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Statistically, they were on a suicide mission.
That's Roger Morehouse's assessment of the odds facing Hitler's U-boat crews in the final years of the Second World War.
Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Roger relates the story of these missions from the German perspective, a tale encompassing scurvy, sleep deprivation, terror and acts of astonishing kindness.
Let's kind of start at the beginning of the war.
What was the German high command's attitude to the U-boat fleet at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939?
Did it regard it as potentially a war-winning weapon?
Not really.
No, I think in a way it was kind of slightly out on a limb, a little bit unloved.
You know Dönitz, the head of the U-boat arm, spent most of the sort of few years pre-war after Germany had been permitted to have U-boats again, you know, desperately trying to sort of sell the idea of this as a tactical weapon in the future war and saying well, you can attack Allied shipping, you can essentially strangle britain out of the war.
You can at least strangle britain to to a position where they would be willing to negotiate.
And he'd really been in sort of very stiff competition with every other branch of the german military, you know, for for raw materials, for steel, for manpower and all the rest of it, which is a was a very difficult situation for him and to a large degree he sort of lost out in that and he complained in his memoir that You know a lot of his superiors were what he called, you know, continentally obsessed, which is, you know, meaning that they were obsessed about the land, war and especially going east, you know Lebensraum and all of that sort of thing.
So they're obsessed about that particular theatre, and really to the expense of everything else, and him included.
And it takes until really late, sort of late 1941, for Hitler to come round to the view that actually this was potentially a decisive weapon, by which time, of course, the window of opportunity that the Germans had closed.
And how was his attitude informed by the experience of use of U-boats in the First World War?
How effective had U-boats been in that first conflict?
Yeah, very, actually.
I mean very effective against allied merchant shipping with.
You know, I mean again relatively primitive weapon.
It's another generation earlier, so it's that much more primitive.
But they had worked very well.
Pretty deadly, not least to their own crews as well, but also to allied merchantmen.
And, of course, Dönitz had first-hand experience of all of that.
You know, he'd been a U-boatman in the First World War.
He'd ended up being captured and actually, you know, sent to a POW camp in Sheffield, of all places.
So, you know, he called himself a sort of submariner to his bones.
You know, that was his that was his world.
So he was absolutely the right choice for reconstituting the German U-boat arm when that was permitted after 1935.
So yeah it was.
They were building on fairly solid foundations, both sort of tactically and technologically, from First World War.
But they had.
What's crucial, I suppose, is that you know, as we know, from Treaty of Versailles, they've been forbidden to have U-boats at the Treaty of Versailles.
But there was this continuity because the Germans had very sort of cunningly carried on U-boat construction through various sort of shell companies.
And particularly in the Netherlands.
They would build U-boats for the Finns, the Turks, anyone that would pay.
And it looked like a Dutch company doing an ordinary commercial enterprise.
It was actually the, you know, it was German engineers, it was German technology.
And so they kept this continuity throughout the period where you know supposedly, they weren't allowed to have U-boats.
So when they did come to reconstitute the U-boat arm, they were able to hit the ground running.
And what about the British sort of attitude at the beginning of the war?
I mean, how wary was the British establishment at the the prospect of sort of new boats strangling the country into submission?
I think there's a general assumption that Germany would essentially carry on from where they'd left off in the First World War.
So it's interesting that convoy tactics are instituted right from the outset, right from the 3rd of September.
It takes time for them to finesse that, particularly the escort element, the sort of defensive and then later offensive element of a convoy.
So that takes time to finesse.
But, you know, the convoys are in place from the first few days of the war.
The shock really, I suppose, of the potential of the U-boat comes with the sinking of the Royal Oak in Scarpa Flow on October 14th 1939.
And I suppose also the Athenia.
So the Athenia is sunk on the 3rd of September.
So really, you know, the first day of the war, as far as Britain's concerned.
And then you've got a passenger liner being sunk by a U-boat out in the western approaches with huge loss of life.
For a lot of the allied commentators at the time it's like same old, same old.
