Built at
Kiel in 1935,
U-6 was a prestigious position for a captain in the
Kriegsmarine during the years running up to the war, her commanders were all
First World War veterans. On 31 August 1939, before the outbreak of World War II, the U-6 spotted three
destroyers of the
Polish Navy, the
Burza,
Błyskawica, and
Grom, executing
Peking Plan, on their way to Great Britain, but no action was undertaken. However, once war began, it was painfully clear that
U-6 and her sisters were not capable of competing with other nations' larger and faster boats, and so after an initial patrol in the
Baltic Sea,
U-6 was not deployed again until March 1940, when every ship available to the
Kriegsmarine was sent to support the invasion of Norway. During the month-long campaign,
U-6s sister boats suffered numerous losses, and gained a reputation as something of a liability, which led them to be withdrawn to a training squadron in the Baltic for the remainder of the war. In the Baltic,
U-6 trained officer cadets in the skills needed to fight in the
Battle of the Atlantic. Some of her patrols even verged on Soviet territory following
Operation Barbarossa but, unlike some of her sister boats,
U-6 never found a target on these missions. In the summer of 1944, with fuel and resources in short supply and the reputation of the Type II boats plummeting following a number of fatal accidents,
U-6 was removed from service and laid up at
Gotenhafen with a skeleton crew to perform maintenance. There she remained until May 1945, when a demolition team blew her up at her berth to prevent her falling into enemy hands. ==References==