The U-Boat Stink

At the start of WW2 the U-Boat threat gave the British sleepless nights. But even during the Happy Time (of which there were two) when ships were being sunk at a terrific rate the German effort was too little, too late. And then the war in the Atlantic turned against them and their casualties soared and successes became rarer.

Roger Moorhouse has written a terrific book discussing all this (and much more), 'Wolfpack: Inside Hitler's U-Boat War' where he looks the campaign from the German point of view, using diaries, letters and other records from the time.

We got through a lot in this  episode. Amongst the horrible waste of it all there were some grimly amusing moments, not least the sinking of a U-Boat thanks to a malfunctioning toilet. 

Very interesting to me was how the U-Boat men generally tried to fight an 'honourable' war. That was very different to what I had understood to be the case and certainly very different to how the war was conducted on other fronts.

And above all the stink. The terrible, terrible U-Boat stink.

Transcript

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Welcome And Why This Story Matters

Russell 0:04

Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hogg. My guest today is Roger Moorhaus. Roger is an historian of the Second World War and the author of a series of very well-received books on that subject. So, for example, there is Berlin at War, which is what life was like in the German capital at the time of the war. There was The Devil's Alliance, which was about the Nazi-Soviet pact. And there's First to Fight, which is his history of the invasion of Poland. But today we're talking about his latest book, which is Wolfpack inside Hitler's U-Book War. And I I first came across this book when I heard Roger give a talk about it earlier this summer at the Chalk Valley History Festival. And it was absolutely eye-opening for me, because I've seen Das Boat, which I thought was terrific, but really nothing quite prepared me from what I learned from the talk and later from Roger's book. And I think a lot of the impact comes from the fact that Roger uses the diaries and letters of the German submariners themselves to help tell the story. And it really is an astonishing story of a part of the German war effort that suffered simply staggering casualty rates. Anyway, uh welcome Roger to the podcast.

Inside A Type VII U-Boat

Russell 1:20

Thank you, Russell. Good to be here. I thought we might start with the physical experience of the boat itself and what was it like on board a U-boat? And how many men are we talking about? How much space have they got? And how long are they out there on the boat?

SPEAKER_01 1:36

The easiest thing to describe is the Type 7 U-boat, which was, you know, that formed very much the backbone of the German U-boat fleet in the Second World War. You know, in total it's about 60 meters long. The interior, sort of habitable space, if you like, is about the same as two London Underground carriages end-on-end. So if you imagine, I mean, that's a fairly good metric for most people to get, they can kind of get their heads around that. Obviously tapering at each end, but very, very cramped. Within that, you've got torpedoes, you've got living space, you've got a very small galley, you've got two massive diesel engines, which are enormous. They're 20 tons each, astonishingly, plus the electric engines for when they're submerged. So all of that plus 50 crew means that the only space inside a type 7 that you can actually sort of move around with any sort of freedom at all is actually the the the central section, what's known as the centrale, which is underneath the Conning Tower, and you know, where the where the uh periscope was and that sort of thing. Everywhere else is there's that you have to resort to this sort of rather embarrassed shuffle past past anyone coming the other way. So, yeah, 50 men, usually something like five or six officers, and the rest being made up of ratings. So you know it's an extremely cramped environment. The the the type 7 is actually quite a primitive vessel. It was a sort of development from the type 3B, which was one that um the Germans had had at the end of the First World War. So there are some improvements from the type 3B. It's it's somewhat safer, technological standards and so on are better. So it's a it's a pretty primitive vessel in in all respects. Compared to, for example, you know, contemporary American vessels, U-boats, or submarines rather, that you know, for example, had air conditioning were generally much larger, much more comfortable. In comparison to those, the German ones are still pretty primitive.

Heat Cold Filth And Disease

Russell 3:40

And you mention air conditioning. So is it hot in there? Is it cold in there? What's what's it like physically in there?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

It's pretty similar to whatever's outside. So you'd you know you'd have the situation when from the end of 1941 onwards, the U-boats are sent up to the Arctic, for example, to try and intercept the Arctic convoys. Where they are sailing in in uh in freezing conditions, then it very quickly gets very, very cold inside. So you'd have frost forming on the inside of the hull, for example. So that would be extremely cold. And then the other end of the spectrum, cross the equator, you go down into the tropics, into the Indian Ocean as as the U-boats do, we'll talk about later on. Very quickly could get up to 50 degrees, was um not unusual. So the the men tended to be permanently sort of stripped to the waist with bandanas to keep the sweat out of their they looked like pirates, basically. There was a great account from um a Polish merchant captain whose whose vessel was sunk off the north coast of Latin America, and he was actually taken prisoner. It was quite a rare thing for the um U-boats to actually take prisoners, but he was taken prisoner because he was the captain, they thought they might be able to press him for some information, and spent the next, I think, something like six weeks finishing their tour, finishing their patrol with them before they delivered him back to to Bremen, I think it was, as a prisoner of war. And his memoir, he survived the war, and he wrote this sort of memoir about that experience, which is fascinating because he talks about them operating in the tropics. Basically, they looked like pirates, they all had long hair, they had these sort of, you know, various sorts of bandanas to keep the sweat off them, and they were filthy as well, so all bearded, and that was a that was one of the sort of natural consequences of the fact that clean water was rationed, so fresh water was rationed. They were allowed to um wash with salt water, but it was this sort of horrible soap, so most people didn't do it, which meant that they didn't shave, which meant that they didn't wash either, so they stank. BO was a problem, so everyone you know was wearing the same clothes because you couldn't bring spare clothes, there's no room. So you'd be wearing the same set of clothes for six weeks potentially and without washing.

Russell 5:52

Yeah, I think one of the things that just slightly horrified me when I heard your talk was you said that uh the only spare clothes they could bring was one spare pair of underpants.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Yeah, that was it. I mean, that was one one spare pair of under underwear for you know six or eight weeks. You know, the wonderful thing, I I I often you mentioned Dust Bort earlier on the film. If your listeners read my book first and then re-watch Dust Bort, there's so much in it that actually rings true. And I I funnily enough, I mean, I remember the film like you. I remember the film from back in the day. I deliberately didn't watch it while I was writing the book because I didn't want to be influenced, right? Yeah, so as soon as I delivered my text, I went back and watched the film through three and a half hours of it. And there were so many things that I was sort of ticking off mentally in my own uh you know, my own mind. Just you know, things that I'd mentioned, things that had come up that had come up in the memoirs. And one of them was the fact that if you know if you look closely, you can see that that you know various characters that that are in the film, they're all wearing the same clothes all the way through. Yeah, that was how it was. One change of underwear, you know, there's no there's no lockers and sort of somewhere to store your stuff, it just didn't exist. There was simply no space. There, the ratings at least are constantly hot bunking, and it's an absolute breeding ground for diseases as well. So they all have skin diseases, scabies, for example, spreads like wildfire. So it's a pretty grim environment, the whole thing. Do they have a medical officer on board with all these disgusting ailments? The short answer is no. I mean, that you know, they actual qualified doctors in the German Navy were were a little bit like gold dust, so they weren't risked putting it putting them on a on a U-boat, for example. So until later on, they had they had a later um model of U-boat, which was a sort of supply U-boat, which was much larger and it had it didn't carry any weaponry, it just carried sort of spare fuel and spare torpedoes, and it used to meet the other U-boats at sea and transfer over food and everything else, and they had doctors on them. So if there was something urgent that somebody had, you could, you could actually, during that sort of liaison at sea, you could see a doctor. But generally, no, they didn't carry doctors. What they what they did have was a radio, a radio operator who tended to double as a medical officer, which meant that he'd had read rudimentary training. I mean, very rudimentary as well. So they were given this sort of weird handbook by the German Navy, which basically said, in case of X symptom, do Y. Which is, you know, if you if you don't have much in the way of medical training, then I'm supposed I suppose it could be quite useful. But very often it assumed, and that was also given to you know crews of um of destroyers, for example. So they've got much more space, they've got fresh air, they've got fresh water, all the things that actually, you know, U-boat crews kind of didn't have. So a lot of the advice that it gave was, you know, to you know, ensure, ensure a ventilated, uh ventilated area, um, keep patient dry, things like that. Can't do any of that on a U-boat. So a lot of the advice was completely useless. Um, so yeah.

