockhaven, Saskatchewan,
01:39the youngest of eight children, raised by his mother after his father died. When he finished
01:45high school, he hitchhiked to Vancouver and joined the Air Force. And he had a rule. Years later,
01:52he put it in one sentence. When I got into trouble, I went down, not up. Every instinct a pilot
02:00has under fire says climb. Get height. Get away from the guns. Moore went the other way. Down
02:09onto the water and straight into the guns. Because he had worked out something about the enemy that
02:15the briefing rooms had not. Remember that rule. Everything tonight hangs on it. Within the next
02:22half hour, that rule. A full moon and the nine other men in that aircraft will do something almost
02:30no crew in coastal command ever did. They will find and attack two U-boats on a single patrol,
02:38and leave both of them going down. 22 minutes apart. That is what this story is about. Not whether it
02:48happened. The record is clear on that. How. How a 21-year-old from a Saskatchewan village flying an
02:57American-built bomber in a Royal Air Force squadron beat two German crews who had every reason to stay
03:06on the surface and shoot it out. And how he did it on a night when his own squadron had
03:12already lost
03:13two crews in little more than a day. If what the Canadians did over these waters matters to you,
03:21a subscribe helps stories like this one reach more people. Thank you. Now hold him there, 50 feet above
03:29the water, with the guns coming up to meet him. We will come back to this exact second. Before we
03:37do,
03:37you need to know what was in that water, and why it was on the surface at all. On June
03:43the 6th,
03:44as the first reports came in from the Normandy beaches, Grand Admiral Carl Donitz set in motion
03:51a plan that had been waiting for weeks. In the concrete pens at Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire,
03:59and La Palis, the U-boats of the Bay of Biscay had been held back for exactly this day. Within
04:0748 hours,
04:0836 of them were at sea. The orders that went with them said, in substance, that every vessel taking
04:16part in the landing was a target, even one carrying a single tank, and was to be attacked regardless of
04:24the risk to the boat. Here is the detail that matters. Many of those boats had no snorkel,
04:31the breathing pipe that let a submarine run its diesels just below the surface. Without one,
04:38a boat underwater crawled along on its batteries, and it could not crawl for long. To reach the channel
04:45while the invasion was still coming ashore, those boats had to come up and run on their diesels.
04:51On the surface. Fast. Across the one stretch of sea the Allies had spent months preparing to watch.
05:00The man who commanded Coastal Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, put it plainly in his
05:08official report. The U-boats, he wrote, were in too much of a hurry to be able to proceed submerged,
05:15and when the aircraft found them, the enemy fought back desperately with his anti-aircraft armament.
05:23Think about what that means for a man like Moore. The enemy is coming to him, on the surface, in
05:30the
05:31dark. That is the best chance a submarine hunter will ever get. It is also the moment a submarine is
05:38most dangerous to him, because now it wants the fight. Moore's Squadron, 224 Royal Air Force, flew
05:47from St. Eval on the north coast of Cornwall, squarely across the path of those boats. Two of
05:54its crews went out into that sea ahead of him, and never came home. And one of them, the records
06:01suggest,
06:02was brought down by a U-boat doing exactly what the boat in Moore's sights was doing now,
06:09staying on the surface and shooting back. Those two crews had been briefed the same way Moore had.
06:16Moore had simply stopped believing one line of that briefing. June the 6th, 1944, 20 minutes to 10 at
06:26night, at RAF St. Eval on the cliffs of North Cornwall. The first wounded were still coming off
06:34the Normandy beaches when a liberator marked M for Mike rolled down the runway and climbed out over
06:41the sea. Its captain was Flying Officer Ethan Allen, 25 years old, an American from Tohunga, California,
06:49flying in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Eleven men went with him. M for Mike flew
06:57out toward its patrol line off the French coast. Nothing was ever heard from it again.
07:04Kenneth Moore was not in the air that night. He remembered it plainly. We didn't get out on D-Day,
07:10he said. We got out the night after D-Day. For 24 hours his crew was on the ground at
07:18St. Eval while
07:19the squadron flew the patrols without them. That same evening, about 120 miles to the south,
07:27the other side was moving. From the concrete bunkers at Brest, 15 U-boats slipped out into the dark
07:34in two waves. Seven of them had the schnorchel. Eight did not. Those eight would have to make the whole
07:42run on the surface, with their diesels hammering, through the sea that 224 Squadron was patrolling.
