U-boat Adventures

Twenty-two U-boat veterans tell their stories in this collection of their experiences, recorded by the author during several years of travel throughout Germany. While many books have been written about the U-boat war, this is one of the few that focuses on the lives of the submariners, and rarer sti [...]
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Twenty-two U-boat veterans tell their stories in this collection of their experiences, recorded by the author during several years of travel throughout Germany. While many books have been written about the U-boat war, this is one of the few that focuses on the lives of the submariners, and rarer still is its concentration on the crewmen rather than the officers. Melanie Wiggins interviewed seventeen men of the enlisted ranks, along with five commanders, to take readers into the terrifying world of underwater warfare, where every single crewman made a crucial difference in the fate of his boat.
As she searched for and interviewed U-boat men, Wiggins also collected photographs from scrapbooks and archives, and consulted war-era personnel records and secret diaries. Her attendance at a reunion of the crew of U-682 netted a wealth of information as did her interviews with submarine veterans in Gorlitz, former East Germany. Her interviews with Admiral Otto Kretschmer just two months before his death and ninety-four-year-old Commander Jurgen Wattenberg in Hamburg add important dimensions to the work.
Among the individual sagas included are Radioman Hans Burck's description of his 1942 patrol to Aruba and the visit of Japanese submarine I-30 at Lorient; Fireman 2nd Class Josef Erben's explanation of how his boat, U-128, got stuck on a large rock and had to be hauled free; POW Ernst Go: thling's memories of being wounded in a British prison camp when German planes mistakenly dropped bombs in the area; and Herman Wien's description of U-180 transporting Indian anarchist Subhas Chandra Bose to Madagascar. Every account gives new details about the crews' activities at sea and their experiences in prisoner-of-war camps.