Russell 8:59

Make sure he gets out for walks on the fresh boat.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yeah, precisely, yeah. Fresh air and fresh air and and constitutional walks, it's not gonna happen. So, you know, a lot of the sort of uh, you know, the medical care is pretty rudimentary, and there's a there's a few you know choice examples in the book. The main problem a lot of them have, you know, aside from dramatic stuff, like if they you know, if they do if they do a crash dive and people are falling all over each other, and there's there's instances of of broken legs, and there's a one chap I remember an account that he get has his thumb torn off, which is particularly unpleasant. But the run-of-the-mill stuff is as I said before, skin diseases, ear infections, eye infections. It's basically the all the all the all the things that you can imagine from living in your own filth for six weeks, they had, right? Scabies and that sort of thing. So and all of them are affected. It's very common.

Russell 9:53

Do they have a toilet on board?

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Yeah, they've got they've got actually got two uh type seven has two toilets, one of which is basically used as a larder, so it's um it's you know packed up with um with all the food that they took with them out of port. Um which look you know, the fresh food lasted for you know probably about two weeks, uh, by which time you could loot use the second toilet. Again, it's rudimentary, it just sort of pumps out straight out into the sea, the other side of the bulkhead. So, yeah, they had they had two toilets. There

Toilets Batteries And Deadly Mistakes

SPEAKER_01 10:22

was a a funny story of a of a later development. They they developed towards the end of the war, they developed these pressure toilets, which meant that you could go to the toilet when they were submerged, because I should should add that you know a typical type 7 was designed essentially to stay most of its life on the surface, right? Probably 95% of its time it would be on the surface, and it would only dive either to attack or to evade attack. Later in the war, you know, because they're being hounded from pillar to post by you know for end of 43, 44, they're using a snorkel. They're they're developing various methods of basically staying submerged for much longer, so the snorkel being the most obvious example, and that meant you had to have uh some sort of toilet that would uh sustain sustain pressure or be able to operate at pressure, and they did that. So various valves and things that had to be all turned in sequence so that you could actually pump what you'd just done back out against pretty heavy water pressure, so when you're submerged, and there's a great example, I think it was it was towards the end of the war, might be about March 45, off the east coast of Scotland. A U-boat was actually sunk because the pressure toilet malfunctioned. So um one of the one of the crewmen would you know did his business and then got the procedure wrong for flushing, and rather than flushing it out, it just kind of opened the valve and all of the seawater rushed in, and no one could work out how to stop it coming in. Um so so very quickly, all this water and everything that the that the that the uh submariner had had deposited in the toilet flooded the batteries, which gives off chlorine. This was always the sort of horror scenario for you for U-boatmen. As soon as you get too much water in, it floods the batteries, the batteries short out, give off chlorine, which at which point you have to surface, right? Because that will kill you fairly quickly. So you have to surface to ventilate the boat. So they do that, and they uh and in this case, as I mentioned, with the one with the toilet, they surface pretty much you know, right in front of a of a British destroyer, which um destroys them. It's one of those wonderful stories which you think is apocryphal, but it actually isn't. You know, it was it was sunk because of its uh malfunctioning toilet.

Russell 12:33

There's

The U-Boat Stink And Shore Leave

Russell 12:34

a great part of your book when you describe how the U-boats come back into port, sort of celebrating their victories or celebrating their survival, and uh they can be smelled from some considerable distance.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Yeah. There was a thing, and this occurs in you know a lot of the memoirs and the sort of first hand accounts, it was known as the U-boat stink. I mean, this is the weird thing. I mean, you said at the top, you know, that what's what sort of sets this book apart, because there's a lot of books about the um about the battle at the Atlantic, you know. Absolutely, but but not many of them really pay too much attention to the German side of things and to the German accounts. So once I started looking into it, you you know, you get a very different story, and this is one part of it. I don't, you know, I don't think that's really been talked about before, but the U-boat stink comes up in everything, in all of these firsthand accounts, and it's given what I've just described, it's a sort of combination of body odour, certainly. Halitosis, because a lot of them had bad teeth from scurvy, actually open sores in their mouths in many cases. Um, so halitosis is part of the mixture. Mould, everything is wet all of the time in a in a U-boat, you know, there's no there's no dry spaces, so mould is a problem. There's one great account of them crossing the equator and actually watching in the heat, watching the mould grow up the interior bulkheads, um, you know, literally from day to day. So I mean it's absolutely filthy environment, and then on top of the all of that combination of smells, rotting food, because again, that was a constant, and diesel. Diesel was everywhere. You've got two massive diesel engines, like I described. There's diesel in the bilge, there's diesel, you know, diesel you'll as you'll know if you've ever spilt any on your trousers filling a car as I have. It's very difficult to get rid of the smell. So that combination of all of that, uh, and of course, vomit. I mean, just because you're uh you know a submariner doesn't mean you don't get seasick. So add all that together, you get the U-boat stink. And there were various examples of U-boats coming into port, and they sort of you know pop the pop the uh Conning Tower hatch expecting some sort of you know uh triumphant welcome, and and that basically the sort of welcoming party staggers back in horror when the smell reaches them. So it's a really it's really quite a grim existence, and and this is all this is all stuff. It's not it's not unique to the U-boat crews. I mean, it would have been pretty similar for particularly British crews of submarines in World War II, but I think because of the sort of rather concentrated nature of of what the U-boatmen were trying to do, you know, that specific task that they had, doing six or eight week patrols as they were, this is a part of the narrative, certainly, that we haven't really heard about before.