07:50One of the eight was U-373. Her captain was Detlef von Leisten, 27 years old, from Hamburg. And his
07:59boat has
08:00a history you should keep in mind, because it ties straight back to Moore. Five months earlier, in
08:06January, U-373 had been caught on the surface by a Wellington and a Liberator, and the Liberator was
08:14from 224, Moore's own squadron. Von Leisten was on that bridge. His boat crawled back into Brest so badly
08:24damaged that the dockyard found two unexploded depth charges lying on top of the conning
08:30tower. They were lifted off and dumped. The boat was repaired. Now she was heading back out,
08:36on the surface, across the same squadron's patrol line. Von Leisten had already survived one 224 crew.
08:45Remember that. Another of the boats that left Brest that night was U-415, under a young commander
08:53named Herbert Werner. In the early hours of June 7th, a Lee Light Wellington found her and hit her hard.
09:01She did not dive and stay down. She stayed up, and she kept her guns manned. Somewhere in that same
09:09stretch of sea, another of 224's Liberators was flying its patrol. B for Baker, captained by a pilot
09:17named Buchan Hepburn with a crew that was mostly Australian. Around two in the morning, the squadron
09:24received its last radio call from that aircraft. Then, nothing. The German records list a 224 Liberator,
09:33letter B, shot down by U-415 that day. Ten men are listed as lost, with B for Baker. So
09:42this was the
09:43first full day of the invasion for Moore's squadron. Two aircraft gone. Two crews of young men from
09:50California, from Australia, from Britain and Canada, who had walked out to their dispersals at St. Eval,
09:58and never walked back. Moore put it in the bluntest words he had. We had just lost 30 people.
10:07Sholto Douglas, writing his report in London, saw it from much higher up.
10:13The U-boat attacks, he wrote, cost his command a high proportion of casualties. Then he added the
10:20line that made the price worth paying in his eyes. Very few got through. Very few. Not none. And every
10:30boat that did get through to the channel would be in among troop ships, tank landing craft, ammunition
10:37ships. That was the whole point of the German order. One boat in the wrong place could kill hundreds
10:45of men before anyone on the beaches knew it was there. Now look at the crew Moore was about to
10:51take
10:51out into that sea. He had built it in an unlikely place, at an operational training unit in Nassau,
10:59in the Bahamas. That is where he picked up seven Canadians, and he kept them. A real benefit, he
11:06called it. A liberator on these patrols carried ten men and two navigators, because a patrol could run
11:14sixteen and a half or seventeen hours. Bill Foster, from Hamilton, Ontario, worked the radar. Alec Gibb,
11:24from Saskatchewan, was the second navigator, and manned the nose guns. The man who would aim the depth
11:30charges was the navigator, Johnston McDowell, known as Jock, Royal Air Force. The flight engineer was
11:39Sergeant James Hamer, a Briton. In the tail sat a gunner named Webb. And there was one more member of
11:47the crew, a stuffed toy panda called Dinty Moore. The men treated it as a warrant officer and carried
11:56it on operations for luck. The crew's idea of a night off was going to the pub together. Men brought
12:04their problems to the table and asked their pilot what to do about them. Moore said later that the
12:10whole secret of leading men was simple to say and hard to live. I think you have to know your
12:17people.
12:18He was twenty-one, and he had been flying operations for the better part of two years. He had been
12:25the
12:25youngest man on a bomber crew at eighteen. He knew exactly what the loss of B for Baker meant, because
12:33he had been told the same things at the same briefings as Buchan Hepburn. When Moore's crew took
12:40off on the night of June the seventh, the squadron saw it in a particular way. It was sort of
12:47accepted,
12:48he said, as a retaliation type thing. But you cannot fly out to avenge two crews with the same method
12:56that
12:56killed them, and Moore was not going to. He had already found the flaw in that method three months
13:04earlier, on a night in March, when he took his Liberator straight between two German destroyers
13:10and finished the attack with his head jammed under the instrument panel. What he saw from that cockpit
13:17told him exactly where the German gunners expected him to be. March 1944, night, off the coast of Brittany.
13:27Moore's radar operator had three contacts on his screen, close together, near the French shore.
