Word: u-boats
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...mortality figures were even closer, with a 68.7% death rate aboard the Titanic and 67.3% for the Lusitania. What's more, the ships sank just three years apart - the Titanic was claimed by an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and the Lusitania by a German U-Boat on May 7, 1915. But on the decks and in the passageways and all the other places where people fought for their lives, the vessels' respective ends played out very differently...
...barely escaped the Holocaust. As a child, Richard Sonnenfeldt fled Nazi Germany for boarding school in England, where, because of his nationality, he was declared an "enemy alien" and deported. On his way to an internment camp in Australia, he survived an attack by a German U-boat and was later abandoned in India when British officials realized he was Jewish. After being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, Sonnenfeldt, who died Oct. 9 at 86, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp. In 1945 the native German speaker became...
...shipwreck 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. He quickly rounded up a dirty dozen of recreational divers, including a Vietnam veteran named John Chatterton, and sailed out for a look-see. A quick underwater peek revealed that the wreck was, unbelievably, a World War II--vintage German U-boat, nestled on the ocean floor. Nobody--not the Navy, not the historians, not even the few surviving German U-boat captains--knew what it was doing there...
...team, led by the intrepid Chatterton, began to explore the mystery U-boat. At that depth they could stay down for just minutes at a time, so they had to work methodically, room by room, dive by dive. The wreck began gobbling them up just as methodically: the first to die was an affable hobbyist named Steve Feldman, who lost consciousness and drowned. Others didn't go as peacefully, but with each death the divers only became more determined...
...British disaster on Crete in 1941 ("Foreknowledge No Help"), on the Americans' immense triumph at Midway a year later (a world-historical victory that owed as much to luck, Keegan ingeniously argues, as to intelligence) and the struggle of British intelligence to locate and destroy Hitler's U-boat offensive against England...