From the point of view of the Third Reich, submarines, silent and efficient, represented the ideal weapon in the naval field. Hitler knew that it was beyond his power to build a fleet that was capable of competing with the Royal Navy, so he looked for another way to challenge the supremacy of the British. And he found it: at the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic, the Nazis managed to corner their enemies. They sank 175 Allied warships and about 3,000 merchant ships.
The success of the Third Reich was based, in part, on Rudeltaktik (wolf pack tactics). It consisted of several submarines launching against an allied objective in a coordinated manner. These types of attacks posed such a threat to the United Kingdom that Winston Churchill himself admitted, in his memoirs, that only one thing truly scared him during the war: the German U-boats.
However, only one in five German sailors survived their service in the war. In 1944, his life expectancy in a submersible was reduced to only eight weeks. They were, in general, young people with an average of twenty years old. The fact that they were single without children made them ideal candidates for missions with a high level of danger.
The crew was crowded into a very small space, with precarious hygienic conditions. But if there was nothing enviable about living in that suffocating environment, dying was even more terrible. The impact of a depth charge represented certain death for everyone on board a submersible.
Late in the war, Great Britain prevailed thanks to its superior technology. With sonar it was possible to detect the submarines, and Alan Turing's deciphering of the Enigma machine codes made it possible to know the routes assigned to the U-boats.
Isabel Margarit, director of History and Life, and journalist Ana Echeverría Arístegui recommend the book Torpedo Los! (Almena, 2019), by Javier Bosch. “Torpedo Los” was the war cry that marked the launching of that projectile from a U-Boat. This is a very graphic volume. Those who prefer a first-person account have Steel Coffins (Salamina, 2021), the memoirs of Herbert Werner, one of the few German captains who survived the war. Without forgetting the cinematographic classic Das Boot, by Wolfgang Petersen.
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