13:34They worked out the picture between them. In the middle, a U-boat. On either side of it,
13:41one to port and one to starboard, a German destroyer. An escort. Three ships, all with guns,
13:49and every lookout on them watching the sea for aircraft. So Moore did not come from the sea.
13:56I very quickly decided, he said, that I was going to go in over France. He swung the Liberator round
14:04and
14:04brought it in low from the land side, reasoning that German lookouts would take anything coming
14:10out of France for one of their own. It was a good idea and the first pass still went wrong.
14:16He was not
14:17lined up the way he wanted when he reached the target. The Liberator went straight through the
14:22gap between the two destroyers and both of them fired into it from either side. Here is what most
14:29pilots did after a pass like that. They climbed and ran. Get height, get distance, get out of range.
14:38Moore stayed on the water. He hauled the big aircraft round in a full circle and came back in for
14:46a
14:46second attack, through the same guns. I stayed down, he said, because I just like being down low.
14:54On the second run, the tracer was so thick that it lit up the cockpit. Moore could not read his
15:01instruments for the glare. So he lowered his seat as far as it would go and flew the attack with
15:07his
15:08head down under the dashboard, reading the dials while the fire went past above him. Picture that.
15:15A Liberator has a wingspan of 110 feet, about as big a target as anything flying in 1944. And a
15:2421-year-old
15:25from Saskatchewan is flying it between two destroyers, head below the glass, on purpose.
15:33When I look back on it, he said decades later, it scares the hell out of me. They came out
15:39the other
15:40side. And Moore brought home something worth more than whatever he had done to that U-boat. He had
15:47watched where the fire went. That is the first piece of how he did it in June. Listen to how
15:54Moore
15:54described it. The standard attack, the one crews were briefed on, came in at around 300 feet,
16:03and crews flying it were being lost. Moore turned that over and came to a simple conclusion.
16:11The enemy knows we are going to attack at 300 feet. If you know the height a bomber will come
16:17in at,
16:18you know where to aim. Moore described the U-boat's weapons as a box the aircraft had to fly through,
16:26and he judged the odds of a Liberator getting through that box at the expected height to be poor.
16:33So he moved out of the box, down, maybe 20 feet at night. At that height, he said,
16:42he tried to keep the enemy tracer going over the coop top, over the cockpit roof, aimed at where a
16:50bomber was supposed to be, not at where Moore actually was. And he did not come in quietly.
16:57We used our turrets to clear their decks, he said. The nose gunner fired all the way in,
17:04at the men on deck and at the guns. That was Alec Gibb's job, and Moore said Gibb did a
17:11great job of
17:12clearing the way. Hold on to that picture. Down low, guns firing, under the box. The Germans had been
17:21building that box for a year. In May 1943, a U-boat fitted out with extra anti-aircraft guns as
17:30a
17:30deliberate trap for aircraft stayed on the surface in the Bay of Biscay and shot down a Sunderland
17:36flying boat. All 11 men aboard were killed. The boat's number was U441. Remember it. It comes back at
17:47the very end of this story. Now here is the problem, and it is a hard one. Everything Moore worked
17:55out
17:55only works if he can see the U-boat. At night, at 50 feet, a conning tower is a small
18:03black shape on a
18:05black sea. Radar can find it 10 miles out and steer the aircraft toward it, but in the last seconds,
18:12a pilot has to lay his depth charges across a hole about the length of a hockey rink, in the
18:18dark,
18:18at 190 miles an hour. Coastal Command's answer was the Lee Light, a searchlight under the wing,
18:26switched on in the last mile of the run, that lit a U-boat up like a stage. Moore's Liberator
18:33carried
18:34one that night. But think about what that light means to a gunner on a U-boat deck who has
18:39decided
18:40to stay up and fight. Before it comes on, there is only engine noise somewhere in the dark. The moment
18:46it comes on, there is a blazing point in the sky, coming straight at him, low and level. Something to
18:54aim at. Moore had to choose. Use the light and give the gunners their target, or leave it off and
19:01attack
19:02something he might not see until it was too late. He made that choice before he ever reached Ushant.
19:09The light would stay off. He had something else in mind for lighting up a U-boat. To make it
19:16work,
19:17though, he would sometimes have to do the thing every pilot dreaded most over an armed submarine.
