spotted the lone Greek steamer . Eck, despite his mission, decided to attack the ship. After stalking her until nightfall, the steamer was sunk with two torpedoes. However, the sinking of the Peleus had created a large debris field containing survivors in rafts and clinging to wreckage. Eck decided that this would indicate to any Allied shipping patrol aircraft there was a U-boat in the area, so he ordered his junior officers to destroy the wreckage by firing into it using hand grenades and automatic weapons. They did this while the rest of the crew remained below decks. There were only three survivors from the 35-man Peleus. Dahomian Two weeks later the U-852 sank the British cargo ship Dahomian off Cape Town on 1 April. This time the U-852 left rather than attack the survivors. Capture On 30 April 1944, U-852 was spotted in the Indian Ocean by a Vickers Wellington bomber flying from Aden. After being left unable to dive due to damage from aerial depth charges, she headed for the coast of Somalia. However, before reaching land the U-boat came under attack from six RAF bombers from 621 Squadron. Eck was forced to run aground on a coral reef () about from shore. Seven crewmen were lost in the engagement; the remainder fled ashore. Fifty-eight were captured by the Somaliland Camel Corps and local militia. A British boarding party examined the wrecked U-boat and retrieved Eck's Kriegstagebuch ("War Diary"), which proved crucial in constructing the Allied case against him and his men. The British also discovered the Fa 330 Bachstelze rotor kite, a towed one-man aerial observation platform. War crimes trial In November 1945, Eck and the U-852'''s four junior officers were tried by the British at a special military tribunal in Hamburg for killing the crew from the Peleus. The German commander said he carried out the attack because there might have been communications equipment on the survivors’ rafts and the Laconia Order forbade him from helping the crews of sunk enemy ships. However, the British tribunal rejected his plea of “operational necessity” and sentenced him to death. Despite claiming they were "only following orders", the boat's second-in-command, August Hoffmann, and Walter Weisspfennig, the ship's doctor (who was condemned for using a weapon in contravention of the Geneva Convention) were also given the death penalty. Hans Lenz, the engineering officer, who had opposed Eck's order but eventually