Word: schaeffer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...boat officer. Author Schaeffer saw the end of many an Allied merchantman. While he rarely tells his story as well as the U.S. Navy's Commander Edward Beach in Submarine!, his book has two special interests: 1) it is the first by a World War II U-boat commander, and 2) its tone of "My fatherland, right or wrong shows remorse only for losing...
...Days to Live. Almost before Author Schaeffer and his sub mates had warmed to the role of ship-killers, they found themselves among the hunted. By Christmas 1942, the U-boats in the Atlantic were already spending much of their time trying to avoid radar and Allied planes. In Schaefler's boat the men got so jumpy they began mistaking seagulls for planes and shelling lighthouses. Once they were pinned down for eight hours while 168 depth charges thundered around them...
Near war's end the British were able to estimate the life expectancy of any U-boat 40 days. "Forty days was generous," says Author Schaeffer. But Admiral Dönitz, who lost two sons in the submarine service, kept sending the U-boats out. Schaeffer was assigned to commanders' training school just before the sub in which he had been on duty was sunk with all hand...
...came before Commander Schaeffer's U-977 had fired a torpedo. Schaeffer assembled his crew, many of them teenagers, and filled them with scary bilge about what they could expect in postwar Germany-how all its males would no doubt be sterilized and the country turned into a goat pasture. He added another naive touch which he obviously hopes will take in 1953's reader, to the effect that all Allies had fought not out of hatred of Nazism, "as they have pretended-for Naziism ended with the death of Hitler-but of the people of Germany themselves...
When Commander Schaeffer brought U-977 into Mar del Plata Harbor on Aug. 17, 1945, he was ready for almost anything but the suspicion that most interested the Allied commissioners who questioned him: that U-977 had carried Hitler to some South American hideaway. Schaeffer eventually convinced them it had not. The legend that Hitler is still alive annoys Schaeffer. Its danger, he feels, is that Germans may believe it and sit back "waiting for ghosts to return from the grave to do their work for them...