'Brandenburg' was a U-boat wolfpack operation in the Atlantic Ocean against the ON.14, ON.16, ON.19, SC.42 and SC.44 convoys (15 September/2 October 1941).

The wolfpack comprised 11 boats 1, and for the loss of none of its own number sank the corvette Levis and 10 merchant ships (54,593 tons).

During its passage to the patrol line assembly area off Cape Farewell, on 15 September Oberleutnant Otto Ites’s U-94 came across and sank three stragglers (14,447 tons) from the ON.14 convoy, namely the 5,613-ton British Empire Eland, 5,102-ton British Newbury and 5,762-ton Greek Pegasus.

On 18/19 September an initial nine boats 2 were in position before the British had been able to decrypt the order of Vizeadmiral Karl Dönitz, commanding the U-boat arm, ordering this disposition. U-74 spotted and reported the SC.44 convoy of 56 ships supported by Lieutenant Commander G. E. C. Wood’s Canadian 23^rd Escort Group (British destroyer Chesterfield, and corvettes Mayflower, Levis, Agassiz and British Honeysuckle). As a result of radio interference, the German boats were unable to plan a co-ordinated attack, and only U-74, U-373, U-94, U-552 and U-562 were able to engage the convoy.

During the night of 18/19 September, Kapitänleutnant Eitel-Friedrich Kentrat’s U-74 sank the corvette Levis. During the following night U-74 attacked once again and sank the 6,956-ton British Empire Burton. In its first attack, Korvettenkapitän Erich Topp’s U-552 sank the 8,212-ton British T. J. Williams and 4,150-ton Panamanian Pink Star, and in its second damaged the 6,325-ton Norwegian tanker Barbro, whose destruction was completed in daylight by Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm Zahn’s U-69.

The escort was strengthened on 20 September by the arrival of the Free French corvette Alysse and on 21 September by the Canadian corvettes Arrowhead and Eyebright detached from other convoys. Also on 20 September, a US destroyer unit consisting of Winslow, Overton, Truxtun, Bainbridge and Reuben James was allocated for further support. More attacks by U-74 and U-562 failed, but the latter sank the 1,590-ton British Erna III, a straggler from the ON.16 convoy, on 22 September.

On the same day, the task of escorting the SC.44 convoy for the rest of its passage was assumed Commander A. J. Baker-Cresswell’s British 3^rd Escort Group with the destroyers Bulldog, Amazon, Georgetown and Richmond, corvettes Heartsease and Free French Aconit, and four trawlers.

The battle of the SC.42 convoy convinced Dönitz that the key to success against the Atlantic convoys lay not in fixing the exact dispositions of his U-boats, whose locations might be still covered or harassed by Allied aircraft, but by deploying the U-boats in patrol lines in the waters off southern Greenland, where the convoy routes approached each other outside the current range of air cover before swinging north for the passage across the Atlantic. Dönitz calculated that the new area was 'particularly favourable' for wolfpack operations, and this was confirmed a week after the assault on the SC.42 convoy when the 'Brandenburg' wolfpack sank four ships from the SC.44 slow eastbound convoy after the remaining boats 3 had been ordered to relocate to a new patrol line south-east of Cape Farewell.

After some boats have started to return to base, the wolfpack was further dispersed on 26 September. U-372 shadowed a convoy on 30 September and 1 October, but could sink no ship. On 2 October U-94 sank the 12,842-ton British tanker San Florentino, Kapitänleutnant Horst Hamm’s U-562 despatched the 7,463-ton catapult-armed merchantman Empire Wave from the ONS.19 convoy, and Oberleutnant Wolfgang Boehmer’s U-575 and Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm Dommes’s U-431 each sent one ship (4,652-ton Dutch Tuva and 3,198-ton British Hatasu respectively) to the bottom.