This is back to the same sort of barbaric tactics that you had.
You know the sinking of the lusitania, for example, in the first world war that ultimately brings the americans into the first world war, the athenia kind of shows.
Oh, you know, here we are, we're back there again.
You know these sort of barbaric sinkings by german submarines.
Fast forward about six weeks and you get to the sinking of the of the royal oak, as i just mentioned, in scarpa flow.
Again, huge loss of life, but over 800 Royal Navy sailors are killed there.
And that's a really sort of forensic strike, really.
U-boat gets into Scarpa Flow, which was supposed to be pretty much impregnable, manages to torpedo a British capital ship and then escape again.
This is a massive shock to the British, like you say, the naval establishment.
How the hell did that happen?
So the sort of combination of those two, I think, makes the British establishment and the high command realise that they are in a fight.
On one level, they're back to where they had been in the First World War, with this kind of raiding and this sinking, very often, of passenger vessels and the rest of it.
And also that this is a U-boat arm which has genuinely talented sailors aboard, you know, included in it that is able to carry out these quite sort of forensic and pinpoint actions.
So it really does absolutely convince them that they're in a fight at that point.
And this is famously being said this was the one threat that Churchill said that kept him awake at night, wasn't it?
That really gave him nightmares.
Yes, that is a line from his memoir, post-war memoir.
I think a little bit.
I look into this quite a lot in the book, because the whole point of this book is to try and look at the U-boat war in World War II, but from a German perspective, because that's the angle that we haven't really had before.
The way it's always written is very much through the eyes of the destroyers and the merchantmen and all the rest.
So that's what I wanted to try and do with this was to flip the perspective and see, in a way, to see what some new insights that brings with it, because very often it will do right.
And I think one of the points that comes out of this, when you look at the German perspective, is that they're pretty clear that there is a window.
There is a window of opportunity early in the war.
Convoy measures are not really up to speed.
They're being done, as I said, but they're not really up to speed.
So there's a window of opportunity, but they just don't have the numbers to make it tell, for all the reasons that we said a little bit earlier on.
They don't have the numbers.
They go to war with, you know, it's disputed, but it's about 27 ocean-going combat U-boats, right, in 1939.
And that number goes down because you know, with losses and so on they can't be replaced quick enough.
So they really haven't got the numbers to make it tell in that window of opportunity.
By the time they've got the numbers, which is about late 1942, The window's closed.
So I think that time that Churchill is talking about in his memoir is January, January 40, early 40 and into 41.
So that's when that window is there.
Absolutely.
And you can see why he says it because there is this, you know.
The concern was, for example, that British imports between January 40 and January 41 halve because of the U-boat threat.
So there's the real prospect that that already sort of straightened on already suffering civilian populations are going to have to suffer even more.
And that brings all sorts of political consequences with it.
So you can see why he says it then.
But I think a generation of, or two generations maybe of historians have kind of run with that comment and in a sense built up the U-boat war in general to be a much bigger threat than i think it actually was.
And when you look at the german side of things it shows you that that you know, certainly from 43 onwards there's really no threat from the germans, that it's a turkey shoot, to be honest.
So i think that's one of those comments i think is a little bit.
Can i understand it?
I wouldn't dare to contradict churchill, but i i think it's been, it's been run with by a generation of historians basically, and i think erroneously sure.
Now, as you just said there Wolfpack, your new book, really tries to tell the story of this campaign from the perspective of those who man the U-boats.
If you could start sort of digging into that.
I mean, how tough was life on a U-boat on a sort of day-to-day basis?
It was thoroughly, thoroughly horrible, Spencer.
A lot of these accounts that I've read, I sort of.
When I started doing it, I was just I used to be aghast, you know.
Let's some of the basics.
Right.
So a basic patrol would be.
So you know, your period out of port would be, on average, about eight weeks.
Most of the U-boats, the U-boat fleet, were what was known as a type seven, which was an updated version actually, of the U-boat they had at the end of the First World War.
So it's it's a pretty primitive weapon.