Russell 15:19

And so

Depth Charges And The Sound Of Fear

Russell 15:20

all these miseries, but but this is as nothing uh when uh when the British or whoever starts dropping depth charges on you. So what's it like to be on the receiving end uh of a depth charge attack? I mean, presumably this is in the diaries.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yes, it is. I mean, a lot of the um a lot of those that of course are lost, you know, they will be lost with their diaries, usually with with you know um a few survivors. There there are certain sort of patterns of sinkings, which is one of the interesting aspects of all of this. So in the early phase of the war, the normal pattern of a sinking would be depth charging, like you described, which is basically a fairly dumb bomb, you know, with a barometric fuse on it, which would be dropped in the f vicinity of a submarine, of a U-boat, and if it exploded within, you know, it's set to a depth, which was more or less a guess as to where where the um the U-boat would be, if it exploded within something like about 20 or 30 metres of the U-boat, you could expect damage to the U-boat itself, which could be catastrophic, i.e. it goes straight down, or it could be enough to force it to the surface. So in the opening phase of the war, the standard kind of model of the sinking is damage to the U-boat. The commander makes the decision to surface, he's you know, saving his own skin and that and those of his crew, and he's gonna surface, let the crew off. Very rarely they try and fight it out on the surface with with whatever vessel it was that attacked them, but it's not a wise thing to do. They do have a deck gun, for example, they have an 88 deck gun, but you know, you can't you can't defeat a raw navy destroyer at close range, it's just not gonna happen. So they might occasionally try and fight it out, but uh generally they would abandon ship and then scuttle the vessel, so pull the seacocks and then the the the U-boat would go down. In those cases, you do have survivors, so you can have people who actually would leave an account of what it was like to be depth charged, for example. They also did it in training, they used to do it with training as well in a controlled environment. They used to have to familiarise themselves with the effect of depth charging, right? Because it is quite is quite horrific. One of them described it, I think, quite aptly, as being as like being in a sort of one of those enormous oil drums while 12 people hit the thing outside with sledgehammers, right? That that was the sort of the you know the sound, and so it's you know, very sort of all-encompassing, quite terrifying.

Russell 17:43

But I understood, but I understood that quite often you could be, I mean, you could be spend hours and hours being depth charged. Yeah. And because the depth charges have to come pretty close to sync you, you know, you could be having this experience for hours and hours at end, and then eventually you manage to slink away.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah, that's very true. And that, you know, the the the time, you know, as long as their batteries are fully charged, they could, you know, type 7 could spend anything up to about 24 hours submerged. So you had a pretty good chance of getting away. And as long as you had a commander who would, you know, be able to vary your you know, height in the water, your depth in the column of water, for example, so that you know, even with sonar that the that the destroyer above you couldn't really get a uh a fix on where you were, you know, you had a good chance of getting away. So many of them did. And very often, you know, the the depth charging would be quite distant. And you could, even as an ordinary crewman, you could hear it as to whether it was getting more and more distant or whether whether it was getting closer to you. So it that sort of ramps up, certainly if it's getting closer to you, it ramps up the sort of sense of peril. Um, if you can hear it getting closer and closer. And then when it once it does get closer, then then you get that effect that I just mentioned that it, you know, it's it literally sort of rattles the fillings out of your teeth, and then you'd be you know plunged into darkness, for example. There was a brilliant account that I found in the archive, which was an in an interrogation report of a captured U-boat captain, and he saved what I think otherwise would have been a sort of total loss because he was depth charged and lost control of the vessel. He was unconscious, lost control of the vessel. It actually went to the bottom, which fortunately for him was only about sort of 200 metres. Had he been out in the deep ocean, I th you you know he would never have survived the day. But he came to when the when the U-boat hit the bottom, and it was pitch black, and the thing was keeled over to 45 degrees, his waist deep in water. I mean, it's terrifying, and it's a very matter-of-fact account, but it's absolutely terrifying, and yet, and he's covered, he's got shrapnel wounds, he's got a shrapnel wound in his chest, for example, um, and he manages to communicate to his to his officers and his men that they have to surface, so they have to be able to blow the tanks, you know, try and get rid of some of the water, pump that out very often by hand, blow the tanks and get to the surface, because they're not going to survive 10 minutes on the bottoms, which which he does, and and he surrenders himself and uh most of his crew as well, and some of them were killed in the in the uh in the action. But that is a really good example of what arguably should have been a total loss. And later in the war, with a less experienced captain, that would have been a total loss. Um, because you know the the captains later in the war are woefully inexperienced and and ill-trained, and in many cases, you know, a situation like that they would lose their heads.

Combat Stress And No Way Out

Russell 20:43

Do people crack? I mean, I just wonder how people cope psychologically.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Uh well, I mean, the short answer I suppose is that they don't, uh, or a lot of them don't. This is another, I think, I think quite a revelation I would say from the book is that I started looking for official accounts in the archive and elsewhere of the treatment of PTSD or combat stress, and there was very, very little. So I kind of wasn't really expecting much because you know I knew anyway that Nazi Germany was not really fond of the idea of combat stress, it saw it as being fundamentally unmanly, unbecoming for a warrior. So they didn't tend to talk about it, the men didn't tend to talk about it, whether this was on land or or at sea. The men didn't talk about it, the officials didn't talk about it, so it was kind of an unspoken thing. But I did find a report by two Navy doctors who did start looking into it wherever they could find submariners to actually open up and discuss this stuff, which was is not a given at all. And they said themselves that you know, this we know this is the tip of an iceberg, but it was pretty clear that that most crew suffered. In some way from combat stress, whether that be you know insomnia or anxiety, in some you know, some more spectacular cases, you there are examples of people being struck dumb, um, you know, particularly during stressful um episodes like a depth charging, all the way up to nervous breakdown, and there's there's certainly one documented case of suicide during a depth charging attack. So the whole spectrum uh is there in terms of you know how they how the men process the stress that they're under. And if you like you mentioned before, you could potentially be depth charged for hours on end, and then the same thing could happen the following day, and you know, that that stress of being at constant risk of imminent death is only interspersed with, you know, if you were lucky, a bit of uh combat and trying to trying to give you know as good as you get to the other side. So it's an extremely stressful environment for them to be in, and that and that is reflected in uh a lot of the first hand accounts as well. They allude to combat stress without actually using the words. So they will talk about insomnia, for example, you know, the various commanders and how they deal with the stress on board by methods like you know having a having a uh an evening when they can have a the men can have a beer together and sort of unwind. And there's there's there's all sorts, you know, that sort of thing, how you keep crew morale up in a submarine is is really, really important. And that there's a lot of attention to detail to that stuff, which again we don't really think about, but it's a crucial aspect in in actually trying to manage the the problem of combat stress.

Russell 23:44

But I guess what I was wondering is, you know, how do you get the men to go back for the next patrol after they've been through an experience like that?

