Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
As Roger Moorhouse suggests in the introduction to Wolfpack, it was natural that post-war English language books about the Battle of the Atlantic would largely ignore the German perspective on the conflict. After the horrors of war, a kind of patriotic Anglo-centricity was an understandable response. The acclaimed 1981 film Das Boot was unusual in seeing the struggle from the viewpoint of the U-boat crews. Since then, a number of studies have started to open up this once-neglected field.
Wolfpack integrates a narrative of the whole undersea campaign with a close look at the lives of the U-boat men. The author takes the reader through the various phases of the U-boat war: from initial successes and the ‘happy time’ of 1940-1941, through the tipping point in the Atlantic in May 1943, to the surrender of the submarine fleet two years later. Familiar episodes are covered, such as the sinking of HMS Royal Oak soon after the outbreak of war, the controversial loss of the passenger vessel SS City of Benares in September 1940, and the devastating attack on the Arctic convoy PQ-17 in July 1942.
With a loss rate of 75%, the U-boat service was the most dangerous of all combat arms to serve in. To recreate the experience of those who manned the submarines, Moorhouse draws on an impressive range of materials, including German- and English-language memoirs, records of POW interrogations, and standard secondary works.
Life below the waves
Who were the U-boat men? Most were no older than their mid-20s – a captain in his 30s was known as ‘the old man’. While most officers were from established middle-class backgrounds, a typical crew member was drawn from a working- or lower-middle-class urban milieu. Such men were typically chosen for their practical skills. They may also have played a team sport in civilian life – a useful indicator of an ability to work with others in the cramped confines of a submarine.
Moorhouse vividly evokes the claustrophobic living conditions and the monotony of the daily routine, punctuated by bursts of intense, terrifying action. Night and day were fused in an unreal continuum. The almost total absence of washing facilities made for an appalling stench by the end of a voyage, described by one mariner as comprising ‘rotting food, stale sweat and imperfectly flushed toilets’.
Lurking at the back of the seamen’s minds was the fear of being sent to a watery grave.
Lurking at the back of the seamen’s minds was the fear of being sent to a watery grave if their craft came off worst in an encounter with Allied convoy-escort ships. U-9, for example, spent 21 tense hours on the seabed off the Norfolk coast evading depth charges. On a lighter note, Moorhouse recounts the onboard entertainments devised to stave off boredom. There were special celebrations for Christmas, crew members’ birthdays, and the ceremony of crossing the Equator. The fleshpots of Brest and Lorient afforded crews much-anticipated relief when on shore leave.
The relationships between crews and their commanders are explored in some depth. Successful captains like Otto Kretschmer, who sank 44 ships in the space of 18 months, naturally enjoyed the devotion of their men. On returning to dry land, they were often turned into folk heroes by the Nazi propaganda machine. But in the tightly knit world of the U-boat, an inadequate or unpopular captain could have a severely negative effect on morale. Senior officers from U-570, which surrendered without good cause, faced a ‘court of honour’ convened by their peers in a Lake District POW camp. Apparently seeking belated redemption, one condemned man escaped with the intention of breaking into the dockyard at Barrow-in-Furness to sabotage the captured U-boat, only to be shot dead by a member of the Home Guard.
No close-run thing
As the war dragged on, U-boats were increasingly crewed by less experienced, more hastily trained men. ‘Third generation’ commanders tended to be less capable than the ‘aces’ who predominated in the opening stages of the war. Meanwhile, submarine tactics became more ruthless, with the qualified chivalry of the early years discarded after Admiral Dönitz issued the notorious ‘Laconia Order’ of September 1942, banning assistance to survivors from torpedoed ships.
Even so, Moorhouse makes a case for the submarine arm as less tainted by atrocities than other branches of the German armed forces. The March 1944 Peleus incident, when Captain Eck of U-852 tried to cover his tracks by firing on life-rafts launched from a stricken Greek steamer, is the only known example of a deliberate attack on people adrift in the water by a U-boat during World War II. The traditional solidarity of seafarers was never entirely extinguished by adherence to Nazi ideology.
Moorhouse follows what has become a widely accepted assessment, ever since the appearance in the late 1990s of Clay Blair’s monumental Hitler’s U-Boat War, that Nazi Germany did not come close to winning the Battle of the Atlantic. In no way is this intended to underplay the very real danger faced by the convoys. Yet, although almost 15 million tons of shipping were sunk during the campaign, the scale of Allied shipbuilding more than compensated for the losses. The U-boat arm entered the war with woefully inadequate numbers, and by the time that Dönitz’s target of 300 craft had been met in the summer of 1942, Allied countermeasures were proving increasingly effective. The invention of the ‘snorkel’ (allowing U-boats to operate submerged while still taking in air from above the surface) meant they could run underwater for longer – though by creating a partial vacuum below decks, this came at a cost to the health of the crews. The technically more advanced U-XXI and U-XXIII variants appeared too late to make any difference to the eventual outcome of the conflict.
Moorhouse’s text is fluent and engaging, and accompanied by a useful selection of maps and photographs. One regret is that, although the book contains copious footnotes, oddly there is no bibliography. A final thought: the sources for such a study will necessarily be less plentiful than for the 1939-1945 period, but what we need now is a companion volume on the U-boat experience of the Great War.
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
Wolfpack: inside Hitler’s U-boat war
Roger Moorhouse
William Collins, hbk, 416pp, £25
ISBN 978-0008644895