19:24Circle it in plain view and wait. June the 7th, 1944. A quarter past 10 at night, St. Eval. Moore's
19:34Liberator, G for George, turned onto the runway with 10 men and a stuffed panda aboard. In the bomb bay
19:41was
19:42the heaviest load the crew had ever taken out. On a normal patrol, Moore said, they carried six depth
19:49charges, which isn't a lot of weapon. Tonight they had 12, packed with Torpex. And one thing more,
19:58a homing torpedo codenamed Proctor, built to chase the sound of a submarine's propellers underwater.
20:05They climbed out, crossed Cornwall, and headed south over the sea. A little after 11, they reached their
20:12patrol line, the area the squadron called Patrol E, at the western mouth of the channel near Ushant.
20:20Here is how that line worked. Moore described it simply. His squadron covered the water from
20:26Land's End to Brest in the island of Ushant, and we had an airplane in the air every 15 minutes.
20:34Across the whole operation, Coastal Command laid its patrols so that any stretch of that sea was swept
20:41by radar about every half hour. The plan had a name that tells you everything. Cork. The aircraft were
20:50the cork, and the bottle was the English Channel. A U-boat on the surface could not hide in that.
20:57It
20:58could only hope to be missed or fight. Now look up, because this is what Moore had been waiting for.
21:06That night the moon was full, and it was rising over the Bay of Biscay as G for George reached
21:13its
21:13patrol. The cloud was thin, scattered puffs. Below, the water shimmered. Here is the second piece of the
21:22answer. A full moon over the sea lays a bright road across the water toward you. Anything that sits on
21:30that road between you and the moon stands out black against the glitter, a conning tower included.
21:37You do not need a searchlight. You need geometry. Put the U-boat between yourself and the moon,
21:45then come at it along that bright road. Crews called it attacking up moon, and Moore did not invent it.
21:53What was his was the combination. Up moon, light off, at a height no German gunner was set up for.
22:01But the moon has a price. It stays where it is. If the U-boat is on the wrong side,
22:08the pilot has to
22:09swing round to find the angle, and every second spent swinging is a second the men on that deck
22:16can hear him coming. For three hours G for George flew its line. Somewhere in the same sea, another of
22:24the squadron's liberators, S for sugar, flown by a pilot named Ensor, found a U-boat of its own and
22:32attacked it. The boats were out there, and they were on the surface. A little after two in the morning,
22:39in the dim glow of his screen, Bill Foster from Hamilton saw it. A solid return, about 12 miles dead
22:47ahead. At liberator speed, that is a few minutes. Watch what Moore does with them,
22:53because every move is part of the answer. First, he has the radar switched off. By then,
23:00U-boats carried receivers that listened for aircraft radar, and a set left running all the way in could
23:08warn the boat it was being hunted. Moore takes that warning away. From here on, the crew hunts with their
23:16eyes. Second, he takes the liberator down. Off the patrol height, down toward the water, down to the
23:25height he trusted. Third, the lee light stays dark. And then the eyes in the front of the aircraft found
23:34it. A conning tower, about three miles out, black on the silver water. A U-boat on the surface, heading
23:44for the channel. Fourth, the angle. Moore brought G for George round to come at the boat from the south,
23:53at a right angle across its path, with the moon beyond it. Broadside on, the hull is at its longest.
24:00A line of depth charges dropped across it has the best chance of landing on both sides of it at
24:08once,
24:09which is what crews called a straddle, and what every crew wanted. Six depth charges, not twelve.
24:18Moore had twelve aboard, and he and his crew had decided to split them, half for this attack,
24:24and half held back. Think about what that means. A crew does not keep half its weapons in reserve
24:32unless it believes there may be a second boat out there tonight. At the bomb site, Jock McDowell set
24:39up the release. Each depth charge would fall 55 feet from the last. In the nose, Alec Gibbs swung his
24:48guns
24:49onto the conning tower. Moore held the aircraft at about 50 feet and 190 miles an hour. On the deck
24:58below,
24:58the Germans had heard them, or seen them. Men were running for the guns. This is the moment we froze,
25:06at the very beginning. Now we let it run. In the next few seconds, Moore would find out whether his
25:14rule,
25:15his moon, and his split load were worth the bet, or whether G for George was about to become the
25:23third 224 Liberator to vanish in two nights. Gib fired first. From the nose turret he poured about
25:31150 rounds into the conning tower as the Liberator came in. In the moonlight, Moore and Gib could see
25:39them clearly now. Men coming up out of the hatch and scrambling along the deck toward the guns.
