WOLFPACK

The U-boat story, from fresh eyes.

Prize-winning historian Moorhouse, author of Berlin at War, begins with facts well known to scholars if not to Hollywood. One is that, despite Churchill’s famous confession that “the U-boat war was the only thing that ever really frightened him during the conflict,” ship sinkings never came close to disrupting Allied supply lines. Another fact, as readers familiar with the classic 1981 German film Das Boot will recall, is that the reality of submarine warfare included no lack of courage and technological marvels but also boredom, filth, stench, unimaginable human endurance, and death. Nearly 75% of U-boat crews died, the highest mortality of any service branch. No less surprising, German rearmament during the 1930s gave no priority to U-boats. Hitler focused on building a surface fleet. When he found Germany unexpectedly at war with Britain, numbers of submarines were far fewer than his fiercely energetic U-boat chief, Admiral Karl Dönitz, felt were necessary. Production ramped up, but that was a slow process. In the meantime, the existing fleet inflicted painful losses on Allied shipping, which peaked in the fall of 1942. By then the U.S. had entered the war, and its massive shipbuilding capacity, combined with sophisticated technology and tactics, turned the tide; in May 1943 German losses forced Dönitz to withdraw from the North Atlantic. Other historians, led by Clay Blair and John Keegan, deliver the big picture. Moorhouse excels at the details. Drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, and archives, he delivers gripping accounts of training, operation, living conditions, tactics, accounts of captains, crewmen, victims, and often tragic actions, all overlaid with a heavy dose of Nazi politics.

A vivid approach to a well-worn subject.