It was meant to spend most of its time on the surface.
It's basically a submersible rather than a submarine.
You know, there is a difference.
It spends most of its time on the surface.
It can dive to attack or to evade attack, but it can't spend more than probably about 24 hours roughly.
Later versions, you know, that improves.
But that's the sort of limit of the time they can spend below the surface.
When they're on the surface, they're generally motoring, and that's how they're most comfortable.
In terms of the interior size, I'd always describe it as about two underground carriages.
That's about the size of the thing.
Full of torpedoes, it's huge diesel engines, absolutely no space at all, and it has a crew of 50.
So that gives you an idea of what life is like in there.
And they have to work sleep, have their downtime, be on duty, off duty all the rest of it.
It's a pretty tough environment.
There's only one space in a Type 7 where two grown men can kind of get past each other without sort of you know shuffling in a slightly embarrassed fashion.
On the eight weeks they go with all the food that they've got, which is a lot of fresh stuff which runs out after two weeks.
And then they've got, you know, a lot of tinned food, or they try and scavenge stuff from you know.
If they're lucky enough to sink a freighter that's, you know, carrying some marmalade, they might try and scavenge it from the wreckage.
You know it's almost a sort of piratical existence that they have.
Because they're all living on top of each other, skin diseases become rife.
So the health of the cruise is horrific.
So they all get skin diseases.
They don't tend to wash is another thing, because fresh water is rationed right, so they tend to.
You know that you might.
You might literally just sort of wash your face with, with fresh water, but that's it, you know.
So they fundamentally don't wash.
For eight weeks they have one change of underwear for eight weeks.
That's all they're permitted.
So they stink.
They get scurvy because the food is generally poor.
I mean, the food is good up to the point that the fresh food runs out and then it's tin stuff.
They're lacking vitamin C.
So the old nemesis of the naval personnel scurvy, makes a reappearance in the U-boat war.
So their teeth are falling out.
They've got scabies and various skin diseases.
And you know there's a thing called red dog they used to get, which was a sort of skin infection that just made everything red, raw from your neck down, sort of torso.
And there's this thing called the U-boat stink.
To cap it all is the U-boat stink, which is a combination of all those things.
Diesel, because they've got two massive diesel engines there that are constantly leaking.
Mold, because everything's damp all the time.
Halitosis from the scurvy.
Body odour.
The last one is vomit, because you know everyone's seasick all the time, because you're in this tiny thing, you know, in the open sea.
So if you imagine all of that rolled together, it's a pretty grim existence.
You know, sleeplessness days turn into nights because you generally spend the day below the surface to avoid being seen.
So it takes a huge mental toll and also a physical toll on the submariners themselves.
And that's something that I wanted to bring out quite strongly in the book, because it's in all of the accounts.
You know just the sheer toll that it took on them.
Added to the mix, you've got the fact that I think I'm right in saying that a staggering 75 of German submariners didn't survive the war.
The odds of them surviving seem to have diminished as the war progressed.
What kind of impact did that?
You know that crushing fear they must have been existing with all the time.
How did that impact their psyche?
You're absolutely right with that, Spencer.
You know, from the beginning, that that opening period when, you know, they are attacking allied convoys, not with impunity, but, you know, with sort of sizable successes, sort of 1940-41, it was estimated that statistically the lifespan of a U-boat crew was about between seven and nine missions, seven and nine patrols, right?
By 1943, when the U-boat war turns, that's already down to between two and three missions, two and three patrols.
And then from then on, it declines further.
So, By the time you get to, you know, the second half of 1944, it's hovering about one patrol.
So the crews that are going out, then they kind of know that there's, you know, statistically they're on a suicide mission.
And the way that the I think the stresses of the U-boat war on the crews is that much greater, and partly because of that sense of claustrophobia.
You know you can't get out, you can't get fresh air if you, from their perspective, lucky enough to even get in a position where you can carry out an attack after 1943, which was a rarity, by the way.