25:45Up to eight of them. This was the second Moore's rule depended on. Every round Gib put on that deck
25:54was a round that made a German gunner duck instead of aim. The official citation for that night says Moore
26:01pressed home his attacks in the face of heavy opposing fire. He did not climb. McDowell watched
26:09the boat slide into his bombsite and press the release. Six depth charges fell out of G for George's
26:17belly, one after another, 55 feet apart, in a line across the hull. A flame float went down with them
26:25to mark the spot. Then the Liberator was over the boat and past it, still at 50 feet, so low
26:33that the
26:34guns on that deck had to swing round and down to follow it. In the tail turret, Flight Sergeant Webb
26:40had the best seat in the aircraft, looking straight back at what they had done. He saw the depth charges
26:47go off, white in the moonlight. Three on one side of the hull, three on the other. A straddle,
26:55exactly as McDowell had laid it. And Webb watched the explosions lift the U-boat, the better part of
27:03700 tons of steel, up out of the sea. Moore brought G for George round and back over the flame
27:13float.
27:14There was no U-boat. There was wreckage on the surface and a spreading slick of oil, black on the
27:21silver
27:21water. We got confirmation, Moore said years later. Immediate confirmation. In coastal command, a crew
27:31could attack a U-boat and go through the rest of the war, never knowing whether it had done anything
27:37at all. This crew knew within a minute. Hold on to the cost for a moment, because it is real.
27:45Whatever boat that was, it went down with its crew. Roughly three out of every four men who served in
27:52the U-boat arm did not survive the war. The worst odds of any service on either side. The men
28:00running for
28:01those guns knew that when they climbed out of the hatch. They ran anyway. Now look at where Moore is.
28:09He has just done what many crews never did in a whole tour of operations. He has six depth charges
28:17left,
28:17a torpedo, hours of fuel, and a squadron at home that has just lost two crews. He could turn for
28:25St.
28:25Aval with the best news 224 had had all week. He went back on patrol. 20 minutes to 3. Foster
28:35called it.
28:35A second contact. Ten degrees off the starboard nose. Six miles. Here is the third piece of the answer,
28:44and it is the plainest one. Moore found a second U-boat that night because he stayed out to look
28:51for it. The citation speaks of a crew whose efficiency and cooperation were of inestimable value. In
28:58practice, that meant ten tired men who had just come through one attack going straight back to the
29:05screen, the guns and the bomb sight for another. At two and a half miles they saw it. A conning
29:12tower,
29:13well off to starboard, heading northwest at about eight knots. On the surface like the first. And now
29:21the geometry turned against them. This boat was not sitting on the moon's road. From where G for George
29:29was, the U-boat sat against dark water. To see it the way he had seen the first, Moore had
29:37to get to
29:37the other side of it, with the moon beyond. That meant taking the liberator up to about 700 feet,
29:45swinging away to port in a wide circle, and coming back down up the moon path. Remember what I told
29:52you
29:52earlier? To make his method work, Moore would sometimes have to do the thing every pilot dreaded
29:59most over an armed submarine. Circle it, in plain view, and wait. This was that moment, and this boat
30:09was ready for him. As G for George swung round, the night lit up. The U-boat opened fire with
30:16flack and
30:17tracer, and it kept firing. Its gunners were not scrambling for their weapons this time. They were
30:24already on them, tracking the big shape against the moonlit sky as it came round. And on the bridge
30:31of that boat stood a man you have already met in this story. Five months earlier, he had come under
30:39the
30:39depth charges of a .224 liberator and lived. And he had brought his boat home to Brest with two of
30:46those
30:47charges lying unexploded on his conning tower. He knew what a .224 liberator would try to do,
30:54and from which direction it would have to come. Moore had six depth charges left and one approach to make,
31:03straight down the moon path, into guns that were already firing, and a captain who had seen this
31:10attack before. Moore came in on the U-boat's starboard side, angling across its path, with the moon
31:16beyond it and the conning tower standing black on the bright water, down from 700 feet, down to 50,
31:25190 miles an hour. This time there was no surprise to buy him seconds. The tracer was already coming up
31:34the moon path to meet him. In the nose, Alec Gibb opened up again on the conning tower and the
31:40guns
31:40around it. The words of the citation, heavy opposing fire, cover both attacks that night. But this was
31:49the one where the Germans had watched him come round. Now think back over everything you have learned
31:55since the first minute of this story, because all of it is in this one run. The height. The tracer
32:02coming up
32:03back G for George was aimed where a bomber was supposed to be. At 50 feet, Moore was underneath
32:10it. The light. The lee light under the starboard wing was dark. The gunners had a shape against the
32:17sky and a roar of engines, not a blazing point to aim at. The moon. The boat sat on the
32:25bright road,
32:26and the man at the bomb site could see every foot of it. The guns. Gibb's rounds were hammering the
32:34conning tower, making men duck. And the load. Six depth charges were still in the bay, because hours
32:43earlier, a 21-year-old pilot and his crew had decided not to spend them all on the first boat.