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Well, they don't have a choice, is the short answer. I mean, they've been they've been conscripted. Um, you know, they've been conscripted, first of all. You know, you potentially might have had the choice to go in, whether it was Navy or or you know the Wehrmacht, for example, but you don't really have a choice beyond that. Um, you're then selected for the submarine service, and that's sometimes on uh on the basis of your own merits and experience. You know, they were particularly interested in having people like plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and so on, you know, people with with practical skills because you need that, right? You can take a peasant boy and give him a rifle and put him in the in the uh in the infantry and he'll do a good job, but maybe less of a good job in a in a submarine because you need some some sort of technical practical skills. Yeah, I mean they didn't really have a choice. So they would select it on you know on their uh background, on their on their talents, but also just because that you know, very often because they were short. You know, there was a one wonderful uh yeah. I mean, there was one wonderful um account that I mentioned in the book where that particular cadre of of recruits that have done the basic training in the Navy, and they basically say to them, right, you know, step forward if you're under five foot eight. Uh and those that step forward, they say, right, well, that's our next crop of recruits for the U-boat arm. You know, and they're all kind of going, Oh, like what the hell just happened? Uh but yeah, I mean it makes sense, right? You don't want people who are six foot three, you want you want the shorties that are not going to bang their heads all the time.

Brutality Myths And Prize Rules

Russell 25:22

One image I had pretty clearly in mind before I read the book is that the U-boat men were ruthless, and maybe a bit more than ruthless, you know, actively cruel. So torpedoing, you know, without warning, machine gunning the survivors uh in the water. But that doesn't really seem to be the case, according to your book.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

No, it doesn't. And again, I was I was expecting something similar, honestly, because a lot of the stuff that I've written before, you know, you mentioned at the top um my book First to Fight, for example, on the on the um the September campaign in Poland, is unbelievable, it's an unbelievably brutal campaign. I think we have a a stereotype of World War II where we imagine, I suppose, that at the beginning of the war, it's I wouldn't say civil or chivalrous, but it's it's not quite as brutal as it later becomes. That's so there's an idea, I think, that that's an assumption that's very common, which is that you get this sort of galloping brutalization, which I think to some extent is the case. But if you look at the Polish campaign of 1939, like the opening campaign of the war, it's unbelievably brutal. So I would say that the main driver of that brutality was actually the attitude that the Germans had to their enemy on a racial basis, right? Did they think, like the British and the French, that they were worth fighting and they were worthy adversaries, or did they think that they were, you know, beneath them, that they were, you know, lesser forms of human, basically, in which case they gave no quarter, right? And you have, you know, in the in that in that Polish campaign, for example, there's like 600 massacres in the space of uh five weeks. It's astonishingly brutal. So I came into this book kind of assuming that I'd see something similar, like the stereotype that we have, you know, whether that's from you know commando comics when we were growing up or whatever it might be, you know, the stereotype we have is is what you just described, is that there's you know, there's a a good dose of wanton brutality there. Now, if you look at the records and the you know, the war diaries and the and the records even of even of um survivors of of sinkings, whether civilians or or military, you you realise that actually that's a bit of a a misnomer, a misconception. So the thing about attacking without warning, um to a large extent, they the the U-boat force are forced into that. They have to do that in a way, because when they're when they're engaging the convoys, and the convoy system is is put into place right at the beginning of the war, you can't you can't sort of advertise your presence and say, Oh, by the way, here we are, you know, surrender whatever valuables you're carrying. I mean, it just wouldn't work. You get blown out of the water. The circumstances force them to attack without warning. But prior to that, there was this thing called the prize regulations, which uh was a an inter-war sort of legal agreement, which the Germans had signed up to, which essentially sought to make submarine warfare legally unvia. The prize regulations basically stated that a U-boat was supposed to, you know, when it found a vessel that it wanted to investigate, it would surface, it would engage with the with the captain, whether you know, send a boarding party or by you know by other means, ascertain where the where the vessel was from, who who owned the vessel, what it was carrying, where it was destined to, all of those details. And uh, and then if it was decided that it was an enemy vessel, then they had to give the crew notice, they had to um abandon ship, then it could be sunk once they had abandoned ship, and then the then the U-boat crew were at, or the submarine crew were actually responsible for the well-being of the crew that had that had abandoned ship, right? Right. So it's it's it's deliberately designed to make submarine warfare unviable. And the Germans, to my astonishment, actually tried quite hard to stick by these rules at the beginning of the war, 3940, right? If you look at the the sort of the patterns of sinkings at versus death tolls as well, very, very often they're sinking quite a few vessels in this time, but the death tolls are really quite low. And it's because they are usually where possible, where they're not in convoy, if you're engaging an an individual vessel, they would proceed by the prize rules. And there was a couple of mad examples of U-boats that would actually tow the you know the lifeboats with the crews that they'd just uh sunk, effectively, that they would actually tow them to safety because it wasn't enough just to you know say off you go. They actually, as I said, were responsible for those crews. So there's one example where you know a U-boat actually towed the crew to the Irish coast and you know set them ashore. You know, this was this was no way to prosecute a war. And they knew it. I mean, it was farcical. Later on, that sort of develops into you know, there was a a concern generally that they would give the crews that they'd just sunk, they would say, you know, do you need any medical help? You know, can we give you water? Can we give you blankets? And at the very least, they would say lands that way. I mean, that wasn't that isn't a uniform thing, it doesn't happen in every instance. In many cases, it was it was actually quite brutal. I mean, that the one I described with the Polish captain that they took prisoner earlier on, you know, they took him prisoner, he's well treated, he's taken back to Germany and ends up in a POW camp. But his crew are basically left in a in a lifeboat, and they they are actually adrift for a month before they're found, which is when you think about it, it's absolutely horrific. But they weren't really helped by the crew, so it wasn't a universal thing. But the key point is I think that that image of wanton brutality of of machine gunning the crews only actually happens as far as we know once, and that's the infamous case of the S.S. Peleus, which is in the book, only happens once. So generally, and this was a surprise to me as as much as anything, the way I would formulise this is to say that you know, yes, of course, the regime is absolutely bloody and brutal and murderous. However, U-boat crews I think tended to cleave, as did arguably the wider German Navy, tended to cleave to a sort of the older idea of you know solidarity of the sea and all of that. And they tended to uh actually try to follow the rules to some extent. I mean, so much so that you know the famous Laconia Instant of September 1942, halfway through the war, halfway through the war, the Laconia Instant is basically the the uh best vessel U-156 sinks the Laconia, then spends five days trying to save the survivors from the sinking, uh and is eventually attacked itself and it becomes a scandal in in German naval circles because they say, why why is this vessel? Why are we trying to save these crews and the and the uh and the survivors from the Laconia? Because the the higher-up said this was nonsense, but the crews and the commanders tended to do it. So, right at the in the middle of the war, they are still being told off for saving survivors.

