Biber (submarine) - Operation

Operation

Biber operations were carried out under the auspices of the K-Verband, a German naval unit which operated a mixture of midget submarines and explosive speedboats. The training of Biber operators was originally planned to take eight weeks, but the initial group of pilots was rushed through in just three weeks. Planning also called for flotillas of 30 boats and pilots with just under 200 shore support crew.

Operations generally lasted from one to two days with pilots either using a drug known as DIX to stay awake on longer missions or caffeine-laced chocolate. The poor quality of the Biber's periscope meant that night attacks had to be carried out on the surface.

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