Luftwaffe General Ulrich Kessler After Captured in a U-Boat

 

 

Captured General der Flieger Ulrich Kessler (Luftwaffenattaché in Tokio) reading the American book "After the War--What?" aboard a U.S. submarine. Official Caption: "Rome. 6/13/45--Captured German General reads--Maj. Gen. Ulrich Kessler, German Air Force Officer, reads a book written by an American as he sits in the galley of a U.S. Coast Guard ship after being removed from a German submarine which surrendered in the North Atlantic on May 13, 1945. The U-Boat gave up five days after Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The 16-ton enemy vessel, bearing several other German Air Force Officers as well as General Kessler and its crew, was intercepted by U.S. surface vessels and then escorted to Portsmouth, a port on the northeast coast of the U.S. The vessel was reported to have been en route to Japan. The bodies of two Japanese, who had committed suicide aboard the submarine, had been buried at sea.--PPA Photo--Serviced by Rome OWI (A List out). Approved by appropriate military authority. 6690." Portsmouth, New Hampshire. May 1945. General Kessler was in the mission of delivering a load of Uranium and a set of German jet planes to an undisclosed South American country when the U-boat captain decided to surrender to the Americans. He was captured on 15 May 1945 while on board U-234 by a 15-man boarding party from the destroyer USS Sutton. He was returning to active duty as Chief of the Luftwaffe-Liaison-Staff Tokyo and Air-Attache at the German Embassy in Tokyo. On the voyage, according to Fehler, relations between Kessler and a convinced Nazi passenger, naval judge Kay Nieschling, became very strained.

Items from the service of Isaac "Ike" Bethel Utley, who was born in Smith Mills, Kentucky on 3 March 1920. Ike enlisted in the Army Air Corps on 19 January 1942. He was shipped overseas to the European Theatre and worked with a supply division based out of the city of Naples with an office set up in a residential villa. Utley worked with the Office of War Information and used their photographs in news articles to inform soldiers of the progress of the war. At war's end, Utley returned stateside. A trunk full of over 800 photographs from the O.W.I. arrived on his doorstep from his office in Italy, sender unknown. This collection consists of those photographs.

Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Kessler
https://portraitofwar.com/2012/02/17/captured-german-u-boats-in-portsmouth-new-hampshire-may-1945/
https://www.ww2online.org/image/captured-german-general-kessler-reading-american-book-new-hampshire-may-1945