Russell 32:42

Well, I mean, they are attacked, I think, by an American plane, but is that not when Donitz gives the order? So well, maybe they've already given the order, but but he's absolutely firm from now on there's to be no more rescues.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

That is the end result, is that you know Dernitz is basically browbeaten by Hitler. Hitler says, you know, why are we doing this? Why, why, you know, the their enemy enemy uh personnel, they should be should be shot, right? Uh and Dohnitz basically says, Well, that's not how it works. I paraphrase, but it he he basically stands up to Hitler. But the consequence of that is that Dernitz gives the order that from then on they were not to help sunk crews. It still does happen in isolated examples, because as I said, I think that that ethos of the solidarity of the sea is one that actually is quite hard for sailors in general to get rid of to jettison. Um but that is the moment you're right, that's when Durnitz says, you know, we've got to stop doing this because it's insane. And it and it kind of was insane. Um, you know, it it was a it was a brutal campaign, it was warfare. So we can't dress it up completely, but that sort of wanton committing of atrocities is conspicuous by its absence, which I I thought was a surprise.

Russell 33:56

So

Dönitz And The Tonnage War

Russell 33:57

let's move on to the campaign itself. So, what was Donitz actually trying to do, and and as much to the point, does he have the resources, does he have the boats to do it?

SPEAKER_01 34:07

Yeah, I mean the it you know in German it's it's known as the um a tra essentially a handelskrieg, so it's like a trade war, in effect. That was the phrase that they use, and it's and it's basically about tonnage. So you've got to sink as many tons of of cargo vessels as possible to strangle your enemy into submission. So it's economic warfare. 36 onwards, basically, when the U-boat arm is is reconstructed. I mean, they were the Germans were banned from having submarines under Treaty of SI. So that's the intention is to sink you know enough of your enemies' um cargo vessels and supply vessels that you you'd at least force them to negotiate with you, right? And it's a reasonable assumption, given what the German U-boat arm had achieved at the end of the First World War, that this could be effective. But the problem for Dernitz was that he couldn't really convince the higher-ups that this was a viable proposition until it was too late, effectively. So consequently, he goes to war in nine in September 39, as he puts it himself, you know, woefully under equipped for carrying out his allotted task of trying to you know disrupt allied shipping. But he goes to war with numbers of numbers vary according to who you read, but I always say it's 29 combat U-boats, um, which is much smaller than anyone imagines. And actually, given the way the fleet tended to be used, they tended to go on rotation. So they would you'd always have you know you couldn't have them all out because you'd have to have them all back again. So they tended to go on rotation. So you'd have generally, broadly speaking, a third of the of the of the uh fleet would be out, a third would be in port refueling and revitling, and then the other third would be transitioning between the two, right? So you always had a third of your your fleet, broadly speaking, out in in theatre, which means that the numbers available to donuts reduce even further. So rather than 29 U-boats out in theatre, he probably had something like 10 at the beginning of the war, right? Actually in theatre any one time, which makes it sound a lot less threatening than it did at you know to to most Brits at the time. Um you know you've got some you've got some you know pretty significant sinkings about you think of the Athenia, for example, you think of the Royal Oak in October of 39. What's the Royal Oak? That was the the British battleship that sunk at anchor in Scarpa Flow in October 39, which is a massive loss of life, about 800 plus um sailors are killed. Um it's a remarkable feat of seamanship, actually, by um U-47 and Gunta Prien to get into Scarpa Flow and then out, you know, carry out the attack and then out again. So it was you know held up as an example that uh you know U-boats and submarine warfare was the future. Yeah. But it it's uh it's actually very atypical because, as I said, it doesn't fit the pattern of actually attacking merchant ships, which was the which was the primary target, right?

Russell 37:12

That's what they they what they were supposed to be attacking. But even with this limited resources, and maybe things do ramp up a bit because because for a bit it does seem to be working, at least you know, to some extent, because the crews call it the happy time or something like that, where they are seeking significant tonnage. But I'm I'm not quite sure from your book, even whether even at their best, it's it's really working.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Yeah, it's true. That that the opening two years of the war, probably, they are, you know, they as you said, they just described it as the happy time. They are putting together some pretty good figures. That's partly because you have some very experienced captains in that time, you know, people like Gunter Prien, that I just mentioned. Um, you know, Prien had had a good ten years in you know the merchant marine and the and the Kriegsmarina behind him before he before he even set foot on a on a U-boat. So, you know, he was tremendously experienced as a seaman and brought that experience with him. And and others were very similar. You know, you you think of someone like Otto Kretschmer as well, had tremendous experience prior to coming to the U-boat arm. So um, you know, they were very, very gifted, they were very experienced commanders, and a lot of the crews as well of that in that opening phase, a lot of their the commanders and crews were people who had you know served from the the late 1930s, from the reconstruction of the U-boat arm from 36 and 37 onwards. So that was really the the sort of creme de la creme of uh of the manpower was available then. They, of course, mostly die off in the opening two years. So that's part of the reason for the the drop-off in performance, and also the you know, the Allied sort of countermeasures, apart from reinstituting the the um convoy system, were really pretty undeveloped for the first two years of the war. You've basically got depth charging, and which is a pretty dumb weapon. It's very defensive, they're not yet taking the combat, you know, taking the fight to the U-boats, and those experienced commanders exploit that, I would say, naivety really very, very effectively. So you get someone like Otto Kretschma, would you know you'd have a wolfpack attack on a convoy and they would attack from the outside, draw off the escorts, and then Kretschma would pop up in the middle of the convoy and literally ride up and down the lanes of a maybe a 40-strong convoy, picking off all of the juiciest targets, which is you know, usually things like oil tankers. They're attacking at will pretty much in that opening phase. So they're posting really, really amazing figures. Some of those tours that U47 and others U99 go on, they're coming back having sunk you know 40 or 50,000 tons, which is insane. So, yeah, they're you know, they they are having a great success, but it's as much to do with the the the I would say the weakness of the Allied countermeasures as anything else. And once you have you know, 43 is the great turning point in all of this. Uh spring of 43, you know, in the previous six months, the the U-boats under Durnitz have kind of gone toe-to-toe with the Allies. And in many cases, you know, you've got the ramping up of Allied countermeasures, you've got the use of Enigma um intelligence, ultra intelligence from uh decrypted Enigma being used in a much more offensive capacity as well at that point. You've got the closing of the um the mid-Atlantic gap, you know, all of this stuff kind of moves in the Allies' favour.

Russell 40:43

So

Radar Air Power And The 1943 Shift

Russell 40:44

what do you mean by the closing of the mid-Atlantic gap?

SPEAKER_01 40:47

So the mid-Atlantic gap was the gap in the the middle of the Atlantic where Allied, which was not covered by Allied um the the air umbrella, right? So aircraft out of East Coast, US, UK, and Iceland left a gap in the centre of the of the Atlantic, where basically the U-boats were pretty much you know scot-free. You know, they were hope-free. They they they knew if they were going to be attacked, it had to be from a destroyer. They could usually see them coming from a long way away. The primary killer of U-boats is is air attack, which again is is not what we think. We think it's depth charging, but it's not, it's air attack. So that was where they could, you know, they could rest up, they could have those rendezvous with the supply vessels, for example. Um, if the weather was fine, they would they would surface and everyone would have a swim. I mean, things like that. It's all in the it's all in the records. So, you know, the the closing of the mid-Atlantic gap is a sort of significant moment. That's in the space. But how do they do that? Because they can't build an island. Using sort of drop tanks and that sort of thing, so extending the range of aircraft. For the Allies, that's a significant moment that you know suddenly U-boats don't have the safe space uh to to you know resupply or do whatever they have to do. Um, so that's one of the factors. So from you know 43 onwards, the war shifts you know pretty swiftly against the U-boats. Uh, and of course, then you've got this you know that second generation of commanders, second generation of of crews who are much less experienced, less well able to deal with the new challenges of Allied countermeasures. So the successes that they had enjoyed earlier in the war drop off very, very quickly.