32:50McDowell
32:51pressed the release. Six depth charges fell across the hull. In the tail, Webb watched them hit the
32:59water, four on the starboard side and two on the port side. Another straddle. Then the sea went up
33:08in great flumes of white water, and for a moment the U-boat vanished behind them. When the water came
33:16down, the boat was still there, but not the way a U-boat should be. Its bow was rising out
33:24of the sea,
33:25higher and higher, until it stood at about 80 degrees, nearly upright, black against the moon.
33:32Then it slid back and was gone. The squadron's record describes it going down, amid a large amount of
33:42confused water. Twenty-two minutes. By the official count, that is how long separated the first attack
33:50from the second. Then Moore did something that tells you as much about him as the attacks do.
33:57He switched on the Lee light. Not to attack. The attacking was done. He turned the searchlight on
34:06to see what was left. The beam swept across the oily water, and in it the crew saw three yellow
34:15rubber
34:15dinghies crowded with men. They were the crew of U-373. Detlef von Lesten, 27, from Hamburg, was among them.
34:27The captain, who had survived 2-24 in January, had now lost his boat to 2-24 in June.
34:36And he was alive, in the glare of the aircraft that had sunk him. Moore had the guns, and he
34:43had the men
34:44in the water under his light. His squadron had lost two crews in a day, and its own people called
34:51this
34:51sortie retaliation. G for George passed over the dinghies without firing a shot. Moore switched off
35:00the light and left the German sailors floating in the moonlight. All but four of U-373's crew survived.
35:08The next day, French fishing boats picked them up and took them back to Brest. One of the four who
35:15died
35:15was the boat's chief engineer, Lieutenant Korger. 47 men lived. Now you have the whole of it.
35:25This is how a Canadian pilot sank two U-boats in one night. He went in under the box, because
35:32he had
35:32worked out that the enemy was aiming at three hundred feet. He kept the light off and let the moon
35:39light
35:39the target, because a searchlight gave the gunners theirs. He shut down his radar, so the boat had no
35:46warning. He let his nose gunner clear the deck on the way in. He split his load, and then he
35:54stayed out
35:54to use the other half. And he did it with a crew he had met as strangers in the Bahamas,
36:01men who followed
36:03him under the guns twice in one night. None of those pieces is a secret weapon. Every one of them
36:10is a
36:11decision, and every one belonged to the man flying the aircraft. At half past three, and again at 3.47,
36:19the reports went back to Cornwall. They read like telegrams. First U-boat, six depth charges,
36:28straddle, sunk, oil and wreckage on surface. And then, second U-boat, six depth charges, straddled,
36:38sunk, three dinghies with survivors. Then, G for George went back to the patrol line. With no depth
36:47charges left, and the torpedo still in the bay, the crew flew the cork for nearly two more hours.
36:54At 24 minutes past five, Moore sent one more signal. Returning to base, arriving seven o'clock.
37:03He suspected the aircraft was losing fuel. Between him and Cornwall lay a long stretch of the same sea
37:11where Allen and Buchan Hepburn had disappeared. And while he flew it, the men who ran the German U-boat
37:19arm were already beginning to count what nights like this one were costing them, and what they would
37:25have to give up because of it. He made it. G for George left the patrol line a little after
37:31six in
37:32the morning, still carrying the homing torpedo it had taken out the night before, and crossed back over
37:38the sea toward Cornwall. Whatever was wrong with the fuel held. At seven o'clock on Thursday, June the 8th,
37:461944, Moore put the Liberator down on the runway at St. Eval. The signals had gone in hours earlier,
37:55so the station knew. A crowd was waiting at the dispersal. One man who was there left an account
38:01that the historian Martin Bowman later reproduced, and it is the closest thing we have to a photograph
38:08of Moore that morning. He described the pilot's face as rugged Canadian, incapable of false expression.