You know, from 1943 onwards, only 16 of U-boats produced in that period actually sink anything at all.
So most of them, they're so on the other side being attacked.
They can't even get close to convoys at that point.
So if they're lucky enough to be in that situation, then the stress and the strain of an Allied counterattack which would be, you know, much more deadly generally than what they'd be able to achieve themselves, that is extremely damaging to their mental state.
And you can see this, and this is something i again i picked up on from the german archive there were a few german naval doctors who were looking at combat stress in u-boat crews and it wasn't very fashionable, you know.
The higher-ups didn't want to hear about it.
The crews themselves didn't want to hear about it because it was seen as less than manly.
But from their sort of, you know, piecemeal bits of evidence that they had, they're saying it's absolutely a thing.
Right.
You know, these crews are really suffering.
And then once you accept that and you look back at the accounts, you can see, you know people struck mute, people suffering with anxiety, you know sleeplessness all the way up to.
You know there's a couple of commanders.
One called Heinrich Bleichroth, for example, had a nervous breakdown on one of his patrols in 1943.
Had to be removed from service.
The most extreme example is a chap called Peter Zech, who was a U-boat commander, committed suicide in the middle of a depth charge attack.
So this is all in that spectrum of combat stress.
Another example you know one of those one in four that survived and, as you said, 75 of the U-boat arm died during the war, were killed during the war.
One of those few comparatively few that survived is actually a relative and uncle of my mother-in-law.
And I mentioned this in the book.
And she said when I told her I was writing the book, she said oh yes, my uncle was in the U-boat arm, which I'd never heard you know.
And she said yes post-war, he used to come to the house in the middle of the night and we had to call the police.
And I said, well, you know, what's this story?
And she said, yeah well, he spent the rest of his life in a series of, you know, psychiatric institutions.
He basically was driven mad by it.
So you know, that sort of opened up to me that this is a you know To a large extent, I think, one of the untold stories of this particular narrative.
How was discipline maintained, given the enormous stress that you know these people are operating under?
In very different ways between the various commanders.
I mean, you had some commanders who were, you know, sort of martinets and would just shout and ball and reiterate their superiority to the men and hope for that was enough.
They generally weren't terribly effective as commanders in that respect and tended to just put the crew's backs up.
The best crews, the most effective crews, were those that had a real sense of camaraderie about them, which could be actively fostered by the commander.
And that meant that, you know, they would allow them some sort of downtime.
So you know, if you ever see the supplies that were those pictures online, you can see these piles of supplies that were put on U-boats.
There were always a few crates of Beck's beer in there as well, you know.
So they did sort of allow the crews, when it was possible, to sort of have a have a social evening where they could have a drink and they could let off steam and they could, you know, just talk to each other about home or their girlfriends or their wives, or whatever it was.
And everyone would sort of enjoy themselves.
And there's various things.
Like you know, they had these sort of rituals of you know sewing the victory pennants.
For example, they had these pennants that they used to sew to mark each of the ships that they'd sunk.
And then they would be flown from the conning tower basically as they returned to port.
And it was a way of sort of showing off to your fellow crews and the shore personnel as well.
You know, this is what we've achieved while we've been out.
But the whole sort of ritual of sowing those pennants was a key part of growing that sense of camaraderie between them.
You know, and things like, you know, the crossing the line ceremony was one.
Whenever you cross the equator, you'd have this big sort of ceremony.
Anyone that hadn't, up until that point, crossed the equator had was, you know, had to be presented to you know Neptune, the king of all the seas and all the rest of it.
So they had this.
You know, big ceremonies like that, which when you I mean I talk about that in some of the accounts in the book, and it does feel a bit like what we'd now call sort of hazing, basically.
It almost feels like bullying.
But, you know, a lot of the crews as well at the time, you know, those were harder times, I suppose.
A lot of the crews really looked forward to it because they saw it as a rite of passage.
And, you know, this was an essential part of pulling everybody together.
So you know, the best crews really went out of their way and the best commanders went out of their way to sort of pull everyone together with you know, social evenings and all of this and develop a real sense of camaraderie.