Russell 42:27

And the Allies they improve their radar or something, don't they? I mean, there's something can they fit the radar on board the airplanes? Yeah, is that right?

SPEAKER_01 42:35

That's a that's a game changer. I mean, it's you know, there's there's always a constituency of you know historians and enthusiasts who will you know essentially attribute every success in World War II to um to Enigma, to Enigma decrets, right? And they are they are important and they're important in this story as well. But I I think that aerial radar is is the game changer in the U-boat war. Very good one was the Mark III aerial radar, which was fitted to you know things like liberators, particularly used by Coastal Command, and they would pick up a U-boat on the surface, and as I said, they spent most of the time on the surface from anything up to about 15-17 miles, something like that. And they could zero in on it. By the time the U-boat saw their attacker coming, they had a minute to dive, and it took them 30 seconds to crash dive, so they've got 30 seconds of leeway. That's how close the tolerances got, how tight the tolerances got. And there's a lot of cases of those crews basically kind of looking up and seeing this vessel cut this aircraft coming in, preparing to attack, and basically kind of collectively uh having a panic attack, and you know, by the time that's 10 seconds gone, and then they order a dive, and you know, very often they don't survive the day because it's it's happening so quickly. Quickly.

Russell 44:00

Yeah. And do the Germans r really understand what's happening to them? You know, because we've got Enigma and we've got the they don't really have aerial radar in the same way. So do they know what's going on?

SPEAKER_01 44:13

No, they they generally don't. And this is actually a really interesting angle of the book because I I do describe some of those developments, but you know, my perspective in the book is always from the German side. So I do describe them and explain them. But the key thing is you look at from the German perspective, they didn't know. So they didn't know that Enigma had been compromised. I mean, even Dernitz, when he wrote his memoir post-war, he wrote his memoir in 56-57, so he'd been in Spandau for 10 years, came out, wrote the memoir, which is a really interesting book. But you know, he says in that, I still don't know whether if the Allies broke broke Enigma, because we didn't admit to it until the 1970s, right, publicly. So he didn't know in the 1950s, so they certainly didn't know in the 1940s. They knew that they're being detected with radar, so they had these these radar detectors that would detect when they had been pinged by radar, right? Um, but they didn't trust them because they didn't always work. And crucially, once the British went from the type three to the type four radar, which worked on a different wavelength, then the detectors that the Germans had no longer worked, right? So then the Germans, you know, are being attacked out of a out of a clear blue sky, and suddenly everyone's saying the bloody radar detector doesn't work, right? It's letting us down. And then they then the rumour spreads that rather than being a radar detector, it's actually betraying their position, right? And this so this idea spreads like wildfire. So you get them switching the thing off, right? Which is mad when you think about it. This is the this is the machine that's been developed by German Boffins to try and save their lives, and the and the commanders and the crews are going, let's switch the bloody thing off. It's it's betraying us, right? So they are in a a weird world of kind of superstition and and fragmentary information where they're making decisions like that, which in many cases cost them their lives.

Three Quarters Die And Why

Russell 46:09

Well, let's talk about the lives. I mean, what are the casualty rates throughout the war? Pretty brutal.

SPEAKER_01 46:15

The total, to go straight to the total, Russell, is 30,000. The official figure is 30,003, out of a total uh U-boat arm of 41,000.

Russell 46:28

Dear God.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

So it's nine 75%, three-quarters, are killed during the war. The vast majority majority of those are never, you know, bodies never recovered, they're going straight down. Okay, so only a tiny fraction of the of the U-boat dead are ever even recovered. In terms of looking at how that war shifted in the statistics as well, as I just mentioned, from 43 onwards, you've got that grand shift, right? You can look at the lifespan of an average crew, how it was calculated statistically. At the beginning of the war, a crew operating in 3940 would expect to have a lifespan of about of between seven and nine missions, seven and nine patrols, which is quite a respectable lifespan, really, for you know, for um someone in their position, given all of the perils that we've described. By 43, particularly into 44, it's down to between two and three patrols already. Right? By the end of 44, it's hovering around one. So it's it's you know, this is where you've got Allied countermeasures are really up to speed. We've got all of the you know, new technology, we've got um hedgehog is a much more effective mechanism for destroying U-boats at sea than than depth charging was or had been. You've got those you know, aerial radar is being is very, very effective. On top of all of that, you've got German crews that are woefully inexperienced. You've got commanders who have been you know seconded in from a desk job in Wilhelmshaven and have never set foot on a U-boat before, and they're given six weeks of training and told to go and command a U-boat, right? So they don't know what they're doing, their crews very often don't really know what they're doing. That shows itself you know in extreme situations when they're under attack, they make the wrong decisions, all of which accounts to a large extent for that for that shift. So by the end of you know, the last six months of the war, most crews that are going out statistically are on a death ride because the chances of them coming back are pretty close to to zero.

Russell 48:42

Um but so why is don't I mean Donitz, my image of Donitz is not as a as a cruel man, so so so why is he doing this? I mean, this is more like something Hitler would want, although maybe Hitler is giving the orders, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 48:55

Yeah, it's I mean it's true that and the the key thing on in that respect is that in the spring of 43, late spring, early summer of 43, May 43, Durnitz withdraws his wolf packs from the Atlantic because they've had they had a bloody nose from the Allies, right? Um, and the line that he gets, and actually he one of his two sons is actually killed in in those engagements in Black May, they call it Black May. So he withdraws the wolf packs, but that doesn't mean that he stops submarine operations, far from it. If anything, submarine operations kind of dissipate, so they're no longer just concentrating on you know intercepting convoys in mid-Atlantic because that's that's too bloody, that's too costly to themselves for them to keep doing it. But they spread elsewhere, so they spread down into the South Atlantic, they spread down into the into the Indian Ocean and beyond. I mean, as far east, I think they get as the Java Sea, West Coast of Australia by 1944. They're patrolling there as well. So it's not that they get withdrawn, they just dissipate. And in that way, they're kind of avoiding the hard target, which is the well-defended, well-drilled, by this stage, well-drilled convoys. They're going for lone vessels at sea, you know, smaller convoys elsewhere in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. So they're still fighting and they're still convincing themselves that they're still pursuing the same goal. They're still sinking vessels, for example, but much, much reduced from the earlier phase of the war. Um, so it's pretty rare, even, you know, from 1943 onwards, it's pretty rare for a commander to even get to you know sinking 10 vessels, like compared to what they were doing earlier in the war, when a good commander would sink 10 in one patrol.

unknown 50:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

Later on, you know, it's it's unusual to even sink a single vessel. So uh, you know, there's a great example that sort of I think sums up this problem that they're in, this sort of spiral of this the latter half of the war. I think it was U426, I think it was from memory, which um was launched in the in the um summer of 1943, for all the way through to the end. Uh so two full years in theatre. It sank nothing in that time, and it was depth charged over 600 times, right? And that says everything that you need to know about the U-boat experience in the second half of the war, right? Yeah, so they're really not sinking, you know, anything like the figures from before, and and instead they are subject to constant brutal harassment and uh you know and depth charging and and aerial attack and everything else. And it and the you know, the hunters absolute cliche, but the hunters become the hunted.

