For more than 80 years, U-672 sat on the seabed in the wrong place. At least according to the official records.
The English Channel has been the subject of intensive wreck research for decades. The result is that almost every German U-boat wreck in the Channel has now been identified. There are very few mysteries left. Which is what makes it rather remarkable when another one suddenly appears.
This is the story of how one did, and how a single transposed digit in a post war document had been hiding it in plain sight since 1944.
The wrong wreck
On 25 July 2026, Ian Taylor and the Skin Deeper dive team set out to investigate a wreck that the UK Hydrographic Office records had tentatively identified as the Hildegard, an American sailing vessel lost in 1917. When they reached the seabed, something was immediately obvious. This was not a sailing vessel. It was a submarine. Almost certainly German, almost certainly Second World War.
Unable to establish exactly which boat they had found, they passed the details to Dom Robinson and the Gasperados, a diving team led by Steve Mortimer, to see whether an identification could be made.
As soon as Dom looked at where the wreck was sitting, one particular U-boat came to mind: U-672.
A digit out of place
The reason lay in research conducted by Dr Innes McCartney, one of the foremost authorities on German U-boat losses around the British Isles. In his doctoral thesis, McCartney had compared the official post war records of U-boat losses against what divers were actually finding on the seabed. U-672 presented a persistent problem. According to the official record, it had been lost at 50°03′N, 2°30′W. But no submarine matching its description had ever been found anywhere near that position.
McCartney concluded that someone, at some point in the post war compilation of records, had transposed two digits in the longitude. The intended position was not 2°30′W — it was 3°20′W. That small clerical error had moved the wreck more than 30 nautical miles west on every chart and database that followed.
The corroboration was hard to argue with. After U-672 was scuttled, her crew were recovered from the water. The position recorded for those survivors in the Admiralty records was approximately 50°01′N, 3°20′W, almost exactly the corrected location. As Axel Niestlé, who has spent four decades examining wartime U-boat photographs and records, noted: it is almost impossible to account for 50 men in small rubber dinghies drifting 40 miles overnight. The attack position, not the rescue position, was the error.
The wreck Ian Taylor had found was 37 miles from the officially recorded loss position of U-672, and roughly five miles from the corrected one.
Into the water
The first dive attempt, on 15 August, came to nothing. The shot line missed the wreck, Dom scootered 60 metres across featureless sand following drag marks, found nothing, and called the dive.
The following day, Dom went back in with Guy Trees. The shot missed again, but this time the current was right. The two of them headed out across empty seabed on scooters. Then Dom spotted an anglerfish, which tend to congregate around wrecks. Then an octopus on a piece of rope. Then a lot of fish. And then, out of the gloom, the bow appeared: that distinctive knife-like profile that belongs only to a submarine.
They had about 20 minutes of working time at 70 metres. They made it count.
Reading the evidence
The hull was recognisably a Type VIIC. The most common German submarine of the Second World War, built in the hundreds. Type alone proved nothing.
What mattered were the details. U-672 had been fitted with a snorkel during a refit in the spring of 1944. The wreck carried an early ball-float schnorkel head, without the radar-detection mats added to later installations. This was consistent with that spring 1944 refit, and inconsistent with a boat lost any later in the war. There were no external rescue dinghy containers at the bow; those became standard fitting in late 1944, after U-672 was already on the seabed. The outer casing showed three rectangular openings followed by a smaller circular one; a pattern that matched wartime photographs of U-670, built in the same Hamburg yard and the same production batch as U-672. The propeller was steel rather than bronze, consistent with the material shortages that increasingly constrained German production from 1943 onwards.
Then there was the pile of pressurised steel cylinders Dom found just aft of the conning tower. He had no idea what they were. Niestlé recognised them immediately: hydrogen cylinders, part of the Aphrodite radar-decoy system. This was a German device that used hydrogen-filled balloons trailing aluminium strips to create false radar echoes while the submarine slipped away beneath them. More than 80 years on the seabed, and they were still there.
The closed hatches, which seemed puzzling for a deliberately scuttled boat, resolved themselves against the historical record. The engineering officer was the last man out. He opened the flooding vents, climbed through the conning tower, and sealed the hatch behind him.
The men aboard
U-672 had been laid down on Christmas Eve 1941 in Hamburg, launched in February 1943, and commissioned in April 1943. Her only commanding officer throughout was Oberleutnant zur See Ulf Lawaetz, born in Copenhagen in 1916 and half Danish by heritage. He had previously served as a watch officer aboard U-564 before taking command.
The boat completed three war patrols without sinking a single Allied vessel, survived a serious attack by a Canadian Sunderland flying boat from 423 Squadron (which very nearly destroyed the aircraft when one of its own depth charges detonated prematurely) and sailed on its fourth and final patrol on 6 July 1944, a month after D-Day, into a Channel saturated with Allied anti-submarine assets.
On 18 July 1944, HMS Balfour detected U-672 by Asdic and attacked with Hedgehog — a forward-firing weapon that projected 24 contact-fused projectiles. Three detonated. The boat took on water. The crew fought the flooding and failed to control it. Lawaetz ordered abandonment. All 52 men got out. All 52 survived and were taken prisoner. Lawaetz himself lived to 85, dying in Copenhagen in 2002.
From the British perspective, the attack had been inconclusive. No wreckage, no oil, no bodies had surfaced. Without those markers, the Admiralty would have had little basis for claiming a confirmed kill.
The verdict
Niestlé reviewed the images sent via satellite link from the dive boat and, within hours of Dom’s decompression being complete, offered his assessment: 90–95% confidence in the identification as U-672. Not on any single piece of evidence, but on the cumulative weight of type, schnorkel generation, absent dinghy containers, hull-opening pattern, steel propeller, corrected position, and survivor rescue location. Added to this that there was an absence of any other plausible candidate U-boat in the area.
For Dom Robinson, the appeal of this kind of diving has never been purely about finding things. As he put it himself: finding something on the seabed is exciting, but finding out what it is, working through the history, comparing what you can see underwater with records that might be more than a hundred years old, and eventually being able to put a name to a wreck, that is one of the best parts of diving.
U-672 is no longer one of the English Channel’s unsolved mysteries. It took a clerical error, four decades of archival research, two dive attempts, 20 minutes of working time at 70 metres, and a pile of hydrogen cylinders that nobody recognised until the right person looked at the photograph.
A touching postscript came when Ulf Lawaetz's family got in touch to say how pleased they were that his boat had been found. They sent Dom a copy of his death notice, a picture of him as an old man and also a tag from U-672 that he kept all his life (see pictures below).
