Word: u-boats
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...U-BOAT 977 (260 pp.)-Heinz Schaefter-Norton...
Before long, Cadet Schaeffer's group was assigned to U-boat duty, and one day late in 1941 the fledgling submariners heard the speech they had been waiting for, the one that ended: "Go in and sink...
...U-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...
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...
Victory's first chapter, called Design for War, shows the first feeble, then gradually stronger Allied efforts to beat off Nazi U-boat wolf packs. It leaps breathlessly back & forth between British film and captured German footage. The effect is to personalize the battle. The war becomes a stirring conflict between a Nazi submarine captain, gloating over a new kill as he downs periscope, and a half-drowned British mariner, hauled oil-covered from the wreckage of his torpedoed tanker...