This happened six consecutive times, usually due to sabotage by French dockyard workers in the Resistance, and caused U-505 to become the butt of numerous jokes for her combat ineffectiveness; while some U-boats were racking up impressive tonnage totals (and others were being sunk with all hands), U-505 had not even succeeded in leaving the Bay of Biscay in almost a year.

After only 14 days, she drew the attention of a pair of Allied destroyers while surfaced off the Azores and came under concentrated depth charge attack, a procedure all too common for U-boat crews by this point in the war.

While riding out the depth charging, Zschech apparently suffered a severe mental breakdown and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a Walther PPK pistol in his control room, in full view of his shocked crew.

His second-in-command, Oberleutnant zur See Paul Meyer, swiftly took command, rode out the remainder of the attack per standard procedure and returned the boat to port with light damage.

that the terrible morale instilled in U-505's crew by the combined influence of these events led heavily to her being the only U-boat to be captured intact on the surface (instead of being scuttled as was standard procedure) when U-505 was attacked southwest of the Canary Islands on her next patrol; the crew reportedly panicked almost at once, with the new captain surfacing and abandoning ship before she was unseaworthy or even significantly damaged, leading to U-505's capture by the Allies, along with an intact Enigma machine, the month's Kriegsmarine codebook, and a variety of other secret documents.