Russell 51:42

Yeah. There

Operation Hannibal And Baltic Tragedy

Russell 51:43

was um there was a section in your book that uh really surprised me, which is that in towards the end of the war, the German Navy finds itself doing something completely different, which is running a sort of a German Dunkirk, which I'd which I'd never heard of. So do you just want to tell that story? Because I think it's terribly interesting.

SPEAKER_01 52:02

Yeah, um, Operation Hannibal is it's not very well known actually. It kind of should be. I think this is the reason it's not well known, I think, is one it's you know, it's Eastern Europe, and I think we traditionally, a bit like Chamberlain in 38, we have a sort of collective blind spot a little bit about Eastern Europe. So as the as the um the Red Army is advancing at the end of 1944, they effectively get to East Prussia, so that sort of lump of e of German territory that that province of East Prussia that uh stuck out in the Eastern Baltic. That is reached in October of 44 by the Red Army, and they sort of swoop down, they attack East Prussia, but they also swoop down and envelop it effectively. So they cut it off more or less on the line of the river Vistula, which is the rib river that now runs through the centre of Poland. So the Germans have a decision to make. A lot of their U-boat bases and and uh boatyard facilities are in in the Eastern Baltic. That was like their you know playground, test ground for a lot of the U-boats. You've got things like the Schikau work, which is in in Danzig, in modern-day Gdańsk, which is pumping out you know, U-boats left, right, and centre by this stage. So they have to you know evacuate both manpower and sensitive um materials and blueprints and so on, and the injured and civilians. There's a massive effort to basically evacuate East Prussia before the Soviets can cut it off, and that means a seaborne evacuation. So they they rope in you know surface vessels mainly because obviously they've got the capacity to load them up with all of that, you know, wounded personnel, you know, female auxiliaries, ordinary civilians, blueprints, you know, anything of value, basically, and ship it west to sort of keel or or somewhere that's uh you know appropriate and further west. And and this is a massive operation, and it runs for a you know a couple of months. It's not it's sometimes described as humanitarian, it's kind of not. I mean, a lot of people owe their lives to it, you know, or at least owe owe the fact that they didn't have to go and serve in the salt mines in the Soviet Union in the interim. So there's a lot of people in Germany now who are descendants of people survived because of Operation Hannibal, right? Without question. But it's not it's not really humanitarian in its intention, it's much more you know hard-nosed than that. But still, huge numbers come out.

Russell 54:33

So, what kind of numbers are we talking about?

SPEAKER_01 54:35

I think it's about I think it's about a million people are actually evacuated of various categories. So some military, you know, wounded and so on. But it's it's huge numbers. Um, so it really deserves to be much better known. But the reason I include it, I mean, one of the most famous vessels that was included in this was actually the Wilhelm Guslov, which is the worst maritime disaster in history, as I'm sure you know, Russell. Um, you know, it's one of those little stories that sort of crops up every now and then. But you know, upwards of 10,000 people were aboard the Wilhelm Guslov, which was a uh pre-war um pleasure liner, um, when it was sunk in the Baltic by by a by a Soviet submarine, uh, and it sank in 40 minutes, with the loss of something like nine and a half thousand people in the freezing water of the Baltic. So this was part of Operation Hannibal. That's why it was sailing, and that's why it was so horribly overladen. But the U-boats are used for it as well. So U-boats are sent west, you know, very often rammed to the gunnels with you know, Hitler youth boys, for example. You might be carrying, I think one of them was carrying 60 Hitler youth boys, as well as all of its crew. So, you know, they're they're you they're roped into this process as well, so they belong to that narrative.

Russell 55:49

Funnily enough, I was uh on a sort of a cycling tour up from Lubeck up to Flensburg along the along the Baltic coast, and uh came across the Gusloff Memorial or a Gusloff Memorial in in Damp, and just a small thing. Uh I hadn't hadn't known anything about it until I until I came across that. Yeah, yeah. One thing

Surrender Orders And The Black Flag

Russell 56:09

I don't understand uh about the whole story is that is that at the end of the war and they're ordered to surrender, and you'd think that having you know survived the war, their next patrol, you know, less than 50% chance of coming back, you'd think that this would be the happiest moment of their lives, and yet they seem you know thoroughly depressed. I I just don't quite get that.

SPEAKER_01 56:31

Well, there's there's a mixture of reactions to be fair. So a lot, there's a there's a lovely account of the next batch of recruits who are being trained up for the Uber arm. When they hear that the order to surrender has been given, they basically sort of run out of the classroom and run across the fields cheering, uh, you know, because they don't have to go and face the wrath of the Allies, um, which is quite a nice image. So you know, it does, you know, it kind of conforms to the assumption that you just made. But then for many of the of serving crews and particularly of commanders as well, it was it was the worst day of their lives because you know they've spent however long it would have been by that point, in many cases, years. There are very few U-boats that actually served all the way through, incidentally. I mean, they're they're rare as hens' teeth. One of them I think was U-48, who was you know, one of the most you know has the longest service life, but they're very, very rare to have one that serves all the way through. But they'd spent the best parts of their lives in this venture, and they'd failed right by their own uh standards, they'd failed in that venture, they'd been defeated, and for military men, you know, yeah, okay, survival is one thing, and that's a that's a positive, absolutely, but they'd also failed, and they'd also been defeated. So for a lot of them, this was a this was a very, very dark day. There are a couple of accounts of of commanders committing suicide, for example, when they're you know instructed to surrender. They were told the procedure by which they were to surrender included them having to raise a black flag as a sign that to any approaching vessel that they had heard the message that they weren't going to fight and so on. Because you know, if you're on an allied destroyer and a and a U-boat surfaces in front of you, and there's an account of this happening, suddenly it's all men to the guns, and you know what's going on here until they raise the black flag, at which point you you know that they got the message. But even raising the black flag to to that generation of submariners or navy personnel generally was seen as an insult because they said, Well, it's like being just you they're saying we're pirates, like we're not pirates, you know, we're we're sailors, we're sailors of the of the German Navy. So they even that they found offensive, right? So for many serving personnel, it was a profoundly difficult moment, yes.

