UC-44 was the first submarine to use the tactic of releasing oil and debris from her torpedo tubes to fool the enemy into believing it had been sunk by depth charges.

Her actual sinking, sometimes claimed to be the result of British deception, also yielded intelligence that showed how little effect the Dover Barrage antisubmarine defences were having on the U-boats and forced changes in its command and operation before the year ended.

[3] During a particularly intense depth charge attack on 15 February 1917, Kapitanleutnant Kurt Tebbenjohanns, UC-44's commander, ordered that the vessel's front torpedo tubes be filled with waste oil and other debris, then fired, simulating what might have been expected to reach the surface had the submarine sank.

[5] In summer 1917 UC-44 was operating off Waterford Harbour on the southern coast of Ireland, laying mines and then re-laying them after British minesweepers had cleared the field.

The Royal Navy officers in charge of the minesweeping surmised from the regularity with which this occurred and the haste with which the mines were laid that the Germans had broken their codes.

Some of them later claimed that, realising this, they had the minesweeper run a dummy operation in mid-July, leaving all the mines in place and reporting that it had cleared them using the code suspected to have been broken, then closing the harbour to all shipping for two weeks.

[6] The hope was reportedly that a stricken U-boat would sink in shallow water where it and its contents could be recovered and examined by Room 40 and other departments of naval intelligence.

Tebenjohanns and two others managed to escape through the conning tower hatch, but the commander was the only one still alive when a British vessel swept the area for survivors an hour and a half later (another account suggests that another crewmember was found separately).