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Right.
So Roger, you've written a feature for the November issue of BBC History magazine in which you considered whether you both conducted a relatively inverted commas a clean campaign, or whether they were just as guilty of committing atrocities as say, their compatriots on the Eastern Front.
Now there's an incident you mentioned in the feature that casts quite a long shadow over this debate, and that's one involving the U-boat U-852 in an incident in 1944.
I wonder if you could explain to our listeners what happened there and how that kind of informs this debate.
Yeah, U-852 departed from the Biscay ports in the spring of 1944.
It goes into the mid-Atlantic, heads south.
It was heading for the Indian Ocean, by the way, head south, and as it's passing between west africa and ascension island, in in the middle, at mid-atlantic, it spots a greek merchantman called the ss palius, which it tracks for a couple of hours and then, with nightfall, it torpedoes, which is what it's supposed to do.
Right, that's its task.
That's what it does.
Again, as is relatively normal in the u-boat war, the commander surfaces afterwards and tries to find one of the survivors and asks them you know what the ship was, where it was headed, what it was carrying, all of that sort of stuff so he can include it in his log.
They don't know all that stuff beforehand in the vast majority of cases, so that was normal procedure as well.
He then goes to sort of pull away, changes his mind and he takes the U-852 back into this sort of debris field and he gives the order to his crew to basically machine gun all of the debris that's left.
This is the middle of the night mid-Atlantic, and they are up on the deck of this U-boat machine gunning into the darkness, into lifeboats floats, debris and men, because there are men there as well.
The rationale, as far as we can divine it, of this chap.
The commander was called ek as a german word for corner, but you know that's immaterial.
He uh, had been told before he left that he had to, you know, be very careful of leaving any trace because of the such was allied superiority in the air, particularly that if any debris or anything was spotted, you know he would, he would soon be caught up with and probably put under counter-attack.
So he was rather paranoid about that.
This was his maiden voyage as well.
You can see that the The mental procedure for him was OK.
I've got to get rid of the evidence of this sinking.
So that was the logic behind what he does.
It's not necessarily kind of brutally minded, like it's a deliberate massacre, but there's certainly an indifference towards the survivors.
That is very obviously on show.
Three men survived that night.
Three men of, I think, a crew of about 25.
Three men survived the night.
They're picked up a month later, believe it or not.
So they spend a month at sea, which sounds absolutely horrific in itself.
So then, by the time that U-852 is then subsequently captured and some of the crew are captured, it's run aground right around on the Horn of Africa.
Then the story of what U-852 has done is already kind of known.
And what's worse for Eck is that the British capture his logbook in which he says yes, you know, I sank the Palaeus at this place on this day.
So you've got his own confession effect in black and white.
Eck was tried post-war along with two members of his crew and were executed.
So he gets his just desserts.
But what I sort of argue in the piece is that this is, as far as we can tell, surprisingly exceptional.
It's an outlier.
And this goes against history.
Essentially, I think, our assumptions of the war generally and of the behavior of sailors of the Third Reich throughout.
So I think our assumption is there's, you know, such as the importance and the thoroughgoingness of Nazi ideology, that you know it's not we, as we now know, it's not just the SS that carries out atrocities.
It's the Wehrmacht, even Air Force personnel do it.
So this is so widespread.
It's such a sort of a common thing.
My assumption certainly was that when I started doing this I was sure I'd find a few atrocities in the U-boat arm as well.
But this is the only documented one.
Now as a caveat.
There may be others, but maybe all of those that were attacked were killed and then the crew was killed later on the mission.
So there's no evidence, there's no record of it ever happening.
It's lost to history.
That may be the case.
But the fact stands that this is the only documented war crime carried out by the Uber arm.
If we accept that to be the case, even with those caveats, then we have to think about why would that be?
How do we explain that?
And I think that's an interesting example.
And I think there are some reasons to give by way of explanation.
