The incident was the only case in which U-boat personnel were convicted of war crimes committed during the Second World War, compared to the thousands of people from the other branches of service. Similar and even worse war crimes had been committed by German submarines during the First World War, as in the case of the machine-gunning of the survivors of the hospital ship. British and American submarines (such as and ) were recorded as killing survivors of their targets, and yet their crimes were hushed up at the time and for some years after the war; no legal proceedings were ever attempted against their crews. The crew of the "Wahoo" could not be tried after the war, because they were by then dead, as were the crew of the German , who had shot the shipwrecked survivors of the fishing trawler "Noreen Mary".