38:16Moore was white with exhaustion, but as excited as a child. People crowded round the crew, and
38:24you've made history, was all that anyone seemed able to say. He described the whole station, around 4,000
38:32men and women, catching the mood. I have seldom seen so much jaunty walking or heard such whistling.
38:40Even the group captain, usually cool and self-controlled, was rushing about with the photographs of
38:47the attacks in his hand. The same witness rode back with Moore in the van. Moore was too tired to
38:54talk.
38:54At the mess, he went straight to sleep. About three hours later, the witness saw him again.
39:01Kenneth Moore, the pilot every man on that station wanted to shake hands with, was carrying plates of
39:08fish and chips to the members of his crew, who were still in their beds. Remember what he said about
39:15leading men. You have to know your people. Now look across the water, to the other side,
39:21because this is where the night's real effect shows. The U-boats that had sailed from the Biscay
39:27ports were running into the cork night after night, on the surface, and paying for it. Sholto Douglas,
39:34at the head of coastal command, later wrote out the count for the first four days of the invasion.
39:4136 U-boats sighted. 23 attacked. 6 destroyed. Two of the six on that list were credited to one crew,
39:51in one night, 22 minutes apart. Then the German side gave way. After D plus 4, Douglas wrote,
40:01the enemy was forced to change his tactics. On June the 10th, U-boat command barred boats
40:08without the snorkel from the channel. On the 12th, it ordered the non-schnorkel boats in the Bay of
40:14Biscay back into port, to be fitted with a breathing pipe before they went out again. Think about what
40:20that means. The order that sent those boats out on D-Day said, in substance, attack regardless of risk.
40:29Within a week, the same command was calling them home, because running on the surface across that sea,
40:36into crews like Moore's, had proved more than even that order could justify. The boats that came back
40:43out were slower, submerged, and much harder to find. Douglas admitted the snorkel was,
40:50a most difficult target for airborne radar. But a boat crawling underwater could not race to the beaches
40:58either. Between D-Day and the end of August, of the thousands of merchant ships in the channel
41:04operations, Douglas recorded that only nine were sunk by U-boats. Moore's crew did not stop that threat
41:12alone, and he never claimed they had. But on the one night when the surface rush was at its height,
41:18they took two boats out of it. The cost did not stop for 224 either, and it would be dishonest
41:26to
41:26pretend it did. A crew that had flown the same patrols that week, under a pilot named Jenkinson in
41:33Sea for Charlie, came back safely from their sortie. Four days later, near Ushant, they were lost with
41:40every man aboard. That was the sea Moore's crew kept going back out into. Now the verdicts. Look at who
41:48gave them. The first came from the British. The official citation, published in the London Gazette,
41:54named Moore and three of his crew, Foster, McDowell, and Hamer. It said Moore pressed home his attacks
42:02with great skill and gallantry in the face of heavy opposing fire, and that his crew's efficiency and
42:10cooperation throughout were of inestimable value. It ended, On this notable sortie, Flying Officer Moore and
42:20his comrades set an example of the highest order. Moore was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
42:27That decoration normally went to squadron commanders and above. Given to a flying officer,
42:33it was understood to mark gallantry not far short of the Victoria Cross. The second came from the
42:40commander-in-chief himself. When Sholto Douglas wrote his despatch on Coastal Command's part in the
42:46invasion, one sortie out of all those months went in by name. Two U-boats sunk on one sortie by
42:54a
42:54liberator of 224 Squadron, piloted by Flying Officer Moore. The third came from the Americans. Their
43:03soldiers had gone ashore at Omaha and Utah, and their ships were in that invasion fleet. They gave Kenneth
43:10Moore, a Canadian flying officer in a Royal Air Force squadron, the Silver Star. The British, the
43:17Americans, and Coastal Command's own commander all said it, each in their own way. And the German U-boat
43:24command said it too, more plainly than any of them, when it called its surface boats home. But one question
43:32about that night has never been closed. Remember the number I asked you to hold onto? The U-boat that
43:38once
43:38shot down a Sunderland? Seventy years after the war, that number is still tangled up with Moore's first
43:45attack. And the ten men who flew that night, the crew Moore was so close to, did something afterwards
43:52that surprised even him. Here is the honest answer about the first boat. For decades after the war,
44:00Moore's first attack was recorded as the sinking of U-629, a boat under Oberlieutenant Hans Helmut
44:08Boogs, lost with all 51 men. Later researchers, working through the German records, challenged that.