So would you argue then, that the Kriegsmarine and, by extension, U-boat crews were less ideologically aligned to Nazism than other sections of the armed forces?
Up to a point, I think that's probably a reasonable assumption.
And I'll explain why.
I mean, you know U-boat crews and Greeks marrying a cruise, you know were taken from a cross-section of German society.
So in that sense you've got the same personnel as everywhere else right, you've got nazis on the one hand of the spectrum, you've got, you know, believers in in the nazi idea, you've got anti-nazis and you've got everything in between, and generally the vast majority in between they tend to sort of go with the flow.
They tend to do what they're told, they tend to do what their mates do.
You know all of that stuff.
So it's not always a hundred percent conviction, i ideological conviction that drives people.
Sometimes it's to a degree, it's kind of passivity, it's going along with what everyone else is doing, even if you don't necessarily agree with it, you do it right.
What's interesting in that respect in the U-boat arm is that there's a sort of an older ethos, if you like, which you can see throughout naval history, which is what I'd describe as the solidarity of the sea.
You know, all against the sea.
What the U-boat war is trying to do is to strangle Britain out of the war by hitting tonnage.
It's a tonnage war.
So the key thing is to sink the ship.
Now, of course that doesn't mean that the personnel aboard the ship are going to get off scot-free, and very often they don't.
The death toll amongst Allied merchant crews is about 30,000, upwards of 30,000.
So very similar to the number of U-boat men that were killed.
But the sort of wanton killing of those crews afterwards after the fact of the sinking is much, much rarer right.
And actually there are many more examples of U-boat crews where it was possible to surfacing and actually helping those sailors that they just shipwrecked, giving them blankets, giving them medical assistance, giving them food water, writing lifeboats, at the very least saying to them you know anyone need medical care.
By the way, land is that way, you know, at the very very least.
That's much more common, the atrocities that we mentioned before, like the peleus.
And wasn't there an incredible anecdote of a U-boat taking survivors back to Ireland?
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's one extreme of this almost a duty of care that they demonstrated.
That was, I think U-30, I think it was which sank a merchantman off.
You know, Western approaches off Ireland in a rough sea.
And because of the rough sea, the commander basically opted to tow the lifeboats from this merchantmen that he just sunk and he towed them to the irish coast, which took about 24 hours.
I mean it's, it's insane, i mean how that's even vaguely plausible in in in warfare is is ridiculous.
But it's indicative of that, as i said, that duty of care that they evidently felt.
So this whole question does come to a point and comes to a climax really, with the sinking of the laconia in 1942, which is another quite famous sinking, And then the aftermath of that, Hitler basically bans U-boat crews from assisting shipwrecked sailors because of the circumstances of the Laconia, which I won't go into.
But you know, the commander there was actually counterattacked from the air while he was trying to save the personnel in the water, those that he just sunk.
So that provoked a response from the German high command.
I said, OK, you know, the Laconia order said we're not going to save shipwrecked crews anymore.
We can't afford to if we're going to be counterattacked doing it.
But this is a really interesting aspect.
And it does lead us, I think, to the conclusion, as I say in the book, that this is I think I would absolutely stipulate this is the cleanest theater of World War Two, which might surprise us.
Right.
Certainly surprised me when I was writing the book.
And I'm quite familiar with all of the.
You know the atrocities and so on carried out by the Germans.
I've looked at, you know, with previous books, I've looked at some of those theaters.
Atrocities particularly against civilians and POWs are absolutely rife, not least Poland, of course.
But you have to go where the evidence takes you.
And if you, and if you're you know, if you look at the U-boat war, it's remarkable how few atrocities there are.
Palais is kind of the one, and in contrast you've got all of this, you know, remarkable effort to uh, to actually assist the crews that they've just sunk.
So right that it was customary for allied subs to attack uh, japanese merchant ships without warning.
So i mean, would you say that there's an element of victor's justice in the way we look back at the battle of the atlantic?
Yeah, i think there probably is.
Because i don't necessarily make this point quite so explicitly, I bring it in a little bit in the conclusion to the book.