Russell 59:02

And

U-234 Japan Cargo And Suicide

Russell 59:03

can you tell the story of uh U234? Because that's the one that's that's heading for Tokyo uh at the time when Germany surrenders. And I think they have some Japanese personnel on board as well.

SPEAKER_01 59:15

Yeah, this opens up again, it's another sort of part of the narrative which I hadn't really appreciated until I started looking at this. Was that you had this kind of weird connection to Japan via the U-boat force. I mean, we don't really think much about the Germans and the Japanese actually collaborating. Now we know that they're all in the you know, anti-comintern front, they're all in the Axis together, they kind of support them, sports, support each other, at least in their rhetoric. But the idea of them actually kind of collaborating and exchanging materials and exchanging personnel, when you think about it, it was very difficult to do because after 41, you've got the Soviet Union in the way, which is a combatant nation. The only way to do that was via U-boats. So you did have this weird situation where a lot of those long-range U-boats, which was a type 9, it was slightly larger than type 7, um, were used and they were they would be packed with sensitive materials and any personnel that needed to be exchanged across, you know, to to Japan. So, for example, the Indian nationalist Chandra Bose, for example, was delivered to Japan to ultimately be inserted into India, that was the plan, via U-boat, because he'd spent the early early part of the war in uh in Germany. Um, so they did exchange, you know, send personnel and the the the Japanese would send back military attaches and junior diplomats and so on. I mean, it's a pretty uncomfortable journey, to be honest. It's a horrible journey to have to undertake. So, yeah, it's a really interesting angle to the story, which I hadn't I hadn't appreciated at all. But the Germans had a base in in Malaya. Obviously, Japanese had conquered Malaya, and just uh just outside Penang, which had you know, um, there was a uh a German base was set up for U-boats for resupply and so on, and it was in collaboration with the Japanese. So the Japanese used to broadly supply it, you know, with food and so on, and uh, and they would sustain their operations in the eastern Indian Ocean from Penang. And very often those vessels would come from Europe, go to Penang, resupply, and then and then go up in up to Japan and hand over their cargoes and and the individuals aboard, and then vice versa come back. So it's a it's a really interesting angle to the story, one which one which we don't I don't think we generally think about. Uh in our well, certainly not in our you know rather stereotypical view of the battle at the Atlantic being the you know the centerpiece of the submarine war. We don't realise that it spreads right across the globe, not into the Pacific, but almost everywhere else, even the Black Sea, for example. They're even fighting in the Black Sea.

Russell 1:01:58

What I was thinking about with though with 234, UT234, was that they have the Japanese officers on board, yeah, and then the Germans surrender, and then the uh and then the Japanese have to decide what to do about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:09

Yeah, and and choose suicide. It's actually a very sort of poignant story in a lot of ways. I mean, certainly the the eyewitness account, there's one I think he was going to be a German di supposed to be a German diplomat in in Japan, and he survived, and the account comes from him, right? And he talks about these two uh and then the order comes from surrender, and these and these two, you know, these two fellows basically they give away all their possessions to the crew and take poison and they leave a note saying please don't revive us. I mean it's it's it's a kind of a I mean I fully appreciate this is the it's the enemy from our sort of you know conventional British viewpoint, but it's actually quite a poignant moment, I thought. And I thought that writing it as well, it comes across like that.

Dönitz At Nuremberg And Final Thoughts

Russell 1:02:56

Yeah. So Donnet, he's he's the man who's built the submarine force, and yeah, so very unluckily for him, he ends up as Hitler's chosen successor. Yes, and then he ends up uh in the dock at Nuremberg. I mean, what do you think? Uh he gets 10 years, I think. Uh was was that too harsh, or or did he somewhat get away with it?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:18

There are a lot of differences of opinion on this, and I I think it's actually about right. I think given the emotions at the time, and there was this perception, and it is a perception, that the Hubert war war was particularly brutal, you know, his case is not helped by the fact that he was named as Hitler's successor. Let's be honest, he was a Nazi. I mean, he was a believer in you know Hitler's genius and all of that and the Nazi project, but in the in the wider sense that you know that yeah, as he claimed at Nuremberg, and I think this was with justification, he claims that he didn't have oversight of you know the plans for war, for example, the the planning of of the war. I mean, he was when you look at his uh career as a submarine, he's obsessive, he's an obsessive micromanager, and he was obsessed with his uh what was within his control, which was the Uber arm, with his boys, as he called them. That was his world. I can believe that he didn't have oversight over other stuff, and certainly not the big picture, because he was too obsessed with his own little world. And his defense on that front, so his defense in terms of how he conducted the war was I mean very cleverly done by his lawyer, but I think with again with justification, because he basically looked at the American prosecution of the submarine war in the Pacific, and the Americans in the Pacific were actually trying to do exactly the same thing as the Germans were trying to do in the Atlantic. You know, you've got an island nation almost entirely dependent on foreign trade, so the best thing to do to try and knock it out of the war is to cut all of its trade links, right? Exactly what the Germans are trying to do in their tonnage war. The Americans are doing actually very successfully against the Japanese. So by the end of the war, they're bringing the Japanese domestic economy to its knees through their sinking of Japanese um merchant vessels, and in some cases there were atrocities committed in the process. So Dernitz's defense was basically, well, I conducted the war pretty much exactly as you conducted the war in the Pacific. Uh, and they actually got uh I think it was Admiral Nimitz was was brought in as a as a as a sort of witness, unwittingly in the defense of of Dernitz, but basically said, Yeah, you know, things happen at sea, and you know, sometimes the crews carried away in the moment, and you know, people get killed, and so on. Essentially, that was Dernitz's defense was was that I did the same as you. So if I'm in the dock, you've got to be in the dock. That was the implication, which was kind of an uncomfortable one for the allies at Nuremberg. So I think 10 years for Dernitz, honestly, I think was okay. I think it would have been unjust for him to have been, you know, hanged or or you know given maybe 20 years or whatever. But as I said, he is a Nazi, he's not a woolly liberal, he's not someone that you want to have tea and cake with. Um, let's be honest. But I think he is at, you know, his defense was was, I think was a justified one, justifiable one, that he didn't have oversight or and certainly not any sort of decisive hand in the wider conduct of the war.

Russell 1:06:41

Hmm. Okay, well, I think uh I think we've done the subject justice today, so uh shall we leave it there?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:49

I think I mean it's been great to uh uh go through it and ri revisit it actually. The book is out, uh was out last year, last autumn. So I've had my my uh head into the the next the next uh What is the next project? I'm working on a book on the on the uh night of the long knives, the purge of 1924, which is which is great fun. You had to be there. It's unbelievably brutal. And incidentally, I should add uh Russell that the paperback of Wolfpack is out imminently, is out in uh the middle of September. So that might be uh coinciding with uh with this uh podcast going out and being broadcast. So if you do listen to this and you enjoy it, then uh by all means seek out the paperback.

Russell 1:07:34

Well, I can warmly I can warmly recommend it. Um anyway, Roger, uh thank you very much indeed. My great pleasure. Thanks very much.