44:16Some argued that the boat Moore sank first was U-441, the same boat that had once been fitted out
44:23as a trap for aircraft and had shot down that Sunderland. Today, the main U-boat loss records
44:30credit U-629 to a different liberator, the day before, and list U-441 as lost later that month,
44:40in another attack entirely. Different researchers have put different names on Moore's first target,
44:46and the argument is not settled. What is not in dispute is what the crew saw. Webb, in the tail,
44:53saw the straddle and the boat lifted out of the sea. Moore came back over the flame float and found
45:00wreckage and oil where a U-boat had been. Sholto Douglas counted it, and so did the Gazette. The name
45:06of the boat is what history has lost. The second boat was never in doubt. 47 men in three yellow
45:14dinghies
45:15made sure of that. Moore kept flying. 61 sorties with the squadron over just over two years,
45:22and he never came off operations in all that time. Then the crew went home. And here is the thing
45:30that
45:30surprised him. The men who had trusted one another under the guns twice in a single night drifted apart
45:37after the war. We were so close, Moore said, and yet we didn't maintain that closeness, or anywhere
45:45near it. He turned it over for years. I often wondered why that was, and I think it was because
45:52we were so close. Even as their time together ran out, he noticed, we never talked about it. Then,
46:00quietly, that's difficult. Moore stayed in the Air Force. He flew for 31 years and retired a wing
46:08commander. He studied leadership at Staff College and concluded that no textbook could pin it down.
46:15You got to live it. For 45 years he worked with a service club, and he said the hardest job
46:22there
46:22was getting the people in charge to understand that every member was different. He admitted all those years
46:29of flying had cost his family. I'm sure it annoyed my wife many, many a time.
46:37About the night itself, he was plain. I think the two subs in 22 minutes was a great feat, he
46:45said.
46:46He accepted it. But he admitted it left him with a mixed feeling, and he never dressed it up into
46:53more
46:53than it was. Kenneth Moore died in Victoria, British Columbia on January 17, 2008. He was 85. His obituary
47:04called him a natural leader, whose unselfish, compassionate, and understated strength touched
47:11everyone's life. His medals are at the Comox Air Force Museum on Vancouver Island. Beside them sits a
47:19stuffed panda, Dinty Moore, the warrant officer who flew with G for George. Go back one last time to
47:28where we started. June the 8th, 1944. A little after two in the morning. A liberator at 50 feet over
47:36the
47:36sea off Ushant. A black conning tower on the moon path. Men running for the guns. And a 21-year
47:44-old from
47:45Rockhaven, Saskatchewan, holding the aircraft straight. He was flying an American-built bomber
47:51in a Royal Air Force squadron, inside a British plan, with British depth charges. Almost nothing in
47:59that aircraft was Canadian, except the men. What was his was the decision. Under the guns, instead of into
48:07them. The moon, instead of the light. Half the load held back, and the patience to stay out and use
48:14it.
48:15A crew, most of them Canadians, met as strangers on a training field in the Bahamas, who went in
48:22under the guns with him twice in 22 minutes. And a light switched on at the very end, only to
48:29look at
48:29the men in the water and leave them be. So how did a Canadian pilot sink two U-boats hunting
48:36the D-Day fleet?
48:37He went down when everything told him to go up. Then the British commander-in-chief wrote his name
48:44into the official record. The Americans gave him their silver star, and the German U-boat command
48:49answered by calling its surface boats home. He said it himself, in one sentence 60 years later.
48:57When I got into trouble, I went down, not up. Thank you for spending this hour with Kenneth
49:04Moore and his crew. If you think what the Canadians of Coastal Command did over these waters deserves to
49:10be remembered, a like genuinely helps this story find more people. And if you'd like to hear more,
49:17we're here every week. If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second
49:23World War, I would be honored to hear about him in the comments.