But, you know, this is very consciously about the German experience.
But if you look at the war in the Pacific, for example, the Americans have a really effective submarine arm.
Their fight against the Japanese mirrors very obviously what the Germans are trying to do to Britain in the Atlantic.
So the Americans are basically trying to strangle Japan out of the war by hitting its merchant fleet very good at it, you know.
So that japan is already pretty much economically on its knees.
You know, long before the firebombing of tokyo, long before the, the dropping of the, the atomic bombs in 1945, and that's courtesy largely of the of of what um america's submarines have been doing in the pacific.
There are instances, particularly one by a submarine called um the uss wahoo, where you know very, very similar to the case of the police.
You know they machine gun survivors.
The claim was that they were shot at in return.
But, you know, the end effect is that they machine gun survivors in the water.
And, as you say you know, the general practice of U-boat or submarine warfare was unrestricted warfare.
You didn't give a warning because you couldn't afford to, because of the threat of counterattack and convoys and all of that sort of thing.
So it tended to be unannounced attack on what looked like a plausible target.
And that's being done exactly in the same way by the Americans in the Pacific as it is by the Germans in the Atlantic.
And this comparison was made actually at Nuremberg.
So I think you're right, there is a degree of yeah, you could say Victor's justice is a strong phrase, but I think there's a degree of that in the perception of the U-boat war, post-war definitely.
And also that assumption, which was current at the time, that this was a brutal thing and atrocities were relatively common, and so on.
So I think that's been an assumption that really persists.
But as I said, I mean, I think my book hopefully will start to knock that down.
And Roger.
Finally, during your research for the book, you obviously scoured many memoirs and interviews from survivors of the U-boat campaign.
Are there any particular anecdotes or individuals you encountered in your research that really you know, stuck in your mind, that really stand out in your memory, and if so, maybe you could just wonder if you could tell us about one or two of them?
Yeah, there was one uh, otto kretschmer, who's one of one of um, you know, germany's most prominent europe commanders, and survived the war.
He was taken prisoner in 1941 so he actually appears in some of these um world at war interviews, if you remember, you know, back from the 1970s.
He appears there as a sort of old, much older man And there's a story from one of his missions where they attacked a convoy mid-Atlantic.
And in the aftermath, it was always at night.
So in the middle of the night, you know, they surfaced to try and see if there's anything to sort of any information to be gleaned and so on.
And they see a man with a sort of makeshift raft and a sort of makeshift sail.
And they sort of motor over to him and he's on his last legs.
And he turns out he's an Irishman.
He's a merchant mariner, Irishman.
And they pull him on board, and he's sort of slightly delirious by that point.
And he comes down below, and he's treated, and he's given a tot of rum and all this sort of thing.
And when he comes to his senses he says well, thank God, you know, I've found myself on a British submarine.
Those Nazi swine and all this.
You know they sunk us and thank God I found myself on a British submarine.
And all the sort of Germans sort of look at each other and go, who's going to tell him, you know?
They eventually caught up with some of the other lifeboats from you know that had been sunk that night.
And they took this chap up through the conning tower, having now been revived, you know, took him up through the conning tower so he could be put on the lifeboat.
And apparently this moment of realization where he sort of looked at the commander's cap with the swastika and the eagle and all of that on his forehead.
And he sort of looked and went like, oh my god, i'm actually on a german submarine.
And that was the moment that he realized, because they didn't have the heart to tell him, you know, that the same nazi swine that had sunk them were the nazi swine that were now tending his wounds.
You know, which i just thought was a really a, really.
I mean it's a funny story and it's it's kind of indicative a little bit.
I mean, this is early in the war, so it's still in a, in a, in a more chivalrous, can we say slightly more chivalrous mode certainly than later on.
And I thought it was quite, you know, it's kind of an instructive story.
That was Roger Morehouse speaking to Spencer Mizen.
Roger is an author and leading historian of the Second World War.
His new book, Wolfpack, Inside Hitler's U-Boat War, is out now.
